Falling From Horses

by Molly Gloss

  “Jake didn’t want it either. On Friday nights he tried to get away from Diamond early enough for the Shabbat blessing, and I tried to keep the children up late to wait for him; but lots of times he had to lay his hand on our sleeping children’s heads and whisper the prayer in the darkness of their bedroom.”

  She wrote that Jake’s clothes always smelled of horses, and when he undressed for bed he set his folded pants and shirt on a wooden chair in the corner of the room: he didn’t want his clothes stinking up the closet.

  In my letter I had brought up the time we all went to their apartment for dinner. She remembered it. “I made pot roast, and sent you all home with chocolate cake wrapped up in waxed paper.” None of us had known it, but she had made the cake for Jake’s birthday. He was thirty that day, and he had told Leah that he wanted to have a little celebration, a dinner party. She didn’t say why he wanted to invite the men he worked with. She didn’t say if he had any better friends than the three of us.

  And she wrote about horses, the Belgians Jake had grown up with in Cleveland, how they had big feathery legs, and in the winter when they got sweaty, each one of the hairs would frost, and they’d get icicles hanging down around their mouths and noses. “Jake always said they were beautiful when they were frosty all over. It never got cold enough for that in California, and I think he missed it.” His father kept the horses in a barn just off the south-side rail yards, but there was a drayage company over on Pike Avenue that kept horses in a bare field, and when Jake was a boy he had wondered what those horses thought about when they were left outside in the middle of a winter night or standing in deep mud in the spring when the ground thawed out. He always wondered if Hollywood horses were grateful for the mild weather. When he saw a horse standing in a pasture alone, looking off toward the horizon, maybe looking toward the sun setting behind some trees, he wondered what they were thinking, whether they felt lonely. “Jake had a love for horses,” Leah wrote in her letter. “I guess you must have known that.”

  11

  THAT FIRST MORNING, when we had all the horses loaded, we threw the saddles and the rest of the tack and gear in the back of the two trucks, and then Harold had me ride along with him in the Dodge while he sent Hugh and Jake in another direction with the bigger load. The dog jumped in the bed of the truck with the saddles. It wasn’t quite daylight but already growing hot, and we rode with the windows rolled down. Harold didn’t talk much except to say we were going up to Bronson Canyon, where one of the Poverty Row studios was setting up to shoot in the park, and he planned to leave me there with the two horses while he went back to Diamond to pick up a third one. I didn’t know Harold at all yet, but he seemed to be brooding about something, and shortly I started brooding too, thinking maybe he’d seen the whole business with Guy and was feeling he’d made a mistake taking me on. I didn’t know where the hell I’d be sleeping that night if Harold decided to boot me out of the house.

  I guess the TV shows still use Bronson sometimes when they want to give an impression of rugged wilderness without bothering to leave town—I spot it every so often on a show I’m watching. There are a couple of caves up there, left over from when the place was a quarry, plus a small, bowl-shaped piece of ground with a lot of rocks, a few trees, a small stream, and some quarry rubble. It’s tucked into the west side of Griffith Park, and you can see the big HOLLYWOOD sign on Mount Lee if you stand at certain places in the bowl—they always have to angle the camera to keep that out of the shot. It was a favorite location for the cheap studios making westerns back then, when the sign still said HOLLYWOODLAND. Diamond hauled horses up there a couple times a week.

  We unloaded the horses and took them to some skimpy willow shade, and Harold said darkly, “Try to keep out of trouble until I get back.” I thought this was a jab at me, but then he gestured toward an actor in fancy boots and a pale blue pearl-button shirt, sitting in his car with the door propped open. “That’s Dick Hayes. If he’s drunk, he’ll be mean. Keep the horses clear of him if you can, but don’t lose me any business. If push comes to shove, you let him shove. To a point, anyway.”

