Bull Rider Read online

  First it snowed. Yeah, it was hot in September, and now it was snowing in October, but weather’s changeable, and the wind blew in from the north. I met Mike and waved at his folks. We signed in and got our numbers in a snow flurry. Snow doesn’t bother me when we’re dropping hay to the cattle, but it’s tricky when you’re on a skateboard.

  The Winnemucca Skate Park is on the edge of a city park, right by the road. You can look across the lawns and see train tracks and then the mountains. It’s a pool-shaped deal. You’d think a small town like that would have one of those little flat parking-lot skate parks that the Boy Scouts build, with a chain-link fence and a couple of ramps and a rail, but this is a full-on hole dug into the ground with rounded sides, ramps, and concrete benches built into the side. It’s got lights for night skating, too, and there’s a playground with a bouncy purple dinosaur right there. Lali took off to ride on it the minute she jumped out of the Bronco, with Grandma Jean trotting right behind her.

  The Parks and Rec guy went inside and came out with a push broom and got one of the kids busy sweeping snow off the ramps. It piled into the pockets at the bottom of the pool, and he shoveled it into a plastic bucket.

  “You think it’s going to ice up?” I asked Mike.

  “Naw, the sun’s coming out. It’ll melt.”

  “I’d rather skate when it’s dry,” I said. I checked the underside of my skateboard, the trucks and wheels, to make sure everything was all working right.

  Mike grinned. “It doesn’t matter if it’s wet. Just as long as you’re ready to come in second.”

  “Shut up,” I said. “You can’t jump that board over a garden hose.”

  He poked my back with his board. “I’m gonna win, you know.”

  “Shut up,” I said again. I popped a couple of aspirins I got from Grandma Jean’s purse. My bruised foot throbbed against my tennis shoe. “Check out the rest of these guys.”

  There were some boarders in the lineup we knew from practicing in Winnemucca. They were older, and they usually ignored us or offered us cigarettes and laughed when we wouldn’t take ’em.

  “Hey, Cam, you trying for the big-time here?” one guy asked. “Did you bring your mama along?”

  I didn’t pay him any mind. He was a senior, and he always gave me a hard time because I was better than him—and had been since I was about twelve.

  His friend chimed in. “At least his mama wants to see him skate. Yours won’t watch ’cause she don’t want to see you get wiped up by a couple of ninth graders.”

  “Ninth graders?” one of the guys from Battle Mountain said. “Man, I thought that one was our age.” He pointed to me. Then he started practicing some tricks. The three boarders from Battle Mountain were good. Could be Mike and me would both come in second to them anyway.

  Mike was up first. It was kind of a freestyle competition that a couple of guys who worked at the park cooked up. They’d made this routine that took you down into the bottom of the pool, up one side, and down again. We had to use a couple of the ramps, land a jump—any kind—and do a 50-50, and then go back around to the beginning. After that, you could let go and do what you wanted till three more minutes were up. But no flips. Even if somebody could land one, the park didn’t want the liability.

  They lined up three judges at a card table. They were older guys who were done with high school but still hung out at the skate park when they weren’t working. They scored your tricks—how hard they were and how good you did them. That worked for me. I could always catch a lot of air.

  Mike started off. I hoped the combination of the snow and the audience would rattle him, but no such luck. He flew down the ramps and around the turns. Mike was good at skating vert up the sides of the pool. When he was at the top, he did a rock and roll with a 180 kickturn, which flipped him and his board around to take him back into the bowl. Once he looked like he was going to lose his board, but I knew better. Mike could look out of control, but he wasn’t. He landed square and kept running. Everyone went nuts yelling. He coasted to a stop at the top of the pool, turned, and waved like he was royalty or something.

  Next the boys from Battle Mountain took their shots. Anybody could see that they weren’t going to catch Mike on difficulty, so it was my turn to win it—or not. I got through the “compulsories” as they called it and on to my part. I ran down into the hole, up again, turned onto the first ramp, shot across with my board right under my feet, and landed low and solid. Someone called out, “Bustin!” I used the speed to get me up on a curb and I 50-50ed along it. Next, I did a 360, turned 180, and was flying along, feeling great. I went to a 5-0 to set up my next shot into the pool, and then my ankle just folded. It slammed down on me like the school bus stop sign. I smashed into the concrete, tumbled down the side of the pool, and landed in the puddle of melting snow. My board went sailing and so did my chances. I lay there for a minute and then popped to my feet. I’d torn a hole clean through my jeans, and my right side was scraped raw from my waist to my armpit.

