Falling From Horses (2 page)

I didn't have a lot of experience with girls, but it crossed my mind that she might think I was sneaking looks at her under the cover of looking at the mountain; I thought she might be wondering whether I found her pretty. She wasn't pretty, at least by my standards back then. She had thick, dark eyebrows that just about met over her nose—she hadn't yet begun to pluck them—and she was so skinny there was nothing to fill out the front of her wrinkled dress. Plus the dress was bright green with an orange collar, which might have looked all right on the right girl, but it threw an orange pallor onto her face. I didn't have any interest in her, not in that way, and I figured I had better be clear about it. So I said, “I wonder if you'd mind switching seats. I like looking out at the country going by.”

It took her half a minute to lift her attention from that pile of pages and figure out what I had just said. She looked over at Shasta as if she had not realized it was there and then cut her eyes briefly to me. “Well, all right, but I might want to switch again later.” After we changed seats, she immediately went back to her reading, and I realized she wasn't interested in me—that none of this had been on her mind at all and she just had a lot of twitchiness in her.

We stopped at Dunsmuir for lunch. The big mountain was behind us now, and I was beginning to feel that the steep woods around there were too much like the wooded ridges I had known back home on Echol Creek, so when we climbed back on the bus I asked if she wanted to take back the window seat. She shook her head and said, “No, that's all right. This twisty road is making me queasy,” and I nodded and said, “It'll do that,” as if being road-sick was something that only happened to girls.

After Dunsmuir the road went from bad to worse. These days the interstate highway has taken out a lot of the kinks, but the road used to closely follow the Sacramento River, with a lot of zigzags through the canyon, plus a steep grade to boot. And they were doing a lot of rerouting just then, cuts and fills and gravel detours, because they had started building the Shasta Dam, which when it was finished would put parts of the old road underwater. They hadn't yet built or rebuilt the masonry guardrails on some of the sheer dropoffs, and the northbound cars, feeling crowded on the curves by our big bus taking up the whole lane, would sometimes lay on the horn as they scraped past us with inches to spare. From the window seat I had a nice bird's-eye view of every close call and the edge of the road where it fell two or three hundred feet down a steep rock face to the river. Given where I was in my life then, I began hoping the bus would go up on two wheels on one of those curves, and I leaned my weight against the window to help it along.

Lily stuck with her reading for a while, and anyway, being Lily, she wouldn't have admitted to nerves, but we were taking the curves pretty fast, and when she closed the folder of pages and asked me where I was from and where I was headed, I figured it was to take her mind off the curvy road and the likelihood of our bus plunging into the gorge. I don't know if that's right—she has written otherwise—but it's what I thought at the time.

I told her I was going down to Hollywood to work in the cowboy movies, which caused her to perk up slightly. She said she was headed there too, to get into the business of writing for the movies.

She asked if I was an actor, and I told her I was just expecting to ride in posses and such, which wasn't really acting. Then I told her what I'd heard—that the work was mostly riding fast and pretending you'd been shot off your horse. She had never been on a horse in her life, but she'd seen enough cowboy movies to know what I meant. “You might have to jump onto a runaway buckboard to save the girl,” she said, “and maybe shoot the gun out of the bad guy's hand.” She said all this with a straight face—she had a dry sense of humor and never liked to give away that she was joking. It wasn't exactly a test, but if I'd taken her for serious I imagine she might have decided I was too dumb to bother with. My dad had always made fun of the bloodless fistfights, though, and how the hero's fancy horse was bulletproof even when other horses were falling dead all around him, so I figured Lily was mocking those movies in the same way. I said, serious as church, “Lucky my six-shooter never runs out of bullets.” She smiled slightly and gave me a sidelong look, and I believe that was when she made up her mind I might be worth talking to.

Lily Shaw was the most straightforward, unconcealed person I've ever known, and she had a bold streak in her already, like she was heading to Hollywood to burn down the town. It's one of the reasons I took to her. But I should tell you right now: when we met, I was the one who was more reckless. I had been nursing a dangerous streak for a couple of years, which she took for boldness, and I imagine this is one of the reasons she took to me.

