Dream Wheels (42 page)

“I know what she meant,” Claire said.

“Yeah?” He went back and sat down on the log beside her. When she didn’t speak right away he picked up the fire stick and poked around at the embers until a tiny lick of flame climbed up and caught the logs again. They watched the fire grow.

“Yeah,” she said in a faraway voice. “The last man I was with beat me. Beat me bad. Before that he used me. Used my body. It was like I wasn’t a person, I was a device, a toy. He didn’t care about me or about Aiden. All he wanted was the
sexy black woman. His fantasy. His reward. When he punched me it was like an indictment, a judgment for every man I’d ever served it up for. Because he wasn’t the first. Sure, he was the first one to hit me but he was far from the first I ever gave it all up for. All of me, I mean.

“I swore I wouldn’t let myself do that again. I wouldn’t be a body. I swore I wouldn’t let a man touch me. I set out to become independent, and I did. When Aiden got sent to jail it was the perfect opportunity for me to lose myself in my chase for liberty. I buried myself in work and achievement. I thought about men, found myself craving that heat, but I let it pass.

“But your mother and your grandmother taught me something. They taught me that there’s a big difference between being free and being independent.”

“What’s that?” Joe Willie asked.

She looked up at the peak and smiled. “You can share freedom. Independence you hang on to like you hang on to a bull—alone, with all you got.”

“Yes.”

“That was the bravest thing I ever saw,” she said, looking at him directly.

“The bear? No choice, really. Not a lot of room for bravery when you got no choice.”

“I don’t mean the bear. I mean telling me what you just told me.”

“It ain’t the bravest thing,” he said.

“What is, then?”

“Choosing to tell you.”

Even as they emerged from the trailhead the women could tell they were different. Claire lounged in the saddle like a trail boss, no longer obsessively vigilant about posture, balance, the
placement of the heel in the stirrup. Instead, she moved in the horse’s rhythm, casual, easy, letting the sway itself find her seat. Joe Willie and Aiden walked on either side of the packhorse, and they could see them talking animatedly back and forth to each other, their hands creating a parallel language in the air. Now and then Claire turned in the saddle to join in, and when she faced forward again they could see the whiteness of her smile, the head-thrown-back insouciance of her laugh.

Johanna and Victoria walked slowly across to the main barn to greet them, waving to summon the men, who were busy unloading a truck by the equipment shed. The four of them angled toward the back paddock and then leaned on the rails watching the adventurers cross the pasture. When they got closer the Wolfchilds stepped through the rails to greet them.

“Good trip?” Victoria asked.

“Amazing,” Claire said, hugging them all in turn.

The men’s voices were higher suddenly, and everyone listened intently as Joe Willie described the encounter with the bear. He talked while they walked the horses into the barn, where a couple of the wranglers appeared to put them up in their stalls.

“So she stood up at the edge of the meadow again then dropped down and disappeared,” Joe Willie said. “We sat up until daybreak and she never showed again.”

“The three of you yelling and making a lot of noise was probably the best thing you could have done,” Birch said.

“It was the lullaby that calmed her down,” Aiden said. When the Wolfchilds looked at him, he told them about Joe Willie’s conversation, and they all laughed.

Johanna seemed unsurprised. “You two weren’t strangers,” she said to Joe Willie.

“No,” he said. “Not hardly.”

He told them about the bear, and for the first time the men were quieted, intent on his descriptions of the dreams. When he finished they nodded, then looked to the women for words.

“The bear is a protector,” Johanna said. “She carries medicine meant to heal. She told you that in the hospital and she kept coming back to you to help you through because this healing would be the hardest thing you ever did.”

Joe Willie nodded. “That’s a fact,” he said.

“But the most important thing is the thirteen steps she took in her last visit. That was the biggest healing sign she left you,” Johanna said.

“Why’s that?” Joe Willie asked, leaning forward to catch his mother’s words.

“Thirteen is a spiritual number. There’s thirteen poles in a teepee. There’s thirteen principle stones in a medicine wheel. A turtle’s shell has thirteen segments in its middle. Each of them has a principle attached to it that tells us how to live in community.”

“So?” he asked.

“So,” Johanna said, “she took thirteen steps and you counted them. The bear was telling you that you could only heal yourself through community, only come back by letting other people into your lodge, let them join you in your journey.”

