Falling From Horses (20 page)

I had thought I might have trouble with the sorrel, that he might veer off in his own stubborn direction or not have the legs to keep up with the others, but he lit out at a hard run—I lost my hat on the first jump—and he wormed his way into the middle of the pack and settled there. I leaned out over his stretched neck, ropes of his slobber trailing back in my face. Clods of dirt and grass flew up in a pelting rain. We were galloping so close together that I could have reached out and touched the man on either side of me. We raced out along the dolly rails, chasing the dust plume of Deets's horse, and when we swept past the camera I saw it swivel to follow us, the grip pushing the dolly along the rails a short way to give the scene more of a rush.

The whole chase didn't last much more than a minute. Deets pulled to a stop at the edge of the willows, and the rest of us barreled up to him and brought our horses on their tails. I don't know if I thought it at the time—not in words, anyway—but if I could have kept racing like that until my horse wore himself out and lay down underneath me, I think I would have been glad to do it.

EVERY RIDER WORKING THAT DAY
was well acquainted with the cold-jawed son-of-a-bitch horse I was riding, which is why he'd been the last one standing in Verle's picket line. Somewhere or other that horse had learned all manner of low tricks, and once you had ridden him you would go to some trouble to keep from riding him again. Somebody had named him Prince, so whoever was stuck with him was naturally dubbed the Prince of Fools, a label that got shortened to Fool and trailed me for most of the time I worked in the movies. But the men had all had plenty of practice keeping a straight face when a newcomer got stuck playing the Fool, so they didn't start ribbing me until after we'd finished the chase.

“Hey kid, since you need both hands to steer that horse, maybe you want me to scratch your ass when it itches.”

“Nah, Jerry, he don't need your help. He bounces on the saddle so much he can scratch his ass on the horn.”

And so forth.

In my experience hanging around rodeos and ranches, men wouldn't bother to razz a green hand or a dime-store cowboy, so I took this to mean I had measured up. I said something along the lines of
go-to-hell-why-don't-you
, which seemed to make them happy.

I had been ready to beat the damn horse with a piece of pipe earlier, but by now I was feeling almost warmly toward him. I steered him back along the dolly rails to hunt up my hat, and when we went past Cab he looked over but didn't say a word to me.

They set up the camera at a new place, right at the bottom of a long hill. What Cab wanted for the scene was the outlaw gang exploding over the top of the rise, racing in a tight bunch downhill straight toward the camera, then scattering apart at the last minute, the horses flying by close enough to throw dirt on the lens. He sent a guy out to tie a strand of orange ribbon to a clump of greasewood so we'd know where to swerve off—“and no damn sooner.” He didn't want all of us breaking in the same direction, so he told each man which way he wanted him to swerve. When he got to me, he said, “I want you to follow Wes there, when he heads off to the right,” and he pointed out a guy sitting on a broad-barreled chestnut. “But if you can't muscle the fucking horse where I'm telling you, just be sure you don't run over the fucking camera. Got the idea?”

I could feel a little blood come into my face. Cab's foul mouth shocked me a bit, to tell the truth. I had grown up in a part of the world where men just didn't swear that much, and even hanging around rodeo grounds I hadn't often heard worse than
son of a bitch.
But I was feeling pretty cocky right then, so I said, “You bet,” trying to get the same tone I'd heard Steve Deets use, and this made a few people crack a smile. Cab was one of them. I didn't know him yet, or I might have seen this as a reason to worry.

We started our run a few hundred yards back so that when we cleared the top of the hill we'd be going flat out. The sorrel liked to gallop, I'll give him that, but for his own inscrutable reasons he wanted to put himself shoulder to shoulder with a big red roan in the middle of the pack, nowhere near Wes's chestnut, and I had all the work I could handle trying to get him lined up behind Wes so we could veer off the way Cab wanted us to. When we came pounding down that hill, the ground streamed by in a blur and I never did see the orange ribbon, but when Wes peeled off to the right I yanked the reins hard over. The sorrel flung his head around, fighting the bit, and cut so close to the camera I think he wound up jumping one of the splayed legs of the tripod. The camera operator's head was down, his eye fixed to the lens—I don't think he knew how close we came to running him over—but I caught a glimpse of Cab perched on a stool behind him, arms folded and shoulders leaning out almost in our path, and Cab didn't flinch a bit. I never got to like Cab much, but I sure admired his nerve.