  I imagine this was what he’d been brooding on in the car. The horses had been hired out to Merit Pictures, and Dick Hayes was Merit’s big star. Harold had had dealings with Dick, so he had the view that leaving me alone with him was the same as throwing me into the deep end of the pool. Hayes was a genuine horseman, you could say that for him, but when he got into an argument with the producer or the director about how a picture should be made, he’d show up drunk and take out his frustrations on the horses. Well, I didn’t know any of this yet, but I’d watched Dick Hayes lift a flask to his mouth half a dozen times in the few minutes we’d been there, and now Harold was the model of an unhappy man about to see trouble, so I was able to figure out more or less what was up.

  After Harold drove off, I got busy brushing dust and dried manure off the horse Harold called Bingo and picking rocks and dirt clods out of his feet. I was saddling him when Dick Hayes wandered over. The horses seemed to know what was up too. They had had their own dealings with him, or they could smell the booze and the anger coming off him like fog. Both of them shifted their weight and twitched their hides nervously, and Bingo bumped my sore thigh as I was reaching under him to grab the cinch. I swore and shoved him over hard with my shoulder, which maybe had something to do with Guy, or was in some obscure way a show for Dick Hayes.

  “That’s the same goddamn plow horse you brought me last time,” he said. “Goddamn plug. You get me? Every goddamn picture I’ve made for Ferret,” and he paused over the sarcasm so I wouldn’t miss it, “they rent me this shit-ugly crowbait.”

  I said, “I don’t know anything about it, Mr. Hayes, I just got hired today,” and went on saddling the horse.

  “You mean to say you don’t know plug-ugly when you see it?” He was standing at Bingo’s head, and he grabbed hold of the horse’s jaw and shoved the muzzle up until it was pointing at the sky. “That’s ugly right there, see? Don’t tell me you don’t know ugly.” The horse snorted and tried to shake his head loose, and I could see Hayes’s thumb whiten as he held on and dug into the hinge of the jawbone.

  I said, “You could be right. I guess I’ve seen prettier.” I tightened up the cinch and dropped the stirrup and stepped over to the other horse, the one called Blue, even though he was as red as the king of hearts. Hayes let go of Bingo’s jaw then and grabbed hold of the halter up close to the throat. The horse rocked his head up and down, rattling the metal D-ring.

  “I’m asking for a particular reason. Why I always get the ugly horse.” He wasn’t looking at me when he said this. He yanked on the halter, forcing the horse’s head toward him so he could look Bingo in the eye, like he was daring him with a scowl. Hayes’s face was smeared thick with makeup, his cheeks rouged. Up close, I could see the bristles of his beard through the pancake batter.

  “I don’t know. I’m just the hired help. I’m supposed to get these horses cleaned up and saddled, that’s all I know.” I was brushing out Blue, who kept shifting his feet and shaking his head up and down. I took hold of his ear and twisted it, leaned in, and said, “Quit.”

  “I get an ugly horse because they’re making ugly pictures, and they don’t give an ugly goddamn,” Hayes said, breathing the words directly into Bingo’s flaring nostrils. The horse’s eyes showed white all around, and I could hear a low groaning vibrato coming from him, the kind of sound a cat makes when he’s deciding whether to put up with you or take a bite out of your hand.

  I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want Harold to fire me on the first day, and I figured from what he had said—you let him shove—that he didn’t want me to get between Hayes and the horse unless I thought the horse was about to stomp him. I wasn’t a bit sure what I ought to do in that case, but while I was grooming Blue I started thinking that if I had to, I could step back and land a boot or a knee in the damn horse’s belly.

  Hayes cuffed Bingo on the muzzle lightly,
as if with affection, and the horse snorted and pulled back as far as the rope would let him. But then Hayes let go of the halter and made a sound that I thought might have been a word, stepped back, and dug his flask out of his back pocket and drank from it. “Probably you’d like me to leave you and these horses alone, mind my manners, is that it?”

  “It doesn’t matter to me. But if a horse stomped you, I’d lose my job. And I just got hired.”

  He laughed. “That horse hasn’t got the balls to try to stomp me. He hasn’t got any balls, period.” He leaned against one of the trees and watched me, taking a long pull every so often from his flask. He wore black trousers with red piping along the pockets. His shirt had red piping on the pockets and along the edge outlining the pearl buttons. There must have been a hat and a fancy gun belt to finish the look, but he wasn’t wearing them.

