Falling From Horses

by Molly Gloss

  Other men and horses had made it down into the hot shade with us. I turned and looked back at the battlefield, at the injured horses running loose across the field, the men on the ground, the litter of fallen lances, the dead horses heaps of darkness against the dust and the yellow grass. I looked, but all these things were at a remove. I saw Greer standing in the middle of the shambles, holding his horse by the reins. The horse’s head was very high, jerking up and down, his nostrils flaring, the ears pointing and swiveling. Crewmen were streaming out onto the field, and after a moment Greer led his horse through them toward the top edge of the field, where we had formed up our line just minutes earlier. A wrangler stepped up and took the horse from him, and Greer walked on past him, stopping briefly to speak to Cab, who was just stepping off the bucket of the crane. And then he walked on out of sight.

  A horse plunged loose through the shade under the oak trees where I was standing, ran so close past me that the dirt he kicked up peppered me in a dry hail. The chestnut half reared in alarm, and when the reins slipped out of my hand he took off running with the other horse. I didn’t try to go after him. When I heard a loud crack out on the field, I knew what it was and I came back as if from a journey. I walked out onto the grass to see who was hurt, see who I could help. Around me, three or four men, wranglers, I think, were walking from horse to horse, and every time a gun popped I couldn’t keep my shoulders from jerking. Horses were screaming, men moaning. A wind came up, pelting grit and chaff, blowing across the valley from the sandstone bluffs to the west.

  30

  SO MANY HORSES were brought down in that Valverde battle scene that I’m surprised no men died. Plenty were hurt—stabbed or sliced with lances, thrown, trampled. There were a lot of broken bones. Dave Keaton broke his leg in a bad way. I don’t know how many horses died—died outright or were shot afterward. Twenty-five, I heard, or thirty, forty.

  I heard later that Jamerman was satisfied with the footage. It hadn’t gone as he’d planned—there hadn’t been a second charge—but the wreckage of horses and men gave him a battle scene that was more dramatic than the one he had been carrying around in his head. I heard he walked over to Cab afterward and shook his hand.

  This was Saturday, at the end of a long week of long days, and we weren’t shooting film on Sunday, so even if horses hadn’t died that day, even if men hadn’t been hauled off to the hospital, I imagine we’d have wanted to find a bar that stayed open late. As it was, we went at it with pretty serious intention. The dozen of us staying at the Wagon Wheel walked down the sidewalk half a mile or so and turned in at the first bar we came to.

  There were several local fellows in that bar, men who worked for the railroad, I think. At some point they were laughing about something that could have been a slur against movie cowboys or could have had nothing to do with any of us. I went over there and took a swing at one of them. I was hoping for a brawl, but my swing went wide, and then Ralph Foster, who wasn’t quite as drunk as I was, stepped in front of me, put his hand on my chest, and shoved. I went down on my butt, and I was too drunk to get to my feet. Ralph spoke a few friendly words to the locals and wandered off with them to a table in the corner. Nobody helped me up. I went on lying there with men stepping around me like I was an overturned chair. When I finally got back on my feet, Carl Frisson came over and dabbed at me with a bar towel—I had dropped my drink when Ralph pushed me, and the spill was all over my shirt front and my chin. He said, “Fool, you got to remember to set your drink down before you start a fight.”

  He then set his drink down and walked over to the table in the corner and punched one of the locals in the face. Blood spurted from the man’s cheek, and when the rest of them registered what had happened they climbed over the table onto Carl. Ralph Foster stood up too, took a moment to make up his mind which side he was on, then randomly thumped one of the railroad men on the back of his head.

  There was a big bouncer working that night, or maybe he was the bar owner, and he might have been the one who broke my nose. My nose had been broken once before, in another bar fight. The barroom brawl is a movie cliché, and this is probably the time to tell you I had been living up to that particular part of the cowboy stereotype for a while.

