Bull Rider (3 page)

T
here we were, just a piece more than a year after the send-off barbecue at the salt lick, and we were praying in the Baptist hall while Ben lay halfway around the world with his brain smashed up. Ben had some shrapnel in him, but we didn’t know much else about what’d happened. Except they called it TBI—traumatic brain injury. It comes from getting shot in the head, or hitting the concrete with your skull, or from shock waves knocking your brain around when there’s an explosion next to you and then your brain swells up. TBI. Who’d ever heard of it? It wasn’t fair.

Ben had a long trip home. When he was hit, they took him to a field hospital and then they loaded him in the belly of a special plane that was fixed up for taking care of the wounded. They landed in Germany and held him in the hospital there for a couple of days to stabilize. Then they flew him to the military hospital in DC. Mom and Dad were already there, waiting for him in a motel an hour out of
town. Dad called home every night and talked to Grandpa Roy about Ben, the ranch, Lali, and me. Mom couldn’t hold it together enough to say more than, “Love you,” or “I’ll see you soon.” Then you’d hear her voice crack, and she’d pass the phone back to Dad.

They weren’t telling me much about what happened, so I went on the Internet and found pictures of the special plane. It was pretty cool how they set that up, but I couldn’t see the wounded guys, so I found some blogs of soldiers who’d got shot up. They looked okay, sitting in their hospital beds, but some days I couldn’t read all the way through their stories. One had had his feet blown off. Even so, he said he could feel them at night like they were still there. He hadn’t slept for weeks. At least Ben had his feet.

Lali came in and I switched off the computer so she wouldn’t see. “Cammy, teach me to ride Pretty.”

“You can’t ride that goat, silly. You’ll get hurt.”

“But I need to practice for the mutton busting at the fair. I want Ben to see me when he comes home.”

“Then you should put a saddle on a sheep,” I teased. But even Lali couldn’t make me feel better after what I’d just read. I gave her a hug, grabbed my board, and biked over to Mike’s.

That’s where I always went when I felt rotten. Mike was the best. His folks moved them over from California when we were in third grade. He was the only new kid we had that year. His mom sent him to school in fancy clothes and new cowboy boots, like he’d need those at school. First thing he did was set his skateboard on his desk. So, Mrs. Lindsay took it away. Mike rolled his eyes around in a circle and
stuck out his tongue lizard-style. Nobody else could do that, and I knew right then we’d be friends.

Mike and me used to play a lot of tricks. Like the time we built a catapult behind my house. We balanced an old plank on a rock like a teeter-totter and set a cantaloupe on one end. Mike jumped, hard as he could, on the other side.

“There it goes!” he yelled.

Then the melon landed, splat, in Mom’s basket of clean laundry by the line.

“Oh man,” I looked at him. “We’re in trouble now.” And we were. We had to wash up all that stuff and hang it out again, and we had to pick cantaloupes out of the garden for a week. But it was worth it to see that melon fly.

Mike’s family, the Giannis, have a big house and a paved driveway, which is why we started skateboarding there. They let us build a skate ramp and keep it in their garage, and they put in floodlights just so we could practice at night. Mike’s dad even set an iron rail into one side of the driveway so we could set the ramp next to it and slide on it. When we were in fifth grade, Mike and I made a promise. No matter what else happened, we’d skateboard together. It started when Mike broke his arm because he missed a landing and I rode with him to the emergency room.

“You guys should take it easy with the skating,” the doctor said to him. “I see a lot of skateboard injuries.”

“I keep telling him that,” Mike’s mom said. “I think you boys should take up basketball. Especially you, Cam, you’re growing so tall.”

Mike rolled his eyes. After he picked out his cast—red so we could draw cool skating logos on it—we rode home in the back of his mom’s Lexus.

“You’ll be back on your board soon,” I said.

“Tomorrow,” he answered.

“Absolutely not,” his mother said.

Mike shook his head and stuck out his tongue, ducking so she couldn’t see in the rearview mirror.

