Falling From Horses

by Molly Gloss

  I wandered up and down the streets and saw a lot of fellows wearing cheap ten-gallon hats that wouldn’t stand up to a light rain and shop-made footgear that hadn’t ever toed a stirrup. I didn’t want to ask any of them about picture work, and anyway they were lounging in front of bars or leaning on parked cars appearing to be out of work themselves.

  The day had started warm, and by lunchtime the heat was shimmering off sidewalks and the roofs and hoods of cars. The duffle began to feel heavy against my shoulder, and my feet were sweating in boots never meant for walking. Finally I hunted up a telephone booth and called the number Ray had given me, and I told a girl who answered that I was looking for work riding horses. She asked me for a phone number so she could get in touch if a job came up, and when I said I didn’t have one she wasn’t interested in taking my name.

  It’s a funny thing: when a man is broke he’s always hungry. The coffee and oranges I’d had for breakfast had worn off hours ago, and when I walked by an air-conditioned diner the question of money was the only thing that kept me from going inside. But I saw an Indian with long braids sitting at the lunch counter in there, eating a hamburger. He was hatless but otherwise not dressed much different from me, jeans and a button-up shirt, boots with stack heels worn down at the corners. I figured he must be an actor or at least a movie extra, because I’d only ever seen long-haired Indians in pictures; the ones I had met riding rodeo wore their hair cut short like anybody else. I circled the block, thinking it over, and when I came back around I went in and sat on the stool next to him. I studied the menu while I let the sweat cool, and then I ordered a bowl of chili and some saltine crackers. I ate slowly, eyeing blackberry pie under a glass cover on the counter and enjoying the cool air blowing down from a box on the wall. I had to sit there thinking for quite a while before I came up with something to say to him.

  “My uncle Jim, he saw Jackson Sundown ride at the Round-Up the year he won the All-Around.”

  What shames me now is that I thought my knowing about a famous Indian rodeo champion who had died before I was born was somehow a compliment to the whole Indian race.

  Well, this fellow was polite about it. He looked over at me, nodded, and said, “Did he,” and drank some of his Coke. Then he said, “Your uncle Jim, he a bronc rider?”

  My dad’s brother had died before my parents ever met, but I had heard enough about him from my grandparents and my dad that I sometimes forgot I hadn’t known him. I said, “No, he did some law work for the city of Pendleton and for the Round-Up, so he happened to be there that time Sundown got the silver-trimmed saddle.”

  He nodded again and took another swig of his Coke. I could see his hands were callused from rope burns and three fingers were bent—maybe they’d been broken and healed crooked.

  I was mulling over what else I could say to keep him talking—maybe something about Chiloquin, which was the last place I had rodeoed before heading south to Hollywood. It was the biggest town on the Klamath Indian Reservation, so I had met quite a few Indians there. I might have been preparing to ask if he knew any of them. But then he glanced down at my boots and said, “I guess maybe you’re the bronc rider.”

  I tried to hold on to a sober expression. “Yes sir, I’ve rode a few. But I’m looking for picture work right now.”

  I don’t suppose he was surprised, but he lifted his eyebrows like he was. “Is that right.”

  “I thought there’d be a lot of work down here, but I haven’t had much luck. You in pictures?”

  He’d probably known from the first word I spoke that this was where I was headed—that I was new in town and hoping he might be able to give me a leg up in the movie business. He took a minute making up his mind how to answer, and then he passed me a dry smile and said, “I’ve shot up a few wagon trains.”

  “Yeah? You ever been shot off a horse? I heard that’s mostly what the work is.”

  He gave me another look, another slight smile. “That there is called a saddle fall. You get on a picture, you’ll be falling two, three times every day. That and just straight hard riding, that’s what the work mostly is for the fellows in the posses and such.”

