The Glass Castle
A Memoir
Jeannette Walls
SCRIBNER
New York London Toronto Sydney
Acknowledgments
I'd like to thank my brother, Brian, for standing by me when we were growing up and while I wrote this.
I'm also grateful to my mother for believing in art and truth and for supporting the idea of the book; to
my brilliant and talented older sister, Lori, for coming around to it; and to my younger sister, Maureen,
whom I will always love. And to my father, Rex S. Walls, for dreaming all those big dreams.
Very special thanks also to my agent, Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, for her compassion, wit, tenacity, and
enthusiastic support; to my editor, Nan Graham, for her keen sense of how much is enough and for
caring so deeply; and to Alexis Gargagliano for her thoughtful and sensitive readings.
My gratitude for their early and constant support goes to Jay and Betsy Taylor, Laurie Peck, Cynthia
and David Young, Amy and Jim Scully, Ashley Pearson, Dan Mathews, Susan Watson, and Jessica
Taylor and Alex Guerrios.
I can never adequately thank my husband, John Taylor, who persuaded me it was time to tell my story
and then pulled it out of me.
Dark is a way and light is a place,
Heaven that never was
Nor will be ever is always true
—Dylan Thomas,
"Poem on His Birthday"
I
A WOMAN ON THE STREET
I WAS SITTING IN a taxi, wondering if I had overdressed for the evening, when I looked out the
window and saw Mom rooting through a Dumpster. It was just after dark. A blustery March wind
whipped the steam coming out of the manholes, and people hurried along the sidewalks with their
collars turned up. I was stuck in traffic two blocks from the party where I was heading.
Mom stood fifteen feet away. She had tied rags around her shoulders to keep out the spring chill and
was picking through the trash while her dog, a blackandwhite terrier mix, played at her feet. Mom's
gestures were all familiar—the way she tilted her head and thrust out her lower lip when studying items
of potential value that she'd hoisted out of the Dumpster, the way her eyes widened with childish glee
when she found something she liked. Her long hair was streaked with gray, tangled and matted, and her
eyes had sunk deep into their sockets, but still she reminded me of the mom she'd been when I was a
kid, swandiving off cliffs and painting in the desert and reading Shakespeare aloud. Her cheekbones
were still high and strong, but the skin was parched and ruddy from all those winters and summers
exposed to the elements. To the people walking by, she probably looked like any of the thousands of
homeless people in New York City.
It had been months since I laid eyes on Mom, and when she looked up, I was overcome with panic that
she'd see me and call out my name, and that someone on the way to the same party would spot us
together and Mom would introduce herself and my secret would be out.
I slid down in the seat and asked the driver to turn around and take me home to Park Avenue.
The taxi pulled up in front of my building, the doorman held the door for me, and the elevator man took
me up to my floor. My husband was working late, as he did most nights, and the apartment was silent
except for the click of my heels on the polished wood floor. I was still rattled from seeing Mom, the
unexpectedness of coming across her, the sight of her rooting happily through the Dumpster. I put some
Vivaldi on, hoping the music would settle me down.
I looked around the room. There were the turnofthecentury bronzeandsilver vases and the old books
with worn leather spines that I'd collected at flea markets. There were the Georgian maps I'd had
framed, the Persian rugs, and the overstuffed leather armchair I liked to sink into at the end of the day.
I'd tried to make a home for myself here, tried to turn the apartment into the sort of place where the
person I wanted to be would live. But I could never enjoy the room without worrying about Mom and
Dad huddled on a sidewalk grate somewhere. I fretted about them, but I was embarrassed by them, too,
and ashamed of myself for wearing pearls and living on Park Avenue while my parents were busy
keeping warm and finding something to eat.
What could I do? I'd tried to help them countless times, but Dad would insist they didn't need anything,
and Mom would ask for something silly, like a perfume atomizer or a membership in a health club.
They said that they were living the way they wanted to.
After ducking down in the taxi so Mom wouldn't see me, I hated myself—hated my antiques, my
clothes, and my apartment. I had to do something, so I called a friend of Mom's and left a message. It
was our system of staying in touch. It always took Mom a few days to get back to me, but when I heard
from her, she sounded, as always, cheerful and casual, as though we'd had lunch the day before. I told
her I wanted to see her and suggested she drop by the apartment, but she wanted to go to a restaurant.
She loved eating out, so we agreed to meet for lunch at her favorite Chinese restaurant.
Mom was sitting at a booth, studying the menu, when I arrived. She'd made an effort to fix herself up.
She wore a bulky gray sweater with only a few light stains, and black leather men's shoes. She'd washed
her face, but her neck and temples were still dark with grime.
She waved enthusiastically when she saw me. "It's my baby girl!" she called out. I kissed her cheek.
Mom had dumped all the plastic packets of soy sauce and duck sauce and hotandspicy mustard from
the table into her purse. Now she emptied a wooden bowl of dried noodles into it as well. "A little snack
for later on," she explained.
We ordered. Mom chose the Seafood Delight. "You know how I love my seafood," she said.
She started talking about Picasso. She'd seen a retrospective of his work and decided he was hugely
overrated. All the cubist stuff was gimmicky, as far as she was concerned. He hadn't really done
anything worthwhile after his Rose Period.
"I'm worried about you," I said. "Tell me what I can do to help."
Her smile faded. "What makes you think I need your help?"
"I'm not rich," I said. "But I have some money. Tell me what it is you need."
She thought for a moment. "I could use an electrolysis treatment."
"Be serious."
"I am serious. If a woman looks good, she feels good."
"Come on, Mom." I felt my shoulders tightening up, the way they invariably did during these
conversations. "I'm talking about something that could help you change your life, make it better."
"You want to help me change my life?" Mom asked. "I'm fine. You're the one who needs help. Your
values are all confused."
"Mom, I saw you picking through trash in the East Village a few days ago."
"Well, people in this country are too wasteful. It's my way of recycling." She took a bite of her Seafood
Delight. "Why didn't you say hello?"
"I was too ashamed, Mom. I hid."
Mom pointed her chopsticks at me. "You see?" she said. "Right there. That's exactly what I'm saying.
You're way too easily embarrassed. Your father and I are who we are. Accept it."
"And what am I supposed to tell people about my parents?"
"Just tell the truth," Mom said. "That's simple enough."
II
THE DESERT
I WAS ON FIRE.
It's my earliest memory. I was three years old, and we were living in a trailer park in a southern Arizona
town whose name I never knew. I was standing on a chair in front of the stove, wearing a pink dress my
grandmother had bought for me. Pink was my favorite color. The dress's skirt stuck out like a tutu, and I
liked to spin around in front of the mirror, thinking I looked like a ballerina. But at that moment, I was
wearing the dress to cook hot dogs, watching them swell and bob in the boiling water as the late
morning sunlight filtered in through the trailer's small kitchenette window.
I could hear Mom in the next room singing while she worked on one of her paintings. Juju, our black
mutt, was watching me. I stabbed one of the hot dogs with a fork and bent over and offered it to him.
The wiener was hot, so Juju licked at it tentatively, but when I stood up and started stirring the hot dogs
again, I felt a blaze of heat on my right side. I turned to see where it was coming from and realized my
dress was on fire. Frozen with fear, I watched the yellowwhite flames make a ragged brown line up the
pink fabric of my skirt and climb my stomach. Then the flames leaped up, reaching my face.
I screamed. I smelled the burning and heard a horrible crackling as the fire singed my hair and
eyelashes. Juju was barking. I screamed again.
Mom ran into the room.
"Mommy, help me!" I shrieked. I was still standing on the chair, swatting at the fire with the fork I had
been using to stir the hot dogs.
Mom ran out of the room and came back with one of the armysurplus blankets I hated because the
wool was so scratchy. She threw the blanket around me to smother the flames. Dad had gone off in the
car, so Mom grabbed me and my younger brother, Brian, and hurried over to the trailer next to ours.
The woman who lived there was hanging her laundry on the clothesline. She had clothespins in her
mouth. Mom, in an unnaturally calm voice, explained what had happened and asked if we could please
have a ride to the hospital. The woman dropped her clothespins and laundry right there in the dirt and,
without saying anything, ran for her car.
***
When we got to the hospital, nurses put me on a stretcher. They talked in loud, worried whispers while
they cut off what was left of my fancy pink dress with a pair of shiny scissors. Then they picked me up,
laid me flat on a big metal bed piled with ice cubes, and spread some of the ice over my body. A doctor
with silver hair and blackrimmed glasses led my mother out of the room. As they left, I heard him
telling her that it was very serious. The nurses remained behind, hovering over me. I could tell I was
causing a big fuss, and I stayed quiet. One of them squeezed my hand and told me I was going to be
okay.
"I know," I said, "but if I'm not, that's okay, too."
The nurse squeezed my hand again and bit her lower lip.
The room was small and white, with bright lights and metal cabinets. I stared for a while at the rows of
tiny dots in the ceiling panels. Ice cubes covered my stomach and ribs and pressed up against my
cheeks. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a small, grimy hand reach up a few inches from my face and
grab a handful of cubes. I heard a loud crunching sound and looked down. It was Brian, eating the ice.
***
The doctors said I was lucky to be alive. They took patches of skin from my upper thigh and put them
over the most badly burned parts of my stomach, ribs, and chest. They said it was called a skin graft.
When they were finished, they wrapped my entire right side in bandages.
"Look, I'm a halfmummy," I said to one of the nurses. She smiled and put my right arm in a sling and
attached it to the headboard so I couldn't move it.
The nurses and doctors kept asking me questions: How did you get burned? Have your parents ever hurt
you? Why do you have all these bruises and cuts? My parents never hurt me, I said. I got the cuts and
bruises playing outside and the burns from cooking hot dogs. They asked what I was doing cooking hot
dogs by myself at the age of three. It was easy, I said. You just put the hot dogs in the water and boil
them. It wasn't like there was some complicated recipe that you had to be old enough to follow. The pan
was too heavy for me to lift when it was full of water, so I'd put a chair next to the sink, climb up and
fill a glass, then stand on a chair by the stove and pour the water into the pan. I did that over and over
again until the pan held enough water. Then I'd turn on the stove, and when the water was boiling, I'd
drop in the hot dogs. "Mom says I'm mature for my age," I told them. "and she lets me cook for myself
a lot."
Two nurses looked at each other, and one of them wrote something down on a clipboard. I asked what
was wrong. Nothing, they said, nothing.
***
Every couple of days, the nurses changed the bandages. They would put the used bandage off to the
side, wadded and covered with smears of blood and yellow stuff and little pieces of burned skin. Then
they'd apply another bandage, a big gauzy cloth, to the burns. At night I would run my left hand over
the rough, scabby surface of the skin that wasn't covered by the bandage. Sometimes I'd peel off scabs.
