Falling From Horses

by Molly Gloss

  The truth was, Henry had forgotten about the start of school. Martha was ordinarily strong in her feeling about her children’s education, but she hadn’t said a word about it. “I guess we lost track of it,” Henry said. He didn’t have any idea what Bud would say about going back to Hart to finish school. He himself didn’t have an opinion about it. In the first days after Mary Claudine had gone missing, his brain and heart had raced along, but by now he was hollowed out, body and soul, too tired to give his attention to anything but the map and the search.

  He took off his hat and scratched the dry scalp. “I don’t know how long you’ve been here waiting for Bud,” he said, “but I imagine he won’t be in until after dark. It was just luck that I come in early; I had to swap out a horse with a bruised foot. Anyway, I’ll talk to him about it and if that’s what he wants I’ll bring him over to school myself in a day or two.”

  Mr. Dickerson nodded. “Well, all right, you talk to Bud. He’s a smart boy, he ought to get a high school education. He hasn’t missed but three weeks so far. He’ll catch right up.”

  They shook hands again, and Henry walked with them to the car. Both Dean and his dad wore shoes meant for hardwood floors and sidewalks. The cuffs of their trousers were colorless with dust from walking across the dry yard.

  Dean hadn’t said a single word. Before they drove off, Henry reached in through the open window and briefly cupped a hand to the boy’s shoulder. “You take care,” he said. Dean flashed him a look that Henry couldn’t read. He didn’t blame the kid for wanting to make a cowboy. He blamed himself for letting him try.

  There had been so many grass fires in the valley that summer and on into the fall, well past the usual fire season, that whenever the wind came up in the long afternoons of their search they could smell smoke and ash, taste it on their tongues. For many years afterward, whenever any of them smelled wood smoke or burning grass they would fall back suddenly into a memory of those fruitless long days on horseback looking for Mary Claudine.

  But the weather finally rounded a corner in the first week of November, days of rain and then a wet, heavy snow. They should have welcomed it after the long drought, but the wet weather turned the steep slopes in the reserve muddy and slick. When Bud’s horse slid and rolled off the side of a ravine, it scared Martha and Henry both. He wasn’t hurt, but he might have been—might have been killed, which they didn’t speak of.

  They kept on a little longer, riding wet and cold through the shortening days, but one morning, a week after Bud’s fall, Martha left off saddling the horses and went back to the house. She had come inside to tell Henry something that was still unformed in her mind, something about how tired she was. Or something else, something about Mary Claudine. She found him standing in the front room staring out the window at the rain. He didn’t turn around, but he must have heard her, because he said, as if she had asked him about it, “I haven’t been down to pick up the mail in a while. I’m thinking I ought to go do that before the creek floods the road.”

  After a silence she said, “All the horses need their feet trimmed. I guess I’ll do that.”

  “You hate trimming hoofs.”

  “Well, it needs doing.”

  Henry nodded. When he turned to her, she saw nothing in his face but empty exhaustion. She looked over at Bud, at his narrow shoulders and back, the way he moved slowly, deliberately, making three sandwiches. He hadn’t yet turned eighteen.

  “Bud.” She waited until he quit what he was doing and looked at her, and then she said, “Arlo and his boys stacked some hay at the Germany Bench. You need to go up there and fence the stack yard so the elk don’t get all of it.”

  He understood what his mother meant: that they were quitting the search for his sister and were picking back up the work they’d been neglecting.

  Mary Claudine had always been prone to close calls and narrow escapes—she had come near drowning in the creek when she was little, and she’d been stung by a hundred hornets once when she poked a stick into their nest. He was used to feeling more annoyed than worried when she got herself into trouble. But in the past few weeks he had stopped going over in his mind all the many ways in which Mary Claudine could still be alive in the world. And he’d been waking up in the morning as tired as when he went to bed. He wanted to argue with his mother, to accuse her of losing courage. But no words came into his mouth.

  It was a couple of men hunting a mountain lion early in January who found Mary Claudine’s bones in a part of the reserve that had been searched back in September.

