Falling From Horses

by Molly Gloss

  “He’s Harold’s.”

  She suddenly left the shelter of the awning, crossed over to the truck parked at the curb, and petted the dog’s wet head. “What’s his name?”

  “Blackjack. Or Harold just says Jack.”

  She scritched the dog behind his ears. “Good Jack,” she said quietly. Then she looked over at me again. “I had a black dog once, his name was Rags.” She was squinting, her glasses already spotted with rain. “Don’t you hate how dogs always die before people do?” She said this as if it was a curious question she’d been pondering for a long time.

  When we were still living on Echol Creek, a neighbor gave us a shepherd pup that Mary Claudine named Quinn. He was now about eight years old, living up at Bly with my parents. I thought of telling Lily she was wrong about dogs always dying before people, but I didn’t have the words for it.

  She gave the dog another little pat on his head and then came back across the sidewalk to stand under the awning. While she wiped the rain off her glasses with a handkerchief, she said, “They don’t let us smoke in our rooms at the Studio Club; we have to go down to the living rooms to smoke.” As if this was a hardship she had learned to live with. Then she pulled a pack of Lucky Strikes from the pocket of her coat and offered me one.

  I had known only a few women in my life who smoked, and I hadn’t thought Lily was one of them—I hadn’t seen her smoking on the bus. But I acted like I wasn’t surprised. I had smoked a few cigarettes myself in the last year without yet making it a habit, so I took the cigarette from her and lit us both up. Lily drew some smoke into her mouth and blew it out, then tucked her elbow into her waist and held the cigarette out from her hip. I had seen movie stars strike that pose, but she looked to me like a child play-acting with a candy cigarette.

  15

  I GOT TO THE STUDIO CLUB ON SUNDAY about a quarter of two and waited in the lobby for almost half an hour, watching pretty girls come and go. Lily, it turned out, was still in her nightgown. While the girls she roomed with were primping for a picnic, speaking slyly about being “crazy” or “gone” for young men they had met the week before, she was sitting up in bed writing. She had the opinion that a screenwriter had to learn to write with distractions—telephones ringing and directors charging in and out of your office and actors standing over you demanding that lines be changed. So while the girls chattered, she kept her pencil moving across the page. When one of them said, “You should come too, Lily, and bring that boy Bud,” she didn’t look up from her work. “He’s just coming to get a look at the club,” she said. “He’s not my boyfriend.”

  When she finally woke to how late it was, got dressed, and came down the curving staircase, it was twenty past two. But she just said, “Hey,” and I said “Hey,” and then she led me around the public parts of the building, those big front rooms and the library. The parlors flanking the hall were each a good thirty feet long, sporting tall fireplaces with tile surrounds and ceilings with heavy plaster arches and oak box beams. I was fairly awestruck by the place, but it wasn’t in Lily’s nature to be awed. Anyway, she had grown up in circumstances considerably more embellished than I was used to—her dad was a ferry boat inspector for the state of Washington, and her mother was an opera singer and a music teacher who used to play the organ for silent films at the Orpheum Theatre in Seattle—a gilded building more opulent than anything in my experience. Lily stood back and let me gawk.

  We could hear somebody practicing vocal exercises in one of the music rooms down the corridor. She said there was a dance studio where girls could rehearse their auditions for musicals, utility rooms with ironing boards, sewing machines, and machines for doing up laundry. A makeup room with shelves and mirrors. Even a typewriter room for aspiring screenwriters, although Lily hadn’t used it yet. She liked to write her early drafts in pencil in a notebook.

  When we walked out through the gardens and the loggia, girls were sitting under the bougainvillea drinking coffee and talking, and girls in shorts were stretched out on the lawn, reading movie scripts or magazines. I had been holding my hat in my hand inside the club, but as soon as I stepped out to the loggia I put it on, and several of the girls looked up at me when we came by, at least partly, I imagine, to see if I was a cowboy actor they recognized. I was wearing my good boots, a bib-front white shirt, and the purple polka-dot rag my folks had sent me for Christmas, knotted at the side of my neck.

