Half broke horses: a true-life novel (10 page)

ROOSTER STARTED DROPPING BY
on Saturday afternoons. We’d work on his reading and writing, then head out for a night of fivecard stud. I was still racing Red Devil and winning more often than not. I had spent some of my winnings to buy a crimson-colored shirt of genuine silk, and I wore it whenever I raced. That way even shortsighted spectators could recognize me. I just loved that brilliant, shiny red shirt. Anyone could tell at a moment’s glance that it was mail-order, not homemade or home-dyed, and that shirt became my trademark.

One day in early spring, Rooster and I rode down to a race on a ranch south of Red Lake. It was a bigger meet than usual, with five heats, a final, and a fifteen-dollar purse, and it was held on an actual track, with an inside rail where the spectators had gathered.

Red Devil’s legs were on the short side, but that little mustang had fire, and when he got going, he moved so quickly that his hoofbeats sounded like one long drumroll. We took the lead early in the second heat. We were still ahead going into the first turn when a car near the rail backfired with a loud bang. Red bucked and veered sharply to the right, I went left, and before I knew what was happening, I was rolling on the track.

I clamped my hands over my head and lay still, eating dirt, as the other horses thundered by. I’d had the wind knocked out of me, but otherwise, I was fine, and when the sound of the hoofbeats faded, I got up and smacked the dirt off my behind.

Rooster had caught Red and was jogging back toward me with the horse. I climbed into the saddle. I had no chance of catching up with the others, but Red needed to learn that my taking an involuntary dismount didn’t mean he got out of doing his job.

When I crossed the finish line, the judge stood up and doffed his Stetson. I raced in a later heat, but Red was off his stride, and we finished toward the back. I had felt that fifteen-dollar purse was within my reach, and afterward, as Rooster watered the horse, I was still cursing about that backfiring car when the judge came over. He was a big man with a deliberate way of moving, a weathered face, and steady pale blue eyes.

“That was quite a tumble you took,” he said. His voice was deep, like he was speaking from inside a bass fiddle.

“No need to be reminding me, mister.”

“Everyone takes spills, ma’am. But I was mightily impressed with how, instead of calling it a day, you got right back on and finished the race.”

I started railing about the backfiring jalopy, but Rooster cut me off. “This here is Jim Smith,” he said. “Some folks call him Big Jim. He owns the new garage in town.”

“Don’t much like automobiles, do you?” Jim asked me.

“Just don’t like them spooking my horse. Truth is, I always wanted to learn to drive.”

“Maybe I can teach you.”

I WAS N’T ABOUT TO
pass up an opportunity like that, so Jim Smith taught the teacher how to drive. He had a Model T Ford with a brass radiator, brass headlights, and a brass horn. The car, which Jim called “the Flivver,” was an ordeal—and sometimes an outright menace—to start. On really cold days you couldn’t get it going at all, and even on warm days it helped to have two people, because otherwise you had to crank it by hand, then jump into the front seat to pull out the choke. Sometimes the car lurched forward while you were cranking it, and other times the engine kicked back, causing the crank to suddenly reverse. When that happened, people had been known to break their wrists.

But once you got the Flivver started up, driving it was a hoot. I discovered that I loved cars even more than I loved horses. Cars didn’t need to be fed if they weren’t working, and they didn’t leave big piles of manure all over the place. Cars were faster than horses, and they didn’t run off or kick down fences. They also didn’t buck, bite, or rear, and they didn’t need to be broke and trained, or caught and saddled up every time you needed to go somewhere. They didn’t have a mind of their own. Cars obeyed you.

I practiced driving with Jim out on the range, where you didn’t have to worry about hitting anything but a juniper tree, and I got the hang of it quickly. In no time at all, I was tootling around the streets of Red Lake at a breakneck twenty-five miles an hour, operating the pedals with my feet and the levers with my hands while honking at the chickens in my way, swerving to avoid hitting the poor foot-bound sodbusters, and startling horses with the occasional backfire.

But they had to get used to it. The automobile was here to stay.