  They buried her in the Bailey Creek Cemetery, a place that had been laid out maybe fifty years earlier with the first rush of homesteaders. It was a quarter acre of leaning tombstones, cow-fenced from the sagebrush all around it. No one had ever bothered to plant trees there, or maybe they had, and none had survived. It was by now a place of desolation and despondency. There had been rain in recent days, but the ground was dry below the top couple of inches, and dirt striking the casket made a hard, rattling sound. D. L. Winslow, a homesteader and part-time preacher from down around Foy, read a verse from the Bible, the one about the shepherd in the valley of the shadow. None of the twenty or twenty-five people standing around the grave wept. This was 1937, and it seemed to all of them that the barren cemetery was a sign and symbol of their life and times.

  The neighbors had done what they could to finish the roundup, but nobody had finished the Frazers’ haying, and it had been a skimpy year for hay anyway. By February their cows were half starved, and a heavy snowstorm killed off a great many of them. That same month Elbert Echol, who had a weak heart, died suddenly, and in the spring his nephew called the loan on the ranch. Martha saw the heifers through the calving season, and right after the spring roundup Henry sold off what was left of the herd and paid what he could, but they had always lived on a thin edge and by now they didn’t have anything in reserve. The nephew was strapped himself and in need of his inheritance.

  In June, almost a year after Mary Claudine was lost, Martha and Henry Frazer gave up the ranch where their daughter had been born and died. They hired themselves out to Arlo Gantz’s cousin, a new widow who needed somebody to run her husband’s ranch until she could figure out what to do next.

  The widow’s place was on the Umpqua River in Klamath County, and if Bud had been willing to move over there with them he could have finished his last year of high school in Roseburg. Or he could have gone back to the boarding school at Hart. But he had already missed a year because of all that went on with his sister, and he didn’t have the patience for going back. Or, to tell it clean, he didn’t know how to fix his parents’ unhappiness, or they his, and he was looking for a reason to get out from under their roof. So when they moved out of the house at Echol Creek, Bud headed out on his own.

  There were some big ranches around Harney County, and he picked up work here and there that summer, mostly delivering groceries to the cow camps or putting in fence. A lot of the men who worked for the big spreads would buck horses on their off-days, just for the hell of it. They’d bring an unbroke horse into a pen and ear him down while they got the saddle on, then turn him loose after the rider climbed up. No gun to sound the end of the ride, you’d just ride until the horse quit or the men watching said get down. And every so often a bunch of them would pile into cars and find a real rodeo somewhere and spend their wages on entry fees. Bud Frazer tagged along.

  The horses he had grown up with had all been started by his mother, and they hardly ever bucked. When you’re a kid dreaming about riding at Madison Square Garden or Calgary, this can be somewhat of a disappointment. You look for horses that might buck, or you climb on a young steer, and when he goes wild-eyed and throws you off, you find another one and try again; after you manage to stay on one or two, you start thinking you’re some kind of bronc rider. By the time he was thirteen or so Bud had kept his seat on some unbroke ponies at Fourth of July picnics around Harney County, and he thought he was hell on horseback.
/>   But he was not quite eighteen when he left home and not done growing—he was five-nine and weighed about one forty soaking wet. When he started hanging around rodeos that summer, those big saddle broncs just shrugged him off like a burlap sack. He was too slight to bulldog steers, but he could work the gates and haze the calves and steers. The riders and stockmen paid him for that, and if there was a wild horse race he could sometimes stick on long enough to finish. And he could rope calves: once in a while, if he had enough money for the entrance fee and if the competition wasn’t too fierce, he’d come in third and pocket a few dollars, enough to pay for the beer he had started to drink.

  In the fall, when roundup got under way, Arlo Gantz’s old Hamley saddle was enough credential to get him a few weeks of steady cow work. But after roundup the ranches laid off all the itinerants, and shortly after that the rodeo season was done. He managed to pick up a little more work here or there, but by the middle of winter he was out of work and out of money, so he found a ride to where his folks were living—they were running a small ranch for an absentee owner in Jackson County by then—and spent a few weeks helping them feed cows. But as soon as the weather broke that spring, he took off again.

