Falling From Horses by Molly Gloss Page B

he said.
    â€œThat’s what I’m finding. I guess Ray didn’t know it.”
    Lee took a pencil out of his shirt pocket and wrote down a couple of places he knew about that had their offices in some other part of town. “I ain’t sure of the addresses, but I’m writing down the cross streets as I remember, and you can ask around and maybe get yourself there.”
    Then he said, “You sleeping in the park?” He meant Griffith Park, although I didn’t know it at the time. “I slept a few nights up there myself when I first come to town. At least you’re out of some heat, being under the trees.” It didn’t occur to me at the time, but now that I’m thinking back I imagine he meant this as mild advice. He said it as if money wasn’t the consideration at all, but he must have known I was flat broke—that if I wasn’t already sleeping behind trash cans in an alley I would be before long.
    The last year or so following rodeos and picking up itinerant ranch work, there’d been plenty of days and weeks when I had been stone broke, but I could almost always count on some winner buying me a sandwich and some rancher who didn’t care if I bedded down in an empty stall in his dry barn. Here in Hollywood it was just starting to sink in that this was a different sort of place.
    I nodded. “Well, the room I had last night was hot as hell. Maybe I’ll try sleeping out.”
    I asked him where the park was, and he told me the bus that would get me up there. Then he took back Ray’s list and wrote down where to find Diamond Barns, which he said was a stable that supplied horses to the cowboy movies. “It’s right up there in the park, so if you’re already in the neighborhood you might see if Harold is doing any hiring. That’s if you’re not too high-hat to go to work pitching hay and mucking out stalls. Wrangling might get you started in the business anyway, get you onto some movie sets where you might meet a few ramrods, get yourself an opening to ride.”
    We walked out of the cafe together and shook hands, and he said, “See you around,” before climbing into a Model A and driving off. I never did see him again, though at the end of 1942 I happened to catch a glimpse of him in a motion picture. That was after I had joined the army and finished up training and was waiting to ship out from New York. It was all over the papers that the cowboy star Buck Jones had died a hero trying to save people in the Cocoanut Grove fire, and a bunch of men from the barracks decided to go see a Buck Jones picture playing at a theater in town. I had stayed away from westerns after leaving Hollywood, but Buck was one of the cowboy stars I’d admired when I was working there; before getting started in the movies he’d been a horse breaker for the French during the Great War, and I knew he was a real horseman. So I went along with the others to see his last picture. When Lee Waters came up on the screen, I recognized him right away. He had a small speaking part, delivering his lines in that clipped “Injun” style that the movies always used back then—not a bit like when I’d met him at Gower Gulch. I waited through the credits at the end to see if I could spot him. Well, there wasn’t any Lee Waters, just “Injun Lee.”
    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