A shrewd, cold look passes over her face and then she dismisses the opportunity with a regretful, weary shake of the head. “No, he paid in full. Always did. He’s a punctual man.”
“Do you have a guess where he went to?”
“No.”
“Did he say anything? Give any reasons for leaving?”
Mother Reardon cocks her head, shoots me a look like a bright-eyed scrawny bird. “Business associate, you said?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“Then you ought to know him to be closed-mouthed. Never said much more to anybody than a word at the supper table. ‘Pass the butter.’ ‘Pass the beans.’ That’s all he ever asked from anybody, that they pass him what he paid for.”
“So he just up and left.”
“That’s right. Came out of his room one Sunday morning with his duffel bag packed and asked what he owed. Left without breakfast.”
“On the run?”
“No. He wasn’t in any particular hurry.”
“I talked to a man this afternoon. He mentioned something about a director. Did Mr. McAdoo ever say anything about a director?”
“I heard him say a thing or two about directors. None of it good. I feel the same way. Movie people don’t get into my house if I can help it. They’re all whores and thieves. Except for the cowboys. They may be rough but they’re honest.”
“Did he have any visitors?”
“A few young fellows came by. Just to sit with him. They admired Mr. McAdoo. Wanted to hear about the old days. Once I heard him tell them, ‘Don’t ask me about the old days. Let the dead bury the dead. I ain’t dead.’ ”
“What do you think he meant by that?”
“I don’t think he meant anything. It’s just something an old man might say.”
“Do you know the names of any of those young fellows?”
“No.”
“And you have no idea why he left?”
“Could be any number of reasons. Could be money, he hadn’t worked in some time. I’ll carry people I trust until they find work. Mr. McAdoo I trusted, but he never asked me to carry him.”
“You mentioned there might be a number of reasons. What other reasons?”
She considers a moment. “I came in the house the night before he moved out. I’d been visiting my sister. It was dark. Saturday night the boys are usually out. I walked in the living room and threw the light switch. Mr. McAdoo was sitting by the radio.” She paused. “He was crying. That’s the last thing I expected to see… Shorty McAdoo crying. He’s a tough old bird. I thought, Lord God, what’s this? His face was all wet with tears, he wiped them off with his hands. I said to him, ‘Mr. McAdoo, are you feeling poorly? Anything I can get you?’ He said, ‘No, the light coming on so sudden made my eyes burn.’ I said, ‘Well, let me get you a cool cloth for them.’ I went out and ran some water on a washcloth; I knew it wasn’t the light. He slipped out before I came back. Maybe he got bad news about family. Maybe he learned he ain’t well.”
“Anything else?”
She shook her head.
In the next few days I make no more progress. Groping for a lead, I go to the obvious places and ask the obvious questions. I spend an unfruitful afternoon loafing around the Sunset Barn, where a lot of the Western stars stable their horses. It’s a popular place for corral buzzards who perch on the rail fences hoping to get noticed by somebody important. For young men who hail from Montana, Arizona, Texas, and Oklahoma, the Sunset Barn is what the drugstore counter was later to become for the corn-fed beauties of the Midwest, the rosy-cheeked milkmaids of Minnesota; it’s the place to get discovered. They drawl and spit, do rope tricks, and show off their bandy-legged struts. I don’t find Shorty McAdoo here, nor do I discover any reliable information as to his whereabouts.
The next day I motor out to Mixville, the ranch where the great Western star Tom Mix produces his horse operas. The ranch foreman knows McAdoo but has little to say about him. He was there three months before doing a picture, but nobody has seen him since. “He’s a tumbleweed,” he says. “Blows in and blows out.” I leave my number and ask him to call if Shorty happens to blow in. The only profit in this wasted day is catching a glimpse of Tom Mix in a lurid purple tuxedo, matching purple stetson and boots, easing himself behind the wheel of his white Rolls-Royce with the fourteen-karat-gold initials TM on the doors. He puts the evening’s sunset to shame.
Each night I am required to call Fitzsimmons to make a report on my progress or lack of it. Fitzsimmons wants results and he wants them fast.
“You got expense money – spread it around.”
“If anybody knew anything, I would. But they don’t.”
“How do you know if they know anything until you offer a little fucking incentive? Get the rag out, Vincent. You’re getting paid a hundred and fifty dollars a week to get results. A hundred and fifty is a lot of money.”
