Half Broke Horses

by Jeannette Walls

  Jim thought it was all a little ridiculous, but I couldn’t help noticing the way women smiled and flirted with the Parachutin’ Cowboy when he doffed his hat or opened the door for them.

  Jim didn’t expect me that day, and when I walked into the warehouse, Glenda the floozy bookkeeper was standing in his doorway, talking to him. She had jet-black hair and blood-red lipstick, wore a tight purple dress, and was leaning with her back against the door frame to show off her figure. She had on one of those wire bra contraptions, and it pushed her bosoms forward like a couple of airplane nose cones.

  When she saw me, instead of seeming contrite, she gave her bosoms a little jiggle and looked at my husband. “Uh-oh, Smithy,” she said. “Are we in trouble?”

  My blood boiled up, and I was sorely tempted to backhand that hussy, but instead I looked at Jim to get his reaction. If he was all hot to trot, there was going to be hell to pay, but Jim just seemed embarrassed, more for the tart than for anything he’d done. “Knock it off, Glenda,” he said.

  The two of us went out to a cafeteria for lunch, and I didn’t say anything about Glenda’s little display, but I made a mental note to keep an eye on the two of them.

  * * *

  Truth be told, as the days went by, I couldn’t help wondering if there was actually something going on between Jim and the floozy. At times the two of them were all alone in that big warehouse, and there were plenty of hidden nooks and crannies to provide sites for hanky-panky. And then they both had lunch hour, again giving them ample time to duck into some hot-sheets hotel. In other words, they both had opportunity, and she clearly had motive. The question was, did my husband?

  There was no point in confronting Jim, because if he was turning out to be another crumb bum like my first husband, he’d simply lie. I thought I knew Jim, but I also knew you couldn’t-or shouldn’t-trust men. An otherwise sensible man might be driven wild if an irresistible temptation presented itself. And there was a heck of a lot more temptation wagging its tail in Phoenix than there ever had been in Yavapai County. Also, men can change. Maybe this Parachutin’ Cowboy business had gone to Jim’s head, all the adoring ladies with their battering eyelashes and nose-cone bosoms making him think he was the prize stallion at the stud farm. Maybe it had brought out the latent polygamist in him.

  Whatever the case, as the days went by, I realized I was not going to get any peace from these thoughts unless I got to the bottom of the matter. I needed to investigate.

  I didn’t want to hire a private detective, the way they did in all those movies. The gumshoes were always men, and I couldn’t trust them, either. I also didn’t want to follow Jim around myself, the way I did my first husband in Chicago. I’d known that crumb bum was a louse, I’d just needed to prove it. With Jim, I was trying to make a determination of the facts, the more quietly the better. Besides, Phoenix was a lot smaller than Chicago, and people knew me. I was a schoolteacher with a reputation to maintain. I didn’t want to be caught lurking in alleys.

  So I enlisted Rosemary’s help.

  “But, Mom, I don’t want to spy on Dad,” she said when I explained the enterprise.

  “It’s not spying, it’s investigating,” I said. “He might be cheating on me, but we don’t know. He might be innocent. That’s what we hope, and that’s what we’re trying to prove-that he’s innocent.”

  How could the girl say no to that?

  I figured that if something was going on between Jim and the floozy, the odds favored lunchtime assignations. The consequences of being caught in the warehouse with your pants around your ankles were a little too serious.

  Rosemary had spring break coming up. My plan was for her to spend her week off school following Jim during his lunch hour. If Jim and the floozy were going at it, they were probably doing so at least on a weekly basis. If, during that week, there was no suspicious activity, I decided I could let him off the hook.

  The first day of our investigation, it was hot for spring, and the cloudless sky was a deep, almost dark blue. I parked the Kaiser a couple of blocks from the warehouse. I told Rosemary to hide in the alley across the street and follow Jim when he came out at lunchtime, making sure to keep several other people between them in case he happened to turn around. I gave her a pencil and pad. “Take notes,” I said.

