Falling From Horses (38 page)

Cab wanted us to ride single file across the face of one of those hills, following a beaten trail with the shoulder of the hill on our left. And since this was Cab, he wanted us racing along at top speed. It wasn't anything out of the usual. I had been riding the same way when I was twelve years old and chasing cows. I was in the middle, Pat was up front, Lon brought up the tail. The pinto was anxious about getting to the other side, so he was moving at a very fast clip, swiveling his ears from side to side, alert for anything that might hurt him, and my eyes were slitted against the dust that Pat raised ahead of me. And then something started rocks rolling from above us—some creature scrambling to get away from us, maybe—and in the instant between the veer and the snort of my horse I saw what was coming, but it was too late. The pinto whirled and reared up, pawing the steep slope, and I pulled my hand back and the horse came too high—I saw it was too high. I slipped off his tail end, my right hand still clenching the reins, which might be why the horse came above me, looming dark. I landed on my feet and tried to throw myself to the side, but I lost my footing on the slope. The ground or the horse rose up and hit me—a white flash behind my eyes—and then we were both sliding downhill, a long slide it seemed at the time, but maybe not more than thirty or forty feet before I hit a bit of flat shelf and the horse rolled over me—incredible red-hot wires of pain flashing through my hips and my legs. The pinto kept going all the way down the hill and came to his feet at the bottom without a goddamn mark on him.

I couldn't move but I did, scraping my heels and my hands in the gravel, because the pain was more than I thought I could stand, and I had to writhe around like a crab to stand it. I was on the border of being sick. The wires in my pelvis twisted and pulled, scraping through my bones. I held on, grinding into the gray, almost gone but then coming back with Lon's face leaning over me, his hand gripping my wrist. I caught a breath and another. I was trembling cold, my heart racing high and desperate.

Lon said, “Lie still, kid, be quiet.”

I heard other voices. I couldn't see well. A shout came from below, and Lon shouted down, and I saw through a watery haze the legs of men and then faces closing around me. I was working hard to hold back the sounds that were trying to come out of my throat. There was talking, but I couldn't focus on it. Then Lon's voice by my ear, “We got to move you off this here hill.”

I think I tried to say no, don't move me, don't touch me, but I'm not sure any words actually came out except “No.”

“We got to, kid, just don't try to do anything for yourself. Let us carry you. We're gonna lift you onto this board now, easy does it.”

They lifted me. The wires flashed, a white melting heat, and I went flat out for a while.

Then I heard Lon say into my ear, “We got you, kid,” and I was sweating cold, and I heard the men grunt as they carried the board with me on it, lurching. I was almost level with their belts as we went crosswise down the hill, jerking and swaying. I slipped in and out of someplace gray. We went under some dry trees, and they set the board down on a table. I was cold, my teeth chattering. Somebody brought a blanket and put it over me. Lon brought my hat and set it down on the table where I could reach it with my hand.

It was a while before the ambulance showed up. I heard Cab shouting, and then Lon said, “Sorry, kid,” and all the men went back to work and left me alone. I lay still, swallowing down nausea. I was in a shaking, icy fever of weakness and hurt. Broken open like a wishbone, dragged a hundred miles by a wild horse, that's what it felt like. And I was in a lonely place, caught between rage at the fucking horse and rage at my hand yanking back on the reins, bringing him over, goddamn it, right onto me. Racked by knowing that this was the pain Mary Claudine had borne in the hours after Goldy rolled onto her and wrecked her small body.

At the hospital they asked me who was my closest relation, who they should call. They meant who would pick me up when I was turned out of the place, or maybe who would pay the bill, but I thought they meant who to call in case I died, and after I rummaged through the reasons for calling or not calling my folks, I told them Lily Shaw.

I HAVE SAID
this wouldn't be the whole story of my life, that I would stick to that year I worked in Hollywood, riding for the movies. But before we get to the end of it, I want to say a few things about the years that followed.

