Authors: Suzanne Morgan Williams
T
hat night, the three of us made the plan. I asked Mom if I could go into Reno on Saturday with Mike to see the monster trucks. I hated ’em really, but Mike liked the show and there really was one going on over there. Mom said yes, and I had my excuse to go into Reno. I emptied out my stash of birthday money and the pay I got last summer for mowing lawns, and had $150 in my pocket. I hoped that would buy Mike and me the monster truck tickets—we had to see the show or we’d get caught for sure—and leave enough to pay off the guy Mike knew who was going to take my picture and make my ID.
We left early in the morning. Mr. Gianni drove us to Reno. Mike practiced making rude sounds with air under his armpits, and I kept yawning and finally I tried to sleep. Mike’s dad planned to do errands while we watched the truck show. What he didn’t know was that Mike had his guy lined up to meet us on the backside of the Livestock Events
Center after we bought our tickets and went in.
We got to Reno by ten o’clock. My family didn’t go to Reno too often except to Christmas shop or sometimes to take Grandpa Roy to get some medical tests. It’s sure bigger than Winnemucca, and downtown has some places my mom didn’t like me or Lali to see. You can spot ’em easy enough. They’re painted pink or purple and the windows are painted over. In between are tattoo parlors and pawn shops. I pictured exactly where this ID guy had to live and figured I’d be staring down some bald-headed guy with dragons tattooed on his arms. Or maybe the “guy” would be a dried-up woman with red hair and a stale cigarette waiting to ask in a raspy voice if anyone had followed me. Honestly, I kind of liked the idea. My adrenaline was pumping.
Mike’s dad dropped us off, and we promised to call his cell phone as soon as we were done. We bought the tickets, making sure we got our hands stamped so we could get back in later to meet Mike’s dad. We pushed through the crowds, right out the back door, and past the row of blue outdoor toilets to the Dumpsters.
“Nice meeting place,” I said.
Pretty soon, a clean-cut guy pulled up in a Toyota with a fresh wax job. He had on a University of Nevada sweatshirt and khaki pants. He rolled down the window and gave Mike a high five. “What’s up?” he said, and pointing to me, “Is this the guy?” He laughed. “I can see why you need an ID. No introductions necessary. Let’s see the cash. Two hundred dollars will get you a first-class license. Adult.”
“I only need to be eighteen, so that’s cheaper, right?”
He laughed. “Wrong. How much do you have?”
“Ninety bucks.” Now he laughed louder. He motioned for me to come closer. I leaned in and he took my baseball cap off my head.
“Gianni, this kid isn’t any older than you. He gets caught, I get caught. Come back when you’re sixteen.”
“I am sixteen,” I said.
“Sure,” he said. He turned on the motor and backed away from us. “Come see me in a couple years.”
He drove away and we were left standing between the Dumpsters at the event center. “Great,” I said. “That’s your guy? Now what?”
Mike shrugged. “Want to see the monster trucks?”
Lali met me at the door when I got home. “How were the trucks? Did they jump over cars like they do on TV? Did you bring me anything?”
I handed her a stick of gum and tried to duck into my room, but Grandma Jean stopped me. “Good, Cam, you’re home. Did you have fun?” and before I could answer her, she said, “Your mom needs help tilling the garden. I told her to wait for you, but she’s already started. She’s set on getting the onion starts in today. There’s still a little daylight to work.”
I didn’t care about onion starts but Mom did. The ground was ready and today was the day she was planting ’em. “Let me change my clothes,” I said. I took over with the rototiller and turned the dark, soft earth while Mom buried the little onions thumb deep. All the while I was thinking about my next idea for getting an ID. We worked until it got dark.
Finally, there was time to call Favi. “Did you get it?” she asked.
“No, the guy flaked. He said I was too young.”
“You’ll think of something to cheer up Ben,” she said. “You don’t have to ride Ugly.”
“It’s not just cheering him up. It’s more. I’m going to ride that bull. Listen, I’m coming down to your house. Get out your art stuff.”
