by Win Blevins
Danny Borzage waddled up carrying his big accordion, slid it underneath a chair, and sat next to Mature. Mr. John gave him a big grin.
Linda tiptoed forward to her director, gave him a buss on the forehead, took a seat well down the table, and nodded me and Colin in next to her. Colin put his broad-brimmed hat on the chair next to him, saving it for Iris. Cathy Downs and Janey, the first-aid lady, filled the end of the table. Julius and a couple of others eyeballed the director’s table and went somewhere else.
One thing was odd. Walter Brennan, one of the stars who would get a big credit, was at the head of the next table behind me and Linda. The second tier of actors, those playing the nasty Clanton brothers and the good-hearted Earp brothers, sat down-table from Brennan.
It was easy to see the pecking order. One table was those who called Mr. John “Pappy” or “Jack.” The second table was the people who called him “Mr. John”—the Clanton family and the Earp brothers, whose real names I couldn’t keep straight.
Brennan, the evil Clanton patriarch, was the odd man out. He called the director “Mr. Ford.” Something about Brennan made Mr. John’s hackles rise, and anyone could see that the feeling was mutual. When the two did a shot, the air itself seemed ready to burst into flame.
One afternoon Mr. John had said irritably to Brennan, “Can’t you even mount a horse right?”
“No,” said Brennan, “but I got three Oscars for acting.”
So the performer with the most Oscars of any actor in the world was relegated to the second tier. I suspected that, no matter how long his career would be, he and Mr. John probably wouldn’t work together again. Too much tension.
Standing and watching, Colin waved Iris to join us. When she sat down, she took his elbow for a moment. I wondered who she’d be flirting with next.
Mature set out to entertaining the table with wisecracks and bits of song and hijinks. Though he didn’t seem like much of an actor—and Ford clearly didn’t think he was—he had those good looks, he wasn’t a bit self-important, and he was a barrel of fun. He and Danny Borzage were Mr. John’s tonics.
I heard Iris say, “So who are you, Colin Murphy, and how did you end up in this desert?”
Inviting myself in, I said, “I’ve been wanting to know that, too.”
“My family came across the sea near the end of the Irish War of Independence. Sick of it all, they were—the spying, the betrayals, the jailings, the killings, the whole lot of it—but mostly sick of the English. Besides, Pap was a man marked for death by the Brits.”
One beer, and he sounded a lot more Irish now than he had earlier.
“I was the first of our crew born in this country. I dropped into a heritage of fighting and honorable bloodshed, and when I was twenty years old Pearl Harbor set off World War Two. On December eighth, I was at the front of the line to sign up for the big brawl.”
“Colin was one hell of a fighter,” Ford called from the head of the table. “Drove one of the landing craft onto Omaha Beach. Got his troops safely there when a lot of landing craft were going down.”
“Omaha, yes, sir. While you were there filming, and made your landing in the middle of that awful killing ground, determined to show the truth about it. And got wounded and won a commendation.”
Mr. John waved that aside. “Don’t insult the brave men who died there by bringing up a guy who only fought with a camera.” Then Mr. John turned back to talking to his brother-in-law about something or other.
“Did you meet Mr. John at Normandy?” said Iris. I wondered whether she hated war because it was war or because it had killed so many of her tribe. Well, my tribe, too.
“Not at all. I come to him later in Hollywood, and he got me war record on his own.”
“Why did you go to Hollywood?”
“In love with the movies. The Wizard of Oz to Wuthering Heights and even to that silly Gone with the Wind. Foolish about ’em I was.”
Iris, Linda, and I waited. Listening to his voice was like hearing music, and the words barely mattered.
“So when the killing was over, and I got demobilized, I went out to Fox and wrangled my way close enough to tell Mr. John we’d both been on Omaha Beach on the same day. Didn’t need to say I was Irish, had me name to tell him that.”
“And you wanted to be a security guy?” said Iris, disbelieving.
“No, I wanted to write movies. I do yet. But I judged the way to start out was to get a job, watch ’em being made, and figure it out from there.”