“We’ll always be skaters,” I said.

“Always,” Mike said. “As long as we’re friends.” He rolled his good hand into a fist and reached toward me. We tapped our fists together to promise.

Now I pedaled as fast as I could, and when I got to Mike’s house, he was already outside on his skateboard. There was a boarding jam coming up in Winnemucca, and Mike and I practiced together for it like we always did. Mike liked to call the tricks out and we’d do ’em. But now he could call out a bunch and I’d only remember the first one.

“What’s up with you?” Mike asked. He wiped a smudge off his board with his T-shirt.

“Nothing,” I said.

“We can’t lose,” he said. “I’m not losing ’cause you’re going ADD on me.”

“I can’t stop thinking about Ben.”

He ran his fingers through his hair. “Look, just skate. That’s all you have to do.”

“I’m trying.”

He bopped me with his baseball cap and took off on his
skateboard. “You’ll be okay. I know you. But everybody will be there watching, so focus, you dork.”

“I’m good,” I said. And I pumped up to speed and roared around his driveway. The dry air stung my face. My board felt solid under my feet, and when I took off the end of the ramp, I kept myself straight over it. I got good air, sailing high and long, and then all four wheels hit the ground with a deep thump. I flexed my knees to take the shock and turned toward Mike. “Focused enough?” I yelled at him. But as I coasted to a stop, I figured Mike might be right. We might lose ’cause I couldn’t think straight anymore.

Boarding made the waiting bearable. That and Dad’s calls. Ben was going to live, that was the first one. When we got the news, Grandpa Roy let out a whoop to curl your hair. Then Ben was awake, but when he came out of the coma, he couldn’t talk. The doctors said his brain was like a clean slate. The brain injury had scrambled up the nerves in his brain. They thought he’d get them back to working better, but it needed time. He couldn’t walk, either. But pretty soon he could sit up. Next he said a word: “Eat.” I didn’t want to think about Ben learning how to eat and talk again. He couldn’t say what happened to him, although it had to do with an explosion. Two other guys who were with him died. “At least Ben’s alive,” Mom said. “The doctors work miracles. He’ll be back to himself soon enough.” She passed the phone to Dad, and he sprung it on me.

“Cam, I’ve got something to tell you. About Ben.”

Of course it was about Ben. “What?” I asked.

“The doctors have done what they can for now. He’s so much better than he was.” There was a long silence on the line. I wanted to talk to fill it up, but I knew Dad wasn’t done. “He’s paralyzed.”

“How paralyzed? Can they fix him?”

“Well, that’s the good part. He can move his upper body, and he gets more control every day. It’s an incomplete paralysis—his right leg and arm don’t work. He can’t stand yet, but he may. These brain injuries, they don’t know how they’ll turn out. It could get better with therapy. That’s the good part.”

Good part? This was good? “So will he be able to walk?”

Dad swallowed and it echoed on the phone line. “That doesn’t look good yet,” he said. “But he can move his upper body.”

“You said that,” I said. “I don’t believe it. The doctors are wrong. He’ll walk, he will.” Then my throat backed up, and I passed the phone to Grandpa.

There’s this thing that happens when I’m sad. Colors fade and rooms close in on themselves. Everything turns, well, gray. Waiting for Ben was so long and muddled, I call it the gray time. And it would have choked me except Grandma Jean showed up.

D
ad calls Grandma Jean a loose cannon, but I just love her to death. Nobody has a better grandma than I do. And no, she isn’t any relation to Grandpa Roy, except because her daughter married his son. Grandpa Roy is Dad’s dad and Grandma Jean is my mom’s mother. Her last name is Carl, and Dad and Grandpa and the rest of us are O’Maras. So they’re on either side of the family, and man, are those sides different. Grandma Jean’s about the only one who could make me laugh in the gray time. I’m thankful she did.

