Falling From Horses

by Molly Gloss

  By the time I turned back around, he had pulled his tools and a patch kit out of the truck and was bracing the back wheels with a couple of big rocks. “If there’s one nail on the road, this truck will find it,” he said, but I knew he was relieved—we both were—that it wasn’t another blowout.

  While I crutched back and forth along the edge of the road, he jacked up the truck, pulled off the wheel, and began prying the tire away from the rim with the spoon end of the tire iron. He had propped the flashlight against a rock while he was doing the takeoff, but once he had the tube out of the limp rubber casing he sat on the ground and held the flashlight in one hand while he fumbled the tube around in his other hand to find the puncture.

  “I can hold the light,” I said. It was pretty much all I could do to help.

  He handed up the light, and I shined it down onto his hands as he turned the tube around slowly. When he found the hole, he squirted some cleaning fluid on a rag, wiped a clean spot on the tube, roughed it up with emery paper, and cleaned it again. He cut a piece of patch with his pocket knife, and after he cemented the patch to the tube he sat there holding it stretched down tight against his knee until it dried. When he stuffed the tube back into the tire, he was careful to line it up so the stem fit squarely through the grommet hole in the tire—if it pinched or twisted, we’d be broke down by the side of the road again before very many miles.

  With the tire back on the wheel and the wheel back on the truck, he pulled out the hand pump. He had been quick up to now—he’d had plenty of experience—but pumping air into a flat tire could take twenty minutes of hard work. If I hadn’t been on crutches, we would have spelled each other. He did thirty or forty quick pumps in a row, then straightened up and shook out his arms before going at it again. After a while the spells of pumping got shorter and slower and the breaks came closer together. I was ashamed to stand there watching him, no help at all—he didn’t even need the flashlight for this part of it. In truth, I was worn out from just dragging my legs a dozen steps each way along the road. I couldn’t even sit back down in the truck without his help, that’s how useless I was, so I had to lean my weight against the truck sideboards and wait for him to finish.

  When he thought the tire had enough air, he cranked down the jack most of the way but waited a minute to make sure the tire would hold before letting it down completely. Then he stood up and bent over to loosen a kink in his lower back. When he straightened again, he said, “I hope that’s the last one until we’re home.”

  “How far, do you think?”

  “Oh, another couple of hours.” He looked in my direction. “How you doing?”

  Just watching him stretch out his sore back had been enough to give me a reflexive spasm of pain. “I’m all right.”

  “It’s not your leg that’s broke, is that right? It’s your hip? I was expecting to see you in heavy plaster.”

  “I don’t know if they’d call it my hip. They said I cracked my pelvis in three places. There’s nothing they do for it except tell you to keep your weight off as much as you can and wait for the bones to join back up.”

  “Well, that don’t sound comfortable.”

  “No. Not as much as you’d think.”

  He might have smiled. I could see a movement somewhere around his mouth, his chin. “I s’pose not.”

  He helped me sit back down in the truck, but then he walked to the front and lifted the hood, unscrewed the radiator cap, and shined the flashlight down the neck to see if we were running low on water; then he ran the dipstick in and out to make sure we had enough oil. My mother was the mechanic, and these were about the only two things—plus fixing a flat tire—my dad knew how to do on his own. I had heard the brakes squeal against metal when we stopped, but that was something that could wait for my mother to work on.

  While he was up front checking fluids, I swallowed a handful of aspirin. Moving around was always painful, but so was sitting until I got kind of settled. When he fired up the engine and we started off again, I looked ahead at the road passing under the dim headlights, and I tried to keep from breathing louder than normal.

  “Do you think you’ll stay home now, Bud?”

  These words came after a long period of silence. I knew what he meant: When your bones mend, are you leaving again? But there didn’t seem to be any judgment in the question, or expectation.

  I didn’t have an answer, and in the darkness it was easy to just float on a raft of silence. The stars were so bright they seemed almost close enough to touch, and the Milky Way cut a broad bright swath through the blackness. I thought about looking for Scorpius, but it was behind us and would have been half below the horizon anyway.

  A long while went by before he said anything else, and it wasn’t anything I expected. “Are they hard on the horses, down there in Hollywood? It always looks to me like they’re being rode too hard, and then jumped off cliffs and whatnot.”

  When I was a kid I never paid much attention to the way horses were used in the movies, which baffles me now when I think about it. I had grown up in a life with horses, in a family where horses were treated with particular consideration. I had seen them badly used a few times by neighbors and ignorant cowhands, and I’d seen rodeo stock sometimes poorly handled, but for the most part ranchers treated horses as necessary and useful tools. They might be broken out pretty roughly, but after that they were usually treated well. I hardly ever saw outright cruelty. In the movies, though, you couldn’t watch a cowboy picture without seeing horses used in terrible ways, whipped and spurred by stage drivers, by posses and outlaw bands, ridden hard up and down steep ravines, through flooding rivers, into deserts or snowstorms without water or food or shelter. They were always being jumped through plate-glass windows or trapped in burning barns, caught in the middle of gunfights, and shot at, wounded, killed, by just about everybody in the picture—good guys, bad guys, cavalry, Indians. Ridden hell-for-leather until they staggered and dropped dead on the ground. I don’t know why that didn’t strike me as wrong at the time—why I didn’t pay more attention to the mistreatment of horses in the movies I saw as a kid. When I was young, the thing I remember being fixed on was a kind of frustration that the horses I rode could never get up as much hellbent speed as the horses I saw in the movies. When I went to Hollywood, one of my first disappointments was learning how they undercranked the camera to make the action race along.

