Half Broke Horses

VIII GUMSHOES

Rosemary, age sixteen, Horse Mesa

JIM DECIDED THAT WE should start our new life in Phoenix by splurging.

“Name something you’ve always wanted,” he said.

“New choppers,” I said immediately. My teeth had been giving me trouble for years, but folks on the Colorado Plateau weren’t big on dentists. If a tooth wouldn’t stop aching, you found yourself a pair of pliers and pulled the bugger. I also had a gap between my two front teeth where they had rotted in from the sides. I tried to keep the gap plugged with a piece of white candle wax, but when the wax fell out from time to time, I had to admit it looked a little scary. Jim’s teeth were every bit as bad.

“You get yourself a pair, too,” I said.

Jim grinned. “Two new sets of choppers. That should get us going just fine in this here town.”

We found a nice young dentist who shot us full of Novocain, pulled out our worn-down brown teeth, and fitted sets of new dentures to our gums. The first time he put them in place and held up the mirror, I was thrilled by those two flawless rows of big gleaming white porcelain, as shiny and square as kitchen tiles. Overnight I’d gotten myself the smile of a movie star, while Jim looked about thirty years younger. The two of us walked around the city beaming radiantly at our new neighbors.

We also bought a house on North Third Street. It was a big old place with high windows, sturdy wooden doors, and adobe walls about two feet thick. Finally, we junked that beater of a hearse and bought a maroon Kaiser, a new kind of sedan made in California, with wide bumpers and running boards. I was proud of that house and proud of that car, too, but nothing made me prouder than my new set of choppers. They beat the pants off real teeth, and from time to time when I was in a restaurant or someplace telling someone about them, I couldn’t help it, I had to pull them out and show them off to prove that they were the genuine article.

“Look!” I’d say as I held them up. “They’re not teeth. They’re real dentures!”

AT FIRST I THOUGHT Phoenix was terrific. Our house was near the center of town, and we could walk to stores and movie theaters. I made a point of going to every single restaurant on Van Buren Street. I especially loved cafeterias, because you could actually see the food before you ordered it instead of flying blind with a menu. After all those years of sitting on orange crates and drinking from coffee cans, I went out and bought a carved mahogany dining set and Bavarian china. For the first time in our lives, we got a telephone, which meant people who wanted to get in touch with me didn’t have to leave a message with the sheriff.

Little Jim, however, hated Phoenix from the get-go. “You feel penned in,” he said. “You feel puny.”

And when Rosemary’s boarding school let out and she joined us in the city, she hated it, too. They hated the black asphalt and the gray concrete. They thought air-conditioning was weird and noisy, and the telephone just allowed busybodies to pester you day and night. Phoenix was square and straight, boxy and boxed in, and above all, fake.

“You can’t even see the ground,” Rosemary complained. “It’s all covered up with pavement and sidewalks.”

“But think of the advantages,” I said. “We eat at cafeterias. We have indoor plumbing.”

“Who cares?” Rosemary said. “Back at the ranch, you could hunker down and take a pee whenever you had the urge.” She added that living in Phoenix was even making her question her faith. “I’ve been praying daily to go back to the ranch,” she said. “Either God doesn’t exist or he doesn’t hear me.”

“Of course he exists and of course he hears you,” I said. “He has the right to say no, you know.”

But I did begin to worry about the effect Phoenix was having on that girl. She had no use for indoor plumbing, questioned the existence of God, and even acted all embarrassed when, the next day at a luncheonette, I took out my dentures to show them off to the waitress.

I didn’t care to admit it to the kids, but after a few months, I started feeling a little penned in myself. The traffic drove me crazy. Back in Yavapai County, you drove wherever you wanted at whatever speed you wanted, and left the road whenever you were so inclined. Here there were stoplights, cops with whistles, yellow lines, white lines, and all manner of signs ordering you to do this and forbidding you from doing that. Cars were supposed to mean freedom, but all these people stuck in traffic on one-way streets-where you weren’t even allowed to make a U-turn to get the hell out of the jam-might as well have been sitting in cages. I found myself constantly arguing with other drivers, sticking my head out the window of the Kaiser, which was always overheating, and hollering at those dimwits that they should go back east, where they belonged.

