Falling From Horses (9 page)

I went on chewing my sandwich for a bit, so as not to appear eager, and then I said, “I've been staying in a hotel, but I'd like to take you up on that room.”

“I thought you might. Have you got anything you need to pick up at the hotel?”

“No sir, I don't. I've got everything in this here bag.”

“Well, all right. We got a couple of hours before I need to pick up those horses from out at The Canyon, so after we finish with these sandwiches you can go on down the hall there and make up the other bed in that room and take a load off your feet for a short while.”

I gave myself half a minute, then said, “I sure appreciate the work.”

He grinned. “Well, you might want to hold off the appreciation until you know what I'm paying, which ain't much, and whether this job mostly involves shoveling horse crap, which it does.”

THE ROOM HE SHOWED ME
to had been the servants' quarters when the old movie star had lived there. It was a small, airless bedroom behind the kitchen, smelling of grease and onions and dirty clothes, with just one small window looking out on a feed shed full of hay, but it had twin beds with fancy carved-oak headboards and oak bureaus carved to match, and a bathroom to itself, which I guess was meant to keep the servants from using the movie star's bath. There was a permanent dark yellow stain at the base of the toilet and on the front rim of the bowl, and the bowl was almost black inside. The tub had a thick ring of grime and shed hair, but there were fancy coral-colored tiles on the walls and on the plaster arch over the bathtub alcove, and a pair of paintings on the wall, a couple of Mexican kids with round faces staring solemnly out at the world. I had grown up in a house without indoor plumbing, and I'd lately been camping in the hills, fighting off bums, and considering the prospect of sleeping in alleys, so when I saw the fancy beds and that bathroom I felt like the pig who lands in slops.

Harold gave me some limp, worn-thin sheets and a couple of blankets he pulled out of a cupboard and left me alone to settle in. One of the mattresses was bare ticking, the other one a tangle of wrinkled, soiled bedclothes with crumbs of hay and dry mud stuck in the folds and furrows. I was so damned tired and sore I lay down for a few minutes on the bare bed, but after a while I stood and found an empty drawer in one of the bureaus, emptied my duffle into it, went into the bathroom and peed and washed up as well as I could without running a bath, then made up the bare mattress and lay down again. I didn't think I'd sleep—I was pretty wrought up and my whole body ached, and I could hear Harold moving around in other parts of the house. But the next thing I knew, Harold was tapping on the doorframe.

“I'm going out to start up the truck. If you can stuff your toes back in those boots, I'll take you with me to pick up the horses.”

It was getting on toward dusk, and some cars were already running their headlights by the time Harold had us pointed up Cahuenga in the Dodge truck. That truck wasn't more than three or four years old, but the gearbox was already half shot because Harold had never learned to drive with any facility, and he had managed to strip the gears pretty well. Every time the traffic slowed or a signal light stopped him on a hill, he double-pumped the clutch and roughly manhandled the stick to get it to shift down and muttered, “Jesusgod get outta my way.” But after dealing with the downshift, he'd go right back to what he was telling me, about the work I'd be doing for him, not shoveling manure, or anyway not as the principal thing, but trucking horses to wherever they were needed—nearby in the park usually or over to one of the small movie ranches—then getting them groomed and tacked up, ready for the actors, and leading them to and from the camera setup. You had to make sure the horses had some shade and water when they weren't in a scene, he said, and since nobody else on the set would give this a single damn thought, you might have to be the one to figure it all out and probably haul the water yourself. Keeping the horses fit and getting them to where they were needed, ready to ride and on time: really, that was the gist of it.