The nurses had told me not to, but I couldn't resist pulling on them real slow to see how big a scab I
could get loose. Once I had a couple of them free, I'd pretend they were talking to each other in
cheeping voices.
The hospital was clean and shiny. Everything was white—the walls and sheets and nurses' uniforms—
or silver—the beds and trays and medical instruments. Everyone spoke in polite, calm voices. It was so
hushed you could hear the nurses' rubbersoled shoes squeaking all the way down the hall. I wasn't used
to quiet and order, and I liked it.
I also liked it that I had my own room, since in the trailer I shared one with my brother and my sister.
My hospital room even had its very own television set up on the wall. We didn't have a TV at home, so
I watched it a lot. Red Buttons and Lucille Ball were my favorites.
The nurses and doctors always asked how I was feeling and if I was hungry or needed anything. The
nurses brought me delicious meals three times a day, with fruit cocktail or JellO for dessert, and
changed the sheets even if they still looked clean. Sometimes I read to them, and they told me I was
very smart and could read as well as a sixyearold.
One day a nurse with wavy yellow hair and blue eye makeup was chewing on something. I asked her
what it was, and she told me it was chewing gum. I had never heard of chewing gum, so she went out
and got me a whole pack. I pulled out a stick, took off the white paper and the shiny silver foil under it,
and studied the powdery, puttycolored gum. I put it in my mouth and was stunned by the sharp
sweetness. "It's really good!" I said.
"Chew on it, but don't swallow it," the nurse said with a laugh. She smiled real big and brought in other
nurses so they could watch me chew my firstever piece of gum. When she brought me lunch, she told
me I had to take out my chewing gum, but she said not to worry because I could have a new stick after
eating. If I finished the pack, she would buy me another. That was the thing about the hospital. You
never had to worry about running out of stuff like food or ice or even chewing gum. I would have been
happy staying in that hospital forever.
***
When my family came to visit, their arguing and laughing and singing and shouting echoed through the
quiet halls. The nurses made shushing noises, and Mom and Dad and Lori and Brian lowered their
voices for a few minutes, then they slowly grew loud again. Everyone always turned and stared at Dad. I
couldn't figure out whether it was because he was so handsome or because he called people. "pardner"
and. "goomba" and threw his head back when he laughed.
One day Dad leaned over my bed and asked if the nurses and doctors were treating me okay. If they
were not, he said, he would kick some asses. I told Dad how nice and friendly everyone was. "Well, of
course they are," he said. "They know you're Rex Walls's daughter."
When Mom wanted to know what it was the doctors and nurses were doing that was so nice, I told her
about the chewing gum.
"Ugh," she said. She disapproved of chewing gum, she went on. It was a disgusting lowclass habit, and
the nurse should have consulted her before encouraging me in such vulgar behavior. She said she was
going to give that woman a piece of her mind, by golly. "After all," Mom said. "I am your mother, and I
should have a say in how you're raised."
***
"Do you guys miss me?" I asked my older sister, Lori, during one visit.
"Not really," she said. "Too much has been happening."
"Like what?"
"Just the normal stuff."
"Lori may not miss you, honey bunch, but I sure do," Dad said. "You shouldn't be in this antiseptic
joint."
He sat down on my bed and started telling me the story about the time Lori got stung by a poisonous
scorpion. I'd heard it a dozen times, but I still liked the way Dad told it. Mom and Dad were out
exploring in the desert when Lori, who was four, turned over a rock and the scorpion hiding under it
stung her leg. She had gone into convulsions, and her body had become stiff and wet with sweat. But
Dad didn't trust hospitals, so he took her to a Navajo witch doctor who cut open the wound and put a
dark brown paste on it and said some chants and pretty soon Lori was as good as new. "Your mother
should have taken you to that witch doctor the day you got burned," Dad said, "not to these headsup
theirasses medschool quacks."
***
The next time they visited, Brian's head was wrapped in a dirty white bandage with dried bloodstains.
Mom said he had fallen off the back of the couch and cracked his head open on the floor, but she and
Dad had decided not to take him to the hospital.
"There was blood everywhere," Mom said. "but one kid in the hospital at a time is enough."
"Besides," Dad said, "Brian's head is so hard, I think the floor took more damage than he did."
Brian thought that was hilarious and just laughed and laughed.
Mom told me she had entered my name in a raffle at a fair, and I'd won a helicopter ride. I was thrilled.
I had never been in a helicopter or a plane.
"When do I get to go on the ride?" I asked.
"Oh, we already did that," Mom said. "It was fun."
Then Dad got into an argument with the doctor. It started because Dad thought I shouldn't be wearing
bandages. "Burns need to breathe," he told the doctor.
The doctor said bandages were necessary to prevent infection. Dad stared at the doctor. "To hell with
infection," he said. He told the doctor that I was going to be scarred for life because of him, but, by
God, I wasn't the only one who was going to walk out of there scarred.
Dad pulled back his fist as if to hit the doctor, who raised his hands and backed away. Before anything
could happen, a guard in a uniform appeared and told Mom and Dad and Lori and Brian that they
would have to leave.
Afterward, a nurse asked me if I was okay. "Of course," I said. I told her I didn't care if I had some silly
old scar. That was good, she said, because from the look of it, I had other things to worry about.
***
A few days later, when I had been at the hospital for about six weeks, Dad appeared alone in the
doorway of my room. He told me we were going to check out, Rex Walls–style.
"Are you sure this is okay?" I asked.
"You just trust your old man," Dad said.
He unhooked my right arm from the sling over my head. As he held me close, I breathed in his familiar
smell of Vitalis, whiskey, and cigarette smoke. It reminded me of home.
Dad hurried down the hall with me in his arms. A nurse yelled for us to stop, but Dad broke into a run.
He pushed open an emergencyexit door and sprinted down the stairs and out to the street. Our car, a
beatup Plymouth we called the Blue Goose, was parked around the corner, the engine idling. Mom was
up front, Lori and Brian in the back with Juju. Dad slid me across the seat next to Mom and took the
wheel.
"You don't have to worry anymore, baby," Dad said. "You're safe now."
A FEW DAYS AFTER Mom and Dad brought me home, I cooked myself some hot dogs. I was
hungry, Mom was at work on a painting, and no one else was there to fix them for me.
"Good for you," Mom said when she saw me cooking. "You've got to get right back in the saddle. You
can't live in fear of something as basic as fire."
I didn't. Instead, I became fascinated with it. Dad also thought I should face down my enemy, and he
showed me how to pass my finger through a candle flame. I did it over and over, slowing my finger with
each pass, watching the way it seemed to cut the flame in half, testing to see how much my finger could
endure without actually getting burned. I was always on the lookout for bigger fires. Whenever
neighbors burned trash, I ran over and watched the blaze trying to escape the garbage can. I'd inch
closer and closer, feeling the heat against my face until I got so near that it became unbearable, and then
I'd back away just enough to be able to stand it.
The neighbor lady who had driven me to the hospital was surprised that I didn't run in the opposite
direction from any fire I saw. "Why the hell would she?" Dad bellowed with a proud grin. "She already
fought the fire once and won."
I started stealing matches from Dad. I'd go behind the trailer and light them. I loved the scratching
sound of the match against the sandpapery brown strip when I struck it, and the way the flame leaped
out of the redcoated tip with a pop and a hiss. I'd feel its heat near my fingertips, then wave it out
triumphantly. I lit pieces of paper and little piles of brush and held my breath until the moment when
they seemed about to blaze up out of control. Then I'd stomp on the flames and call out the curse words
Dad used, like. "Dumbass sonofabitch!" and. "Cocksucker!"
One time I went out back with my favorite toy, a plastic Tinkerbell figurine. She was two inches tall,
with yellow hair pulled up in a high ponytail and her hands on her hips in a confident, cocky way that I
admired. I lit a match and held it close to Tinkerbell's face to show her how it felt. She looked even
more beautiful in the flame's glow. When that match went out, I lit another one, and this time I held it
really close to Tinkerbell's face. Suddenly, her eyes grew wide, as if with fear; I realized, to my horror,
that her face was starting to melt. I put out the match, but it was too late. Tinkerbell's once perfect little
nose had completely disappeared, and her saucy red lips had been replaced with an ugly, lopsided
smear. I tried to smooth her features back to the way they had been, but I made them even worse.
Almost immediately, her face cooled and hardened again. I put bandages on it. I wished I could perform
a skin graft on Tinkerbell, but that would have meant cutting her into pieces. Even though her face was
melted, she was still my favorite toy.
DAD CAME HOME IN the middle of the night a few months later and roused all of us from bed.
"Time to pull up stakes and leave this shithole behind," he hollered.
We had fifteen minutes to gather whatever we needed and pile into the car.
"Is everything okay, Dad?" I asked. "Is someone after us?"
"Don't you worry," Dad said. "You leave that to me. Don't I always take care of you?"
"'Course you do," I said.
"That's my girl!" Dad said with a hug, then barked orders at us all to speed things up. He took the
essentials—a big black castiron skillet and the Dutch oven, some armysurplus tin plates, a few knives,
his pistol, and Mom's archery set—and packed them in the trunk of the Blue Goose. He said we
shouldn't take much else, just what we needed to survive. Mom hurried out to the yard and started
digging holes by the light of the moon, looking for our jar of cash. She had forgotten where she'd buried
it.
An hour passed before we finally tied Mom's paintings on the top of the car, shoved whatever would fit
into the trunk, and piled the overflow on the backseat and the car floor. Dad steered the Blue Goose
through the dark, driving slowly so as not to alert anyone in the trailer park that we were, as Dad liked
to put it, doing the skedaddle. He was grumbling that he couldn't understand why the hell it took so
long to grab what we needed and haul our asses into the car.
"Dad!" I said. "I forgot Tinkerbell!"
"Tinkerbell can make it on her own," Dad said. "She's like my brave little girl. You are brave and ready
for adventure, right?"
"I guess," I said. I hoped whoever found Tinkerbell would love her despite her melted face. For comfort,
I tried to cradle Quixote, our gray and white cat who was missing an ear, but he growled and scratched
at my face. "Quiet, Quixote!" I said.
"Cats don't like to travel," Mom explained.
Anyone who didn't like to travel wasn't invited on our adventure, Dad said. He stopped the car, grabbed
Quixote by the scruff of the neck, and tossed him out the window. Quixote landed with a screeching
meow and a thud, Dad accelerated up the road, and I burst into tears.
"Don't be so sentimental," Mom said. She told me we could always get another cat, and now Quixote
was going to be a wild cat, which was much more fun than being a house cat. Brian, afraid that Dad
might toss Juju out the window as well, held the dog tight.
