Falling From Horses (36 page)

So the silence went on for half a minute or so. Finally somebody called out, “You bet,” and a few others joined in, and Jamerman nodded and smiled, completely satisfied.

I didn't think I was nervous, but I woke up early on the morning of the filming—it was still dark, but I could feel the stars turning toward morning. I washed my face and got dressed and went outside, sat on a bench, and just for something to do I took out some paper and sketched the row of cars parked in front of the motor court. The first time I'd drawn anything in weeks. Finally the men in the other rooms started to stir and wake—I could hear their voices and coughs—and after a while a bus picked us up.

The light had brightened by the time we got to the field, and then the sun broke suddenly in a red line along the low range of hills in the east. It was already warm, would be hot later, so after we had suited up in our lancer costumes we found what shade we could at the edges of the battlefield and waited to be told when it was time to do some riding. A few men got up card games, but I lay down on the dry grass, pulled down my hat, and tried to sleep.

Cab and Renner and Jamerman were still parleying about how the charge would start and end and how long it would run. They were walking over the field mapping out details of the action, talking things over with the cinematographer—angles and focus for the three cameras. I thought the tripwires had been rigged the day before, but there were grips out on the field rigging more of them.

Wranglers had brought in a hundred horses under saddle, crowded together inside a rope pen, but the one handling Rocking Chair kept him under a shade cloth away from the others, and every so often he walked the horse out and back so he'd stay limbered up while he was waiting for the action to start. Alan Greer showed up early with the rest of us, but nobody mistook him for an extra. An assistant brought over a canvas chair with his name stenciled on it, and he sat there reading a script. After a while he put down the pages, dropped his chin on his chest, and took a nap.

It was noon before we got word they were ready to shoot the scene. The sun by then was hot, the sky pale with dust. The mountains to the west seemed almost white in the dazzling sunlight. We sorted out the horses and got mounted up, which took a while, and then a bunch of prop men went around handing up the lances. I was riding a tall, big-headed chestnut that day. He was nervous, skipping his feet, flicking his ears back, rolling the bit in his mouth—he didn't like the small banners on the tips of the lances or the fluttering battle flags. I rode him in circles to quiet him down.

Jamerman was watching from a wooden blind built around one of the cameras, but the action scenes were Renner's responsibility, and he was letting Cab call the shots that day. We drew up in our battle line, and Cab, from the bucket of a crane lifted above the field, shouted over our heads his idea of a pep talk: “Y'all better make it look fucking good.”

I wasn't the only one on a nervous horse. The line broke again and again as horses danced out and had to be reined back in. I don't know what sort of moment Cab was looking for, but it was a long couple of minutes before I heard him shout the warning call. A puff of wind moved across the silence afterward, bending the flags, lifting a fine mist of dust along the battleground. Finally the whistle blew for the take. Alan Greer trotted his horse a few steps forward of the line. The chestnut, jittery, wanted to follow him, but I touched his neck, touched the reins, told him quietly, “Wait, wait, not yet.” I didn't know his name or if he had one.

As Greer lifted his saber, Rocking Chair whirled in a neat pirouette. “Ride like hell, boys!” he shouted, and we roared back our cheer, leveled our lances, and the horses all jumped out at once.

By about the third stride the chestnut was wide open, and I could feel the power he had, the gather and reach of his springing legs. I tried to watch the ground as it streamed by, thinking to catch a glimpse of a tripwire before we were right on top of it, but my eyes blurred in the wind, and the grass in the field was tall under a veil of dust, and then horses started falling around me, horses and men both, and it seemed to me that the whole charge just collapsed in a matter of moments.

A dark shape fell in our way, and the chestnut reared, swerving away from it. I leaned over his neck, and when he jerked his head he struck my cheekbone a hard blow. I think that might have been when I let go of the lance, but anyway it was gone. Alongside me a horse lunged suddenly to its feet, one of its hind legs dangling broken, and the chestnut sprang away from him, a sideways lunge, and then his hooves scrabbled, kicking a mass on the ground, a man on the ground, the thick sound of a hoof striking bone. My eyes burned. A hot flare of wind lifted the chaff of dry grass and dust, a dry fog that hid the field. Shapes rose up through the yellow cloud or fell through it, and I could hear men calling out and horses squealing their pain. The hack of my own breath was loud in my head, but I could still hear the thud of bodies striking the hard, dry ground. The chestnut ran, and I let him run. We were under the oaks at the other side of the field before I asked him to stop. I got down and stood, shaky, with my hands on the pommel. I could hear the horse's winded breath, the labored rise and fall of his panic.