  Mike won. His mom took a bunch of pictures and the Parks and Rec gave him a tricked-out new skateboard and a certificate to a boarding shop.

  “Nice board,” I said.

  “You should have practiced more,” Mike said.

  “I practiced. I busted my ankle, that’s all.”

  “Busted your ankle riding a stupid bull,” Mike said.

  “It didn’t hurt you none,” I said. “I’d have won if I didn’t mess up my ankle.”

  “Yeah, and I’d have lost—is that what you’re saying? Except, gee, I didn’t spend my weekend bull riding and ignoring my real friends.” Mike walked off.

  I spit on the new snow. I’d lost. I was glad Darrell wasn’t there to rub it in too. And more, I was glad Ben had stayed home.

  Mom put her arm around me as we walked to the car. Her hand stung my bruised shoulder.

  “You hurt that ankle worse than we thought. Do you think you need an X-ray?” She was really asking herself. But I answered.

  “I’ll be okay. I can get it from here.” I brushed her arm aside and limped faster, moving ahead of her.

  “You’ll do better next time,” she said. “You will.” She waited for me to agree with her. But a train barreled by. It made plenty of noise and I didn’t have to answer.

  If it wasn’t already my worst day, it took the prize when we stopped by the post office on the way home. Report cards were in our PO box. I opened the envelope while we were driving. Mom reached over and took the printout almost before I could finish reading. “What do you mean getting a C in history? And a C+ in algebra?” Mom demanded. “I’ll have to talk to Mr. Killworth about that. Honestly, Cam, I can’t believe you let your grades go. And don’t even think about saying you didn’t have time to study. You found time for skateboarding and sneaking off to bull ride.”

  “I didn’t sneak off, Grandpa took me. And my grades aren’t bad. That stuff is hard.”

  “It’s never been hard before. And you should know to do your part without asking, especially now, with Ben home. We don’t have time for this.” She stopped talking, like she had to think on just how mad she could get. “Okay, you can just hand over that skateboard. I’m keeping it. It’s chores and homework for you until your next report card.”

  “Till my next report card? That’s six weeks. My muscles will shrivel up. I’ll forget how to jump.”

  Dad pulled the Bronco to the side of the road, turned, and leaned against the door, just looking at me. “Stop with the whining, Cam. And watch what you say. Ben has real problems with his muscles, you know. It’s not something you should be joking about.”

  I wasn’t joking. You have to keep boarding. It’s natural, like bull riding. I can’t explain how my legs know how to kickflip or how my butt stays on top of a bull, but it works if you just keep doing it.

  “Just don’t blame me for stuff I didn’t do,” I said. “I don’t sneak.”

  “He’s right,” Grandma Jean said. “Cam wouldn’t do anything
sneaky.”

  “This is between Cam and Jim and me,” my mother said. Her voice was flat and cool, like she was holding herself together with just words.

  Dad drove the rest of the way home and pulled into the driveway. I jumped out and went around back toward the barn. No skateboarding, no bull riding. Mike was mad at me for slacking off on our boarding practice, and Mom, she was the one who hadn’t even asked me about my homework since Ben got hurt. She just doctored him and took on more ranch accounts for other people. Well, I could get as worked up as her. I picked up the axe by the woodpile, lined up three rounds of pine and whaled into one. The ax sunk deep, then kicked back against my shoulders. I swung again, harder, and the wood split clean through with a crack. I sucked in the pine smell and hammered it again. Splitting kindling is just the thing to do when you really want to bust your hand through a wall but know better.

  That Monday, Killworth chewed me out too. He’d talked to Mom.

  “O’Mara, your algebra is weak, and you are behind in your history assignments. I’m relieving you of PE. You can use the time to get your history turned in. As for algebra, you should get a tutor. If your grades don’t come up, we’ll add some after-school sessions for you. Am I clear?”