  Then this fellow—his name was Lee Waters—must have decided I was worth a little bit of coaching. I was to learn over the next few months that stunt riders were naturally proud of the work they did, and most any of them would open up and talk about it if you looked interested and gave them half an opening. If they had a specialty, they might not tell you their secrets, but they’d be happy to let you in on the ordinary tricks and tell you the story of how they got started working in pictures. Lee told me he’d been riding for a wild west show, and after the outfit went broke in the Depression he came down to Gower Gulch. This was when things were still booming along Poverty Row, and he picked up work pretty much every day just by showing up at the cheap studios wearing his own moccasins and buckskin leggings, with a crow feather stuck in his long braids. In the wild west show he had learned the trick of hanging off the far side of a horse, shooting a bow and arrow from under the horse’s neck, and when word of this got around to the second-unit ramrods, they took to calling him whenever they needed somebody to ride that gag. For the last few years he’d been working regularly for Republic and Monogram, the studios Ray Mullens had called “the big guns.”

  Ray had told me it wasn’t worth my time to try those outfits. The Monogram office was quite a few miles to the east along Sunset Boulevard, and Republic was a long streetcar ride up Cahuenga to the valley. “You’d waste half your day getting out to one of them and back, and I just wouldn’t do it if I was you. For them places, you got to know somebody or been around the business a while.”

  When I said this to Lee Waters, he nodded. “Ray Mullens told you that? Hell, I know Ray, I rode with him a time or two. Yeah, you got to fall off a few saddles for the eight-day outfits, pay your dues, so to speak, before them guys at Republic will give you a ride.” He leaned back and lit a ready-made cigarette and took a couple of drags before he said, “Ray got busted up, I heard, and had to quit the business.”

  “He’s pretty stove in.”

  “Where’s this list he give you?”

  I pulled out the list and handed it to him, and he smoked quietly as he studied it a couple of minutes. “A lot of these places been bought out or gone broke,” he said.

  “That’s what I’m finding. I guess Ray didn’t know it.”

  Lee took a pencil out of his shirt pocket and wrote down a couple of places he knew about that had their offices in some other part of town. “I ain’t sure of the addresses, but I’m writing down the cross streets as I remember, and you can ask around and maybe get yourself there.”

  Then he said, “You sleeping in the park?” He meant Griffith Park, although I didn’t know it at the time. “I slept a few nights up there myself when I first come to town. At least you’re out of some heat, being under the trees.” It didn’t occur to me at the time, but now that I’m thinking back I imagine he meant this as mild advice. He said it as if money wasn’t the consideration at all, but he must have known I was flat broke—that if I wasn’t already sleeping behind trash cans in an alley I would be before long.

  The last year or so following rodeos and picking up itinerant ranch work, there’d been plenty of days and weeks when I had been stone broke, but I could almost always count on some winner buying me a sandwich and some rancher who didn’t care if I bedded down in an empty stall in his dry barn. Here in Hollywood it was just starting to sink in that this was a different sort of place.

  I nodded. “Well, the room I had last night was hot as hell. Maybe I’ll try sleeping out.”

  I asked him where the park was, and he told me the bus that would get me up there. Then he took back Ray’s list and wrote down where to find Diamond Barns, which he said was a stable that supplied horses to the cowboy movies. “It’s right up there in the park, so if you’re already in the neighborhood you might see if Harold is doing any hiring. That’s if you’r
e not too high-hat to go to work pitching hay and mucking out stalls. Wrangling might get you started in the business anyway, get you onto some movie sets where you might meet a few ramrods, get yourself an opening to ride.”

  We walked out of the cafe together and shook hands, and he said, “See you around,” before climbing into a Model A and driving off. I never did see him again, though at the end of 1942 I happened to catch a glimpse of him in a motion picture. That was after I had joined the army and finished up training and was waiting to ship out from New York. It was all over the papers that the cowboy star Buck Jones had died a hero trying to save people in the Cocoanut Grove fire, and a bunch of men from the barracks decided to go see a Buck Jones picture playing at a theater in town. I had stayed away from westerns after leaving Hollywood, but Buck was one of the cowboy stars I’d admired when I was working there; before getting started in the movies he’d been a horse breaker for the French during the Great War, and I knew he was a real horseman. So I went along with the others to see his last picture. When Lee Waters came up on the screen, I recognized him right away. He had a small speaking part, delivering his lines in that clipped “Injun” style that the movies always used back then—not a bit like when I’d met him at Gower Gulch. I waited through the credits at the end to see if I could spot him. Well, there wasn’t any Lee Waters, just “Injun Lee.”