Nothing had ever made me feel as free as flying, and I was only a few hours away from getting my pilot’s license, so I decided to take up lessons again. The airport had a flying school, but when I showed up one day, the clerk passed me an entire sheaf of forms and started yammering about eye exams, physicals, takeoff slots, elevation restrictions, and nofly zones. I realized that these city folks had boxed off and chopped up the sky the same way they had the ground.

One thing about Phoenix, though: There were a lot more jobs available than in Yavapai County. Jim was hired as the manager of a warehouse stocking airplane parts, and I landed a teaching position in a high school in South Phoenix.

There were also investment opportunities in the city. After paying for our house on Third Street, we still had money left over, and we used it to buy a few other small houses that we rented out. Distressed properties were always coming onto the market at bargain prices. Jim and I attended courthouse auctions and bid on foreclosures, and I started carrying a ten-thousand-dollar cashier’s check in my purse, just in case I happened across anyone needing to sell quickly at a discounted price. For the first time in our lives, we were living on the backs of others, but that was how you got ahead in the city. When Jim said it made him feel like a vulture, I told him that scavengers got a bum rap. “Vultures don’t kill animals, they live off the dead,” I said. “And that’s what we’re doing. We’re not bringing misfortune on these people, we’re just taking advantage of it.”

I worried constantly that someone might snatch my purse and make off with the check, so I kept the bag clutched to my chest when I walked through town. That was only one of a number of things I found myself worrying about in Phoenix. We had bought ourselves a radio that we could listen to all day long now that we were living in a house wired for electricity. At first I thought that was just grand, but it meant that for the first time I was also listening to the news every day, and about every day, it seemed, there was a report about some crime or another in town. People were always getting robbed or having their cars stolen or their houses burgled if they weren’t getting raped, shot, or stabbed. A Phoenix woman named Winnie Ruth Judd-known as the “Blonde Butcher” and the “Trunk Murderess” because she’d killed two people and put their bodies in her luggage-kept escaping from the insane asylum she’d been sent to, and the news was always filled with accounts of possible Trunk Murderess sightings, along with warnings to the citizenry to lock all doors and windows.

So I kept my pearl-handled revolver under my bed. I also bought a little twenty-two pistol to carry in my purse along with the check. Every night I made a point of bolting the doors, which we had never done at the ranch, and I slept on the outside of the bed I still shared with Rosemary, keeping her next to the wall so if anyone got through the locked doors and attacked us, I could fight them off while Rosemary escaped.

“Mom, you’ve become such a worrywart,” she said.

Rosemary was right. On the ranch, we worried about the weather and the cattle and horses, but we never worried about ourselves. In Phoenix people worried about themselves all the time.

PEOPLE ALSO WORRIED ABOUT bombs. Every Saturday at noon, the air-raid siren was tested, and an earsplitting whoop-whoop-whoop blared throughout the city. If the siren sounded at any other time, that meant an attack was under way and you were supposed to run to the bomb shelters. Rosemary couldn’t abide the siren, and when it went off, she buried her head under a pillow. “I can’t stand that noise,” she said.

“It’s for your own good,” I said.

“Well, all it’s doing is scaring me, and I don’t see the good in that.”

The girl was developing a pronounced contrarian streak. One morning that August, when Rosemary and I were walking down Van Buren Street, we passed a storefront where a bunch of people were gathered, gawking at an automatic donut-making machine. Next to it was a newsstand, and it was when I glanced down at the headlines that I first learned about the atom bomb falling on Hiroshima. I bought the paper, and as I read, I tried to explain to Rosemary what had happened. Rosemary couldn’t believe that a single bomb had obliterated an entire city- hundreds of thousands of people, not only soldiers but also grandparents, mothers, children, as well as dogs, cats, birds, chickens, mice, every living thing. “Those poor, poor creatures,” she kept sobbing.

