Live Like You Were Dying by Michael Morris Page B

legs. Manure-stained sand was all that I saw when I landed against the dirt, the breath knocked out of me but the spirit stronger than ever.
    â€œYaaaaa! Yaaa!” Ham yelled from inside the arena, flagging his arms at the bull. At the edge of the fence, my father reached over to lift me, but it was his praise that got me over the fence. “Good job, son. Real good job.”
    Gasping for air, I tumbled forward and slid over the fence. From the other side, FuManChu raked his horns across the fence and snorted. I looked at the meanest son of a gun I’d ever faced since Jay Beckett and managed to laugh. Laughter continued to ring out as the thing that I thought might kill me trotted away for good.
    That night, at a honky-tonk named Road Kill, Ham sucked down Jack Daniels with a frenzy equal to that of his bull. Stumbling up to the tiny stage where a DJ played classic country music, the microphone squealed when Ham snatched it away from the young boy. “I want everybody to listen up,” he said, leaning against the DJ’s sound system, “that skinny Georgia boy sitting over there . . . Stand up, boy,” Ham said, waving his hand and tipping his glass until the drink sloshed to the floor. “That boy just put a natural-born hurting on my prized bull. Fuchow . . . FuManChu.” The applause was weak, but my father winked at me just the same. “Come on,” Ham shouted. “Let’s see how many of ya’ll can stay on that bull for 2.7 seconds.” And with that somebody yelled, “Play ‘Call Somebody Who Cares.’”
    A bouncer wearing a black wrestling T-shirt helped lift Ham from the stage, and he meandered through the crowd towards me, pulling something from his pocket. “While you were getting your insides ruptured, I took this picture . . . a souvenir . . . a medal.” He tossed a blurred instant photo of me leaning far back, feet in the air, while FuManChu kicked up dirt and twisted sideways.
    The next morning, after we’d shaken Ham’s hand and paid him what was promised, he reached over and handed me the birdhouse that hung on the deck rail. “Here. A trophy.”
    Riding down the bumpy sand road, I held the white-steepled birdhouse in my lap and decided that it would go in Grand Vestal’s backyard next to her clothesline. She wouldn’t know how I came by it. For all she knew, I might have bought it at some roadside stand filled with velvet rugs and plastic flowers. Just as long as my father and I knew the story behind it was all that mattered. That birdhouse would be something that we’d both glance at long after the migrating birds had come and gone. The house would stand as a memorial to the day I broke the phrase “it can’t be done.”
    Taking a pen from the glove box, I wrote on the bottom white margin of the picture Ham had taken, “When life tries to buck you, don’t look down and don’t give in. Few things are as tough as they first appear.”
    Addressing an envelope to Malley at Grand Vestal’s house, I tucked the photo inside. Life’s only worth living if you’re willing to share it with the people who matter most.
    â€œAre you getting bored yet?”
    Heather asked the question twice before I answered. Holding the pay phone closer to the edge of my chin, my two-day-old beard scratched against the receiver. “No, I wouldn’t say I was bored.” A group of children ran screaming around the chain-link fence that separated them from the booth of pay phones at a campground outside of Amarillo, Texas.
    â€œWell, it sounds like somebody’s having a good time,” Heather said.
    â€œThere’re a bunch of kids out here swimming. Man, I wish you and Malley were here. I’m missing you bad.”
    Looking out into the flat landscape scattered with small oaks and the pink-colored sky that comes with the close of day, I pictured Heather wrapping the phone cord