Other men and horses had made it down into the hot shade with us. I turned and looked back at the battlefield, at the injured horses running loose across the field, the men on the ground, the litter of fallen lances, the dead horses heaps of darkness against the dust and the yellow grass. I looked, but all these things were at a remove. I saw Greer standing in the middle of the shambles, holding his horse by the reins. The horse's head was very high, jerking up and down, his nostrils flaring, the ears pointing and swiveling. Crewmen were streaming out onto the field, and after a moment Greer led his horse through them toward the top edge of the field, where we had formed up our line just minutes earlier. A wrangler stepped up and took the horse from him, and Greer walked on past him, stopping briefly to speak to Cab, who was just stepping off the bucket of the crane. And then he walked on out of sight.

A horse plunged loose through the shade under the oak trees where I was standing, ran so close past me that the dirt he kicked up peppered me in a dry hail. The chestnut half reared in alarm, and when the reins slipped out of my hand he took off running with the other horse. I didn't try to go after him. When I heard a loud crack out on the field, I knew what it was and I came back as if from a journey. I walked out onto the grass to see who was hurt, see who I could help. Around me, three or four men, wranglers, I think, were walking from horse to horse, and every time a gun popped I couldn't keep my shoulders from jerking. Horses were screaming, men moaning. A wind came up, pelting grit and chaff, blowing across the valley from the sandstone bluffs to the west.

SO MANY HORSES
were brought down in that Valverde battle scene that I'm surprised no men died. Plenty were hurt—stabbed or sliced with lances, thrown, trampled. There were a lot of broken bones. Dave Keaton broke his leg in a bad way. I don't know how many horses died—died outright or were shot afterward. Twenty-five, I heard, or thirty, forty.

I heard later that Jamerman was satisfied with the footage. It hadn't gone as he'd planned—there hadn't been a second charge—but the wreckage of horses and men gave him a battle scene that was more dramatic than the one he had been carrying around in his head. I heard he walked over to Cab afterward and shook his hand.

This was Saturday, at the end of a long week of long days, and we weren't shooting film on Sunday, so even if horses hadn't died that day, even if men hadn't been hauled off to the hospital, I imagine we'd have wanted to find a bar that stayed open late. As it was, we went at it with pretty serious intention. The dozen of us staying at the Wagon Wheel walked down the sidewalk half a mile or so and turned in at the first bar we came to.

There were several local fellows in that bar, men who worked for the railroad, I think. At some point they were laughing about something that could have been a slur against movie cowboys or could have had nothing to do with any of us. I went over there and took a swing at one of them. I was hoping for a brawl, but my swing went wide, and then Ralph Foster, who wasn't quite as drunk as I was, stepped in front of me, put his hand on my chest, and shoved. I went down on my butt, and I was too drunk to get to my feet. Ralph spoke a few friendly words to the locals and wandered off with them to a table in the corner. Nobody helped me up. I went on lying there with men stepping around me like I was an overturned chair. When I finally got back on my feet, Carl Frisson came over and dabbed at me with a bar towel—I had dropped my drink when Ralph pushed me, and the spill was all over my shirt front and my chin. He said, “Fool, you got to remember to set your drink down before you start a fight.”

He then set his drink down and walked over to the table in the corner and punched one of the locals in the face. Blood spurted from the man's cheek, and when the rest of them registered what had happened they climbed over the table onto Carl. Ralph Foster stood up too, took a moment to make up his mind which side he was on, then randomly thumped one of the railroad men on the back of his head.