  In the movies, men get punched in the face and don’t even wind up bruised, but I can tell you a broken nose hurts so much it will just about make you weep. I was bleeding all over the front of my shirt and barely able to see to walk, but when they booted us out of that bar and the other men went looking for another bar to inhabit, I went along, and we only came weaving back down the sidewalk to the Wagon Wheel as the early risers were stepping out of their houses to go to Sunday-morning church service. I made it all the way back without puking or falling down. I drew the shades and slept all day. Ralph always snored like a bugling elk, and I’d been having trouble sleeping through his racket, but that was one time I didn’t hear it. I sipped ginger ale for supper and went to bed again.

  Monday morning I wasn’t the only one who turned up for work bleary and with a marked face, but Cab looked us all over without saying a thing about it. The work that day, and the rest of the week, had us riding hard and taking falls—it was the cavalry battle at the ford—so he pushed us through some long days, and maybe that was how he made his point.

  Carl Frisson had driven Dave Keaton back to LA in the Franklin after he broke his leg, so I rode the crew bus back to town at the end of that shoot. Leaning on the window, looking out at those weird streaked monoliths and sandstone bluffs, what came into my mind was Glass Buttes up in Lake County, the outcroppings of volcanic glass half a day’s ride to the west of our ranch.

  Mary Claudine and I had gone to Glass Buttes overnight on horseback a couple of times to collect obsidian arrowheads when we were kids. Sedona was a thousand miles from Glass Buttes, and those rock-hunting trips had been years earlier, but memory is a disjointed thing, and from thinking about Mary Claudine I was thrown back suddenly to the Christmas dance I’d gone to in Foy a few weeks after we gave up the search for her. I wasn’t drinking back then, I didn’t even like the taste of it, but somebody had brought whiskey and stashed it under the edge of the dance hall porch. That night I got pretty drunk for the first time in my life and got into a fight with a man I’d never seen before, an unshaven fellow about forty, wearing baggy pants and a soiled shirt. There were lots of itinerants, bums, and out-of-work cowhands passing through on the cross-state highway in those years, and one of the ideas I had been entertaining for a while was that one of those men might have grabbed my sister. I didn’t think about why somebody like that would be traipsing around in the canyons above the ranch, miles from any road. Or the odds of his coming upon a girl out there. I was looking for somebody to blame and some reason for what happened other than a meaningless accident, and what I thought was this: if she’d been taken by somebody—a man looking for a girl to rape—he might still have her and she might still be found alive.

  The man I picked a fight with was not as drunk as I was, and he had twenty or thirty pounds on me. I came away with a chipped tooth and a broken nose.

  It was right after that Christmas party that hunters happened to come upon Mary Claudine’s body. My face was still swollen, still purple with bruise, the day we buried her bones.

  31

  WHEN I GOT BACK TO TRUE’S HOUSE on Saturday night, he was dressing to go out. I took off my boots and lay down on the sofa in my clothes. From the bedroom he called to me, “Some of us are going out to the beach. I’ll wait if you want to get cleaned up first. Lorraine might be there.”

  I said, “I’m pretty done in.”

  I went on lying there after he drove off. I could hear some kids in the yard next door playing cowboys and Indians, shooting cap pistols and whinnying like horses.

  When it started to get dark in the house, I sat up and turned on a lamp and phoned the Studio Club. They called Lily to the phone, and when she said hello I said, “You want to see Dodge City tomorrow?”

>   I hadn’t seen her in about a month, hadn’t told her I was leaving town to make a movie in Arizona, hadn’t talked to her at all since she told me on the telephone about starting work at RKO.

  She was silent a moment. “All right. It’s playing at the Music Box.”

  So I met her at the Music Box and we saw Dodge City. We didn’t talk much. Lily didn’t want to stay for the second feature—it was a silly comedy with Louis Jossup—so we went out to a spaghetti joint and ordered some supper. I still had lurid yellow bruises from the bar fight and a swollen lump where my nose was broken. She waited until we were in the cafe before she said, “Did you get in a fight?”

  I said, “I fell off a bar stool.”

  “That’s stupid,” she said, and I knew she meant the fight, not the joke.

