Falling From Horses

by Molly Gloss

  Lily, on the other hand, was always thinking of how a movie could have been better, which for her meant better written. To her way of thinking, every time a cowboy broke into song the writers were getting away with not writing a real story. Her complaint about the singing cowboys and the eight-day oaters was that they always had a bare-bones plot and not much dialogue. In the lobby at intermission, and later when I was walking her back to her place, she’d be rewriting for me whatever we’d just seen—shifting things around, dropping things out so they’d be less predictable, making up dialogue for the scenes where they’d sidestepped it with a long shot and sentimental music.

  She was game to see just about anything playing in town, but she made sure we saw all the major studio melodramas and foreign films dubbed in English or with English title cards. When I didn’t like a picture, she would press me to say why, which to my way of thinking was like asking “Why don’t you like the way those stars are arranged up there in the sky?” I had thought she was too proud of her French films, but it turned out she was a bit like Verle with his horses: she could find something to like in almost every picture we saw. She judged each one by its own standards. She measured a cowboy picture against other cowboy pictures and not against Captains Courageous or The Good Earth. “You can’t expect a cowboy movie to be Grand Illusion, Bud. People call them horse operas because they’re like grand opera but more American. Opera has silly plots too.” This didn’t mean much to me. I didn’t have a clear notion what an opera was.

  She’d get just as exercised arguing the fine points of a cliffhanger in a chapter movie as picking through the themes in Fritz Lang’s films. She’d ask my opinion of whatever we’d seen and then argue with every damn thing I said. I was used to girls who tried to make you think you were smarter than them even if you weren’t, but Lily never in her life cared whether a boy knew she was smarter than he was.

  When we started going to the pictures together she was still working on her Texas Ranger script. I had seen more hay-burners than she had, so she wanted me to tell her if she was plowing up ground that was too familiar. Familiarity was one of the things I liked about the cowboy pictures—knowing from the outset that Tim McCoy wouldn’t be shot dead, that he’d only ever be winged in the shoulder. But this was Lily. Even then, when everything she was writing was more or less pulp work, she kept trying to wrestle the usual stories into something fresh. When we were at the movies she’d lean over and whisper what she thought would happen next, and how it would end, and she was almost always right. So when she read part of her script to me, she would stop every so often and ask me to guess what I thought would happen next. Whenever I guessed right, she took it as bad news. She’d study the script, her eyebrows bunched over her nose, and then scribble something in the margin, and the next time she read it to me that part of the story would be heading off in another direction. I can tell you this: in those early movies Lily wrote, you never saw a cowboy hero save his sidekick at the last minute by cutting the hangman’s rope with an unerring shot from halfway down the street.

  I had a pretty clear idea that the cowboy hero stood for being brave and true, a man with a strict moral compass, and in those days even Lily hadn’t thought too deeply about what else the cowboy hero might stand for—she was the first person I ever heard talk about Buck Jones, Tom Mix, all those top cowboys, as if they were America’s version of Galahad or Lionheart, as if the cowboy were a chivalrous emblem of our national character. But she always wanted any picture, even an oater, to be about real people and their problems, so it annoyed her that all the heroes in westerns were rootless loners, lacking a childhood history and a family—no parents or brothers or sisters, never a wife.

  A few years later, in Bent Grass, the only western she wrote for RKO, she gave Ted Barstow a sister living back in North Carolina, a sister he had broken with for reasons that were never quite spelled out. Toward the end of the film Lily put him at a desk writing a letter to her, a letter full of loneliness and regret and tender affection. John Ford always said he couldn’t have made The Searchers without RKO having first made Bent Grass. I don’t know if that’s true—those pictures don’t seem at all alike to me—but I know the studio tried to cut that letter-writing scene out of the film before it hit theaters, and Lily had to dig in her heels to keep it.

  20

  I HADN’T SAID ANYTHING TO HAROLD about the work I’d done for Cab O’Brien up at Las Cruces—I figured he wouldn’t want to know I’d been stunt riding while I was supposed to be wrangling his horses, and anyway I wasn’t sure anything would come of it. But I told Lily.

