Bull Rider (18 page)

S
o that’s how come, if you look up Ugly, you’ll find that Adam Carl won the challenge and it was his first and only bull ride. No one knew what happened to him. Now, I caught up with Darrell Wallace in the parking lot and asked him why he didn’t ride. He just said, “You won. I didn’t have the heart for it.” But I know better. I think he had a heart to do his own thing for Ben, although it turned out neither of us got the money. And as for Ben, well, he was awake when we came home. I went into his room and turned off the TV.

“So, you ready for this?” I said, pulling off my boots and throwing his lucky socks at him.

“For what?” he said.

“I won our bet.”

“What bet?”

“You remember. When we had that fight in the barn,
you said if I rode Ugly, then you’d believe anything was possible.”

“So?” he asked.

“So I rode Ugly tonight.”

“No way.”

I pulled the bull rope out of my bag and tossed it on his bed, along with his glove.

“You took my bull rope? Did you think to ask?”

“I didn’t want to ask. Get yourself looking decent and come into the living room. We’re having company.” I went in his dresser and tossed him a clean T-shirt and his comb.

“You gotta
ask
to use my bull rope,” he said. “You didn’t really ride Ugly.”

“Yep, I did. And now company’s coming. You look a mess.”

“So, who all is gonna be here?” he asked, looking a little more interested.

“Come out and see. It’s important—to me.”

His eyes lit up, just a little, and he strapped his artificial arm into his walker, grabbed the other side with the good hand, and took a couple of steps to the mirror. He ran the comb through his hair and we walked out together.

Everyone was in the living room. I couldn’t look at Mom. Dad was trying to keep from grinning. And Grandma and Grandpa, they were just glowing. Mom had the coffee on, decaf because it was late, and Lali was setting out cookies on the dining room table. Soon enough, we heard trucks in the driveway. The Ruiz family, the Giannis, and Neil and Amy Jones came in.

“So, has Cam told you what he did?” Amy asked.

“Not really,” Ben said. “He said he rode Ugly, but he’s kidding, right? Nobody’s ever stuck on that bull.”

“Well, tell him, Cam,” she said.

I didn’t know how to start. Yeah, I rode Ugly, but I came home empty-handed.

“No need,” Grandma Jean said. “I’ve got it on video.” She pulled the tape out of her camera and clicked it into our TV in the living room. I watched Mom. And Ben. There was the flag, and the mutton busters, the team ropers, and the announcer. He was talking about a cowboy from Hawthorne, Adam Carl.

“What?” Mom asked, looking at me.

“Just wait,” Grandma Jean said. “It’s terrific.”

Next, I came out of the chute on Ugly. Watching it was a whole ’nother story than riding it. It wasn’t a pretty ride. I was stiff and jerky and Ugly seemed slow. I could see a couple of times, when I was in real trouble—the crowd gasped and I’d leaned way too far to one side or the other, but there I was, up on Ugly, still, and then the buzzer went. I landed, looking dazed, and then the bull turned and came right at me.

“Oh no, Cam.” Mom gasped and covered her eyes.

I watched the bullfighters push me down and turn him away and figured I owed them a whole lot—maybe an arm or a leg. Mom peeked at the TV. Anybody could see, they’d saved my butt.

Mom dropped into a chair and looked back and forth from me to Grandpa Roy to Grandma Jean. “You
knew
about this?”

“That’s not pertinent,” Grandpa Roy said. “Didn’t you
see? He rode Ugly. There was a fifteen thousand dollar purse on that bull from the stock company for the first guy to ride him, and it should have been Cam’s.” Grandpa took a long breath. “But he didn’t qualify ’cause of his age. He was doing it for you, Ben.”

“You rode Ugly for me?” Ben’s mouth dropped open. He gaped at me like that for a second and then he said, “But why?”

“I told you when we made the bet in the barn. If I can ride Ugly, you can do anything. I wanted to get the money too, but…I’m sorry, Ben, I wanted money so you could start up your bull-breeding business like you wanted before….”

It was too much. The coolest thing I’d ever done was the most disappointing, too. I didn’t want to cry. Not in front of everybody. So I ducked into the kitchen, put my face to the wall, and held my breath, hoping it would stop the tears. Ben’s walker clicked on the floor behind me and then I felt his hand on my shoulder. My back heaved and I swallowed the sobs. “I just wanted you back. I thought the bucking bulls you’d always talked about…” My words jammed up and wouldn’t come out.

Ben put his arm around me, and I leaned into his shoulder and cried.

“It’s all right, bro’. It’s messed up. This whole deal, it’s really messed up. Go on and let it out.”

I did. I wrapped my arms around my big brother, buried my head in his shirt, and cried. He squeezed me with his good arm. After a while, I sucked in the snot and wiped my tears on my sleeve.

“I can’t believe you rode Ugly. Wow,” Ben said. The look
on his face was worth a whole lot. “We’ll get along all right without that money, you know.”

Neil Jones cleared his throat and stepped into the kitchen. “I don’t mean to butt in, but maybe we can help out. Ben, you could come up and work with Amy and learn the ropes in our AI business. It won’t be your own, like Cam was hoping for, but we’ll pay you commission on your sales, and you can save up and buy some straws of your own to get started. You cross some prize bull’s line with some of your crazy O’Mara cows, and it won’t be long before you’ll have your own breeding business.”

I straightened up and looked between them. “Ben, you could pick the stock, Grandpa and I will be the hands, and Mom can do your books,” I said.