The Canyon was a little movie ranch off Mulholland with about twenty acres of chaparral-covered hills and a couple of bare dirt fields decorated with hauled-in boulders and some tumbleweed. Harold parked the truck and told his dog, who'd been riding in the back end, “Jack, you stay put.” We walked past a few trailers and cars to where a tarp was strung up for shade over a couple of saddled horses. In the field in front of us they were finishing up filming a scene, so we stood a minute, watching. There was a big two-reel camera on a heavy tripod, and several people stood near it talking, surrounded by silver reflector boards and big spotlights and umbrellas on tall poles. One of the fellows had a megaphone, and after a while he said something that sounded like “Quit” but I guess must have been “Quiet,” and then a shrill whistle blew and everybody fell silent. A couple of cowboy actors who'd been lounging on horseback a few yards away suddenly looked alert, jumped off their horses, and crouched down studying a cold campfire on the dirt. Their mouths moved, and the words must have been picked up by a microphone on a long fishpole-like thing, but we were too far away to hear what they said. Then they jumped back on the horses, wheeled around, and trotted off. That was all there was to it. The whistle blew again, and the people who'd been bunched around the camera began to talk and scatter. The actors pulled up their horses before they'd gone twenty yards, hopped off, and just walked away. The horses were evidently used to this; they stood there waiting until somebody walked over and took their reins and led them off.

Well, it turned out the fellow who picked up the horses wasn't one of the movie crew but was Harold's wrangler, and he brought the pair of them right over to us. He was wearing a cloth cap like newsboys used to wear and flat-heeled workman's boots and a Levi's jumper, all of which caused me to wonder whether I'd been wrong about Harold being a fellow of savvy judgment.

Harold introduced us: he said I was Bud, from Oregon, but he pronounced it “Or-ee-gone,” and he said, “This is Jake, from Ohio,” making Ohio sound like three words too, just because he thought this was amusing. He didn't say I was the new hired help, but I suppose he thought Jake could figure that out. We shook hands, and Jake took a look at my cut-up face, but he didn't ask about it. He said to Harold, “Boss, you can have these two. It's King and Skippy they want for the sundown shot.”

“Okey-dokey, we'll see you in a while,” Harold said, and took the reins from him. I followed Harold back to the truck and helped him load the horses into the trailer, still saddled. We didn't talk much, but as we were driving back to Diamond he said, out of the blue, “That there's my best hand. Jacob Reichl. He's a Jew, which in his case don't signify. He's the best hand with horses that I believe I ever have seen.”

I'd never met a Jew before in my life, or anyway none that I knew of. Without a clear idea what a Jew was, I must have imagined there wasn't any such thing as a Jewish cowboy. Harold saying he was his best hand wasn't enough to settle me on the question, because no horse handler of my acquaintance would walk around in those clothes, looking as common as any shoe repairman or grocery store clerk. I didn't argue with Harold, though, or ask him about it. Now that I seemed to have a toehold on the bottom rung of the movie world, I intended to keep my mouth shut and hang on until something better came along.

At the Diamond ranch gate Harold pulled over and let me drive the half mile of his dirt road to get the feel of the truck with that swaying horse trailer back there, and the tricky gearbox. I did all right—our old truck was a son of a bitch too—but I was already worrying about the highways and the Hollywood traffic that I knew I'd have to get used to; I was more than glad that somebody else would be driving the big GMC, hauling the other trailer with eight or ten horses in the back.

We unloaded the horses, stripped their tack, turned them into one of the corrals. Then Harold drove us all the way back to The Canyon on dark roads streaming with headlights. I was so tired I fell asleep for part of the way. We loaded up the other two horses and headed back to Diamond, all three of us crammed together in the front seat. I was in the middle, getting cozy with that gearshift, and Jake at one point said, “Boss, quit playing with the new kid's balls.” I had been thinking a Jewish cowboy must be different from the rest of us, but this was the kind of ribbing I was used to hearing from ranch hands and bronc riders.

It must have been close to ten or eleven by the time we got back to Diamond and turned out the horses. Jake got into an old Chevrolet parked in the yard and drove away into the dark. Harold and I took a piss off the veranda, and then I went down the long hallway to the room I'd be sleeping in. Harold's other hand, Hugh Rovzar, had come back from the shoot in Griffith Park quite a long time before and was already asleep and snoring in the other bed. I stripped to my underwear and climbed under the sheets, and I think I was asleep before Harold made it to his bedroom at the other end of the house.