“I know how much money it is, Mr. Fitzsimmons. And the rag was out the minute I signed on. There’s a lot of ground to cover and I assure you I’m covering it. It seems everybody has heard about Shorty McAdoo but nobody knows him. No wife, no kids, no friends. A fucking loner. He could be anyplace, doing anything. He might be dying in some flophouse. He might be making a movie. He might have fucked off to Kansas, or Montana, or Arkansas – anyplace they need somebody to serenade cows from a horse. I don’t know. But I’m looking.”
“Shit.”
“And what’s the point of phoning you every night and going through this song and dance? Half the time you’re not in. I call a dozen times; I’m up until midnight trying to get through to you. Why can’t I call only if I have news?”
“Mr. Chance wants it that way. That’s why.”
“Then stop chewing my ass. I’m doing my best.”
“You think your ass been chewed, Vincent? Your ass ain’t even been nipped.”
The next ten days I spend bouncing back and forth over dirt roads in the San Fernando Valley, the Mojave Desert, the sierras of Lone Pine, all the favoured locations for dusters. I locate fourteen or fifteen crews employing hundreds of cowboys. I had no idea there were so many cowpokes in Hollywood, but talking to them I learn they’ve been drifting into town for ten years, jumping off cattle-cars in the Los Angeles stockyards, going AWOL from Wild West shows and rodeos, riding in from the small family spreads which dot southern California. They’re all refugees from a vanishing West. The cessation of hostilities in Europe has meant the end of the beef boom, the big spreads in Wyoming and Montana are cutting back herds and cutting loose wranglers. Cowhands wander into Hollywood, chasing rumours that five dollars a day can be earned as stunt men and extras in the Western pictures which Broncho Billy, William S. Hart, Tom Mix, and Art Accord have made famous. Maybe they’ll get famous, too. Or at least passably prosperous on five dollars a day, boxed lunch provided. The only problem is there’s too many cowboys and too few jobs.
A lot of these cowpokes won’t give me the time of day when I mention Shorty McAdoo, maybe because I look like a subpoena-server. Sometimes the young ones, the green boys, talk, but they usually know nothing about McAdoo. To them he’s as much a rumour as he is to me. They don’t know where he lives, who his friends are. Slowly, it dawns on me that I’m chasing a reputation as much as a man.
On the weekend I drive out to the cowboy star Hoot Gibson’s Saugus Ranch to take in the rodeo he throws there every Sunday, sit parked on hot bleacher-boards under a brassy, breathless sky, scanning the crowd for the grizzled, haunted face I’d seen projected on Chance’s screen. I don’t find it. Delayed by a flat tire, I get back to my apartment late that night, exhausted, my leg throbbing like a rotten tooth. I’m in no mood to phone Fitz. He can wait until morning. Or maybe even until tomorrow night. Fuck him.
I climb into bed and no sooner does my head drop on the pillow than the phone rings. It goes on and on, drilling into my head, then stops. Fifteen minutes later, it starts again. I know who it is. I get up and take the receiver off the ho
ok. On my way back to the bedroom I can still hear the tinny sound of Fitzsimmons, shouting down the line.
At dawn, I drive out to Universal City where more white hats ride the range than on any other spread in southern California. The program feature is king at Universal and the king of program features is the Western, cheap to make and profitable. Uncle Carl Laemmle has many of the biggest Western stars under contract – Harry Carey, Neal Hart, Jack Hoxie, Art Accord, Peter Morrison, Hoot Gibson. Universal City is, as its name implies, a metropolis of sorts, a two-hundred-and-thirty-acre hive with its own police, fire department, street-cleaning crews, shops, forges, mills, prop departments, stages, outdoor sets, and a variety of scenery made to order for Westerns, and Uncle Carl is mayor of it all. This Western factory also has its own herds of cattle, horses, and mules, grazing a huge pasture, ready to serve at a moment’s notice. But it also requires a reliable reserve of two-legged stock to work as doubles, stunt men, and extras. Uncle Carl’s solution to the problem of ready supply is to construct a big hiring tank fenced with wire to hold cowboys corralled inside the studio gates and out of mischief until they are needed. Anybody looking for employment is penned there until Universal directors give him the nod and cut him out of the remuda for a day’s shooting.