To distract us kids, Mom got us singing songs like. "Don't Fence Me In" and. "This Land Is Your
Land," and Dad led us in rousing renditions of. "Old Man River" and his favorite. "Swing Low, Sweet
Chariot." After a while, I forgot about Quixote and Tinkerbell and the friends I'd left behind in the
trailer park. Dad started telling us about all the exciting things we were going to do and how we were
going to get rich once we reached the new place where we were going to live.
"Where are we going, Dad?" I asked.
"Wherever we end up," he said.
***
Later that night, Dad stopped the car out in the middle of the desert, and we slept under the stars. We
had no pillows, but Dad said that was part of his plan. He was teaching us to have good posture. The
Indians didn't use pillows, either, he explained, and look how straight they stood. We did have our
scratchy armysurplus blankets, so we spread them out and lay there, looking up at the field of stars. I
told Lori how lucky we were to be sleeping out under the sky like Indians.
"We could live like this forever," I said.
"I think we're going to," she said.
WE WERE ALWAYS DOING the skedaddle, usually in the middle of the night. I sometimes heard
Mom and Dad discussing the people who were after us. Dad called them henchmen, bloodsuckers, and
the gestapo. Sometimes he would make mysterious references to executives from Standard Oil who
were trying to steal the Texas land that Mom's family owned, and FBI agents who were after Dad for
some dark episode that he never told us about because he didn't want to put us in danger, too.
Dad was so sure a posse of federal investigators was on our trail that he smoked his unfiltered cigarettes
from the wrong end. That way, he explained, he burned up the brand name, and if the people who were
tracking us looked in his ashtray, they'd find unidentifiable butts instead of Pall Malls that could be
traced to him. Mom, however, told us that the FBI wasn't really after Dad; he just liked to say they were
because it was more fun having the FBI on your tail than bill collectors.
We moved around like nomads. We lived in dusty little mining towns in Nevada, Arizona, and
California. They were usually nothing but a tiny cluster of sad, sunken shacks, a gas station, a dry
goods store, and a bar or two. They had names like Needles and Bouse, Pie, Goffs, and Why, and they
were near places like the Superstition Mountains, the driedup Soda Lake, and the Old Woman
Mountain. The more desolate and isolated a place was, the better Mom and Dad liked it.
Dad would get a job as an electrician or engineer in a gypsum or copper mine. Mom liked to say that
Dad could talk a blue streak, spinning tales of jobs he'd never had and college degrees he'd never
earned. He could get about any job he wanted, he just didn't like keeping it for long. Sometimes he
made money gambling or doing odd jobs. When he got bored or was fired or the unpaid bills piled up
too high or the lineman from the electrical company found out he had hotwired our trailer to the utility
poles—or the FBI was closing in—we packed up in the middle of the night and took off, driving until
Mom and Dad found another small town that caught their eye. Then we'd circle around, looking for
houses with forrent signs stuck in the front yard.
Every now and then, we'd go stay with Grandma Smith, Mom's mom, who lived in a big white house in
Phoenix. Grandma Smith was a West Texas flapper who loved dancing and cussing and horses. She was
known for being able to break the wildest broncs and had helped Grandpa run the ranch up near Fish
Creek Canyon, Arizona, which was west of Bullhead City, not too far from the Grand Canyon. I thought
Grandma Smith was great. But after a few weeks, she and Dad would always get into some nasty
hollering match. It might start with Mom mentioning how short we were on cash. Then Grandma would
make a snide comment about Dad being shiftless. Dad would say something about selfish old crones
with more money than they knew what to do with, and soon enough they'd be facetoface in what
amounted to a fullfledged cussing contest.
"You fleabitten drunk!" Grandma would scream.
"You goddamned flintfaced hag!" Dad would shout back.
"You nogood twobit pudsucking bastard!"
"You scaly castrating banshee bitch!"
Dad had the more inventive vocabulary, but Grandma Smith could outshout him; plus, she had the
homecourt advantage. A time would come when Dad had had enough and he'd tell us kids to get in the
car. Grandma would yell at Mom not to let that worthless horse's ass take her grandchildren. Mom
would shrug and say there was nothing she could do about it, he was her husband. Off we'd go, heading
out into the desert in search of another house for rent in another little mining town.
Some of the people who lived in those towns had been there for years. Others were rootless, like us—
just passing through. They were gamblers or excons or war veterans or what Mom called loose women.
There were old prospectors, their faces wrinkled and brown from the sun, like driedup apples. The kids
were lean and hard, with calluses on their hands and feet. We'd make friends with them, but not close
friends, because we knew we'd be moving on sooner or later.
We might enroll in school, but not always. Mom and Dad did most of our teaching. Mom had us all
reading books without pictures by the time we were five, and Dad taught us math. He also taught us the
things that were really important and useful, like how to tap out Morse code and how we should never
eat the liver of a polar bear because all the vitamin A in it could kill us. He showed us how to aim and
fire his pistol, how to shoot Mom's bow and arrows, and how to throw a knife by the blade so that it
landed in the middle of a target with a satisfying thwock. By the time I was four, I was pretty good with
Dad's pistol, a big black sixshot revolver, and could hit five out of six beer bottles at thirty paces. I'd
hold the gun with both hands, sight down the barrel, and squeeze the trigger slowly and smoothly until,
with a loud clap, the gun kicked and the bottle exploded. It was fun. Dad said my sharpshooting would
come in handy if the feds ever surrounded us.
Mom had grown up in the desert. She loved the dry, crackling heat, the way the sky at sunset looked
like a sheet of fire, and the overwhelming emptiness and severity of all that open land that had once
been a huge ocean bed. Most people had trouble surviving in the desert, but Mom thrived there. She
knew how to get by on next to nothing. She showed us which plants were edible and which were toxic.
She was able to find water when no one else could, and she knew how little of it you really needed. She
taught us that you could wash yourself up pretty clean with just a cup of water. She said it was good for
you to drink unpurified water, even ditch water, as long as animals were drinking from it. Chlorinated
city water was for nambypambies, she said. Water from the wild helped build up your antibodies. She
also thought toothpaste was for nambypambies. At bedtime we'd shake a little baking soda into the
palm of one hand, mix in a dash of hydrogen peroxide, then use our fingers to clean our teeth with the
fizzing paste.
I loved the desert, too. When the sun was in the sky, the sand would be so hot that it would burn your
feet if you were the kind of kid who wore shoes, but since we always went barefoot, our soles were as
tough and thick as cowhide. We'd catch scorpions and snakes and horny toads. We'd search for gold,
and when we couldn't find it, we'd collect other valuable rocks, like turquoise and garnets. There'd be a
cool spell come sundown, when the mosquitoes would fly in so thick that the air would grow dark with
them, then at nightfall, it turned so cold that we usually needed blankets.
There were fierce sandstorms. Sometimes they hit without warning, and other times you knew one was
coming when you saw batches of dust devils swirling and dancing their way across the desert. Once the
wind started whipping up the sand, you could only see a foot in front of your face. If you couldn't find a
house or a car or a shed to hide in when the sandstorm started, you had to squat down and close your
eyes and mouth real tight and cover your ears and bury your face in your lap until it passed, or else your
body cavities would fill with sand. A big tumbleweed might hit you, but they were light and bouncy and
didn't hurt. If the sandstorm was really strong, it knocked you over, and you rolled around like you were
a tumbleweed.
When the rains finally came, the skies darkened and the air became heavy. Raindrops the size of
marbles came pelting out of the sky. Some parents worried that their kids might get hit by lightning, but
Mom and Dad never did, and they let us go out and play in the warm, driving water. We splashed and
sang and danced. Great bolts of lightning cracked from the lowhanging clouds, and thunder shook the
ground. We gasped over the most spectacular bolts, as if we were all watching a fireworks show. After
the storm, Dad took us to the arroyos, and we watched the flash floods come roaring through. The next
day the saguaros and prickly pears were fat from drinking as much as they could, because they knew it
might be a long, long time until the next rain.
We were sort of like the cactus. We ate irregularly, and when we did, we'd gorge ourselves. Once when
we were living in Nevada, a train full of cantaloupes heading east jumped the track. I had never eaten a
cantaloupe before, but Dad brought home crates and crates of them. We had fresh cantaloupe, stewed
cantaloupe, even fried cantaloupe. One time in California, the grape pickers went on strike. The
vineyard owners let people come pick their own grapes for a nickel a pound. We drove about a hundred
miles to the vineyards, where the grapes were so ripe they were about to burst on the vine in bunches
bigger than my head. We filled our entire car full of green grapes—the trunk, even the glove
compartment, and Dad piled stacks in our laps so high we could barely see over the top. For weeks
afterward, we ate green grapes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
***
All this running around and moving was temporary, Dad explained. He had a plan. He was going to
find gold.
Everybody said Dad was a genius. He could build or fix anything. One time when a neighbor's TV set
broke, Dad opened the back and used a macaroni noodle to insulate some crossed wires. The neighbor
couldn't get over it. He went around telling everyone in town that Dad sure knew how to use his noodle.
Dad was an expert in math and physics and electricity. He read books on calculus and logarithmic
algebra and loved what he called the poetry and symmetry of math. He told us about the magic qualities
every number has and how numbers unlock the secrets of the universe. But Dad's main interest was
energy: thermal energy, nuclear energy, solar energy, electrical energy, and energy from the wind. He
said there were so many untapped sources of energy in the world that it was ridiculous to be burning all
that fossil fuel.
Dad was always inventing things, too. One of his most important inventions was a complicated
contraption he called the Prospector. It was going to help us find gold. The Prospector had a big flat
surface about four feet high and six feet wide, and it rose up in the air at an angle. The surface was
covered with horizontal strips of wood separated by gaps. The Prospector would scoop up dirt and
rocks and sift them through the maze of wooden strips. It could figure out whether a rock was gold by
the weight. It would throw out the worthless stuff and deposit the gold nuggets in a pile, so whenever
we needed groceries, we could go out back and grab ourselves a nugget. At least that was what it would
be able to do once Dad finished building it.
Dad let Brian and me help him work on the Prospector. We'd go out behind the house, and I'd hold the
nails while Dad hit them. Sometimes he let me start the nails, and then he'd drive them in with one hard
blow from the hammer. The air would be filled with sawdust and the smell of freshly cut wood, and the
sound of hammering and whistling, because Dad always whistled while he worked.
In my mind, Dad was perfect, although he did have what Mom called a little bit of a drinking situation.