I tried to argue that it was the Japs who’d started the war, and because of Hiroshima, thousands more American boys would not have to die fighting them, but Rosemary decided there was something sick about the atom bomb. The deaths of all those mice and birds was just as upsetting to her as the deaths of the people. After all, she said, the animals hadn’t started the war.

She also decided there was something sick about Americans who would stand there gawking at a donut maker while there was so much agony on the other side of the world.

“Focus on the positive,” I said. “You live in a country where no one has to make donuts by hand.”

Rosemary’s feelings got even darker that fall. We’d enrolled her at St. Mary’s, a Catholic school a few blocks from the house, and the nuns, who kept reminding their students that all life was sacred, showed some Japanese news reels of the devastation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The scenes of flattened city blocks, incinerated corpses, and babies deformed by radiation gave Rosemary nightmares. The nuns told her that we needed to pray for the Japanese because they were God’s children, too, and they had lost their sons and daughters and fathers and mothers. I was less sympathetic. “That’s what happens when you go around starting wars,” I said. But Rosemary was distraught. No one but God, she thought, should be able to kill so many people so easily and so quickly as we had done with the atomic bomb. That her own government had that kind of power made her very afraid of it. Now that it had the bomb, who was it going to bomb next? What if it decided she was the enemy?

When I got tired of explaining that the end justified the means, I told Rosemary to stop talking about Hiroshima, because if she stopped talking about it, she’d stop thinking about it. She did stop talking about it, but one day I looked under the bed we still shared and found a folder full of drawing after drawing of animals and children, all with Japanese eyes and angels’ wings.

ROSEMARY STARTED DRAWING AND painting more obsessively than ever. As far as I could tell, it was her one talent. Her grades were still terrible. I signed her up for violin and piano lessons, but her instructor said she lacked the discipline to practice. I tried to defend her, arguing that improvisation, not recitation, was her musical forte, but one day the instructor said if he had to listen to her torturing that poor violin one more minute, he’d puncture his own eardrums.

“What are we going to do with you?” I asked her.

“I’m not worried about me,” she said. “And no one else should be, either.”

A lot of pretty girls lost their looks when they reached adolescence, but Rosemary was still a stunner, though I’d kept my promise to myself never to tell her this. However, I was getting a little desperate, and one day when I read a newspaper article about a beauty contest, I figured maybe Rosemary should go ahead and play that card. “I have an idea,” I said. “You can be a beauty queen or a model.”

“What are you talking about?” Rosemary asked.

I told her to put on a bathing suit and walk back and forth in front of me. It wasn’t promising. She had the looks and the figure, but she moved like a cowgirl, not a beauty queen, swinging her arms vigorously with each big stride. So I enrolled her in modeling school, where she learned how to walk with a book on her head and get out of a car without showing her underpants. But at her first photo session, when the photographer told her to flirt with the camera, she couldn’t stop giggling self-consciously, and the man shook his head.

What Rosemary really wanted to do was be an artist.

“Artists never make any money,” I said, “and they usually go crazy.”

Rosemary pointed out that Charlie Russell and Frederic Remington had both gotten rich painting western scenes. “Art’s a great way to make money,” Rosemary said. For the cost of a piece of canvas and some paint, she went on, you could create a picture worth thousands of dollars. In what other line of work could you do that? A blank canvas, she kept arguing, was a treasure waiting to happen.

I finally took some of her drawings to a few frame shops and asked the clerks if they thought my daughter had any talent. They said she showed promise, so I arranged for her to take lessons with Ernestine, an art teacher who wore a beret just in case you couldn’t tell from her accent that she was a Frog.

Ernestine taught Rosemary that white wasn’t really white, that black wasn’t really black, that every color had other colors in it, that every line was made up of more than one line, that you should love the weeds as much as the flowers because everything on the planet had its own beauty and it was up to the artist to discover it, and that for the artist, there was no such thing as reality because the world was as you chose to see it.