She drove up from Hawthorne. It took her thirty-six hours to get the news, pack her beat-up fire-engine red Ford Bronco, and drive the five hours to Salt Lick. She brought clothes for a month, licorice for Lali, and the heat. It hit ninety-seven the day she arrived, with more predicted.

“Good night! Have you three been moping around here since it happened?” she asked, including Grandpa Roy in her scolding. “It doesn’t help, you know.” She put on a Reba
McIntyre CD and turned up the volume. Next, she opened the windows to let the fresh air blow in. She passed the time under the yellow-splattered cottonwoods out front. She filled Lali’s wading pool, put in a lawn chair, and brought out her romance novels.

“It seems to me everybody around here’s talking about Ben like he’s dead already.”

“I can’t believe you just said that,” I blurted out.

Lali jumped in the pool and splashed Grandma Jean, and Grandma splashed her right back. She wiped some drops off of the cover of her novel. “Well, we’ll give ’em something
else
to talk about. We will tonight.” She grinned at me.

I knew that look. Your grandma probably isn’t like mine, unless she’s always playing tricks and jokes on people. Ben might be suffering and Mom and Dad gone back east, but Grandma Jean, she stayed the same.

About the time most people were going to bed, she started the dishwasher and handed me a flashlight.

“Roy, you’ll watch Lali while Cam and I run an errand, won’t you?”

“I always do. What business have you got going out at this hour?” He looked from her to me and back again. “No, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.” He picked up the TV remote and settled into the couch. Grandma Jean disappeared into her room and came out with her purse.

It was a cloth bag with round wooden handles and red roses all over it. Not that there was one thing about Grandma Jean that would make you think of roses, but the bag, which she was proud to say she bought for next to nothing at a swap meet, was enormous and she liked that.
It was a mystery what Grandma could hide in there—books, knitting, chocolate bars, and the like.

Some of her stuff was strange. She carried a baby picture of my cousin Adam Carl, who drowned on his ninth birthday. She said he was our guardian angel now, and she wouldn’t leave the house without his picture. And she kept a little red plastic pouch with a couple of strands of his baby hair, some sage leaves, some salt from out to our salt lick, and a medal of St. Jude—the saint for lost causes—that one of her friends gave her. She carried all that just so Adam could find us. She made one like it for Ben when he went overseas too. “A little extra insurance, in case that O’Mara luck wasn’t enough”—a lot of good it did him. Grandma’s rose bag was always bulging, so who knew what else she’d stuffed in there. She nodded to me and the two of us climbed into her Bronco.

A sliver of moon slid behind Sugar Peak as Grandma drove down Main Street. The only other people around were in the bar on the far end of the street. The single streetlight hadn’t had a bulb since Tom Lehi, a gold miner who’d been around here for sixty of his ninety years, got tired of it and shot it out. Floating in that darkness, the stars seemed close enough to grab.

“Like I told you, this town needs something else to talk about,” Grandma said. “You children don’t need folks creeping around talking about your brother like he was a cripple and whispering behind your back.” She stopped the car in front of the closed-down antique store and motioned for me to get out.

“So let’s change the subject, so to speak,” Grandma Jean said. “Turn on that flashlight.”

I held the flashlight while Grandma opened her handbag and laid out a length of
³
/4-inch irrigation tubing, scissors, two irrigation joints, a Laundromat-sized box of detergent, and a packet of powdered orange-drink mix in the back of the Bronco.

“What are we doing?” I asked.

“We’re fixing that fountain,” Grandma said seriously. She nodded toward a plaster fountain that Mike’s mom had stuck front and center by the walk to the antique store—to spruce things up. I always thought it looked silly to have Roman cherubs playing in the water out in central Nevada. ’Specially since the water line froze and busted the first winter, leaving them dancing in the dust.

I didn’t know Grandma’s plan, exactly, but I knew what the irrigation stuff was for, so I found the broken water line, cut the bad part out, and jammed the joints onto each open end. I cut a patch from Grandma’s line and stuck the ends into the joints. The line was connected to the store by a garden hose and an orange electric cord ran the pump. Grandma Jean turned the spigot and started the water. “Tell me when it’s full,” she said.

