Falling From Horses (4 page)

I don't think we ever talked about the wreck later on, at least not in those months while we were both living in California. But there's a bus wreck in one of her films, it might be
San Luis Obispo
, and after my wife and I went to see it, I wrote to Lily that it had been quite a few years since I had thought about our bus running off the road outside Bakersfield and that her movie had brought it back.

She wrote that she hadn't ever been in a wreck before that one. “And I hadn't ever seen anybody dead—I don't think death was real to me back then. I had a terrible wish to see what a dead man looked like, but I was afraid to walk over there and see him. You know how it is: I had to leave all that alone for a while before I could put it in my writing.”

By then we had written back and forth many times about art, about not making demands on your art but just humbly inviting it in, and I knew this was what she meant.

I lay back on the grass with my head pillowed on my bent arms and studied the night sky as if I didn't give a damn whether Lily talked to me or not, and she went back to writing in her notebook. The grass had a dry late-summer smell, like it hadn't rained in weeks, so I don't know why, lying there, I suddenly remembered a time in January or February, right after we buried Mary Claudine, when I went out after dark and lay down on the frostbitten grass in the pasture behind the house. It was cold as hell, but I stayed out there half the night. The stars were thick in a clear sky, so bright and so numerous I couldn't make out the constellations. The slow turn of the earth is what moves the stars in their slow spiral—I knew this—and I tried to feel it, that slow turning, the earth carrying my body on it like a raft. There had been an odd comfort that night in coming to know in some deep part of my brain the immenseness and indifference of the universe.

The moon had set, and when the flares finally went out, there was suddenly enough darkness to uncover all the stars. I wasn't used to seeing the sky this far south, and it took a while to realize I was looking at the whole of Scorpius along the southern horizon. I made a sound of surprise, I guess, and Lily looked over at me.

If I had kept still, I know she would have gone right back to her notebook. And it wasn't in my mind that she and I might get to be friends. I had been keeping to myself for the last year and a half, drifting around without wishing to make any friends, which could have been something I had decided or just the life, the cowboy life, I had chosen. So I can't tell you why I wanted to get back in Lily's favor right then. But I know it had something to do with the way she didn't seem to care whether I liked her or not.

I pointed as if she had asked me something and said, “Up north, Scorpius is down below the horizon by this time of year. Most of it, anyway. But we're far enough south now, you can see the whole thing.”

She looked where I pointed.

“Antares is the bright one,” I said. “People call it the scorpion's heart. And then, if you look left and down, you can see the curve of the tail and the stinger. You have to use your imagination. There's a couple of star clusters in the tail, but you can't really see them without a telescope or good binoculars. In July the whole constellation would show up over the ranch for a few weeks. I used to go up to the fire lookout near our place and look through the ranger's binoculars so I could see the clusters—the Butterfly Cluster and Ptolemy's Cluster.”

I was showing off, which of course she knew. She studied the sky while she made up her mind if I was worth talking to again.

Up to this point, I imagine she had been thinking I was a ranch kid with a backwoods education, a kid without much knowledge of the world. I had gone to a two-room grade school, and I'd never finished high school, so that wouldn't have been a bad guess. But I came from a family of readers, and we'd always had a lot of discussion around our dinner table. My dad liked to read out loud from the newspapers, anything he found of interest. All of us talked about the books we were reading, and Mary Claudine and I were encouraged to talk about what we were learning in school. I'd had a couple of bright and lively grade school teachers and half a dozen high school teachers who brought the life of the mind into their classrooms. This is not to say I was a kid with intellectual attainment, but I could rise to the occasion.

Finally she said, “Who taught you about the stars?”

“I mostly learned it from books. From
The Book of Knowledge.
”

“Is that an encyclopedia?”