EVERY SO OFTEN
in those first days looking for work, I'd thought about Lily Shaw. The Studio Club, that girls' sorority she had told me about, was somewhere close to Vine Street—I remembered that much—so walking around Gower Gulch I had looked for it, and I kept an eye out in case I might bump into her. I wondered how she was making out.

It would be January before we met up again, and I never did ask her much about those months when we'd been out of touch. But a couple of years before she died, she wrote about that time in a piece for
Vanity Fair
—she'd been working on her memoir, and this was part of it. She always let me know whenever she used my name in a piece she'd written, so she called me up one day and said, “You're in this, Bud, but you're not the star.”

And then she read the whole thing to me over the phone, a story I had never heard from her before, about how she went into the Studio Club that first afternoon right after we split up at the streetcar stop, then went out to buy a pack of cigarettes.

“This woman, Miss Legard”—Lily's voice was husky, reading it to me, the way smokers' voices get after a few years—“walked me upstairs to the linen room, piled my arms with towels and sheets, and led me to the bedroom I would share with the other agency girls. It was four o'clock, they were away at work, so when she left me to get settled in I found myself standing alone in an empty room. There were rumpled clothes scattered on the floor and the furniture and on the two mussed beds and on the bare mattress that I surmised was mine. Pots and tubes of makeup lay open on the dressing tables, damp towels were draped over closet doors, henna stained the bowl of the sink. I sat down on the bed, holding the stack of folded linens in my lap. I was quite tired—I thought of lying down and trying to sleep—but after a while I stood and made the bed, found an empty drawer in which to put my things, walked down the hall to use the bathroom, and then went downstairs to one of the parlors off the entrance hall.

“It was an enormous long room, with chairs and sofas upholstered in mohair in groupings of two or three. A proscenium stage with maroon velvet curtains took up the whole end wall. The only people in the big room were a young man and woman sitting near the fireplace talking quietly, their fingertips touching. I sat down in a wicker rocker in a far corner close to a window, took a notepad out of my pocket, folded it to a blank page, and wrote
letter to folks
and, underneath that,
buy cigarettes.

“Making lists of things I planned to do was a habit from childhood. I've kept lists sometimes for weeks—it's satisfying to look at the rows of chores and errands and see all the things crossed out, what's been accomplished, the unwasted days. The summer before, when I was still arguing with my parents over my plan to move to California, I had decided to take up smoking as soon as I was living away from home; it was in some unstated way part of my larger plan to become a famous Hollywood screenwriter. I must have imagined that to be famous a woman needed to be bold and shocking.

“That first afternoon at the Hollywood Studio Club, I wrote a short letter to my parents, crossed that off the list, folded the letter inside the notepad, and then at the bottom of my list wrote
buy stamps.
By then it was nearly five o'clock. Some of the girls had begun to come in from their jobs, but when I went back to the bedroom it was still empty. I picked up my purse and walked out in search of a place to buy stamps and cigarettes and to mail the letter.

“A man wearing a big cowboy hat and denim trousers tucked into shiny boots was lounging against a parked car at the corner of the block, and though I knew perfectly well it wasn't Bud Frazer, this gave me a start. I had left Bud at the streetcar stop only an hour earlier, and in any case, he was someone I had known for just a day and a night. So I couldn't account, and can't even now, for the sudden pang of lonesomeness when I saw this cowboy who was not
my
cowboy.”

Lily drew on her cigarette: I could hear the slight, soft
puck
and then the slow exhale. “That's it for you, Bud. It's a walk-on part. Day rate is all you get.”

I laughed. “Let's hear the rest.”

She must have known I would want to hear it all, but she fell silent for a minute, maybe reading ahead. When she started again, her voice was flat, without inflection.

“When I reached the corner I said to him, ‘Do you have a cigarette?' I had seen women in films approach a stranger for a cigarette and then lean in for the flaring match. They were being flirtatious usually, though sometimes a certain kind of woman was signaling something else, something like confidence or casual bravado, and that was what I meant to show. I didn't smile, and I looked the man straight in the eye.