  Lily said quietly, “That girl in the pink shorts is crazy for you.”

  I was nineteen years old, and I had never seen a naked woman or touched a naked breast, which is probably all you need to know about my sexual experience. But I wasn’t bad-looking in those days, which I was not unaware of, and of course Lily knew, although she was also perfectly clear—we both were—that she and I were pals only.

  I looked around and spotted more than one girl in pink shorts. “Which one?”

  Lily laughed and said, “All of them.”

  When we walked back through the big dining room, the tables were already set for dinner and the kitchen staff was at work—we could smell onions frying. The Studio Club served two meals a day, but the girls were on their own for lunch. During the week Lily sometimes bought a sandwich or a bowl of soup from the Dutch Diner around the corner from the office, but on weekends she usually wrote all day and would forget to eat lunch at all. She hadn’t even come down for breakfast that day, and when we walked past the kitchen she was suddenly hungry. She said, “Do you want to get an ice cream cone?” so we walked out to an ice cream store on Sunset and bought a couple of cones and walked around eating them and talking.

  When I asked about her war movie, she told me she’d finished that one and now was writing a cowboy picture. She gave me a sidelong look as if she thought I might disapprove. “I have to start somewhere, and I heard Mr. Buchanan on the phone the other day saying to one of his writer clients that a shoot-’em-up was an easy sell.” She’d been reading a bunch of “giddyuppers” to get a feeling for the form, and she was reworking one of her New York plots, moving it to the wide-open range and throwing in a couple of chases. She didn’t know a thing about ranching, but I understood even then that it didn’t matter much. Her movie was about a Texas Ranger wounded by an outlaw, and the outlaw’s daughter who saves his life and nurses him back to health.

  “Rose gets killed later by one of the rustlers, and the Ranger wants revenge. He plans to go out and shoot them, but in the end he knows he has to follow his duty, and he takes them all to jail.”

  Well, I’d seen that plot a few times, but Lily might not have known how common it was. She said, “People think honor is simple, but it’s really not.” She meant this seriously. Even in those days, she always wanted to write important stories—stories that mattered. The pictures that later made her famous were gritty, unsentimental melodramas—women and men wrestling their way through tough situations—and noir thrillers with an understory of political shenanigans. Movies not out to change the world, maybe, but always trying to mean something.

  We passed a billboard for a Mickey Rooney picture, which got us talking about movies we liked. Lily had been taking herself to the pictures a couple of times a week for years, so she had seen pretty much every movie that showed up in Seattle. This put me at a disadvantage. Every so often a bunch of us kids from the farms and ranches around Echol Creek and Bailey Creek would meet up to ride our horses to the movie theater in Burns, which was twelve miles by trails and backcountry lanes. We’d just turn the horses into a vacant lot next to the theater and ride home late at night after a double feature and not think anything of it. And when I was in high school, Dean Dickerson and I saw a picture most every Saturday at the theater in Hart. But those were small-town movie palaces that showed cowboy pictures, jungle adventures, popular melodramas. Lily had no trouble keeping up with me when I started talking about Wild Bill Elliott—she had seen enough cowboy movies to know some of the plots and the names of the heroes—but I didn’t have anything to say when she b
rought up I, Claudius or The Life of Emile Zola.

  “Did you see Grand Illusion? That’s a war movie.”

  It didn’t sound to me like a war movie. “Who’s in it?” I asked her.

  “Jean Gabin is the most famous one. He’s really good. It’s a French movie.”

  “Well, I don’t go to foreign pictures.” I’d never heard of Jean Gabin. I didn’t say anything to her about the kinds of movies that came to small-town theaters.

  “No foreign movies at all?” She said this as if it was not to be believed.

  “I guess I saw a picture about Pancho Villa once.”

  “That doesn’t really count. You should see Grand Illusion. I think it’s just about the greatest movie ever made.”

