Falling From Horses (14 page)

There was ease and kindness in our family, and tenderness that we all understood was love, but I don't think I ever heard my parents tell each other “I love you,” and I know they never said it to their kids, at least not in our growing-up years. In our family, and all of the families I knew, you could pet and kiss puppies and kittens, foals and young children, but a child who was eight or nine was too old for that kind of open affection. When I watched Jake with his children, I remembered being ten, a big kid finished with cuddling, watching Mary Claudine, who was not quite five, snuggling into Dad's lap. I remembered a longing I couldn't then have articulated.

Along about 1946, a year or so after I mustered out of the army, I got in touch with Harold to thank him for some things that had gone unsaid while I was working for him, and he told me Jake had died on Okinawa. He'd been dead a couple of years by that time, but I wrote to Leah anyway, a few clumsy lines about being sorry and not knowing what to say. I was living up at Vanport at the time, going to school on the GI Bill, and by then I had started to get serious about drawing. I sent her a little sketch I had made, of Jake holding his two children in his lap and Leah sitting next to him. It wasn't a good likeness—I only had memory to go on—but Leah wrote right back.

She said good things about my drawing and nothing at all about the war or Jake's death, but I guess my letter must have opened up a window. Maybe she didn't have anybody else to talk to about Jake, because she wrote quite a bit about those years when Jake had worked for Harold. She told me he would leave the apartment at half past three every morning while she slept, and she always tried to wait up for him in the evening if the children hadn't tired her out too much. When he came in, she heated up his supper and they sat at the kitchen table while she told him quietly whatever funny thing Noah or Mimi had said or what they'd been doing that day, and she'd ask about his work; then they'd pull down the wall bed in the living room to sleep—they let the children have the one bedroom so Jake wouldn't wake them when he had to rise so early.

He often saw his children only one day a week because Harold had us working the other six. I didn't know back then that Jews went to synagogue on Saturday, but Harold had us working most Saturdays so if Jake was a religious Jew, he couldn't have been much of one during the years he worked at Diamond. Leah said they both knew he was lucky to have steady work—a lot of men were out of work, there were camps of jobless men in the city parks, and families living in tents. And Harold always treated Jake with respect. But in Leah's own childhood, her father had been a ghost in the house, going out in the early morning and coming in late at night—he had worked a grocer's long hours—and Leah didn't want that to be her children's memory.

“Jake didn't want it either. On Friday nights he tried to get away from Diamond early enough for the Shabbat blessing, and I tried to keep the children up late to wait for him; but lots of times he had to lay his hand on our sleeping children's heads and whisper the prayer in the darkness of their bedroom.”

She wrote that Jake's clothes always smelled of horses, and when he undressed for bed he set his folded pants and shirt on a wooden chair in the corner of the room: he didn't want his clothes stinking up the closet.

In my letter I had brought up the time we all went to their apartment for dinner. She remembered it. “I made pot roast, and sent you all home with chocolate cake wrapped up in waxed paper.” None of us had known it, but she had made the cake for Jake's birthday. He was thirty that day, and he had told Leah that he wanted to have a little celebration, a dinner party. She didn't say why he wanted to invite the men he worked with. She didn't say if he had any better friends than the three of us.

And she wrote about horses, the Belgians Jake had grown up with in Cleveland, how they had big feathery legs, and in the winter when they got sweaty, each one of the hairs would frost, and they'd get icicles hanging down around their mouths and noses. “Jake always said they were beautiful when they were frosty all over. It never got cold enough for that in California, and I think he missed it.” His father kept the horses in a barn just off the south-side rail yards, but there was a drayage company over on Pike Avenue that kept horses in a bare field, and when Jake was a boy he had wondered what those horses thought about when they were left outside in the middle of a winter night or standing in deep mud in the spring when the ground thawed out. He always wondered if Hollywood horses were grateful for the mild weather. When he saw a horse standing in a pasture alone, looking off toward the horizon, maybe looking toward the sun setting behind some trees, he wondered what they were thinking, whether they felt lonely. “Jake had a love for horses,” Leah wrote in her letter. “I guess you must have known that.”