  She had a look of resignation about her, but she took the pad and got out of the car.

  “It’ll be fun,” I said. “We’re gumshoes.”

  I sat there for half an hour, trying to read the paper, but mostly checking my watch and studying passersby. Then Rosemary came up the street and got back in the Kaiser.

  “So what happened?” I asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Something must have happened.”

  Rosemary sat there staring at her shoes. “Dad ate lunch. In the park. By himself.”

  She’d followed him, she said, and he’d gone into a grocery store, come out with a paper bag, and walked to the park, where he’d sat on a bench and taken out a packet of saltines, a chunk of bologna, a chunk of cheese, and a carton of milk. He’d used his pocketknife to cut a slice of bologna and a slice of cheese for each cracker, and he’d drunk the milk in little swallows, nursing it so it would last.

  Rosemary smiled as she said that, as if the sight of her father sitting in the sun eating his bologna and crackers and rationing his milk had made her feel good about the world.

  “That was it?” I asked.

  “When he was done, he brushed the crumbs off his fingers and rolled himself a cigarette.”

  “Good,” I said. “We’ll do it again tomorrow.”

  On the second day, Rosemary got out of the car with her pencil and pad, and I sat there for a while drumming my fingers on the steering wheel, then around the corner came Jim with Rosemary. He was holding her hand, and she looked a lot happier than she had when she’d left.

  Jim knelt down by my window. “Lily, what the hell is going on?”

  I thought of coming up with some complicated lie, but Jim was smarter than that, and I knew the game was up. “I was trying to prove to myself and Rosemary what I hoped would be the case-that you are a faithful husband.”

  “I see,” he said. “Let’s all go have lunch.”

  He took us back to the grocery store, where we bought bologna and crackers and cheese and milk and had us a right fine picnic in that same park.

  But that night, when he got home, Jim said to me, “What say the two of us have a little sit-down.”

  I fixed myself a whiskey and water and we sat out in the yard behind the adobe house, where little fruits were starting to come in on the orange trees.

  “I wasn’t spying,” I said. “I was just confirming that everything between us was copacetic. I don’t want you cheating on me with that floozy.”

  “Lily, I’m not cheating on you. But it’s a part of city life that men are going to find themselves, from time to time, in the company of women who are not their wives. You got to trust me.”

  “It’s not that I don’t trust you,” I said. “But I’m not going to stand idly by while some floozy tries to steal my man.”

  “Maybe we’re all feeling a little penned up in this city. Maybe it’s making us all a little crazy.”

  “Then maybe we should leave,” I said. “Maybe we should.”

  “So that’s settled.”

  “Now we just got to find us a place to go.”

  IX THE FLYBOY

  Rex and Rosemary after their wedding

  HORSE MESA WAS A flyspeck of a place, a glorified camp, really, built for the men who worked at Horse Mesa Dam, which held back the waters of the Salt River, formed Lake Apache, and generated electrical power for Phoenix. Only thirteen families lived in Horse Mesa, but those families had kids, and the kids needed a teacher, and that summer I got the job.

  We traded in the fancy but unreliable California Kaiser for a good old made-in-Detroit Ford and, one day in July, packed our suitcases in the trunk and headed east, first to Apac
he Junction, then up to Tortilla Flats, where the asphalt ended. From there, we followed the Apache Trail, a winding dirt road, up into the Superstition Mountains, which for my money were even sweeter on the eyes than the Grand Canyon. We drove by massive cliffs of red and gold sandstone, their layers of collapsed sediment pushed up at an angle like a bunch of books leaning against one another on a shelf. The mountains were studded with saguaros, stag horns, and prickly pears, which were ugly as hell, but you had to admire their ability to thrive in even the driest, stoniest, most inhospitable cliffside cranny-and darned if they didn’t manage to produce some tasty fruit.

