Falling From Horses by Molly Gloss Page A

three fingers were bent—maybe they’d been broken and healed crooked.
    I was mulling over what else I could say to keep him talking—maybe something about Chiloquin, which was the last place I had rodeoed before heading south to Hollywood. It was the biggest town on the Klamath Indian Reservation, so I had met quite a few Indians there. I might have been preparing to ask if he knew any of them. But then he glanced down at my boots and said, “I guess maybe you’re the bronc rider.”
    I tried to hold on to a sober expression. “Yes sir, I’ve rode a few. But I’m looking for picture work right now.”
    I don’t suppose he was surprised, but he lifted his eyebrows like he was. “Is that right.”
    â€œI thought there’d be a lot of work down here, but I haven’t had much luck. You in pictures?”
    He’d probably known from the first word I spoke that this was where I was headed—that I was new in town and hoping he might be able to give me a leg up in the movie business. He took a minute making up his mind how to answer, and then he passed me a dry smile and said, “I’ve shot up a few wagon trains.”
    â€œYeah? You ever been shot off a horse? I heard that’s mostly what the work is.”
    He gave me another look, another slight smile. “That there is called a saddle fall. You get on a picture, you’ll be falling two, three times every day. That and just straight hard riding, that’s what the work mostly is for the fellows in the posses and such.”
    Then this fellow—his name was Lee Waters—must have decided I was worth a little bit of coaching. I was to learn over the next few months that stunt riders were naturally proud of the work they did, and most any of them would open up and talk about it if you looked interested and gave them half an opening. If they had a specialty, they might not tell you their secrets, but they’d be happy to let you in on the ordinary tricks and tell you the story of how they got started working in pictures. Lee told me he’d been riding for a wild west show, and after the outfit went broke in the Depression he came down to Gower Gulch. This was when things were still booming along Poverty Row, and he picked up work pretty much every day just by showing up at the cheap studios wearing his own moccasins and buckskin leggings, with a crow feather stuck in his long braids. In the wild west show he had learned the trick of hanging off the far side of a horse, shooting a bow and arrow from under the horse’s neck, and when word of this got around to the second-unit ramrods, they took to calling him whenever they needed somebody to ride that gag. For the last few years he’d been working regularly for Republic and Monogram, the studios Ray Mullens had called “the big guns.”
    Ray had told me it wasn’t worth my time to try those outfits. The Monogram office was quite a few miles to the east along Sunset Boulevard, and Republic was a long streetcar ride up Cahuenga to the valley. “You’d waste half your day getting out to one of them and back, and I just wouldn’t do it if I was you. For them places, you got to know somebody or been around the business a while.”
    When I said this to Lee Waters, he nodded. “Ray Mullens told you that? Hell, I know Ray, I rode with him a time or two. Yeah, you got to fall off a few saddles for the eight-day outfits, pay your dues, so to speak, before them guys at Republic will give you a ride.” He leaned back and lit a ready-made cigarette and took a couple of drags before he said, “Ray got busted up, I heard, and had to quit the business.”
    â€œHe’s pretty stove in.”
    â€œWhere’s this list he give you?”
    I pulled out the list and handed it to him, and he smoked quietly as he studied it a couple of minutes. “A lot of these places been bought out or gone broke,”