Falling From Horses

by Molly Gloss

  That day at Corriganville none of us did any falling, but we did a lot of riding at breakneck speed, the horses crowding stirrup to stirrup. It was a long day, and then we had to wait in a long line to get paid. I was tired but feeling as if I’d done real work for a change, and then Mike came along and told all of us that the movie they were shooting would be ten days’ work if we wanted it.

  I didn’t have to think too hard about it. I figured this was my chance to get on steady with Cab, and I was pretty puffed up about riding for Republic, one of the so-called big guns when you were talking about westerns. So when I got back to Diamond I went ahead and told Harold I was quitting. And I’m ashamed to say I didn’t give a single thought to whether I was leaving him short-handed.

  He wasn’t surprised. He and Jake had the hood up working on the GMC when I told him, and he just said, “You got somewhere else to bunk?” without looking up from what he was doing. He didn’t say he was planning to kick me out that night, and I imagine if I had said I didn’t have a place yet, he’d have let me stay on until I found one. But I’d been talking that day to a fellow named Dave Keaton, who shared a rented house with a couple of other riders. Dave had said I could sleep on their living room sofa for a few days if I needed to, so I told Harold I was moving in with some other stunt riders who lived down in Los Feliz.

  Harold didn’t look up. “Well, good.”

  I watched him and Jake work on the truck for another minute or two. Harold’s dog was sitting on the porch staring out at something in the middle distance. I looked, but couldn’t see anything in particular he was staring at. After a minute I turned back around to Harold. I felt like I had to say, “I came down here looking to ride horses, not to haul them around in trucks and hold the reins for other men.”

  Harold straightened up and ran his greasy hands down the front of his shirt. “I know that,” he said, then stuck his hand out. “You take care. O’Brien’s got a reputation for wrecks.”

  We shook, and I said, “Thanks for everything, Mr. Capsen,” and he said, “You need a ride downtown?”

  It was a half-mile hike down the driveway to the road, and then probably two or three buses to get to Dave’s place, but Harold’s offer shamed me a little, and maybe I would have said no. Then Jake spoke up and said, “I can drop him off, boss. It’s on my way, more or less.”

  I went into the house and packed my duffle, then walked down to the shed where Hugh was trimming hooves on one of the horses. I told him I was leaving Diamond to work for Cab O’Brien. Hugh shook his head and grinned. “Riding stunts is a good way to get yourself wrecked. You’d be better off sticking with Harold.”

  When I told him I’d be making more money in one day than Harold paid me for a week, he just shook his head again and laughed. “You’ll be spending them big bucks on hospital bills maybe.” We shook hands, and he said, “Don’t get killed if you can help it.”

  I climbed into Jake’s old Chevrolet, and we bumped down the half mile of dirt lane in silence. When we were on the pavement and headed downhill into town, Jake said, “So you’re gonna be riding for O’Brien? I heard he’s hard on horses.”

  I said, “What I’ve heard, he’s hard on his riders.”

  He kept his attention on the road. After half a minute, he said, “Well, the way I look at it, those riders are lining up to take the work, but the same can’t be said for the damn horses. Nobody asks a horse if he wants to get tripped or run off a tilt chute. You heard about that horse that died making Jesse James? They ran him off a cliff, he broke his back or something, rolled over and drowned.”

  This had been in all the newspapers, and Lily said that everybody at the Studio Club was talking about it. Horses had been dying in the movies since the early silents, but nobody had noticed when it was the cheap oaters, the serials and cliffhangers pumped out on Poverty Row. This was a Tyrone Power picture, though, so the story about the dead horse had raised an unholy outcry.

  I was gone from Hollywood by the time they quit running horses off cliffs, but while I was down there the major studios were just starting to get back into cowboy pictures after a decade or better of leaving them to the low-budget blood-and-thunder outfits—Jesse James was the first in a string of them coming out that summer—and the stars at the big studios, big stars like Tyrone Power, didn’t want their names connected to the death of a horse. If the western had never moved off the bottom half of the bill and over to the major studios, maybe they’d still be running horses off cliffs—that’s something I’ve thought about once or twice.

