Dream Wheels Read Online Free

leering at her, talking now in a garbled mélange of curses and loutish description of her body, his desire, his intentions, his control. She didn’t move. That was her part, the one he wanted her to play, the one he needed performed in order for him to move into the realm he needed to inhabit. Acquiescence. Surrender. He needed surrender. The black woman silent before his power. She waited wordlessly and when he reached upward along her thigh and groped for the thin fabric of underwear, the humping of her rear was a preventative move more than invitation. He yanked them from her. He pulled apart the zipper along the back of the thin sundress and threw it from her. He forgot about the shoes. He always did. Instead he raised her heels above his shoulders and speared downward.
    She went places after that. She closed her eyes and travelled to the places she’d gone to all her life when the noise and the motion and the vision got to be too much for her. She went to the imagined freedom of the mountains. She went to a splendid day with the wind bringing the scent of juniper and pine and sage to her as she rode along a trail dappled with shadow. She felt the gentle bump of the saddle pommel against her womanhood. She felt the sway and step of the horse’s girth between her thighs. She felt the polished leather rub rhythmically against her rear. She felt all that languid,sensual motion, the antithesis of this savage pummelling of her vagina. Then she went to the boy’s birth; the joy of it, the agony of bringing him to the light. The terrible hurt followed by the most incandescent beauty lying nestled in her arms. She went there.
    The boy was out. He always was. It was an unspoken pact between them that he would stay away until nine or so before phoning and getting her mumbled coded reply that all was settled there. She was glad of that. Glad that they knew enough of survival to engage in this alliance of deception, to allow the venom to spew before coming home to perform the perfunctory roles of home and family for his convenience. She went to the life the boy and she had shared, the measure of his company the benchmark of what she knew as happiness.
    The man arched and bellowed like a great whale. He turned her, lifted her into the position he required, slapped, gripped, squeezed, bit and battered her with his penis until the false stamina of booze gave way and he groaned loudly before collapsing on top of her, murmuring gentle noodlings of love in her ear on clouds of boozy vapour. Then he’d sleep. If she woke him he’d be angered and the sullenness would last all evening, taken out on her and the boy in spiteful looks and curses before the booze took over again and he slumped to the bed and gave them reprieve. That’s where she lay now. In the amnesty of orgasm.
    Soon, when he made even the smallest of moves, she would rise and repair dinner, serve it to him at the coffee table where he flicked through the channels seeking a ball game or action movie to fill his night. Dinner, laundry, neatening was the dance she did each night. The avoidance dance that got her to the place where he slept and she could relax, think, plot the escape she craved but felt helpless to effect.
    But tonight he turned. Turned and slipped a hand to her throat, pushing her back into the pillow and rising like an assassin in the dark. She closed her eyes and waited. Waited for the light of memory to take her back again to sunlight and space and freedom. It never came.
    Foley had never seen anything like it. The arm had been torn from the socket and only the strength of the muscles had kept it from being separated from the torso. From the paramedic reports, he gathered that the young bull rider had been unable to free the latching hand from the bull and had been flopped about mercilessly for a good thirty seconds. It didn’t seem like a long time, but when Foley considered the prospect of being whipped about by a ton of animal it must have been an