This all struck me as a lot of hogwash, but Rosemary really lapped it up.

“You know what’s the greatest thing about painting?” she said one day.

“What?”

“If there’s something about the world that you don’t like, you can paint a painting that makes it the way you want it to be.”

With Ernestine’s lessons, Rosemary’s paintings became less and less about the thing she was painting and more about what she was feeling at the moment. Around this time, she started spelling her name Rose Mary because she thought it made for a prettier signature. I continued to pay the Frog for the lessons, but I kept reminding Rosemary that art was an iffy proposition, that most women still had to choose between being a nurse, a secretary, and a teacher, and for my money, teaching beat the others hands down.

The funny thing was, even while telling Rosemary this, I was not, for the first time in my life, enjoying my job. I was teaching math and English at a large high school. A lot of the kids came from highfalutin families, wore fancy clothes-a few actually drove their own cars-and refused to obey me if they didn’t feel like it. It was also the first time I had not been on my own, teaching in a one-room school. I had principals and other teachers second-guessing me, forms to fill out, and committees to sit on. Half my day was spent doing paperwork for the bureaucracy.

There were more rules for teachers than for students, and those bureaucrats were awfully persnickety about you following those rules. Once when I opened my purse in the teachers’ lounge, one of the other teachers saw my little pistol and just about had a fit.

“That’s a gun!” she gasped.

“Barely,” I said. “It’s only a twenty-two.”

Still, she reported me to the principal, who warned me that if I ever brought a gun to the school again, I’d be fired.

“How am I going to protect myself and my students?” I asked.

“That’s what the police are for,” he said.

“Who’s going to protect us from the police?”

“Just leave the gun at home.”

JIM NEVER COMPLAINED, BUT I could tell his job chafed him as much as mine did me. He was bored-a big, broad-shouldered guy sitting awkwardly behind a little metal desk, checking his inventory list and watching the Mexican workers boxing up airplane parts. Jim wasn’t a desk man. He also had a lot of downtime, which he wasn’t used to, and he spent a fair amount of it shooting the breeze with the warehouse bookkeeper, a tarted-up divorcée I did not take to named Glenda. She called Jim “Smithy” and was always asking him to light her cigarettes.

My husband just didn’t see the point of city life, didn’t understand why anyone would want to live like this. So many things about it struck him as contrary to the proper and natural way of the world. Shortly after we moved to the city, they cut down all the orange and cottonwood trees that shaded the streets to make room for more parking. “Seems to me you lose more than you gain,” Jim said.

The simple truth was, he missed the outdoors. He missed the sweat and dust and heat of ranching, the smells and hard labor. He missed the way that ranch life forced you to study the sky and the land every day, trying to anticipate nature’s intentions. On Sundays we took walks in Encanto Park in the middle of the city, and out of habit, Jim continued to be mindful of what the plants and animals were telling him. As fall came on that year, he noticed that the birds were migrating south earlier than usual, squirrels were storing extra nuts and their tails were unusually full, acorns were especially large, the bark on the cottonwoods was thicker, and so were the hulls on the pecan nuts.

“Going to be a hard winter,” he said. The signs were all there. He hoped other people were reading them, too.

And that winter was hard. It came on early, and in January it snowed in Phoenix for the first time in most folks’ memory. Back on the ranch, a blizzard like that would have been a call to action, forcing us to run around collecting firewood, bringing in the horses, and carting hay to the range. Jim would build a windbreak to protect the cattle. He’d empty all the wagons out of the garage and make a wall of them between the house and the barn, covering it with tarps, coats, and blankets, then buttressing it with old trunks and anvils and dirt and rocks and whatever he could find. He’d round up as many cattle as could fit into the barn, and when the storm reached us, he was outside on horseback, keeping the cattle moving, keeping their blood circulating. Every couple of hours, he’d rotate a new group into the barn and behind the wall of wagons so they could get a break from the wind and snow.

