Jeannette Walls - Half Broke Horses

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 least 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’Sthird 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.”

The jumper’s name was Rex Walls. He had grown up in West Virginia and was stationed at Luke Air Force Base. Rosemary came back from her first date with him practically giggling with glee. They’d met at a Mexican restaurant in Tempe, and when some guy had flirted with her, Rex had started a fight that became a general brawl, but she and Rex had ducked out and run off hand in hand before the cops arrived.

“He called it ’doing the skedaddle,’” she said.

Just what she needs, I thought. A hellion. “That sounds very promising,” I said.

Rosemary ignored the sarcasm. “He talked all night,” she said. “He has all sorts of plans. And he’s very interested in my art. Mom, he’s the first man I’ve ever dated who’s taken me seriously as an artist. He actually asked to see some paintings.”

The following weekend Rex showed up at Horse Mesa to look at Rosemary’s art. He was a rangy fellow with narrow dark eyes, a devilish grin, and slicked-back black hair. He had courtly manners, sweeping off his air force cap, shaking Jim’s hand vigorously, and giving mine a gentle squeeze. “Now I see where Rosemary gets her looks,” he told me.

“You do know how to spread it,” I said.

Rex threw back his head and laughed. “And now I also see where Rosemary gets her sass.”

“I’m just an old schoolmarm,” I went on. “But I do have a nice set of choppers.” I slipped out my dentures and held them up.

Rosemary was mortified. “Mom!” she said.

But Rex laughed again. “Those are fine indeed, but I can match you there,” he said, and slipped out his own set of dentures. He explained that when he was seventeen, his car had hit a tree. “The car stopped,” he said, “but I kept going.”

This fellow did have a way about him, I thought. And at the very least, you knew anyone who could laugh off a car accident that took out all his teeth had to have a little gumption.

Rosemary had brought in some of her paintings-desert landscapes, flowers, cats, portraits of Jim-and Rex held each one up, praising it to the skies for originality of composition, brilliance of color, sophistication of technique, and on and on. More horseshit, as far as I was concerned, but Rosemary lapped it up, just the way she did that existential hogwash from the Frog art teacher Ernestine.

“Why aren’t any of these paintings hanging on the walls?” Rex asked.

In the living room, we had two woodland prints that I had bought because the blue of the sky perfectly matched the blue of the rug on the floor. Without so much as a by-your-leave, Rex took them down and replaced them with two of Rosemary’s paintings that didn’t have any blue at all in them.

“There,” he said. “On display, where they belong.”

“Well, they’re nice, but they don’t match the rug,” I said. “It took me a long time to find prints with exactly the right shade of blue.”

“To hell with matching,” Rex said. “You got to mix things up every now and then.” He pointed at my prints. “Those are just reproductions,” he said, and then gestured toward Rosemary’s paintings. “These are originals, and not just that, they’re goddamned masterpieces.”

I looked at Rosemary. She was glowing.

BY THE END OFthe summer, Rex and Rosemary were dating regularly. I couldn’t tell how serious she was, but that polecat Rex was sure persistent. I felt I could read the man like a book. He was charming, but most con men were, since before they fleeced you, they needed to gain your trust. My crumb-bum first husband had taught me that. This Rex fellow always had a joke on hand, could talk about any subject, passed out compliments like candy, and made you feel you were the center of the world, but you couldn’t trust him farther than you could throw him.