Falling From Horses

by Molly Gloss

  Hugh and his brother had been homesteaders up in eastern Colorado before a string of dry years drove them out. They had drifted south to Los Angeles, where Hugh landed a job driving truck for a heavy hauler, and after the hauler went out of business he wound up working for Harold. He’d been there about a year before I showed up. I guess you could say he was one of those sodbusters I had so much disdain for, and he wore the same filthy pants every damn day and snuffled annoyingly from an adenoid problem, plus he had a loud, high-pitched voice to make up for being a little bit deaf. But he was a hard worker, tireless as hell, and he didn’t seem to mind giving up half his bedroom to me.

  I shared that bedroom with Hugh for four months without making much effort to get well acquainted, but a lot of nights after we turned out the light, we’d lie in those twin beds swapping dirty jokes and grandiose plans. Mine were all about being a movie cowboy, but Hugh’s plan was to save up his money so he and his brother could buy a tourist court. They had a particular one in mind, a place near Yellowstone Park where they had stayed one time on their way to California. Well, they never bought the motor court, but years later I heard from Harold that Hugh had wound up writing for the smut business.

  It didn’t surprise me much. The dirty stories he used to tell weren’t so much jokes as elaborate tales of sexual conquest. On the wall opposite our beds there was a painting of a young Mexican woman with long black braids and a white dress embroidered with red and orange flowers, a dress that showed off her round bosom. Hugh would start out saying that the girl in the painting reminded him of someone he’d met that day on the movie set—a different girl every day, no matter what location he was working at. “She was wearing an outfit like that,” he’d say, or “She was wearing one of those Injun wigs with braids like that,” and then he’d describe how the two of them had wandered off behind some bushes, where he’d persuaded her to open up the front of her dress and show him her “bumps” and then lift up the hem of her skirt and show him what was down there between her legs—“turned out her hair wasn’t dark at all, the wig had sure fooled me”—and eventually, of course, let him touch her in all sorts of places and then have sex with him in various ways. He spun it out, describing every bit of the girl’s body in detail, and everything the two of them did, and what both of them said, imitating the girl’s virtuous refusals in an accented falsetto voice, and then her giggles and sighs as she gave in to his persistence.

  A few years back I tried to find that painting, or one like it, to buy for Hugh—I had heard he was sick with emphysema and living in a nursing home in Encino. When I couldn’t find that Mexican girl, I sent him one like we’d had in the bathroom, a solemn child in a serape, and when he called me up to thank me for it, he laughed and said, “But what the hell, Bud, did you think I was too sick to want that little senorita to fuck?”

  Hugh was a few years older than me, but I don’t know how much actual experience he’d had in those Hollywood days—I’m guessing not a lot. I only know I learned quite a few things about women’s anatomy from those bedtime stories of his.

  13

  AFTER HAROLD HAD PAID ME A FEW TIMES, and I was pretty sure I had the job nailed down, I phoned my folks. I called at suppertime, when I thought they might both be in the house, but when Mom answered she said Dad had driven into town to pick up some hardware for the pump. I told her where I was and what I was doing. She was surprised, and interested to hear about the horses, but the names of the actors and the things I told her about moviemaking didn’t mean much to her. She had read more than a few cowboy romances, but I could remember only half a dozen times when she’d gone with us to see a picture show.

  We talked about the weather. When I told her it was still hot and dry down in California, summer weather in the first week of November, she seemed not to know what this meant—as if I’d told her about a strange dream that made sense only to the dreamer. It had snowed on them twice already, five or six inches, and they’d been seeing hard frost just about every night. She said the house they were living in had a bad roof that leaked onto the porch, and when the wet places froze overnight you had to be careful not to slip and fall when you stepped out in the morning or went out to the toilet at night.

  I said, “Maybe Dad should roof the house,” and after a little silence she said the owner wouldn’t pay for a new roof, but Dad had climbed up there and patched the part that overhung the porch.

  She asked me where I was rooming, and I told her about Harold’s house and the silent-movie star who used to live there. When she asked if I was eating right, I told her about the lunch they put out on the film sets, and about cooking supper for Harold and Hugh. She said, “You always did like to cook, Bud. Your dad liked it more than I did, so I guess you take after him in that way.” This was something she’d said often, and it was my dad who always said, “Well, honey, Mary Claudine takes after you.”

  I asked her about the hay crop and the rainfall and the calf crop, but I didn’t pay much attention to the answers. It frankly didn’t matter to me if the hay was poor or the calves weren’t putting on weight, because the place wasn’t theirs, they were just hired help.

  When we ran out of things to talk about, I said, “Tell Dad hello,” and she said, “He’ll be back in a couple of hours if you want to call again.”

  I was standing in a telephone booth in front of Santa Ana Pictures, down in Gower Gulch. We’d been shooting in a quarter-acre vacant lot behind their office, and I knew we’d be there the rest of the day, but I said, “Well, we’re about to head out to a movie set over in the park.” When she didn’t say anything to that, I said, “Maybe I’ll call next week.”

  “That’s all right, Bud,” she said after a moment. “He’ll be sorry he missed you, but I’ll tell him you’re doing good.”