  After several miles on the Apache Trail, we came to an even narrower dirt road leading off to the north. We followed it over a ridge and down through a series of sharp, steep switchbacks, passing beneath overhangs and around otherworldly rock formations. Jim was at the wheel, and he made the Ford crawl along, hugging the mountainside, as there was no guardrail and the ground fell away so abruptly on the other side that with one miscalculation, we would plunge into the abyss. The road was called Agnes Weeps, after the town’s first schoolteacher, who had burst into tears when she saw how plunging and twisting the road was and realized how remote the town must be. But from the first moment I laid eyes on it, I loved that road. I thought of it as a winding staircase taking me out of the traffic jams, news bulletins, bureaucrats, air-raid sirens, and locked doors of city life. Jim said we should rename the road Lily Sings.

  We followed Agnes Weeps all the way to the bottom of the canyon, then came around a bend and saw a deep blue lake with red sandstone cliff walls rising on all sides around it. Across a short bridge, perched up on one of the cliffs and looking down on that lake, was Horse Mesa. It was just a cluster of stucco houses, and it was remote-Agnes had been right about that. A truck brought in groceries twice a week from the commissary at Roosevelt Dam. There was only one telephone, in the community center. If you wanted to make a phone call, you had to put in a request through the operator at the Tempe substation, who gave you an appointment and, at the designated time, routed the call through Mormon Flats, and everyone at the community center got to hear your conversation.

  But from the get-go, we were all darned happy to be at Horse Mesa. Since it was summer, the kids spent the entire day at the lake, diving off the cliffs into the cool water. The river and the lake attracted all sorts of animals, and we saw bighorn sheep, coatimundi cats, Gila monsters, Green Mountain rattlesnakes, and chuckwallas.

  Jim got a job with the Bureau of Land Reclamation driving a gravel truck-he filled potholes and rebuilt eroded washes along the entire length of the Apache Trail-and the work made him content. He was riding something powerful, on his own, out in the open.

  And I was back where I belonged, in a one-room schoolhouse, with no fish-faced bureaucrats second-guessing me, teaching my students what I thought they needed to know.

  THE SCHOOL AT HORSE Mesa went only through the eighth grade, so that fall, for the third time, we had to send the kids off to boarding school. We enrolled Rosemary at St. Joseph’s, a small, fancy school in Tucson. I knew that a lot of the other girls came from rich families, so before Rosemary left, I gave her a present.

  “Pearls!” she exclaimed when she opened the box. “They must have cost a fortune.”

  “I got them with S &H green stamps,” I said. “And they’re not real, they’re fake.” I told her for the first time about my crumb-bum first husband and his other family. “The louse gave me a fake ring,” I said. “But for years I thought it was real and acted like it was, and so did everyone else.” I fastened the pearls around her neck. “The point being,” I said, “if you hold your head up high, no one will ever know.”

  With the kids away at school, our life in Horse Mesa settled into a tranquil routine. Part of it was the setting itself. Living there was like living in a natural cathedral. Waking up every morning, you walked outside and looked down at the blue lake, then up at the sandstone cliffs-those awe-inspiring layers of red and yellow rock shaped over the millennia, with dozens of black-streaked crevices that temporarily became waterfalls after rainstorms. During one downpour I counted twenty-seven waterfalls.

  Just as important, everyone in Horse Mesa got along. We had to. Since we all worked together and depended on one another, arguments were a luxury none of us could afford. No one complained or gossiped. We only got intermittent radio signals, so in the evening, while the children played, the grown-ups strolled about visiting one another. None of us had much money, so we didn’t talk about the things people with money talked about. Instead, we talked about what mattered to us-the weather, the level of the lake, the big-mouth bass someone had caught under the bridge, the mountain-lion scat someone else had seen along Fish Creek. It may have seemed to city folk that we had precious little to do, but none of us felt that way, and the quiet routine contributed to the tranquility of our little cliffside camp.

