“Okay,” Barney said. “Let’s go.” He was already turning Badger to the right when he suddenly pulled up. “Listen,” he said. Then Rudy heard it too. From somewhere down toward the spring a calf was bawling. As they listened the weak, hoarse cry came again and then again. “Something’s wrong,” Barney said. “Come on.” He started down the hill with Rudy and Heather following close behind.
The Tumbleweed spring was near the bottom of a narrow valley where water trickled out of a sharp rocky cliff and fell, in a thin waterfall, into a small lake below. Above and on both sides the lake was surrounded by steep and heavily wooded banks, so the only approach to the water’s edge was on the downhill slope. There, a deeply worn cattle trail led through a mud flat and down to the water’s edge. The mud, constantly churned by many hooves, was black and deep and squishy and smelled of cow manure and stagnant water.
They found the calf at the edge of the pond where the earth under an oak tree had been washed away on one side, leaving a network of exposed roots arching down into the mud below. The calf, a very young Brahman, had a front leg caught in among the roots. Its other front leg was bent backward and its head hung down over the trapped leg. Now and then it raised its head, bawled weakly, and then collapsed again. Barney reined Badger to a stop at the edge of the muddy area and Rudy and Heather pulled up beside him.
“Oh, the poor little thing,” Heather said. “Do you suppose its leg is broken?”
“Not broken. Stuck though,” Barney said, sounding like his granddad. When things got critical Barney always sounded like his granddad.
Rudy urged Bluebell a few steps forward into the deep mud.
“Hold it, Rudy,” Barney said. “And be quiet.” Rudy pulled up and they sat quietly listening. There was no sound except for an occasional weak cry from the calf. Barney twisted in the saddle looking around the banks of the pond and then down the trail. At last he said, “All right. The cow must have given up and gone off. Come on, Rudy. We’ll get her loose.” He swung down, dropping the reins over Badger’s head so that he would stand still.
“Wait a minute,” Rudy began. “Maybe we ought to look around a little more first and—”
Barney stopped and looked back, and Rudy shut up. He’d seen that look on Barney’s face before and he knew that there was no use arguing. When Barney got that gleam in his eye there were only two choices—to chicken out or to yell “Geronimo” and jump. Rudy took a deep breath, looked around one more time, got down off Bluebell, and waded out into the mud.
The little heifer’s leg was wedged in tightly between two thick roots. It looked a little bit swollen, and every time they tried to pry it loose she struggled and bawled with surprising strength and volume. But at last one root began to give, the space widened, and the leg came free. They had just managed to carry the calf back a few feet from the bank when a very big, very angry Brahman cow came out of the brush below the spring.
Rudy and Barney were steadying the heifer as she started to walk, using her swollen leg gingerly, when they heard Heather shout, “Look out.” And there the cow was, charging straight at them.
They ran in different directions. Instinct must have taken over and Barney’s instinct, as a born-and-bred cowboy, must have been to get to the horses. He ran up the hill while Rudy ran back through the mud toward the oak trees.
Barney might have made it to Badger, except that the shouting and the charging cow was too much for the horses’ training, and reins down or not, they bolted. Heather and Applesauce had started up the hill too. It was entirely Applesauce’s decision. “I didn’t tell her to,” Heather said later. “I was just sitting there paralyzed by fear.” So Heather and the horses went up the hill and Rudy went up a tree. And Barney was left all alone out on the open hillside.
Rudy’s oak tree was an easy climb, with lots of low horizontal branches, and he’d reached a fairly high limb when he looked down and saw what was happening. The cow had stopped near her calf and was swinging her big horned head from side to side. Then she let out a bellow and started full speed toward Barney. Without waiting to get his balance Rudy bailed out and lit flat on his backside in the mud.
“Run, Barney. Run!” Rudy screamed and, jumping to his feet, started running toward the calf, waving his arms and yelling, “Here, cow. Here, cow. Come and get me.” When the cow stopped and turned in his direction Rudy came to a stop too. It wasn’t until she started in his direction that he whirled around and plowed back through the mud toward the oak. He got to the tree with the cow not far behind him and, in spite of muddy hands and feet, went up it like a squirrel.
