Falling From Horses (24 page)

She didn't cry. She looked at Henry without speaking, then turned from him and looked off toward Dolly and the other horses in the home pasture. What occurred to her, standing there, was how many times she had called Mary Claudine to the window when lightning flashed, just to say,
Isn't it beautiful?

“I've seen lightning enough times,” she said. “I don't know why I never thought to worry about it killing a horse.”

Henry was silent for a while, and then he said, “Worrying about it wouldn't have changed anything. There wasn't anything you could have done to keep it from happening.”

Martha looked over at Bud. “Was it you who found him, Bud?”

“He was up at Cooks Bench where I set one of my traps.”

“There were some other horses up on that grass. Was Sugarfoot the only one struck?”

“The others must have took off. We might have to go looking for them.”

Henry said, “Where's Mary Claudine?”

“She's in the house with her nose in a book. We stopped by the Forbeses' place and Evelyn gave her a book about birds. She was reading from it all the way back.”

“Well, when I get this mule here turned out, I guess I'd better go in and tell her about the horse.”

Martha reached out to touch Mike on the neck, and the mule leaned, pressing himself into her hand. “We'll both go,” she said, looking over at Henry. Then she looked at Bud again. “After dinner maybe you could help me find those horses. If they went uphill they probably got stopped at the fence line above the old Troxle cabin.”

He didn't say anything about checking his trapline. He said, “All right,” and then he said to his dad, “I can take Mike,” and he led the two animals out to the pasture fence. He watched them trot out to join their friends, and he watched as his horse rolled around on the ground and then stood up and shook himself off. He was still standing there looking out at the animals when he heard his parents cross the porch and go into the house.

 

 

 

 

AFTER I RAN INTO LILY
in front of the hardware store, and after we sat through that double feature at the Marcal, we started going to the picture show every Sunday. I'd meet her at the Studio Club and we'd walk to the Iris or the Victory or the Marcal, see a double feature, then go back to her dormitory and play a few hands of cards in the living room, gin rummy usually, or pinochle, hunched over the cards, smoking and talking. What we mostly talked about was movies.

Now that I had some understanding of how the cheap cowboy pictures were made, I had become scornful of them. I told Lily they were cranked out in a week without anybody even knowing what the title was; I was especially bitter about the short ends they spliced in to save money on action scenes.

Well, she had read and studied about the movie business, but Lily had never been on a movie set, never seen a movie camera turning. Her magazines carried plenty of photographs of movie stars lounging on the set or chatting with directors but none of actual moviemaking. So it didn't matter to her that I was only working on Poverty Row pictures. What mattered was that I was watching movies being made every day.

She would pump me to tell her the details of everything I'd seen that week. If I had been near enough to hear what the director told his camera operator, or what the gaffer told the electrician, she wanted every word of it. She wanted a description of the big klieg lights on telescoping stands, how many there were and where they were placed in relation to the camera and the actors. Why did some of the lights have metal earflaps but others didn't? Did I know why the grips built a tall platform and mounted the camera on it for this scene but not for that one? What about the shiny boards and umbrellas that kept shadows off the scene, and the white butterfly nets that softened the daylight, where were those? And where was the director standing when he said “Action”?

She was always pressing me for a better account. I didn't have answers to most of her questions, and I wasn't much good at the meticulous descriptions she wanted. She would have loaned me her little folding Kodak camera, but all the studios had rules against picture taking.

So one day I filched some paper and a stub of pencil from somebody on the film crew, and I drew what they were shooting at the time, which was a cowboy star and a pretty girl standing next to the cowboy's tall horse. I put in the boom mike overhead, and the camera with as much detail as I could capture, and the little crowd of people standing behind it, watching the actors deliver their lines. Once I'd started, I made another quick sketch, a cowboy actor taking a nap on the grass, with his high-crowned hat over his face and his fancy boots crossed at the ankles, and a jumble of light standards and grips' boxes in the background. I didn't have an eraser, so I just moved the pencil in fine scribbles where I wanted to reshape part of the drawing. To my eye the blurred line could seem intended—an impression of the horse restlessly shifting his weight or wind lifting the fringe on the star's fancy shirt.