THAT FIRST MORNING
, when we had all the horses loaded, we threw the saddles and the rest of the tack and gear in the back of the two trucks, and then Harold had me ride along with him in the Dodge while he sent Hugh and Jake in another direction with the bigger load. The dog jumped in the bed of the truck with the saddles. It wasn't quite daylight but already growing hot, and we rode with the windows rolled down. Harold didn't talk much except to say we were going up to Bronson Canyon, where one of the Poverty Row studios was setting up to shoot in the park, and he planned to leave me there with the two horses while he went back to Diamond to pick up a third one. I didn't know Harold at all yet, but he seemed to be brooding about something, and shortly I started brooding too, thinking maybe he'd seen the whole business with Guy and was feeling he'd made a mistake taking me on. I didn't know where the hell I'd be sleeping that night if Harold decided to boot me out of the house.

I guess the TV shows still use Bronson sometimes when they want to give an impression of rugged wilderness without bothering to leave town—I spot it every so often on a show I'm watching. There are a couple of caves up there, left over from when the place was a quarry, plus a small, bowl-shaped piece of ground with a lot of rocks, a few trees, a small stream, and some quarry rubble. It's tucked into the west side of Griffith Park, and you can see the big
HOLLYWOOD
sign on Mount Lee if you stand at certain places in the bowl—they always have to angle the camera to keep that out of the shot. It was a favorite location for the cheap studios making westerns back then, when the sign still said
HOLLYWOODLAND
. Diamond hauled horses up there a couple times a week.

We unloaded the horses and took them to some skimpy willow shade, and Harold said darkly, “Try to keep out of trouble until I get back.” I thought this was a jab at me, but then he gestured toward an actor in fancy boots and a pale blue pearl-button shirt, sitting in his car with the door propped open. “That's Dick Hayes. If he's drunk, he'll be mean. Keep the horses clear of him if you can, but don't lose me any business. If push comes to shove, you let him shove. To a point, anyway.”

I imagine this was what he'd been brooding on in the car. The horses had been hired out to Merit Pictures, and Dick Hayes was Merit's big star. Harold had had dealings with Dick, so he had the view that leaving me alone with him was the same as throwing me into the deep end of the pool. Hayes was a genuine horseman, you could say that for him, but when he got into an argument with the producer or the director about how a picture should be made, he'd show up drunk and take out his frustrations on the horses. Well, I didn't know any of this yet, but I'd watched Dick Hayes lift a flask to his mouth half a dozen times in the few minutes we'd been there, and now Harold was the model of an unhappy man about to see trouble, so I was able to figure out more or less what was up.

After Harold drove off, I got busy brushing dust and dried manure off the horse Harold called Bingo and picking rocks and dirt clods out of his feet. I was saddling him when Dick Hayes wandered over. The horses seemed to know what was up too. They had had their own dealings with him, or they could smell the booze and the anger coming off him like fog. Both of them shifted their weight and twitched their hides nervously, and Bingo bumped my sore thigh as I was reaching under him to grab the cinch. I swore and shoved him over hard with my shoulder, which maybe had something to do with Guy, or was in some obscure way a show for Dick Hayes.

“That's the same goddamn plow horse you brought me last time,” he said. “Goddamn plug. You get me? Every goddamn picture I've made for Ferret,” and he paused over the sarcasm so I wouldn't miss it, “they rent me this shit-ugly crowbait.”

I said, “I don't know anything about it, Mr. Hayes, I just got hired today,” and went on saddling the horse.

“You mean to say you don't know plug-ugly when you see it?” He was standing at Bingo's head, and he grabbed hold of the horse's jaw and shoved the muzzle up until it was pointing at the sky. “That's ugly right there, see? Don't tell me you don't know ugly.” The horse snorted and tried to shake his head loose, and I could see Hayes's thumb whiten as he held on and dug into the hinge of the jawbone.

I said, “You could be right. I guess I've seen prettier.” I tightened up the cinch and dropped the stirrup and stepped over to the other horse, the one called Blue, even though he was as red as the king of hearts. Hayes let go of Bingo's jaw then and grabbed hold of the halter up close to the throat. The horse rocked his head up and down, rattling the metal D-ring.