“What do the thirteen mean?” he asked.

“Things like loyalty, trust, honesty. Things you already know. What we taught you or tried to teach you all your life. Things you forgot because of your pain.”

“Love especially,” Victoria said.

“Pardon?” He looked at her.

“It’s the hardest principle when you hurt like that. Letting yourself be loved through it,” his grandmother said.
“You had to make that journey back to it on your own. The bear was telling you to be strong, that you had it in you to make it back.”

“Did I?”

“You tell me.”

“I made it to the peak,” he said.

“And?”

“It was beautiful. Like always.”

“Amen to that,” she said and smiled.

It was a 1982 Cadillac engine. Aiden had found it in a hot-rod magazine, and after explaining the subtleties of a 249-cubic-inch V6 to Joe Willie, they’d ordered it. They stood staring at it in the hoist three days later. It gleamed, swaying slightly in the air as though eager to be churning, and Joe Willie reached up a hand to it and felt the cool, hard promise of it.

“Tell me again,” he said.

“Jesus,” Aiden grumbled good-naturedly. “Digital fuel injection with 190 foot-pounds of torque in 249 cubic inches.”

“It’ll go?”

“Like stink.”

“Aiden,” Claire said sharply.

“Cowboy talk, Mom.”

“Is that what it is?”

“Yes’m,” he said, nodding and touching the brim of his hat with two fingers.

She laughed. “What have I created?” she asked of the ceiling.

“A bull rider,” Joe Willie said.

Aiden looked at him. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying we need to get to work now.”

“Bulls?”

“Damn straight, bulls.”

“No more gymnastics and getting socked in the face?”

“Oh yeah, you still gotta do that. And I need you running every day and lifting weights too. But we can rig you up now,” Joe Willie said, walking to the door of the shed. “And I mean now.”

“Well, let’s go! Let’s pick out a couple of those bulls over there and get at it,” Aiden said, hurrying after him. “I’ll go wrangle them myself.”

“Oh, no,” Joe Willie said. “You’re not riding them bulls there.”

“Which bulls, then?”

“Them bulls,” Joe Willie said, hooking a thumb toward the stock truck that was making the turn into the Wolfchilds’ driveway.

They were the most frightening things Claire had ever seen. She stood next to Aiden watching the bulls thunder down the ramp and into the corral. Joe Willie was standing with his father and grandfather talking with the two men from the truck. The wranglers herded the bulls out of the truck yelling and whistling loudly, repeatedly, so that the whole process took on an air of urgency, volatility, danger. As they thudded by her Claire could feel the weight of them. Immense. Colossal. Dangerous. They shook the ground as they trotted malevolently into the corral and they took up her whole field of vision beyond the rails. She stepped back. As tall as a man at their shoulders, with heads as wide and thick and heavy as a car bumper. Some of them had nubs of horn like clenched fists and others bore a broad hook of horn at each side of their head. Each of them was covered with great clumps and slabs of muscle, and their hooves were heavy, devilish blocks of granite.

Joe Willie came and stood on the other side of Aiden.

“Brahmas,” Aiden said with awe.

“Not exactly,” Joe Willie said. “Brafords. Brahma and Hereford cross.”

“Rodeo bulls,” Claire said.

“Real ones,” Aiden said, staring.

“The Brahma blood makes them good athletes, good jumpers, buckers, spinners. They’ll kick like sumbucks. The Hereford in them makes them muscular. It gives them gumption too.”

“Mean, you mean?” Claire asked.

“I mean gumption.”

She looked at him. There was a no-nonsense look on his face that was neither devious nor condescending. Instead, it bore the weight of simple, direct truth and Claire trusted him. Trusted him with Aiden.

“If he can ride these he can ride anything,” Joe Willie said.

“Are they dangerous?”

“Not if you leave them alone.”

“God,” Aiden said. “You see them on TV and they look big enough, but when you stand right beside them they’re like tanks. Nothing like the bulls here.”

“Our bulls are greenhorn bulls,” Joe Willie said. “These are the real deal. Pure no-detour bred-to-buck rodeo stock. Chaos with hooves, horns and attitude.”