I didn't tell her where I was from—nothing at all about Echol Creek. I told her about picking up ranch work, traveling around to rodeos, working as a cook's helper on a dude ranch. She didn't tell me a whole lot about her life either. She said she had been writing for the women's pages of the
Seattle Times
, but she had a letter from a friend of her dad's, promising to put her to work in his Hollywood talent agency. His clients were mostly actors and actresses, but he had a few writer clients and he needed a secretary to read the stories they sent in and maybe go at them with a red pencil, which she figured would be more fun than her work for the
Times
, writing about casseroles and table etiquette. What she really wanted to do was become a screenwriter herself; the pages in her lap were a couple of screenplays she had written.

Some screenwriters, when you ask what they're working on, will flinch and clam up, but a lot of them are dying to tell you not just their bright idea but every damn camera angle and the casting of the bit parts. That was Lily. She held up the thick folder she was still fiddling with and said it was a war movie,
Death Rides the Sky
, about a college boy who's hit by a taxi on his way to enlist in the Air Corps. His limp keeps him out of the service, but he ends up as an aviation mechanic for the Belgians, then flies a plane to rescue a beautiful French girl caught behind the lines spying for the Allies. Lily didn't need to say this was the first Great War; there hadn't been a second one yet. Or we hadn't completely figured out that the fighting in Spain and the Japanese invasion of China were already the kickoff to the second one.

“And this one,” she said, tapping the other folder, “is a New York City crime story.” She hadn't ever stepped foot in that city, but a New York story was cheap to make, she said, “because they can use stock footage for the traffic and the skyscrapers and whatnot.”

I knew “stock footage” didn't have to do with livestock, but I didn't know what it meant and I wasn't about to ask. Then she went ahead and told me: “See, they've got all these bits they call ‘short ends' that they've clipped from old movies, just about anything that doesn't have the actors in it, and they use those over in the new movies because it saves a lot of time and money.” She was matter-of-fact about it. “I've seen the same taxis go by on Central Park West in about a dozen pictures, but people hardly ever notice.”

This started me thinking about all the cattle stampedes I'd seen in the movies and whether I'd failed to notice the same cows bawling past the camera over and over. I wouldn't say I was pissed off about it, but this felt like being tricked. And it was maybe the beginning of my education about Hollywood moviemaking.

WE CHANGED BUSES IN REDDING
at the head of a long valley. While the luggage was being moved over, I went into the station and used the bathroom. The sink in the men's room was rust-spotted and had a tin bucket under it to catch the leaks. In the big waiting room a bald guy manned the ticket booth and a Mexican man was behind the doughnut counter. The floor was sticky with grime and scattered with cigarette butts. An old man lay sleeping on one of the scarred benches, defending himself from the overhead lights with a newspaper spread open across his face. I had slept in bus stations more or less like this one half a dozen times in the last year.

I bought a doughnut from the Mexican and went back outside. Lily had gone in too, and when she came out I caught her glancing at the sugar on my fingers. Back then I tended to treat certain kinds of girls like they were my little sister, which was something I was almost aware of. Lily had a few years on me, but she was a tiny thing with skinny legs; she was so short I could look down at the white line of the part in her hair. I didn't know her yet, and at this point in our acquaintance I guess I thought she was one of those girls—a girl who needed looking after. I broke off part of the doughnut and offered it to her. “Thanks,” she said and put the whole piece in her mouth, then sucked the sugar off her fingers.

