Falling From Horses (15 page)

All the horses were six, seven, eight years old—young enough to get the job done but old enough to be well broke. Harold had a good eye for smart, sound horses that had lived a little and learned a lot. They were all experienced picture horses—they hardly even twitched when guns went off right by their heads. The trouble wasn't with the horses, usually, but with actors who didn't know a damn thing about riding a horse but liked to pretend they'd grown up with Tom Mix on a ranch in Texas. A fellow who couldn't ride but thought he could was a dangerous nuisance, which I already knew, having learned it the worst way. A lot of the job was just figuring out how much an actor could really handle and matching the horse to the rider. Before I took a horse over to an actor I might have to get on myself and ride him until he settled down—taking the top off is what we used to call it.

Harold wanted us to stay close to the horses all the time. We had to watch out for an actor doing something stupid that might cause a horse to misbehave, or a crew member walking up behind a horse who wasn't expecting it or thinking it might be funny to play a prank involving a burr under a saddle. Diamond had a reputation for reliable horses, horses safe for any greenhorn actor to ride, and Harold didn't want that reputation wrecked by one of his horses going suddenly wild, bucking off some handsome hero wearing a fancy shirt.

When a horse was in front of the camera, I sometimes had to crouch down out of sight and hold his leg to keep him standing still while they were getting a close-up shot of the guy on his back playing a guitar and singing. Or I might have to poke a horse in the hindquarters when they wanted a shot of him tossing his head and snorting. I was the pickup man, too, which was what I had seen Jake doing that first evening, walking out to where the horses had been left standing and leading them back in. Wranglers for the big studios sometimes were called on to ride out and grab the traces of a buckboard or stagecoach, but the cheap studios we were working for filled in those scenes with cut ends, so I never did get to stop any runaways.

I had come into this job with a vague notion that moviemaking would be like watching a movie, but I got over that right away. For one thing, the scenes that used our horses were pretty tame: the actors would amble along speaking their lines with the boom mike overhead, or they'd gallop a short way straight toward the camera, then pull up hard, jump down, and crouch behind a plaster rock, something like that. Since Diamond Barns mostly rented out horses for chapter pictures and cheap features, all the fast action—the chases, stampedes, and horse falls—were clipped from older movies and then spliced in with the new film in a cutting room.

When there was action, it was mostly away from the horses—saloon brawls that broke all the furniture and sent the whiskey bottles flying, gun battles between the bad guys and the hero. When you saw them up close, the fistfights looked pretty phony: long, looping punches with unclosed fists, and some guy off camera slapping a boxing glove against a big pink ham to fake the sound of knuckles hitting a jaw. The gun battles, if they weren't using a long lens and rubber pistols, could look more like the real thing—squibs full of fake blood and real pistols and rifles shooting blanks—but they didn't let the camera run the whole time the scene played out. They were always stopping, moving the camera setup, then starting again in short overlapping runs, so it never felt like I was watching a movie. After a week or two I stopped paying much attention to the filming except when I had to, when Diamond's horses were in the shot.

Even on the sets where they were shooting very fast and wrapping up the outdoor work in two or three days, there was a lot of waiting around. The background extras would get together and play cards, and I guess I could have joined them; it would have been all right with Harold so long as I kept an eye on the horses. But I was into the habit of keeping to myself, so I spent the loose time mostly reading paperback books I borrowed from Hugh, who had a collection of Tarzan adventures and lurid stories about tentacled monsters grabbing hold of buxom young women. If I found a newspaper lying around, I'd read through every bit of it. I remember that was the year the Yankees swept the Cubs in the World Series, and Seabiscuit beat War Admiral in a match race. I read about a ballet called
Billy the Kid
opening in Chicago. And that was the year France and Germany signed a treaty promising neither of them would attack the other.