I met my wife in the summer of 1947, standing in line at the Vanport Extension Center, one of those adjunct colleges put together quickly to handle all the veterans wanting to take advantage of the GI Bill. I had mustered out of the army a year earlier and gone home to work for my folks, who were living in Mason Valley, Nevada, by then. They had scraped together the money for a little place of their own, a scant half-section. It was mostly flat and arid, but the drought that had held on through most of the thirties had finally abated, and the Mason Valley property had the Walker River running through it and a good deep well for irrigation. So they could make a meager living raising horses and mules and growing hay they sold to Nevada Fish and Game for overwintering mule deer and elk on a couple of nearby refuges.

I had been away from ranching for almost three years, was mostly glad to get back to it, and probably thought I'd stick with it for the rest of my life. It was my mother who pushed me to sign up for college; if the government wanted to pay all the soldiers to go back to school, she felt I should take them up on it.

If it were up to me, I would have gone into an agricultural program, but all the Nevada colleges were full up with returned soldiers. Vanport, up in Oregon and the nearest place with any room, was strictly a city college, with no ag programs. In any case, my mother was adamant that I get a general education; I already knew everything I needed to know about ranching, she said, and I should learn what else was out there in the world. There may have been more to it than that. During the two years I was in the army, she and my father had spent every evening listening to the war news on the radio and poring over my letters trying to figure out where I was and whether the battles being fought might involve me. And I wasn't in great shape when I came back to them—I was still leaning on a cane when I mustered out. It hadn't been that many years since I had returned home from California with a broken pelvis, and I guess, along with her other reasons, my mother didn't want to see me hobbling around like a cripple anymore. Ranching was all right for her and my father—they had both been laid up in plaster a few times—but I believe she had in mind that her only living child should take up some kind of work that didn't regularly involve accident and injury.

I stood in a long line to register for classes, and when I got to the head of it a woman pushed papers in front of me and pointed to the few classes that were still open for enrollment: Art History, Principles of Archaeology, Introduction to English Poetry. Nothing, as I remember, that related to real work, work you could earn a living at. I went ahead and signed up for all three, which I think surprised the woman sitting behind the desk. She looked up at me for the first time.

I was wearing my flat-crowned hat, a neckerchief knotted at the side, and a sheepskin vest; my toothbrush mustache hadn't grown all the way in yet from army smooth, but I'd made a start at it. I could see that she'd expected another soldier still wearing his uniform, as a lot of them were, and here I was in another sort of uniform altogether. But then she said, “Are you Basque?” so I was the one surprised. And, frankly, that was the first time I really looked at her. She had dark hair and a small cleft in her chin. I thought she looked about seventeen, but in fact she was twenty-four.

“No, ma'am, but I grew up around some who were, and our family took up the buckaroo tradition.”

“My father's family was Basque way back, or some of them. I had an uncle who ran sheep, and he dressed like that.” She indicated my whole self standing there in front of her.

When she handed me the paperwork for the classes, she said, “Art History is mine,” and I thought she meant we would both be students in the class, but when I walked into the room the first time, she was up at the chalkboard writing her name: “Miss De Beau Soleil.”

About a year later, when the Vanport college was flooded out, we decided to get married and move down to Flagstaff, where Simone had an offer to teach. By then she and Lily Shaw together had begun to persuade me that I could be an artist, and when I finished my degree we moved to Missouri so I could study with Tom Benton at the Kansas City Art Institute. Simone went on teaching, which she loved, shouldering the financial burden of our household while I went on studying and painting, which for an artist is the most fundamental and valuable kind of affirmation. I was the cook, and I kept the house; it was more or less the same arrangement my dad had made with my mother.

But I wanted to make a living at painting if I could, and I half expected to wind up selling to tourists in the Taos galleries and maybe doing some greeting-card art for Leanin' Tree; but while I was still at the Art Institute I got a commission for a pair of frescoes for the Nevada state capitol. And though I haven't run in the gallery scene very much, I have not often lacked for work in the years since.

We moved to Nevada while I was working on the frescoes, partly to be closer to my parents, and then Simone went back to school herself and became an art therapist, which was a brand-new field at the time. By then we had Jim and Lora, and when Simone brought home a six-year-old girl who didn't have a family, Pilar was our third.