  “Yes, sir.” I didn’t want to tick him off and have to clean the whole school or run laps on the track or something. Killworth loved laps. He said it wasn’t punishment because he ran them with you. He called it a “health opportunity” or “attitude adjustment.”

  “You’re not like half these other fools, O’Mara. Get yourself together. I’m expecting you to make the right decisions here.”

  This was sabotage. Between my mother and Killworth, they’d have me learning to knit with Grandma Jean or playing hopscotch with Lali. And an algebra tutor? Mom and Dad were still paying off the airline tickets and motels bills from when they’d gone to DC to be with Ben. There was no way I could ask them to pay for a tutor.

  When I came in from school, I stopped at Favi’s. If I couldn’t board with Mike, I could play video games with her. But she wasn’t home. Figured.

  I headed home and, as I came in the door, Grandma Jean called, “Is that you, Cam? Come up to my room.”

  I went in and she patted the bed for me to sit next to her.

  “Things aren’t going so well for you, Cam,” she said. “So I made this for you.” She pressed a navy blue plastic packet into my hand. “It’s like mine. I think you need an angel now.”

  “Grandma, I don’t think angels worry about me.”

  “There’s salt from the Salt Lick in there too,” she said.

  I opened the little snap at the top and peeked inside. There were bits of sage and the salt and a little silver heart. I could see a St. Jude medal, and there was other stuff I couldn’t name.

  Grandma Jean took the bag and closed it. “No matter what’s in there. It’s special for you and nobody else’s business. Don’t show it off. But keep it with you. It will help.”

  I didn’t think it would help at all, but I pushed the little bag down into my jeans pocket.

  “That’s a good boy,” she said, and she kissed my head.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Mom took my skateboard and went right back to life as usual.

  On Wednesday she drove Ben to the VA hospital in Reno for an assessment. When I came in from school, Mom and Ben were already home. The look on Ben’s face told me something was up. “Hey, bro’, guess what?” he said. “I can feel a pinprick in my ankle. That’s good. Like a miracle.”

  “So what’d the doctors say?”

  “They say if I work hard, I might walk.”

  “Wow.” I whistled. This was a miracle, for sure. “So what do you have to do? How long till you can walk?”

  “Don’t know. But I will. You bet on it.”

  Going from feeling a prick on your ankle to walking—that would be a real trick. But that was way too mean to say, so instead I answered, “I’ll be waiting on that.”

  And when you stop your own thoughts from coming out of your mouth, don’t you wonder what other folks are doing with theirs? What else was inside Ben’s head that he wasn’t saying? Was he mad that I had my legs and could do stuff like skateboarding, even if I was grounded? Was he mad that he had to go back to California so he could learn to twitch his toes? He was hoping for so little of what the rest of us still had. Honestly, his excitement made me kind of sad.

  I tried to cheer myself up. “It can’t be tougher than getting thrown from a bull or hiking Wheeler Peak the time we got caught in a whiteout. Remember that?”

  Ben looked at me blankly. “I don’t remember Wheeler Peak. Some stuff is gone.”

  How could he forget that? We’d done it in June just before he left. “You don’t remember Wheeler Peak?” I said. “What about the high school championship rodeo?”

  “I remember that,” he said. Then Ben smiled.

  “They’ll work on your memory in Palo Alto too,” Mom said.

  Well, if Ben was excited, Mom was feeling down. She had been content having Ben under her roof and knowing he was safe, even if he wasn’t quite whole. But she had to see, like the rest of us did, that the idea of therapy, of standing up again, made him more whole of a person than he’d been since he’d come home. So, even though he had three days left of his leave, she and Dad loaded Ben into the pickup and headed west to California. They took Ben back to the TBI unit and spent the weekend in Palo Alto.

  I took it as my chance to get a little elbow room. Saturday morning, I helped Grandpa Roy change the oil in the tractor. Then, I took one of the cow horses, Pepper, out for a ride. I started out like I was going over to the Jones’s ranch but turned the horse around once we were on the main road, and rode to the bull ring. Mom hadn’t told me I couldn’t watch, and Darrell Wallace was my best bet for getting help with algebra.

