Falling From Horses Page 2

  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.

  2

  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.

  I said, “Nothing against farming, but I wouldn’t do it for love or money.” I imagine I was working on my imitation of William S. Hart, that scowl when he’s standing outside a cabin checking his guns, preparing to go in and shoot it out with seven bad guys holding a woman tied to a chair.

  Lily’s eyebrows pinched down over the bridge of her nose. “I don’t know why you’re taking offense at that question.”

  I couldn’t have said why myself. I’d never heard of the ancient contempt of herders for tillers of the soil. “I’d just rather be roping steers than pushing a plow,” I told her, which was not any kind of answer, and the truth was, I had been plowing up ground for hay fields since I was six or seven. I should have smiled and said as much and made a joke out of it; I’d been brought up with right manners, taught from an early age not to go around shooting off your mouth. But when you’re nineteen years old, sometimes words pop through the gate before you can herd them off, and then you’re too stubborn or stupid to call them back.

  She relaxed her brows and said, with a complete falling away of interest, “That’s no reason,” and she drew the folder of pages into her lap and took up reading again.

  We rolled on for quite a while in silence. Finally I said, “Those were pintails.”

  She looked up.

  “Those birds. They were mostly pintails. Might have been a few wigeons too.”

  “What kind of bird is a wigeon?”

  “They’re ducks. Good to eat if you don’t mind that they’re small and usually full of shotgun pellets.” I waggled my eyebrows like Groucho so she’d know I was kidding.

  “Well, you just spit those out through your teeth,” she said, and you’d never have known she was kidding—this was Lily. But I smiled and flourished my eyebrows again so she’d know I got the joke, and maybe that won me back a point or two.

  I imagine if Lily had any interest in me back then, it was from her belief that I was the one needing looking after. At Williams, when we stopped for supper, I bought a candy bar and a soda pop and sat on a bench in front of the cafe trying not to bolt it down. After a few minutes she came out and said, “I can’t eat this whole thing, do you want it?” and handed me half a tuna fish sandwich. I was six feet tall by then, still growing toward six-two; I’d had a boiled egg at six o’clock that morning while I waited for the bus in Klamath Falls, and since then nothing but a ginger ale for lunch in Dunsmuir and that doughnut when we changed buses in Redding. Tuna fish was never my favorite, but I wolfed down Lily’s sandwich and was glad to get it, which shamed me at the time and now just makes me think well of Lily.

  3

  WE CHANGED BUSES AGAIN AT SACRAMENTO, and then Lily turned off the overhead light and we tried to sleep. Those seats reclined a bit, and we must have dozed off and on, but you can’t get much sleep on an interstate bus. People went on talking, for one thing, and all night long the bus stopped every forty minutes or so to pick up or drop off passengers in that string of towns running down the lower valley—Stockton, Modesto, Merced, Madera, Fresno, Tulare. And if we weren’t stopping for passengers we were stopping at filling stations or all-night cafes so people could use the restrooms. Lily’s head would tip sideways, but when the bus geared down she’d jerk awake. Once, when her hands went slack with sleep, the glasses she was holding in her lap slipped off onto the floor. I bent down and fished them up and tucked them into the pocket of the seatback in front of her. Then I folded up my jacket and pushed it against her head so she wouldn’t always be tipping onto my shoulder.

  At one stop I climbed out just to stretch my legs and get a breath of air, and I stood off alone at the edge of the road, looking around at the dark farm fields, smelling eucalyptus, I think it was, on the cool air. Everything about it felt strange, not my country, and an uneasiness came over me all at once, a strong qualm about what I was doing. I thought about not getting back on the bus. It was one of those times you think of afterward, a hinge point in your life. But my duffle bag was still on the bus, and then the people who had gotten off to use the restroom began to make their way back, and the driver, standing by the door smoking a cigarette, looked over at me. I guess that was all it took, because I just walked back and climbed on. When I sat down next to Lily, she was more or less awake. She peered at me nearsighted without her glasses, but we didn’t speak.

  Years afterward, I told her about how I almost didn’t get back on the bus, and she said she remembered it. She said she had seen something in my face when I sat back down. Maybe she did. But she was damn near blind without her glasses, so maybe not. She always liked to think she knew me better than I knew myself.

