Falling From Horses (7 page)

I spent the rest of the day hunting up the places he had written down for me. I didn't have the damnedest idea how Hollywood was laid out, and I was too stubborn to ask anybody, so I wound up going lost a good part of the afternoon and hoofing it more than my boots were meant for, and in the end I ran into the same trouble I'd had in the Gulch: a girl behind a desk who barely looked up before saying there wasn't any need for a cowboy.

By the time the shops and offices had started closing for the day, my feet had come out in blisters and the sweat was rolling down the back of my shirt in itchy streams. I stood on a street corner counting up the money I had left, which was a buck-eighty, and then I limped up Sunset to Western and caught a city bus going into the park.

IN
1938
THERE WAS ALREADY AN OBSERVATORY
at the top of Griffith Park, and a Greek amphitheater and an aerodrome, but as soon as the bus started climbing north of Hollywood Boulevard we were in empty hills grown over with manzanita and chaparral, and steep gullies thick with oaks and big old sycamore trees. Even now, most of that park is still undeveloped, still rough country, but back then it looked as if it was unchanged from when Indians had walked those ravines. I was in a black mood about the way things had gone that day, and when I saw how wild the park was I began entertaining a little fantasy about living like an outlaw, camping in the park, and coming down into town to rob a bank now and then. I was thinking if I had my .22 with me to shoot rabbits and threaten bank tellers, I'd be all set.

When I stepped onto the bus I hadn't made up my mind whether I was going up there to find the horse stable Lee Waters had told me about or to find a place to camp, but partway up the hill I caught a glimpse of what might have been water in one of the ravines, and I guess that was when I made up my mind I was camping out. I yanked the cord, and the bus pulled over to let me off, nowhere close to anything—just trees. The driver didn't remark on this, which I took to mean I wasn't his first cowboy looking for a place to spend the night.

It was a relief to be away from concrete sidewalks and under the shade of those big old canyon oaks. And a shock, almost, to hear quiet for the first time in two days. Once I left the road and hiked down into the gully, there was almost no traffic noise, no rattling streetcars, no buses whining through the gears, no muttered voices through cheap hotel walls, just a lot of bird chatter—California birds, their strange songs not the ones I recognized—and the understory buzz that crickets and grasshoppers make, and every so often the dry rustle of a snake or a squirrel or a gopher moving off through the brush. I think that may have been the point at which I realized I'd been taking such things for granted my whole life.

The water turned out to be not much more than a stagnant thread, scummy with algae, but I found a couple of deeper puddles I could dip my hands into, and I was thirsty enough it didn't matter to me. I drank some tepid, fusty-tasting palmfuls, took off my shirt and hat and sluiced water over my sweaty head and chest, and then took off my boots and soaked my feet. The sun hadn't quite set, but the gully was in deep orange shadow, and the air at the bottom of the ravine was cooler than it had been in the city. Sitting with my sore feet in water, my chin resting on my bare chest, I just about went off to sleep. So I found a level spot with plenty of leaf duff, rolled out my blanket and lay down on it, and then, the way it happens sometimes, I was wide awake, staring overhead into the crewelwork of dry oak leaves while the sky slowly darkened.

I should have been making a plan for the next day, but what I thought about was the dead man, his open eyes examining the night sky, and it wasn't far from there to my sister. The stars came out slowly. The only constellation I recognized in the wedge of sky above the ravine was Aries. Finally it got a little chilly, so I sat up and put on my shirt and walked barefoot into the darkness to take a piss. When I lay down again and rolled up in the blanket, I guess the long day finally caught up with me, because I stopped thinking about anything, and when I came back to the surface it was gray morning.

The oak leaves over my head were faintly moving shadows. I looked up into them a minute, listening to the quiet rustle, and then woke all the way up and turned my head and saw what I'd been hearing, which was a couple of men rummaging through my duffle bag. One of them was hatless, his dirty shirt torn out along the shoulder seam. The other guy was wearing my hat pushed far back on his greasy hair. The one in the torn shirt had my good boots clasped under his arm while he squatted down watching his pal poke around inside my bag.