“And meet people who’d read your script when you got one written,” said Linda.
“There’s that,” said Colin.
Mr. John called down the table, “Hey, Yazzie! Tell the story about the shot in Stagecoach with fifty Indians riding hard and … You know, the one. Tell it!”
At the time I’d got a big kick out of this screwup. Mr. John motioned me up with his hand, so I stood to tell it. “One afternoon, well, like Mr. John says, about fifty Navajo extras were supposed to ride hard behind the stagecoach and fire off rifles and arrows. The guard and John Wayne were supposed to shoot back.
“Mr. John wants to offer the riders a deal. I’m the translator. I say, ‘When Mr. Wayne starts shooting that gun, one or two of you fall off your horse, and Mr. John will give you a bonus of one dollar on top of your day’s pay.’
“They nod and lead their horses off.
“‘It’s dangerous,’ Mr. John says to me aside, ‘taking a fall in the middle of all those flying hooves. Think anyone will do it?’
“‘Yeah.’
“‘Maybe I should have said two dollars.’
“‘No.’
“So we do the shot, and all fifty Navajos fly backward, and go kerplunk onto the sand. Pretty good shooting with just six bullets, even for the Duke.”
The whole table laughed, including those who knew the story.
“Mr. John yells, ‘Cut!’, gathers the extras and has me explain bit by bit. ‘I’ll give every one of you the dollar I promised for the stunt you just did. But I need just three of you to fall off your horses, and you three will get another dollar.’
“This time he lets me pick the ones who take a dive. Naturally, I choose three of my clansmen, and I tell them to ride out in front and fall off in order: ‘You fall the first time that Mr. Wayne shoots, you the second, you the third.’ Worked just dandy.”
The whole table laughed. Mr. John said, “Can’t beat that. Second take went fine. Cut and print! Thanks, Yazzie.”
“Sure thing, Mr. John.” I sat down next to Linda again and glanced sideways to see if Iris was smiling.
“Yazzie—our bridge between red and white,” Mr. John said.
“Traffic runs both ways,” I said, grinning over a shoulder at him.
That was my personal highlight of the evening. After that, I sat through white-man food I didn’t like and a bunch of phony conversation that didn’t interest me.
Mr. John came to the rescue again. He clapped his hands once. “Let’s have a dance tune.”
Danny rose and dived right into a popular swing song of the time, “Call of the Jitterbug.”
Linda and Iris jumped up as one. Iris pulled Colin up by the hand and started swing-dancing, her face turned up to his. Linda pranced straight over to Henry Fonda, held out both hands, and she got a big grin, in return, maybe the only one I ever saw from Fonda. Then I saw why. Brother, could that man dance. He was long and lanky and brought off some real tricky steps. A natural.
He and Linda made a terrific pair and stayed right with it when Danny switched to another hot swing tune, “Minnie the Moocher.” By now half the cast and crew were following their star’s example and hopping away. Linda looked like she was having a great time.
Iris either adored dancing or Colin, I couldn’t tell which.
At the end of the second tune Victor Mature cut in on Fonda, which I guessed only he could do. Linda got a dubious look on her face but went along with it, and soon those two seemed to be having fun. But
she stopped after one more dance.
She said to her roommate, “Are you ready, Cathy?”
“Sure.”
“Seaman Goldman, will you see us to our cabin?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Colin,” said Linda.
He dropped Iris’s hands and turned into a shadow that would flicker behind us up the road, armed and watchful.
Iris looked downcast.
Linda said to her, “The Seaman will be back in five minutes.” She looked at Julius.
He nodded and mumbled around his cigar, “I’ll wait at the town car.”
We all played our parts. Linda and I said a proper good-night at the cabin door, no touch of any kind, and I headed down the hill to Iris, Julius, and our ride home.
In the backseat I asked Iris, “You like Colin?”
She shrugged. She looked out at the night and wondered aloud, “What is it like to live in so much unreality? An art that is passing images on a screen. Fake relationships with other people. Conversations about things that aren’t real.”