My driving lessons with Jim Smith began to include trips to the Grand Canyon to deliver gas to a filling station near there, then picnics. After I’d learned to drive, we continued the picnics and also took horseback rides out to places like the ice cave near Red Lake, a hole so deep that if you climbed way down into it, you could find ice in the middle of the summer. We used that ice to make cold lemonade to go with our biscuits and jerky.

After a while it became clear that, without saying anything directly, Jim was courting me. He’d been married once before, but his wife—a pretty blond thing—had died in the influenza epidemic ten years earlier. I still wasn’t interested in marriage, but there was a lot about Jim Smith that I found to admire. For one thing, unlike my previous crumb-bum husband, he didn’t lay down a smooth line of patter. He spoke when he had something to say, and if he didn’t, he felt no need to fill the void with hot air.

Jim Smith was a Jack Mormon. He’d been born into the faith but didn’t practice it. His father was Lot Smith, a soldier, pioneer, and ranger who had been one of Brigham Young’s chief lieutenants when the Mormons went to war with the U.S. government. At one point the federals put a thousand-dollar price on his head, but when they came to arrest him, Lot Smith held off the soldiers at gunpoint. He also helped found the Mormon settlement in Tuba City and was killed there by a Navajo— or by a rival Mormon, depending on which story you believed.

Lot Smith had eight wives and fifty-two children, and those kids learned to fend for themselves. When Jim turned eleven, his father gave him a rifle, some bullets, and a packet of salt and said, “Here’s your food for a week.” Jim became an excellent marksman and horseman and a wrangler at age fourteen. He worked in Canada for a while but fell afoul of the Mounties for using his pistols a little too freely. He returned to Arizona and became a lumberjack and homesteader. After his wife died, he joined the cavalry and, during the Great War, served in Siberia, where American soldiers were protecting the Trans-Siberian Railway in the midst of the fighting between the White Russians and the Red Russians. While he was in Siberia, his homestead was seized for failure to pay taxes, so after being mustered out of the cavalry, he become a prospector before finally opening his garage in Red Lake. The man was no slouch.

Jim Smith was going on fifty, which made him twenty years older than me, and he had some wear and tear on him, including a star-shaped bullet scar on his right shoulder from an incident he felt wasn’t worth discussing. Plus, he was pretty much bald, and all the hair was missing from the left side of his body on account of the time that he was dragged by a horse for two miles. But Jim Smith was hardly worn out. He could spend twelve hours in the saddle, lift a car axle off the ground, and cut, split, and stack enough firewood to keep his stove going all winter.

Jim could see things with those pale blue eyes that other people couldn’t see—the quail in the thick brush, the horse and rider on the horizon, the eagle’s nest in the side of the cliff. It was what made him a crack shot. He also noticed everything—the small lump below a horse’s knee that meant it had a bowed tendon, the hand calluses that only farriers had. He could spot liars, cheaters, and bluffers from the get-go. But while nothing escaped him, he never let on that he knew what he knew.

And nothing ever rattled Jim Smith. He was always calm, never lost his temper, and never flailed about trying to figure out his own mind. He always knew what he thought and how he felt. He was dependable and established. He was solid. He had his own business, and it was a steady and respectable one. He fixed cars that needed fixing. He wasn’t trying to sell vacuum cleaners to gullible housewives by throwing dirt on their floors.

Even so, I still wasn’t prepared to marry again, but Jim hadn’t yet broached the subject of marriage, so we were enjoying ourselves having picnics, taking horseback rides, and bombing around Coconino County in the Flivver when I got the letter from Helen.

IT WAS POSTMARKED HOLLYWOOD.

Helen had been writing me regularly since she moved to California, and her letters always seemed unnaturally cheerful: She was continually on the verge of breaking into the movies, heading off to auditions and narrowly missing out on being cast, taking tap-dance lessons, and sighting stars as they drove around town in their convertibles.

Helen was also always meeting Mr. Wonderful, the man with the connections and wherewithal who treated her like a princess, who was going to open doors for her in this crazy movie business, and whom she might even marry. But after several letters, she’d stop mentioning that particular Mr. Wonderful, and then an even more terrific Mr. Wonderful would come along, so I suspected that, in fact, she was getting involved with a series of cads who used her and then, when they were tired of her, dumped her.