When I gave Lily the drawings, she studied them quite a while, her dark brows pulled down to her nose, and then looked up at me. “You never said you could draw, Bud. These are really, really good.”

I wasn't exactly embarrassed. I had always liked to draw, and all my life I had been praised for my drawing. But I should probably make it clear right here that becoming an artist was not a notion that had yet taken hold. Back then it was obvious to me that art wasn't related to real work—work you could earn a living at. I had grown up believing that I would make my living on horseback. I was just killing time and helping Lily out, is what I thought when I made those first sketches.

I said, “Well, there's a lot of waiting around on the set. I had the time, and I figured it might be easier to sketch what was going on than tell you about it afterward.”

She pointed at the drawing of the actors being filmed, the tip of her finger not quite touching the paper. “Who is this woman sitting with a big notebook in her lap? Is she the screenwriter?”

“That's the script girl. I don't know what a script girl does, exactly, but she's usually on a stool right there next to the camera. She makes a lot of notes. I'm pretty sure she didn't write the story.”

She frowned again—I imagine she had been hoping to see actual proof that a woman could be a screenwriter—then went back to studying the drawing. Two men were standing by the camera, and she pointed to the one who had his hand lifted as if he was supporting its weight. “Who's this?”

“That's the focus puller. I guess he's kind of holding the camera steady or something.”

She went on frowning. “No, no, I know what a focus puller is, he helps the cameraman keep the picture sharp when the actor moves around. He's turning the lens with his hand, I bet.”

It went back and forth like that, until she had learned everything I could tell her about the people and equipment in both drawings. She didn't compliment me again, which I was glad of, but she said, “This is better than a Kodak picture.”

Mostly, as a little kid, all I had to draw on were the margins of the
Saturday Evening Post
or the backs of old ballots from the last election; for Christmas I always asked for a brand-new tablet of drawing paper. My folks bought me tablets now and then when they could afford it, but it wasn't until high school that one of my teachers made sure I had all the paper, pencils, and paint I could want. The last couple of years, working on ranches and hanging out at rodeos, I was stone broke most of the time, and if I had any spare coin I spent it on beer, not paper and pencils. And I guess after Mary Claudine died I lost some of my inclination to draw.

But after I gave those first sketches to Lily I bought a box of soft lead pencils and a couple of pads of paper, and whenever I was waiting around on the set, I sat down on the ground or in a folding chair close to the picket line and sketched whatever was going on in front of me: the actors, the equipment, the horses lounging about. I bought an eraser too, but I didn't use it much. And then on Sunday I'd hand the drawings to Lily. And after we had talked over what was in them, we would head for the theater to see a double feature and walk out afterward, arguing over what we'd seen.

Before I met Lily, it had seemed to me that movies were fixed, unchangeable, they just existed in the world. I didn't much care for the singing-cowboy pictures, the silliness of the damn things, with a full orchestra suddenly backing up a guy on horseback strumming a guitar, but I hadn't realized that a series of decisions had made it that way, that the movie would have turned out differently if somebody else had been making those decisions.

Lily, on the other hand, was always thinking of how a movie could have been better, which for her meant better written. To her way of thinking, every time a cowboy broke into song the writers were getting away with not writing a real story. Her complaint about the singing cowboys and the eight-day oaters was that they always had a bare-bones plot and not much dialogue. In the lobby at intermission, and later when I was walking her back to her place, she'd be rewriting for me whatever we'd just seen—shifting things around, dropping things out so they'd be less predictable, making up dialogue for the scenes where they'd sidestepped it with a long shot and sentimental music.

