Falling From Horses (3 page)

I said, “Nothing against farming, but I wouldn't do it for love or money.” I imagine I was working on my imitation of William S. Hart, that scowl when he's standing outside a cabin checking his guns, preparing to go in and shoot it out with seven bad guys holding a woman tied to a chair.

Lily's eyebrows pinched down over the bridge of her nose. “I don't know why you're taking offense at that question.”

I couldn't have said why myself. I'd never heard of the ancient contempt of herders for tillers of the soil. “I'd just rather be roping steers than pushing a plow,” I told her, which was not any kind of answer, and the truth was, I had been plowing up ground for hay fields since I was six or seven. I should have smiled and said as much and made a joke out of it; I'd been brought up with right manners, taught from an early age not to go around shooting off your mouth. But when you're nineteen years old, sometimes words pop through the gate before you can herd them off, and then you're too stubborn or stupid to call them back.

She relaxed her brows and said, with a complete falling away of interest, “That's no reason,” and she drew the folder of pages into her lap and took up reading again.

We rolled on for quite a while in silence. Finally I said, “Those were pintails.”

She looked up.

“Those birds. They were mostly pintails. Might have been a few wigeons too.”

“What kind of bird is a wigeon?”

“They're ducks. Good to eat if you don't mind that they're small and usually full of shotgun pellets.” I waggled my eyebrows like Groucho so she'd know I was kidding.

“Well, you just spit those out through your teeth,” she said, and you'd never have known she was kidding—this was Lily. But I smiled and flourished my eyebrows again so she'd know I got the joke, and maybe that won me back a point or two.

I imagine if Lily had any interest in me back then, it was from her belief that I was the one needing looking after. At Williams, when we stopped for supper, I bought a candy bar and a soda pop and sat on a bench in front of the cafe trying not to bolt it down. After a few minutes she came out and said, “I can't eat this whole thing, do you want it?” and handed me half a tuna fish sandwich. I was six feet tall by then, still growing toward six-two; I'd had a boiled egg at six o'clock that morning while I waited for the bus in Klamath Falls, and since then nothing but a ginger ale for lunch in Dunsmuir and that doughnut when we changed buses in Redding. Tuna fish was never my favorite, but I wolfed down Lily's sandwich and was glad to get it, which shamed me at the time and now just makes me think well of Lily.

WE CHANGED BUSES AGAIN AT SACRAMENTO
, and then Lily turned off the overhead light and we tried to sleep. Those seats reclined a bit, and we must have dozed off and on, but you can't get much sleep on an interstate bus. People went on talking, for one thing, and all night long the bus stopped every forty minutes or so to pick up or drop off passengers in that string of towns running down the lower valley—Stockton, Modesto, Merced, Madera, Fresno, Tulare. And if we weren't stopping for passengers we were stopping at filling stations or all-night cafes so people could use the restrooms. Lily's head would tip sideways, but when the bus geared down she'd jerk awake. Once, when her hands went slack with sleep, the glasses she was holding in her lap slipped off onto the floor. I bent down and fished them up and tucked them into the pocket of the seatback in front of her. Then I folded up my jacket and pushed it against her head so she wouldn't always be tipping onto my shoulder.

At one stop I climbed out just to stretch my legs and get a breath of air, and I stood off alone at the edge of the road, looking around at the dark farm fields, smelling eucalyptus, I think it was, on the cool air. Everything about it felt strange, not my country, and an uneasiness came over me all at once, a strong qualm about what I was doing. I thought about not getting back on the bus. It was one of those times you think of afterward, a hinge point in your life. But my duffle bag was still on the bus, and then the people who had gotten off to use the restroom began to make their way back, and the driver, standing by the door smoking a cigarette, looked over at me. I guess that was all it took, because I just walked back and climbed on. When I sat down next to Lily, she was more or less awake. She peered at me nearsighted without her glasses, but we didn't speak.