  I hadn’t ever seen a tilt chute in action, but I had seen plenty of pictures where the hero, escaping the bad guys, rides his horse right off a cliff into the water, so I acted like I knew what I was talking about. “He just landed wrong is what I heard. They run horses off cliffs all the time and they don’t usually get hurt.”

  Jake cut his eyes to me, then looked back at the road and was silent.

  At the time I thought Jake was sentimental about horses. The truth was, he just had a good opinion of them and strong views about how they ought to be treated. He was like my folks in that way, and it was how my folks had raised me. But a horse had played a part in Mary Claudine’s death, and if I wasn’t exactly holding a grudge against the whole horse clan, I was at a point in my life where I was intent on being unsentimental about horses and everything else.

  When Jake dropped me off in Los Feliz, I thought the odds were pretty good I wouldn’t meet up with him or Hugh or Harold again, because Harold’s horses hardly ever worked one of Cab O’Brien’s jobs. I was wrong about that—I ran into each of them a few more times before I left Hollywood for good—but when I shook Jake’s hand and stood on the sidewalk holding my duffle, watching him drive away, I had the same hollow, butterflies-in-the-stomach feeling I always got when I was about to climb into the chute with a saddle bronc. I had come down to Hollywood expecting to fall off horses for the cameras, and I’d been looking out for that kind of work all the time I’d been wrangling for Harold. But I hadn’t actually thought through the part where I’d leave Diamond Barns, leave Harold’s employ. I could count on the fingers of one hand all the people I had come to know in California, and now I was cutting myself loose from three of them. That’s what I happened to think.

  22

  THE SOFA I SLEPT ON in the Los Feliz house turned out to be too short and plenty lumpy, and it smelled like cat piss—it was a long way from the servant’s bedroom in Harold’s fancy house. But I was riding in movies and not sleeping in an alley somewhere, and all of us were working on the same job, so we could ride out to the location together in Dave Keaton’s old Franklin sedan. In the mornings I just folded up the blanket and shoved my duffle in a corner, brushed my teeth, and climbed into the back seat; that was it. No need to feed, groom, and load horses into trailers before heading to the set at five in the morning. And they always stopped at a diner on the way back to the house at night, so I never let on that I knew how to cook a pork chop.

  Pretty much the only thing I knew about movie riding was the coaching I’d had from Steve Deets and Lon Epps, but I picked up a couple more things from Dave in the few days I lived in that house. Before he came to Hollywood, he had done some trick riding for wild west shows—double vaults and side cartwheels and what-all. He liked to use an extra stirrup—he called it a step—that he’d made out of scraps of leather, which he buckled above the stirrup so he’d have something to push off on when he was doing a saddle fall or a bulldog. And he had some polo stirrups that hinged on both sides so they’d break open and release his foot quickly when he was the one being bulldogged or when he was flying off a horse fall. I never did get myself any polo stirrups, but I found some scrap leather and made a step like the one Dave used, and I know it saved me from getting hurt a couple of times.

  For the first couple of days on that Wild Bill Elliott picture we mostly did a lot of fast, hard riding. We would do a chase scene, then maybe change wardrobe and horses, and film another one.
I learned that any time you were in a posse or a gang of outlaws or a bunkhouse crew, they wanted you bunched up, riding flat out, even if all you were doing was riding from the ranch to the saloon. And when you got where you were going you were supposed to pull to a stop and jump off the horse like the saddle had caught fire. So they had to keep bringing in fresh horses for the ones that were wearing out or pulling up lame, which I learned was typical. I had always thought Harold was too fussy about the people he rented his horses to, but I began to see his reason for it.

  It was Mike Tifflin who ran things when it was just straight riding, but Cab showed up toward the end of the week to ramrod a running gun battle. The crew was setting up to shoot in a big field that Corriganville used for saddle falls. It was about fifteen acres of old farmland that had been disked with a tractor and the earth mixed with peat and sand to make the landings softer. We were dressed in itchy, hot costumes that day, pretending to be a cavalry troop, and Cab looked us over like he was the inspector general. Then he pointed at a man I didn’t know—it was Ralph Foster, the fellow I later roomed with in Arizona—and at me. “You and you. I want you shot off your horses.”