I rummaged around in my bottom dresser drawer through all my crazy stuff I keep ’cause I like it. I found my rock from Lone Mountain with the fossils in it and the old comic books I’d gotten from Ben when I was ten. I moved the little straw duck decoy Grandma Jean made for me and finally found a plastic bag full of photos. I dumped them on my bed and pushed them around looking for the right one. Of course, it was under everything else. But I still had it. It was one of those strings of photos you get in the booth at the fair or in a cheesy store. Mike, Favi, and I had squeezed in together last spring and there were six pictures of us making faces. Mike did the lizard face and Favi could always look silly. When the machine had spit out the photos, we’d joked around about how one shot of me looked like a mug shot—or something that belonged on a driver’s license. Now I cut it off and stuck it in my pocket. I went into Mom’s office. It had taken some doing, but I’d got Mike to loan me his new driver’s license—just till tomorrow. I put some photo paper in the computer and scanned the license. I hit print and waited for the copy.
I walked over to Favi’s, knocked once, and went in.
“So, what are you thinking?” Favi asked.
I looked around. It was just us. “Look, I brought a copy of Mike’s license and this photo.” I laid them on the table. “We can paste something up and maybe we can use contact paper or go to the copy store and get it laminated,” I said.
Favi looked at me like I was crazy. “That says ‘Michael Enzo Gianni.’ You can’t use that.”
“Enzo? Is that his middle name?”
“Cam, think, will you? It’s got the wrong name on it.”
“So we can paste something over it that says ‘Cameron O’Mara.’” I put my picture on top of Mike’s.
“Oh, please,” Favi said. “You couldn’t fool anyone with that.”
“I could try.”
She burst out laughing.
“Don’t,” I said. I clenched my fists and dug my nails into my palms. But then I took another look at me staring like a zombie from the copy of Mike’s license. I couldn’t stop myself from laughing too.
“Maybe you can get your mom to sign for you. Maybe then they’ll let you ride,” Favi said.
“Who are you kidding? She doesn’t know I’m riding at all.”
“Your dad, then?”
I thought about that, but no, Dad wouldn’t go against my mother. “Maybe I can sign up online, and they won’t need anything yet. Then I can think of something later.”
Favi searched “Ugly Challenge” and we found the announcement, and sure enough, there was a registration form. “I’ll type it in,” Favi said. “Name?”
“Cam O’Mara.”
“Address?”
“Route 7, Salt Lick, Nevada.”
“Age?”
“What do I say?” I asked.
“Eighteen,” she typed in. Then she stopped. “Cam, what if they put this in a database or something. What if next time you go to do something, they think you really are eighteen?”
“So?” I said. And then I picked up Mike’s license and looked it over. “I guess I might want to try the bull riding circuit for real when I
am
eighteen….”
“It’s a fake age,” she said. “Think of a fake name.”
I didn’t need to think, it just came out of my mouth. “Adam Carl. Start over and put in my cousin’s name, Adam Carl.”
That’s when I became my cousin, Adam, who’d be nineteen now, just two months older than Ben. That is, if he hadn’t drowned in Walker Lake on his birthday. Grandma Jean called him our guardian angel, and right now I could actually use him. It felt pretty good to bring him back to life. I knew his birthday, too, June 3, and so we were set.
Favi typed, “Adam Carl, PO Box 123, Hawthorne, Nevada. Age nineteen.”
The day I rode Ugly, it wouldn’t be me, it would be Adam, who grew up tall and strong but so baby-faced he could pass for fourteen. Or that’s what I’d say if they asked about my age.
T
hey set the Ugly Challenge in Redding for mid-April. You wouldn’t think it would make a whoop of difference when it was, but April is the middle of our spring calving, and that meant spending every weekend on the ranch. We brought the cows in close and watched out for when they dropped their little ones. Every day, there was a new bunch—from one part of the ranch or another—to round up, bring to the corrals, tag, doctor, and brand. It took one guy to flip and tie ’em, one to handle the vaccines and ear tags, and one with the Circle M O’Mara brand. If we found cows from another ranch, someone cut them out and penned ’em in a separate corral. And if Joneses or Echevarrias or Wallaces found O’Mara cattle, somebody’d ride over to bring ’em back. Nothing was as fun all year, and nothing took more time. If we had enough calves, Grandpa even put a crew together for Sunday. I had to figure some special plan to get me out of a day of calving and on the road to Redding.