He was known for keeping a tight schedule and shooting his scenes quickly, but he made us run that chase twice more—he wanted us breaking over the hill faster, he wanted us bunched up tighter, he wasn't happy with the way we were veering off. When he finally had something that suited him, we brought the horses into the shade under a couple of valley oaks and took a break while the crew got busy setting up for a new shot.

Verle had come out to the field by then, driving a truck with a water tank, and he started making the rounds with buckets, watering all the horses. When he got to mine he petted the sorrel's forehead and said sweetly to the horse, “I hear you and that Fool over there are getting along real swell.”

I made a scoffing sound, and Verle looked my way and grinned and said, “I told you he was opinionated.”

I said, “If he was mine, I'd think about shooting him.” I wasn't joking, which I guess Verle could hear.

He ran his hand down the horse's shoulder to the scar on his leg. “Well, he got tripped one too many times with a dubya, and he took a grudge about it. Next thing we knew, he was making up his own mind about what he'd do or not do.”

What I'd heard about the Running W had come mostly from Harold—the dubya was the principal reason he wouldn't let his horses be used for stunts. I hadn't seen one in action yet, but I knew a horse could wind up lamed or dead. Or you'd get a horse like Prince, who had so much hatred for the people who'd tripped him he was ever afterward looking for ways to make a rider's life miserable.

The horse had his nose buried deep in the water bucket. When Verle stroked his long neck he sighed and shifted his hindquarters as if he was making ready for a cow kick, and Verle laughed and took a step back. “He's pigheaded,” he said, “but he looks good on camera and he still likes to run, so we keep him around.” He gave the horse a couple of pats and walked off. Verle was never sentimental about the horses he wrangled for the cameras, but he could find something to like in just about any horse he came across.

Some of the riders were lying on the dry grass, catching a little rest while they could, so I lay down too and pulled my hat over my face. Almost as soon as I shut my eyes I heard Cab call out, “Hey kid, you, what's your name, Frazer.” When I sat up he gestured that I should come over where he was powwowing with Deets. I figured I was about to get my walking papers for some reason, but that wasn't what happened. Cab was sitting in a canvas chair, and he leaned back in it and said, “Have I got you wore out yet?”

My arms and shoulders were aching from fighting the damn horse, but I wasn't about to own up to it. I said, “No sir, I'm doing all right.”

“Well, we're about to shoot this here bulldogging gag, you know what that is?”

I would have known what bulldogging meant if he'd been talking rodeo, but I didn't figure it meant the same thing here. I acted like I knew, though, and just gave him a little nod. He said, “I was gonna let Epps play the bad guy, but now I'm thinking you might could do it. It's an easy gag, you'd get a little extra paid. You want it?”

Deets was looking at the ground, frowning slightly, so I knew Cab wasn't giving me a prize for good riding. But I figured this was a tryout, and if I passed I might get on steady with him, so I said, “You bet,” which caused Cab to give me another of his little smiles.

“Good. Go back over there to the trailers, find the wardrobe guy, and tell him I want you dressed up like Gillis, and then get back here pronto.”

Gillis was the outlaw leader, so the costumer dolled me up in a high-crowned black hat and black leather vest and spurs duded up with copper trimmings. I remember feeling stupidly self-admiring, as if it meant something to be wearing those clothes. Walking back to the setup, I happened to think about Lily, that the next time I saw her I'd be able to say I was riding in pictures now. That in half a day I'd gone from the back of the posse to doubling for one of the principal players.

Lon Epps, the one who had been set to do the gag before Cab gave it to me, and Steve Deets were waiting for me. Epps had a high-bridged nose and a face so deeply tanned that I took him for part Apache, although I heard later he was Dutch or German and came from a tank town in Oklahoma where he had sold barbed wire for a living before he moved over to California and got into movies.