  Then in the small hours, somewhere between Tulare and Bakersfield, with the highway straight as a string and hardly any traffic to speak of, the bus ran off the road and wrecked. What happened is that a guy in a Chevrolet coupe headed north—the only car in ten minutes—fell asleep, I guess, and drifted into our lane. He would have run straight into us if the bus driver, who’d come on at Fresno, hadn’t been on the ball and wide awake. He jerked the wheel hard to the left, and the Chevrolet just clipped the corner of the bus. We went veering across the highway, squealing and weaving, and then off the pavement and bumping down a grassy embankment into a dry ditch, where the bus tipped onto two wheels and hung there a few seconds, making up its mind, before rocking back onto four.

  This all seemed to happen slowly. Or not slowly but as if each fraction of a second had its own point of interest, its own separate weight, a feeling you can get when you think you might be about to die. I’ve had it happen a few times in my life, and this was not the first. It was dark—the dim lights in the bus went out completely as soon as the engine quit—and for a couple of seconds nobody said anything. Then a baby started shrieking and children started crying and people were yelling and a woman toward the front of the bus started reciting the Lord’s Prayer in a loud, churchy way, as if she expected all of us to join in.

  Lily had fallen over halfway into my lap. I hoisted her up—she was as light as a child—and then I grabbed hold of a seatback to stand up and bumped my head on the overhead luggage caddy. I hadn’t ever been in a wreck, but now that it was over I didn’t think this was very much of one. When I’d leaned my weight against the window on that curvy mountain road earlier, I’d had a different sort of picture in my mind. My head smarted from bumping it on the luggage rack, but otherwise I didn’t have a damn thing wrong with me. I didn’t think Lily was hurt either, but I said, “Did you get hurt?”

  “What happened?” she said, which I thought was a pretty stupid question, but she had been asleep when it happened.

  “We had a wreck.”

  She said, “Oh,” as if this was mildly interesting information, and I took this to mean she was all in one piece. She turned her head. “I can’t find my glasses. I hope they didn’t break.” I felt along the seatback until I found where I’d put her glasses and held them out to her. Then I happened to think of my hat, so I went groping around for it on the floor. The crown was dented from one of us stepping on it, but I worked it with my hands and it popped right back into shape.

  In the darkness around us, people had already calmed down, and I didn’t hear any moaning as if someone was hurt. Toward the front the driver was saying, “Here, c’mon now, watch your step,” and people were moving up the aisle and climbing out through the open door. The bus was like a cave, so dark you could just make out people’s shapes, but when we stepped outside there was more light—a clear sky and a quarter moon low in the west. Lily and I stood around with everybody else, looking at the bus. The front end was only slightly stove in, but two tires were flat, so we weren’t going anywhere. We were stranded in that ditch like a whale in a shallow creek.

  The bus driver’s name was Pete something-or-other. He had a cut lip and a sprained or broken ankle, but he
was as calm as an old dog—somebody said he’d been a sapper in the Great War, so maybe that accounted for it. Blood was dribbling from his lip, and every so often he spat out what had run into his mouth, but he limped around from one person to the next, checking to see if any of us were hurt and bending down to thank the little kids solemnly for taking good care of their mothers. One old man complained he had a sore shoulder, but his wife said his shoulder was sore before the crash. So Pete himself was pretty much the only injury.

  The Chevrolet had gone on across the road, crashed through a fence on the other side of the highway, and overturned in a ditch. When a couple of men headed over to see if anybody in the car needed a hand, I said to Lily, “I better go help out.” I think I just wanted to yell at somebody for causing us to wreck.

  The Chevrolet’s doors had sprung open, and there was nobody in the upturned car. We kicked through the tall weeds looking for the driver, and after a minute we found him lying a good eighty or ninety feet from where his car had ended up. We stood around looking at him without saying anything.

  I had seen plenty of dead cows and even a couple of dead horses, but this was the first dead person I had ever seen. My folks hadn’t let me see Mary Claudine after she was found, and I used to lie awake in the night imagining the way she must have looked in the days and weeks after she died—the way cows look after the ravens and turkey vultures get into them. When I think back about the wreck, what I remember is how the dead man looked almost alive, his eyes slightly open and an expression around his mouth that was unsurprised, seeming tolerant of what had happened to him. His head was steeply bent back on the stalk of his neck, the Adam’s apple bulging out in high relief, and there was a little blood at his nose, that was all. But nobody bent down to see if he had a pulse, because there just wasn’t any question that the life had left his body. He looked to be about thirty, wearing a salesman’s suit. His pomaded hair had fallen down over his forehead, which gave him a disheveled look that was at odds with the suit.