Falling From Horses (16 page)

A couple of weeks after that phone call, when Harold brought in the mail there was a letter from my mother. I hadn't given her an address, but she had sent it to Diamond Barns, Hollywood, California, and that was all it took.

I thought her letter might have something in it, something that she hadn't been able to say on the phone, but what she wrote was just a few short lines about everyday chores, and bits of news about animals and people I had never met—a bay colt she had finished and sold to a Mr. Tallman, who ran the hardware store in Bly, “and now I am starting the paint which is half Arab and belongs to Don Pollock's daughter, they are people living west of here. Your Dad is reseeding the Cougar Bench hay field that was burned out last summer.”

When I was boarding at the high school in Hart, my mother wrote to me once a week, but this was the first time since we'd all left Echol Creek that she had known how to get a letter to me. Her large, looping, childish hand kicked up some familiar feelings. I kept the letter and reread it a few times.

Another letter came from her a couple of weeks later, and regularly after that. Every now and then my dad wrote something as well, folded into the envelope with hers. He had had a high school education, and his handwriting was schoolboy neat. “Take care, son,” he wrote at the bottom of every letter. Neither of them said much in their letters except the humdrum happenings of their life.

I didn't write back. I thought I would call them on the phone every couple of weeks, but sometimes it was six or seven weeks before I got around to it. The calls were short—none of us liked to use the phone much, and there wasn't a whole lot I could think to say.

A package came for me right before Christmas, a purple polka-dot neckerchief like one Arlo Gantz always wore. I went out and bought a souvenir plate painted with a likeness of Grauman's Chinese Theatre and mailed it off to them.

On Christmas Day I went into town and found a tavern that was open, drank a few beers, then went to a phone booth and rang up my folks. It was late. Probably they were already in bed, or I had dialed the wrong number. Anyway, nobody answered. While I was standing there listening to the rings, I leaned my head back and studied the sky. The stars over the Echol ranch were always at their brightest in December, the cold winter nights bringing them out crystal clear, but here a brown haze—nobody called it smog in those days—had been hanging over the Hollywood Hills and the whole Los Angeles valley for the past few weeks, and I couldn't see a damn thing above me except the blurred disk of the moon.

A WEEK OR SO INTO THE NEW YEAR
, I ran into Lily Shaw. I had been down around Gower Gulch more than a few times doing movie work, and the Studio Club where Lily lived was just a block from there, but we bumped into each other not at Gower but over on Sunset.

Harold had us putting up a perimeter fence around his property, tackling the work a little at a time whenever we had half a day, and he had sent me down to the hardware store to pick up a couple of buckets of creosote for the posts. While I was hoisting them into the back of the Dodge, I heard a voice call out “Bud!” I had parked the truck right in front of the building where Lily worked, just up the block from the hardware store. She had seen me from her window on the second floor and had come down the stairs to say hello.

In recent weeks the Greyhound trip had begun to seem as if it had happened a long time ago—I had been thinking Lily Shaw was someone I'd never see again. So when I turned around and saw her standing there, I was caught off-guard, surprised by how glad I was to see her. As if I'd unexpectedly bumped into somebody from back home, someone in my family or a friend I'd known all my life, down here a thousand miles from where I'd left them—that was the feeling I had. It seems to me now that I had set out on purpose to put myself as far as I could from everybody I knew, so this was not what I expected to feel.

It was raining that day, which is why we weren't hauling horses to a movie set. I stood with Lily at the front door of her building, and we talked for a few minutes with the rain rattling on the metal awning over our heads. She had thrown on a cape coat before coming down the stairs. Her hair was combed, the bangs pinned back with a barrette shaped like a bow, and the blue dress under her unbuttoned coat looked as if it had kept a morning appointment with an iron. She was tidy, in other words, compared to how she'd looked when we were on the bus. She had ink on two fingers, though, and a smudge of it on her lower lip, and I almost wet my thumb and reached out to rub it off, as if we knew each other that well.

