Falling From Horses (41 page)

I had never once thought to blame him for losing the Echol place—I was astonished he would think so. I turned and looked out the side window. I wasn't anywhere near crying—I wasn't a kid anymore—but I had to work to get any breath past the hard mass in the center of my chest. If he heard me trying to breathe, he didn't let on.

We rode a long while in silence. In the gradual light I could just make out the dark, straight shapes of trees alongside the road, big old ponderosa pines like the ones I had grown up with. The road had been climbing for miles. We were in the Siskiyous, I figured.

When enough time had gone by, he said, “Do you need to stand up and move around again? It'll be another forty minutes, I guess.”

I had begun to ache from sitting still, but I said, “No. I'm okay.” Then I said, “I'd just as soon get home,” which was as close as I could come to saying what was stuck in my throat.

After another while passed, he said, “Who's that girl Lily, the one that called me? Is she an actress?”

“No. She's a writer.” I wasn't sure what else to say about her. “We met on the bus going down.”

He nodded as if he already knew it. “She said you've been going to the pictures on your day off.” Then he looked over at me. “Is she somebody we ought to start getting used to?”

At the time I didn't know whether I'd ever see Lily again or keep in touch with her, but I knew this wasn't what my dad was asking. “No, I guess not. We're just friends.”

“Well, that's how it starts sometimes.”

My dad had a romantic streak in him—both my parents ran that way—and I realized I shouldn't have left any guesswork in my answer. “Lily doesn't plan to get married. She just wants to write for the movies.”

He smiled slightly. “Well, your mother just wanted to punch cows and break horses.” I understood what he meant: that my mother hadn't planned to marry either.

He hadn't really been saying my situation was like his, but I wanted to be clear, so I said, “Lily's pretty set on making pictures and being famous. And I'm all done with Hollywood, so I don't imagine I'll see her again.”

He kept his attention on the road. The sun wasn't up yet, but the sky was pearling and we could see a long way ahead now, the pavement curving through shadowless grassy hills, smudged here and there with dark clumps of pine. “So you're not going back down there?”

“No.” I didn't feel like saying any more about it, and he didn't ask.

After a while he turned the truck off the highway onto some branching back roads and finally drove under a ranch gate painted white with carved-out letters on the overhead arch: Rocker Z. The ranch lane was dirt but graded smooth, and the first quarter mile was neatly lined with rock fence on both sides. The lane wound back into the hills a couple of miles. Every time we came to a livestock fence, my dad had to climb out and open the gate, get in the truck again and drive us through, then get back out to close the gate, while I sat there like a worthless lump.

We were heading more or less east, and when the leading edge of sun broke over the low range of hills, the sudden slash of light dazzled us both, red like the blood of battle, outlining the dark crowns. My dad slowed the rig and leaned forward, squinting to make out the curves in the road. Long black shapes stretched out behind every rock and blade of grass. Cattle and horses on the hillsides were flattened silhouettes, their bodies all of a piece with their elongated, distorted shadows.

The Rocker Z home place lay in a treeless bowl, a sprawling white house in need of a coat of paint, a windmill, a tall paintless barn, and a couple of corrals leaning slightly on rotting timber uprights. It wasn't much like Echol Creek, but there is a certain sameness to such places. I felt a sudden tight ache under my sternum.

My mother must have heard the truck from a long way off, or maybe the dog had barked a warning. She was already on the porch when we came over the last rise, though I didn't realize it at first: she was nothing but a dark shape in the darker space under the porch roof. Then she stepped into the sunlight at the edge of the porch, and her shadow went out long across the yard. She was gripping the upright porch rail with one hand, her other hand holding Mary Claudine's dog by the loose skin of his neck, and then she sat down on the porch steps as if her legs had given way, and she pulled the dog against her chest. He squirmed and squirmed to get loose, and finally, when we came to a stop in the yard, she let him go, and he came across to meet us, barking and waving his flag of a tail.

FOR TAKING THE TIME TO READ THIS BOOK
in early drafts, and for their smart and useful criticism, I am very much indebted to Tony Wolk, John and Kim Transier, Ursula and Charles Le Guin, Barbara J. Scot, and especially Bette Lynch Husted, who read the entire book more than once, brought me out of blue funks more than once, caught many stupid mistakes, and just generally cheered me on to the finish line.

For insight into movie stunt riding and wrangling I'm grateful to Martha Cantarini, Liz Dixon, and Thomas Bentley. They are all too young to have ridden in the films of the 1930s, but their knowledge of the movie business and the life of a stunt rider was nevertheless invaluable; Martha Cantarini's memoir
Fall Girl
was a particularly useful resource.

For details of how it was in the 1930s, I relied a good deal on Diana Serra Cary's memoir
The Hollywood Posse: The Story of a Gallant Band of Horsemen Who Made Movie History
, and Yakima Canutt's autobiography,
Stunt Man.
For anyone interested in behind-the-scenes photographs and stories of the 1940s B westerns and 1950s television westerns, I recommend
And . . . Action!
by Stephen Lodge.

Thanks to Gretchen Corbett for her helpful knowledge of moviemaking and the language of moviemaking; and to John Zagelow for his knowledge of old trucks and tube tires.

I'm grateful as always to my marvelous, and marvelously patient, editor, Susan Canavan, and everyone at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for their support of this novel.

Over the five years I worked on this book, Wendy Weil was the particular reader I kept always in my mind. She died before reading it. This book is, above all, for her.

M
OLLY
G
LOSS
is the best-selling author of
The Hearts of Horses, The Jump-Off Creek
, winner of both the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award and the Oregon Book Award,
The Dazzle of Day
, winner of the PEN Center West fiction prize, and
Wild Life
, winner of the James Tiptree Jr. Award. She lives in Portland, Oregon.