  I didn’t have to do any bragging to impress her. She hadn’t seen any of the Wichita Carson movies, but she knew Sunrise was a real studio, not a two-bit outfit making serials on Poverty Row. And she had seen enough cowboy pictures to know what a bulldog fall was when I described it to her. Walking back from the theater, she pressed me to tell her everything I’d done and seen, and she acted interested in it all, which inflated me somewhat. And I guess this must have been about the time I started thinking about kissing her.

  Hugh had been needling me about her from the start, as if the two of us were courting, which I knew we weren’t—I hadn’t been thinking of her in that way at all. When I told him Lily wasn’t a girl I would want to marry, he just started talking about her in a smutty way, as if the only other reason to spend time with a girl was if you were taking her to bed. I should have stood up for Lily’s reputation, but his ribbing carried a strong whiff of congratulations, of admiration, and the truth was, I didn’t want to let on to him that I hadn’t ever bedded a girl. So I went ahead and let him think what he wanted.

  And then I did start thinking about Lily differently. She was older than me by a few years, so I thought she might have had serious boyfriends and maybe even some experience. And I had begun to think she was interested in me after all. When she had got me talking that day about the stunt riding I’d done up at Las Cruces, it had felt like the kind of thing a flirting girl might do to nourish a boy’s ego. Now that I’ve got some distance from it, I can see that I was feeling itchy, the way young men get, and Lily was the girl at hand. Anyway, I started to think she might be fair game for some kissing and nibbling and touching. Of course in the dirty stories Hugh was always spinning, this was the kind of thing that led to sexual relations, and I guess I was starting to get serious about having some.

  I worked up my nerve for a couple of weeks, and then when we happened to see a movie with some romance in it, and when the movie stars went into their clinch, I made a clumsy move, trying to plant a kiss on her lips.

  We bumped heads, and she whispered, “Bud, what are you doing?” and rubbed her forehead.

  “I was about to give you a kiss,” I said.

  The movie theater was dark, but not so dark I couldn’t see her frown.

  “Well, don’t.”

  “I just felt like it. I still feel like it. Why don’t you let me kiss you?”

  For some reason, she took off her glasses and squinted at me nearsighted. “Why do you want to?”

  “I just do. I’ve been thinking about it for a while.”

  She was still frowning—it was a look full of suspicion—and it took her a minute to say anything else. “On the lips?”

  “Sure.” I leaned in again, but she pulled back and turned her head so my kiss brushed the side of her mouth.

  “Bud, quit it. I don’t know why you want to kiss me. We’re just friends. Anyway, I’m older than you.”

  “You’re not much older, and anyhow, what does that mean? Have you got a lot of boyfriends or something?”

  She threw me a look I couldn’t read. She didn’t answer, and after a moment she put her glasses on and turned toward the screen and studied it. I was embarrassed for reasons I couldn’t have put into words, which I guess is why I started to say something else, something about her boyfriends. She stood up suddenly and put on her sweater.

  I wasn’t sure what was going on.
I stood up too and said, “Are you mad?”

  She said, “No,” with her face turned away from me, but she sounded mad, and she walked up the aisle and into the lobby without looking back to see if I was following.

  When we got out to the sidewalk I caught up to her and she said calmly, “That was really stupid, Bud. I’m not interested in having sex with you.”

  I was stunned for a minute. I hadn’t been clear in my own mind whether I was after sex or after Lily, so it was a shock that Lily herself seemed to know which it was and had spoken right up about it—had called it “having sex,” which wasn’t what any of us said back then.

  I know I must have turned color—my face was hot. I said, “It was just a damn kiss,” like I was the one entitled to be mad. We walked a block or two without talking. I shoved my hands in my pockets and kept my head turned from her, studying the shop windows.

  Then she said, “We don’t love each other, we’re just friends. And we can’t be friends if we’re having sex, Bud. You wouldn’t want to be friends with me if you thought I was fast.” She said this in almost a matter-of-fact way, but her eyebrows had closed in a hard frown, the same expression I had seen on her face when she was thinking about how to fix a bad movie.