There was what Mom called Dad's. "beer phase." We could all handle that. Dad drove fast and sang
really loud, and locks of his hair fell into his face and life was a little bit scary but still a lot of fun. But
when Dad pulled out a bottle of what Mom called. "the hard stuff," she got kind of frantic, because
after working on the bottle for a while, Dad turned into an angryeyed stranger who threw around
furniture and threatened to beat up Mom or anyone else who got in his way. When he'd had his fill of
cussing and hollering and smashing things up, he'd collapse. But Dad drank hard liquor only when we
had money, which wasn't often, so life was mostly good in those days.
Every night when Lori, Brian, and I were about to go to sleep, Dad told us bedtime stories. They were
always about him. We'd be tucked in our beds or lying under blankets in the desert, the world dark
except for the orange glow from his cigarette. When he took a long draw, it lit up just enough for us to
see his face.
"Tell us a story about yourself, Dad!" we'd beg him.
"Awww. You don't want to hear another story about me," he'd say.
"Yes, we do! We do!" we'd insist.
"Well, okay," he'd say. He'd pause and chuckle at some memory. "There's many a damned foolhardy
thing that your old man has done, but this one was harebrained even for a crazy sonofabitch like Rex
Walls."
And then he'd tell us about how, when he was in the air force and his plane's engine conked out, he
made an emergency landing in a cattle pasture and saved himself and his crew. Or about the time he
wrestled a pack of wild dogs that had surrounded a lame mustang. Then there was the time he fixed a
broken sluice gate on the Hoover Dam and saved the lives of thousands of people who would have
drowned if the dam had burst. There was also the time he went AWOL in the air force to get some beer,
and while he was at the bar, he caught a lunatic who was planning to blow up the air base, which went
to show that occasionally, it paid to break the rules.
Dad was a dramatic storyteller. He always started out slow, with lots of pauses. "Go on! What happened
next?" we'd ask, even if we'd already heard that story before. Mom giggled or rolled her eyes when Dad
told his stories, and he glared at her. If someone interrupted his storytelling, he got mad, and we had to
beg him to continue and promise that no one would interrupt again.
Dad always fought harder, flew faster, and gambled smarter than everyone else in his stories. Along the
way, he rescued women and children and even men who weren't as strong and clever. Dad taught us the
secrets of his heroics—he showed us how to straddle a wild dog and break his neck, and where to hit a
man in the throat so you could kill him with one powerful jab. But he assured us that as long as he was
around, we wouldn't have to defend ourselves, because, by God, anyone who so much as laid a finger on
any of Rex Walls's children was going to get their butts kicked so hard that you could read Dad's shoe
size on their ass cheeks.
When Dad wasn't telling us about all the amazing things he had already done, he was telling us about
the wondrous things he was going to do. Like build the Glass Castle. All of Dad's engineering skills
and mathematical genius were coming together in one special project: a great big house he was going to
build for us in the desert. It would have a glass ceiling and thick glass walls and even a glass staircase.
The Glass Castle would have solar cells on the top that would catch the sun's rays and convert them into
electricity for heating and cooling and running all the appliances. It would even have its own water
purification system. Dad had worked out the architecture and the floor plans and most of the
mathematical calculations. He carried around the blueprints for the Glass Castle wherever we went, and
sometimes he'd pull them out and let us work on the design for our rooms.
All we had to do was find gold, Dad said, and we were on the verge of that. Once he finished the
Prospector and we struck it rich, he'd start work on our Glass Castle.
AS MUCH AS DAD liked to tell stories about himself, it was almost impossible to get him to talk
about his parents or where he was born. We knew he came from a town called Welch, in West Virginia,
where a lot of coal was mined, and that his father had worked as a clerk for the railroad, sitting every
day in a little station house, writing messages on pieces of paper that he held up on a stick for the
passing train engineers. Dad had no interest in a life like that, so he left Welch when he was seventeen
to join the air force and become a pilot.
One of his favorite stories, which he must have told us a hundred times, was about how he met and fell
in love with Mom. Dad was in the air force, and Mom was in the USO, but when they met, she was on
leave visiting her parents at their cattle ranch near Fish Creek Canyon.
Dad and some of his air force buddies were on a cliff of the canyon, trying to work up the nerve to dive
into the lake forty feet below, when Mom and a friend drove up. Mom was wearing a white bathing suit
that showed off her figure and her skin, which was dark from the Arizona sun. She had light brown hair
that turned blond in the summer, and she never wore any makeup except deep red lipstick. She looked
just like a movie star, Dad always said, but hell, he'd met lots of beautiful women before, and none of
them had ever made him weak in the knees. Mom was different. He saw right away that she had true
spirit. He fell in love with her the split second he laid eyes on her.
Mom walked up to the air force men and told them that diving off the cliff was no big deal, she'd been
doing it since she was little. The men didn't believe her, so Mom went right to the edge of the cliff and
did a perfect swan dive into the water below.
Dad jumped in after her. No way in hell, he'd say, was he letting a fine broad like that get away from
him.
"What kind of dive did you do, Dad?" I asked whenever he told the story.
"A parachute dive. Without a parachute," he always answered.
Dad swam after Mom, and right there in the water, he told her he was going to marry her. Twentythree
men had already proposed to her, Mom told Dad, and she had turned them all down. "What makes you
think I'd accept your proposal?" she asked.
"I didn't propose to you," Dad said. "I told you I was going to marry you."
Six months later, they got married. I always thought it was the most romantic story I'd ever heard, but
Mom didn't like it. She didn't think it was romantic at all.
"I had to say yes," Mom said. "Your father wouldn't take no for an answer." Besides, she explained, she
had to get away from her mother, who wouldn't let her make even the smallest decision on her own. "I
had no idea your father would be even worse."
Dad left the air force after he got married because he wanted to make a fortune for his family, and you
couldn't do that in the military. In a few months, Mom was pregnant. When Lori came out, she was
mute and bald as an egg for the first three years of her life. Then suddenly, she sprouted curly hair the
color of a new penny and started speaking nonstop. But it sounded like gibberish, and everyone thought
she was addled except for Mom, who understood her perfectly and said she had an excellent vocabulary.
A year after Lori was born, Mom and Dad had a second daughter, Mary Charlene, who had coalblack
hair and chocolatebrown eyes, just like Dad. But Mary Charlene died one night when she was nine
months old. Crib death, Mom always said. Two years later, I was born. "You were to replace Mary
Charlene," Mom said. She told me that she had ordered up a second redheaded girl so Lori wouldn't
feel like she was weird. "You were such a skinny baby," Mom used to tell me. "The longest, boniest
thing the nurses had ever seen."
Brian arrived when I was one. He was a blue baby, Mom said. When he was born, he couldn't breathe
and came into this world having a seizure. Whenever Mom told the story, she would hold her arms rigid
and clench her teeth and go bugeyed to show how Brian looked. Mom said when she saw him like that,
she thought, Uhoh, looks like this one's a goner, too. But Brian lived. For the first year of his life, he
kept having those seizures, then one day they just stopped. He turned into a tough little guy who never
whined or cried, even the time I accidentally pushed him off the top bunk and he broke his nose.
Mom always said people worried too much about their children. Suffering when you're young is good
for you, she said. It immunized your body and your soul, and that was why she ignored us kids when we
cried. Fussing over children who cry only encourages them, she told us. That's positive reinforcement
for negative behavior.
Mom never seemed upset about Mary Charlene's death. "God knows what He's doing," she said. "He
gave me some perfect children, but He also gave me one that wasn't so perfect, so He said, 'Oops, I
better take this one back.'" Dad, however, wouldn't talk about Mary Charlene. If her name came up, his
face grew stony and he'd leave the room. He was the one who found her body in the crib, and Mom
couldn't believe how much it shook him up. "When he found her, he stood there like he was in shock or
something, cradling her stiff little body in his arms, and then he screamed like a wounded animal," she
told us. "I never heard such a horrible sound."
Mom said Dad was never the same after Mary Charlene died. He started having dark moods, staying
out late and coming home drunk, and losing jobs. One day soon after Brian was born, we were short on
cash, so Dad pawned Mom's big diamond wedding ring, which her mother had paid for, and that upset
Mom. After that, whenever Mom and Dad got in a fight, Mom brought up the ring, and Dad told her to
quit her damn bellyaching. He'd say he was going to get her a ring even fancier than the one he pawned.
That was why we had to find gold. To get Mom a new wedding ring. That and so we could build the
Glass Castle.
"DO YOU LIKE ALWAYS moving around?" Lori asked me.
"Of course I do!" I said. "Don't you?"
"Sure," she said.
It was late afternoon, and we were parked outside of a bar in the Nevada desert. It was called the Bar
None Bar. I was four and Lori was seven. We were on our way to Las Vegas. Dad had decided it would
be easier, as he put it, to accumulate the capital necessary to finance the Prospector if he hit the casinos
for a while. We'd been driving for hours when he saw the Bar None Bar, pulled over the Green Caboose
—the Blue Goose had died, and we now had another car, a station wagon Dad had named the Green
Caboose—and announced that he was going inside for a quick nip. Mom put on some red lipstick and
joined him, even though she didn't drink anything stronger than tea. They had been inside for hours.
The sun hung high in the sky, and there was not the slightest hint of a breeze. Nothing moved except
some buzzards on the side of the road, pecking over an unrecognizable carcass. Brian was reading a
dogeared comic book.
"How many places have we lived?" I asked Lori.
"That depends on what you mean by 'lived,'" she said. "If you spend one night in some town, did you
live there? What about two nights? Or a whole week?"
I thought. "If you unpack all your things," I said.
We counted eleven places we had lived, then we lost track. We couldn't remember the names of some of
the towns or what the houses we had lived in looked like. Mostly, I remembered the inside of cars.
"What do you think would happen if we weren't always moving around?" I asked.
"We'd get caught," Lori said.
***
When Mom and Dad came out of the Bar None Bar, they brought us each a long piece of beef jerky and
a candy bar. I ate the jerky first, and by the time I unwrapped my Mounds bar, it had melted into a
brown, gooey mess, so I decided to save it until night, when the desert cold would harden it up again.
By then we had passed through the small town beyond the Bar None Bar. Dad was driving and smoking
with one hand and holding a brown bottle of beer with the other. Lori was in the front seat between him
and Mom, and Brian, who was in back with me, was trying to trade me half of his 3 Musketeers for half
of my Mounds. Just then we took a sharp turn over some railroad tracks, the door flew open, and I
tumbled out of the car.
I rolled several yards along the embankment, and when I came to a stop, I was too shocked to cry, with
my breath knocked out and grit and pebbles in my eyes and mouth. I lifted my head in time to watch the
Green Caboose get smaller and smaller and then disappear around a bend.
Blood was running down my forehead and flowing out of my nose. My knees and elbows were scraped
raw and covered with sand. I was still holding the Mounds bar, but I had smashed it during the fall,
tearing the wrapper and squeezing out the white coconut filling, which was also covered with grit.