  We ate our noodles in silence. Finally she asked if I’d been working much, and I told her I’d been in Arizona making a picture. When I told her it was an RKO movie, she guessed right away which one it was. “Dorothy worked on part of it, the dialogue where Kit Carson and Canby are arguing about the retreat.” I didn’t know that part of the story, but then she said, “And she wrote the scene where the mules are blown up.”

  I said, “I watched them film it.”

  “Did you? How did they do it? Do you think it’ll look real?”

  In the scene Union soldiers were supposed to fit up a pair of mules with fused barrels of gunpowder and send them over to the Rebel lines to blow up the picket posts. We had been waiting around a lot that day, standing in the shade about a hundred yards from where they were setting up the scene with the mules, so we watched for quite a while. On a big picture like this one, it could take a couple of hours to set up and film three or four shots that would run less than a minute in the final edit.

  We had always kept mules on our place to do the heavy hauling and pull a wagon. My mother said they had less brains than a horse, but I think this was out of loyalty to horses and not from any evidence; I know she respected Mike and Prince, who would do just about anything we asked them to do. The mules they were using for the movie were smaller, but one of them was almost oxblood in his coloring, like Mike—not a color that shows up too often in mules. It gave me a start when I saw him, that half-second when you think a stranger is somebody you know.

  In the movies I’d worked in, the red sticks of dynamite were always phony, and the flash-bang, triggered by somebody off camera, was a pine mortar buried in the ground, packed with black powder and loose fuller’s earth, the lampblack ignited with gasoline to make black smoke. It would send up a nice cloud of flame and dust without doing any damage. Watching all the preparation for the shots, I had been thinking the barrels of gunpowder loaded on the mules were phony, like the sticks of dynamite. I figured that a powder monkey would rig up mortars on the ground, and then the film would be edited so it looked like the mules had been blown up in the explosion. They were setting up for the last shot before I came awake to the fact that they weren’t burying the mortars in the ground but loading them into the barrels on the mules.

  These were big mortars and maybe wrapped too tight. I had helped my dad blow up stumps, so I knew what a real explosion looked like, and when those blasts went off, one after the other, geysers of flame and smoke went thirty or forty feet in the air. We weren’t anywhere close to the setup, but the booming thunderclap of sound just about deafened us. Shapes, pieces of shapes, landed, smoking, smelling of gunpowder and burnt hair. Through the smoke, I could see one of the mules lying with its side torn open, working its legs mechanically in a spreading pool of blood.

  Wranglers had strung up a temporary rope corral close by to hold our saddled horses while we waited to be called, and another fifty or sixty horses were spread out on pasture behind us. The explosions stampeded all the horses, and we spent the rest of that day rounding them up from the far corners of the ranch. We lost the next day too, while people in the costume crew cleaned the shrapnel—the mules’ flesh and blood and slivers of bone—from our cavalry uniforms.

  I said to Lily, “They blew up the mules.”

  She looked at me.

  “They loaded some big mortars on two mules and lit the fuses and blew them up. I was picking bits of mule out of my hair for a couple of days.” I wasn’t sure why, but I meant to shock her, horrify her. I said, “There’s other ways they could have filmed it, they didn’t have to kill the mules.” And I know she heard something in it, something like blame.

  After a moment she said, “Dorothy told me she didn’t make it up, it really happened. At Valverde, I mean. It really happened in the war.” And then after another short silence, “You don’t have to blame Dorothy for it.”

  I should have said no, I didn’t blame Dorothy. What I said was, “Maybe I’ll blame Kit Carson for thinking it up,” as if I was making a joke.

  There was a prolonged silence. Then she said, “Are you mad at me for some reason?”

  “No.”

  She watched me, then said, “Well, you’re mad about something.”

  I was well acquainted with that tone of voice from her. “You don’t know what I’m feeling.”