Years afterward, I told her about how I almost didn't get back on the bus, and she said she remembered it. She said she had seen something in my face when I sat back down. Maybe she did. But she was damn near blind without her glasses, so maybe not. She always liked to think she knew me better than I knew myself.

Then in the small hours, somewhere between Tulare and Bakersfield, with the highway straight as a string and hardly any traffic to speak of, the bus ran off the road and wrecked. What happened is that a guy in a Chevrolet coupe headed north—the only car in ten minutes—fell asleep, I guess, and drifted into our lane. He would have run straight into us if the bus driver, who'd come on at Fresno, hadn't been on the ball and wide awake. He jerked the wheel hard to the left, and the Chevrolet just clipped the corner of the bus. We went veering across the highway, squealing and weaving, and then off the pavement and bumping down a grassy embankment into a dry ditch, where the bus tipped onto two wheels and hung there a few seconds, making up its mind, before rocking back onto four.

This all seemed to happen slowly. Or not slowly but as if each fraction of a second had its own point of interest, its own separate weight, a feeling you can get when you think you might be about to die. I've had it happen a few times in my life, and this was not the first. It was dark—the dim lights in the bus went out completely as soon as the engine quit—and for a couple of seconds nobody said anything. Then a baby started shrieking and children started crying and people were yelling and a woman toward the front of the bus started reciting the Lord's Prayer in a loud, churchy way, as if she expected all of us to join in.

Lily had fallen over halfway into my lap. I hoisted her up—she was as light as a child—and then I grabbed hold of a seatback to stand up and bumped my head on the overhead luggage caddy. I hadn't ever been in a wreck, but now that it was over I didn't think this was very much of one. When I'd leaned my weight against the window on that curvy mountain road earlier, I'd had a different sort of picture in my mind. My head smarted from bumping it on the luggage rack, but otherwise I didn't have a damn thing wrong with me. I didn't think Lily was hurt either, but I said, “Did you get hurt?”

“What happened?” she said, which I thought was a pretty stupid question, but she had been asleep when it happened.

“We had a wreck.”

She said, “Oh,” as if this was mildly interesting information, and I took this to mean she was all in one piece. She turned her head. “I can't find my glasses. I hope they didn't break.” I felt along the seatback until I found where I'd put her glasses and held them out to her. Then I happened to think of my hat, so I went groping around for it on the floor. The crown was dented from one of us stepping on it, but I worked it with my hands and it popped right back into shape.

In the darkness around us, people had already calmed down, and I didn't hear any moaning as if someone was hurt. Toward the front the driver was saying, “Here, c'mon now, watch your step,” and people were moving up the aisle and climbing out through the open door. The bus was like a cave, so dark you could just make out people's shapes, but when we stepped outside there was more light—a clear sky and a quarter moon low in the west. Lily and I stood around with everybody else, looking at the bus. The front end was only slightly stove in, but two tires were flat, so we weren't going anywhere. We were stranded in that ditch like a whale in a shallow creek.

The bus driver's name was Pete something-or-other. He had a cut lip and a sprained or broken ankle, but he was as calm as an old dog—somebody said he'd been a sapper in the Great War, so maybe that accounted for it. Blood was dribbling from his lip, and every so often he spat out what had run into his mouth, but he limped around from one person to the next, checking to see if any of us were hurt and bending down to thank the little kids solemnly for taking good care of their mothers. One old man complained he had a sore shoulder, but his wife said his shoulder was sore before the crash. So Pete himself was pretty much the only injury.

The Chevrolet had gone on across the road, crashed through a fence on the other side of the highway, and overturned in a ditch. When a couple of men headed over to see if anybody in the car needed a hand, I said to Lily, “I better go help out.” I think I just wanted to yell at somebody for causing us to wreck.

The Chevrolet's doors had sprung open, and there was nobody in the upturned car. We kicked through the tall weeds looking for the driver, and after a minute we found him lying a good eighty or ninety feet from where his car had ended up. We stood around looking at him without saying anything.