  It would be years before I heard the real story about the icy porch. Mom didn’t see him fall, and Dad never did remember how it happened, but she had come in from the barn and found him lying there with a plum-colored egg on his forehead, eyes open but not able to speak or get up. She couldn’t get him to his feet by herself, so she bundled him in blankets and just sat there talking to him until he came back to himself. She never gave a thought to phoning the neighbors, and of course after he was able to stand up and walk around and answer what year it was and who the president was, neither of them considered that he should have been brought to a doctor.

  Even if she had told me all that when I phoned her up, I wouldn’t have considered it a reason to go back home. More likely I would have thought it was another reason to stay away, which maybe she knew, and maybe was the reason she didn’t tell me about it at the time.

  A couple of weeks after that phone call, when Harold brought in the mail there was a letter from my mother. I hadn’t given her an address, but she had sent it to Diamond Barns, Hollywood, California, and that was all it took.

  I thought her letter might have something in it, something that she hadn’t been able to say on the phone, but what she wrote was just a few short lines about everyday chores, and bits of news about animals and people I had never met—a bay colt she had finished and sold to a Mr. Tallman, who ran the hardware store in Bly, “and now I am starting the paint which is half Arab and belongs to Don Pollock’s daughter, they are people living west of here. Your Dad is reseeding the Cougar Bench hay field that was burned out last summer.”

  When I was boarding at the high school in Hart, my mother wrote to me once a week, but this was the first time since we’d all left Echol Creek that she had known how to get a letter to me. Her large, looping, childish hand kicked up some familiar feelings. I kept the letter and reread it a few times.

  Another letter came from her a couple of weeks later, and regularly after that. Every now and then my dad wrote something as well, folded into the envelope with hers. He had had a high school education, and his handwriting was schoolboy neat. “Take care, son,” he wrote at the bottom of every letter. Neither of them said much in their letters except the
humdrum happenings of their life.

  I didn’t write back. I thought I would call them on the phone every couple of weeks, but sometimes it was six or seven weeks before I got around to it. The calls were short—none of us liked to use the phone much, and there wasn’t a whole lot I could think to say.

  A package came for me right before Christmas, a purple polka-dot neckerchief like one Arlo Gantz always wore. I went out and bought a souvenir plate painted with a likeness of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and mailed it off to them.

  On Christmas Day I went into town and found a tavern that was open, drank a few beers, then went to a phone booth and rang up my folks. It was late. Probably they were already in bed, or I had dialed the wrong number. Anyway, nobody answered. While I was standing there listening to the rings, I leaned my head back and studied the sky. The stars over the Echol ranch were always at their brightest in December, the cold winter nights bringing them out crystal clear, but here a brown haze—nobody called it smog in those days—had been hanging over the Hollywood Hills and the whole Los Angeles valley for the past few weeks, and I couldn’t see a damn thing above me except the blurred disk of the moon.

  14

  A WEEK OR SO INTO THE NEW YEAR, I ran into Lily Shaw. I had been down around Gower Gulch more than a few times doing movie work, and the Studio Club where Lily lived was just a block from there, but we bumped into each other not at Gower but over on Sunset.

  Harold had us putting up a perimeter fence around his property, tackling the work a little at a time whenever we had half a day, and he had sent me down to the hardware store to pick up a couple of buckets of creosote for the posts. While I was hoisting them into the back of the Dodge, I heard a voice call out “Bud!” I had parked the truck right in front of the building where Lily worked, just up the block from the hardware store. She had seen me from her window on the second floor and had come down the stairs to say hello.

  In recent weeks the Greyhound trip had begun to seem as if it had happened a long time ago—I had been thinking Lily Shaw was someone I’d never see again. So when I turned around and saw her standing there, I was caught off-guard, surprised by how glad I was to see her. As if I’d unexpectedly bumped into somebody from back home, someone in my family or a friend I’d known all my life, down here a thousand miles from where I’d left them—that was the feeling I had. It seems to me now that I had set out on purpose to put myself as far as I could from everybody I knew, so this was not what I expected to feel.

  It was raining that day, which is why we weren’t hauling horses to a movie set. I stood with Lily at the front door of her building, and we talked for a few minutes with the rain rattling on the metal awning over our heads. She had thrown on a cape coat before coming down the stairs. Her hair was combed, the bangs pinned back with a barrette shaped like a bow, and the blue dress under her unbuttoned coat looked as if it had kept a morning appointment with an iron. She was tidy, in other words, compared to how she’d looked when we were on the bus. She had ink on two fingers, though, and a smudge of it on her lower lip, and I almost wet my thumb and reached out to rub it off, as if we knew each other that well.

  I figured Lily would ask me if I’d met Buck Jones yet and what movies I’d been in, so right away I told her I wasn’t chasing any stagecoaches, that I was just working as a wrangler. But I must have been coloring it as if wrangling was what I had come down to Hollywood intending to do. She didn’t let me off the hook. She wrinkled up her brow in disappointment and said, “You’ll probably be riding in the movies before long, Bud. You just have to keep trying.”

