Falling From Horses (37 page)

I said, “I fell off a bar stool.”

“That's stupid,” she said, and I knew she meant the fight, not the joke.

We ate our noodles in silence. Finally she asked if I'd been working much, and I told her I'd been in Arizona making a picture. When I told her it was an RKO movie, she guessed right away which one it was. “Dorothy worked on part of it, the dialogue where Kit Carson and Canby are arguing about the retreat.” I didn't know that part of the story, but then she said, “And she wrote the scene where the mules are blown up.”

I said, “I watched them film it.”

“Did you? How did they do it? Do you think it'll look real?”

In the scene Union soldiers were supposed to fit up a pair of mules with fused barrels of gunpowder and send them over to the Rebel lines to blow up the picket posts. We had been waiting around a lot that day, standing in the shade about a hundred yards from where they were setting up the scene with the mules, so we watched for quite a while. On a big picture like this one, it could take a couple of hours to set up and film three or four shots that would run less than a minute in the final edit.

We had always kept mules on our place to do the heavy hauling and pull a wagon. My mother said they had less brains than a horse, but I think this was out of loyalty to horses and not from any evidence; I know she respected Mike and Prince, who would do just about anything we asked them to do. The mules they were using for the movie were smaller, but one of them was almost oxblood in his coloring, like Mike—not a color that shows up too often in mules. It gave me a start when I saw him, that half-second when you think a stranger is somebody you know.

In the movies I'd worked in, the red sticks of dynamite were always phony, and the flash-bang, triggered by somebody off camera, was a pine mortar buried in the ground, packed with black powder and loose fuller's earth, the lampblack ignited with gasoline to make black smoke. It would send up a nice cloud of flame and dust without doing any damage. Watching all the preparation for the shots, I had been thinking the barrels of gunpowder loaded on the mules were phony, like the sticks of dynamite. I figured that a powder monkey would rig up mortars on the ground, and then the film would be edited so it looked like the mules had been blown up in the explosion. They were setting up for the last shot before I came awake to the fact that they weren't burying the mortars in the ground but loading them into the barrels on the mules.

These were big mortars and maybe wrapped too tight. I had helped my dad blow up stumps, so I knew what a real explosion looked like, and when those blasts went off, one after the other, geysers of flame and smoke went thirty or forty feet in the air. We weren't anywhere close to the setup, but the booming thunderclap of sound just about deafened us. Shapes, pieces of shapes, landed, smoking, smelling of gunpowder and burnt hair. Through the smoke, I could see one of the mules lying with its side torn open, working its legs mechanically in a spreading pool of blood.

Wranglers had strung up a temporary rope corral close by to hold our saddled horses while we waited to be called, and another fifty or sixty horses were spread out on pasture behind us. The explosions stampeded all the horses, and we spent the rest of that day rounding them up from the far corners of the ranch. We lost the next day too, while people in the costume crew cleaned the shrapnel—the mules' flesh and blood and slivers of bone—from our cavalry uniforms.

I said to Lily, “They blew up the mules.”

She looked at me.

“They loaded some big mortars on two mules and lit the fuses and blew them up. I was picking bits of mule out of my hair for a couple of days.” I wasn't sure why, but I meant to shock her, horrify her. I said, “There's other ways they could have filmed it, they didn't have to kill the mules.” And I know she heard something in it, something like blame.

After a moment she said, “Dorothy told me she didn't make it up, it really happened. At Valverde, I mean. It really happened in the war.” And then after another short silence, “You don't have to blame Dorothy for it.”

I should have said no, I didn't blame Dorothy. What I said was, “Maybe I'll blame Kit Carson for thinking it up,” as if I was making a joke.

There was a prolonged silence. Then she said, “Are you mad at me for some reason?”

“No.”

She watched me, then said, “Well, you're mad about something.”

I was well acquainted with that tone of voice from her. “You don't know what I'm feeling.”