I followed her eyes out and up. I had an impulse to tell her one of my people’s old stories about how the night sky was created.
But she pushed on. “I don’t see, for instance, who Julius really is.”
“A guy who’s always looking for something to be grouchy about.”
“No one starts out like that. I wonder if he remembers who he is.”
I thought back to Julius at La Posada. Being treated as if he was invisible. Papers flung at him, being dismissed, watching others become lovers. Driving people around. I was no fan of his, but I didn’t understand how he got it done every day, and I was glad I didn’t live inside his sour skin. I also wondered if living like that could make you twist into something very different than how you’d started out.
Other people’s lives … It was time to turn the subject to something different. Since Iris was looking at the stars, I said, “Do you know how Coyote created the Milky Way?”
“No.”
Her mind was still elsewhere. Julius? Colin? Lots of big questions. I understood.
“Coyote,” I said, “is tricky and a troublemaker. Before the Holy People created the sun and moon, they were planning the arrangement of the stars. But they left Coyote out of the planning. Annoyed, he grabbed the buckskin where the stars were laid out and tossed them into the sky. They’re scattered up there, sometimes very chaotic, because Coyote is chaotic.
“He got a good talking to, but he was still mad about being left out. So he added extra days to the year, which made the months uneven, and he arranged for the moon to fly in a way that made thirteen moon periods, not just twelve. Dajinóo.”
“What does that last word mean?”
“‘So they say.’”
I gave her my starriest smile.
“So Coyote is a troublemaker.”
“Yes, and not really. He loves mischief. He shakes things up, he throws things into disorder. But he also destroys conformity and brings change, which is good.”
I hesitated. I thought about me having a romance with a movie star. Me riding the Super Chief to a different life. Me not marrying whatever woman Mom had picked out for me.
She said, “You have some of Coyote in you.”
“Yes.” I wondered if she liked that. Wondered maybe if I liked it, too.
She laid her head against my shoulder and was quiet the rest of way. I liked the feeling. And I was glad she wasn’t resting on Colin’s shoulder.
* * *
Night turned into dawn, dawn became day, and the sun rose high in its arc. Noon. A harsh and tortured time.
Zopilote lay still, facedown. In prison a man learned great patience. Now he felt calm enough to watch an occasional speck of dust drift down. Nothing else was disturbed by his presence.
What a roost he had found to see, to smell, to learn. The great weapons of the zopilote, his eyes and nose. Even at mountaintop height a buzzard’s eyes could see a final mortal quiver, its nose could smell the last gasp of life and the entry of death. Long live the king. The king is death.
The woman came into the cabin first, as usual. She sat on the small stool in front of the dresser, adjusted the mirror on its handles, and studied her face and hair. She looked as she ever did—had she not just finished showing off in front of the camera? He had gathered that she playacted an unmarried woman who traded sex for dollars. Zopilote had seen her facial expressions, and they suited a degraded woman.
Not touching a woman felt like going twenty-five years without a taste of water.
The temptress stood, ran her fingers through her hair until it looked wild, and shook it out hard. Did that make her feel prepared for what was coming? She unbuttoned her blouse and slipped it off. Then she unfastened the waist of her full skirt and stepped out of it. She readjusted the mirror to a lower angle and looked at herself full length. She wore something called a slip, which Zopilote had seen only in advertisements in newspapers and sometimes in color photos in glossy magazines. Beneath the slip, he knew, were the halter called a brassiere and a flimsy pair of underpants. He hoped that Navajo women had not started wearing such things. They had better sense.
A rap on the door. His heart beat faster, and a few specks of dust fell.
She cracked the door open, peeked out, and let Zopilote’s son in. This misbegotten man gets what has been ripped away from me. The man whose name, people say, is Yazzie Goldman. Born for Jew, so they say. So they say.
As the two sat on the bed and ate the sandwiches his son had brought from the movie people’s tent, Zopilote began to smell desire, arousal.
