Falling From Horses by Molly Gloss Read Free Book Online Page A

“I’ll get off at Vine. They said the club is only a couple of blocks from there.” We were the only ones waiting, but there were people on the sidewalks, men and women going in and out of grocery stores and laundries. It looked safe enough, now that we were away from all those bars, but at this moment I was the only person Lily knew in Los Angeles, which you will notice works the other way too. So I said, “Listen, I don’t know if you should be walking by yourself. Maybe I should walk you to that place where you’re staying.”
    She tipped her head back to look at me. “It’s only a couple of blocks from the streetcar stop. Those other girls walk it all the time.” She looked up the street. “But thanks anyway.”
    I might have tried harder to persuade her—maybe she would have been persuadable—but when we saw the streetcar coming she picked up her suitcase and said, “Well, good luck,” and reached out to shake my hand.
    â€œSame to you,” I said. We were suddenly a little shy, both of us, and that’s what comes back to me—our sudden shyness with each other and how neither of us said anything about staying in touch.

5
    I’VE HAD A FEW BROKEN BONES over the years, from horses that fell on me and horses I fell from, one of which you’ll hear about, and at the tail end of the war I broke my leg when a transport truck I was riding in was hit by a mortar, which is not part of this book except to say that my body gave me enough trouble in later years that I had to give up riding horses by the time I turned fifty. There’s something to be said for ruminating with an animal eye to eye, which I’ve done more of since I quit climbing onto a saddle, but here I am now, getting up from this desk every half hour to keep my hips from stiffening, and every little while limping into the kitchen to pop an ibuprofen. If I had known I would live to be this old and still be using the original equipment, I wonder if I’d have steered clear of stunt riding when I was nineteen and twenty years old.
    Although I guess I already know the answer, because I sure as hell had plenty of warning.
    The Saint James turned out to be crowded with men trying to break into the movies and scraping by on what they could make as extras. A few others were retired bit players, old men who had always put their earnings in a sock instead of a bank, and after the Crash still had enough to cover the rent in a cheap place like the Saint James. One of the old guys I talked with that day was Ray Mullens. He was not anybody whose name you would recognize, but he’d ridden in a bunch of cowboy movies, mostly in the silents, and fallen off plenty of horses before he got too stove up to keep doing it.
    Now that I’m looking back, I have to wonder why Ray didn’t try to talk me out of getting into the business. He’d shattered both his ankles when a horse fell over backward on top of him, and when I met him he was gimping along with a pained grimace, it hurt him that much to walk. But he was happy to talk to me about every gag he’d ever done, some so dangerous and wild he might have been making them up. He bragged about every wreck too—he’d broken an arm and four ribs, had his lung punctured, two or three concussions. When he broke his ankles, he was on location up at Lone Pine and had to be driven a hundred miles to a hospital, loaded into the back of a station wagon. Somebody gave him a quart of Old Crow to kill the pain—he was grinning as he told me this. Now he was coming up on seventy years old and he couldn’t stand straight to piss, but he was tickled pink to send me down that same road. And the truth is, I had come to Hollywood looking for some danger, so I was happy to follow his lead. You could get busted up doing almost anything on a ranch—hell, you could die while you were rounding up cattle. But I had the idea that if I was