I watched the fountain bowl fill up beneath the pair of plaster cherubs that balanced above it. “It’s full,” I whispered.

Grandma brushed the spiderwebs off the outlet by the outside fuse box and plugged in the cord. The pump churned on. Water spewed from the cherubs mouths. I started to giggle. Then I really laughed.

“What’s funny?” Grandma asked.

“It looks like they’re throwing up.”

Grandma cackled. “Just wait.”

She poured the detergent into the bowl and nodded to me to add the orange powder. “We’re on our way,” Grandma said. “That should hold ’em for a while.”

The next morning, it was the talk of the school and the town. Someone had started up that crazy fountain and filled it with bubbly orange detergent. The stuff oozed out all over Main Street, and the cherubs drooled orange goo all day. No one knew who did it. Only Grandpa Roy could guess it was me and my grandma Jean.

Dad came home alone in mid-September. Ben needed more time in the hospital back east, but Dad had to get back to the ranch. Mom got a leave from her job at the bank in Winnemucca and took a room in the house the military keeps for families of wounded guys. She said she’d stay till they moved Ben out to rehab, maybe in California.

I can’t tell you how disappointed Grandpa Roy was. He’d been counting the days till Ben was “safe at home where he belongs.” He took to spending more time in the barn than not. One day after school, I went out to find him. I didn’t see Grandpa, so I picked up a soft horse brush and talked to my colt. “You think we’ll win the skateboard competition? Sure you do. And what about Ben, you think he’ll learn to walk, don’t you?” The colt leaned against me and nosed in my pocket for grain.

I heard someone behind me. I turned and thought I saw Grandpa’s shadow move across the entrance to the barn,
but I didn’t see him. “Grandpa, you there?” I called.

“Yep,” Grandpa said. He cleared his throat and walked out of the tack room on the other side of the barn. “I heard you talking about Ben. ’Course he’ll walk again. He’s an O’Mara. He’s a champ. Here, let me see how you’ve got this colt leading.” Grandpa took a halter from the wall and guided it around the colt’s nose. He pulled the horse’s ears through and buckled the chin strap.

“You believe Ben will ride again in the rodeos, don’t you?” I asked.

“I believe those military doctors don’t know who they’re dealing with. Ben O’Mara’s one stubborn boy. Yeah, I believe he’ll talk and walk and make a nuisance of himself, just like always. And if he don’t…well…I thought there’d be another O’Mara champion, though. That boy has bulls in his blood. Strange how things work out. I couldn’t have been prouder when he joined the service. Who’d have thought he’d come back….” Grandpa Roy handed me the lead rope. He cleared his throat again, pulled his hat down across his forehead, and left the barn.

That’s how it is with Grandpa Roy and my dad, too. That side of the family, they stop talking midsentence if it suits them. Pouring detergent into a fountain isn’t their style. They just take it as it comes, and if it’s too tough, they bite down hard and take some more. Me, I couldn’t figure a way to stop worrying while we waited for Ben. And when I wasn’t tied up in knots thinking about him, I got mad that he went and got shot and took all the attention again. Grandma Jean would call those ugly thoughts, and I had to agree. I was thinking way too much—so I studied less and boarded more.

My grades started down, and Favi stepped up to help me. That was no surprise. Her family and mine, Ruizes and O’Maras, have worked our ranch together since my dad was a kid. It takes two or three families and some extra ranch hands to run a ranch like ours. We all help each other and nobody gets rich. My mom had a job at the bank in Winnemucca, and Favi’s mom was the kindergarten teacher at school. Dad and Grandpa and Oscar Ruiz worked the ranch. Ben was a natural ranch hand, and me and Favi and her sisters, when they still lived at home, helped too. Even Lali took care of the goats and had her egg and chicken chores. Still, there’s never extra money, and if there ever was a little, Grandpa and Dad usually bought some new equipment or reroofed a barn.

