Falling From Horses by Molly Gloss

Griffith Park, or in their own back lot if they had one, then rent a sound stage or an empty warehouse for the wrap-up, add gimmick effects and short ends, some canned music, and call it good. They could turn out an hour-long picture for the bottom half of a double feature in little more than a week, which is why people called them “eight-day outfits.” But when I looked up the addresses that Ray had sent me to, quite a few were vacant buildings sporting for-rent signs. A lot of the smaller places had been eaten up by Republic, which had moved its operation out to the valley. Most of the studios still doing business along Gower Gulch were making either three-day serials or singing-cowboy pictures, neither of which had any call for riding extras: they used songs in place of action and rented stock footage from film libraries for the chases and stunts. I did find a couple of studios from Ray’s list that were still doing it the old way, but his leads were no help at all—nobody remembered Ray Mullens.
    I wandered up and down the streets and saw a lot of fellows wearing cheap ten-gallon hats that wouldn’t stand up to a light rain and shop-made footgear that hadn’t ever toed a stirrup. I didn’t want to ask any of them about picture work, and anyway they were lounging in front of bars or leaning on parked cars appearing to be out of work themselves.
    The day had started warm, and by lunchtime the heat was shimmering off sidewalks and the roofs and hoods of cars. The duffle began to feel heavy against my shoulder, and my feet were sweating in boots never meant for walking. Finally I hunted up a telephone booth and called the number Ray had given me, and I told a girl who answered that I was looking for work riding horses. She asked me for a phone number so she could get in touch if a job came up, and when I said I didn’t have one she wasn’t interested in taking my name.
    It’s a funny thing: when a man is broke he’s always hungry. The coffee and oranges I’d had for breakfast had worn off hours ago, and when I walked by an air-conditioned diner the question of money was the only thing that kept me from going inside. But I saw an Indian with long braids sitting at the lunch counter in there, eating a hamburger. He was hatless but otherwise not dressed much different from me, jeans and a button-up shirt, boots with stack heels worn down at the corners. I figured he must be an actor or at least a movie extra, because I’d only ever seen long-haired Indians in pictures; the ones I had met riding rodeo wore their hair cut short like anybody else. I circled the block, thinking it over, and when I came back around I went in and sat on the stool next to him. I studied the menu while I let the sweat cool, and then I ordered a bowl of chili and some saltine crackers. I ate slowly, eyeing blackberry pie under a glass cover on the counter and enjoying the cool air blowing down from a box on the wall. I had to sit there thinking for quite a while before I came up with something to say to him.
    â€œMy uncle Jim, he saw Jackson Sundown ride at the Round-Up the year he won the All-Around.”
    What shames me now is that I thought my knowing about a famous Indian rodeo champion who had died before I was born was somehow a compliment to the whole Indian race.
    Well, this fellow was polite about it. He looked over at me, nodded, and said, “Did he,” and drank some of his Coke. Then he said, “Your uncle Jim, he a bronc rider?”
    My dad’s brother had died before my parents ever met, but I had heard enough about him from my grandparents and my dad that I sometimes forgot I hadn’t known him. I said, “No, he did some law work for the city of Pendleton and for the Round-Up, so he happened to be there that time Sundown got the silver-trimmed saddle.”
    He nodded again and took another swig of his Coke. I could see his hands were callused from rope burns and