There was a big bouncer working that night, or maybe he was the bar owner, and he might have been the one who broke my nose. My nose had been broken once before, in another bar fight. The barroom brawl is a movie cliché, and this is probably the time to tell you I had been living up to that particular part of the cowboy stereotype for a while.

In the movies, men get punched in the face and don't even wind up bruised, but I can tell you a broken nose hurts so much it will just about make you weep. I was bleeding all over the front of my shirt and barely able to see to walk, but when they booted us out of that bar and the other men went looking for another bar to inhabit, I went along, and we only came weaving back down the sidewalk to the Wagon Wheel as the early risers were stepping out of their houses to go to Sunday-morning church service. I made it all the way back without puking or falling down. I drew the shades and slept all day. Ralph always snored like a bugling elk, and I'd been having trouble sleeping through his racket, but that was one time I didn't hear it. I sipped ginger ale for supper and went to bed again.

Monday morning I wasn't the only one who turned up for work bleary and with a marked face, but Cab looked us all over without saying a thing about it. The work that day, and the rest of the week, had us riding hard and taking falls—it was the cavalry battle at the ford—so he pushed us through some long days, and maybe that was how he made his point.

Carl Frisson had driven Dave Keaton back to LA in the Franklin after he broke his leg, so I rode the crew bus back to town at the end of that shoot. Leaning on the window, looking out at those weird streaked monoliths and sandstone bluffs, what came into my mind was Glass Buttes up in Lake County, the outcroppings of volcanic glass half a day's ride to the west of our ranch.

Mary Claudine and I had gone to Glass Buttes overnight on horseback a couple of times to collect obsidian arrowheads when we were kids. Sedona was a thousand miles from Glass Buttes, and those rock-hunting trips had been years earlier, but memory is a disjointed thing, and from thinking about Mary Claudine I was thrown back suddenly to the Christmas dance I'd gone to in Foy a few weeks after we gave up the search for her. I wasn't drinking back then, I didn't even like the taste of it, but somebody had brought whiskey and stashed it under the edge of the dance hall porch. That night I got pretty drunk for the first time in my life and got into a fight with a man I'd never seen before, an unshaven fellow about forty, wearing baggy pants and a soiled shirt. There were lots of itinerants, bums, and out-of-work cowhands passing through on the cross-state highway in those years, and one of the ideas I had been entertaining for a while was that one of those men might have grabbed my sister. I didn't think about why somebody like that would be traipsing around in the canyons above the ranch, miles from any road. Or the odds of his coming upon a girl out there. I was looking for somebody to blame and some reason for what happened other than a meaningless accident, and what I thought was this: if she'd been taken by somebody—a man looking for a girl to rape—he might still have her and she might still be found alive.

The man I picked a fight with was not as drunk as I was, and he had twenty or thirty pounds on me. I came away with a chipped tooth and a broken nose.

It was right after that Christmas party that hunters happened to come upon Mary Claudine's body. My face was still swollen, still purple with bruise, the day we buried her bones.

WHEN I GOT BACK TO TRUE'S HOUSE
on Saturday night, he was dressing to go out. I took off my boots and lay down on the sofa in my clothes. From the bedroom he called to me, “Some of us are going out to the beach. I'll wait if you want to get cleaned up first. Lorraine might be there.”

I said, “I'm pretty done in.”

I went on lying there after he drove off. I could hear some kids in the yard next door playing cowboys and Indians, shooting cap pistols and whinnying like horses.

When it started to get dark in the house, I sat up and turned on a lamp and phoned the Studio Club. They called Lily to the phone, and when she said hello I said, “You want to see
Dodge City
tomorrow?”

I hadn't seen her in about a month, hadn't told her I was leaving town to make a movie in Arizona, hadn't talked to her at all since she told me on the telephone about starting work at RKO.

She was silent a moment. “All right. It's playing at the Music Box.”

So I met her at the Music Box and we saw
Dodge City.
We didn't talk much. Lily didn't want to stay for the second feature—it was a silly comedy with Louis Jossup—so we went out to a spaghetti joint and ordered some supper. I still had lurid yellow bruises from the bar fight and a swollen lump where my nose was broken. She waited until we were in the cafe before she said, “Did you get in a fight?”