Jeannette Walls - Half Broke Horses

Jim and I discussed it, but we agreed right away that it was not for us. Before, we had been the ones running the ranch, making all the decisions. The storm had humbled Gaiters somewhat, but he still had his cockamamie notions for goosing up the Showtime. Jim didn’t want to do Gaiters’s bidding or have to spend his time arguing the man out of foolish ideas. What was more, there was no possibility of us someday buying the place. I told Jim I didn’t want to live in a caretaker’s cabin, even a knotty pine one, waiting for the owner to fly in with his Hollywood friends for weekend parties and leading dudes on trail rides. I’d been a servant before, and once was enough.

THE FOLLOWING MONTH Ihad a school holiday and was in town running errands when I decided to swing by the warehouse. An article about the work Jim had done saving herds during the blizzard had appeared in the newspaper, along with a photograph of him standing by the plane he’d jumped out of. The headline read COWBOY PARACHUTES THROUGH BLIZZARD TO RESCUE CATTLE. My husband had become a bit of a local hero. People recognized him on the street and stopped to shake his hand. One guy even hollered: “It’s the Parachutin’ Cowboy!”

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.