Jeannette Walls - Half Broke Horses

As soon as I got my foot into the stirrup, he moved off, but I had him by the mane and I swung into the saddle. He immediately started bucking. By now the two guys were splitting their sides with laughter, but I paid them no mind. The way to stop a horse from bucking was to get his head up-he had to drop it to kick out with his hindquarters-and then send him forward. I popped the horse hard in the mouth with the reins, which jerked his head right up, and whaled his rump with the juniper branch.

That got that little varmint’s attention-and the comedians’ as well. We set off at a good gallop, but he was still throwing his shoulders around and fishtailing. I was following the motion, riding with my upper body loose, my heels jammed down, and my legs clamped like a vise around his sides. Rooster and his buddy were not going to be seeing any daylight between me and the saddle.

Each time I sensed the small hesitation that meant a buck was coming, I popped the horse’s mouth and whaled his rear again, and he soon learned that the only way out for him was to do what I wanted him to do. In no time he settled, and I patted his neck.

I walked the mustang back to the comedians, who were no longer laughing. Both of them had lost their patter. They were even a little slack-jawed. I could tell it was killing them that I could get the best of a horse that must have given them plenty of trouble, but I didn’t rub it in.

“Nice little pony,” I said. “Can I have my paycheck now?”

WORD ABOUT ME BREAKINGthat mustang spread around Red Lake, and people began regarding me as a woman to be reckoned with. Both men and women asked for my opinion on problem horses and problem children. Rooster-whose real name was Orville Stubbs but whom I always called Rooster-started acting like my faithful sidekick, as if, since I’d bested him at a game of his own devising, he owed me his utter devotion.

Rooster worked only part-time as a deputy. He lived above the Red Lake stable and also made a little money on the side mucking stalls, shoeing horses, and helping out on roundups. Like most folks out in the country, he didn’t have a particular job, much less a career, but got by doing whatever came his way. Rooster turned out to be a likable little guy, even though he had his less than charming habits. He chewed tobacco and was a swallower, not a spitter. “Spitters just waste good juice,” he declared.

Rooster introduced me to the other horsemen in Red Lake, telling folks I was the former Chicago flapper who’d given up drinking champagne and doing the Charleston to come teach the kids of Coconino County. He encouraged me to enter that mustang, which was his and which he’d named Red Devil, in local races. They were pickup affairs on the weekends, with five to ten horses in quarter-mile heats and a purse of five or ten dollars. I started winning some of those races, and that put around the word about me as well.

I also started playing poker on Saturday night with Rooster and his pals. Our games were in the café, and they involved a fair amount of inebriation. Most folks in that part of Arizona didn’t pay much attention to Prohibition, considering it a perverse eastern aberration. All it really meant was that saloon keepers started calling their establishments cafés and stashed their liquor bottles under the counter instead of on the shelf behind the bar. Wasn’t no one going to come between a cowboy and his whiskey.

Rooster and the others would put away a good quantity of what they called “panther piss,” but I’d sit there nursing a single glass all night long. I avoided the elaborate bluffing favored by the cowboys, and always just played the hand I was dealt, folding as soon as the bidding got too rich for my cards, and going for small victories rather than high-stakes table sweepers. Still, on most nights I’d end up ahead of the game, a nice little stack of coins sitting on the table in front of me.

I became known as Lily Casey, the mustang-breaking, poker-playing, horse-race-winning schoolmarm of Coconino County, and it wasn’t half bad to be in a place where no one had a problem with a woman having a moniker like that.

After a while I could tell Rooster was sweet on me, but before he made his intentions clear, I let him know I’d been married once, it hadn’t worked out, and I had no desire to marry again. He seemed to accept this, and we stayed good friends, but one day he came by the teacherage with a shy, sober expression.

“I got something I needs to ask you,” he said.

It sounded like he was going to propose. “Rooster, I thought you understood we were just friends.”

“It ain’t like that,” he said. “So don’t make this any harder.” He hesitated for a moment. “What I was going to ask was could you show me how to write out ’Orville Stubbs’?”

And that was how Rooster became my secret student.

ROOSTER STARTED DROPPING BYon Saturday afternoons. We’d work on his reading and writing, then head out for a night of fivecard stud. I was still racing Red Devil and winning more often than not. I had spent some of my winnings to buy a crimson-colored shirt of genuine silk, and I wore it whenever I raced. That way even shortsighted spectators could recognize me. I just loved that brilliant, shiny red shirt. Anyone could tell at a moment’s glance that it was mail-order, not homemade or home-dyed, and that shirt became my trademark.

One day in early spring, Rooster and I rode down to a race on a ranch south of Red Lake. It was a bigger meet than usual, with five heats, a final, and a fifteen-dollar purse, and it was held on an actual track, with an inside rail where the spectators had gathered.

Red Devil’s legs were on the short side, but that little mustang had fire, and when he got going, he moved so quickly that his hoofbeats sounded like one long drumroll. We took the lead early in the second heat. We were still ahead going into the first turn when a car near the rail backfired with a loud bang. Red bucked and veered sharply to the right, I went left, and before I knew what was happening, I was rolling on the track.

I clamped my hands over my head and lay still, eating dirt, as the other horses thundered by. I’d had the wind knocked out of me, but otherwise, I was fine, and when the sound of the hoofbeats faded, I got up and smacked the dirt off my behind.

Rooster had caught Red and was jogging back toward me with the horse. I climbed into the saddle. I had no chance of catching up with the others, but Red needed to learn that my taking an involuntary dismount didn’t mean he got out of doing his job.

When I crossed the finish line, the judge stood up and doffed his Stetson. I raced in a later heat, but Red was off his stride, and we finished toward the back. I had felt that fifteen-dollar purse was within my reach, and afterward, as Rooster watered the horse, I was still cursing about that backfiring car when the judge came over. He was a big man with a deliberate way of moving, a weathered face, and steady pale blue eyes.

“That was quite a tumble you took,” he said. His voice was deep, like he was speaking from inside a bass fiddle.

“No need to be reminding me, mister.”

“Everyone takes spills, ma’am. But I was mightily impressed with how, instead of calling it a day, you got right back on and finished the race.”

I started railing about the backfiring jalopy, but Rooster cut me off. “This here is Jim Smith,” he said. “Some folks call him Big Jim. He owns the new garage in town.”

“Don’t much like automobiles, do you?” Jim asked me.

“Just don’t like them spooking my horse. Truth is, I always wanted to learn to drive.”

“Maybe I can teach you.”

I WAS N’T ABOUT TOpass up an opportunity like that, so Jim Smith taught the teacher how to drive. He had a Model T Ford with a brass radiator, brass headlights, and a brass horn. The car, which Jim called “the Flivver,” was an ordeal-and sometimes an outright menace-to start. On really cold days you couldn’t get it going at all, and even on warm days it helped to have two people, because otherwise you had to crank it by hand, then jump into the front seat to pull out the choke. Sometimes the car lurched forward while you were cranking it, and other times the engine kicked back, causing the crank to suddenly reverse. When that happened, people had been known to break their wrists.