I worried that Helen was in danger of becoming a floozy, and I wrote her letters warning her not to count on men to take care of her and to come up with a fallback plan in case, as seemed pretty obvious by now, the movie career didn’t pan out. But she wrote back scolding me for being negative, explaining that this was the way all girls made it in Hollywood. I hoped she was right, since I knew little about the ways of the movie world and hadn’t had much luck with men myself.

In this new letter, Helen confessed that she was pregnant by the latest Mr. Wonderful, who had wanted her to get a back-alley abortion. When she told him she was scared of those coat-hanger operations—she’d heard of women dying from them—he claimed the child wasn’t his and cut her out of his life.

Helen didn’t know what to do. She was a couple of months along. She knew she’d be fired from the millinery shop once she started showing. Auditions would also be out of the question. She was too ashamed to go back to Mom and Dad at the ranch. She was wondering if maybe she should go ahead and get the abortion after all. The whole mess, she wrote, made her want to throw herself out a window.

It was immediately clear to me what Helen needed to do. I wrote her back, telling her not to get an abortion—women did die from them. It was better for her to go ahead and have the child, then decide whether she wanted to keep it or give it up for adoption. She could come to Red Lake, I wrote, and live with me in the teacherage until she figured out what to do.

Helen arrived in Flagstaff a week later, and Jim let me borrow the Flivver to drive over and meet her. As she stepped down from the train carrying a raccoon coat that Mr. Wonderful had probably given her, I had to bite my lip. Her slim shoulders seemed thinner than ever, but her face was puffy, and her eyes were red from crying. She’d also peroxided her hair to that shiny white color that a lot of the starlets were favoring. When I gave her a hug, I was startled by how fragile she felt, as if she had a collapsible little bird’s body. As soon as we got into the Flivver, she lit a cigarette, and I noticed her hands were shaking.

On the way back to Red Lake, I did most of the talking. I’d spent the last week thinking about Helen’s predicament, and as we drove through the range, I laid out what I thought were her options. I could write Mom and Dad, explaining the situation and softening them up, and I was sure they’d forgive her and welcome her home. I’d gotten the name of an orphanage in Phoenix if she wanted to go that route. There were also a lot of men in Coconino County in search of a wife, and she might be able to find someone who’d be willing to marry her even though she was in a family way. Two possibilities that had occurred to me were Rooster and Jim Smith, but I didn’t get into specifics.

Helen, however, seemed distracted, almost in a daze. Smoking cigarette after cigarette, she spoke in fragmented sentences, and instead of focusing on practicalities, her mind drifted all over the place. She kept returning to totally ludicrous plans and pointless concerns, wondering if she could get Mr. Wonderful back by putting the child into an orphanage and worrying if childbirth would ruin her figure for bathing-suit scenes in movies.

“Helen, it’s time to get realistic,” I said.

“I am being realistic,” she said. “A girl without a figure is never going to make it.”

I decided this was not the moment to push the point. When someone’s wounded, the first order of business is to stop the bleeding. You can figure out later how best to help them heal.

MY BED WAS SMALL,
but I scooted over so Helen and I could sleep side by side, just as we had done when we were kids. It was October, and the desert nights were turning cold, so we snuggled together, and sometimes late at night, Helen would start whimpering, which I took as a good sign because it meant that at least once in a while she seemed to understand how grim the situation was. When that happened, I held her close and reassured her that we’d get through this, just the way we’d survived that flash flood in Texas when we were kids.

“All we need to do,” I’d say, “is find us that cottonwood tree to climb up in, and we’ll make it.”

During the day, while I was teaching, Helen kept to herself in that little room. She never made any noise and spent a lot of time sleeping. I’d hoped that once she’d gotten some rest, her mind would clear, and she’d be able to start thinking about her future in a constructive fashion. But she continued to be vague and listless, talking about Hollywood in a dreamy way that, quite frankly, irritated me.

I decided Helen needed fresh air and sunshine. We went for a stroll through town every afternoon, and I introduced her to people as my sister from Los Angeles who’d come out to the desert to cure the vapors. The next time I had a race scheduled, Jim Smith brought Helen along in the Flivver. He was courteous and considerate, but as soon as I saw them together, I could tell they were not meant for each other.