  “What’s the name of the picture you’re making?” I asked, thinking if I started him talking it might take his attention off the horse.

  “Hell, I don’t know. They don’t give this crap a name until it’s ready to ship. They give it a number, and then they just pull something off a list, Burning Cheyenne Hills or Filthy Flaming Arrows or some other shit, when they’re slapping a label on the cans. Don’t matter if there’s no arrows in it or no Cheyennes. They give it a name without even looking at it.”

  Lily Shaw had shown me a list she kept in her notebook, titles for scripts she hadn’t yet written. At the time it hadn’t occurred to me to wonder if this was a good idea, but Dick Hayes sure made it sound stupid. And I was pretty certain Flaming Arrows had been on Lily’s list.

  “The boss went back for another horse,” I said after a while. “A buckskin that looks pretty flashy. You should make sure they put you on that one.”

  He was drunk enough now to turn sentimental. He leaned forward and made a kissing sound and touched his lips lightly to the horse’s muzzle. “Naw,” he said, leaning back again. “This here’s the horse I always ride. Ain’t that right, Bingo?” He rubbed the horse on his blaze, and Bingo, like a goddamn lap dog, stretched his neck toward him, everything forgiven.

  12

  AT FIRST I JUST RODE IN ONE OF THE TRUCKS with Harold or Jake or Hugh, learning the ropes, but sometimes, for short trips that didn’t go through downtown, Harold took the shotgun seat and had me drive the Dodge with the two-horse trailer; he wanted me to start getting used to the traffic and how the city was laid out. We worked the same locations over and over, and before long I was acquainted with most of them. I learned where to find water and where to string up a picket line out of the way of the cameras. In hot weather I knew to loosen the girth to let air under the saddle, so a horse wouldn’t get too sweaty between shots; and I learned to tell, from the way people stood around idly in small groups and then suddenly got animated, that they were about to want the horses brought up for the scene. As soon as Harold was sure I could get them in front of the cameras on time and get them to the right spot, he started dropping me off with a couple of horses and leaving me all day, and shortly after that he started sending me out in the Dodge on my own if he didn’t need the truck to make another run.

  All the horses were six, seven, eight years old—young enough to get the job done but old enough to be well broke. Harold had a good eye for smart, sound horses that had lived a little and learned a lot. They were all experienced picture horses—they hardly even twitched when guns went off right by their heads. The trouble wasn’t with the horses, usually, but with actors who didn’t know a damn thing about riding a horse but liked to pretend they’d grown up with Tom Mix on a ranch in Texas. A fellow who couldn’t ride but thought he could was a dangerous nuisance, which I already knew, having learned it the worst way. A lot of the job was just figuring out how much an actor could really handle and matching the horse to the rider. Before I took a horse over to an actor I might have to get on myself and ride him until he settled down—taking the top off is what we used to call it.

  Harold wanted us to stay close to the horses all the time. We had to watch out for an actor doing something stupid that might cause a horse to misbehave, or a crew member walking up behind a horse who wasn’t expecting it or thinking it might be funny to play a prank involving a burr under a saddle. Diamond had a reputation for reliable horses, horses safe for any greenhorn actor to ride, and Harold didn’t want that reputation wrecked by one of his horses going suddenly wild, bucking off some handsome hero wearing a fancy shirt.

  When a horse was in front of the camera, I sometimes had to crouch down out of sight and hold his leg to keep him standing still while they were getting a close-up shot of the guy on his back playing a guitar and singing. Or I might have to poke a horse in the hindquarters when they wanted a shot of him tossing his head and snorting. I was the pickup man, too, which was what I had seen Jake doing that first evening, walking out to where the horses had been left standing and leading them back in. Wranglers for the big studios sometimes were called on to ride out and grab the traces of a buckboard or stagecoach, but the cheap studios we were working for filled in those scenes with cut ends, so I never did get to stop any runaways.