  I spent the rest of the day hunting up the places he had written down for me. I didn’t have the damnedest idea how Hollywood was laid out, and I was too stubborn to ask anybody, so I wound up going lost a good part of the afternoon and hoofing it more than my boots were meant for, and in the end I ran into the same trouble I’d had in the Gulch: a girl behind a desk who barely looked up before saying there wasn’t any need for a cowboy.

  By the time the shops and offices had started closing for the day, my feet had come out in blisters and the sweat was rolling down the back of my shirt in itchy streams. I stood on a street corner counting up the money I had left, which was a buck-eighty, and then I limped up Sunset to Western and caught a city bus going into the park.

  6

  IN 1938 THERE WAS ALREADY AN OBSERVATORY at the top of Griffith Park, and a Greek amphitheater and an aerodrome, but as soon as the bus started climbing north of Hollywood Boulevard we were in empty hills grown over with manzanita and chaparral, and steep gullies thick with oaks and big old sycamore trees. Even now, most of that park is still undeveloped, still rough country, but back then it looked as if it was unchanged from when Indians had walked those ravines. I was in a black mood about the way things had gone that day, and when I saw how wild the park was I began entertaining a little fantasy about living like an outlaw, camping in the park, and coming down into town to rob a bank now and then. I was thinking if I had my .22 with me to shoot rabbits and threaten bank tellers, I’d be all set.

  When I stepped onto the bus I hadn’t made up my mind whether I was going up there to find the horse stable Lee Waters had told me about or to find a place to camp, but partway up the hill I caught a glimpse of what might have been water in one of the ravines, and I guess that was when I made up my mind I was camping out. I yanked the cord, and the bus pulled over to let me off, nowhere close to anything—just trees. The driver didn’t remark on this, which I took to mean I wasn’t his first cowboy looking for a place to spend the night.

  It was a relief to be away from concrete sidewalks and under the shade of those big old canyon oaks. And a shock, almost, to hear quiet for the first time in two days. Once I left the road and hiked down into the gully, there was almost no traffic noise, no rattling streetcars, no buses whining through the gears, no muttered voices through cheap hotel walls, just a lot of bird chatter—California birds, their strange songs not the ones I recognized—and the understory buzz that crickets and grasshoppers make, and every so often the dry rustle of a snake or a squirrel or a gopher moving off through the brush. I think that may have been the point at which I realized I’d been taking such things for granted my whole life.

  The water turned out to be not much more than a stagnant thread, scummy with algae, but I found a couple of deeper puddles I could dip my hands into, and I was thirsty enough it didn’t matter to me. I drank some tepid, fusty-tasting palmfuls, took off my shirt and hat and sluiced water over my sweaty head and chest, and then took off my boots and soaked my feet. The sun hadn’t quite set, but the gully was in deep orange shadow, and the air at the bottom of the ravine was cooler than it had been in the city. Sitting with my sore feet in water, my chin resting on my bare chest, I just about went off to sleep. So I found a level spot with plenty of leaf duff, rolled out my blanket and lay down on it, and then, the way it happens sometimes, I was wide awake, staring overhead into the crewelwork of dry oak leaves while the sky slowly darkened.

  I should have been making a plan for the next day, but what I thought about was the dead man, his open eyes examining the night sky, and it wasn’t far from there to my sister. The stars came out slowly. The only constellation I recognized in the wedge of sky above the ravine was Aries. Finally it got a little chilly, so I sat up and put on my shirt and walked barefoot into the darkness to take a piss. When I lay down again and rolled up in the blanket, I guess the long day finally caught up with me, because I stopped thinking about anything, and when I came back to the surface it was gray morning.

  The oak leaves over my head were faintly moving shadows. I looked up into them a minute, listening to the quiet rustle, and then woke all the way up and turned my head and saw what I’d been hearing, which was a couple of men rummaging through my duffle bag. One of them was hatless, his dirty shirt torn out along the shoulder seam. The other guy was wearing my hat pushed far back on his greasy hair. The one in the torn shirt had my good boots clasped under his arm while he squatted down watching his pal poke around inside my bag.