I get to Universal City just as the sun is beginning to spread itself on the north Hollywood hills, and already the pen holds forty hands. The scene reminds me of a prison camp, wire and posts, boot-trampled dirt, faces stamped with jailhouse emotions – boredom, apathy, bravado, sullen viciousness. I let myself in at the gate and begin to wander among the men. A small group throws craps on a horse blanket, two play mumblety-peg with a sheath knife big enough to chop sugar cane with; others doze propped up against fenceposts, big hats tipped down to shield eyes from the rising sun. A few stand in silent communion, rolling cigarettes; a number clutch the fence-wires, eyes fixed on the brightening hills as if anticipating the cavalry will ride down from the heights and rescue them.
I drift along, nodding and smiling, trying to strike up a conversation. As the sun warms and starts to take the chill off them, the extras get marginally friendlier and unbend a little, accept cigarettes, pass commonplace remarks about the weather and the promise of the day.
I keep doggedly nudging conversation in the direction of Shorty McAdoo. Finally, in one knot of middle-aged wranglers I manage to awaken some response. One of them claims he’s heard Shorty pulled stakes and headed for Bakersfield. Wichita, says another. Somebody contradicts both of them. No, McAdoo’s still in the Los Angeles area. The only thing they can agree on is that nobody has seen him on any set or location for at least a month.
“He ain’t working because of that deal with Coster,” says a fellow wearing a black hat with a silver-dollar hatband.
None of the others seem to know what the deal with Coster is.
“Look at this goddamn place. Not a stamp’s worth of shade. Not a dipper of water to be had. Old Shorty had something to say to these high-handed bastards,” he mutters. “Said her with a hammer.” He taps his front teeth with a finger. “Knocked a few spokes out of Coster’s wheel with a shoeing hammer, is what I heard.”
“Well, if that’s the case,” says a fellow in a Canadian stetson, “Coster’ll be able to suck dick all the better for it.”
They all laugh.
“Story is it had something to do with simple Wylie’s brother,” says the silver-dollar hatband, tilting his head in a meaningful way toward a solitary kid sitting on a saddle.
“Wylie’s twin, you mean,” a tall, lanky man corrects him.
“Go on, they don’t look no way similar.”
“They ain’t identical. But maybe they split a brain between the two of them because one’s every bit as identical dumb as the other,” asserts the tall man.
Everybody turns to look at the kid.
He has been riding that saddle since I arrived, scrunched down on it with his knees up around his ears, secluded in a lonesome corner of the coop. The stray-dog air of him, the wistful, sad-assed, clinging-vine look of him had kept me clear. He looks like the sort of kid that a kind word will stick to you like flypaper.
“Yes,” concedes the tall man, “could be it had something to do with Wylie’s brother. Because Wylie’s setting on Shorty’s saddle over there. I recognized it right away. Shorty hung a pair of army stirrups on his rig. Steel stirrups. I recognized a weld on the off-stirrup. Shorty had his off-stirrup mended once.”
Before he finishes, I am crossing the tank, hasty and awkward, stiff leg swinging like a gate on rusty hinges. When Wylie spots me coming, he pulls off his hat and crushes it to his chest just the way cowboys do in the movies when the time rolls around to propose to their sweethearts. His jug-handle ears, horse-clipper haircut with haystack top and white-wall temples cut a sorry sight.
“Morning,” I greet him.
When he cranes back his neck to peer up at me, his mouth falls open like a nestling begging for the worm. Everything about him is a plea, the timid eyes, the bottom lip chapped raw from hours of anxious sucking. He clamps down on it now, begins to nurse, the corners of his mouth collapsing in little tugs.
“Morning,” I repeat. Just a little louder.
He leaves off sucking; the eyes scoot from side to side, avoiding mine. “Yessir,” he says.
I poke the saddle with my toe. “I understand the owner of this saddle is Shorty McAdoo.”
His panicked eyes cut back and forth between the saddle and my face. He talks very quickly, as if what he’s saying is a recitation committed to memory. “He borrowed me this saddle. Them picture men’ll hire you sooner you got a saddle your own self. And Miles he got busted up and that was bad and I had to hock my own saddle and so old Shorty he says to me, ‘Wylie, you ride this rig of mine for a while. Might turn your luck. It always done right by me,’ that’s what Shorty said and I been riding her. Rub that luck off her. That’s what I been doing, riding her -” He breaks off, looks up to check if I understand, if all is clear.