  Some phony sagebrush had been set out for markers, and Cab walked us through the field so we’d know where we were supposed to be when we took our falls. Then he said he wanted one of us falling head over heels off the rump of the horse, and he didn’t care which one of us it was.

  If I haven’t already said so, every gag was priced out. For straight riding it was a flat day rate, but on top of that the studios paid an “adjustment” for every saddle fall, bulldog, transfer, horse fall, what-have-you. It varied with the movie budget is what I was told, but the ramrod usually was the one setting those prices, and he could be generous or tight in how he doled out the adjustments. The interesting thing is that Cab was one of the generous ones, and this might be why he had a lot of men willing to work for him, even when they knew he took risks with his crew.

  I hadn’t done any falling since Las Cruces, but a backflip was worth eleven dollars in those days—damn near a fortune to my way of thinking. I didn’t have any idea how to do one without breaking my neck, but I might have stepped up and said I wanted it, except Ralph got his name in first. I wonder now whether Cab would have let me try it. He knew I was green and I might have made a botch of it, maybe gotten myself killed or crippled, but knowing Cab, he could have been hoping to catch a spectacular wreck for the cameras.

  Then he pointed at me again and said, “So that means you’re taking the first fall, kid.” I knew from what Steve Deets had told me that this was not good news: the first one to fall has to lie there and play dead while the rest of the horses run by him. “You got to quit rolling as quick as you can,” Steve had said to me. “It’s easier for a horse to keep from kicking you if you’re not moving. If you stand up before all the others have come through, you’re liable to get run over.”

  We walked back to where the rest of the riders were waiting, and as soon as we were mounted up, Cab called for action. The whole bunch of us, fifteen or twenty, went galloping across that field like lives were at stake, pretending to shoot our fake guns back over our shoulders. I was at my mark so fast I didn’t have time to get worked up about it, I just bailed off like I’d been shot, smacked the ground hard with my arms tucked into a hedgehog roll the way I’d been coached, and then lay on the ground like a corpse while all the horses went flying by me and over me in a rain of damp clods. A man I had known when I was growing up, a cowhand who worked sometimes for Arlo Gantz, had a divot in his head the size of a golf ball where a horse’s hoof had stove in his skull, and that dull-minded fellow came into my mind while I was lying there.

  When the whistle finally blew, I wobbled to my feet, and I was standing there half-dazed when Steve walked up to me. “You’re getting the hang of it,” he said, which made me stupidly proud of myself.

  Cab worked all of us hard that day. Right after we did the running gunfight, the crew moved everything over to a long, low slope and got set up for a shot of cavalry making a downhill charge toward a bunch of Indians who’d taken cover in a ravine. While the prop master was doling out rubber sabers, Cab said he wanted some horse falls to goose up the action, and who wanted to volunteer? I hadn’t seen the Running W in action yet—I should have kept my head down when he looked around for riders—but I thought it over and then nodded and touched my fingers to my hat, and the only reason I didn’t get killed or busted up that day is because Cab wasn’t looking in my direction, and other men got their hands up first.

  A bunch of grips came along while we were getting our horses sorted out, and they set about burying a bunch of heavy truck axles in the ground, each one hooked to a big coil of airplane cable. Then the wranglers hooked the other end of the cable to cuffs on the fetlocks of several horses, and through a complicated three-ring apparatus—this was the W—on a surcingle around each horse’s body. When they were set, we all mounted up and waited for the whistle and took off racing down the hill.

  One of the horses rigged up and hooked to the cable was a rangy chestnut who must have been tripped before—he’d been edgy when they put the cuffs on him, and his muzzle and the white blaze on his face were crisscrossed with scars where the hair had grown back a different color. So I guess he had it figured out. He was running behind me, so I didn’t see what happened, but they said when he got to a spot about thirty feet from where he was set to fall he came to a hard stop, planted all four feet, and stood there. The man riding him jabbed in the spurs and whipped him, but that horse just groaned and flung his head up and down and wouldn’t budge.