On movie days we didn't have time for anything but toast and coffee for breakfast, and the box lunch every studio put out was never much more than a stale sandwich and an orange. At night we ate a lot of canned meat and canned tomatoes and peaches, or peanut butter and crackers, right before we headed for bed. I wasn't exactly going hungry in those first couple of weeks, but it didn't take long to get tired of crackers. So one time when we got back to the house earlier than usual, I rummaged around in Harold's kitchen and cooked up a pot of soup from dried peas, a hunk of canned ham, and a couple of onions and spuds that had softened and started to sprout. Jake had already gone back to town to have supper with his family, so it was just Harold and Hugh and me. When Harold finished his soup, he leaned back with a cigarette and asked, “Where'd you learn to cook? Your mother teach you?”

I had learned to cook mostly from my dad and my grandmother—my mother worked outside with the cows and horses—but I wasn't interested in getting into any of that with Harold. I said, “I was helping out the cook on a dude ranch last summer,” which wasn't quite what he had asked me. “I'm not any kind of fancy cook, but I know enough to put food on the table if I have the groceries.”

He considered this for a minute, then pulled out his wallet and unfolded a couple of bills and laid them on the table in front of me. “Groceries,” he said.

After that, while the others were feeding and watering the livestock in the evening, I was usually in the kitchen putting supper on the table. My cooking was pretty plain and ran mostly to what I could fry up in a hurry, but it was better than peanut butter and crackers.

When we weren't hauling horses to a movie set, Harold kept us busy with the sort of work I had done all my life: fixing fence, grooming horses and doctoring them, repairing leather goods. But most days were movie days, and we put in such long hours I was always tired out by the time I got to bed, and then I'd have trouble falling asleep. I wasn't thinking about home, or not often, but my mind would fasten on something—it could be anything, not even a worry, just something that had happened that day or a remark one of the others had made—and circle around and around it, the way you rub your thumb over a ragged hangnail. When that happened, I was lucky to get three or four hours' sleep at night. Some nights I'd get to sleep right away, then wake up an hour later. I envied Hugh, who could sleep anywhere—in the truck, or lying on the grass with the hubbub of moviemaking going on around him. Sometimes, as we sat talking in the living room of Harold's house, Hugh's chin would just drop to his chest and he'd nod off.

Hugh and his brother had been homesteaders up in eastern Colorado before a string of dry years drove them out. They had drifted south to Los Angeles, where Hugh landed a job driving truck for a heavy hauler, and after the hauler went out of business he wound up working for Harold. He'd been there about a year before I showed up. I guess you could say he was one of those sodbusters I had so much disdain for, and he wore the same filthy pants every damn day and snuffled annoyingly from an adenoid problem, plus he had a loud, high-pitched voice to make up for being a little bit deaf. But he was a hard worker, tireless as hell, and he didn't seem to mind giving up half his bedroom to me.

I shared that bedroom with Hugh for four months without making much effort to get well acquainted, but a lot of nights after we turned out the light, we'd lie in those twin beds swapping dirty jokes and grandiose plans. Mine were all about being a movie cowboy, but Hugh's plan was to save up his money so he and his brother could buy a tourist court. They had a particular one in mind, a place near Yellowstone Park where they had stayed one time on their way to California. Well, they never bought the motor court, but years later I heard from Harold that Hugh had wound up writing for the smut business.

It didn't surprise me much. The dirty stories he used to tell weren't so much jokes as elaborate tales of sexual conquest. On the wall opposite our beds there was a painting of a young Mexican woman with long black braids and a white dress embroidered with red and orange flowers, a dress that showed off her round bosom. Hugh would start out saying that the girl in the painting reminded him of someone he'd met that day on the movie set—a different girl every day, no matter what location he was working at. “She was wearing an outfit like that,” he'd say, or “She was wearing one of those Injun wigs with braids like that,” and then he'd describe how the two of them had wandered off behind some bushes, where he'd persuaded her to open up the front of her dress and show him her “bumps” and then lift up the hem of her skirt and show him what was down there between her legs—“turned out her hair wasn't dark at all, the wig had sure fooled me”—and eventually, of course, let him touch her in all sorts of places and then have sex with him in various ways. He spun it out, describing every bit of the girl's body in detail, and everything the two of them did, and what both of them said, imitating the girl's virtuous refusals in an accented falsetto voice, and then her giggles and sighs as she gave in to his persistence.

