Dream Wheels (27 page)

The three of them walked the horses quietly into the trees. A thin trail meandered up toward the ridge behind the ranch, and they allowed the horses their heads and sat easily to enjoy the lurch and sway of the climb. The smell of horse was thick in the air, and as she breathed it in with the mix of pine gum and moss Claire felt herself transported. This was the landscape of the dream she’d carried. The trees threw angles of light in soft beams everywhere and there was a dappled quality to it that made her feel like she rode through a painting. Swaying easily in the saddle, she closed her eyes briefly and allowed herself to feel the ambience and the texture of her being in this place. She sighed.

“Getting our money’s worth, are we?” Victoria asked.

She opened her eyes and smiled. “When I was a girl I dreamed of this. There never was much hope of it being realized the way we lived, but I held on to this as tightly as I could through everything.”

Victoria half turned in the saddle. “How did you live? What did your parents do?”

“My mother was a junkie,” Claire said. “Chronic. For as long as I knew her she fought it. She went through periods when she didn’t use and we’d think that maybe the monkey had crawled off her back for good. But there was always another run. She’d work some in the clean times but we mostly lived off welfare. She never could hold on to a job for long, really.

“So our life was rooming house to rooming house. They were never anything more than one-room mansions, but it was the best that she could do for us. We moved a lot. I don’t think I ever got a chance to settle anywhere when I was a kid and it probably would have been a lot more terrible except that my mother could be magical. She was grim when she was straight, like it was punishment, but when she used she laughed and pretended everything was all right in our world. I actually liked her loaded better than I liked her straight. Isn’t that terrible? But we were like sisters then. We’d play with makeup, get dressed outlandishly and parade down the street, all lit up in big bursts of colour. But she’d use again and all the colour went out of our world, seeped out slowly, faded just like her. She died of an overdose when I was pregnant with Aiden. He never knew her. Her name was Angela. It’s Greek. It means heavenly messenger. I don’t know if she even knew that.”

They rode on in silence for a time and then Claire said, “We’d sit up late sometimes and tell each other stories. We’d laugh and we’d tell each other our dreams.”

“What kind of dreams?” Johanna asked.

Claire laughed. “The craziest kind of dreams. She’d dream about walking down the street one day and suddenly being lifted up and out of our life and plopped down into a big, bright, shining one with a mansion and money and servants and no monkeys lurking in the shadows. But there was the one dream in particular that my mother held on to tighter than any other.”

“What dream was that?” Johanna asked, reining in her horse and allowing Claire’s to move up beside it.

“That one day a prince would solve it all with a kiss,” Claire said. “Men flummoxed her. She was pretty, nice body
despite her addiction, and men were attracted to her. The wildness, I guess. She kept on hoping that the one magic man would emerge one day, sweep her off her feet and change everything. She passed that on to me unfortunately, and I’m afraid I led Aiden down the same merry trail.”

“Ah,” Victoria said, nodding firmly. “That’s the bones of it. Good girl. You hang right on to all that shame. Hang on to it good and tight and don’t ever let it go. It does you so much good. You can blame yourself for everything then, the prison, the anger in the boy, the fact you two aren’t talking. Lay claim to all of it and give it to yourself good.”

“I’m sorry?”

Victoria chucked her horse over to a stand of small pines and dismounted. Johanna and Claire followed her and the older woman led them off the trail to a thrust of boulders overlooking the valley. She motioned for them to sit with her and for the next while the three of them gazed quietly over Wolf Creek Ranch and the incredible valley it sat in.

“The people used to come here in the old days,” Victoria said. “It was a gathering place. A special place. Over where that equipment shed sits just at the lip of the draw was where they’d set up the big circle of lodges. Teaching lodges. Every summer they’d come and there would be a hundred teepees, maybe more. People would gather the sage for ceremony and there was always sweetgrass in the low places too. Sweat lodges were built right beside the creek down there. It was beautiful. A huge gathering of people unlike anything we ever see anymore.

“And in those teaching lodges men and women would get taught principles. Spiritual principles meant to allow them to enjoy the life they led. It was a hard life. Forty below zero sometimes, with the wind howling and nothing but the thin
skin of a teepee for protection. Only a spiritual way of being will get you through that, and the Old Ones gave them what they could.

