The Glass Castle_ A Memoir - Jeannette Walls [16]
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 sorry-ass old Demon!” Dad called out in the desert night. “Come out and show your butt-ugly face, you yellow-bellied 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 hand-to-hand 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, pen-and-ink 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