  She looked away. “Well, you are being mean, so I think you’re mad at me.” I know now her own father had been one to go mean and throw blame around, which she had learned was a signal of trouble to come: heavy drinking, storms of shouting. The truth is, she had been watching me for weeks—ever since I started turning up on Sunday bleary and bloodshot—waiting for an eruption.

  I swept up some spilled salt into a little drift and then brushed it onto the floor. “It doesn’t have to do with you,” I said.

  I had come back from Arizona with something shaken loose, but I wasn’t sure I could say what that was. In our family and in all the families we knew, people steered clear of anything having a whiff of sentiment. Deep feelings were held close, unspoken. In some way this had to do with never crying when you were hurt. Lily always expressed whatever was on her mind—at least this is what I thought—and she could be impatient with me for holding back. Of course, I didn’t know all that she was holding back.

  But all at once I was filled with the need to tell her about the wreck of horses and men, and my part in it. I wanted to tell her about how I had been having trouble sleeping. Well, I had been having trouble sleeping for a long time, but that last week in Arizona, after the lancer charge, I lay in bed every night seeing, over and over, horses and men falling through a veil of dust and shattered grass, turning over in my head my hatred of Cab, and then in the long hours of darkness coming around slowly to knowing I’d been looking for something like this to happen, a big fall—maybe even hoping for it. And knowing if I’d been hurt or killed I would deserve what I’d been given. A settling of accounts for getting my sister killed.

  But I didn’t know how to start saying any of this to Lily. I needed her to ask me, and she didn’t know the right thing to ask.

  After a minute she asked me what I thought of the movie. I had to think a bit to realize she was talking about Dodge City. I said Errol Flynn was an Englishman and I didn’t think he should be playing a western sheriff. He didn’t have the right look for it, I told her.

  “Well, he’s Australian,” Lily said, as if that made a difference. And then she wanted to know what I thought a western sheriff should look like, and we might have gotten into a quarrel about it except I didn’t care enough to argue.

  When I walked her back to the Studio Club, I didn’t offer to come in and play cards, but I said, “Do you want to see the Sherlock Holmes movie?”

  She studied me. “If you do.”

  So we went back to seeing movies on Sunday. The night we saw Sherlock Holmes we skipped the second feature, a singing-cowboy picture neither of us was interested in, went back to her dormitory, and played a few hands of pinochle. She shuffled and dealt, but then she laid her cards down and took off her glasses to polish them with the hem of her sweater. While she was looking down at her fingers working on the glasses she said,
“I don’t know why you didn’t tell me what happened over there in Arizona. Everybody at RKO is talking about it.”

  I was caught off-guard, but I knew she meant the big cavalry charge, men hurt, horses killed. “Dave Keaton broke his leg, a couple of other fellows got hurt. Guys get hurt all the time. Horses too. I didn’t think you’d want to hear about it.”

  She was silent for a good while, and then she put on her glasses and picked up her cards. “Jamerman is a son of a bitch, everyone at RKO knows it.”

  It was the first swearword I had ever heard from Lily, although that didn’t register at the time. I said, “Well, it was Cab who set up the tripwires, so they’re all sons of bitches, aren’t they?”

  She played a card. “They are,” she said matter-of-factly. I hadn’t heard about Lampman yet, or I might have understood why she suddenly held a dim view of the movie business and just about everybody in it.

  We played a little while in silence, and then she said, “I heard Jamerman wanted to outdo De Mille. He was bragging that he killed more horses in his movie than De Mille killed in Charge of the Light Brigade.”

  I didn’t know how many horses had been killed in the De Mille picture, but I said, “He might have. I saw maybe twenty-five or thirty go down.”

  I didn’t tell her everything, but as we went on playing cards she pulled out of me a few more things I had seen: horses killed outright, horses crippled and shot, men who’d been hurt. It took a while to get the words out, but I told her I was pretty sure the chestnut horse I was riding had kicked one of the men lying on the ground.

  I thought she might tell me it wasn’t my fault or something else completely pointless. What she said after a long silence was “I sprained my ankle once, but I haven’t ever been really hurt. Have you, Bud?”