He believed this was the daily ritual of the temptress and his son, and he was eager to see every detail of what surely came next. They rolled back on the bed, and the temptress slowly took his son’s uniform off, piece by piece. When he was completely naked, she did something to him for a short while that only a whore would do to any man. Then she jumped on top of him with a fury, still in her slip, and with her hips attacked him—there was no other word for it. After a while he moaned and she cried out. Then she collapsed on his naked body and seemed to doze.
The ripeness of the swirling lust dizzied Zopilote. It made him feel drained dry.
He didn’t yet know what to do about his wife. But now I know my first revenge upon my son. It felt good. He would take what he wanted.
He lay very still. He thought he was completely quiet, but in this position he could not be sure.
After a little while the temptress did the whore thing again. And then she rolled him on top of her.
Zopilote squirmed as this Yazzie Goldman mounted her and stifled a gasp as his son thrust into her cave. Soon Yazzie rolled her over, and then they did things Zopilote had never pictured, like they were circus acrobats.
He watched, feeling jolted by every motion, his own body lifting and dropping on the waves of their rutting. The smell made him writhe with lust and envy and fury and in came the Darkness Rolling, filling his bones and his lungs. Becoming him. Yes, the rituals were making him feel more at ease.
* * *
My days were routine.
I watched, horsed around with Linda and others, and waited for lunch. She ordered sandwiches brought up, and we ate them naked in bed. After the loving, she sent me outside so she could take a nap. If she didn’t have a shoot to do that afternoon, she wanted a repeat of our noon recreation. She had a libido that wouldn’t quit, hinted at in public, and in private displayed in big headlines.
Cathy Downs acted sheepish about spending the nights with Linda. I personally didn’t take to Cathy, an upbeat, outdoorsy, cheery creature who was exactly what she seemed to be, pretty and boring, like the sweatered girl with the sweatered guy on a package of stale breakfast cereal.
Iris came down several times and drew people, anyone but the stars. She hung around with Colin a lot and gave the chunky Irishman some sketches of himself to send to his parents. I wondered if something was developing there. Whatever,
it was fine by me.
Bottom line: Linda and I were limited to afternoon trysts, but what afternoons. What a job.
Until it wasn’t. (And I didn’t receive my send-off on a fancy piece of stationery.)
Nine
Linda’s big scenes in the movie were a series of shots where she butted heads with the white hats, Wyatt Earp and Cathy Downs’s schoolmarm. Earp tried to push Doc toward the marm, who wanted marriage. Chihuahua schemed to get both of them to back off—she was Doc’s girl and he was marrying her. Trapped, Doc ignored his teasing promise to Chihuahua and skipped town to escape both women.
In the course of making a living, Chihuahua dallied with Billy Clanton. Doc came back and caught them together in her room. Clanton shot at Doc and accidentally hit Chihuahua.
So here came the crux for Doc Holliday. Chihuahua bleeding, needing surgery, and him the only physician in miles and miles. Fear and self-disgust.
He gave it a go with the scalpel, thought he’d succeeded, and felt good about himself for a change. A glimmer of triumph in view.
Then Chihuahua died.
But that was still to come. Linda was nervous about her scenes with Henry Fonda, I could see that. She was comfortable with everyone in the cast but him. In front of the camera, she had fun teasing out the wild man in the Victor Mature character and pushing away the Fonda character, who tried to turn Doc righteous. Off camera, Fonda’s flinty reserve made her edgy.
It turned out that I underestimated her, and maybe she underestimated herself. She bristled at the marm just right, and Mr. John printed the third take. She was just huffy enough when she stood up to Fonda’s character. Take after take, I admired her more.
And noon hour after noon hour I liked her more.
The dying was Linda’s big moment, and my sad one. It would be the end of her work on the picture. When she left, my job disappeared with her. Probably our friendship—and all else we had together—too.
On the morning of her last day of shooting, when I picked her up, she squeezed my hand once at the cabin door. Then I walked her down the hill, Colin trailing. She didn’t look at me, and I couldn’t sense what was going on inside her mind.