I yelled, “Hey,” which was probably not the smartest thing I could have done. My legs were tangled in the blanket, and before I could get to my feet both men startled upright, and the one with my hat on his head grabbed up my bag and swung it at me. Something hard inside, probably my dad's old steel spurs, clipped me on the eyebrow. It wasn't much of a blow, but I recoiled from it, and then the other one swung out with his hobnail boot and struck me on the side of my neck; all the feeling went out of that side of my body.

They weren't toughs—I imagine they were just hobos looking for money or something to eat or trade for money or food. But at that point they could have taken off running with my boots and my bag, leaving me there in my sock feet with nothing but the clothes I was wearing and a thin blanket. I don't know why they didn't. But once they started, they just became set on beating the living daylights out of me.

I had been in fights as a kid, the kind that ended when somebody got a bloody nose, and in the year and a half since I'd left home I'd been in a few drunken fistfights outside rodeo arenas or bars. I could take a hit and throw one, and I was on my way to being what we used to call a scrapper, but I was on the ground and the two of them were standing over me, kicking with their boots. I couldn't get any leverage to fight back, and one side of my body was nothing but a buzzing numbness. It's interesting how, in a situation like that, you're not thinking about anything, not even feeling fear, you're just trying to protect your soft parts and your head, trying to get out of range of the kicks or grapple with an ankle or a foot to keep the kick from making contact. And your head is too full of the hammering of your own heart, the furious pumping of blood, to have room for feeling much pain.

Finally I managed to get hold of a boot. It was an army boot from the last war, a trench boot too big for the man's foot and with the laces missing. When the boot came off in my hands, he lost his balance and went flailing backward and landed on his butt, and as he went down, the other guy tried to grab hold of his windmilling arms to keep him from falling, which gave me a couple of seconds. I scrambled to my feet and barreled into the one still standing and knocked him flat, knocked my hat off his head, and followed him down to the ground and went to pounding on him with my fists. I was in a rage suddenly, the world gone red through the scrim of blood behind my eyes.

It's probably a good thing I was already beaten up myself, that I didn't have the arm strength to put heat behind the punches. This is something I've thought about off and on over the years.

I don't know how many times I hit him, but at some point the one who had lost his boot got around behind me and struck me on the shoulders and back of the head with a stick of wood or something, hit me two or three times. It didn't knock me out, nowhere close to it, but it stunned me, and I rocked over and brought up my arms to protect my brains. The one who'd been hitting me helped the other guy to his feet, and the two of them took off staggering down the ravine.

I yelled something after them, half-articulated and breathless, something childish like “You better run, pally!” which I think I'd learned from the movies.

I almost stood up, then sat right down again. I looked to make sure they'd left my stuff behind, the boots especially, and the hat, and then I just sat there a while. My mouth was full of blood, there was blood in my eyes. Now that the fight was finished, I had feeling all over my body, throbbing pain in my shoulders and arms, my hands, my neck. Every breath hurt. I lay down for a while, my bloody cheek resting on the dirt, and maybe I even slept for a few minutes. Woke up with a jerk, thinking those two guys were walking up on me again, but I was alone.

I was so stiff I had a hard time climbing to my feet. I went over to the little rill of water and gingerly washed my face—I had cuts on my eyebrow and chin that had already scabbed up, and this got them bleeding again. I felt around inside my mouth to make sure I had all my teeth. The inside of my lip was torn, so when I took a drink of water it tasted of salt and iron. My hands were bloodied and swollen. I soaked them a while, and then I rolled up my shirtsleeves and washed the dried blood off both elbows. I was bruised and sore all over, and it felt like I might have a cracked rib. When I looked through my duffle bag I found I was missing a few things—a pair of socks, a razor, things they must have pocketed before the fight started—but my dad's old spurs were still there, wrapped in a rag at the bottom of the sack. So they hadn't made off with anything important. It could have been worse. I had wakened thinking about Arlo Gantz, who had given me the Hamley saddle, and regretting that I had sold it, but if I'd had the saddle with me the bums might have picked it up quietly and walked off without bothering to rummage through my duffle. Even if they didn't know the worth of a Hamley, they would know that a guy sleeping outside wasn't likely to own anything more valuable than his saddle.

