Falling From Horses (8 page)

There were about a dozen horses in that corral, a few of them big draft horses, most of them various shades of brown, and they stood around in pairs, head to tail, engaged in the serious late-afternoon business of swishing flies. They'd eaten up the morning's hay pretty thoroughly, but a chestnut with a long head snuffled through stray bits of chaff, looking for morsels. The corrals and barns at Diamond didn't look a bit different from all the corrals and barns I'd been around, and the horses standing in them were no fancier than the horses Mary Claudine and I used to ride to school when we lived on Echol Creek. I don't know what I'd been expecting, but this was a mild surprise and a relief to me.

The fellow under the Stetson hat, who looked to be about fifty years old, said, without turning his head, “You ought to get off those feet before they get so swolled up you have to cut them boots off.”

I had been thinking I'd done a good job of walking the last few yards without a gimp, but I guess not. My face got warm, as if he'd caught me doing something shameful.

He glanced down. “Those are good boots, but they was meant for hooking into a stirrup, not walking around Gower Gulch.”

I was somewhat testy, so when I said “Yessir, I know that,” I imagine he heard a small note of indignation.

After another minute he said, “You get into a quarrel with somebody recently?” and he made a slight gesture with one knuckle toward my beat-up face.

I didn't feel like going into the whole damn story, and there wasn't any part of it that I could brag about, but I said, “A couple of bums tried to rob me.”

He didn't say anything to that, didn't even nod. A while later he asked me, “Where you from, son?”

I might have told him Klamath Falls, inasmuch as I'd ridden the Greyhound from there, or I guess I could have said Bly, since that was where my folks were living at the time, but what popped out was somewhat closer to the truth. “I grew up in Harney County,” I said, “which is up in Oregon.”

“I know where Harney County is. That's where Pete French built that big round barn so he could break out his horses in the winter out from under the weather.”

That round barn was pretty famous where I came from, but I was surprised anybody in Hollywood had heard of it. I said, “Our place was quite a bit north of there, we had a couple of sections on Echol Creek and a government lease up in the Ochocos.”

He said, “I heard of the Ochocos, matter of fact I went bear hunting up there once upon a time. There's a Nicoll Creek runs around up there if I remember, which is where we were hunting, but you didn't say Nicoll, did you? I sold some horses once to an outfit on Nickel Creek, up in Grass Valley. They used to pan gold up that way.” He made a slight sound of amusement. “I guess somebody must've panned a nickel's worth of nuggets out of that there creek.” I knew Nicoll Creek, which was maybe ten miles west of our place. It didn't have a thing to do with nickels, it was named for the family that settled there in the early days, but I didn't see any reason to set him straight. Then he turned to me and said, “I'm Harold Capsen,” and stuck out his hand. We shook, and I told him my name, and he said, “Well, come on into the house, Bud. I wasn't kidding about you getting those boots off, and I guess you're looking for work, but we can talk that over while you're soaking your feet in Epsom salts.”

When I was in high school over in Hart, I'd lived in the school dormitory during the week and spent Friday and Saturday quartered with Dean Dickerson's family. Dean's father was a banker, and they lived in a big stone house on C Street behind the Hotel Regent, a house with a sawdust furnace in the cellar and two bathrooms and oriental rugs in the living room. They had a corner lot with a big elm tree and a lawn edged with flowers, and when we sat down to dinner Dean's mother set the table with plates that matched. But I had never seen a house like the one Harold Capsen took me into.

It was a low, Mission-style stucco that, judging from the spread of the bougainvillea growing up the posts of the veranda, looked to have been there since sometime before the Great War. It was cool and dim inside, behind wide shaded porches and thick walls. The living room must have been twenty feet long, with a big plastered fireplace in one corner, its heavy cypress mantelpiece carved with a phrase I thought at the time was Spanish, but I now know was Latin:
Bene qui latuit bene vixit.
The actress who had built the house was a famous recluse, and “To live well is to live unnoticed” was evidently her personal motto.