  The other rigged horses were out in front of me, though, so I got a good look at how the Running W worked. We were riding at a pretty fast clip, and when the cables suddenly played out to their ends they snatched the horses’ front feet up to their chests in mid-stride and flipped them over on their heads and shoulders in a cloud of dust and shattered sagebrush, and the riders went flying off in spectacular fashion.

  If it had been up to me, I probably would have put my horse on his butt and stopped right there to keep from running over the men on the ground, but we were supposed to keep racing downhill, brandishing our sabers, which meant I had to trust the horse I was riding, a horse I had known all of ten minutes—had to trust him, in a flat-out run in a crowd of running horses, to jump the men like windfall logs and veer out around the tripped horses, who were already lunging to their feet and shaking off blankets of dust, had to trust him not to lose his footing or get spooked and start bucking and throw me off into that mess. But when the whistle blew for the end of the scene, the other men just pulled up their horses, and several of them lounged back and took out their smokes as if nothing unusual had occurred. I looked back up the hill and saw the tripped horses all standing, looking dazed and confounded, like they were surprised to still be alive. I was frankly surprised by it too.

  Mike Tifflin was up at the crown of the hill, yelling through the bullhorn that we should come up there and regroup for another shot, and when I started my horse in that direction I passed Wen Luettgerodt, who had been one of the men riding a horse fall that day. He was walking along pretty slowly, smoking a cigarette, not showing any signs of wear, except his cavalry uniform was all brown with dust and he was missing his hat and there was a lot of chaff in his hair.

  When I went by him I said, “I guess you’ve done that a bunch of times.”

  He kept walking. “A few.” He looked up at me and smiled a crooked smile, and I saw he had blood around his teeth. “Another day another dollar.”

  When we got up to where Mike was waiting, Cab was standing a few yards away chewing out the rider who’d been on the chestnut horse, and Mike told us the whole thing had to be run again because the horse stopping in his tracks had ruined the scene.

  The horses who’d been tripped were wobbly and shaking, not in shape to do it again, so the wranglers brought in a fresh bunch, and the same men who had fallen the first time w
ent ahead and rode the gag again, which saved me from giving it a try.

  But I wound up doing three saddle falls that day, and it was after dark by the time I got back to the Los Feliz house. I was covered in dust, had grit in my teeth, my legs and back were aching, and my shoulders were purple with bruise. I fell asleep on the couch without the energy to wash up. I guess I thought I had pretty much arrived at being a movie cowboy. Although from where I am now, this strikes me as a belief grounded in a lack of information.

  23

  I WASN’T SURE where I stood with Lily. Now that I was riding for the cameras, there wasn’t as much waiting-around time, and it was hard to find a place to stash a drawing pad and pencil when we got called for our scenes, so I didn’t have any sketches for her when we met up that Sunday. But the stunt riding gave me something to talk about, some chatter to keep the quiet from taking hold. She asked a lot of questions and seemed pretty interested in the answers, which suited both of us. I didn’t take any of this for flirting, I took it to mean she was interested in every part of moviemaking and happy for me that I was finally riding in the movies. And for the time being, I took it to mean we had got past our dustup. Or mostly past it.

  A couple of weeks later she started working as a reader for Sunrise Pictures, which gave us something else to talk about.

  In those days, the head of the Story Department at Sunrise was Marion Chertok, a Russian woman of about forty who spoke with a heavy accent. People said she had ridden with the Cossacks during the Great War, which may have been somebody’s idea of a joke or could actually have been true. What Lily told me—most of it gossip she had heard from girls at the Studio Club—is that Marion had been Ronald Vlackey’s secretary in the silent-picture days when Vlackey himself had been the story editor at a tiny studio down on Gower Street, and as he had climbed up the ladder he had brought her along with him. Now that he ran Sunrise, Marion was his number two.