Half Broke Horses

IX THE FLYBOY

Rex and Rosemary after their wedding

HORSE MESA WAS A flyspeck of a place, a glorified camp, really, built for the men who worked at Horse Mesa Dam, which held back the waters of the Salt River, formed Lake Apache, and generated electrical power for Phoenix. Only thirteen families lived in Horse Mesa, but those families had kids, and the kids needed a teacher, and that summer I got the job.

We traded in the fancy but unreliable California Kaiser for a good old made-in-Detroit Ford and, one day in July, packed our suitcases in the trunk and headed east, first to Apache Junction, then up to Tortilla Flats, where the asphalt ended. From there, we followed the Apache Trail, a winding dirt road, up into the Superstition Mountains, which for my money were even sweeter on the eyes than the Grand Canyon. We drove by massive cliffs of red and gold sandstone, their layers of collapsed sediment pushed up at an angle like a bunch of books leaning against one another on a shelf. The mountains were studded with saguaros, stag horns, and prickly pears, which were ugly as hell, but you had to admire their ability to thrive in even the driest, stoniest, most inhospitable cliffside cranny-and darned if they didn’t manage to produce some tasty fruit.

After several miles on the Apache Trail, we came to an even narrower dirt road leading off to the north. We followed it over a ridge and down through a series of sharp, steep switchbacks, passing beneath overhangs and around otherworldly rock formations. Jim was at the wheel, and he made the Ford crawl along, hugging the mountainside, as there was no guardrail and the ground fell away so abruptly on the other side that with one miscalculation, we would plunge into the abyss. The road was called Agnes Weeps, after the town’s first schoolteacher, who had burst into tears when she saw how plunging and twisting the road was and realized how remote the town must be. But from the first moment I laid eyes on it, I loved that road. I thought of it as a winding staircase taking me out of the traffic jams, news bulletins, bureaucrats, air-raid sirens, and locked doors of city life. Jim said we should rename the road Lily Sings.

We followed Agnes Weeps all the way to the bottom of the canyon, then came around a bend and saw a deep blue lake with red sandstone cliff walls rising on all sides around it. Across a short bridge, perched up on one of the cliffs and looking down on that lake, was Horse Mesa. It was just a cluster of stucco houses, and it was remote-Agnes had been right about that. A truck brought in groceries twice a week from the commissary at Roosevelt Dam. There was only one telephone, in the community center. If you wanted to make a phone call, you had to put in a request through the operator at the Tempe substation, who gave you an appointment and, at the designated time, routed the call through Mormon Flats, and everyone at the community center got to hear your conversation.

But from the get-go, we were all darned happy to be at Horse Mesa. Since it was summer, the kids spent the entire day at the lake, diving off the cliffs into the cool water. The river and the lake attracted all sorts of animals, and we saw bighorn sheep, coatimundi cats, Gila monsters, Green Mountain rattlesnakes, and chuckwallas.

Jim got a job with the Bureau of Land Reclamation driving a gravel truck-he filled potholes and rebuilt eroded washes along the entire length of the Apache Trail-and the work made him content. He was riding something powerful, on his own, out in the open.

And I was back where I belonged, in a one-room schoolhouse, with no fish-faced bureaucrats second-guessing me, teaching my students what I thought they needed to know.

THE SCHOOL AT HORSE Mesa went only through the eighth grade, so that fall, for the third time, we had to send the kids off to boarding school. We enrolled Rosemary at St. Joseph’s, a small, fancy school in Tucson. I knew that a lot of the other girls came from rich families, so before Rosemary left, I gave her a present.

“Pearls!” she exclaimed when she opened the box. “They must have cost a fortune.”

“I got them with S &H green stamps,” I said. “And they’re not real, they’re fake.” I told her for the first time about my crumb-bum first husband and his other family. “The louse gave me a fake ring,” I said. “But for years I thought it was real and acted like it was, and so did everyone else.” I fastened the pearls around her neck. “The point being,” I said, “if you hold your head up high, no one will ever know.”

With the kids away at school, our life in Horse Mesa settled into a tranquil routine. Part of it was the setting itself. Living there was like living in a natural cathedral. Waking up every morning, you walked outside and looked down at the blue lake, then up at the sandstone cliffs-those awe-inspiring layers of red and yellow rock shaped over the millennia, with dozens of black-streaked crevices that temporarily became waterfalls after rainstorms. During one downpour I counted twenty-seven waterfalls.