She looked away. “Well, you are being mean, so I think you're mad at me.” I know now her own father had been one to go mean and throw blame around, which she had learned was a signal of trouble to come: heavy drinking, storms of shouting. The truth is, she had been watching me for weeks—ever since I started turning up on Sunday bleary and bloodshot—waiting for an eruption.

I swept up some spilled salt into a little drift and then brushed it onto the floor. “It doesn't have to do with you,” I said.

I had come back from Arizona with something shaken loose, but I wasn't sure I could say what that was. In our family and in all the families we knew, people steered clear of anything having a whiff of sentiment. Deep feelings were held close, unspoken. In some way this had to do with never crying when you were hurt. Lily always expressed whatever was on her mind—at least this is what I thought—and she could be impatient with me for holding back. Of course, I didn't know all that she was holding back.

But all at once I was filled with the need to tell her about the wreck of horses and men, and my part in it. I wanted to tell her about how I had been having trouble sleeping. Well, I had been having trouble sleeping for a long time, but that last week in Arizona, after the lancer charge, I lay in bed every night seeing, over and over, horses and men falling through a veil of dust and shattered grass, turning over in my head my hatred of Cab, and then in the long hours of darkness coming around slowly to knowing I'd been looking for something like this to happen, a big fall—maybe even hoping for it. And knowing if I'd been hurt or killed I would deserve what I'd been given. A settling of accounts for getting my sister killed.

But I didn't know how to start saying any of this to Lily. I needed her to ask me, and she didn't know the right thing to ask.

After a minute she asked me what I thought of the movie. I had to think a bit to realize she was talking about
Dodge City.
I said Errol Flynn was an Englishman and I didn't think he should be playing a western sheriff. He didn't have the right look for it, I told her.

“Well, he's Australian,” Lily said, as if that made a difference. And then she wanted to know what I thought a western sheriff should look like, and we might have gotten into a quarrel about it except I didn't care enough to argue.

When I walked her back to the Studio Club, I didn't offer to come in and play cards, but I said, “Do you want to see the Sherlock Holmes movie?”

She studied me. “If you do.”

So we went back to seeing movies on Sunday. The night we saw Sherlock Holmes we skipped the second feature, a singing-cowboy picture neither of us was interested in, went back to her dormitory, and played a few hands of pinochle. She shuffled and dealt, but then she laid her cards down and took off her glasses to polish them with the hem of her sweater. While she was looking down at her fingers working on the glasses she said, “I don't know why you didn't tell me what happened over there in Arizona. Everybody at RKO is talking about it.”

I was caught off-guard, but I knew she meant the big cavalry charge, men hurt, horses killed. “Dave Keaton broke his leg, a couple of other fellows got hurt. Guys get hurt all the time. Horses too. I didn't think you'd want to hear about it.”

She was silent for a good while, and then she put on her glasses and picked up her cards. “Jamerman is a son of a bitch, everyone at RKO knows it.”

It was the first swearword I had ever heard from Lily, although that didn't register at the time. I said, “Well, it was Cab who set up the tripwires, so they're all sons of bitches, aren't they?”

She played a card. “They are,” she said matter-of-factly. I hadn't heard about Lampman yet, or I might have understood why she suddenly held a dim view of the movie business and just about everybody in it.

We played a little while in silence, and then she said, “I heard Jamerman wanted to outdo De Mille. He was bragging that he killed more horses in his movie than De Mille killed in
Charge of the Light Brigade.
”

I didn't know how many horses had been killed in the De Mille picture, but I said, “He might have. I saw maybe twenty-five or thirty go down.”

I didn't tell her everything, but as we went on playing cards she pulled out of me a few more things I had seen: horses killed outright, horses crippled and shot, men who'd been hurt. It took a while to get the words out, but I told her I was pretty sure the chestnut horse I was riding had kicked one of the men lying on the ground.

I thought she might tell me it wasn't my fault or something else completely pointless. What she said after a long silence was “I sprained my ankle once, but I haven't ever been really hurt. Have you, Bud?”