I figured Lily would ask me if I'd met Buck Jones yet and what movies I'd been in, so right away I told her I wasn't chasing any stagecoaches, that I was just working as a wrangler. But I must have been coloring it as if wrangling was what I had come down to Hollywood intending to do. She didn't let me off the hook. She wrinkled up her brow in disappointment and said, “You'll probably be riding in the movies before long, Bud. You just have to keep trying.”

She wasn't doing what she'd hoped, either. Her job, she said, was reading through the screenplays and treatments that writers sent to the agency, then typing up a little summary of each story. After her boss looked those over, she typed up the letters that he dictated back to the writers. A lot of the stories were terrible, in her opinion, but it turned out the boss didn't want her opinion, and he didn't want her to do any editing, he just wanted the plot boiled down to a few words. She'd written a summary of her own story,
Death Rides the Sky
, and slipped it in with the others, but he'd never said a word to her about it.

She was a bulldog even then, and she had come down to Hollywood with an unshakable ambition to be a screenwriter. It was clear to her that being a secretary at a talent agency wouldn't ever lead to a writing job, so she was already looking around for something else, some work at one of the studios. She didn't want to quit the agent, though, until she had another job, which was more or less the same situation I was in, holding on to the work at Diamond Barns while I kept my eye out for a riding job, hoping to bump into a second-unit ramrod every time I came on a new movie set.

When I told her about Diamond Barns, that it was up in Griffith Park, she said, “Do you know there's a telescope at the top of the park? Have you been up there yet? You could look for the star clusters in Scorpius.” She had remembered every bit of what I told her that night after the bus wreck.

I said, “I was up there Sunday, but I couldn't make out much of anything. The sky was too dirty. They said the haze is from dust, but I don't know if that's right.”

She said, “Well, it's been a dry year.”

I came from a dry part of the world myself, but the only time the sky turned brown in Harney County was in late summer, when wind picked up the topsoil. I didn't know enough to argue about it though.

Lily told me about the Studio Club—that the room she shared with the other girls was unremarkable, but the public rooms were a great deal fancier than she'd expected. When she had walked through the doors the first time and seen that grand staircase descending from lofty regions into the big entrance hall, she had thought she was in the wrong place.

The club took up a whole block just off Santa Monica Boulevard and west of Gower, and as she was describing it I realized which place she was talking about. I'd seen it when I was walking around Gower Gulch that first day looking for work: a big Mediterranean-style building with three archways at the front under a painted frieze, full-length arched windows, and balconies with iron balustrades and decorative brackets. I had thought it was a mansion where some movie mogul lived, or maybe the headquarters of a big motion picture studio—Paramount Pictures, maybe, or 20th Century Fox. I hadn't figured it to be a girls' hostel.

“It's even prettier inside,” she said. “I could show it to you if you want. Not all of it, but at least the fancy front rooms. They let boys come into the front rooms when they visit.” She said this as if she didn't care about it one way or the other, which in some other girl might have been romantic cunning. But I hadn't figured her for cunning, and I was pretty sure she didn't have any romantic interest in me.

I shrugged as if it didn't matter to me either. “I could come over there on Sunday if you want.”

On Sundays, our only day off work, Harold took care of the animals himself, then went out to Glendale to call on a woman he was seeing. Hugh took the bus to visit his brother over in the commercial district, and Jake spent the time with his wife and children. I had tried once staying put at Diamond, but when there's too much silence it's easy to wind up in a dark place; so usually I rode the streetcar into the city and killed the day aimlessly, walking around looking in shop windows, eating in a diner, going into a pool hall to drink a few beers. The rest of the week I could keep from thinking too much: even when I wasn't handling the horses or reading one of Hugh's trashy books, there was always some sort of hubbub going on, and it kept me out of my own head. But Sundays there was too much empty time and I had nobody to spend it with.

“Good,” Lily said, without any particular emphasis. “Come around two o'clock. Just come into the lobby and I'll meet you there.”

Over the years she and I rarely talked about the beginning of our friendship. Only that it was Hollywood where our lives had intersected, and if we had met at any other time and place we might not have become friends.