  He spent most of the summer of 1938 working as a cook’s flunky for a dude ranch in the Chiloquin Valley. And in September, two years after Mary Claudine was lost, he rode a Greyhound bus to Hollywood.

  SEVEN

  28

  WHEN I SAW LILY that first Sunday after Steve Deets got hurt, I didn’t say anything about what had happened, nothing about the screaming horse, nothing about Steve putting a gun to his head.

  This was the same day Lily told me she’d been laid off from Sunrise—told me her lie about the writers not having enough work, leaving out the part about Lampman and the Cossack. So we were both steering clear of some things that day.

  I could see she was down in the mouth about something, but I figured it was about money and being out of work, so I asked if she wanted to play cards instead of spending two bits on a movie. But we wound up going to the theater anyway because we both wanted to see Stagecoach.

  Lily had a high regard for John Ford, who had made a big impression on her with a show called The Informer; and I had a high regard for Yakima Canutt, who had doubled for John Wayne in the new movie. Before I came down to California I hadn’t ever heard of Canutt, but after I got into the stunt business I heard his name damn near every day, and people had been saying there were tricks in Ford’s movie that nobody but Yak could have pulled off.

  Whenever people talk about “serious” westerns, “superior” westerns, they point to Ford—they say it was Stagecoach and the rest of Ford’s big-budget cowboy pictures that opened up the cowboy story from what it was. But if you ask me, this mostly means, even now, better filmmaking, a bigger budget, more realistic violence—but the same old stories. It’s always been rare for any western, even the “superior” ones, to spend more than a minute or two counting the cost of what it means to be a hero.

  I didn’t know enough back then to make that point, I just knew there were certain things you could count on in cowboy pictures: chases, fights, shootouts, an Indian raid, a hero who can’t marry the girl or ride out of town until he does away with the bad guys and the savage Apaches. And Stagecoach covered them all. Well, it was a big-budget picture from United Artists, so I had come into it expecting more than just more of the same. I liked the picture, but I didn’t see much that was new except the location over there in Monument Valley and Yakima Canutt pulling off that crazy stunt—tumbling off the stagecoach right between the galloping horses and getting dragged back under the coach.

  When I told Lily I hadn’t seen anything new in Ford’s picture, we got into an argument about it. Or not an argument so much as Lily sounding off about what she thought I had missed—her lecture full of hundred-dollar words like “archetypes” and “ethos” and “redemption.”

  I can look back now and know that we were both trying to get some traction on what had happened that week, the things we weren’t talking about. And at that point Lily and I weren’t getting along anyway. I had been showing up late, looking hung over and bloodshot, not every Sunday but often enough for her to notice. Sometimes when I did finally show up at the Studio Club, Lily wasn’t waiting for me. The girl at the reception desk would hand over a note she’d left for me—Avalon, maybe, or Bagdad, just the one scribbled word, and I’d head for that theater, come in after the movie had started, and sit down next to her in the dark. She never acted like she was mad, she’d just pass me the sack of popcorn without taking her eyes off the screen, but afterward, walking back to her dormitory, she wouldn’t say much. She’d look in shop windows and act like she only halfway heard me when I said anything. Or she’d invite my opinion about Roosevelt’s politics, or Hitler, Gandhi, whatever was in the news that day, and then dispute every opinion I had.

  I had been spending Saturday nights with girls who mostly made me feel like a top hand, so on Sundays I was beginning to be tired of Lily knowing more than I did about everything. And Lily, by then, had begun to think I might be too narrow-gauged to bother with. It’s hard to know what else was going on, but one thing I know is that people are never as coherent and integrated as the characters in movies.