  We were walking past a line of shops with apartments on the second floor and a row of palm trees along the curb. It was the middle of January. In her last letter my mother had written that there was a foot of snow on the high pastures, but in California we had had a string of days as warm as summer. It must have been about eighty that afternoon, and the shade under the palms was a relief from the sun. When we came out again into the heat and glare, what popped into my mind was that my parents hadn’t seen more than a dozen motion pictures in their lives.

  “Well, I didn’t see it. I guess that makes me a shitkicker raised in a barn.”

  She looked at me to be sure I wasn’t teasing her. “I don’t know why you’re mad.”

  “I’m not.”

  “You are. I just think you would like it if you saw it. I could tell you the whole story if you want.”

  “No thanks.”

  She looked at me again. “Well, sometime I will.”

  She didn’t say so at the time, but Grand Illusion was the reason she had decided to be a screenwriter. She had been fourteen or fifteen when she first saw it, and up to that point she hadn’t thought of films as involving writing. She hadn’t thought of the stories she’d been writing since she first learned to use a pen—stories spooling out behind her eyes as she wrote the words on the page—as a kind of movie. It was when she saw Grand Illusion that she suddenly understood somebody wrote this story and then somebody else turned it into a movie. And the whole concept of filmmaking hit her.

  When we finished our ice cream, she brought out her Lucky Strikes, and for a while we walked along in silence, smoking. Then she said suddenly, “I want to go to Paris. The French make the best pictures. I want to meet Sacha Guitry—he writes movies and directs them too. That’s what I plan to do. If you want to have any say over what you write, you really have to become a writer-director or a writer-producer.” If she knew the odds against such a thing, she didn’t let on. She spoke as if it wasn’t in question—as if it might have already happened and she and Sacha Guitry were old colleagues.

  I didn’t know the difference between a director and a producer, and I didn’t ask her to tell me. The cigarette had gone straight to my head, the slight buzz that can happen when you’re new to smoking or haven’t done it in a while. I said, “Sacha sounds like a girl’s name. I guess he doesn’t make cowboy pictures.” I meant for her to hear it as a wisecrack.

  Lily looked at me to see if I was still mad, but then she just changed the subject. “Is that a new scar?”

  I had a few scars, but the new one was the bright pink line running through my eyebrow, which I had got when those bums robbed me in Griffith Park. I told her, “A horse tossed me into some barb wire.” I guess I didn’t want to admit to her that I’d been sleeping in the park. And anyway the fight didn’t make a very heroic story.

  “There’s barbed wire up at Diamond where you’re working?” Of course, that’s the trouble you get into when you start lying.

  I said, “It was on a movie set.”

  She took in this information and nodded. “When you get into the movies, they’ll probably want you to play one of the bad guys, because the hero never has a scar on his face. He should, though, shouldn’t he? Because he’s always getting in fistfights, and wouldn’t he get scars?”

  My dad always joked about how nobody’s teeth got knocked out and nobody’s nose got broken when men fought in the movies. I had been in enough scuffles, even as a kid, to know he was right, but it annoyed the hell out of me every time he said it.

  I just said, “I guess,” and kept walking.

  When we went by the Marcal Theater, Lily stopped to look at the posters. They were showing White Banners in a double feature with The Big Stampede, and Lily said, “Oh, I like Fay Bainter. I saw this movie last summer.”

  I didn’t know anything about White Banners or who Fay Bainter was, but The Big Stampede was a cowboy picture, and the show was about to start. I said, “If you want, we could go in and see Stampede. We wouldn’t have to sit through the other one if you’ve already seen it.”

  She gave me a scornful look. “I wouldn’t let you see your cowboy picture without making you see my weepy.”

  It was seven or eight months later, while I was laid up in the hospital, that Lily one night started telling me the whole story, scene by scene, of Grand Illusion. This was long after the floor nurse had given up trying to kick her out. The room stank of pain and sickness. The three other men in the beds near us in the darkness were listening too, although she spoke pretty low and sat so close to the bed I could feel her breath on my neck and cheek. I was in poor shape, and I imagine she meant to take my mind off my miseries. Well, just about any movie could have served the purpose, and Grand Illusion wouldn’t be the first one you’d think of. There are some lighthearted, even comical things in it, but people are shot and killed in that movie, people that you wish had gone on living, and it doesn’t end with the lovers together.

