Bull Rider (13 page)

“Hey, Frankenstein,” I said.

“Hey, dog face.”

“Look at that, you’re standing up. You decided to get off your butt?”

“Say
tush
,” Lali said.

“Stop that,” Mom said.

“Stop what?” Ben asked. The old Ben seemed to be coming back.

The days with Ben were good, but the nights were a different story. I slept upstairs and Ben slept down, but that first night, he screamed loud enough to wake us all no matter where we slept. I shot out of bed and skipped stairs on the way down. Mom and Dad tore downstairs right after me. Ben was sitting up in bed, eyes open, shrieking.

“Ben, wake up.” Dad shook him. Ben took a swing at Dad
but missed him. “Ben,” Dad yelled, “you’re dreaming!” He shook him again, hard. Ben stopped screaming and looked at us blankly. You could see him trying to place where he was. “Ben, you’re all right,” Dad said quietly.

“I had a dream,” Ben said. He was shaking. Mom turned on the light. Ben’s face was ashy white.

“I’ll get you some water,” she said.

“I’m okay,” he said. “I was dreaming. Bad stuff.”

He sipped at the water and set the glass down next to his new hand on the piano bench. “They say I got more memory back along with my speech. It’s bad. I can’t sleep.”

“Your dreams,” she asked, “are they about the war?”

“It’s like I’m still there,” he said. “I can’t stop them.”

“Well, you’re safe with us, you’re home,” Dad put his hand on Ben’s shoulder.

“They were shooting at me. The noise. It wouldn’t stop. All that fire.” Then Ben saw me. He stopped talking and looked around, like he knew where he was. “Are you all up?” he asked.

“No, Grandpa Roy’s deaf,” I said. “And Lali sleeps through anything.”

“What day’s tomorrow?” Ben asked.

“Saturday.”

“Stay up with me, Cam? We can watch a movie.”

Mom and Dad kissed him good night and went back to bed. The TV reception was gone, except for the Kung Fu channel, since Dad had turned off the satellite service to save money. So, I rummaged through the DVDs and old videos. I put on
Top Gun
. Ben had always loved it, but as soon as the planes started firing, he got all sweaty. “I’ll find
something else,” I said. “It’s just a stupid movie.” We settled on one of Lali’s little kid movies about panda bears. I stayed with Ben till he fell asleep. The sun was lighting the sky behind the mountains when I got back to bed. I had chores to do, but they would wait. I closed my eyes.

The next day, Ben seemed fine. But I was worried. I called Grandma Jean.

“Cam, I’m glad to hear your voice.”

“Me too. How are you?”

“How are
you
? I can tell—is something wrong?”

“Ben had this nightmare. It was awful. I don’t know what to do.”

Grandma Jean sighed. “Honey, you don’t always have to be the one who fixes things. Let your parents and the doctors take care of it. They will.”

“Are you sure? I wish you were here.”

“I’ll be there soon.”

Just talking to her made Ben’s dream seem less scary.

But that night, it happened all over again.

“They said this could happen,” Mom whispered to me after Ben went back to sleep.

“Do you think he wakes up every night?” I asked.

“Oh, I hope not. It’s the memories. He’s got to sort out the awful memories.”

“How long?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Mom said. “I wish he were home for good.”

“Let’s give him something else to think about,” I said. “Let Grandpa Roy and me take him to the bull ring. Let’s do something he loves.”

“In the morning. We’ll talk in the morning.” Then Mom went to bed, and I was so beat I lay back in the easy chair and slept next to my big brother.

I
’ve got to be honest. For months Ben seeped into everything we did. “How’s Ben doing?” everyone asked. They asked it at the feed store and at church, at school and at Grandpa’s bingo night. Ben wasn’t doing well. But we smiled and said, “As well as expected,” or “Thanks, he’s getting along.”

So when we got pulled into Ben’s nightmares and his remembering, there was only one thing I could think of doing that would take my mind and his right off his troubles. On a bull, you don’t have time to think about anything. Mom wasn’t so excited about me taking Ben to the bull ring, especially with the ice on the roads, but Grandpa and Dad got it right away. Grandpa called Tom Lehi, and Dad called Earl Wallace, Darrell’s dad, and the Echevarria brothers—Andy’s dad and uncle. Then they went a step further. They said they’d set up a chute in the Salt Lick corral. We’d all meet up there Sunday after church. Grandpa talked about laying a bonfire, and soon enough, the old guys were thinking about food.