  I told her that if Ford wanted to break new ground he should have had somebody like Clark Gable or Errol Flynn—an A-list movie star—play the part of the Ringo Kid, not John Wayne, who was nothing but a second-rate cowboy actor who’d been in a bunch of Poverty Row shoot-’em-ups—I had wrangled horses for one of his movies while I was still working for Harold.

  She frowned and said, “I think he put Wayne in it because he’s making a comment on western stereotypes. I think it makes the Kid ironic.”

  Sometimes when she talked over my head I didn’t mind it—she could make it sound like she was just thinking out loud, not expecting any kind of answer from me. But this rubbed me the wrong way. I didn’t have any real ammunition to fight her with, but I said, “I think he put Wayne in it because he works cheap.”

  Lily gave me a look I was used to by now, her brows knitting together in an unbroken line. “That’s a stupid thing to say.” Definite and pointed.

  My face grew hot. We walked the rest of the way back to the Studio Club without speaking. At the steps of her building she looked over at me and said, “I better not spend money on a movie next week unless I find another job.”

  I could have said something about getting together to play cards. What I said was, “I was thinking I might go down to the horse races at Del Mar with some friends of True’s on Sunday.”

  She just nodded and went on inside.

  A couple of weeks later she called me at True’s. It had been a slow time for me—no work at all, too much dull and damaging time on my hands. And the funeral for Steve Deets that I’d skipped out on. I thought Lily had called to ask me to a movie, and I know I would have said yes. But she had called to tell me she’d landed work as a staff writer at RKO. I could hear in her voice how happy she was, needing to tell somebody who would know this was big news, a big step up.

  She said Bob Hewitt’s uncle had put in a call to a friend at RKO, and a copy of Death Rides the Sky had made it up the chain in the Story Department over there. Phil Auerbach, the story editor, had liked the script, she said, but he thought it was “a little too soft around the edges.” And he had put her to work with a writer named Dorothy Crowther, who was known around the studio as “Doc” for her hard-boiled style.

  “Remember that movie Rendezvous? We saw it a couple of months ago. Dorothy wrote it. She’s good.”

  I said, “That’s pretty great. I guess you’re major league now. Your story’s not too soft, though. Don’t let her change it too much.”

  “Well, thanks. But she’s good, I can learn from her.”

  “Just don’t let her change your story too much.”

  “No. I won’t.”

  We were both being too polite, but I guess
neither of us could figure out how to get out of it. We didn’t talk long. She said she was working on a new screenplay, going without sleep on the weekends, writing under a blanket at night with a flashlight. This didn’t leave much of an opening for us to get back to seeing movies on Sunday, so I didn’t bring it up. Those were the restless twitches of my mind at the time.

  I want to say just a little more about Dorothy Crowther. I left Hollywood a few weeks later, so most of what I know about her I heard from Lily in the years afterward, but I can tell you she was a striking brunette who looked like she belonged in a magazine advertisement for mink coats. But in some ways she made me think of my sister—the kind of woman Mary Claudine might have been if she’d lived. Dorothy had grown up a tomboy, running up and down the beach, climbing trees, battling with her brothers. She had read everything when she was a kid, but she especially devoured Edgar Rice Burroughs and Jack London, had loved Robinson Crusoe and Smoky the Cowhorse. When she started writing at age twelve or thirteen, she wrote fantastic science-fiction tales, crime fiction, adventure stories. Her heroines were always cynical and wisecracking, and her stories were shot through with danger and villainy. Conventional heroines and domestic stories bored her.

  At RKO, Dorothy had been the only woman in a field of men. She wanted to be thought of as one of the boys, but she was a beauty, so she had to work pretty hard at it: she learned to swear a blue streak, play craps, and sneer at other women, and she’d developed an archive of raunchy jokes. She and Lily figured Phil Auerbach had put them together because they were the only two women in the writers’ building, and Doc worried that being thrown together with another woman might cause the men writers to go back to thinking of her as a “girl.” But they weren’t pushed out of the men’s clubhouse for long—Lily was used to being taken for one of the boys; she’d never had to work at it.