After Redding we left all the curves behind. The ground began to be taken up with strawberries and corn and sugar beets, rows of walnut and plum trees just yellowing toward leaf-drop, and dairy cows grazing on oak-studded pastures. We passed a lot of fruit stands by the side of the road, and I was wishing the bus would stop so we could buy something that had come right off those trees, but we went barreling along, only stopping at filling stations or roadside cafes with restrooms. We went through a lot of little towns, every one of which I could see coming from a long way off: a church steeple and a water tower rising above a grove of trees. The road crossed and recrossed the river. I remember there were hundreds of redwing blackbirds in the cattails and willows along the riverbanks and beside the road, and when the bus drove past they flew up like blown leaves. Every so often we drove through an avenue of big trees overhanging the pavement, trees that must have been sycamores or eucalyptus, though I didn't know their names back then. And by the time we got to Corning I was seeing other things I'd never seen growing before: olives and palms and wine grapes. I couldn't get enough of looking out at that valley, the wide river lined with oaks, the neat rows of orchard trees. I just about had my forehead plastered to the window, looking at it all.

Down around Willows we began to see sloughs and wetlands and some rice fields still holding a bit of water. The rice must have been harvested at least a month before, but I'd never seen rice growing, so those diked paddies were a mystery to me: I thought maybe there was too much water in that part of the world and the dikes were meant to keep it out of the fields. All that water, shimmering in the low sun, was alive with thousands and thousands of birds jostling together, passing through from their breeding grounds to their wintering grounds. I figured these were the same birds I'd seen the day before, when I was hitching from Chiloquin to Klamath Falls. The big flocks congregate on the string of lakes and marshes through the middle of Klamath County, the same flocks that used to come through Echol Creek. We were hopscotching our way south, those birds and me, is what I happened to think.

Even with the bus windows shut I could hear the gabble of geese over the whine of tires on the pavement, and I remembered how my mother used to throw the window open in the early morning to hear the birds better and to see the shifting skeins in the gray dawn sky, how she liked to watch them sailing down to the sloughs and ponds below the house, how she especially looked for the white pelicans and the sandhill cranes. My sister and my mother shared an interest in science and nature—they used to pore over the colored plates in
The Book of Knowledge
to learn the names of the birds that nested on the parkland below our house and the wildflowers that popped up on the banks of the slough in the spring. I couldn't have said why, not in so many words, but watching birds rising up from the rice fields singly and in flocks, veering across the evening sky, I got to thinking about our family before everything fell apart, and about my mother especially, and I began wishing I'd phoned her up before I climbed on the bus.

Just at the edge of night, a great flock of pintails flew up in unison against the darkening sky, turning so the light undersides of their wings caught the seam of sun at the horizon, the reflection flashing as if somebody had tossed a bunch of silver coins in the air. Lily had gone back to her reading, but she looked out and caught her breath and said, “Oh, that's so pretty, did you see those birds?”

I had been thinking about Echol Creek, which must be why I said, “Back home, we had some wet meadows and sloughs on the ranch, and those birds used to come through twice a year, thousands of them.”

If she'd asked me where “home” was, I don't know what I would've said. I didn't want to tell her anything about the ranch. What she said was, “Bud, are you and your folks farmers?” She was leaning across me to peer out the window, following the birds as they made off toward the west.

I was holding in my hands the good flat-crown hat my folks had given me for my fourteenth birthday and wearing the good stack-heel boots I'd won in a calf-roping contest at the Labor Day Fair in Burns the summer before Mary Claudine went missing. My hands were callused from rope burns, and I thought anybody looking at me would know I'd been riding horses and rounding up cattle since before I could walk. It didn't occur to me that the difference between a rancher and a farmer might not be as crystal clear to everybody else as it was to me.

The only farmers I knew were the ones living in the scrub hills around Echol Creek when I was a kid. They had come into the countryside in swarms in the 1910s and '20s, but by the '30s, after a string of dry years, most of them couldn't grow enough to feed their own children, and their little hardscrabble places began emptying out. “Book farmers,” my dad called them, on account of most of them didn't know a damn thing about farming except what they'd read in pamphlets. But he had sympathy for their situation—he blamed the railroads and the government for selling them a bad idea. I was already in a bit of a touchy mood, though, and it put me somewhat crossways to be taken for one of them.