“We’re fixing to do a bull ride,” I told Ben.

“Now?” he asked.

“Yeah, right now. Everyone’s coming up Sunday. You can show off your new head.”

Ben laughed. “It looks okay, huh?”

“You look good,” I said. “The girls’ll be hitting on you, for sure.”

“Don’t think so,” he said. “They like guys who can walk.”

“Don’t talk like that, you dork,” I said. “Sometimes you’re just way dorky.”

“Who you calling that?” he asked. And, you know, he threw his pillow at me.

We only had three days till Sunday, so Dad loaded some of those green portable railings into the pickup, and after school I helped him and Grandpa. We took the gas-powered auger, ’cause the ground was half-frozen, and some bags of cement. The corral at the salt lick was a loading area for putting the stock onto trucks. It had a V-shaped chute that ran into the corral for penning the cattle and another chute that ran out of the corral and up about four feet high for loading them onto a truck. Dad had added some extra height to the corral and doubled up the rails a couple of years ago when the government Bureau of Land Management, the BLM, wanted to use it for some wild horses, so it was stronger than your regular rail cow pen. But there wasn’t any bucking chute. Dad was looking to fix that.

Now, we had a perfectly good bull arena in town with
solid sides and a real chute, but no one suggested we use it. I’m guessing they all understood—the salt lick was the center of our ranch. It was the center of us, really. It was where Lali’d learned to ride a horse and I’d roped my first calf. It was where Mom and Dad came to picnic when they were tired of the rest of us. Grandpa said it was the best place to break a green bronc, so he was figuring there’d be a little salt lick magic for bull riders, too. This was the place to cheer Ben up.

As luck would have it, the loading chute backed right to the gravel road, so Dad parked the truck next to the corral without having to venture into the mud alongside the fence. “I’m thinking we can block off a bucking chute in that one,” he said, pointing to the broad chute that narrowed to the corral gate. “We can fix the gate to swing wide, and after the rides we can run ’em off into the loader.”

“The steers are gonna fly right off the end of that ramp. A bovine bungee jump—is that what you’re meaning to do?” Grandpa Roy asked, laughing.

“Not if we get Jones down here with the cattle truck. We’ll have him back it up to the ramp and just load ’em in the trailer. And when we’ve got a few, we’ll drive ’em back to the holding pen.”

“The truck could bog down in the mud,” Grandpa said.

“Then I’ll bring up a load of gravel. Let’s work on the gates.”

Dad took to running the auger and Grandpa and I mixed cement. The rails were temporary, but there couldn’t be anything half-baked about the posts. Not with bulls behind them. When Dad had a hole cut, we shoveled in some gravel
from the road, set a metal pipe for a post, and I got the chore of shoveling in the concrete. It don’t cure right in the cold, so after the posts were set, we piled on half bales of hay to keep the concrete from freezing. Then Grandpa wrapped it all in fence wire so the cows couldn’t eat all our insulation.

We set posts for two gates—one to use for a bucking chute behind the corral gate and a second one behind that for good measure. The guys would strip the bull ropes off the bulls on the loading ramp before they shooed ’em into Jones’s cattle truck.

“We’ll hang the gates on Saturday and lay the bonfire,” Dad said. “Ben’ll love it.”

Grandpa and I nodded. He surely would.

It was one fine party. The gates were ready, and Neil Jones hauled in the bulls. They came off the truck mooing, their flesh swaying under shaggy winter coats. Dad parked the truck and set Ben’s wheelchair up right in the pickup bed. Ben had a front-row seat. Now that he had his skull repaired, he pulled on his cowboy hat and it fit just fine. Mom refused to watch the riding—it upset her too much. But she said she’d bring Lali, later, to the barbecue. Grandpa and Dad would be moving the bulls, and Andy Echevarria was bullfighting. Darrell and all the regular cowboys showed up to put on a show for Ben. The only one without a job or a bull rope was me. I was supposed to take care of Ben.

“It’s a lousy break for you that you’re not riding,” Ben said.

“Uh-humh.”

“So why don’t you get out there and ride? I know you’ve been doing it.”

“Well, Mom had a cow after I rode in Elko. I don’t think she’ll let me do it now,” I said.

“I wouldn’t count on that. Dad’s the one out here, remember.”

“Do you think?”

“Let’s try something. Hey, Darrell,” Ben yelled, “go see if Grandpa will put my bro’ here on the lineup, will you?”