  I said again, with a hell of a lot more force, “It was just a damn kiss. You shouldn’t get so het up about it.” And then I said, “Well, I changed my mind about it anyway,” like I was sore at the whole idea. Like I had all the girls in the world to choose from, and Lily Shaw didn’t even make the list.

  I had kissed a few girls in high school, and once a woman I met at a tavern had let me pet her breasts through her brassiere, but I hadn’t ever talked to a girl about sexual matters—I hadn’t ever heard the word “sex” spoken by a woman before—so I had by now come to the belief that Lily knew a good deal more about these things than I did.

  Well, I was wrong about that. What I would come to know much later was that she hadn’t kissed a single damn boy yet, and she was still trying to figure out the whole confusing business of her crushes on girls. Up to now, she had thought I was harmless, not a boy she might need to be careful of; but she hadn’t ever been the object of anybody’s sexual attention, which I think must have accounted for some of her fearlessness. And I believe it came into her mind that day that she might not want to go on being friends with somebody she had to be on guard against.

  I didn’t know any of this at the time, and I was inflamed with a particular kind of embarrassed anger. Rummaging around in my head looking for a way to get off the track we were on. After we’d walked a while in silence I said, “Well, we skipped out on that movie, so I hope you already figured out what happens at the end.” Like I was still mad at her but ready to forget the other stuff that had happened.

  For a minute she thought about whether to answer me. Then she said, looking straight ahead, “He runs after her and finds her in front of the museum. It’s nighttime and it’s raining, so when they kiss we can’t tell if it’s the rain on her face or if she’s crying. She’s crying, though, and we know it’s from happiness.”

  She said it deadpan, and by this time I’d had a few weeks’ education in film clichés, so I answered with a sound that wasn’t quite a dry laugh but almost.

  We didn’t talk much more on the walk back to her dormitory. We went ahead and played cards without saying much, and when the lights in the front rooms blinked—a signal that guests should be heading for the door—we both stood up right away. Lily hesitated, but then she said, “See you next Sunday.” I dipped my head and said, “Sure,” as if we hadn’t come near to calling it quits a few minutes earlier.

  I didn’t catch the bus back to Diamond right away—I was full of unspent, inarticulate embarrassment and a yeasty tension that I didn’t know what to do with. It was after dark, but the weather was dry and not cold, so I just started out walking, weaving around through the neighborhoods and staying off the boulevard, figuring I’d walk to the bus stop on Western, the last one before the road goes uphill into the park.

  In those days, even in the cities, you hardly ever saw a dog on a leash—dogs would be roaming around loose, hanging out with kids playing ball under street lamps. But halfway along my route there was a brown dog on a six-foot rope tied to the front porch of one of those California bungalows you still find in the neighborhoods, stucco with peeling paint and a sun-faded, half-rotted awning over the living room window. The dog, ribby and filthy, was lying curled up on the dirt below the porch. A dog doesn’t like to shit in his den, so it looked like he’d been going to the end of the rope, squatting to take a dump, and then curling up to sleep as far from the piles as he could get. But I could smell the stink of his shit from yards away, and there were clouds of flies swarming around the feces.

  When he saw me, he stood up and walked toward me as far as the rope would let him. He didn’t raise his hackles. After we had stood looking at each other a while, he moved his filthy tail. He had a long narrow snout and one ear folded over, and his legs were too short to balance his long body—not a good-looking dog by anybody’s standard.

  Even now I can’t tell you why I went up to him and untied his rope. I can’t tell you what this had to do with trying to kiss a girl and being rebuffed, but I know it did.

  The dog crouched and curled his lip while I was working on the knot. He didn’t get the idea right away. I waved my arm to send him off, which made him shy and cower, but when I kicked my boot toward him, he finally figured out what I was saying and he loped down the street without looking back.