  “Hey, squirt, are you going to ride again?” Darrell asked.

  “Naw, I just came to watch.”

  “Too much for you?”

  “Too much for my mom. She went nuts when she found out I’d been riding.”

  Darrell scratched his head. “So, I don’t see her here now.”

  I tied Pepper to a little cottonwood tree and climbed the fence to look at the weekend’s bulls. Trucks were coming down the road and rumbling onto the gravel. When they filled that area, they parked on the road.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “We’re having a kind of fall jubilee. A bunch of us decided to meet and see who could go the most rounds on those bulls. There’s a jackpot—fifty dollars each. If you ante up and win, the money’s yours—split for first, second, and third.”

  “My mom won’t let me ride and I don’t have fifty dollars,” I said.

  There were about ten bulls and big steers milling around in the holding pen. One of them was the black Brahma, Quicksand. “So who draws the big one?” I asked. “He’s a piece of work.”

  Darrell spit. “Naw, he ain’t nothing compared to Ugly. That bull makes ’em all look puny. And that’s the one I’m going to ride someday. Ugly. You know they have a purse on him. The outfit that raises the bucking bulls wants some exposure, and they’ve put up a prize that’d make a pig dance. They’re paying fifteen thousand dollars to the first cowboy to ride him. That’s gonna be me.”

  “Could be me.” I grinned.

  “Yeah, but your momma won’t let you. And by the time you’re old enough to sign all the papers for the insurance waivers yourself, I’ll have gone and rode him. You’ll have to wait for the next crazy big bull to come along.”

  Actually, that suited me fine. Right now, sitting on the fence, I was longing for the adrenaline rush, but I didn’t long to die. The big bulls scared me, and I could get my fix off a smaller steer any day. But I’d come for something else.

  “Darrell, I’m about to crash and burn in algebra, and if I don’t work it out, my folks are going to have a heart attack. So, I’m thinking, can you help me with my homework now?”
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  “I’m about to ride some bulls, kid, but stick around, and we’ll take a look after the event.”

  So that’s how I came to ignore my mom and get on a bull again. I didn’t mean to. Really. But the cowboys just kept lining up and one after the other, they lowered themselves into the bucking chute. Most of the guys recognized me.

  “Aren’t you Ben O’Mara’s kid brother? You gonna take a round?”

  Well, I did say no a few times, but then one of them offered to waive the jackpot money and let me ride for practice. Temptation got the best of me. Mom or not, I borrowed a bull rope and rigged up a little spotted bull. I was nervous without Ben and Grandpa there. But Darrell took the gate duty and gave me a wink as I slipped onto the bull. I remembered Grandpa shouting to square my shoulders and then I called out, “Go.”

  Darrell pulled the gate, and me and that bull took a ride. This time felt different. I relaxed over his shoulders and let him make the moves. I gripped with my left hand and he spun right, giving me some good pull against the handle. Every time he hit the ground, I was still there, getting ready for the next jolt. I could hear the guys screaming, and then Darrell kept yelling, “Time, time, you’re done!”

  Eight seconds. I’d made it. I ripped the tail of the bull rope—it was squeezed tight between the rope handle and my fingers, glued down by the pine tar on my glove. When I pulled, it unzipped right through my fingers, and with that, I caught some air—flying high off to the side of the bull. I landed easy, though the jarring hurt my ankle, and I ran for the fence.

  “Great ride, kid!”

  “Eight seconds. The kid moves to the next round.”

  And I got to the third round, too. Darrell called it O’Mara magic or beginner’s luck. I’m thinking it was more the luck, or maybe it was lazy bulls? Whatever it was, I was happy to take it. There were only three of us in the third round. Me, Darrell, and a big guy, who I thought was Favi Ruiz’s uncle from Lovelock. No one else had made two eight-second rides. Andrew wrote out the bulls’ names so we could draw, official like, for the next ride. Darrell reached into Andrew’s hat and pulled the spotted bull I’d ridden in the first round. Favi’s uncle drew an albino Brahma, and I got Quicksand. Next to him, his buddy Possum was a pussy cat. My stomach flipped and growled. My rides had gone too well for my own good, and now I was stuck getting on the biggest bull there.