Darrell winked at me. “For you, Ben, sure.” And before I could stop him, he jogged over to Grandpa and was talking and pointing my way. Then Grandpa talked to Dad, and they were all staring over at me. I figured to play dumb and nodded my head at them, business-like. Darrell came back looking like he’d eaten a canary. “You’re in, squirt. Number seven. Lucky, right? Use my rope.”

“No, he’s using mine,” Ben said. “Look in the truck, Cam.”

So that’s how I came to ride Hot Cakes on a freezing Sunday in February. He was a solid animal with two white spots on his rump, giving him his name. I’d practiced a piece since Grandpa’d seen me ride, and Dad, he’d never been around to see me on a bull at all. I was nervous. I pulled on Ben’s glove and rubbed in some extra pine tar in case my shaking caused me to lose my grip. Hot Cakes looked as spooked as I felt. But with Dad and Ben and Grandpa waiting on me, I made myself get on him. He cocked his head back, like to ram me. I pulled the bull rope tight, pinched my hand closed, and signaled to let Hot Cakes fly.

His first landing jarred me hard and he spun like crazy.
It made me mad, and I spurred him. He let loose with his rear end, kicking, mule-style, up and out. That should have done me in, but I stuck for a couple more spins. Then I pitched off the side. The ground was rock hard—froze, I guess. It knocked the wind out of me. Hot Cakes took off in the other direction, and I made it over the fence. My dad shooed the bull right into the loading ramp, and I heard him clatter into the cattle truck.

The riders did three rounds apiece, and I had a good ride on a black mixed breed they called Sixty. That’s for the number on his ear tag, which read sixty, I’m guessing. When we finished, they loaded all the cattle into the truck and started up the bonfire. Everybody was bragging on how good they rode and saying we’d have to come back to ride here again. Grandpa Roy was grinning like an old cat. More families started coming and set up barbecues for steaks and hot dogs and beans. The sun set and the winter chill came on fast. Grandpa Roy and Earl Wallace added wood to the fire.

We took Ben down off the truck, and I pushed him closer to the fire.

“Nice work today, bro’.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Do you ever wish it was you up there?”

“Well, yeah,” Ben said.

I looked away, sorry that I’d asked.

Dad brought me a cup of coffee. “You can ride, son. It’s good to see.” Grandpa Roy nodded my way. I was dying to ask them. “So does Mom know?”

“Let’s keep your mother from worrying about you,”
Grandpa Roy said. “Just don’t go doing nothing stupid, and by the time she has time to think about you and bull riding, she’ll be over it again.”

“That’s not what Grandma Jean says,” I said.

“And that hasn’t stopped you, I see,” Dad said. I wasn’t sure if he was mad about that or not. I’m guessing it was a draw, him being pleased with my riding and peeved that I’d gone against Mom.

Mom drove up with Lali and Favi. They helped themselves to the food and settled down with our family. The fire crackled and spit sparks. The old guys got to talking about back when this snowstorm almost did ’em in or when that BLM agent tried to overcharge them on their range fees. Then they started up talking about the salt lick.

“I gave salt to my horse and he learned to dance,” Tom Lehi said.

“Yeah, I seen you waltzing with him,” my dad said.

“Well, I put the salt in dinner the other night and my wife ain’t slept since. We got the cleanest house in Humboldt County,” Earl Wallace said.

“I tell you, that salt’s magic,” Grandpa Roy said. “Didn’t you feel it when you rode tonight?” He leaned over to me and whispered so Mom wouldn’t hear. “Seriously, Cam, it would behoove you to take some back home for your next bull ride.” He winked at me. I couldn’t tell if he was kidding.

Later, as folks began to pack up and start home, Ben said, “I wish it wasn’t done.”

“There’s still plenty of food. And they’ll be telling stories for a while,” I said.

“My visit, I mean,” Ben said. “I like it here.”

“You’ll be back home in Salt Lick before you know it.” I leaned back on my elbows and looked into the fire. I squinted my eyes and the sparks blurred into bright streaks. “Just keep nailing it down there in rehab.”

“When I’m done in rehab, I’m not fixing to come back here. I’m still a Marine,” Ben said. “I’m hoping to be reassigned.”

I sat right up. “You’re what?” I knew he wanted to stay in the Marines. But didn’t he know how scary that was? I wanted him to be happy—but didn’t he care about Mom? Or Lali? Or me?

“Like I said, Cam, after I get new orders, I won’t be home for a while.”