The rooms were floored with big reddish tiles, the lines of grout almost black, and the deep windowsills were tiled also. There were heavy wooden lintels over every doorway and window. The living room was filled with oak and leather furniture, floor lamps with mica shades, heavy mesquite-wood or oak tables, and woven Navajo rugs. Mexican landscape paintings in heavy oak frames hung on all the walls.

It was an elegant house, but a bunch of uncivilized men had been living in it, so strips of flypaper were hanging everywhere, black with flies, and the furniture and rugs were tracked with mud, furred with horsehair and dog hair, and most everything had a coat of dust on it. Dirty dishes were piled on all the tables and on every surface in the kitchen. Plus Harold had a habit of dropping dirty clothes wherever he happened to be standing when he shucked them off, so there were jeans and shirts and underwear on the floors in every damn room. Harold had been divorced for ten years when I met him and was apparently uninterested in marrying again. I always wondered if his habit of dropping his trousers any-old-where was the reason for his divorce or something he discovered as a benefit of living alone.

The condition of the house didn't surprise me much; in the past year and more, I had become acquainted with the habits of bachelors who lived close to horses. What surprised me was the remarkableness of this big, fancy place tucked up in the hills, half a mile down a dirt road. I guess Harold had been asked about it so often that he didn't wait for the question to come up. While he was running hot water into a pan in the kitchen sink and stirring Epsom salts into it, he told me that some silent-movie actress—he said her name, but it didn't mean a thing to me—had built the house up here to get away from her adoring public. He had bought it cheap right after she died, bought it fully furnished from money he'd made selling his ranch up in Napa Valley when his wife divorced him. He built the corrals and sheds and opened Diamond Barns in 1929, a couple of months before the Crash. “I was just lucky that the cowboy movies never did crash,” he said, “or not much. And when they started pumping out all those second features and chapter pictures, the horse-renting business took a nice upswing.” He said this as though his luck was all still a surprise to him.

After I went to work at Diamond, I learned there were plenty of bigger stables scattered around the valley and in Culver City and up in the Hollywood Hills. Lionel Comport had a stable that specialized in renting swaybacked nags for those occasions when you were looking for an easy laugh; and Fat Jones had a big place that supplied the studios not only with horses, burros, and mules, but oxen, Spanish longhorn cattle, and every kind of wagon, even chariots. Over at the Hudkin Brothers, and maybe at some of the other stables too, star horses and specialty horses had their own box stalls with their names on the door.

Diamond was more of a shoestring outfit, without a single trick pony and nothing in the way of fancy props or silver-trimmed saddles. Harold had just six or seven acres and thirty or so horses and mules in a handful of corrals, plus a stagecoach and a couple of wagons. This wasn't much, ranked against the big stables, but he was close to town, tucked into a corner of the park, where penny-pinching studios could shoot their outdoor scenes cheaply, and he was handy to a couple of the smaller movie ranches in the Santa Monica Mountains. Singing-cowboy pictures were on the rise back then, heavy with actors who hadn't ever put a boot in a stirrup, and Harold staked his reputation on renting out livestock that was thoroughly broke, horses that were proof against even a tenderfoot actor without a bit of riding experience. This meant that Diamond Barns, small as it was, had about as much work as it could handle.

Harold might have had even more business if he hadn't had a rule against renting out his horses for stunts and falls. In those days, whenever stunts were involved, you could just about count on horses being tripped with a Running W or run into a pitfall or galloped through a candy-glass window, and Harold didn't want his horses used roughly. He always said he was running things on a tight budget and didn't want to be hauling dead horses to the glue factory or selling off the lamed animals and buying new ones all the time. But I think that was only part of the reason; Harold had concern for his animals is the rest of it.