  I yelled, “Hey,” which was probably not the smartest thing I could have done. My legs were tangled in the blanket, and before I could get to my feet both men startled upright, and the one with my hat on his head grabbed up my bag and swung it at me. Something hard inside, probably my dad’s old steel spurs, clipped me on the eyebrow. It wasn’t much of a blow, but I recoiled from it, and then the other one swung out with his hobnail boot and struck me on the side of my neck; all the feeling went out of that side of my body.

  They weren’t toughs—I imagine they were just hobos looking for money or something to eat or trade for money or food. But at that point they could have taken off running with my boots and my bag, leaving me there in my sock feet with nothing but the clothes I was wearing and a thin blanket. I don’t know why they didn’t. But once they started, they just became set on beating the living daylights out of me.

  I had been in fights as a kid, the kind that ended when somebody got a bloody nose, and in the year and a half since I’d left home I’d been in a few drunken fistfights outside rodeo arenas or bars. I could take a hit and throw one, and I was on my way to being what we used to call a scrapper, but I was on the ground and the two of them were standing over me, kicking with their boots. I couldn’t get any leverage to fight back, and one side of my body was nothing but a buzzing numbness. It’s interesting how, in a situation like that, you’re not thinking about anything, not even feeling fear, you’re just trying to protect your soft parts and your head, trying to get out of range of the kicks or grapple with an ankle or a foot to keep the kick from making contact. And your head is too full of the hammering of your own heart, the furious pumping of blood, to have room for feeling much pain.

  Finally I managed to get hold of a boot. It was an army boot from the last war, a trench boot too big for the man’s foot and with the laces missing. When the boot came off in my hands, he lost his balance and went flailing backward and landed on his butt, and as he went down, the other guy tried to grab hold of his windmilling arms to keep him from falling, which gave me a couple of seconds. I scrambled to my feet and barreled into the one still standing and knocked him flat, knock
ed my hat off his head, and followed him down to the ground and went to pounding on him with my fists. I was in a rage suddenly, the world gone red through the scrim of blood behind my eyes.

  It’s probably a good thing I was already beaten up myself, that I didn’t have the arm strength to put heat behind the punches. This is something I’ve thought about off and on over the years.

  I don’t know how many times I hit him, but at some point the one who had lost his boot got around behind me and struck me on the shoulders and back of the head with a stick of wood or something, hit me two or three times. It didn’t knock me out, nowhere close to it, but it stunned me, and I rocked over and brought up my arms to protect my brains. The one who’d been hitting me helped the other guy to his feet, and the two of them took off staggering down the ravine.

  I yelled something after them, half-articulated and breathless, something childish like “You better run, pally!” which I think I’d learned from the movies.

  I almost stood up, then sat right down again. I looked to make sure they’d left my stuff behind, the boots especially, and the hat, and then I just sat there a while. My mouth was full of blood, there was blood in my eyes. Now that the fight was finished, I had feeling all over my body, throbbing pain in my shoulders and arms, my hands, my neck. Every breath hurt. I lay down for a while, my bloody cheek resting on the dirt, and maybe I even slept for a few minutes. Woke up with a jerk, thinking those two guys were walking up on me again, but I was alone.

  I was so stiff I had a hard time climbing to my feet. I went over to the little rill of water and gingerly washed my face—I had cuts on my eyebrow and chin that had already scabbed up, and this got them bleeding again. I felt around inside my mouth to make sure I had all my teeth. The inside of my lip was torn, so when I took a drink of water it tasted of salt and iron. My hands were bloodied and swollen. I soaked them a while, and then I rolled up my shirtsleeves and washed the dried blood off both elbows. I was bruised and sore all over, and it felt like I might have a cracked rib. When I looked through my duffle bag I found I was missing a few things—a pair of socks, a razor, things they must have pocketed before the fight started—but my dad’s old spurs were still there, wrapped in a rag at the bottom of the sack. So they hadn’t made off with anything important. It could have been worse. I had wakened thinking about Arlo Gantz, who had given me the Hamley saddle, and regretting that I had sold it, but if I’d had the saddle with me the bums might have picked it up quietly and walked off without bothering to rummage through my duffle. Even if they didn’t know the worth of a Hamley, they would know that a guy sleeping outside wasn’t likely to own anything more valuable than his saddle.