  Peaceful as our life had become, I still had my moments of high dudgeon. I’d always been interested in politics, but I discovered I actually had a talent for it after the Department of Education tried to close down a couple of schools in our area and I hooked up with the United Federation of Teachers to stop it. I saw how easy it was to get things done if you were willing to use your elbows and your lungs, and how easily cowed some politicians got if you grabbed them by the tie or jabbed them in the chest with your finger.

  I started visiting Phoenix regularly, making sure those double-talking politicians followed through on their campaign promises, and on one occasion I burst into the governor’s office, Rosemary in tow, to berate him for not funding the education bill. When he threatened to have me arrested, I said if he did, I-a taxpayer, teacher, and loving mother of two-would hold a press conference and remind everyone what a lying son of a bitch he was.

  I became the Democratic precinct captain for Horse Mesa. I always carried around voter registration cards, and in grocery stores I’d ask the people in line if they were registered to vote. If they weren’t, I’d hand them a card. “Anyone who thinks he’s too small to make a difference has never been bit by a mosquito,” I’d tell people.

  I had all thirteen families in Horse Mesa register to vote, and on election day, Jim drove me into Tortilla Flats. I kept the ballots in one hand and my pearl-handled revolver in the other, daring anyone to try to hijack democracy by stealing the twenty-six votes I had been entrusted with. “Hold on, everyone!” I declared when I arrived. “The votes from Horse Mesa are here, and I’m proud to announce we had one hundred percent turnout.”

  Jim and I also all took up a new hobby-hunting for uranium. The government needed the stuff for its nuclear weapons and offered a reward of one hundred thousand dollars to anyone who discovered a uranium mine. A penniless couple up in Colorado had actually stumbled across one and were now rich. Jim bought a used Geiger counter, and on the weekends we drove out into the desert, hunting for rocks that ticked.

  I was surprised to find a lot of them out there, mainly near a place called Frenchman’s Flat, and it didn’t take us long to fill several crates. We took them into an assayer in Mormon Flats, but he told us they weren’t in fact uranium-all the radioactivity was on the surface. The rocks, he said, had been in an area where the government had been doing nuclear testing.

  I figured ticking rocks would have to be worth something someday, so we stored them under the house and from time to time collected more.

  After they finished high school, both Rosemary and Little Jim went off to Arizona State. At six foot four and two hundred pounds, Little Jim was now bigger than Big Jim. He played college football and ate half a box of cereal every morning, but he’d never been much of a student. During his first year in college, he met Diane, a full-lipped beauty whose father was a big cheese at the Phoenix postal system. They got married, and Jim dropped out of college and became a police officer.

  One down, I thought, and one to go.

  I felt I had come to an understanding with Rosemary. Or at lea
st I considered it an understanding-Rosemary still thought I was imposing my will on her. But we agreed that she could study art in college as long as she majored in teaching and got her certificate. After the war, young men had poured into Arizona, and Rosemary was always being pestered for dates. In fact, several men had already proposed to her. I told her to hold out, she wasn’t ready yet. But I did have a good notion of the type of man she needed-an anchor. That girl still had a tendency to be flighty, but with a solid man beside her, I could see her settling down, teaching elementary school, raising a couple of kids, and dabbling in painting on the side.

  There were plenty of solid men out there-men like her father-and I knew I could find her the right one.

  THE SUMMER AFTER ROSEMARY’S third year in college, she and her friends started driving over to Fish Creek Canyon to swim. One day she came home with what she thought was a funny story. A group of young air force pilots had been at the canyon. When she’d dived off the cliffs into the water, one of them had been so impressed that he’d jumped in after her and told her he was going to marry her.

  “I said that twenty-one men had already proposed to me, and I turned them all down, so what made him think I’d say yes to him. He said he wasn’t proposing, he was telling me we were going to get married.”

  Someone with that sort of moxie, I thought, was either a born leader or a con artist. “What was he like?” I asked.

  Rosemary considered the question for a moment, as if trying to figure it out herself. “Interesting,” she said. “Different. One thing about him-he wasn’t a very good swimmer, but he jumped right in.”