Just as important, everyone in Horse Mesa got along. We had to. Since we all worked together and depended on one another, arguments were a luxury none of us could afford. No one complained or gossiped. We only got intermittent radio signals, so in the evening, while the children played, the grown-ups strolled about visiting one another. None of us had much money, so we didn’t talk about the things people with money talked about. Instead, we talked about what mattered to us-the weather, the level of the lake, the big-mouth bass someone had caught under the bridge, the mountain-lion scat someone else had seen along Fish Creek. It may have seemed to city folk that we had precious little to do, but none of us felt that way, and the quiet routine contributed to the tranquility of our little cliffside camp.

Peaceful as our life had become, I still had my moments of high dudgeon. I’d always been interested in politics, but I discovered I actually had a talent for it after the Department of Education tried to close down a couple of schools in our area and I hooked up with the United Federation of Teachers to stop it. I saw how easy it was to get things done if you were willing to use your elbows and your lungs, and how easily cowed some politicians got if you grabbed them by the tie or jabbed them in the chest with your finger.

I started visiting Phoenix regularly, making sure those double-talking politicians followed through on their campaign promises, and on one occasion I burst into the governor’s office, Rosemary in tow, to berate him for not funding the education bill. When he threatened to have me arrested, I said if he did, I-a taxpayer, teacher, and loving mother of two-would hold a press conference and remind everyone what a lying son of a bitch he was.

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’S third 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 OF the 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.

He also had all sorts of grand plans and was always talking about new energy sources-solar energy, thermal energy, wind energy. Jim thought Rex was all talk. “If we could harness the hot air coming out of that gasbag,” he said, “we could power the whole of Phoenix.”

I didn’t actively discourage Rosemary from getting serious, since there was no more surefire way to make that willful young woman want to do something, but I did try to point out that he might not make the ideal mate for the long haul.

“He’s not exactly a rock,” I said.

“I don’t want to marry a rock,” she said.

What she liked about Rex, Rosemary told me, was that when he was around, things always happened. He loved to start conversations with absolute strangers. He loved to act on whims. He loved pranks and surprises. Once he sneaked one of Rosemary’s smaller paintings into an art museum in Phoenix, hung it in an empty spot, then invited Rosemary to come to the museum with him. She’d never been so startled-or tickled-than when Rex led her over to it and, feigning surprise, said, “Well, lookie here. Best painting in the whole damned building.”

Some of the things that happened around Rex were strange, Rosemary explained, some were exciting, some were funny, some were scary, but he made everything into an adventure. Because of his own wild streak, he had a way of recognizing it in others, as if they were Masons communicating by secret hand signals. You’d go to a circus and meet the clowns, the bareback rider, and the sword swallower, wind up after the show tossing back shots in a bar with all of them, the sword swallower showing you how to stick a knife down your throat, the bareback rider describing how the Nazis had sent her to a concentration camp because she was a gypsy, then one of the clowns- the sad-eyed one-would confess that his old sweetheart was living nearby and he’d never loved anyone since, so you’d all pile into the car and drive over to the sweetheart’s house and you’d find yourself at four in the morning standing under this strange woman’s window serenading her with “Red River Valley” in the hope of rekindling her love for the sad-eyed clown.

Early one Saturday morning that fall, when Rosemary was home from college, Rex showed up at Horse Mesa. He was wearing cowboy boots and a ten-gallon hat. Rosemary, Jim, and I were finishing our Cream of Wheat at the kitchen table. I asked Rex if he wanted me to fix him a bowl.

“No, thank you, ma’am. I got a big day planned and I don’t want to weigh myself down.”

“And what are your plans?” I asked.

“Well, you’re all true horse people,” he said. “And I figure that since I’m going to marry this here daughter of yours, I gotta show you all that even though I’ve never been astride a horse, I got what it takes to ride one. So I’m off to find myself a horse today, and if you all want to come along and give this hillbilly a few pointers, I’d be most obliged.”

Jim and I looked at each other. This fellow just was not going to go away. Meanwhile, Rosemary was saying that the Crebbses, who lived on a ranch at the foot of the mountains and sent their two kids to my school, had some quarter horses that they’d be happy to let us ride. So when we finished our Cream of Wheat, we all dug out our boots and set off in the Ford for the Crebbs place.

Ray Crebbs told us the horses were in the corral and the tack was in the barn and we were free to saddle up, but the horses hadn’t been ridden for a couple of months and might be a bit fresh. We picked out four, but all of them were herd-bound and didn’t want to come to us, so Jim had to lasso those buggers before we could get them into the barn.