He clapped an arm around Aiden’s shoulders. Together they leaned on the rails and peered through at the bulls milling around the water trough kicking up tufts and puffs of dust like schoolyard bullies. Claire laid her arm across Joe Willie’s, the warmth of him comforting, assuring, the feel of her son vital as breath. The bulls clomped about, their eyes flat, baleful,
rimmed with white so that when their gaze caught her Claire felt studied. Some of them shook their heads so that their horns jabbed the air like pitchforks and they scraped at the ground anxiously.

“There’s thirteen of them,” Aiden said quietly.

“Amen to that,” Joe Willie said.

Aiden stood up then and turned to face him. Joe Willie rose slowly and the two of them stood face to face, a foot apart, wordlessly.

“You can change your mind,” Joe Willie said. “No shame in that.”

“Rig me up,” Aiden said.

They turned and walked toward Birch and Lionel, who were waiting with the truck wrangler. As they got to the front of the truck Aiden stopped and turned. He looked at Claire intently a moment, then slowly raised one arm and held it out to her, reaching for her with an open hand. She walked to her son.

The ritual of bull riding began. Joe Willie was a patient and methodical teacher. He showed both Claire and Aiden each piece of equipment and its purpose. He explained the how and why of it so clearly that there wasn’t a doubt in either of their minds about the level of respect a man had to carry into the back lot to prepare.
Intention
. He used that word repeatedly so that it took on the clarity of a mantra, and Claire found herself examining the rope and buckle and leather of it all scrupulously, envisioning each static piece hung on the rails as alive, taut with purpose, made kinetic by intention. It was a world. It was a new and strange and wonderful and scary territory. For Claire it was a geography whose trails were blazed by will, and as she watched Joe Willie lead her son through the range of
gear she sensed the toughness it asked of men, the grit, the determination, the sheer courage it took merely to intend, and at the bottom of it all, the soulfulness, the awareness of the animal, the relationship with it and the respect that mapped it all. She saw that in Joe Willie as he talked. She admired it. She wanted it for her son.

“You tie your boots on with this,” he said, handing a long length of thong to Aiden, who watched with a grave expression.

“How come?” he asked.

“Bull hide’s tough as hell,” Joe Willie said. “When you come to spur it that hide’ll rip your boots right off your feet when he’s bucking.”

“Jesus.”

Joe Willie handed him a thick roll of padding. He showed him how it attached to the Kevlar vest. “Vest’s for your gut. You can always break a rib. That’s nothing, really, but you can get horned in the belly or the back. The roll’s for the back of the neck on accounta your head’ll be slamming backwards some on these bulls.”

“Some?”

“Reckon about eighteen times or so in eight seconds.”

“What’s the helmet for?”

“You kidding me?”

“I was hoping so.”

They laughed. It wasn’t a nervous laugh, and Claire marvelled at it. Instead it was convivial, casual, the danger imminent, accepted and welcomed. It was the laughter of men joined by purpose and she found herself somewhat jealous of that, as though risk keyed a latent gene in men that allowed them levity and solidarity, a slouching, off-handed candour a woman could only wonder at.

“They get like children, don’t they?”

She turned to see Johanna smiling at her and at the sight of Joe Willie and Aiden going through the rote of preparation. “Yes. In a way,” Claire said. “I always wondered at ballyhoo and bluster, though.”

“Me too,” Johanna said. “When you’re around cowboys long enough you come to see it’s what they have to do to get ready. You eventually see the little boys inside the men. Good boys. Gentle, kind. Genuine.”

The wranglers were shunting a big brownish-red bull into the chute, and it clunked and thumped and rattled the wooden rails as it passed. The bull bawled loudly right beside her and Claire started. She could see the horns of it raking the air above the top rail.

“You ever worry?” she asked.

“All the time.”

“Do they?” She watched Aiden, the mother in her watching her son wander off alone into the schoolyard with the big boys, knowing she could never call him back and even if she did, he would never be able to look at her the same.

“Birch always said there was never no percentage in it. A bull’s gonna be a bull regardless, was his reckoning.”

“That’s not too comforting. Look at them,” Claire said.

“A little on the large side, wild, hairy, live too much in the testicles. Hell, we’ve had
men
like that, Claire. Why sweat a bull?”