“Anyhow, what they gave them was choice. In the end, it’s all we ever have. We can have all the head knowing in the world, be all proper educated and smart, but life is about choices, and that was the big spiritual secret that got handed down in them teaching lodges. Nothing huge, nothing complicated, because they knew that the last thing smart people need is more smarts. But we all need simple truth. Something that cuts through the fat of things.”

“What truth is that?” Claire asked.

Victoria looked at her, and for some reason Claire felt like crying.

“That choice is our superhuman power. It allows us to change everything all at once,” Victoria said. “It lets us see what’s possible, then make it happen in our life. Every ceremony, every ritual, every symbol points us toward the energy of choice. We choose what to believe, how to behave, how to think. We choose how we live our lives. Us. No one else. Our choice. You look at things the way they are, and if you don’t like it you choose to change it.”

“How?” Claire asked.

“That’s what everyone asks,” Victoria said and squeezed her hand. “But the better question is why?”

“Why, then?” Claire asked.

“That’s your question to yourself,” Johanna said, standing. “Indians never actually went around asking how. They walked around asking why.”

Claire looked at the two women. She felt safe here, accepted, and there was something in the talk she sensed was given to her to unwrap through consideration.

“It must have been beautiful. That gathering,” she said, standing beside Johanna and looking out across the valley.

“Yes,” Johanna said. “But Victoria, you never told me that before. How long have you known about this?”

Victoria struggled to her feet. She smiled. “About three minutes,” she said and walked back toward the horses.

Johanna laughed, loudly and raucously.

“Sumbitch,” Aiden said and dusted himself off with his hat. He slung his leg over the barrel and glared at the wranglers at the corners. They shook their heads in admiration and reached out to grab ropes again. It was his sixth attempt and the result had been the same the first five times. He sprawled in the straw in a billowed cloud of dust but sprang back to his feet quickly. Birch and Lionel sat back on some hay bales and watched. Now, as he prepared to tackle it again, they rose together and approached. Birch raised a hand, and the wranglers backed off the ropes. Aiden looked up at them hard eyed.

“I ain’t quittin’,” Aiden said.

“Nobody’s asking you to quit, boy,” Lionel said. “We just want to give you some advice, that’s all.”

“That’s right, son,” Birch said. “What you’ve been doing is good. But you been focussing on holding on.”

“What the hell am I supposed to do? Focus on falling off?”

“Well, in a word, yeah,” Birch said, tilting his hat back on his head.

“What?”

“First thing you gotta learn how to do in order to ride well is learn how to fall. Seems to me you’ve about got the lesson,” Lionel said with a chuckle.

The wranglers laughed, and Aiden’s face reddened. He stepped off the barrel and stood face to face with the Wolfchilds.

“What are you saying? That you’ve been making a fool out of me on this thing?”

“No, son, that’s not what we’re saying. We’re saying you’re ready for the real deal now,” Lionel said. “You’re ready to ride a steer.”

“A steer?”

“Yep,” Birch said. “Got a few of the randiest little buggers you ever seen just waiting for you. If you’re not too sore from falling to try.”

Aiden nodded grimly at him, and Birch clapped a hand on his shoulder and led him out of the rope barrel area and toward the main corral.

“Coulda told me right away,” Aiden said bitterly.

“Coulda,” Birch said and laughed like hell.

Motors were built by the devil. For the life of him Joe Willie couldn’t figure how they ever got the idea of horsepower for a lump of steel like this. Horses were easy to figure. This tangle of wires, plugs and casings was impossible. Somewhere in this flathead V8 was the power of ninety-five horses. He understood the horse reference well enough but the technical stuff was gobbledygook. As he read and then looked up the words in a dictionary, he came to understand that this engine was different.