Rosemary always had to have the most spirited horse in the herd, and she chose a hot little bay. I had my eye on a quiet gelding for Rex, but he said there was no way in hell he was riding a horse whose balls had been cut off, so I gave him the mare I’d picked out for myself, even though she was acting a tad scutchy and head-shy.

After we saddled up, we headed out to the corral. Rosemary and Jim started trotting around to limber up their horses, and I sat on mine in the middle to give Rex some tips. The poor fellow was being pretty game about it, but you could tell right off he was not a natural horseman. He was trying too hard. He was tensed up and leaning forward, which put all his weight in his shoulders. I told him to relax, sink down into the saddle, and take his hands off the horn, since it wasn’t going to save him.

Instead of relaxing, Rex kept up a steady patter about what a cinch this riding business was, what a blast he was having, and how he wanted to put this old nag through her paces. “How do I get her out of second gear?” he asked.

“First you got to learn to keep your fanny in the saddle,” I said.

After a while I let Rex trot, but he kept popping out of his seat and jerking leather. Still, he insisted that he wasn’t getting off until he’d galloped because, he said, until you’d galloped on a horse, you couldn’t say you’d really ridden one.

“You want to make her gallop, just kick her,” Rosemary called.

And that was what Rex did, whacking the mare in the ribs. The horse started but didn’t break into a gallop, probably figuring that it wasn’t a good idea with this unbalanced rider. Rex was nonetheless surprised, and he started shouting, “Whoa! Whoa!” and sawing at the reins. All that noise and commotion spooked the poor mare, and that was when she took off.

As the horse tore around the corral in a big circle, I yelled at Rex to sit back and grab mane, but he was so deep in the hole of his panic that he didn’t hear a thing. He kept shouting at the horse and jerking the reins, but the horse just leaned against the bit and galloped on.

Jim and Rosemary scooted into the center of the corral to get out of her way. The mare had made a few circuits without slowing down, and I could tell that Rex was starting to come unglued. I could also tell by looking at the mare’s eyes that she was frightened, not angry, and that meant she wanted to stop but needed permission.

I jumped off my horse and walked into the path of the galloping mare. I was prepared to dive to the side if she didn’t stop, but as she got close, I slowly raised my arms, looked her in the eye, and in a quiet voice said, “Whoa.” And right in front of me, she stopped.

In fact, she stopped so suddenly that Rex pitched forward, clung to her neck for a moment, then fell to the ground.

Rosemary slid off her horse and ran over. “Are you okay?” she asked him.

“He’s fine,” I said. “He just had the lace knocked off his panties.”

Rex got to his feet and dusted off his jeans. I could tell he was shaken up, but he took a deep breath and ran his fingers through his hair. Then a big grin spread across his face. “I found the gas,” he said. “Now all’s I need to do is find the brake.”

Rex insisted on getting back on, which I was glad he did, and we had ourselves a nice little ride around the Crebbs’ spread. It was late afternoon by the time we got back to Horse Mesa. I heated up some beans and, after we’d eaten, suggested we play a few hands of poker.

“You won’t ever hear me say no to that,” Rex said. “I got a bottle of hooch in the car. How’s about I get it and we can have ourselves a pop or two.”

Rex got the bottle, Jim set out glasses-including one for himself, just to be polite-and we all took a seat at the kitchen table. Rex poured everyone two fingers of whiskey. I dealt. There was no better way to read a man’s character than to watch him play poker. Some played with the aim of holding on to what they had, others played to make a killing. For some it was gambling pure and simple, for others it was a game of skill involving small calculated risks. For some it was about numbers, for others it was about psychology.

Rosemary, for example, was a terrible poker player. It didn’t matter how many times I explained the rules, she was always asking questions that revealed her hand. No sooner had I dealt the cards than she looked at hers and asked, “Does a straight beat a flush?”

“You’ll never win if you give yourself away like that,” I said.

“Winning’s not all it’s cracked up to be,” Rosemary said. “If you win all the time, no one wants to play with you.”

I let that one pass.

As we got deeper into the game, I could tell Rex was a good player. To him, the game was not about reading your cards, it was about reading your opponents, and at first he seemed to know exactly when to fold and when to raise the stakes.

But he’d kept the bottle of hooch at his elbow. Jim and Rosemary hadn’t touched their whiskeys, and I’d taken only a few sips of mine. Rex kept refilling his glass, and as the evening wore on, he started playing too grandly, overbluffing, overbetting, losing pots he never should have tried to win, and getting mad at his cards when they let him down.