Once I got my breath back, I crawled along the railroad embankment to the road and sat down to wait
for Mom and Dad to come back. My whole body felt sore. The sun was small and white and broiling
hot. A wind had come up, and it was roiling the dust along the roadside. I waited for what seemed like a
long time before I decided it was possible Mom and Dad might not come back for me. They might not
notice I was missing. They might decide that it wasn't worth the drive back to retrieve me; that, like
Quixote the cat, I was a bother and a burden they could do without.
The little town behind me was quiet, and there were no other cars on the road. I started crying, but that
only made me feel more sore. I got up and began to walk back toward the houses, and then I decided
that if Mom and Dad did come for me, they wouldn't be able to find me, so I returned to the railroad
tracks and sat down again.
I was scraping the dried blood off my legs when I looked up and saw the Green Caboose come back
around the bend. It hurtled up the road toward me, getting bigger and bigger, until it screeched to a halt
right in front of me. Dad got out of the car, knelt down, and tried to give me a hug.
I pulled away from him. "I thought you were going to leave me behind," I said.
"Aww, I'd never do that," he said. "Your brother was trying to tell us that you'd fallen out, but he was
blubbering so damned hard we couldn't understand a word he was saying."
Dad started pulling the pebbles out of my face. Some were buried deep in my skin, so he reached into
the glove compartment for a pair of needlenosed pliers. When he'd plucked all the pebbles from my
cheeks and forehead, he took out his handkerchief and tried to stop my nose from bleeding. It was
dripping like a broken faucet. "Damn, honey," he said. "You busted your snot locker pretty good."
I started laughing really hard. "Snot locker" was the funniest name I'd ever heard for a nose. After Dad
cleaned me up and I got back in the car, I told Brian and Lori and Mom about the word, and they all
started laughing as hard as me. Snot locker. It was hilarious.
WE LIVED IN LAS VEGAS for about a month, in a motel room with dark red walls and two narrow
beds. We three kids slept in one, Mom and Dad in the other. During the day, we went to the casinos,
where Dad said he had a surefire system for beating the house. Brian and I played hideandseek
among the clicking slot machines, checking the trays for overlooked quarters, while Dad was winning
money at the blackjack table. I'd stare at the longlegged showgirls when they sashayed across the
casino floor, with huge feathers on their heads and behinds, sequins sparkling on their bodies, and
glitter around their eyes. When I tried to imitate their walk, Brian said I looked like an ostrich.
At the end of the day, Dad came to get us, his pockets full of money. He bought us cowboy hats and
fringed vests, and we ate chickenfried steaks in restaurants with icecold airconditioning and a
miniature jukebox at each table. One night when Dad had made an especially big score, he said it was
time to start living like the high rollers we had become. He took us to a restaurant with swinging doors
like a saloon. Inside, the walls were decorated with real prospecting tools. A man with garters on his
arms played a piano, and a woman with gloves that came up past her elbows kept hurrying over to light
Dad's cigarettes.
Dad told us we were having something special for dessert—a flaming icecream cake. The waiter
wheeled out a tray with the cake on it, and the woman with the gloves lit it with a taper. Everyone
stopped eating to watch. The flames had a slow, watery movement, rolling up into the air like ribbons.
Everyone started clapping, and Dad jumped up and raised the waiter's hand above his head as if he'd
won first prize.
A few days later, Mom and Dad went off to the blackjack table and then almost immediately came
looking for us. Dad said one of the dealers had figured out that he had a system and had put the word
out on him. He told us it was time to do the skedaddle.
***
We had to get far away from Las Vegas, Dad said, because the Mafia, which owned the casinos, was
after him. We headed west, through desert and then mountains. Mom said we should all live near the
Pacific Ocean at least once in our lives, so we kept going all the way to San Francisco.
Mom didn't want us staying in one of those touristtrap hotels near Fisherman's Wharf, which she said
were inauthentic and cut off from the real life of the city, so we found one that had a lot more character,
in a place called the Tenderloin District. Sailors and women with lots of makeup stayed there, too. Dad
called it a flophouse, but Mom said it was an SRO, and when I asked what that stood for, she told me
the hotel was for special residents only.
While Mom and Dad went out looking for investment money for the Prospector, we kids played in the
hotel. One day I found a halffull box of matches. I was thrilled, because I much preferred the wooden
matches that came in boxes over the flimsy ones in the cardboard books. I took them upstairs and
locked myself in the bathroom. I pulled off some toilet paper, lit it, and when it started burning, I threw
it down the toilet. I was torturing the fire, giving it life, and snuffing it out. Then I got a better idea. I
made a pile of toilet paper in the toilet, lit it, and when it started burning, the flame shooting silently up
out of the bowl, I flushed it down the toilet.
One night a few days later, I suddenly woke up. The air was hot and stifling. I smelled smoke and then
saw flames leaping at the open window. At first I couldn't tell if the fire was inside or outside, but then I
saw that one of the curtains, only a few feet from the bed, was ablaze.
Mom and Dad were not in the room, and Lori and Brian were still asleep. I tried to scream to warn
them, but nothing came out of my throat. I wanted to reach over and shake them awake, but I couldn't
move. The fire was growing bigger, stronger, and angrier.
Just then the door burst open. Someone was calling our names. It was Dad. Lori and Brian woke up and
ran to him, coughing from the smoke. I still couldn't move. I watched the fire, expecting that at any
moment my blanket would burst into flames. Dad wrapped the blanket around me and picked me up,
then ran down the stairs, leading Lori and Brian with one arm and holding me in the other.
Dad took us kids across the street to a bar, then went back to help fight the fire. A waitress with red
fingernails and blueblack hair asked if we wanted a CocaCola or, heck, even a beer, because we'd
been through a lot that night. Brian and Lori said yes, please, to Cokes. I asked if I might please have a
Shirley Temple, which was what Dad bought me whenever he took me to a bar. For some reason, the
waitress laughed.
The people at the bar kept making jokes about women running naked out of the burning hotel. All I had
on was my underwear, so I kept the blanket wrapped tightly around me. After I drank my Shirley
Temple, I tried to go back across the street to watch the fire, but the waitress kept me at the bar, so I
climbed up on a stool to watch through the window. The fire trucks had arrived. There were flashing
lights and men in black rubber coats holding canvas hoses with big jets of water coming out of them.
I wondered if the fire had been out to get me. I wondered if all fire was related, like Dad said all
humans were related, if the fire that had burned me that day while I cooked hot dogs was somehow
connected to the fire I had flushed down the toilet and the fire burning at the hotel. I didn't have the
answers to those questions, but what I did know was that I lived in a world that at any moment could
erupt into fire. It was the sort of knowledge that kept you on your toes.
***
After the hotel burned down, we lived for a few days on the beach. When we put down the backseat of
the Green Caboose, there was room for everyone to sleep, though sometimes someone's feet would be
sticking in my face. One night a policeman tapped on our window and said we had to leave; it was
illegal to sleep on the beach. He was nice and kept calling us. "folks" and even drew us a map to a place
where we could sleep without getting arrested.
But after he left, Dad called him the goddamn gestapo and said that people like that got their jollies
pushing people like us around. Dad was fed up with civilization. He and Mom decided we should move
back to the desert and resume our hunt for gold without our starter money. "These cities will kill you,"
he said.
AFTER WE PULLED UP stakes in San Francisco, we headed for the Mojave Desert. Near the Eagle
Mountains, Mom made Dad stop the car. She'd seen a tree on the side of the road that had caught her
fancy.
It wasn't just any tree. It was an ancient Joshua tree. It stood in a crease of land where the desert ended
and the mountain began, forming a wind tunnel. From the time the Joshua tree was a tiny sapling, it had
been so beaten down by the whipping wind that, rather than trying to grow skyward, it had grown in the
direction that the wind pushed it. It existed now in a permanent state of windblownness, leaning over so
far that it seemed ready to topple, although, in fact, its roots held it firmly in place.
I thought the Joshua tree was ugly. It looked scraggly and freakish, permanently stuck in its twisted,
tortured position, and it made me think of how some adults tell you not to make weird faces because
your features could freeze. Mom, however, thought it was one of the most beautiful trees she had ever
seen. She told us she had to paint it. While she was setting out her easel, Dad drove up the road to see
what was ahead. He found a scattering of parched little houses, trailers settling into the sand, and
shacks with rusty tin roofs. It was called Midland. One of the little houses had a forrent sign. "What
the hell," Dad said, "this place is as good as any other."
***
The house we rented had been built by a mining company. It was white, with two rooms and a
swaybacked roof. There were no trees, and the desert sand ran right up to the back door. At night you
could hear coyotes howling.
When we first got to Midland, those coyotes kept me awake, and as I lay in bed, I'd hear other sounds—
Gila monsters rustling in the underbrush, moths knocking against the screens, and the creosote
crackling in the wind. One night when the lights were out and I could see a sliver of moon through the
window, I heard a slithering noise on the floor.
"I think there's something under our bed," I said to Lori.
"It's merely a figment of your overly active imagination," Lori said. She talked like a grownup when
she was annoyed.
I tried to be brave, but I had heard something. In the moonlight, I thought I saw it move.
"Something's there," I whispered.
"Go to sleep," Lori said.
Holding my pillow over my head for protection, I ran into the living room, where Dad was reading.
"What's up, Mountain Goat?" he asked. He called me that because I never fell down when we were
climbing mountains—surefooted as a mountain goat, he'd always say.
"Nothing, probably," I said. "I just think maybe I saw something in the bedroom." Dad raised his
eyebrows. "But it was probably just a figment of my overly active imagination."
"Did you get a good look at it?" he asked.
"Not really."
"You must have seen it. Was it a big old hairy sonofabitch with the damnedestlooking teeth and
claws?"
"That's it!"
"And did it have pointed ears and evil eyes with fire in 'em, and did it stare at you all wickedlike?" he
asked.
"Yes! Yes! You've seen it, too?"
"Better believe I have. It's that old ornery bastard Demon."
Dad said he had been chasing Demon for years. By now, Dad said, that old Demon had figured out that
it had better not mess with Rex Walls. But if that sneaky son of a gun thought it was going to terrorize
Rex Walls's little girl, it had by God got another think coming. "Go fetch my hunting knife," Dad said.
I got Dad his knife with the carved bone handle and the blade of blue German steel, and he gave me a
pipe wrench, and we went looking for Demon. We looked under my bed, where I had seen it, but it was
gone. We looked all around the house—under the table, in the dark corners of the closets, in the
toolbox, even outside in the trash cans.
"C'mere, you sorryass old Demon!" Dad called out in the desert night. "Come out and show your butt
ugly face, you yellowbellied monster!"