  She wasn’t doing what she’d hoped, either. Her job, she said, was reading through the screenplays and treatments that writers sent to the agency, then typing up a little summary of each story. After her boss looked those over, she typed up the letters that he dictated back to the writers. A lot of the stories were terrible, in her opinion, but it turned out the boss didn’t want her opinion, and he didn’t want her to do any editing, he just wanted the plot boiled down to a few words. She’d written a summary of her own story, Death Rides the Sky, and slipped it in with the others, but he’d never said a word to her about it.

  She was a bulldog even then, and she had come down to Hollywood with an unshakable ambition to be a screenwriter. It was clear to her that being a secretary at a talent agency wouldn’t ever lead to a writing job, so she was already looking around for something else, some work at one of the studios. She didn’t want to quit the agent, though, until she had another job, which was more or less the same situation I was in, holding on to the work at Diamond Barns while I kept my eye out for a riding job, hoping to bump into a second-unit ramrod every time I came on a new movie set.

  When I told her about Diamond Barns, that it was up in Griffith Park, she said, “Do you know there’s a telescope at the top of the park? Have you been up there yet? You could look for the star clusters in Scorpius.” She had remembered every bit of what I told her that night after the bus wreck.

  I said, “I was up there Sunday, but I couldn’t make out much of anything. The sky was too dirty. They said the haze is from dust, but I don’t know if that’s right.”

  She said, “Well, it’s been a dry year.”

  I came from a dry part of the world myself, but the only time the sky turned brown in Harney County was in late summer, when wind picked up the topsoil. I didn’t know enough to argue about it though.

  Lily told me about the Studio Club—that the room she shared with the other girls was unremarkable, but the public rooms were a great deal fancier than she’d expected. When she had walked through the doors the first time and seen that grand staircase descending from lofty regions into the big entrance hall, she had thought she was in the wrong place.

  The club took up a whole block just off Santa Monica Boulevard and west of Gower, and as she was describing it I realized which place she was talking about. I’d seen it when I was walking around Gower Gulch that first day looking for work: a big Mediterranean-style building with three archways at the front under a painted frieze, full-length arched windows, and balconies with iron balustrades and decorative brackets. I had thought it was a mansion where some movie mogul lived, or maybe the headquarters of a big motion picture studio—Paramount Pictures, maybe, or 20th Century Fox. I hadn’t figured it to be a girls’ hostel.

  “It’s even prettier inside,” she said. “I could show it to you if you want. Not all of it, but at least the fancy front rooms. They let boys come into the front rooms when they visit.” She said this as if she didn’t care about it one way or the other, which in some other girl might have been romantic cunning. But I hadn’t figured her for cunning, and I was pretty sure she didn’t have any romantic interest in me.

  I shrugged as if it didn’t matter to me either. “I could come over there on Sunday if you want.”

  On Sundays, our only day off work, Harold took care of the animals himself, then went out to Glendale to call on a woman he was seeing. Hugh took the bus to visit his brother over in the commercial district, and Jake spent the time with his wife and children. I had tried once staying put at Diamond, but when there’s too much silence it’s easy to wind up in a dark place; so usually I rode the streetcar into the city and killed the day aimlessly, walking around looking in shop windows, eating in a diner, going into a pool hall to drink a few beers. The rest of the week I could keep from thinking too much: even when I wasn’t handling the horses or reading one of Hugh’s trashy books, there was always some sort of hubbub going on, and it kept me out of my own head. But Sundays there was too much empty time and I had nobody to spend it with.

  “Good,” Lily said, without any particular emphasis. “Come around two o’clock. Just come into the lobby and I’ll meet you there.”

  Over the years she and I rarely talked about the beginning of our friendship. Only that it was Hollywood where our lives had intersected, and if we had met at any other time and place we might not have become friends.

  But
once she said something else about those early days. This was after her dad had died and I had taken the train up to Seattle for his funeral. We met in a hotel bar and spent an hour or so sipping scotch and talking. Somewhere in there she told me that all the girls she lived with at the Studio Club and the girls she worked with at the agent’s office had been fixed on becoming wives, “which left me outside the picture.” It was a state of affairs she was used to, but a girl with no romantic expectations, a girl who never planned to marry, was ironically a girl that many boys found easy to be with, and at college she had always been able to make friends among the boys. But living in a women’s sorority and working with women, “I wasn’t lonesome exactly, or friendless, but I guess I felt solitary.” She gave me a slightly amused look. “You weren’t much like the boys I knew at college, but this was Hollywood and I had cast you as The Cowboy with a Tragic Past. You’d get a look in your face, Bud, a look I used to see in my dad.”

  The bit about my tragic past was mostly her writerly invention, but I guess some part of it was real. Her dad had been a soldier in the Great War and had come up against some terrible things, so I know she must have picked up something in me that, at the time, I thought was well concealed.

  That day in front of the hardware store, she looked out at the rain puddling in the street and the wet dog in the bed of the pickup. “Whose dog is that?” she asked. Jack was watching every move I made. Every so often he stood up to shake himself off, but he was enough of a ranch dog that it didn’t occur to him to make a show of being pathetic.