For a moment the cow stared up at him, snorting and pawing the mud before she turned away and trotted back toward her calf. Fifty yards up the hill, Barney had almost reached the horses when Badger snorted and whirled away. Holding his head sideways to avoid stepping on his reins, he trotted on up the hill, leaving Barney still stranded out in the open. Rudy was watching from his tree as the cow spotted Barney and again started after him. Rudy jumped out of the tree for the second time. He made a little better landing, more or less on his feet this time, but then lost his balance and sprawled forward flat on his belly in the stinking mud.
It wasn’t until the cow had turned back once more to chase Rudy up the tree that Barney caught up with Badger, and the “Terminator Cow” episode finally came to an end.
The rest of the day was something of an anticlimax. The little heifer got her legs in working order, she and her mother joined the other cattle, and the roundup continued as planned. Except that Rudy had to do his part while wearing a fairly thick layer of mud and smelling like something that should have been buried a month ago.
He must have looked terrible too. Bad enough to scare horses, at least, because the first time he tried to get back on Bluebell she took one look and did one of her famous sideways jumps. It took quite a lot of soft talk before she would let him get close enough to get back in the saddle.
After the scare had worn off and they’d all calmed down a little, the three of them did a lot of laughing. “Here, cow. Here, cow,” one of them would say and they’d all go into hysterics. Not to mention what happened every time the others got close enough to Rudy to smell him. Rudy laughed too. He felt a lot like laughing the rest of the day—in spite of the smell.
Chapter 13
HE WAS A HERO. He hadn’t thought about it that way at the time. He had just seen what was about to happen to Barney and he’d done what was necessary without stopping to think about it. But that, according to Heather, was what made it heroic. And Heather wasn’t the only one to say so.
Barney said it, too, in a different way. Right after they’d gotten back on their horses and convinced the man-killer cow to call off the war, Barney had ridden up beside Rudy. “Hey, thanks,” he said. “Thanks a lot, old buddy.” And then he stuck out his hand and shook Rudy’s, smelly mud and all. That was all he said in words, but, knowing Barney, Rudy was able to read a lot more between the lines.
And later, when they got back to the ranch, Charlie had a few words to say on the subject. Quite a lot of words actually, considering the fact that Charlie Crookshank sometimes got by for days at a time on about half a dozen syllables. Charlie made his lengthy comments after he’d ridden out on his old buckskin to help get the Tumbleweed stock into one of the holding corrals.
As soon as he got a good look at Rudy, he did his slow, lopsided grin and asked, “Git throwed?”
“Well, no,” Rudy said. “I jumped, actually.” And then Barney and Heather took over and told Charlie the whole story and that’s when Charlie really got wordy. He began by getting on Barney for trying to work with a calf without knowing exactly where its mother was.
“You know better’n that, Barney,” he said. But then he turned to Rudy and said, “Handled yourself real well, pardner. Right proud of you.” Then he looked Rudy over some more before he started up his grin again. “Go on in and wash up some. Can’t get in this young lady’s new car thataway.”
So they went inside, and the first thing they had to do was tell the whole story over again for Barney’s mother.
Angela Crookshank was wearing one of her Indian outfits, a low-cut velvet blouse over a full skirt with a heavy turquoise-and-silver belt around her narrow waist. She laughed when she saw Rudy. He’d noticed before how glamorous Angela looked when she put her hands on her hips, tossed her long blond hair, and laughed. He’d seen her do the same thing at rodeos when she’d finished a barrel race or a stunt-riding demonstration. Seen her get off her horse, lead it up in front of the judges’ stand, bow and make her horse bow too—and then she’d laugh, with her head thrown back and her hair blowing in the wind while the crowd roared and clapped.
There wasn’t any roaring crowd in the ranch house kitchen, but Angela did the head-tossing laugh anyway when they finished telling about what happened. And then, still laughing, she said, “Rudy, you are just too much! How do you always manage to be the fall guy?”