  There were lights on in the house, but nobody came out to the porch. I stood there a while, thinking about going to the door, but finally I went on up the street. I hadn’t even gone a block, though, before I heard a guy coming up behind me, calling something I couldn’t make out. I turned around and waited for him.

  “What the hell!” he yelled. “You the bastard that loosed my dog?” This was Sunday, but he was wearing dirty overalls, his face and hands sooty, as if he’d worked all day in a metal shop maybe, or sweeping chimneys.

  “Dog didn’t want to be sleeping in his own shit,” I said, and he sang out, “The hell if it’s your business!”

  He was close to me by then, and I got ready to hit him if he came at me. Or hit him even if he didn’t come at me. He was heavier than me, but I was taller: I figured I had more reach and he had a softer gut. But he was still a couple of yards off when he stopped and took a wide stance and shook his hands in front of his face as if the fingers were burning. He said, “The damn dog might have got the rabies! I been tying him up since he got bit by a coyote. What the hell I tell my kid, heh? Tell him his dog’s gonna get shot?”

  There had been a rabies epidemic in Los Angeles the summer before I got there, people dying of dog bites, and for a few months any dog running around loose had been suspect. A lot of dogs had been shot. It was one of the first stories I had heard when I got down there.

  My face went warm. I said, “Tell him his dog didn’t like sleeping in his own shit,” and I turned around and walked off.

  He yelled after me, “Ah, go to hell!” but it didn’t have any great force in it, and he didn’t make a move to follow me. At the time I guess I thought he was chicken. Now I think he was just tired, and this was the end of a long day.

  When I got to the middle of the next block, I took a quick look back. He was standing in front of his house, looking down the street. His damn dog was trotting toward him, tongue lolling in a big smile.

  21

  THE PHONE NUMBER I had put down on Cab O’Brien’s clipboard was the number for Diamond Barns, so for the next three or four weeks every time some two-bit studio called up to rent horses I thought it might be Cab. Finally, early in the week after that whole thing with Lily, the kiss, and the dog and all, I got a call.

  The woman on the phone said if I wanted to ride for Cab I should show up at Corriganville in the morning, be there by six. I didn’t know how the hell I’d get out to the Corrigan ranc
h by six—it was clear out in the valley, and buses didn’t run that early. But I said I’d be there, and then I told Harold I had something else to do the next day. And I asked him if he’d loan me the Dodge because the something else was clear out in the valley.

  He and Hugh were sitting in the living room playing dominoes when the phone rang, and he had heard my side of the phone call. Maybe he didn’t know exactly what the hell was up, but he could guess, and he gave me a look. “As it happens, we got an easy day tomorrow, so take the Dodge, but get it back here by six.” Then he gave me another look, tipping his hat back so I could see his face and know what he was getting at. “And don’t figure this for a regular thing. The rest of the week we got plenty of jobs to keep us busy. If this gets to be a regular thing, you’d better figure out where you’re gonna live when you quit working for me, because this here isn’t a boarding house and I need somebody who can show up for work every day.”

  Harold was always straight with me, and fair, which at the time I didn’t appreciate as much as I should have.

  So I drove out to Corriganville the next morning, where it turned out they were shooting a Republic picture starring Wild Bill Elliott. I didn’t see much of Cab that day, I guess because he was overseeing a saloon brawl on an indoor set. A second assistant named Mike Tifflin was in charge of the humdrum stuff, and he put me in with a dozen men riding in a sheriff’s posse hard on the trail of some badmen.

  Steve Deets and Lon Epps were riding in the posse too. I had been thinking they were unhappy with how I’d handled the bulldog fall that day at Las Cruces, but now that we were working together again they seemed to think I was worth a little help. One or the other rode alongside me most of the day and gave me a rundown on some of the gags—what a transfer was, and a pony express mount. If you bailed off a running horse, that was called a saddle fall, and if a Running W or a pitfall took your horse down and sent you flying off him, that was a horse fall. And they gave me some tips on how to do it without breaking my neck. In a few hours I learned things it would otherwise have taken me weeks of movie work to pick up, if I didn’t kill myself first.