"Yeah, c'mon, you old mean Demon!" I said, waving the pipe wrench in the air. "We're not scared of
you!"
There was only the sound of the coyotes in the distance. "This is just like that chickenshit Demon," Dad
said. He sat down on the front step and lit up a cigarette, then told me a story about the time Demon
was terrorizing an entire town, and Dad fought it off in handtohand combat, biting its ears and
sticking his fingers in its eyes. Old Demon was terrified because that was the first time it had met
anyone who wasn't afraid of it. "Damned old Demon didn't know what to think," Dad said, shaking his
head with a chuckle. That was the thing to remember about all monsters, Dad said: They love to
frighten people, but the minute you stare them down, they turn tail and run. "All you have to do,
Mountain Goat, is show old Demon that you're not afraid."
***
Not much grew around Midland other than the Joshua tree, cacti, and the scrubby little creosote bushes
that Dad said were some of the oldest plants on the planet. The great granddaddy creosote bushes were
thousands of years old. When it rained, they let off a disgusting musty smell so animals wouldn't eat
them. Only four inches of rain fell a year around Midland—about the same as in the northern Sahara—
and water for humans came in on the train once a day in special containers. The only animals that could
survive around Midland were lipless, scaly creatures such as Gila monsters and scorpions, and people
like us.
A month after we moved to Midland, Juju got bitten by a rattlesnake and died. We buried him near the
Joshua tree. It was practically the only time I ever saw Brian cry. But we had plenty of cats to keep us
company. Too many, in fact. We had rescued lots of cats since we tossed Quixote out the window, and
most of them had gone and had kittens, and it got to the point where we had to get rid of some of them.
We didn't have many neighbors to give them to, so Dad put them in a burlap sack and drove to a pond
made by the mining company to cool equipment. I watched him load the back of the car with bobbing,
mewing bags.
"It doesn't seem right," I told Mom. "We rescued them. Now we're going to kill them."
"We gave them a little extra time on the planet," Mom said. "They should be grateful for that."
***
Dad finally got a job in the gypsum mine, digging out the white rocks that were ground into the powder
used in drywall and plaster of paris. When he came home, he'd be covered with white gypsum powder,
and sometimes we'd play ghost and he'd chase us. He also brought back sacks of gypsum, and Mom
mixed it with water to make Venus de Milo sculptures from a rubber cast she ordered through the mail.
It grieved Mom that the mine was destroying so much white rock—she said it was real marble and
deserved a better fate and that, by making her sculptures, she was at least immortalizing some of it.
Mom was pregnant. Everyone hoped it would be a boy so Brian would have someone to play with other
than me. When it got time for Mom to give birth, Dad's plan was for us to move to Blythe, twenty miles
south, which was such a big town it had two movie theaters and two state prisons.
In the meantime, Mom devoted herself to her art. She spent all day working on oil paintings,
watercolors, charcoal drawings, penandink sketches, clay and wire sculptures, silk screens, and wood
blocks. She didn't have any particular style; some of her paintings were what she called primitive, some
were impressionistic and abstract, some were realistic. "I don't want to be pigeonholed," she liked to
say. Mom was also a writer and was always typing away on novels, short stories, plays, poetry, fables,
and children's books, which she illustrated herself. Mom's writing was very creative. So was her
spelling. She needed a proofreader, and when Lori was just seven years old, she would go over Mom's
manuscripts, checking for errors.
While we were in Midland, Mom painted dozens of variations and studies of the Joshua tree. We'd go
with her and she'd give us art lessons. One time I saw a tiny Joshua tree sapling growing not too far
from the old tree. I wanted to dig it up and replant it near our house. I told Mom that I would protect it
from the wind and water it every day so that it could grow nice and tall and straight.
Mom frowned at me. "You'd be destroying what makes it special," she said. "It's the Joshua tree's
struggle that gives it its beauty."
I NEVER BELIEVED IN Santa Claus.
None of us kids did. Mom and Dad refused to let us. They couldn't afford expensive presents, and they
didn't want us to think we weren't as good as other kids who, on Christmas morning, found all sorts of
fancy toys under the tree that were supposedly left by Santa Claus. So they told us all about how other
kids were deceived by their parents, how the toys the grownups claimed were made by little elves
wearing bell caps in their workshop at the North Pole actually had labels on them saying MADE IN
JAPAN.
"Try not to look down on those other children," Mom said. "It's not their fault that they've been
brainwashed into believing silly myths."
We celebrated Christmas, but usually about a week after December 25, when you could find perfectly
good bows and wrapping paper that people had thrown away and Christmas trees discarded on the
roadside that still had most of their needles and even some silver tinsel hanging on them. Mom and Dad
would give us a bag of marbles or a doll or a slingshot that had been marked way down in an after
Christmas sale.
Dad lost his job at the gypsum mine after getting in an argument with the foreman, and when Christmas
came that year, we had no money at all. On Christmas Eve, Dad took each of us kids out into the desert
night one by one. I had a blanket wrapped around me, and when it was my turn, I offered to share it
with Dad, but he said no thanks. The cold never bothered him. I was five that year and I sat next to Dad
and we looked up at the sky. Dad loved to talk about the stars. He explained to us how they rotated
through the night sky as the earth turned. He taught us to identify the constellations and how to
navigate by the North Star. Those shining stars, he liked to point out, were one of the special treats for
people like us who lived out in the wilderness. Rich city folks, he'd say, lived in fancy apartments, but
their air was so polluted they couldn't even see the stars. We'd have to be out of our minds to want to
trade places with any of them.
"Pick out your favorite star," Dad said that night. He told me I could have it for keeps. He said it was my
Christmas present.
"You can't give me a star!" I said. "No one owns the stars."
"That's right," Dad said. "No one else owns them. You just have to claim it before anyone else does, like
that dago fellow Columbus claimed America for Queen Isabella. Claiming a star as your own has every
bit as much logic to it."
I thought about it and realized Dad was right. He was always figuring out things like that.
I could have any star I wanted, Dad said, except Betelgeuse and Rigel, because Lori and Brian had
already laid claim to them.
I looked up to the stars and tried to figure out which was the best one. You could see hundreds, maybe
thousands or even millions, twinkling in the clear desert sky. The longer you looked and the more your
eyes adjusted to the dark, the more stars you'd see, layer after layer of them gradually becoming visible.
There was one in particular, in the west above the mountains but low in the sky, that shone more
brightly than all the rest.
"I want that one," I said.
Dad grinned. "That's Venus," he said. Venus was only a planet, he went on, and pretty dinky compared
to real stars. She looked bigger and brighter because she was much closer than the stars. Poor old Venus
didn't even make her own light, Dad said. She shone only from reflected light. He explained to me that
planets glowed because reflected light was constant, and stars twinkled because their light pulsed.
"I like it anyway," I said. I had admired Venus even before that Christmas. You could see it in the early
evening, glowing on the western horizon, and if you got up early, you could still see it in the morning,
after all the stars had disappeared.
"What the hell," Dad said. "It's Christmas. You can have a planet if you want."
And he gave me Venus.
That evening over Christmas dinner, we all discussed outer space. Dad explained lightyears and black
holes and quasars and told us about the special qualities of Betelgeuse, Rigel, and Venus.
Betelgeuse was a red star in the shoulder of the constellation Orion. It was one of the largest stars you
could see in the sky, hundreds of times bigger than the sun. It had burned brightly for millions of years
and would soon become a supernova and burn out. I got upset that Lori had chosen a clunker of a star,
but Dad explained that. "soon" meant hundreds of thousands of years when you were talking about
stars.
Rigel was a blue star, smaller than Betelgeuse, Dad said, but even brighter. It was also in Orion—it was
his left foot, which seemed appropriate, because Brian was an extrafast runner.
Venus didn't have any moons or satellites or even a magnetic field, but it did have an atmosphere sort of
similar to Earth's, except it was superhot—about five hundred degrees or more. "So," Dad said. "when
the sun starts to burn out and Earth turns cold, everyone here might want to move to Venus to get warm.
And they'll have to get permission from your descendants first."
We laughed about all the kids who believed in the Santa myth and got nothing for Christmas but a
bunch of cheap plastic toys. "Years from now, when all the junk they got is broken and long forgotten,"
Dad said, "you'll still have your stars."
AT TWILIGHT, ONCE the sun had slid behind the Palen Mountains, the bats came out and swirled
through the sky above the shacks of Midland. The old lady who lived next door warned us away from
bats. She called them flying rats and said one got caught in her hair once and went crazy clawing at her
scalp. But I loved those ugly little bats, the way they darted past, their wings in a furious blur. Dad
explained how they had sonar detectors kind of like the ones in nuclear submarines. Brian and I would
throw pebbles, hoping the bats would think they were bugs and eat them, and the weight of the pebbles
would pull them down and we could keep them as pets, tying a long string to their claw so they could
still fly around. I wanted to train one to hang upside down from my finger. But those darn bats were too
clever to fall for our trick.
The bats were out, swooping and screeching, when we left Midland for Blythe. Earlier that day, Mom
had told us that the baby had decided it was big enough to come out soon and join the family. Once we
were on the road, Dad and Mom got in a big fight over how many months she'd been pregnant. Mom
said she was ten months pregnant. Dad, who had fixed someone's transmission earlier that day and used
the money he'd made to buy a bottle of tequila, said she probably lost track somewhere.
"I always carry children longer than most women," Mom said. "Lori was in my womb for fourteen
months."
"Bullshit!" Dad said. "Unless Lori's part elephant."
"Don't you make fun of me or my children!" Mom yelled. "Some babies are premature. Mine were all
postmature. That's why they're so smart. Their brains had longer to develop."
Dad said something about freaks of nature, and Mom called Dad a Mr. KnowItAll SmartyPants who
refused to believe that she was special. Dad said something about Jesus H. Christ on a goddamn crutch
not taking that much time to gestate. Mom got upset at Dad's blasphemy, reached her foot over to the
driver's side, and stomped on the brake. It was the middle of the night, and Mom bolted out of the car
and ran into the darkness.
"You crazy bitch!" Dad hollered. "Get your goddamn ass back in this car!"
"You make me, Mr. Tough Guy!" she screamed as she ran away.
Dad jerked the steering wheel to one side and drove off the road into the desert after her. Lori, Brian,
and I braced one another with our arms, like we always did when Dad went on some wild chase that we
knew would get bumpy.
Dad stuck his head out the window as he drove, hollering at Mom, calling her a. "stupid whore" and a.
"stinking cunt" and ordering her to get back into the car. Mom refused. She was ahead of us, bobbing in
and out of the desert brush. Since she never used curse words, she was calling Dad names like.