“O’Mara Bucking Bulls,” Ben said with a grin. “Or how about O’Mara
Brothers
Bucking Bulls?”

Lali stuck her head around the corner. “No, it’s O’Mara
Family
Bucking Bulls. Don’t forget me.”

Who could forget Lali?

We had a party after that, and it wasn’t just cookies and decaf. It was laughing and joking and Mom getting mad at me for the bull riding. “How could you do that, Cam? You knew I said no.”

Grandma Jean spoke right up. “He did it for Ben. You raised a good boy there. He’s got a whole lot of ‘try’ in him, and some good sense too—usually. It’s time you trusted him.” Then Grandma Jean put her arms around Mom and hugged her until she relaxed.

It was the Giannis toasting Ben, and Favi’s dad sitting down with my dad to plot out how to house new bucking stock. It was Ben talking about tomorrow for the first time since they’d put him out of rehab and the Marines. And it was the look on Grandpa Roy’s face when he talked about my bull ride. “You should have seen it, Ben. It was like that O’Mara magic just kicked in.”

Finally, the company went home, and Dad put Lali to bed. The rest of us sat down at the kitchen table. I looked at Ben. Except for the scar on his skull, he looked the same as he did before he left for Iraq. But I knew how much everything had changed. “I just wish I could fix the rest of it,” I said, nodding toward his walker. He teared up the way he does nowadays and punched my shoulder.

“You were stupid to ride that bull. You could have got killed, you know,” Ben said. “I still can’t figure how you did it. You just started riding. It’s not possible.”

“It’s the salt.” Grandpa winked at us.

“Maybe,” Grandma Jean said. She went over to the pile of photo albums that Mom kept by the piano and came back with an old one. She thumbed through the fading pages and set it down in front of me and Ben. A young, dark-haired kid stared at the camera from his bike.

I stared back. “That’s the kid who yelled at me from the stands tonight.”

Ben fixed on the snapshot, then looked around the table, finally resting his eyes on Mom. “I remember now, how it happened. I was in the road after the bomb exploded. I was lying there, playing dead, and this kid came out of nowhere and pulled me off the road. He stayed till my guys came for
me.” He turned, puzzled, to Grandma Jean. “
That’s
the kid.”

“Can’t be,” Mom said. “Don’t you remember, Ben? That’s your cousin, Adam Carl.”

And just then, I believed in all the possibilities. I believed I’d get my brother back one way or another. I believed in Ben’s new bull business and in family and the land. And somehow, in that moment, I believed in Grandma’s angels.

Salt Lick, Nevada, is a fictional town, and the characters in
Bull Rider
are fictional as well. But there
have
been a few real bucking bulls called Ugly. I saw Ugly (DK825) walk off a cattle truck and into the Reno Events Center in 2006. He was impressive, and I borrowed his name for the book. There is no “Ugly Challenge,” although companies occasionally give cash prizes to cowboys who successfully ride certain bulls on a given night. Like the cowboys from Salt Lick, some bull riders are working cowboys who compete in rodeo on the side, while others are professional rodeo cowboys of the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association or the Professional Bull Riders. There
is
a Nevada High School Bull Riding Champion—the National High School Rodeo Association sponsors events in forty-five states and provinces in the United States, Canada, and Australia. And there
are
family ranches, like the O’Maras’, where people are committed to preserving their traditional way of life—often working both on the ranch and in outside jobs to make ends meet.

Like the fictional O’Maras, thousands of real families have suffered the death or injury of loved ones during the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars, which started in 2001 and 2003. Body armor and improved medical techniques have saved a great number of soldiers and Marines’ lives, but many of them come home having lost arms or legs or with traumatic brain injury (TBI). Some suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder or mild forms of brain injury, and you would not know from looking at them that they are victims of the war.

As of early 2008, the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America reported that veterans’ advocates believe between 150,000 and 300,000 troops have returned from these wars with some level of traumatic brain injury. They also estimate that one in every three of the approximately 31,000 wounded (through January 2008) have TBI. Some of these men and women will live with the effects of their injuries for years to come. It is up to us to support them, now and in the future.

I depended on many people to inspire and inform me as I wrote
Bull Rider
. I did my best to listen carefully, and I thank them for sharing their stories and their expertise. My deepest thanks to:

Eric Skogsbergh—for a year of e-mails from Iraq

Chris Shivers, Sevi Torturo, and Jake McIntyre, Professional Bull Riders, and Bob Allen and Tuffy, photographers—for interviews and inspiration

Joe Clark, JJJ Bull Riding, Washoe Valley, Nevada—for letting me get up close to the bulls

The Henningsen family—for sharing experiences of ranch life

Todd Gansberg, rancher/bull rider—for ranching expertise

Sandra Musser—for her knowledge of the AI business

Dr. Claire Hall and Rick Riley—for their medical and prosthetic expertise

VA Hospital in Palo Alto, California, especially Patricia Teran-Matthews, Public Affairs Officer; Harriet Straus, Nurse Manager, Polytrauma Unit; and Keleen Preston, TBI Coordinator, Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Disability, Carson City, Nevada—for all their insight on TBI patients

Stanley Williams—for sharing his experiences in the Can Do Unit

Alyen Contreras, Cassie DeSalvo, and Jacob Kavanaugh—for checking skateboarding tricks

Ugly—for inspiring my own Ugly

Emma Dryden—editor and friend

Stephen Barbara—valued agent

Carol Chou—for her editorial insight

Terri Farley and Ellen Hopkins—authors, fellow Nevadans, and friends—and the many friends from SCBWI who supported me through the years

My family.