But once she said something else about those early days. This was after her dad had died and I had taken the train up to Seattle for his funeral. We met in a hotel bar and spent an hour or so sipping scotch and talking. Somewhere in there she told me that all the girls she lived with at the Studio Club and the girls she worked with at the agent's office had been fixed on becoming wives, “which left me outside the picture.” It was a state of affairs she was used to, but a girl with no romantic expectations, a girl who never planned to marry, was ironically a girl that many boys found easy to be with, and at college she had always been able to make friends among the boys. But living in a women's sorority and working with women, “I wasn't lonesome exactly, or friendless, but I guess I felt solitary.” She gave me a slightly amused look. “You weren't much like the boys I knew at college, but this was Hollywood and I had cast you as The Cowboy with a Tragic Past. You'd get a look in your face, Bud, a look I used to see in my dad.”

The bit about my tragic past was mostly her writerly invention, but I guess some part of it was real. Her dad had been a soldier in the Great War and had come up against some terrible things, so I know she must have picked up something in me that, at the time, I thought was well concealed.

That day in front of the hardware store, she looked out at the rain puddling in the street and the wet dog in the bed of the pickup. “Whose dog is that?” she asked. Jack was watching every move I made. Every so often he stood up to shake himself off, but he was enough of a ranch dog that it didn't occur to him to make a show of being pathetic.

“He's Harold's.”

She suddenly left the shelter of the awning, crossed over to the truck parked at the curb, and petted the dog's wet head. “What's his name?”

“Blackjack. Or Harold just says Jack.”

She scritched the dog behind his ears. “Good Jack,” she said quietly. Then she looked over at me again. “I had a black dog once, his name was Rags.” She was squinting, her glasses already spotted with rain. “Don't you hate how dogs always die before people do?” She said this as if it was a curious question she'd been pondering for a long time.

When we were still living on Echol Creek, a neighbor gave us a shepherd pup that Mary Claudine named Quinn. He was now about eight years old, living up at Bly with my parents. I thought of telling Lily she was wrong about dogs always dying before people, but I didn't have the words for it.

She gave the dog another little pat on his head and then came back across the sidewalk to stand under the awning. While she wiped the rain off her glasses with a handkerchief, she said, “They don't let us smoke in our rooms at the Studio Club; we have to go down to the living rooms to smoke.” As if this was a hardship she had learned to live with. Then she pulled a pack of Lucky Strikes from the pocket of her coat and offered me one.

I had known only a few women in my life who smoked, and I hadn't thought Lily was one of them—I hadn't seen her smoking on the bus. But I acted like I wasn't surprised. I had smoked a few cigarettes myself in the last year without yet making it a habit, so I took the cigarette from her and lit us both up. Lily drew some smoke into her mouth and blew it out, then tucked her elbow into her waist and held the cigarette out from her hip. I had seen movie stars strike that pose, but she looked to me like a child play-acting with a candy cigarette.

I GOT TO THE STUDIO CLUB ON SUNDAY
about a quarter of two and waited in the lobby for almost half an hour, watching pretty girls come and go. Lily, it turned out, was still in her nightgown. While the girls she roomed with were primping for a picnic, speaking slyly about being “crazy” or “gone” for young men they had met the week before, she was sitting up in bed writing. She had the opinion that a screenwriter had to learn to write with distractions—telephones ringing and directors charging in and out of your office and actors standing over you demanding that lines be changed. So while the girls chattered, she kept her pencil moving across the page. When one of them said, “You should come too, Lily, and bring that boy Bud,” she didn't look up from her work. “He's just coming to get a look at the club,” she said. “He's not my boyfriend.”

When she finally woke to how late it was, got dressed, and came down the curving staircase, it was twenty past two. But she just said, “Hey,” and I said “Hey,” and then she led me around the public parts of the building, those big front rooms and the library. The parlors flanking the hall were each a good thirty feet long, sporting tall fireplaces with tile surrounds and ceilings with heavy plaster arches and oak box beams. I was fairly awestruck by the place, but it wasn't in Lily's nature to be awed. Anyway, she had grown up in circumstances considerably more embellished than I was used to—her dad was a ferry boat inspector for the state of Washington, and her mother was an opera singer and a music teacher who used to play the organ for silent films at the Orpheum Theatre in Seattle—a gilded building more opulent than anything in my experience. Lily stood back and let me gawk.