“But it was only a loan,” I say.
He disregards me, plunges on. “Shorty said to me, he said, ‘Wylie, you look after this here saddle of mine.’ That’s what he said, Shorty said.” He commences to rock back and forth on the saddle-seat. “Shorty said that. I’m a-watching it for him. I’m a-watching it like a son of a bitch.”
“Until he wants it back.”
“He borrowed me his own saddle, so’s I could get work,” Wylie repeats stubbornly. “I found twenty dollar in the saddlebags. I know who put it there. Twenty dollars.” The skittish eyes zoom off; he’s thought of something else. “Miles,” he says, “Miles. That’s right. I put breakfast out for Miles. On that table. By his bed. I didn’t forget.”
“Shorty wants his saddle back. He asked me to collect it for him.”
The kid resumes scooting his ass back and forth on the saddle-seat, quicker and quicker, he’s riding away. Then suddenly he freezes, both hands lock tight on the horn, knuckles white. It has caught up to him. “He don’t,” he says.
“Yes, he does.”
“He don’t want this here old saddle.”
“Right now, Wylie. He wants it now. Today.”
Wylie blinks so hard his eyelids blur.
“I’ve got a car parked outside. I’ll deliver you. You can hand it over to Shorty personally.”
“I ain’t even had a horse under it yet,” says the kid, jumping to his feet, pulling at the crotch of his trousers. “But if Shorty wants her back -”
“He does.”
When we get to the car I inquire of Wylie whether he drives. He nods solemnly.
“All right,” I say, “take the wheel. Working the clutch is hard on this bum leg of mine. I don’t drive unless I have to.”
Wylie takes it at face value. Behind the wheel he doesn’t head the car back to Los Angeles as I expect him to, but bucks it out into the wilderness which still clings to the skirts of Hollywood like a burr, racketing us down dirt roads which unfurl
lazy pennants of dust under our tires. Most of the countryside we are crossing is unoccupied, state lease land and tracts in the hands of speculators hoping to cash in on the next boom in real estate. But it isn’t entirely deserted. Here and there I manage to spot some small frame farmhouse; occasionally we encounter a flivver or farm wagon creaking along the road. Whenever Wylie spies another vehicle, even a couple of hundred yards up the road, he immediately slows to a turtle’s crawl and surrenders so much of the thoroughfare he nearly has us in the ditch. When the approaching vehicle has gone safely by he turns a sly look of pride on me. And I smile back my approval of his skilful, life-preserving manoeuvre and wonder how much further we have to go to find McAdoo and whether Wylie has any notion whatsoever of where he is taking us.
Then, all at once, he is talking again, rattling away very fast, something about Running W’s and his twin brother, Miles. A Running W is how horses were thrown in movie action scenes before the SPCA got a stop put to it. A Running W worked like this. A post called a deadman was driven solidly into the ground, out of camera view. Two lines of piano wire were run from the horse’s fetlocks up its front legs and back underneath the girth of the saddle; the remaining several hundred feet of piano wire were coiled beside the deadman and the ends of the coils snubbed tight to the post buried in the ground. The stunt man’s job was to ride a horse at a hard gallop until it ran out of line and the wire yanked its legs out from under it, crashing them to the ground. The Running W killed a lot of horses, hurt and crippled a lot of men. It was not popular with cowhands.
“Miles and me and Shorty we were working for Mr. Coster in the Valley. It’s how it happened. The Running W done it. He was bad, Mr. Coster.”
“Whoa,” I say, feigning ignorance. “Who’s Coster?” Any more information I can collect may prove useful.
“The director, the director!” he exclaims excitedly. “All day long he wants this shot. ‘Spectacular!’ he keeps hollering. ‘I want spectacular! Give me some goddamn spectacular!’ But it ain’t the stunt men’s fault. They tried, didn’t they? It’s the horses, that’s what Shorty said. It’s the horses. Because they all been throwed lots of times. And they know what’s coming soon as them pianer wires get put on their legs. They know. Shorty says they won’t run flat out because them horses know they going to get took down hard at the end. So they don’t gallop terrible hard. They’re smart horses. They been hurt before, them horses. They don’t want to get hurt again, do they?”
The Englishman’s Boy Page 7
