Jeannette Walls - Half Broke Horses

“Is that where you learned to drive like this?” I asked. “Trying to get away from the revenuers?”

“Hell, no,” he said. “The law was our best customers. And Uncle wouldn’t allow no speeding. It was fine moonshine, and he bade me drive slow so as to let it age.”

I told him about my days selling hooch stored under the baby’s bassinet and how Rosemary had saved me by bawling at the sight of the cops who’d come to investigate. We got along just fine, chatting away until we reached the flats and came to a beat-up trailer surrounded by junk: car axles, metal sinks, old fuel drums, stacks of folded canvas tarps, and a rusting truck up on cinder blocks.

Rex slammed on his brakes and swerved into the yard in front of the trailer. “Look at all that crap!” he exclaimed. “Being from West Virginia, I’m a mite touchy about white-trash eyesores, and I’m going to give that fellow a piece of my mind.”

He got out and started pounding on the door. “Will the sorry-ass lowlife who lives in this heap of rubble have the balls to show his buttugly face?”

A scrawny fellow with a crew cut opened the door.

“My future mother-in-law’s in that car,” Rex hollered. “And she’s sick of driving past this pigsty. So the next time I come down this road, I want to see it cleaned up, understand?”

The two men stared at each other for a moment, and I was certain one was going to deck the other, but then they both started laughing and slapped each other on the back.

“Rex, you ornery son of a bitch, how you been?” the fellow said.

Rex brought him over to the car and introduced him as Gus, an old air force buddy. “You may think I’ve got the long-lost Amelia Earhart here, but she’s Lily Casey Smith. She could teach Amelia Earhart a thing or two about flying, and she really is the mother of my future bride.”

“You’re going to let this AWOL jackass marry your daughter?” Gus cried. “Keep the bullwhip handy!”

They both thought that was just hilarious.

Rex explained that, strictly speaking, it was against regulations for air force pilots to take civilians up in military planes, though everyone did it all the time on the QT. Since they couldn’t take off from the airbase, in front of the controllers, the pilots picked up the civilians at the different grass fields outside the base where they practiced landings. One of those fields was right behind Gus’s trailer, so Rex was going to leave me with Gus, take off from the base, and fly the plane back to the trailer. I didn’t mind a man who ignored stupid regulations, so Rex got another check in the plus column-though the minus column was still well in the lead.

I sat in back of the trailer, shooting the breeze with Gus. There was an orange wind sock on a pole by the landing field, but since there was no wind, it just hung there. Finally, the plane appeared. It was yellow, a single-engine two-seater with a glass canopy that Rex had shoved back. He landed and taxied toward us. After Rex stopped, Gus pointed out the footstep below the flap, and I scrambled onto the wing. Rex had me sit in the front while he got in the back. I plugged in my headphones and watched the needles on the instrument panel jiggle from the engine’s vibration. Rex throttled up, and we bumped across the field into the air.

As we gained altitude, I again had the sensation that I was an angel, watching tiny cars creep along ribbons of road far beneath me, and gazing toward the earth’s distant curve, with that infinity of blue space behind it.

We flew toward Horse Mesa, and Rex dropped down to buzz the house a couple of times. Rosemary and Jim came running out waving like maniacs, and Rex dipped the wings.

Rex climbed, and we followed the spine of the mountains to Fish Creek Canyon. Then we dropped down into the canyon itself, flying above the winding river with the red stone cliff walls sweeping in and out on either side of us.

When we came up out of the canyon, we circled back over the flats, and Rex, who could talk to me over the intercom, let me take the controls. I banked left, brought her level again, banked right in one big circle, climbed, and dropped. Nothing in life was finer than flying.

Rex took the controls again. He sent the plane on a big rolling loop, and I couldn’t help grabbing on for dear life when we went upside down. Coming out of the loop, we dove steeply and then went skimming along barely fifty feet above the ground. Trees, hills, rock formations zoomed up at us and flashed by.

“We call this flat-hatting,” Rex said. “A friend of mine was doing it over the beach, and when he leaned out to wave at the girls, his plane went right into the drink.”

Then we were flying toward a road with a string of telephone poles running alongside it. “Watch this!” Rex shouted over the intercom. He dropped the plane down even lower until we were practically touching the ground.

I realized he was going to try to fly under the telephone wire. “Rex, you fool! You’ll kill us!” I yelled.

Rex just cackled, and before I knew it, we were lining up to shoot between two poles, then they zipped past, along with the blur of the wire overhead.

“You’re a goddamned crazy man!” I said.

“That’s what your daughter loves about me!” he hollered back.

He climbed again and headed north until he found what he wanted, grazing cattle. He dropped down behind the herd and approached it, once again almost skimming the earth. The cattle started stampeding away from us at their lumbering gallop, streaming out to the sides as we came onto them, but Rex banked right and then left, driving the cattle toward the center. Only when he had them back together did he pull up and away.

“Can’t do that on a horse, can you?” he asked.

THAT SPRING REX ANDRosemary decided to get married. She gave me the news one evening after dinner while we were doing the dishes.

“You need someone solid,” I told her. “Haven’t I taught you anything?”

“You sure have,” she said. “That’s all you’ve been doing my whole life.

’Let this be a lesson.’ ’Let that be a lesson.’ But all these years, what you thought you were teaching me was one thing, and what I was learning was something else.”

We stood there, staring at each other. Rosemary was leaning against the kitchen sink, her arms crossed.

“So you’re going to marry him even if I don’t approve?” I asked.

“That’s the plan.”

“I always liked to think I’d never met a kid I couldn’t teach,” I said. “Turns out I was wrong. That kid is you.”

At the same time, Rex announced that his tour of duty was coming to an end and he’d decided not to reenlist. The air force wanted him to fly bombers, and he wanted to fly fighters. Also, he didn’t want Rosemary to waste her life raising a brood of kids in a broiling trailer on a desert air base. Besides, he had other plans. Big plans.

The whole idea was half-baked.

“Where are you going to live?” I asked Rosemary.

“I don’t know,” she said. “It doesn’t matter.”

“What do you mean, it doesn’t matter? The place where you live- your home-is one of the most important things in a body’s life.”

“I feel like I haven’t really had a home since I left the ranch. I don’t think I’ll ever have a home again. Maybe we’ll never settle down.”

Jim was philosophical about Rosemary’s decision, figuring that since her mind was made up, we’d only turn her against us by arguing with her.

“I feel like I failed,” I said.

“Don’t beat yourself up,” Jim said. “She might not have turned out like you planned, but that don’t mean she turned out wrong.”

We were sitting on the front step of our house. It had rained earlier. The red rock cliffs around Horse Mesa were wet, and runoff was pouring over crevices, creating dozens of those temporary waterfalls.