“I'm asking for a particular reason. Why I always get the ugly horse.” He wasn't looking at me when he said this. He yanked on the halter, forcing the horse's head toward him so he could look Bingo in the eye, like he was daring him with a scowl. Hayes's face was smeared thick with makeup, his cheeks rouged. Up close, I could see the bristles of his beard through the pancake batter.

“I don't know. I'm just the hired help. I'm supposed to get these horses cleaned up and saddled, that's all I know.” I was brushing out Blue, who kept shifting his feet and shaking his head up and down. I took hold of his ear and twisted it, leaned in, and said, “Quit.”

“I get an ugly horse because they're making ugly pictures, and they don't give an ugly goddamn,” Hayes said, breathing the words directly into Bingo's flaring nostrils. The horse's eyes showed white all around, and I could hear a low groaning vibrato coming from him, the kind of sound a cat makes when he's deciding whether to put up with you or take a bite out of your hand.

I didn't say anything. I didn't want Harold to fire me on the first day, and I figured from what he had said—
you let him shove—
that he didn't want me to get between Hayes and the horse unless I thought the horse was about to stomp him. I wasn't a bit sure what I ought to do in that case, but while I was grooming Blue I started thinking that if I had to, I could step back and land a boot or a knee in the damn horse's belly.

Hayes cuffed Bingo on the muzzle lightly, as if with affection, and the horse snorted and pulled back as far as the rope would let him. But then Hayes let go of the halter and made a sound that I thought might have been a word, stepped back, and dug his flask out of his back pocket and drank from it. “Probably you'd like me to leave you and these horses alone, mind my manners, is that it?”

“It doesn't matter to me. But if a horse stomped you, I'd lose my job. And I just got hired.”

He laughed. “That horse hasn't got the balls to try to stomp me. He hasn't got any balls, period.” He leaned against one of the trees and watched me, taking a long pull every so often from his flask. He wore black trousers with red piping along the pockets. His shirt had red piping on the pockets and along the edge outlining the pearl buttons. There must have been a hat and a fancy gun belt to finish the look, but he wasn't wearing them.

“What's the name of the picture you're making?” I asked, thinking if I started him talking it might take his attention off the horse.

“Hell, I don't know. They don't give this crap a name until it's ready to ship. They give it a number, and then they just pull something off a list, Burning Cheyenne Hills or Filthy Flaming Arrows or some other shit, when they're slapping a label on the cans. Don't matter if there's no arrows in it or no Cheyennes. They give it a name without even looking at it.”

Lily Shaw had shown me a list she kept in her notebook, titles for scripts she hadn't yet written. At the time it hadn't occurred to me to wonder if this was a good idea, but Dick Hayes sure made it sound stupid. And I was pretty certain Flaming Arrows had been on Lily's list.

“The boss went back for another horse,” I said after a while. “A buckskin that looks pretty flashy. You should make sure they put you on that one.”

He was drunk enough now to turn sentimental. He leaned forward and made a kissing sound and touched his lips lightly to the horse's muzzle. “Naw,” he said, leaning back again. “This here's the horse I always ride. Ain't that right, Bingo?” He rubbed the horse on his blaze, and Bingo, like a goddamn lap dog, stretched his neck toward him, everything forgiven.

AT FIRST I JUST RODE IN ONE OF THE TRUCKS
with Harold or Jake or Hugh, learning the ropes, but sometimes, for short trips that didn't go through downtown, Harold took the shotgun seat and had me drive the Dodge with the two-horse trailer; he wanted me to start getting used to the traffic and how the city was laid out. We worked the same locations over and over, and before long I was acquainted with most of them. I learned where to find water and where to string up a picket line out of the way of the cameras. In hot weather I knew to loosen the girth to let air under the saddle, so a horse wouldn't get too sweaty between shots; and I learned to tell, from the way people stood around idly in small groups and then suddenly got animated, that they were about to want the horses brought up for the scene. As soon as Harold was sure I could get them in front of the cameras on time and get them to the right spot, he started dropping me off with a couple of horses and leaving me all day, and shortly after that he started sending me out in the Dodge on my own if he didn't need the truck to make another run.