In my public art I always seem to be looking at the hard knot that is our myth of the cowboy West: the violence on the movie screen and behind it and the way the humanity has been hollowed out of our movie heroes and villains, the poverty, isolation, and precariousness of ranch work, the dignity and joy of it, and the necessary cruelty. At the start I thought that if I could get everything right, people would see where the cowboy stories went wrong, what we have missed or lost, and they might see that the cowboy life doesn't have to be so goddamn brave and bloody and lonesome as the movies make it out to be. But I have learned over the years that all I can do is reach for something difficult—try to get the colors right and the negative space, the angle of the light. And if a few people can see it, that has to be enough.

I didn't come to this understanding on my own. I learned it, over the years, from Lily Shaw.

IT WAS LILY
who finally got in touch with my folks. She went to True's house and searched through my belongings and found the telephone number I had written down the last time I talked to them, when they said they were moving to a place in Bear Valley. My dad answered the phone when Lily called. He would start out the next morning, he said, and drive down to get me. I don't know where he would have found the money for gas, and anyway they were still driving the old truck with a homemade box that my mother had cobbled together from a car chassis and spare parts when I was a kid. It's doubtful that truck would have made it all the way to Los Angeles, eight hundred miles or better from where they were living, and eight hundred back. But Lily told my dad that she and True had already figured out another arrangement, a friend of True's who was towing a livestock trailer from Los Angeles to Red Bluff, delivering a pair of horses up there. So that's what happened. This fellow, Gil Newhart, drove me north in the cab of his truck and handed me off to my dad, who drove a hundred and fifty miles down from Bear Valley, which was just about as much distance as the old truck could manage.

 

Gil was hauling a couple of thoroughbred horses that a wealthy rancher had bought. I've heard about men transporting horses hundreds of miles without stopping a single time, but a lot of horses can't urinate in a moving trailer, and Gil was mindful of the value of those horses, so he stopped every three or four hours, took them out, walked them around so they could stretch and void. Then he watered them, forked some hay into the net, shoveled out the trailer, and loaded them back in—an hour or better each time. Sometimes when he stopped at a filling station the truck would vapor-lock and we'd have to sit there and wait for the engine to settle down before he could get it to start. With all that stop and go, and more than six hundred miles to cover, it took the greater part of three days getting up the road to Red Bluff.

If I didn't stand up and move around every little while myself, I'd freeze in one position, and when I finally did move, the pain would be just about enough to make me cry, so every time Gil stopped to take care of the horses I'd try to get up and walk around some. My crutches were in the truck bed, where I couldn't reach them by myself. Anyway, I couldn't stand up or sit down without help. If I wanted to move my left leg, I had to reach down and lift it with my hands. I had a jar to piss in, but if I had to take a crap, I needed somebody to pull down my damn pants while I held myself up on the two crutches, careful not to put any weight at all on that left leg. When we stopped at roadside diners, it was always a big production getting me out of the truck and hobbling across the parking lot to the cafe.

Gil hadn't planned on any of this. He gave me a hand when I asked for it, but I usually had to ask, and he didn't speak to me beyond the necessary. He was heavy-jowled, powerfully built, with a sightless glass eye—True said he'd been with Pershing's expedition against Pancho Villa. If he'd been an actor, they'd have cast him as the cigar-chewing mobster. But I didn't blame Gil. He was probably a decent enough guy. It was just that True had talked him into giving me a ride and, I think, must have paid him a few dollars, without warning him how stove up I was. So I didn't blame him. I wasn't happy about any of it either.

We took the same highway going north as the bus had taken coming down. But what I noticed on the northbound ride sure wasn't avenues of eucalyptus trees or mountains like ice cream cones or rafts of birds settling down on sloughs and rice fields. What I saw were the migrant labor camps and wrecking yards filled with scrapped farm machinery and crop-duster planes flying just a couple of yards off the ground, laying down a wet blanket of poison. In one town we passed through, dead Christmas trees were tied to all the street lamps, their shed orange needles in ragged circles on the pavement underneath each one. At a labor camp outside Lodi, a woman stood in front of one of the tents watching the traffic go by, her face all black and blue and a little child in a dirty smock hanging behind her skirts. The oak hills we drove through were dry and brown in the heat of day but at sunset turned the color of a livid bruise.