She was game to see just about anything playing in town, but she made sure we saw all the major studio melodramas and foreign films dubbed in English or with English title cards. When I didn't like a picture, she would press me to say why, which to my way of thinking was like asking “Why don't you like the way those stars are arranged up there in the sky?” I had thought she was too proud of her French films, but it turned out she was a bit like Verle with his horses: she could find something to like in almost every picture we saw. She judged each one by its own standards. She measured a cowboy picture against other cowboy pictures and not against
Captains Courageous
or
The Good Earth.
“You can't expect a cowboy movie to be
Grand Illusion
, Bud. People call them horse operas because they're like grand opera but more American. Opera has silly plots too.” This didn't mean much to me. I didn't have a clear notion what an opera was.

She'd get just as exercised arguing the fine points of a cliffhanger in a chapter movie as picking through the themes in Fritz Lang's films. She'd ask my opinion of whatever we'd seen and then argue with every damn thing I said. I was used to girls who tried to make you think you were smarter than them even if you weren't, but Lily never in her life cared whether a boy knew she was smarter than he was.

When we started going to the pictures together she was still working on her Texas Ranger script. I had seen more hay-burners than she had, so she wanted me to tell her if she was plowing up ground that was too familiar. Familiarity was one of the things I liked about the cowboy pictures—knowing from the outset that Tim McCoy wouldn't be shot dead, that he'd only ever be winged in the shoulder. But this was Lily. Even then, when everything she was writing was more or less pulp work, she kept trying to wrestle the usual stories into something fresh. When we were at the movies she'd lean over and whisper what she thought would happen next, and how it would end, and she was almost always right. So when she read part of her script to me, she would stop every so often and ask me to guess what I thought would happen next. Whenever I guessed right, she took it as bad news. She'd study the script, her eyebrows bunched over her nose, and then scribble something in the margin, and the next time she read it to me that part of the story would be heading off in another direction. I can tell you this: in those early movies Lily wrote, you never saw a cowboy hero save his sidekick at the last minute by cutting the hangman's rope with an unerring shot from halfway down the street.

I had a pretty clear idea that the cowboy hero stood for being brave and true, a man with a strict moral compass, and in those days even Lily hadn't thought too deeply about what else the cowboy hero might stand for—she was the first person I ever heard talk about Buck Jones, Tom Mix, all those top cowboys, as if they were America's version of Galahad or Lionheart, as if the cowboy were a chivalrous emblem of our national character. But she always wanted any picture, even an oater, to be about real people and their problems, so it annoyed her that all the heroes in westerns were rootless loners, lacking a childhood history and a family—no parents or brothers or sisters, never a wife.

A few years later, in
Bent Grass
, the only western she wrote for RKO, she gave Ted Barstow a sister living back in North Carolina, a sister he had broken with for reasons that were never quite spelled out. Toward the end of the film Lily put him at a desk writing a letter to her, a letter full of loneliness and regret and tender affection. John Ford always said he couldn't have made
The Searchers
without RKO having first made
Bent Grass.
I don't know if that's true—those pictures don't seem at all alike to me—but I know the studio tried to cut that letter-writing scene out of the film before it hit theaters, and Lily had to dig in her heels to keep it.

I HADN'T SAID ANYTHING TO HAROLD
about the work I'd done for Cab O'Brien up at Las Cruces—I figured he wouldn't want to know I'd been stunt riding while I was supposed to be wrangling his horses, and anyway I wasn't sure anything would come of it. But I told Lily.

I didn't have to do any bragging to impress her. She hadn't seen any of the Wichita Carson movies, but she knew Sunrise was a real studio, not a two-bit outfit making serials on Poverty Row. And she had seen enough cowboy pictures to know what a bulldog fall was when I described it to her. Walking back from the theater, she pressed me to tell her everything I'd done and seen, and she acted interested in it all, which inflated me somewhat. And I guess this must have been about the time I started thinking about kissing her.