After a while he stopped pouring himself shots and started swigging straight from the bottle. That was when I knew I could take him to the cleaners. I waited until I had a solid hand-a full house, eights over fours-and then I let him think he was bidding me up, but I never called him, and soon he was in deeper than he realized.

I laid my cards on the table. Rex studied them, his expression turning sour, then threw his own cards facedown at the pot. After a few seconds, he chuckled. “Well, Lily,” he said, “that gelding didn’t have any balls, but you sure got yourself a pair.”

Rosemary giggled. I had the feeling she liked the way her boyfriend had just gotten cheeky with her mother. Truth be told, he was the first fellow she’d brought home who hadn’t been even a little bit scared of me.

Jim looked at Rex with raised eyebrows. “Watch yourself, flyboy,” he said.

“No offense, pardner,” Rex said. “I was paying the lady a compliment.”

Jim shrugged. “She’s taken many a ranch hand’s paycheck that very same way,” he added.

Rex reached for his bottle to take another swig, but it was empty. “Guess we polished that off,” he said.

“You polished it off,” I said.

“Maybe we’ve played enough,” Rosemary said.

Rex nodded. He set the bottle on the table, stood up, then lurched to one side.

“You’re drunk,” I said.

“Just got a little buzz,” Rex said. “But I do believe I’ll be taking my leave.”

“You can’t drive that road in the condition you’re in.”

“I’m fine,” Rex said. “I drive like this all the time.”

“Maybe Mom’s right,” Rosemary said.

“You can sleep in the garage,” Jim said.

“I said I’m fine,” Rex told him, and started fishing in his pocket for his keys.

“Listen, you boneheaded boozer,” I said, “you’re too drunk to drive, and I’m not allowing it.”

Rex leaned both his fists on the table. “Listen, lady, Rex Walls don’t take orders from anyone, certainly not some old leather-faced, hard-assed biddy. And with that, I will bid you good night.”

We all sat there in silence as Rex staggered out, slamming the screen door. We heard him turn the engine on, gun it, and then, with a screech of tires, he drove off into the darkness, down the mountainside on Agnes Weeps.

THE NEXT DAY I felt I needed to have a serious talk with my daughter about her boyfriend.

“That scalawag might be fun,” I said, “but he’s also a danger to himself and others.”

“Nobody’s perfect,” she said. “We’re all just one step up from the beasts and one step down from the angels.”

“True enough,” I said, “but not everyone lines up exactly in the middle. Rex is unstable. You’ll never have any security with him.”

“I don’t really care about security,” she said. “And anyway, I don’t believe I’ll ever really have it with anyone. We could all be killed by an atom bomb tomorrow.”

“So you’re telling me the future’s not important? That you’re going to live your life like there’s no tomorrow?”

“Most people spend so much time worrying about the future that they don’t enjoy the present.”

“And people who don’t plan for the future get ambushed by it. Hope for the best but plan for the worst, my dad always used to say.”

“You can’t prepare for everything that life’s going to throw at you,” she said. “And you can’t avoid danger. It’s there. The world is a dangerous place, and if you sit around wringing your hands about it, you’ll miss out on all the adventure.”

I felt there was a lot more I could say about the subject of danger. I could have given her an entire lecture on it, talking about my dad getting his head staved in by a horse when he was three, about my Chicago friend Minnie getting killed when her hair got caught in machinery, about my sister, Helen, taking her own life after accidentally getting pregnant. Life came with as much adventure and danger as any one body needed. You didn’t have to go chasing after them. But the fact of the matter was, Rosemary hadn’t really listened to what I had to say ever since that time we visited the Havasupai and I gave her the whipping for swimming with Fidel Hanna.

“I don’t know what I did wrong raising you,” I said. “Maybe I tried too hard. But I still say you need an anchor.”

Later that day there was a knock on the door. When I answered it, Rex Walls was standing outside. He had a big bouquet of white lilies in one hand, and he held it out to me.

“Lilies for Lily, by way of apology,” he said. “Though they’re not as lovely as their namesake.”

“That’s not exactly the tune you were whistling last night.”

“What I said was inexcusable, and I’m the first to admit it,” he said. “But I was hoping you’d cut a fellow some slack.” He’d had a tough day, he went on, falling off a runaway horse in front of the woman he loved, then getting beat by her mother in poker, all of which led him to take a few nips too many. “But you started it, you know, calling me a bone-head.” He paused. “And I do know how to drive drunk.”