While I sat there in a kitchen chair soaking my sore feet, he put together a couple of roast beef sandwiches and asked me a few things about the ranching I had done and whether I could drive a truck with a horse trailer behind it. I didn't tell him any wild tales—I figured he'd know if I tried to sell him one. I told him my folks raised cows and horses, and I'd done pretty much everything around their place and I'd driven our old truck, which had been cobbled together from an International drive train and a homemade box. I had driven it with a cow or a colt riding in the bed, but we never had owned a livestock trailer. A few times in the last year I had driven a truck towing a one-horse trailer, but only to move the rig around a rodeo ground, never out on the highway, and I hadn't ever tried to back the thing up. I told him I'd been working around rodeos for a while, but I didn't brag about it. Mostly what I had done, I said, was calf roping and working the gates. When he asked me how come I was down here in Hollywood, I told him I'd heard there was plenty of work for anyone used to being around cows and horses. I didn't say anything about expecting to ride alongside Buck Jones or Ken Maynard, and he didn't ask me why I wasn't still working for my folks.

He told me he had two trucks, a Dodge Brothers pickup and a big GMC cab-over, plus a two-horse trailer he ran with the Dodge and a big livestock trailer he pulled behind the GMC. “One of the fellas that works for me used to work for a freight hauler, so he's the one always taking out the big rig. It's the principal reason I hired him on. He ain't the best horse handler, but that truck and trailer is a goddamn beast, and he's the only one of us can lick it.”

When he had a bunch of horses rented out, they had to do a lot of shuttling, dropping off horses and wranglers and then picking them up later. “Hugh took eight horses out to the park this morning, and Jake's got four out at The Canyon, and I just brought one in from a little shoot in Culver City. Along about four o'clock I need to go pick up Jake and those horses from The Canyon, but Hugh has the big rig, so I've got to do it with the Dodge and make two trips.”

He said, “Days like today, it's a hell of a lot of driving, and I wish I had another truck, but I'd rather be busy with two rigs than slow with three. Feed ain't cheap, I guess you know, blacksmiths and vets neither. I don't have a lot of leftover money to invest in new equipment. Anyway, hell, the bottom could still fall out of the cowboy-movie business. Where I grew up, we learned to rub the picture off a nickel”—he cut his eyes to me and raised his eyebrows like he'd just had a surprising and amusing thought—“Shit, maybe that's why there's no damn nickels in any of those creeks. So anyway, I'm holding off on a third rig until I see if this keeps up being busy.”

I was of the opinion that the bottom would never fall out of the cowboy movies, but I didn't say so.

He handed over one of the sandwiches. It had his big dark thumbprint in the bread, which didn't stop me from biting into it. When we were just about finished with the sandwiches, he went rummaging around for something that turned out to be a pair of socks, which he handed to me without saying what for. Well, I had worn holes in the heels of both my socks from walking around Gower Gulch, which he must have seen. Given my stiff neck in those days, I might have said something ungrateful to him if I hadn't had my mouth full of bread. In any case, I didn't get the chance, because right then he said he had two men wrangling for him and business was good enough he was in the market for another, “which I guess means I'm giving you a try. I don't know where you're staying, but there's a room at the back of the house you can move into with Hugh if you don't mind listening to him snore. I'll dock your pay three bucks a week for the bed and board if you want it. Or if you want to stay down in town, you'll just have to get yourself up here every day, good and damn early in the morning, which is what my other fellow is doing.”

Later on I heard from Jake that Harold had more or less made up his mind to hire me when he first saw me walking up the road. He'd been on the lookout for somebody for a while—tired of the long days and feeling shorthanded. Plenty of men were walking around town hoping for movie work, of course, and every so often one of them would find his way up the road to the barn, but a lot of the rodeo riders and cowpunchers were hard drinkers, illiterate, work-shy about anything they couldn't do from a saddle, and many of the others didn't know a thing about horses—they thought the way to get hired as a wrangler was to dress up like a movie cowboy. Harold was always polite, and he would ask a few things to make sure he wasn't missing something—that was how he'd come to hire Jake, who didn't look the part—but he could always spot a dime-store cowboy. And I guess he could see right off the bat that I was a ranch kid who'd grown up knowing the work and knowing how to work hard.

I imagine he also knew that I wouldn't be in his employ for very long, that I had come down to Hollywood expecting to ride fast horses, not stand around holding the reins for greenhorn actors. That as soon as an opportunity presented itself I'd be gone.