I had seen plenty of dead cows and even a couple of dead horses, but this was the first dead person I had ever seen. My folks hadn't let me see Mary Claudine after she was found, and I used to lie awake in the night imagining the way she must have looked in the days and weeks after she died—the way cows look after the ravens and turkey vultures get into them. When I think back about the wreck, what I remember is how the dead man looked almost alive, his eyes slightly open and an expression around his mouth that was unsurprised, seeming tolerant of what had happened to him. His head was steeply bent back on the stalk of his neck, the Adam's apple bulging out in high relief, and there was a little blood at his nose, that was all. But nobody bent down to see if he had a pulse, because there just wasn't any question that the life had left his body. He looked to be about thirty, wearing a salesman's suit. His pomaded hair had fallen down over his forehead, which gave him a disheveled look that was at odds with the suit.

Finally somebody said, “I guess we ought to cover him up.” One of the men found a blanket in the wrecked car, and we put it over him and then we all walked off.

When I got back to Lily, she said in a whisper, “Is he dead?” and I said yes, or nodded. Then she said, “Was it awful?” in a deeply interested way. I can tell you now, this is how a writer views things, but back then it provoked something in me. I wasn't thinking about Mary Claudine exactly, but I didn't think Lily would have said it in that way—as if she was just curious—if she'd ever had somebody die on her, somebody in her family, somebody she cared about.

I said, “Go on over there and take a look, if you've got to know,” and I turned and walked off.

A few cars came along eventually and stopped to help. We were twenty people standing along the edge of the road in the dark, and I have to wonder what those drivers thought they saw at first—a crowd of ghosts, maybe, or sleepwalkers, rising up in front of them at three in the morning. Finally a state police car rolled up and the trooper laid a couple of railroad flares in the road. He took a look at the overturned car and the dead man, then talked to a few people who'd been in the front of the bus, the ones who'd been awake and had seen the Chevrolet come straight for us and knew Pete wasn't to blame. A sheriff's car showed up too, and the deputy talked to the state trooper and then took Pete somewhere to get his ankle looked at and maybe set in a plaster cast. The state trooper made half a dozen radio calls and told us the Greyhound station in Bakersfield would be sending another bus to pick us up. He didn't say so, but he must have called for a morgue wagon too.

Just because I needed something to do, I helped a couple of men haul bags and suitcases out of the luggage holds and the overhead caddies of the wrecked bus, and we piled them at the verge of the highway. It was a warm night. Some people pulled blankets from their luggage and spread them on the grass and sat or lay down to wait. Lily was just sitting on the dry ground. Finally I went over and sat down with her. The flares were still burning, and the night was saturated with a red glare.

She was holding a little spiral-bound notebook in her lap and a pencil, and every so often she wrote something on the page. I didn't say anything to her about the dead man, not directly, but I said, “I guess you're writing about the wreck. Making it into a story,” and I know there was some judgment in it.

She gave me a look—that deep crease just above the bridge of her nose that I later came to know as one of her regular features and had mostly to do with being dead tired of idiots. It's pretty much the same look she's giving Roy Cohn in the photograph that made the cover of
Time.
“No, I'm not writing about the wreck, but someday I might. Writers are always using their lives, and if you were a writer you'd probably be writing about rodeo.”

When we had first started talking, she had been interested in hearing about rodeo. I had told her the rules of calf roping and bronc riding, the way a ride was judged and so forth, and then I'd told her every damn story I could remember, stories about guys getting busted up or stomped on but riding anyway, and haywire bulls breaking loose from the chutes, chased down by a clown on foot, and man-killing horses ridden until they gave up bucking, lay down, and died. I had seen a couple of these things myself, but most were stories I'd heard from other men. I was pretty sure some of them were true, but a lot of them were lies and boasts, which I also knew, and some I had only seen in movies; plus I let her think some of them had happened to me.

If she planned to write about the wreck and the salesman lying dead over there in the high grass, at least it wouldn't be made up: that's what I figured she was saying to me. And this might be a good place to point out that Lily was always smarter than me, more able to see the truth in things, and the untruth.