I shook my head and looked at the lilies. “I could cut you all the slack in the world, but I still think my daughter needs an anchor.”

“The problem with being attached to an anchor,” he said, “is it’s damned hard to fly.”

What a scoundrel, I thought. Always having to have the last word. But the lilies were pretty. “I’ll go put these in water.”

“You like to fly,” Rex added. “If it would get me back into your good graces, I’d be honored to take you up for a spin.”

I HADN’T BEEN UP in a plane for years, and though I was still steamed at that hooligan, the idea thrilled me, so of course I agreed. When Rex arrived to pick me up the following Sunday, I was standing outside in my aviator’s jumpsuit, carrying my leather helmet.

Rex leaned out the window of the two-toned Ford sedan he was always borrowing from a friend. “Amelia Earhart!” he called. “You’re alive after all!”

Rosemary wanted to come along, but Rex told her the plane was only a two-seater. “This trip’s just me and Amelia,” he said.

Rex drove like a demon, the way I liked to, and in no time at all, we had hurtled down Agnes Weeps, climbed out of the canyon, and were heading along the Apache Trail.

I asked Rex a little bit about his background.

“Ma’am,” he said, “if you’re looking for pedigree, you’re going to find more in the local dog pound.” He’d grown up in a coal town, he said. His mother had been an orphan, his father had worked as a clerk for the railroad. His uncle made moonshine, and as a teenager, Rex sometimes ran the hooch into town.

“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 AND Rosemary 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.

“People are like animals,” Jim went on. “Some are happiest penned in, some need to roam free. You got to recognize what’s in her nature and accept it.”

“So this is a lesson for me, then?”

Jim shrugged. “Our daughter’s found something she likes, this painting, and someone she wants to be with, this Rex fellow, so she’s way ahead of a lot of folks.”

“I guess I should try to let it go.”

“You’ll be happier if you do,” Jim said.

I told Rex and Rosemary I’d pay for everything if they’d get married in a Catholic church, and we’d do it in style. I was hoping that a big traditional wedding would get them off on the right foot and might even lead to a traditional marriage.

We rented a banquet hall at the Sands Hotel, which had just been built in downtown Phoenix. I got a good deal, since the hotel was new and trying to drum up business. I helped Rosemary pick out a wedding dress, and I got a good deal on that, too, because another bride-to-be had returned it when her wedding had fallen through. But it fit Rosemary perfectly.

I invited practically everyone I knew: ranchers and ranch hands, teachers and former students, administrators, members of the Arizona Democratic Party, people from my past like Grady Gammage, who got me that first teaching job in Red Lake, and Rooster, who wrote back to his old writing teacher that he’d be bringing the Apache girl he’d married. I was going to wear my Gone with the Wind gown, but Jim put the kibosh on that idea. He said he didn’t want me upstaging the bride.

“What are you going to do for a honeymoon?” I asked Rosemary as the day approached.

“We’re not going to plan one,” she said. “It’s Rex’s idea. We’re just going to get into the car after the wedding and go where the road takes us.”

“Well, honey, you’re in for a ride.”

Rosemary did look beautiful at her wedding. Her dress reached to the floor, with layers of lace over white silk, a long lace veil, and matching lace gloves that came up to her elbows. In her white high heels, she was almost as tall as Rex, who looked rakish as hell in his white dinner jacket and black bow tie.

Rex and his buddies were nipping from their pints all day, and things got a little wild at the reception. Rex gave a big speech, calling me “Amelia Earhart” and Jim “The Parachutin’ Cowboy” and Rosemary “My Wild Rose.” When the music started, he twirled Rosemary around the room, dipping and spinning her. She was having the time of her life, flouncing her lace dress and kicking up her white high heels like she was a cancan girl. Then Rex led everyone in a conga line and we all snaked around the room, swaying our hips and kicking out.

At the end, when the newlywed couple came out of the hotel, Rex’s borrowed Ford was waiting for them at the curb. It was a late afternoon in May, and that golden Arizona light filled the street. We all crowded onto the steps to wave good-bye. When they reached the sidewalk, Rex grabbed Rosemary by the waist, leaned her backward, and planted a long, deep smooch on her mouth. They almost fell over, and that set them laughing so much it brought tears to their eyes. As Rosemary climbed into the car, Rex patted her behind like he owned it, then got in beside her. They were both still laughing as Rex gunned the motor the way he always did.

Jim put his arm around me and we watched them take off up the street, heading out into open country like a couple of half-broke horses.