Living in the city, all we did was turn up the radiator and listen to the hiss and clank of the pipes.

The snow kept falling, and the next day the governor went on the radio, declaring a state of emergency. School was canceled and most businesses were closed. The National Guard was called out to rescue people stranded in remote parts of the state. Jim said he hoped that Boots and Gaiters knew what they were doing. He hoped all the cattle had been moved off the plateau down to the winter range and the hands had broken the ice on the ponds. “The first thing you got to do is break the ice,” he said. “The cattle’ll die of thirst before they starve.”

On the third day of the storm, we got a knock on the door. It was a man from the Arizona Department of Agriculture. Cattle were dying across the state, he said. Ranchers needed help, and the name that kept coming up was Jim Smith. It had taken them a while to track him down, the man said, but he was needed.

Jim threw some heavy clothes into his old army duffel bag, grabbed his hat, and was out the door in less than five minutes.

The first thing Jim did was organize drops of hay. He had a big cargo plane filled with round bales, and they took off into the storm. When they reached the range, the crew rolled the bales out the back of the cargo bay and watched as the hay tumbled through the snow and bounced on the ground.

Since the roads were impassable, Jim asked the government for a small plane and a pilot, and they flew across the state, touching down at isolated ranch houses. Jim explained to the ranchers, most of whom had never seen a blizzard the likes of this one, what to do. You got to break the ice on the ponds, he told them, and cut down the fence wire. Let the cattle roam. They need to move to keep their blood circulating, and they’ll instinctively move south, but if they hit a wire fence, they’ll all press up against it and die. Let them get into big herds and huddle for warmth. You can sort them all out by the brands later.

At one ranch up in the hills, there was no place to land. Jim had never put on a parachute before, much less jumped, but he strapped one on. “Count ten, pull the cord, and roll into the fall,” the pilot said, and Jim heaved himself out of the plane.

The storm had stopped, but the temperatures were still frigid when Jim reached the Showtime Ranch. Even before he landed, he could see from the air that no one had broken the ice on Big Jim. Carcasses of frozen cattle lay clustered along the pond’s edge. When he got to the ranch house, he found Boots and the new hands sitting around Gaiter’s fancy propane stove, their feet up, drinking coffee.

Any muttonhead can run a ranch during good times. You only find out who the real ranchers are when calamity strikes. Those dunces sitting around that stove may not have been able to read tree bark, but at the very least, they should have been listening to the weather reports, and when they heard that a devil of a storm was coming down from Canada, they would have had twenty-four hours to prepare. I would have lit into that fool Boots and those other chumps, but that was not Jim’s way. He did, however, get their sorry butts out and mounted up to cut wire, break ice, and start the cattle moving.

There were thousands of dead cattle lying rock-hard in the snow, piled along the southern fences. Some of the cattle that had survived were so weak they couldn’t walk, so Jim had the men bring hay and water and hand-feed them. He massaged their legs, which were cut from where they’d tried to break the ice themselves, and helped them stand again. If he could get them moving, he knew, they’d live.

Jim was gone two weeks. That whole time I didn’t know where he was or how he was doing, and it was the longest two weeks of my life. When he finally came back, he’d lost twenty pounds. His face and hands were raw. He hadn’t slept for days, and there were dark circles under his eyes. But he was happy. He hadn’t felt this useful since leaving the ranch. He’d been out doing what he was meant to do. He was Big Jim again.

A few days after Jim returned, he got a call from Gaiters. When Jim had been back in Yavapai County during the blizzard, people had told him that Gaiters had been going around referring to him as a “relic” and a “washed-up old geezer.” But that was before the storm. Now Gaiters was so impressed with the way Jim had salvaged what remained of the Showtime’s herd that he offered Jim his old job as ranch manager. He’d even build us our own knotty pine caretaker’s cabin. “You’re the real thing,” Gaiters said.

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 I had 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.

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.”