When Rudy was in Barney’s bathroom, taking a shower and getting into some borrowed clothing, it occurred to him what Angela hadn’t mentioned. What Angela hadn’t said anything about was that Barney could have been killed. She didn’t seem to have noticed that part of it at all.
On the way home in the Toyota, Heather said, “You know what you were like? You were just like those rodeo clowns. You know, during the bull-riding events when the clowns keep the bulls from attacking the riders who fall off. You know, risking your neck to get the bull’s attention—okay, it was only a cow, but you were risking your neck just the same.”
“Thanks a lot,” Rudy said. “That’s what I like to hear. Rudy the clown.”
Heather laughed. “No. That’s not the point. I didn’t mean you were a clown. What I meant was that what you did took lots of guts. And what the clowns do takes a lot of courage. I’ve always thought that the clowns have to be the bravest ones in the whole rodeo. Don’t you think so?”
Rudy hadn’t thought much about rating rodeo bravery before, but when he did he had to agree. Lying in bed that night, he went over the whole thing again and decided that what Heather said was true. For one thing what the clowns did was really dangerous, there was no doubt about that. He’d often seen them in action at local rodeos and on TV, too, climbing fences or jumping into barrels with huge angry bulls about two steps behind them. And what he’d done had been very similar. So maybe he wasn’t so chicken after all. And now, maybe, no matter what might happen in the future, people wouldn’t forget that he hadn’t been chicken when the cow attacked Barney. Barney, in particular, wouldn’t forget. It was a good thought to go to sleep on.
The next day, Tuesday, Natasha went to Jackson to go shopping and visit some friends. She took the M and M’s with her, so Rudy had the whole day to himself and no plans. So right away he called up Barney to suggest that he could help again with the roundup.
“All done. Finished last night,” Barney said in a kind of excited, upbeat tone of voice. Rudy could almost see his wide Crookshank grin. “Hey, guess what?” he went on. “I’m going to go to Montana next week with my mom and dad—to a couple of rodeos. And I might even get to compete in some of the junior events. My dad just told me today.”
“Wow,” Rudy said. “That’s great. Fantastic. Amazing.” It really was pretty amazing, because it almost never happened anymore. When Barney was a little kid Jeb and Angela had taken him with them once in a while when they went on the rodeo circuit. But he hadn’t gotten to go at all for a long time. Barney said it was because his folks didn’t want him to miss school, but Rudy had noticed he didn’t get to go during summer vacations either.
“Fantastic,” Rudy said again. “How long will you be gone?”
“Oh, for a week or so,” Rudy said. “But we don’t leave until Friday, so today is okay. I could come to your place. Granddad’s got some Cattlemen’s Association stuff to do in town and I could ride in with him.”
“Hey,” Rudy said. “Great! We could go skateboarding at the school, or hang out downtown, or—hey, it’s going to be real hot. I could call Julie and see if we can go swimming in her pool. Okay?”
“Sure,” Barney said. “Whatever.”
Whatever. Barney used to say “whatever” a lot when they were discussing what to do with some free time, but it was a word that Rudy hadn’t heard much of recently. “Whatever” sounded like the old Barney.
Rudy hung up the phone and leaned against the kitchen sink thinking—and grinning. He didn’t realize how hard he was grinning until he caught sight of himself in Natasha’s broom closet mirror. Not cool, he thought. Pretty sappy-looking, actually. But he didn’t care. Grabbing the flyswatter off the windowsill and waving it like a baton, he did a kind of drum major strut around the kitchen table before he came back to the phone and called Julie Harmon.
Julie sounded pleased when she found out it was Rudy on the phone. “Well, hi, Rudy Drummond,” she said. “It is Rudy, isn’t it? Not Windy Dayes. Or Miss Harrington?” Miss Harrington was the principal at Pyramid Hill’s Middle School and one of the people Rudy was especially good at imitating.
Putting on his creaky “Miss Harrington” voice, Rudy said, “Well, actually, I’m calling to speak to your parents about your perfectly terrible grades, young lady.” Julie shrieked with laughter. Julie was always an easy audience. But then Rudy got down to business. “No, you were right the first time. It’s Rudy. I was just wondering… well, it is a very hot day, isn’t it?”