A few years back I tried to find that painting, or one like it, to buy for Hugh—I had heard he was sick with emphysema and living in a nursing home in Encino. When I couldn't find that Mexican girl, I sent him one like we'd had in the bathroom, a solemn child in a serape, and when he called me up to thank me for it, he laughed and said, “But what the hell, Bud, did you think I was too sick to want that little senorita to fuck?”

Hugh was a few years older than me, but I don't know how much actual experience he'd had in those Hollywood days—I'm guessing not a lot. I only know I learned quite a few things about women's anatomy from those bedtime stories of his.

AFTER HAROLD HAD PAID ME A FEW TIMES
, and I was pretty sure I had the job nailed down, I phoned my folks. I called at suppertime, when I thought they might both be in the house, but when Mom answered she said Dad had driven into town to pick up some hardware for the pump. I told her where I was and what I was doing. She was surprised, and interested to hear about the horses, but the names of the actors and the things I told her about moviemaking didn't mean much to her. She had read more than a few cowboy romances, but I could remember only half a dozen times when she'd gone with us to see a picture show.

We talked about the weather. When I told her it was still hot and dry down in California, summer weather in the first week of November, she seemed not to know what this meant—as if I'd told her about a strange dream that made sense only to the dreamer. It had snowed on them twice already, five or six inches, and they'd been seeing hard frost just about every night. She said the house they were living in had a bad roof that leaked onto the porch, and when the wet places froze overnight you had to be careful not to slip and fall when you stepped out in the morning or went out to the toilet at night.

I said, “Maybe Dad should roof the house,” and after a little silence she said the owner wouldn't pay for a new roof, but Dad had climbed up there and patched the part that overhung the porch.

She asked me where I was rooming, and I told her about Harold's house and the silent-movie star who used to live there. When she asked if I was eating right, I told her about the lunch they put out on the film sets, and about cooking supper for Harold and Hugh. She said, “You always did like to cook, Bud. Your dad liked it more than I did, so I guess you take after him in that way.” This was something she'd said often, and it was my dad who always said, “Well, honey, Mary Claudine takes after you.”

I asked her about the hay crop and the rainfall and the calf crop, but I didn't pay much attention to the answers. It frankly didn't matter to me if the hay was poor or the calves weren't putting on weight, because the place wasn't theirs, they were just hired help.

When we ran out of things to talk about, I said, “Tell Dad hello,” and she said, “He'll be back in a couple of hours if you want to call again.”

I was standing in a telephone booth in front of Santa Ana Pictures, down in Gower Gulch. We'd been shooting in a quarter-acre vacant lot behind their office, and I knew we'd be there the rest of the day, but I said, “Well, we're about to head out to a movie set over in the park.” When she didn't say anything to that, I said, “Maybe I'll call next week.”

“That's all right, Bud,” she said after a moment. “He'll be sorry he missed you, but I'll tell him you're doing good.”

It would be years before I heard the real story about the icy porch. Mom didn't see him fall, and Dad never did remember how it happened, but she had come in from the barn and found him lying there with a plum-colored egg on his forehead, eyes open but not able to speak or get up. She couldn't get him to his feet by herself, so she bundled him in blankets and just sat there talking to him until he came back to himself. She never gave a thought to phoning the neighbors, and of course after he was able to stand up and walk around and answer what year it was and who the president was, neither of them considered that he should have been brought to a doctor.

Even if she had told me all that when I phoned her up, I wouldn't have considered it a reason to go back home. More likely I would have thought it was another reason to stay away, which maybe she knew, and maybe was the reason she didn't tell me about it at the time.