  I had come into this job with a vague notion that moviemaking would be like watching a movie, but I got over that right away. For one thing, the scenes that used our horses were pretty tame: the actors would amble along speaking their lines with the boom mike overhead, or they’d gallop a short way straight toward the camera, then pull up hard, jump down, and crouch behind a plaster rock, something like that. Since Diamond Barns mostly rented out horses for chapter pictures and cheap features, all the fast action—the chases, stampedes, and horse falls—were clipped from older movies and then spliced in with the new film in a cutting room.

  When there was action, it was mostly away from the horses—saloon brawls that broke all the furniture and sent the whiskey bottles flying, gun battles between the bad guys and the hero. When you saw them up close, the fistfights looked pretty phony: long, looping punches with unclosed fists, and some guy off camera slapping a boxing glove against a big pink ham to fake the sound of knuckles hitting a jaw. The gun battles, if they weren’t using a long lens and rubber pistols, could look more like the real thing—squibs full of fake blood and real pistols and rifles shooting blanks—but they didn’t let the camera run the whole time the scene played out. They were always stopping, moving the camera setup, then starting again in short overlapping runs, so it never felt like I was watching a movie. After a week or two I stopped paying much attention to the filming except when I had to, when Diamond’s horses were in the shot.

  Even on the sets where they were shooting very fast and wrapping up the outdoor work in two or three days, there was a lot of waiting around. The background extras would get together and play cards, and I guess I could have joined them; it would have been all right with Harold so long as I kept an eye on the horses. But I was into the habit of keeping to myself, so I spent the loose time mostly reading paperback books I borrowed from Hugh, who had a collection of Tarzan adventures and lurid stories about tentacled monsters grabbing hold of buxom young women. If I found a newspaper lying around, I’d read through every bit of it. I remember that was the year the Yankees swept the Cubs in the World Series, and Seabiscuit beat War Admiral in a match race. I read about a ballet called Billy the Kid opening in Chicago. And that was the year France and Germany signed a treaty promising neither of them would attack the other.

  On movie days we didn’t have time for anything but toast and coffee for breakfast, and the box lunch every studio put out was never much more than a stale sandwich and an orange. At night we ate a lot of canned meat and canned tomatoes and peaches, or peanut butter and crackers, right before we headed for bed. I wasn’t exactly going hungry in those first couple of weeks, but it didn’t take long to get tired of crackers. So one time when we got back to the house earlier than usual, I rummaged around in Harold’s kitchen and cooked up a pot of soup from dried peas, a hunk of canned ham, and a couple of o
nions and spuds that had softened and started to sprout. Jake had already gone back to town to have supper with his family, so it was just Harold and Hugh and me. When Harold finished his soup, he leaned back with a cigarette and asked, “Where’d you learn to cook? Your mother teach you?”

  I had learned to cook mostly from my dad and my grandmother—my mother worked outside with the cows and horses—but I wasn’t interested in getting into any of that with Harold. I said, “I was helping out the cook on a dude ranch last summer,” which wasn’t quite what he had asked me. “I’m not any kind of fancy cook, but I know enough to put food on the table if I have the groceries.”

  He considered this for a minute, then pulled out his wallet and unfolded a couple of bills and laid them on the table in front of me. “Groceries,” he said.

  After that, while the others were feeding and watering the livestock in the evening, I was usually in the kitchen putting supper on the table. My cooking was pretty plain and ran mostly to what I could fry up in a hurry, but it was better than peanut butter and crackers.

  When we weren’t hauling horses to a movie set, Harold kept us busy with the sort of work I had done all my life: fixing fence, grooming horses and doctoring them, repairing leather goods. But most days were movie days, and we put in such long hours I was always tired out by the time I got to bed, and then I’d have trouble falling asleep. I wasn’t thinking about home, or not often, but my mind would fasten on something—it could be anything, not even a worry, just something that had happened that day or a remark one of the others had made—and circle around and around it, the way you rub your thumb over a ragged hangnail. When that happened, I was lucky to get three or four hours’ sleep at night. Some nights I’d get to sleep right away, then wake up an hour later. I envied Hugh, who could sleep anywhere—in the truck, or lying on the grass with the hubbub of moviemaking going on around him. Sometimes, as we sat talking in the living room of Harold’s house, Hugh’s chin would just drop to his chest and he’d nod off.