"blanketyblank" and. "worthless drunk soandso." Dad stopped the car, then jammed down the
accelerator and popped the clutch. We shot forward toward Mom, who screamed and jumped out of the
way. Dad turned around and went for her again.
It was a moonless night, so we couldn't see Mom except when she ran into the beam of the headlights.
She kept looking over her shoulder, her eyes wide like a hunted animal's. We kids cried and begged Dad
to stop, but he ignored us. I was even more worried about the baby inside Mom's swollen belly than I
was about her. The car bounced on holes and rocks, brush scratching against its sides and dust coming
through the open windows. Finally, Dad cornered Mom against some rocks. I was afraid he might
smush her with the car, but instead he got out and dragged her back, legs flailing, and threw her into the
car. We banged back through the desert and onto the road. Everyone was quiet except Mom, who was
sobbing that she really did carry Lori for fourteen months.
***
Mom and Dad made up the next day, and by late afternoon Mom was cutting Dad's hair in the living
room of the apartment we'd rented in Blythe. He'd taken off his shirt and was sitting backward on a
chair with his head bowed and his hair combed forward. Mom was snipping away while Dad pointed
out the parts that were still too long. When they were finished, Dad combed his hair back and
announced that Mom had done a helluva fine shearing job.
Our apartment was in a onestory cinderblock building on the outskirts of town. It had a big blueand
white plastic sign in the shape of an oval, and a boomerang that said: THE LBJ APARTMENTS. I
thought it stood for Lori, Brian, and Jeannette, but Mom said LBJ were the initials of the president,
who, she added, was a crook and a warmonger. A few truck drivers and cowboys had rooms at the LBJ
Apartments, but most of the other people who lived there were migrant workers and their families, and
we heard them talking through the thin Sheetrock walls. Mom said it was one of the bonuses of living
at the LBJ Apartments, because we'd be able to pick up a little Spanish without even studying.
Blythe was in California, but the Arizona border was within spitting distance. People who lived there
liked to say the town was 150 miles west of Phoenix, 250 miles east of Los Angeles, and smack dab in
the middle of nowhere. But they always said it like they were bragging.
Mom and Dad weren't exactly crazy about Blythe. Too civilized, they said, and downright unnatural,
too, since no town the size of Blythe had any business existing out in the Mojave Desert. It was near the
Colorado River, founded back in the nineteenth century by some guy who figured he could get rich
turning the desert into farmland. He dug a bunch of irrigation ditches that drained water out of the
Colorado River to grow lettuce and grapes and broccoli right there in the middle of all the cactus and
sagebrush. Dad got disgusted every time we drove past one of those farm fields with their irrigation
ditches wide as moats. "It's a goddamn perversion of nature," he'd say. "If you want to live in the
farmland, haul your sorry hide off to Pennsylvania. If you want to live in the desert, eat prickly pears,
not iceberg pansyassed lettuce."
"That's right," Mom would say. "Prickly pears have more vitamins anyway."
Living in a big city like Blythe meant I had to wear shoes. It also meant I had to go to school.
School wasn't so bad. I was in the first grade, and my teacher, Miss Cook, always chose me to read
aloud when the principal came into the classroom. The other students didn't like me very much because
I was so tall and pale and skinny and always raised my hand too fast and waved it frantically in the air
whenever Miss Cook asked a question. A few days after I started school, four Mexican girls followed
me home and jumped me in an alleyway near the LBJ Apartments. They beat me up pretty bad, pulling
my hair and tearing my clothes and calling me a teacher's pet and a matchstick.
I came home that night with scraped knees and elbows and a busted lip. "Looks to me like you got in a
fight," Dad said. He was sitting at the table, taking apart an old alarm clock with Brian.
"Just a little dustup," I said. That was the word Dad always used after he'd been in a fight.
"How many were there?"
"Six," I lied.
"Is that split lip okay?" he asked.
"This lil' ol' scratch?" I asked. "You should have seen what I did to them."
"That's my girl!" Dad said and went back to the clock, but Brian kept looking over at me.
The next day when I got to the alley, the Mexican girls were waiting for me. Before they could attack,
Brian jumped out from behind a clump of sagebrush, waving a yucca branch. Brian was shorter than
me and just as skinny, with freckles across his nose and sandy red hair that fell into his eyes. He wore
my handmedown pants, which I had inherited from Lori and then passed on to him, and they were
always sliding off his bony behind.
"Just back off now, and everyone can walk away with all their limbs still attached," Brian said. It was
another one of Dad's lines.
The Mexican girls stared at him before bursting into laughter. Then they surrounded him. Brian did
fairly well fending them off until the yucca branch broke. Then he disappeared beneath a flurry of
swinging fists and kicking feet. I grabbed the biggest rock I could find and hit one of the girls on the
head with it. From the jolt in my arm, I thought I'd cracked her skull. She sank to her knees. One of her
friends pushed me to the ground and kicked me in the face; then they all ran off, the girl I had hit
holding her head as she staggered along.
Brian and I sat up. His face was covered with sand. All I could see were his blue eyes peering out and a
couple of spots of blood seeping through. I wanted to hug him, but that would have been too weird.
Brian stood up and gestured for me to follow him. We climbed through a hole in the chainlink fence he
had discovered that morning and ran into the iceberglettuce farm next to the apartment building. I
followed him through the rows of big green leaves, and we eventually settled down to feast, burying our
faces in the huge wet heads of lettuce and eating until our stomachs ached.
"I guess we scared them off pretty good," I said to Brian.
"I guess," he said.
He never liked to brag, but I could tell he was proud that he had taken on four bigger, tougher kids, even
if they were girls.
"Lettuce war!" Brian shouted. He tossed a halfeaten head at me like a grenade. We ran along the rows,
pulling up heads and throwing them at each other. A crop duster flew overhead. We waved as it made a
pass above the field. A cloud sprayed out from behind the plane, and a fine white powder came
sprinkling down on our heads.
***
Two months after we moved to Blythe, when Mom said she was twelve months pregnant, she at last
gave birth. After she'd been in the hospital for two days, we all drove out to pick her up. Dad left us kids
waiting in the car with the engine idling while he went in for Mom. They came running out with Dad's
arm around Mom's shoulders. Mom was cradling a bundle in her arms and giggling sort of guiltily, like
she'd stolen a candy bar from a dime store. I figured they had checked out Rex Walls–style.
"What is it?" Lori asked as we sped away.
"Girl!" Mom said.
Mom handed me the baby. I was going to turn six in a few months, and Mom said I was mature enough
to hold her the entire way home. The baby was pink and wrinkly but absolutely beautiful, with big blue
eyes, soft wisps of blond hair, and the tiniest fingernails I had ever seen. She moved in confused, jerky
motions, as if she couldn't understand why Mom's belly wasn't still around her. I promised her I'd
always take care of her.
The baby went without a name for weeks. Mom said she wanted to study it first, the way she would the
subject of a painting. We had a lot of arguments over what the name should be. I wanted to call her
Rosita, after the prettiest girl in my class, but Mom said that name was too Mexican.
"I thought we weren't supposed to be prejudiced," I said.
"It's not being prejudiced," Mom said. "It's a matter of accuracy in labeling."
She told us that both our grandmothers were angry because neither Lori nor I had been named after
them, so she decided to call the baby Lilly Ruth Maureen. Lilly was Mom's mother's name, and Erma
Ruth was Dad's mother's name. But we'd call the baby Maureen, a name Mom liked because it was a
diminutive of Mary, so she'd also be naming the baby after herself but pretty much no one would know
it. That, Dad told us, would make everyone happy except his mom, who hated the name Ruth and
wanted the baby called Erma, and Mom's mom, who would hate sharing her namesake with Dad's
mom.
A FEW MONTHS AFTER Maureen was born, a squad car tried to pull us over because the brake
lights on the Green Caboose weren't working. Dad took off. He said that if the cops stopped us, they'd
find out that we had no registration or insurance and that the license plate had been taken off another
car, and they'd arrest us all. After barreling down the highway, he made a screeching Uturn, with us
kids feeling like the car was going to tumble over on its side, but the squad car made one, too. Dad
peeled through Blythe at a hundred miles an hour, ran a red light, cut the wrong way up a oneway
street, the other cars honking and pulling over. He made a few more turns, then headed down an alley
and found an empty garage to hide in.
We heard the sound of the siren a couple of blocks away and then it faded. Dad said that since the
gestapo would have their eyes out for the Green Caboose, we'd have to leave it in the garage and walk
home.
The next day he announced that Blythe had become a little too hot and we were hitting the road again.
This time he knew where we were going. Dad had been doing some research and settled on a town in
northern Nevada called Battle Mountain. There was gold in Battle Mountain, Dad said, and he intended
to go after it with the Prospector. Finally, we were going to strike it rich.
Mom and Dad rented a great big UHaul truck. Mom explained that since only she and Dad could fit in
the front of the UHaul, Lori, Brian, Maureen, and I were in for a treat: We got to ride in the back. It
would be fun, she said, a real adventure, but there wouldn't be any light, so we would have to use all our
resources to entertain one another. Plus we were not allowed to talk. Since it was illegal to ride in the
back, anyone who heard us might call the cops. Mom told us the trip would be about fourteen hours if
we took the highway, but we should tack on another couple of hours because we might make some
scenic detours.
We packed up what furniture we had. There wasn't much, mostly parts for the Prospector and a couple
of chairs and Mom's oil paintings and art supplies. When we were ready to leave, Mom wrapped
Maureen in a lavender blanket and passed her to me, and we kids all climbed into the back of the U
Haul. Dad closed the doors. It was pitch black and the air smelled stale and dusty. We were sitting on
the ribbed wooden floor, on frayed, stained blankets used to wrap furniture, feeling for one another with
our hands.
"Here goes the adventure!" I whispered.
"Shhhh!" Lori said.
The UHaul started up and lurched forward. Maureen let loose with a loud, highpitched wail. I shushed
her and rocked her and patted her, but she kept crying. So I gave her to Lori, who whispered singsong
into her ear and told jokes. That didn't work, either, so we begged Maureen to please stop crying. Then
we just put our hands over our ears.
After a while, it got cold and uncomfortable in the back of the dark UHaul. The engine made the floor
vibrate, and we'd all go tumbling whenever we hit a bump. Several hours passed. By then we were all
dying to pee and wondering if Dad was going to pull over for a rest stop. Suddenly, with a bang, we hit
a huge pothole and the back doors on the UHaul flew open. The wind shrieked through the
compartment. We were afraid we were going to get sucked out, and we all shrank back against the
Prospector. The moon was out. We could see the glow from the UHaul's taillights and the road we'd
come down, stretching back through the silvery desert. The unlocked doors swung back and forth with
loud clangs.