Riding for the movies was a good way to get yourself wrecked or killed in those days, and looking back, I wonder why I didn't get hurt sooner than I did, doing all those stunts without any padding or much coaching. I was young and pliable, I guess, or just lucky. Lily could look at me and know I'd had my nose broken, but she also knew I'd been riding for the movies for a few months without once being hauled off to the hospital.

I guess I knew she was asking about something else.

I said, “I've been hurt a few times.”

I might have let it stay there, but she kept looking at me, waiting for more, and silence can prod you into saying something you don't plan to say. “You can't hardly work around cows and horses without getting hurt. Everybody in my family's been hurt one time or another.” Then, I don't know why, I said, “My sister got killed just riding for cows. She got thrown from her horse and the horse stepped on her.”

Lily made a small sound, a slight intake of breath. I wanted her to know about Mary Claudine, but I sure didn't want any sympathy from her, didn't want her to pump me for the whole story—not that night, anyway—so I played a trump card and gathered in the trick, put down my next card, and gestured with my chin that it was her play. She studied me. She knew what I was doing, and I guess she was making up her mind if she'd let me get away with it. Finally she looked down at her cards and played one, and we went on with the game. The only other thing she said, after a long, long silence, was “I hope you don't get killed in one of their stupid movies, Bud.”

I kept my eyes on the cards in front of me. “I've been killed a bunch of times already, so I'm starting to get the hang of it.”

She threw me a look. “Ha ha. Funny boy.”

AFTER WHAT HAPPENED IN ARIZONA
, I started asking who the ramrod was every time Central Casting called about a picture, and I steered away from anything Cab O'Brien was running. This was a stupid thing to do: plenty of other action directors were just as cold-blooded as Cab, and you couldn't hardly ride in a cowboy picture without seeing men hauled off to the hospital and horses thrown, tripped, ridden through saloon windows. So I can't tell you why I was so dead set on not working for Cab, but I guess it's not hard to come up with theories.

Things went along okay for a while. I rode in a picture with Hoot Gibson, and I had a couple of lines in one of Tim McCoy's hay-burners. Then there was a two-week stretch at the end of August when the phone didn't ring, and I got down to hard bread and a couple of thin dimes. I called Central Casting, and late in the day they called back with two days of work on an oater called
Mojave War Drums.
They were shooting at The Canyon. I didn't ask who the ramrod was, but I knew it might be Cab. He ran a lot of pictures at The Canyon.

I rode a bus out there, and they were already shooting film when I got on the set. The picture was half done but running behind schedule—the horse they had been using as a double for the star horse had come up lame, and it had taken a while to find another lookalike for a tricky river crossing. They had finally put that scene to bed, but Cab was in a foul mood, in a hurry to finish the movie on time. A man riding a horse fall had been hurt the day before, which was the reason I'd been called. Cab shouted at me, “Where the fuck have you been? Get dressed and get in here, fucking pronto.”

They put me in a black wig and greasepaint, playing an Apache Indian, and the wrangler gave me a long-necked pinto horse he said was high-strung. I had come to know that “high-strung” in a picture horse meant he'd been hurt more than once and was naturally worried he might be hurt again. The horse was rigged up in the usual “Indian” fashion, with a blanket thrown over the saddle, and if I'd had time I would have pulled off the saddle and ridden him bareback, which might have saved me a little bit later on. But Cab was roaring about delays, so I toed the stirrup and trotted out to where two other Indians were waiting. One was Lon Epps, and the other was a man named Pat McDermott, whom I'd met once or twice. Lon wiggled his eyebrows like Groucho. “Hey, kid. Ain't we got fun.” He spoke low, barely moving his mouth, while Cab was shouting his directions.

The Canyon was pretty small for a movie ranch, just twenty acres and a couple of tame, chaparral-covered hills; if you were to guess where I'd wind up busting a gut, it wouldn't be The Canyon. But one thing I learned that year is that men and horses could sometimes walk away from the most appalling-looking wrecks, could walk away without a scratch, or a man could step off the saddle wrong and break his damn head. There is just no way to make sense of it.