“I guess it's like that. It's a set. There's twenty books.” My mother had bought
The Book of Knowledge
from a salesman at the Harney County Fair with money she had earned from the sale of a horse. I was pretty sure the expense had been hard for my father to accept—there had been a prolonged silence between my parents and then whispered voices from their bedroom late at night. But all of us, even my father, liked to pore over the colored pictures of muscles in the body, and drawings of Borneo people, and step-by-step instructions on building a dry stone wall, and answers to questions like “Why is the sky blue?” There were drawing lessons in almost every volume; I learned a lot about perspective and values and shading from
The Book of Knowledge.

Lily didn't ask me anything else, but eventually she lay back on the grass herself, and after she had studied the sky a while she said, “There are more stars here than in Seattle.”

“That's because cities have all those street lights and neon signs that shine too much light back up in the sky. They wash out the stars.”

“I know that,” she said. “You don't have to keep on acting so smart.” But she didn't sound annoyed.

In
Hard Light
, one of the movies she wrote for RKO, there's a boy who escapes the fighting and shouting in his house—his father's a falling-down drunk—by going out at night to study the constellations. Lily called me up a few weeks before that picture came out to let me know that the boy in
Hard Light
wasn't me. She didn't need to say so. By then I knew that it was Lily who had grown up with family battles—not brutal abuse but slamming doors, shouting; both of her parents drank. She had escaped from it into books and writing and movies.

“I'm so tired,” she said after a while. “I haven't really been able to sleep in the bus.” Well, she had been sleeping, but I didn't call her on it.

I said, “You could try to sleep right now. That other bus might be a while.”

After a minute she said, “I guess I'm too keyed up.”

We fell silent. Then she said, “When you get down there, have you got a place to stay?”

I said, “I figure I'll just get a hotel.” I didn't tell her I only had enough money for a couple of nights in a flophouse.

“You should look for a place around Gower Street,” she said. “A lot of the cowboy pictures are made close to there.” She knew quite a lot about Hollywood, which she was glad to tell me without prompting, and I was glad to learn from her. She'd learned most of it by close study of
Photoplay
and
Modern Screen
, but I can't fault her for it, since most of what she told me turned out to be true.

When I asked her where she'd be staying, she told me she had a room waiting for her at the Hollywood Studio Club, which was a kind of sorority for women who worked in the movie business, not only the actresses and starlets but the secretaries and office girls. She would be sharing with the other girls who worked in the agent's office, a three-bed dormitory room that had a sink and two closets. One of the secretaries had married and moved over to Santa Monica with her husband, and Lily would be taking that girl's place.

“I hope I can sleep when I get there,” she said, “but it'll still be the middle of the day, so I guess I'll have to wait until the other girls are ready for bed.”

It began to gray toward daylight. Some black-and-white dairy cows were standing in the field beyond the wrecked fence, and the state policeman was standing near the dead man as if to keep the cows from walking on the body. I could have told him no cow would ever walk on a human body, living or dead. No horse, either. What I figured he should be worried about was the hole in the fence. If somebody didn't patch it up, those cows would be through it and walking up the highway just as soon as we were gone.

Finally the other bus came from the south, and we watched it jockey back and forth in the road to get turned around and headed back toward Bakersfield. It was still running headlights, which swept across the car lying upside down with its tires in the air and the trooper standing near the dead man. Down there in the dry weeds you could just see a bit of the blanket covering the body.

We shuffled onto the bus without speaking and rode into Bakersfield in silence. At the station a smiling man stepped onto the bus and told us, “Breakfast is on the Greyhound Lines, folks. Step right next door to Betty's Biscuits, they're expecting you all, and the griddle is hot.”

So I had a stack of hotcakes courtesy of Greyhound, and Lily ate up every bit of her eggs and sausage—not a word about how it was too much food for a girl to choke down.