First problem—I didn’t have a driver’s license or a car, so I figured I’d use the money I’d saved by not buying the ID and get a bus from Winnemucca to Redding. Now I just needed the reason to take all day Saturday and all of Saturday night to be gone. Easy, right?
Maybe not. I signed up for the first challenge on the Internet, and I was praying they didn’t want me to show ’em my ID when I got there. Maybe if I cut the timing close they wouldn’t bother to ask questions. But the bull riding started at six o’clock. I didn’t know how many crazy cowboys would show or what the draw for order would be, so I had to be at the bull ring by five thirty, latest. “The bus might be late,” Favi said. That meant taking the early one—so, I needed to be on the road at nine o’clock in the morning.
I complained over lunch in the cafeteria, “Grandpa Roy will never let me out of calving that early.”
“Pretend you’re sick,” Mike said.
“Don’t matter,” I said. “‘You can brand with a fever or you can brand without,’ that’s what he’ll say.”
“So go ahead and tell him what you’re doing,” Mike suggested.
That was some idea. “Tell him I’m lying about my name and my age and I’m going to Redding to ride a bull? I don’t think so.”
Favi sighed. “Use your head, Cam. Your
mom
will let you go. Tell her we’re having a study group—all day. You can say we’re all going down to Winnemucca to use the library. I’ll ask my mom to drive us. When she leaves, you can go to the bus station.” I had to give her credit. Favi could think on her feet.
“Okay. See, I knew we’d figure it out,” I said. “High five, Favi!” We had a plan. A good one. “But what about when I don’t come home?”
“I can tell my mom you went home with Mike,” Favi said.
“And by the time your folks find out, you’ll already be gone,” Mike said, grinning.
The plan would have worked too, except Grandpa Roy heard me talking to Mom in the kitchen and he was none too happy. “You can’t take all day, even if you are studying,” he said.
“Of course he can,” Mom said. “His grades are important. He’ll help on Sunday.” Not that I’d be awake on Sunday morning after spending all night riding home on the bus, but as long as I wasn’t handling the hot branding iron or the ear-notch knife, I figured I wouldn’t be too dangerous. And if I came home with fifteen thousand dollars and a kick in the pants for Ben ’cause I’d won our bet, well, they might just decide to let me sleep in.
“You can get in some time at the corral before Favi’s mom picks you up. Tell her to meet you at the house at nine thirty. That way, we can start at six when the sun’s up and you’ll get in three hours.”
“Nine thirty’s late,” I said.
Mom laughed. “Since when have you worried about missing a half hour of library research? That sounds good to me, Roy.”
So there I was, with half an hour to shave off the time I
needed to get to the bus station already. Maybe this wouldn’t work. But I peeked into Ben’s room as I left the kitchen and he was napping
again
. Yeah, I was ready to try it.
Saturday morning started out well enough. Men get a rhythm going, working the calves, and since I was leaving early, that made me the pick-up man. Pick up the ropes. Pick up the coffee. Pick up the stray O’Mara calves over at Jones’s and herd ’em back. I had enough time to do it too, and I was happy to get the ride on Pepper.
I didn’t go out to the corral where they were working on the calves but rode directly to Jones’s ranch to fetch three of our calves and their mothers that they’d brought in on their roundup. They were waiting for me in a little pen behind the big barn. I waved at Neil Jones, opened the gate, and shooed the cows ahead of me. I swung my rope, and they started down the road. It’s mornings like that when you could take me for a real cowboy. The cattle were moving good, and my adrenaline was already kicking in. I got a rush from thinking about my plan and another one from thinking about Ugly. That got my heart pumping more.