“Oh, I get it,” Julie said. “You want to go swimming, right?
“Swimming?” Rudy pretended surprise. “What a great idea, now that you mention it. But now that you mention it, Barney’s going to be in town today and maybe he and I—”
“Barney!” Julie shrieked. Then she put her hand over the receiver and shrieked a lot of other stuff that Rudy couldn’t quite hear. When she came back on the phone he found out that she’d been talking to Jennie and Stephanie, who were spending the whole day at the Harmons’.
“Some other kids might be coming later too,” Julie said. “So you and Barney come anytime. Come anytime—as soon as Barney gets there.”
It was one of the all-time great afternoons. Stephanie was wearing a killer bikini bathing suit and looking even more sensational than usual. Two more guys and another girl showed up, so they had enough people for a major-effort game of water polo. Barney was the big star, as usual, and made all the goals, and got all kinds of attention, especially from the girls. But Rudy got lots of attention, too, because people kept asking him to do his impersonation of Michael Jackson—the one he’d done for the graduation assembly. Around four o’clock Julie fixed tuna sandwiches and popcorn, and just before the party broke up Stephanie actually spoke to Rudy without his having to start the conversation, which was practically a first. He came up out of the pool near where she was sitting and before he even opened his mouth she said, “Would you mind standing somewhere else? You’re dripping on me.” It wasn’t much, maybe, but along with everything else it made it a perfect day.
Perfect at least in most respects. The only thing that might have made it better would have been if he and Barney had more time to talk, if he could have found out, for instance, just where the gold-mining scheme stood at the moment and if Tyler’s hedge-sitting fiasco had really changed Barney’s feelings about the whole picture. But Barney had gone straight downtown from the Harmons’ to meet his granddad at the Cattlemen’s Association building, and Rudy walked home alone.
Natasha wasn’t back yet when Rudy got home, so he fixed himself a peanut butter sandwich and turned on the TV. But nothing very interesting was on. Nothing, at least, as interesting as thinking about what a great day it had been. So he shut off the tube—and it was at that point he hit on the idea of having another session with Conquering Your Fears.
As he got the book out from u
nder his mattress he was feeling pretty confident that he was certainly going to be much more successful with the phobia treatments than he’d been before. After all, if a person could keep his cool in a situation like the killer-cow episode, he surely wouldn’t hit the panic button over imagining something scary, or maybe crawling into a little old closet. Or even, for that matter, a deserted gold mine. Like the book said, some phobias were simply outgrown as a person matured.
But when he tried the “implosion” method he nearly went into shock, and he couldn’t get into the hall closet any farther than his ankles. Not without getting a distinct impression that if he pushed it anymore somebody would have to scrape him off the ceiling. The whole thing was a major disappointment, and after being so up all afternoon it was particularly hard to take.
He was still feeling the letdown that evening, and even though he was trying to hide it Natasha must have noticed. Sometimes, when she wasn’t too busy or tired, Natasha seemed to have a built-in mood detector. They were cleaning up after dinner when she suddenly said, “Is something wrong, Rudy? I’m getting a feeling that all is not well.”
“Wrong?” He gave her a big “can’t imagine what you’re talking about” number. “No. Everything’s fine as far as I know. Have you checked the evening news? Maybe World War Three has started.”
“Very funny,” Natasha said. “I just meant that you seem a little bit gloomy.”
“I’m fine,” Rudy said. “I had a terrific day, actually. One of the best.” He’d already told Natasha a little about the swimming party at the Harmons’. “It was a blast at Julie’s. Oh, yeah, I forgot to tell you about something. Barney’s going to get to go to a couple of rodeos in Montana with Jeb and Angela.”
“Oh, really.” Natasha looked surprised. “I thought they didn’t take him with them anymore.”
“Well, they don’t very much. Not during school anyway.”
“And not much in the summer either.” Natasha’s lip curled up on one side the way it always did when she was talking about something that made her angry. “Not since he’s gotten to be so embarrassingly grownup looking.”
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