Free Dream Wheels by Richard Wagamese

the easy distances, and there were the sounds of music from sidewalk cafés and the clatter of dishes and the slushysound of passing cars and a levity that made the dimming of the light and the approaching darkness easier to enter somehow. They looked at each other. Aiden hooked a thumb toward the cement steps and they sat there together watching it all. He lit a cigarette and passed the pack to Cort. He could tell by the way Cort settled into the smoke, inhaling deeper, holding it longer, that he was flattened out, the drug easing off and the reality of the walk upstairs looming like an unwelcome labour.
    “Shit when it ends, huh?” he said.
    “The stone?”
    “That too.”
    They laughed.
    “Feels freer out here,” Aiden said after a moment.
    “No shit. It’s never Howdy Doody time up there. Ever,” Cort said.
    “Fucker beat my mom.”
    Cort looked at him. Then he looked back out over the street and thought a long while before looking at the trees and the sky beyond. “It eats me up that she stays,” he said.
    “Me too. Can’t figure that. No way.”
    “Me neither. I had my way the miserable pricks’d get a little of their own, you know?”
    “I hear you. Maybe they will.”
    Cort looked at him again. He nodded. “Maybe they will,” he said.
    “We can change things,” Aiden said.
    “Yeah.”
    “All it takes is the jam.”
    “I got that.”
    “Yeah.”
    They looked around them at the street. Everywhere they could see the shape of people wending their way toward theirhomes, a casual slouching about them that spoke of a desire for predictability, for rest, for the safety of routine. The moon was a slip of light above them. Aiden grabbed the pack of smokes and handed Cort the unopened half, then stood up and leaned on the handrail. He moved aside to let an old couple shuffle past them. The old man and old woman held hands and when the man reached out to open the door for her he let his other hand rest against the small of her back. Both boys watched them enter the building and disappear slowly up the stairs, the man still guiding her with that light palm. They looked at each other.
    “Chivalry,” Aiden said.
    “What’s that?”
    “It means being a warrior with class.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Yeah. Honour, man. Stand-alone honour.”
    “I could handle that.”
    Aiden gave a small grin and clapped him firmly on the back. “It’s the only way to fly, my friend.”
    The bear walked right through the crowd and people stepped aside easily to let it through. No one screamed and there was no stampede of people trying to get away. Joe Willie wondered how that could be. The bear was immense. A silvertip grizzly like they saw every once in a while in a mountain valley, five feet tall at the shoulder and as heavy as any rodeo bull. But it strolled through the crowd toward him like any other partygoer and people nodded politely and stepped aside. There was a band playing somewhere and the bear moved in counterpoint to the lilt and jump of the two-step they played. It kept its eyes on him as it approached and Joe Willie felt only a deep curiosity watching it watch him. He could hear the sharp click of claws on the floor. Each step it took was accompanied by a metallic rollingtap of claw. Slow. Solemn. There was a smell in the air. Bear smell. Rancid, foul. But above it, mingled with it, were the twin odours of smoke-tanned buckskin and medicine smudge. Sweetgrass, sage, cedar and tobacco rolled all around him, grew thicker, sharper, more poignant as the bear neared him. Click. Click. Click. The tap of claws continued as the music died and the bear came to within three feet of where he stood. Staring. Silent. Then it stopped. The smell of the old healing medicines was rife in the air, and the bear swivelled its great head around as though smudging itself, snorting smoke and huffing with the feel of it in its lungs. Then it rose, stood up with a tremendous lurch, wavered slightly on its hind legs, caught its balance,