I was feeling good, riding along and watching some quail rustle around in a mahogany bush that was about to bloom. Then I glanced up at the cows. Three cows. Two calves. That wasn’t right. Now, I could lose a mom and her baby, and it would make me mad, but we’d find them sooner or later. But you can’t just lose a calf. They need their moms, and there’s coyotes and mountain lions and stuff that will take down a lone calf. I pulled up my horse and scanned the desert. The little group I was herding got to grazing and picking at the ground. The cow missed her baby and started
calling in long, sad wails. She’d wander off too if I didn’t keep them moving. I had to choose. And it wasn’t really a choice. I whistled and hurried the cattle toward our own corral. Grandpa met me at the gate.
“Get ’em all?” he asked.
“One of the calves took off halfway between Joneses’ and here. I couldn’t see him. I brought these on over and figure I’ll go back for the calf.”
“Okay,” Grandpa said. He handed me a thermos of coffee and closed the gate on the five animals I’d collected.
I rode back at a fast lope and started making circles from where I’d first missed the calf. I checked for tracks, but the ground was hard and I wasn’t finding any. The sun got higher and I knew it was getting late. I had to go. I’d ask Dad to come back on the ATV. I started riding toward our corral and just then, I heard a bawl. It started low and went high and long. It was a calf calling for its mom. I turned Pepper toward the sound. She stepped carefully down a slope and into a dry wash. The calf was still mooing. The little guy was getting pretty worked up from the sound of him. “Keep calling,” I said. “Just keep calling.”
I spotted him at the bottom of a second slope that was covered in talus—slippery little rocks that bust off the mountains from freezing and thawing. Walking down talus is like trying to keep your footing on ball bearings. The calf had slipped down and was wedged between a boulder and a piñon pine that was growing out from under it. “You got yourself in a fix, didn’t you?” I said. I stopped Pepper at the top of the slope. I tied my rope to her saddle horn, grabbed it, and slid down the hill on my butt, letting the rope unwind
as I went. The rocks showered out in all directions. “No wonder you got stuck.” I dug my heels in as I got close to the bottom and coughed from the dust I stirred up. The calf was scared to death, bawling and pawing at the rocks, trying to get a grip. “You’re a cute one,” I told him. I looped the rope over his neck. Then I got behind the calf and pushed. He yelled some more, but with me lifting his tail end, he got some traction on the front and moved out. He ran straight down the wash. The rope pulled taut and jerked him back.
Pepper’s a good cow horse. She held him tight. “So now we have to get you back there,” I said, pointing to the top of the slope. I crawled up on my hands and knees. The rocks scratched my palms and dug into my shins. At the top, I pulled myself onto my horse and walked her backwards. She worked the rope hard. With each step she took, the calf climbed closer to the top. He lost his footing a couple of times, but Pepper didn’t let him slip. She’d sidestep and pull harder. Slowly, the little guy made his way up the hill.
“You’re a troublemaker,” I told him. He looked at me like nothing had happened. His eyes were big and soft against his cinnamon-colored face. “That took some doing. Now let’s get you back.” I pulled in the rope and led him toward our branding corral. The sun heated my back. I stopped to judge its height and it was well above the mountains. I’d forgotten how late it was getting. Maybe too late already. I kicked my horse and tugged on the calf’s rope. Pepper took off at a lope, and the calf barely kept up. Still, it seemed like it took forever to cover any ground. Finally, we saw our corral.
I handed the calf off to Grandpa Roy and rode back to
the barn. Favi’s car was in front of the house. She ran out to meet me. “Where have you been?”
“I had to bring in a calf. I’ll cool Pepper off and we’ll go.”
“No, we won’t,” she said. “It’s ten forty-five. The bus is gone and you’ll have to take a jet to get to Redding if you leave now.”
It took a minute to sink in. “We can’t get there,” I said to myself.
“No,” Favi answered. “My mom’s waiting.”
There was no getting out of that part of the plan. Favi and I spent the day writing history reports at the Winnemucca library. And, I imagined, Darrell was on his way to Redding to ride Ugly and win my prize money.