THE SUN WAS WELL UP IN A CLEAR SKY
when we left Bakersfield on a fresh bus. Flat orchard country stretched away on both sides of the road, and low, lion-colored mountains stood all along the southern horizon. Around ten o'clock we stopped for gas and water and a restroom break at the bottom of those mountains, and I bought some oranges from a stand next to the bus station, not a fruit stand, but a funny place shaped just like a big orange, with a hole cut out for the walkup window. This wasn't quite the same thing as buying them right off the tree, but those oranges were as sweet as candy and so full of juice I had it running down my arms and chin, all sticky, and had to wash up afterward in the men's room.

By the time we started up the Grapevine, the air was light and dry and hot. We pulled down the bus windows, and the whine of tires on the pavement was so loud we didn't bother to talk. The cutbanks on both sides of the highway were raw red earth, the dry slopes scattered with scrub oak, chaparral, and cottonwoods—country I had seen in a lot of cowboy movies. The pavement widened into three lanes, and cars started to pass us in the middle lane as we ground down into low gear. Traffic thickened, and there were plenty of cars and trucks and buses in the slow lane with us, and rigs pulled over with steam boiling out of their radiators.

We stopped for lunch in San Fernando. I still had some oranges left, and I bought myself a piece of butterscotch pie; then I ate most of Lily's chicken-fried steak, which she pushed toward me when she'd barely eaten half.

That last leg into LA, the stretch from San Fernando to Glendale, was mostly groves of oranges and lemons in those days, their big, neatly planted squares bounded by windbreaks of poplars. Every so often you'd see a house with gingerbread trim or a stucco house with Spanish-style balconies and red-tiled roof standing higher than the orange trees but shaded by a big old elm or a beech. Sometimes you'd see oil rigs pumping up and down, right out there in the middle of the orchards, and every so often rows of deep green eucalyptus or palm trees lining a straight stretch of road, or big fields of beans worked by Japanese people.

We rolled through Burbank and then Glendale's rows of little shops and half-built suburbs. What I remember is clean, wide boulevards, palm trees, Spanish-looking stucco houses with bright-flowering vines—orange trumpet vine or red bougainvillea—growing up the porch posts, and fields of pink geraniums in the front yards. You could smell the sweetness of the orange trees even through the stink of exhaust. A kind of fairytale land, I thought at the time. I'd never seen anything like that country in my life.

We crossed the Los Angeles River eight or nine times, although I didn't know it, seeing nothing below the bridges but a mud-caked channel. Somewhere around the last bridge I got my first glimpse of the city of Los Angeles, a knot of tall buildings way off on the valley floor with a grid of streets and dusty trees and houses spread out like skirts around it. We were in baking sun by then, and the whole city shimmered under a yellow-blue dome. One of the passengers started singing “California, Here We Come,” as if we hadn't been in California for a day and a half already, and quite a few others joined in. Some of them had become quite friendly after the wreck, as if they'd been in a battle together, and there was some exchanging of addresses. I didn't ask for Lily's, and she didn't offer.

About five years later I would take the grand tour of Europe on the army's nickel—Paris and Rome, the whole shooting match—but at nineteen I hadn't spent any time in a town bigger than Prineville or Burns. Los Angeles in those days wasn't what it is now, but it was every bit the big city, and we began to pass through built-up neighborhoods, places where you could look down the cross streets and see pepper trees arching over the pavement in a shadowy tunnel lined with automobiles, or dry, rustling palms in long rows leaning into the front yards of stucco bungalows. And then we were in swarms of cars and streetcars, the jangle of trolley bells, honking horns, sidewalks packed with people walking fast through a wilderness of billboards and neon signs and telephone poles weighed down crazily with wires. The bus went on threading through the traffic, mile after mile. By the time we got into the downtown proper we were crawling through the shadows of eight- and ten- and twelve-story buildings, and people on the sidewalks were making better headway than the cars.

We rolled into the terminal just after three and milled around in the garage waiting for the driver to haul our luggage out of the hold. Lily disappeared for a minute, walking off to talk to somebody out on the sidewalk. When she came back, I was standing with my bag at my feet, trying to figure out what the hell to do next.