That’s how we live—with the land. And with family. That included Favi. She acted like a sister, too, ordering me around when I could decide just fine for myself. That’s what she did to help me study for our English vocabulary test.

“So give me the definition of ‘intrepid,’” she said.

“I know what ‘cataclysmic’ means,” I answered her.

“Not relevant,” Favi said. “Do you want to pass this test or not?”

“Yeah, I want to pass the test,” I said. Mom was strict about grades and I’d be busted for sure if she came back and I’d let them slip. “Tell me what it means.”

“You look it up, Cam. I’m not doing everything for you.”

“I didn’t ask you to.”

“You didn’t need to. You always take the easy way.”

“Who died and made you queen?”

Favi gave me that look of hers. She’d lift one eyebrow just enough to let you know she was wondering why you ever said what you just said. She shoved a dictionary at me and I paged through it looking for “intrepid.”

“Good,” she said. “How’s Ben?”

“Mom hasn’t called today.”

“She will. I bet Ben’s having a good day and she’s still at the hospital.” How she could beat everybody at school at video games, get herself greasy working under her dad’s car, and then turn around and say just the right thing, I’ll never know.

We finished and Favi walked back to her house. I talked Grandma Jean into driving me to Mike’s to board. Lali tagged along. Grandma pulled up to Mike’s, and I jumped out with my skateboard. We set up our ramps, and Lali ran around back with Mike’s dog. Grandma Jean sat down on the porch just like she lived there, and Mrs. Gianni came out with coffee. “It’s too bad about Ben,” Mrs. Gianni said.

“He’ll be fine,” Grandma said.

“Well, it’s such a loss, a young kid in the military like that, he was so strong…. And the whole town couldn’t have been prouder of his bull riding.”

I used the drone of the board’s wheels to block out their talk. While Mike warmed up, I coasted down the driveway, ollied onto the ledge, and did a 50-50, sliding my board along the edge until I kicked off. Then I sped up, hit the ramp, and landed dead center on the metal rail, spraying sparks. I wobbled and jumped off. “Man, I never hit that.”

“Practice makes perfect,” Grandma Jean said.

I rolled my eyes at Mike. “Let’s try our routine.”

Mike called out the tricks. We started at each end of the driveway, met in the middle, and did frontside flips at the same time. We landed the first one. On the second pass, we switched to 360s. Mike leaned too far back on the landing and ended up on his back. Then I hit a bump on the driveway and drove my elbow into the asphalt.

“Stay on your feet!” Mike yelled at me.

“I’ll get it down before the skate jam,” I said. I picked up my board and walked past the porch to start over.

“I wish they didn’t crash so much,” Mrs. Gianni said. “Ever since Mike broke his arm, in two places you know, I can hardly watch.”

“Heavens, you should go to a rodeo,” Grandma Jean said. “There’s some bruising goes on there.”

But there was nothing in skateboarding or rodeo to get me ready for the licking Ben had taken in Iraq. They moved him to Palo Alto at the end of September to a TBI rehabilitation unit at the Veteran’s Hospital. Mom flew to California with him. He could talk some now, and he even called me. “Hi, Cam.” His voice was slurred. “How’s skateboarding?”

“Good,” I said. “How are you?”

“Mom takes me dancing.” He made a sound I took for a laugh.

“Yeah, right. When do you come home?” I asked.

“Leave. They give me leave. Ask Ma.” He faded out, and Mom came on the line.

“Isn’t he talking great?” she asked.

I thought he sounded awful—like he was drunk. “Sure,” I said. “When are you coming home?”

“It shouldn’t be too long. They’ll give him a thirty-day leave when the doctors here think he’s ready. They need to make sure I can take care of him. We’re working on that. I miss you, Cam.”

I missed her too. By early October, the doctors had done all their tests, and they said Ben was ready to start his rehab. But first he got leave. The gray time was over. Ben came home.