He said to me, “This here bulldog is Carson chasing the outlaw leader, jumping him, knocking him off his horse. But this here won't be like getting bucked off a bronc, if that's what you're thinking. This here horse will be going at a dead run when you bail off. You got to land right, and then you got to hope the other man don't land on you. There ain't no rehearsal, kid, so listen to what we're telling you and maybe you won't get killed.” He looked over at Steve. “Or kill my friend here.”

He and Deets had worked together quite a bit, and they'd done plenty of bulldogging falls. I hadn't known what the gag was called, but as soon as Epps laid it out I knew I had seen plenty of them on the movie screen—a furious chase on horseback and then one rider coming alongside the other and knocking him out of the saddle, both of them hitting the ground together. Deets and Epps had done so many they could almost have done the gag blindfolded, but just because something is routine doesn't make it less dangerous, which they had learned the hard way. And of course I was dangerous on account of I didn't know a damn thing. In the movies, as my dad liked to point out, you never saw anybody break any bones—both men always scrambled to their feet, fists swinging—but in the real world fellows were always being carted off to the hospital when something went wrong with the gag.

Prince wasn't any kind of horse to use for a bulldog—if his rider bailed off, he'd have kept right on running out of LA County—so Verle brought around a couple of horses who were trained for the gag, who knew to run at a steady gallop in a straight line. Deets's horse was another one of those doubles for Wichita Carson's good-looking white stallion, and Verle put me on a plain bay gelding like the one Gillis rode.

We'd be racing along a dirt road with a grassy sloping shoulder, and I only had to make sure the bay ran close to the edge of the road so when I bailed off I could land on the grass and roll downhill. “When we're in our run, look back once or twice like you're worried about me catching up to you,” Deets said, “and then just lean forward like you're urging the horse faster. But don't spur him. Let him set the speed.” The bay knew to keep to a straight line—“He runs true,” is what Verle said—and I could count on him to keep to a regular pace. He knew he was supposed to let Steve's horse catch up and pull almost alongside. He'd be at a gallop, but nowhere near the lickety-split I had seen in so many movies. As I've said, this was a movie trick: they cranked the camera at a slower speed while they were filming, and when they played it back at normal speed it made everything fly by faster than the real thing.

Steve would be the one timing the fall for the camera. When I felt his hand on my shoulder or back—getting ready to grapple me out of the saddle—I was to kick loose of both stirrups and pick a landing spot, point my left shoulder at it, relax everything, and tuck into a somersault roll. “Don't stick your arms out to break the fall or you'll wind up breaking an arm.” And if I could manage it, I should roll to the right when I hit the ground, and Steve would try to roll left so as not to land on top of me.

They went over the gag with me pretty fast because Cab was just about set up, and everybody knew that when he called for action he wanted you right there ready to ride. Then Steve and I jogged back along the road a few hundred yards and waited for the signal to start. The muscles in my shoulders and legs were tight and sore from the riding I'd already done, and by this point I was on edge about the whole thing. I could feel the horse under me picking up on my nerves. Maybe Deets picked it up too. He looked over at me and said, “You know you don't got to jump to your feet afterward like they do in all the pictures. They put that in later with the real actors. I don't know if you had that idea. You just keep rolling—it takes some of the bang out of it—and then you just lay there and get your breath, that's what I do. These falls ain't no cake and pie.”

I had seen guys knocking each other off galloping horses, going sideways or ass over teakettle, in every oater I ever sat through, and they always jumped right up to fight. So I had ideas, for sure. Growing up on horseback, I had fallen plenty of times, been thrown from horses when they stumbled or fell, been rubbed off under trees and clotheslines, been bucked off when a horse was scared or feeling frisky. And I'd been falling off rodeo broncs for more than a year. I hadn't ever deliberately jumped off a horse that was running full out, but I think I shrugged at Deets's warning. I was nineteen years old, putting on an act like I was already an old hand.

We didn't have long to wait. From the bunch of people around the camera, I heard somebody with a bullhorn shout, “Quiet,” and then, a couple of ticks later, “Action!” I clapped my legs against the bay, and he took off running. The road was hard packed, and the booming of his hooves against the dirt drove everything else out of my head. When I finally remembered to look back at Steve, I could hardly see him through the cyclone of dust we were raising in the dry road. I turned back around and leaned over the bay's neck and remembered not to spur him.