Dream Wheels by Richard Wagamese

Author:Richard Wagamese [Wagamese, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, General, Indians of North America, Friendship, Westerns, Literary, Cultural Heritage
ISBN: 9780312359263
Publisher: Anchor Canada
Published: 2006-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

He didn’t like guests. Guests disrupted the flow of things, the order, the predictability, the routine. In the last year or so he’d come to depend on things being what they were day in and day out. It steadied him. He had no need for expectation and there was only the work on the old girl and the vague idea he had come to develop about getting her up and on the road again. Time wasn’t anything he counted or measured anymore. There was just the matter-of-fact satisfaction of the job. It was all he needed and all he cared to claim as his own. Guests, however long they arrived for, altered the pitch of things, and he resented the effect they had on his routine. He was preparing to lie out and examine his work on the undercarriage when there was a knock at the door before it slid open and the old man poked his head in.

“Okay to come in, boy?” Lionel asked.

Joe Willie heaved a sigh and put the flashlight down on the workbench. “Yeah,” he said.

“Don’t mean to bother you.”

“Why do it, then?”

“Call it cussedness, I guess. I just wanted a word with you.”

“About?”

“About our company.”

“Your company.”

“Yes,” Lionel said and put a foot up on the running board of the old truck. “Our company. The kid is kinda gonna need a hand getting straightened out.”

Joe Willie snorted. “Probably coulda used a hand a lot earlier. Right square on the backside. Wouldn’t have needed any straightening out now.”

“Can’t say,” Lionel said. “Don’t know the whole story.”

“No need. Convicts ain’t peaches. They don’t just grow.”

“Well, he’s a guest. He’s welcome.”

“Not around me he’s not. Don’t like convicts no matter what their story.”

“Seems to me you aren’t exactly partial to most folks,” Lionel said.

Joe Willie picked up the flashlight and turned toward the old truck. “Long as they leave me be,” he said. “I’m partial to that.”

Lionel watched him bend and roll onto his back and push himself under the truck. There was the sound of metal scratching against metal and his boots never moved at all, and eventually the old man tired of waiting for words and walked out of the shed and back to the main house. Once he’d gone Joe Willie climbed back out and up into the cab. She didn’t complain so much anymore when there was weight presented to her. He grinned at that and flexed his left hand. The bolts on the undercarriage were changed and tight now. It had taken all that time but the old girl felt solid or at least as solid as her age allowed her to be. He thumbed open the engine-repair manual and began to read, nodding and dog-earing important pages. The springs were next and then the engine, the guts of her: the growl, the moan, the promise of the road. It surprised him how much he wanted to hear that.

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