  “Yeah, they’re hell on horses,” I said to my dad.

  I wasn’t sure what had brought this matter into his mind, but now it was in mine. I told him, “When I first got down there, I worked for a fellow who treated his animals right. And the star horses, they get pretty good treatment. But I saw a lot of horses run into the ground.”

  After a silence he said, “Well, that’s what I thought.”

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to get into the rest of it, but sometimes, once you’re started, you just go on and say what’s in your head. “I rode in a movie a while ago where they tripped a lot of horses in this one big scene. They had a hundred of us galloping flat out, and when the horses hit the tripwires, they had their legs yanked out from under them. Some that weren’t tripped got all tangled up with the ones that were. A bunch of horses died. Died on the spot or wound up with legs broke, broken backs, they had to be put down. It was—” I was going to say a fucked-up mess, but that felt suddenly like I’d be bringing Cab O’Brien home with me, so I worked my mouth and finally said, “It was a hell of a thing.”

  My dad glanced over at me. “That wasn’t when you got hurt?”

  “No, I was on a horse that time that kept his feet. But they hauled some riders to the hospital. A guy I knew got pretty busted up. If I’d had any sense I would’ve quit the movie business right then. I guess if I’d quit, I wouldn’t be sitting here.”

  I heard how this must have sounded to him: that I wouldn’t have come back home except I was hurt. I hadn’t meant to say it like that, but there didn’t seem to be a way to unsay it, and anyway
it might have been true.

  For quite a while he didn’t speak, and then he said, “I didn’t tell your mother you were hurt. I told her you didn’t have the money for a bus ticket and you were asking for a ride home. I didn’t want her worrying.”

  This shamed me in some way I couldn’t have articulated. I hadn’t really expected both of them to make the trip to pick me up, but at the Red Bluff ranch, when I had realized it was just my dad—that my mother hadn’t come—I had given in to a moment of self-pity.

  I said, “I told Lily not to call you,” as if I was blaming her for making the call or him for answering.

  He looked over at me. The night had begun to thin, and his features were a dim map, a map I could almost read. “You were hurt bad, and when you got kicked out of the hospital you needed a place to heal up, that’s what the girl said. But you’d rather sleep on the damn sidewalk than come back home, is that it?”

  I hadn’t expected him to snap back at me, and anyway I wouldn’t have been able to put into words what I was feeling. What came out was a muttered, stupid complaint. “We don’t have a damn home anymore.”

  He flung his answer back, quick and angry as a slap. “You blame me for losing the ranch, go ahead, but Echol Creek is just a goddamn place, that’s all it is, and your home is with your mother.” He gripped the wheel with both hands and looked straight up the road.

  My dad had a temper, and when I was a little kid it used to scare me when he flared up, even when his anger wasn’t aimed at me. A lot of men in those days thought they weren’t doing their job right unless their children were afraid of them, and some of them took it farther than that. I had gone to school with a boy—was his name Bradley?—whose father beat him halfway to death once. He missed three or four months of school, recovering from losing the sight in his left eye. And I’d had plenty of teachers who believed a wooden stick across the back of your hand or your buttocks was the right way to get your attention. Well, that wasn’t my dad. He was patient with his animals and his wife, and mostly patient with his kids. His anger was generally aimed at inanimate objects—a cinch breaking at the wrong time, a frozen pump, a hammer if it happened to land on his thumb. He had hit me a few times—his bare hand, mostly, or a doubled-up belt across my backside—not usually for disobedience but for some idiotic stunt that could have landed me or somebody else in the hospital. All my life, whenever I remember one of those times, heat climbs up into my neck and my face—ashamed of myself, mostly, and ashamed on my father’s behalf.

  I had never once thought to blame him for losing the Echol place—I was astonished he would think so. I turned and looked out the side window. I wasn’t anywhere near crying—I wasn’t a kid anymore—but I had to work to get any breath past the hard mass in the center of my chest. If he heard me trying to breathe, he didn’t let on.

  We rode a long while in silence. In the gradual light I could just make out the dark, straight shapes of trees alongside the road, big old ponderosa pines like the ones I had grown up with. The road had been climbing for miles. We were in the Siskiyous, I figured.

  When enough time had gone by, he said, “Do you need to stand up and move around again? It’ll be another forty minutes, I guess.”

  I had begun to ache from sitting still, but I said, “No. I’m okay.” Then I said, “I’d just as soon get home,” which was as close as I could come to saying what was stuck in my throat.