  That night Lily said, “Remember when you came down to the Studio Club that first time, and we walked around eating ice cream and talking about movies?” Something—I don’t know what—had brought that into her mind. And then she began telling me the story of Grand Illusion in such a way that I could almost see it playing on the inside of my eyelids. She always had that gift for telling a movie, her own or somebody else’s.

  I wouldn’t get around to seeing it myself for another twenty years. When it finally played at the art house here in town, I took my wife to see it, and I know she was afraid of what it might dredge up—something about the war, my war. But what it brought back into my mind was the movie Lily had been writing when I met her on the bus, that World War One story about a guy who goes behind the lines to rescue a French girl. And it brought back to me that year in Hollywood, every part of it, including Lily Shaw and the night she sat by my hospital bed and told me the whole damn story of Grand Illusion, as well as Steve Deets, Cab O’Brien, and all the horses I’d seen killed when we made The Battle at Valverde Ford. Every part of that year. And for two or three weeks after seeing the movie, I’d wake up in a sweat, dreaming of jumping a horse through a candy-glass window, falling twenty stories to the street. Dreams that mixed up Lily with my sister, long nightmare searches going lost in the dark maze of a movie lot.

  Now that I’m writing what I remember of that year, I have begun to wonder if we only invent the past. When we think back over our lives, maybe we just take a few things remembered out of so much unremembered and stitch those bits together so they spool out like a movie and make a kind of sense.

  That night when Lily told me the story of Grand Illusion she got a few things wrong. She left out Boeldieu’s death, for one. He had planned an elaborate ruse to help the others escape from the prison, and he was shot before he could get away himself, but when she told the story, Lily said he made it out with the others. I don’t think she rewrote it deliberately for my sake. I think she just remembered it that way.

  16

  ABOUT THE MIDDLE OF JANUARY, Harold sent me up into the Santa Monica Mountains to Las Cruces Ranch, where an outfit called Sunrise Studios was shooting a picture. This was the first time I’d been up there. Las Cruces had once been a Spanish cattle ranch, and it ran close to a thous
and acres—everything from salt lagoons and beaches to chaparral hills and wooded uplands. The studios we usually worked with couldn’t afford the rental at a place like that, but Sunrise was a couple of cuts above Poverty Row. They weren’t one of the majors, but they were known for using better locations and staging the action scenes instead of cobbling together stock footage and gimmicks. Sunrise had rented the horses for this picture from White Oak Stables over in Culver City, but White Oak was short of draft horses that day, and they asked Harold if he’d help them out. He wouldn’t have taken the job if it had involved a runaway stagecoach or anything tricky like that, but they just needed a pair of horses pulling a farm wagon, clopping along in the background of a scene. Las Cruces would supply the wagon, so Harold sent me up there in the Dodge with a couple of his color-matched Belgians.

  The ranch had a permanent little western town with dummy fronts and some roofed three-wall and four-wall buildings where players and crew could stay overnight if they needed to and a livery barn with a small tacked-on corral for horses to stand in the shade under some cottonwood trees. A dozen White Oak horses were already saddled along a picket line when I got there, and another dozen were loafing in the corral. The White Oak wrangler, having nothing better to do, helped me get the Belgians unloaded, and then we stood around talking while we waited for our horses to be called up for their scenes.

  This other wrangler, Verle Miller, was a little guy who had been a jockey until he got tired of starving himself to make weight. He was wearing calf-high jockey boots and a Spanish beret, which didn’t impress me, but he knew horses, and he’d been around the movie business for three or four years. He knew a fair bit about the nutty studio goings-on and the tricks of the trade, and he was full of stories about the parties he’d been to and the famous stars who were his pals. I thought at the time this was mostly bullshit, but I heard later that going to the races was a popular pastime for the upper-crust Hollywood crowd, and a lot of actors cozied up to Verle because of his inside knowledge about horse racing.