Since the furniture was stored between us and the cabin, we couldn't knock on the wall to get Mom's
and Dad's attention. We banged on the sides of the UHaul and hollered as loud as we could, but the
engine was too noisy and they didn't hear us.
Brian crawled to the back of the van. When one of the doors swung in, he grabbed at it, but it flew open
again, jerking him forward. I thought the door was going to drag Brian out, but he jumped back just in
time and scrambled along the wooden floor toward Lori and me.
Brian and Lori held tight to the Prospector, which Dad had tied securely with ropes. I was holding
Maureen, who for some strange reason had stopped crying. I wedged myself into a corner. It seemed
like we'd have to ride it out.
Then a pair of headlights appeared way in the distance behind us. We watched as the car slowly caught
up with the UHaul. After a few minutes, it pulled up right behind us, and its headlights caught us there
in the back of the cab. The car started honking and flashing its brights. Then it pulled up and passed us.
The driver must have signaled Mom and Dad, because the UHaul slowed to a stop and Dad came
running back with a flashlight.
"What the hell is going on?" he asked. He was furious. We tried to explain that it wasn't our fault the
doors blew open, but he was still angry. I knew that he was scared, too. Maybe even more scared than
angry.
"Was that a cop?" Brian asked.
"No," Dad said. "And you're sure as hell lucky it wasn't, or he'd be hauling your asses off to jail."
After we peed, we climbed back into the truck and watched as Dad closed the doors. The darkness
enveloped us again. We could hear Dad locking the doors and doublechecking them. The engine
restarted, and we continued on our way.
BATTLE MOUNTAIN HAD started out as a mining post, settled a hundred years earlier by people
hoping to strike it rich, but if anyone ever had struck it rich in Battle Mountain, they must have moved
somewhere else to spend their fortune. Nothing about the town was grand except the big empty sky and,
off in the distance, the stony purple Tuscarora Mountains running down to the tableflat desert.
The main street was wide—with sunbleached cars and pickups parked at an angle to the curb—but
only a few blocks long, flanked on both sides with low, flatroofed buildings made of adobe or brick. A
single streetlight flashed red day and night. Along Main Street was a grocery store, a drugstore, a Ford
dealership, a Greyhound bus station, and two big casinos, the Owl Club and the Nevada Hotel. The
buildings, which seemed puny under the huge sky, had neon signs that didn't look like they were on
during the day because the sun was so bright.
We moved into a wooden building on the edge of town that had once been a railroad depot. It was two
stories tall and painted an industrial green, and was so close to the railroad tracks that you could wave
to the engineer from the front window. Our new home was one of the oldest buildings in town, Mom
proudly told us, with a real frontier quality to it.
Mom and Dad's bedroom was on the second floor, where the station manager once had his office. We
kids slept downstairs in what had been the waiting room. The old restrooms were still there, but the
toilet had been ripped out of one and a bathtub put in its place. The ticket booth had been converted into
a kitchen. Some of the original benches were still bolted to the unpainted wood walls, and you could
see the dark, worn spots where prospectors and miners and their wives and children had sat waiting for
the train, their behinds polishing the wood.
Since we didn't have money for furniture, we improvised. A bunch of huge wooden spools, the kind that
hold industrial cable, had been dumped on the side of the tracks not far from our house, so we rolled
them home and turned them into tables. "What kind of fools would go waste money on storebought
tables when they can have these for free?" Dad said as he pounded the tops of the spools to show us
how sturdy they were.
For chairs, we used some smaller spools and a few crates. Instead of beds, we kids each slept in a big
cardboard box, like the ones refrigerators get delivered in. A little while after we'd moved into the
depot, we heard Mom and Dad talking about buying us kids real beds, and we said they shouldn't do it.
We liked our boxes. They made going to bed seem like an adventure.
***
Shortly after we moved into the depot, Mom decided that what we really needed was a piano. Dad
found a cheap upright when a saloon in the next town over went out of business, and he borrowed a
neighbor's pickup to bring it home. We slid it off the pickup down a ramp, but it was too heavy to carry.
To get it into the depot, Dad devised a system of ropes and pulleys that he attached to the piano in the
front yard and ran through the house and out the back door, where they were tied to the pickup. The
plan was for Mom to ease the truck forward, pulling the piano into the house while Dad and we kids
guided it up a ramp of planks and through the front door.
"Ready!" Dad hollered when we were all in our positions.
"Okeydoke!" Mom shouted. But instead of easing forward, Mom, who had never quite gotten the hang
of driving, hit the gas pedal hard, and the truck shot ahead. The piano jerked out of our hands, sending
us lurching forward, and bounced into the house, splintering the door frame. Dad screamed at Mom to
slow down, but she kept going and dragged the screeching, chordbanging piano across the depot floor
and right through the rear door, splintering its frame, too, then out into the backyard, where it came to
rest next to a thorny bush.
Dad came running through the house. "What the Sam Hill were you doing?" he yelled at Mom. "I told
you to go slow!"
"I was only doing twentyfive!" Mom said. "You get mad at me when I go that slow on the highway."
She looked behind her and saw the piano sitting in the backyard. "Oopsiedaisy," she said.
Mom wanted to turn around and drag it back into the house from the other direction, but Dad said that
was impossible because the railroad tracks were too close to the front door to get the pickup in position.
So the piano stayed where it was. On the days Mom felt inspired, she took her sheet music and one of
our spool chairs outside and pounded away at her music back there. "Most pianists never get the chance
to play in the great outofdoors," she said. "And now the whole neighborhood can enjoy the music,
too."
DAD GOT A JOB AS an electrician in a barite mine. He left early and came home early, and in the
afternoons we all played games. Dad taught us cards. He tried to show us how to be steelyeyed poker
players, but I wasn't very good. Dad said you could read my face like a traffic light. Even though I
wasn't much of a bluffer, I'd sometimes win a hand because I was always getting excited by even
mediocre cards, like a pair of fives, which made Brian and Lori think I'd been dealt aces. Dad also
invented games for us to play, like the Ergo Game, in which he'd make two statements of fact and we
had to answer a question based on those statements, or else say. "Insufficient information to draw a
conclusion" and explain why.
When Dad wasn't there, we invented our own games. We didn't have many toys, but you didn't need toys
in a place like Battle Mountain. We'd get a piece of cardboard and go tobogganing down the depot's
narrow staircase. We'd jump off the roof of the depot, using an armysurplus blanket as our parachute
and letting our legs buckle under us when we hit the ground, like Dad had taught us real parachutists
do. We'd put a piece of scrap metal—or a penny, if we were feeling extravagant—on the railroad tracks
right before the train came. After the train had roared by, the massive wheels churning, we'd run to get
our newly flattened, hot and shiny piece of metal.
The thing we liked to do most was go exploring in the desert. We'd get up at dawn, my favorite time,
when the shadows were long and purple and you still had the whole day ahead of you. Sometimes Dad
went with us, and we'd march through the sagebrush militarystyle, with Dad calling out orders in a
singsong chant—hup, two, three, four—and then we'd stop and do pushups or Dad would hold out his
arm so we could do pullups on it. Mostly, Brian and I went exploring by ourselves. That desert was
filled with all sorts of amazing treasures.
We had moved to Battle Mountain because of the gold in the area, but the desert also had tons of other
mineral deposits. There was silver and copper and uranium and barite, which Dad said oildrilling rigs
used. Mom and Dad could tell what kind of minerals and ore were in the ground from the color of the
rock and soil, and they taught us what to look for. Iron was in the red rocks, copper in the green. There
was so much turquoise—nuggets and even big chunks of it lying on the desert floor—that Brian and I
could fill our pockets with it until the weight practically pulled our pants down. You could also find
arrowheads and fossils and old bottles that had turned deep purple from lying under the broiling sun for
years. You could find the sunparched skulls of coyotes and empty tortoise shells and the rattles and
shed skins of rattlesnakes. And you could find great big bullfrogs that had stayed in the sun too long
and were completely dried up and as light as a piece of paper.
On Sunday night, if Dad had money, we'd all go to the Owl Club for dinner. The Owl Club was. "World
Famous," according to the sign, where a hoot owl wearing a chef's hat pointed the way to the entrance.
Off to one side was a room with rows of slot machines that were constantly clinking and ticking and
flashing lights. Mom said the slot players were hypnotized. Dad said they were damn fools. "Never play
the slots," Dad told us. "They're for suckers who rely on luck." Dad knew all about statistics, and he
explained how the casinos stacked the odds against the slot players. When Dad gambled, he preferred
poker and pool—games of skill, not chance. "Whoever coined the phrase 'a man's got to play the hand
that was dealt him' was most certainly one pisspoor bluffer," Dad said.
The Owl Club had a bar where groups of men with sunburned necks huddled together over beers and
cigarettes. They all knew Dad, and whenever he walked in, they insulted him in a loud funny way that
was meant to be friendly. "This joint must be going to hell in a handbasket if they're letting in sorryass
characters like you!" they'd shout.
"Hell, my presence here has a positively elevating effect compared to you mangy coyotes," Dad would
yell back. They'd all throw their heads back and laugh and slap one another between the shoulder
blades.
We always sat at one of the red booths. "Such good manners," the waitress would exclaim, because
Mom and Dad made us say. "sir" and. "ma'am" and. "yes, please" and. "thank you."
"They're damned smart, too!" Dad would declare. "Finest damn kids ever walked the planet." And we'd
smile and order hamburgers or chili dogs and milk shakes and big plates of onion rings that glistened
with hot grease. The waitress brought the food to the table and poured the milk shakes from a sweating
metal container into our glasses. There was always some left over, so she kept the container on the table
for us to finish. "Looks like you hit the jackpot and got something extra," she'd say with a wink. We
always left the Owl Club so stuffed we could hardly walk. "Let's waddle home, kids," Dad would say.
The barite mine where Dad worked had a commissary, and the mine owner deducted our bill and the
rent for the depot out of Dad's paycheck every month. At the beginning of each week, we went to the
commissary and brought home bags and bags of food. Mom said only people brainwashed by
advertising bought prepared foods such as SpaghettiOs and TV dinners. She bought the basics: sacks of
flour or cornmeal, powdered milk, onions, potatoes, twentypound bags of rice or pinto beans, salt,
sugar, yeast for making bread, cans of jack mackerel, a canned ham or a fat slab of bologna, and for
dessert, cans of sliced peaches.
Mom didn't like cooking much. "Why spend the afternoon making a meal that will be gone in an hour,"
she'd ask us, "when in the same amount of time, I can do a painting that will last forever?"—so once a
week or so, she'd fix a big castiron vat of something like fish and rice or, usually, beans. We'd all sort
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