It was a flathead first and foremost. They were called flatheads because the usual collection of valves were in the back beside the pistons instead of over them. There were no valve heads showing, and it resulted in a flatter visible top. That much was easy. Then there was the weird placement of the camshaft. It wasn’t centred over the crankshaft, and the crankshaft in turn wasn’t centred on the cylinders. That’s where he began to get dizzy. He had no head for compression
ratio or bore and stroke measurements. In fact, the exploded-view drawings only served to show him a world he’d never entered before.

Sure, like every other road cowboy he’d learned to change a flat, tinker with an oil pump, a starter, the spark plugs, adjust timing and the ordinary roadside stuff of life, but he’d never seen the guts of a vehicle. The drawings worried him. They pointed to a lot of time spent hunched over the old girl’s motor. And that was after he figured out how to get the block out of the chassis. The first thing was to find the mounting bolts and get them off. Then, it was likely going to take an A-frame, a chain and a block and tackle. That might require help unless they made such a thing as a push-button block and tackle these days.

He’d be damned if he was going to ask anyone for help.
Help
was erased from his dictionary. This was his arena now. He’d come this far on his own and he wanted to see it through the same way. The arm was strong enough to handle the extra twisting and fine adjusting to come, and despite the occasional shiver and tremble it held up pretty good. He could still not get used to the strange feeling of lightness on his left side, and having to reach across his body with his right hand to do something ordinary, two-hand ordinary, pissed him off as purely as pity. There wasn’t a day when he didn’t have to stop, crawl out from beneath the old girl and cuss and swear and kick at something. He’d hung an old punching bag off the rafters in the rear of the shed and he’d walk over and punch and punch and punch until gradually he felt the cloud lift and he could think again.

He saw the bear in those moments. It always floated up out of somewhere behind his clenched eyelids and stared at him, coaxed him to feel the fire in his belly, and he’d rock the
bag until he was greasy with sweat and tears, the anger too tiring to chase anymore. Then he’d sit in her and smoke. He’d rub the tiny spot in front of the windshield that was scarred by a cigarette and see the gnarled knuckles placing it there as the undulating roll of Nebraska, Wyoming or Colorado hummed beneath the wheels of her and someone’s transistor radio strapped to the visor wailed some lonesome Jimmie Rogers train song and the family croaked along valiantly through the night while sore muscles were soothed by the soft rocking of the old truck and the whine of the tires became a song itself that made the night less lonesome, less cold, the miles halved by the vagabond togetherness of rodeo and the promise of another stab at glory in a chute somewhere beyond the next sweeping bend. He’d sit in her and see all that, feel all that, and become calm enough to crawl back under her with the solid earth of home at his back and work again, deliberately, steadily, focussed on that same sweeping bend and a ragged chorus of notes in the night. “Get up, girl,” he’d say and lose himself in the work.

“Keep your feet on the rails until you’re ready to settle,” Lionel said to him. “Otherwise the little spud might crush your legs against the sides.”

Aiden listened intently, his lips pressed tight and his hands clenching and unclenching quickly.

“He’s gonna go out crazy,” Lionel said. “All he wants is out of here and you off his back. And it won’t feel like the rope barrel. We give it to you good out there, pretty much full out, but he ain’t gonna feel like that. He’ll go out flat at first. Running full bore. Then sometime after the first few yards he’ll start to kicking. Hold on tight and try to feel him with your legs. Don’t press ’em in. Get you a good seat and try and feel with them.”

When he felt ready, Aiden lowered himself down onto the steer’s back. He looked down at its brown shoulders and found his place behind them like Birch had advised him. The pocket. All the power the steer would generate came from the rear, from behind the pocket. Aiden shrugged his shoulders quickly and felt the steer react to the motion. Then he reached one hand down to the rope rigging.

“Two hands, son,” Birch said from the front of the chute.

“No way,” Aiden said through gritted teeth.

“Two hands or nothing,” Birch said, firmer.

“No way,” Aiden said again.

“Stubborn cuss.”

“Damn straight.”

“Pap?” Birch asked, looking up at Lionel.

The old man stepped down onto a lower rail and cleared his throat to get Aiden’s attention. “Keep it up away from you. Can’t let it touch you or the steer. When you feel yourself start to fall press it out flat away from you, don’t let it bend. Less break that way.”

Aiden nodded in small, tense shivers.