  After another while passed, he said, “Who’s that girl Lily, the one that called me? Is she an actress?”

  “No. She’s a writer.” I wasn’t sure what else to say about her. “We met on the bus going down.”

  He nodded as if he already knew it. “She said you’ve been going to the pictures on your day off.” Then he looked over at me. “Is she somebody we ought to start getting used to?”

  At the time I didn’t know whether I’d ever see Lily again or keep in touch with her, but I knew this wasn’t what my dad was asking. “No, I guess not. We’re just friends.”

  “Well, that’s how it starts sometimes.”

  My dad had a romantic streak in him—both my parents ran that way—and I realized I shouldn’t have left any guesswork in my answer. “Lily doesn’t plan to get married. She just wants to write for the movies.”

  He smiled slightly. “Well, your mother just wanted to punch cows and break horses.” I understood what he meant: that my mother hadn’t planned to marry either.

  He hadn’t really been saying my situation was like his, but I wanted to be clear, so I said, “Lily’s pretty set on making pictures and being famous. And I’m all done with Hollywood, so I don’t imagine I’ll see her again.”

  He kept his attention on the road. The sun wasn’t up yet, but the sky was pearling and we could see a long way ahead now, the pavement curving through shadowless grassy hills, smudged here and there with dark clumps of pine. “So you’re not going back down there?”

  “No.” I didn’t feel like saying any more about it, and he didn’t ask.

  After a while he turned the truck off the highway onto some branching back roads and finally drove under a ranch gate painted white with carved-out letters on the overhead arch: Rocker Z. The ranch lane was dirt but graded smooth, and the first quarter mile was neatly lined with rock fence on both sides. The lane wound back into the hills a couple of miles. Every time we came to a livestock fence, my dad had to climb out and open the gate, get in the truck again and drive us through, then get back out to close the gate, while I sat there like a worthless lump.

  We were heading more or less east, and when the leading edge of sun broke over the low range of hills, the sudden slash of light dazzled us both, red like the blood of battle, outlining the dark crowns. My dad slowed the rig and leaned forward, squinting to make out the curves in the road. Long black shapes stretched out behind every rock and blade of grass. Cattle and horses on the hillsides were flattened silhouettes, their bodies all of a piece with their elongated, distorted shadows.

  The Rocker Z home place lay in a treeless bowl, a sprawling white house in need of a coat of paint, a windmill, a tall paintless barn, and a couple of corrals leaning slightly on rotting timber uprights. It wasn’t much like Echol Creek, but there is a certain sameness to such places. I felt a sudden tight ache under my sternum.

  My mother must have heard the truck from a long way off, or maybe the dog had barked a warning. She was already on the porch when we came over the last rise, though I didn’t realize it at first: she was nothing but a dark shape in the darker space under the porch roof. Then she stepped into the sunlight at the edge of the porch, and her shadow went out long across the yard. She was gripping the upright porch rail with one hand, her other hand holding Mary Claudine’s dog by the loose skin of his neck, and then she sat down on the porch steps as if her legs had given way, and she pulled the dog against her chest. He squirmed and squirmed to get loose, and finally, when we came to a stop in the yard, she let him go, and he came across to meet us, barking and waving his flag of a tail.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  FOR TAKING THE TIME TO READ THIS BOOK in early drafts, and for their smart and useful criticism, I am very much indebted to Tony Wolk, John and Kim Transier, Ursula and Charles Le Guin, Barbara J. Scot, and especially Bette Lynch Husted, who read the entire book more than once, brought me out of blue funks more than once, caught many stupid mistakes, and just generally cheered me on to the finish line.

  For insight into movie stunt riding and wrangling I’m grateful to Martha Cantarini, Liz Dixon, and Thomas Bentley. They are all too young to have ridden in the films of the 1930s, but their knowledge of the movie business and the life of a stunt rider was nevertheless invaluable; Martha Cantarini’s memoir Fall Girl was a particularly useful resource.

  For details of how it was in the 1930s, I relied a good deal on Diana Serra Cary’s memoir The Hollywood Posse: The Story of a Gallant Band of Horsemen Who Made Movie History, and Yakima Canutt’s autobiography, Stunt Man. For anyone interested i
n behind-the-scenes photographs and stories of the 1940s B westerns and 1950s television westerns, I recommend And . . . Action! by Stephen Lodge.

  Thanks to Gretchen Corbett for her helpful knowledge of moviemaking and the language of moviemaking; and to John Zagelow for his knowledge of old trucks and tube tires.

  I’m grateful as always to my marvelous, and marvelously patient, editor, Susan Canavan, and everyone at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for their support of this novel.

  Over the five years I worked on this book, Wendy Weil was the particular reader I kept always in my mind. She died before reading it. This book is, above all, for her.

  About the Author

  MOLLY GLOSS is the best-selling author of The Hearts of Horses, The Jump-Off Creek, winner of both the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award and the Oregon Book Award, The Dazzle of Day, winner of the PEN Center West fiction prize, and Wild Life, winner of the James Tiptree Jr. Award. She lives in Portland, Oregon.