I pulled on my boots and lay down with my hat and duffle resting on my chest, but I didn't sleep. I didn't have a plan for the coming day, but I wasn't drawn to the idea of walking around the Gulch again, looking for work on an empty stomach and sore feet. On the other hand, I knew if I stayed there and tried to sleep off the fight, I'd be jerking awake every few minutes for fear somebody was coming at me again.

The day had already warmed, and I could see some sunlight at the top of the ridge, so after a while I stood and limped my way up there, found the road again, sat down beside the pavement, and waited until a bus came along on its way down to town.

I hadn't had anything to eat since that bowl of chili with Lee Waters the day before, so I got off somewhere along Western, walked to the first diner I saw, and spent most of the money I had left on coffee and a short stack. I sat on the stool for quite a long time afterward, moving crumbs around in the last dab of syrup, until the waitress made a point of picking up the plate and wiping off the counter underneath it. By then the studio offices on Gower Street were open, so I limped around to the same ones I'd been to the day before.

My face all beat to hell like I'd been in a bar fight didn't improve my prospects any, and by noon I had run out of doors to knock on. I walked by a few men standing in the shade, leaning against lampposts, trying to look as if they were waiting for a limo to pick them up, and I tried doing that too. But finally I hobbled over to Western Avenue and caught a bus back up into Griffith Park.

LEE WATERS HAD TOLD ME
to look out for a dirt road with an arch over it, which was the ranch gate for the stables, but I was slumped down in the seat, half asleep and not paying much attention, until the bus driver called back to me, “You getting off at Diamond?” I guess I didn't look like I was headed up to the observatory to look at stars. I said, “Yeah,” and he pulled the bus over where a dirt road poked back into a side canyon. The ranch sign didn't have any lettering on it, just a big diamond carved into the flattened face of a log.

It was half a mile up the road to the Diamond Barns corrals and sheds, which was about as far as my blisters would carry me. By that time, I had pretty much decided to quit the whole movie-cowboy enterprise. I would muck out stalls if I had to, just long enough to get the money for a bus ticket back to Klamath County. And what bumped me off this plan was Harold Capsen, who owned Diamond Barns. Harold was the first person I worked for in the movie business, and I want to say right here that he was also the best.

I came around a turn in the road to find a bunch of corrals and sheds spread out under the trees. From twenty yards off I could see that the fellow leaning on the rails looking over some horses was wearing a hat with a Montana crease in the high crown, an honest-to-god Stetson that had already stood up to some weather; his boot resting on the lower rail was the sort my dad always wore, scuffed brown leather with a worn, steep-cut heel that had been resoled a few times.

A black mutt was lying down on the straw right under the horses, his chin on his front paws, as if he and the horses had come to an understanding of peaceful cohabitation. When he saw me he hoisted himself off the straw and came up the road to meet me. He didn't bark, which I thought was a bad sign—I stood where I was, deciding if it was time to get out of range of his teeth—but he'd been taught that barking riled up the horses, that's all it was.

The man standing at the corral took a look over his shoulder and saw me coming, but then he went back to studying the horses. I spoke to the dog before he got all the way up to me, told him he was an ugly son of a gun and too stupid to find his own way home, and he studied my face and the tone of my voice before he walked up to my hand and let me touch him around the ears. He wasn't a pup, he had some gray around his muzzle.

I walked on toward the man and leaned on the rails next to him. The dog followed me, then went ahead into the corral and wandered amidst the legs of the horses. He waved his tail slightly as he let various horses snuffle him thoroughly. I learned later that he had a bed of feed sacks in a corner of the tack barn. I guess he must have slept on them, because there was always shed fur and a dent in the folded-up sacks in the morning, but when we went out to the corrals he was always there ahead of us, hanging around the horses before the sun was up. No one knew what his history was, because he'd been a stray before he found his way to Diamond. Harold figured he had grown up around horses and was pleased to find himself among them again.