“Mr. Chance wants it that way. That’s why.”
“Then stop chewing my ass. I’m doing my best.”
“You think your ass been chewed, Vincent? Your ass ain’t even been nipped.”
The next ten days I spend bouncing back and forth over dirt roads in the San Fernando Valley, the Mojave Desert, the sierras of Lone Pine, all the favoured locations for dusters. I locate fourteen or fifteen crews employing hundreds of cowboys. I had no idea there were so many cowpokes in Hollywood, but talking to them I learn they’ve been drifting into town for ten years, jumping off cattle-cars in the Los Angeles stockyards, going AWOL from Wild West shows and rodeos, riding in from the small family spreads which dot southern California. They’re all refugees from a vanishing West. The cessation of hostilities in Europe has meant the end of the beef boom, the big spreads in Wyoming and Montana are cutting back herds and cutting loose wranglers. Cowhands wander into Hollywood, chasing rumours that five dollars a day can be earned as stunt men and extras in the Western pictures which Broncho Billy, William S. Hart, Tom Mix, and Art Accord have made famous. Maybe they’ll get famous, too. Or at least passably prosperous on five dollars a day, boxed lunch provided. The only problem is there’s too many cowboys and too few jobs.
A lot of these cowpokes won’t give me the time of day when I mention Shorty McAdoo, maybe because I look like a subpoena-server. Sometimes the young ones, the green boys, talk, but they usually know nothing about McAdoo. To them he’s as much a rumour as he is to me. They don’t know where he lives, who his friends are. Slowly, it dawns on me that I’m chasing a reputation as much as a man.
On the weekend I drive out to the cowboy star Hoot Gibson’s Saugus Ranch to take in the rodeo he throws there every Sunday, sit parked on hot bleacher-boards under a brassy, breathless sky, scanning the crowd for the grizzled, haunted face I’d seen projected on Chance’s screen. I don’t find it. Delayed by a flat tire, I get back to my apartment late that night, exhausted, my leg throbbing like a rotten tooth. I’m in no mood to phone Fitz. He can wait until morning. Or maybe even until tomorrow night. Fuck him.
I climb into bed and no sooner does my head drop on the pillow than the phone rings. It goes on and on, drilling into my head, then stops. Fifteen minutes later, it starts again. I know who it is. I get up and take the receiver off the hook. On my way back to the bedroom I can still hear the tinny sound of Fitzsimmons, shouting down the line.
At dawn, I drive out to Universal City where more white hats ride the range than on any other spread in southern California. The program feature is king at Universal and the king of program features is the Western, cheap to make and profitable. Uncle Carl Laemmle has many of the biggest Western stars under contract – Harry Carey, Neal Hart, Jack Hoxie, Art Accord, Peter Morrison, Hoot Gibson. Universal City is, as its name implies, a metropolis of sorts, a two-hundred-and-thirty-acre hive with its own police, fire department, street-cleaning crews, shops, forges, mills, prop departments, stages, outdoor sets, and a variety of scenery made to order for Westerns, and Uncle Carl is mayor of it all. This Western factory also has its own herds of cattle, horses, and mules, grazing a huge pasture, ready to serve at a moment’s notice. But it also requires a reliable reserve of two-legged stock to work as doubles, stunt men, and extras. Uncle Carl’s solution to the problem of ready supply is to construct a big hiring tank fenced with wire to hold cowboys corralled inside the studio gates and out of mischief until they are needed. Anybody looking for employment is penned there until Universal directors give him the nod and cut him out of the remuda for a day’s shooting.
I get to Universal City just as the sun is beginning to spread itself on the north Hollywood hills, and already the pen holds forty hands. The scene reminds me of a prison camp, wire and posts, boot-trampled dirt, faces stamped with jailhouse emotions – boredom, apathy, bravado, sullen viciousness. I let myself in at the gate and begin to wander among the men. A small group throws craps on a horse blanket, two play mumblety-peg with a sheath knife big enough to chop sugar cane with; others doze propped up against fenceposts, big hats tipped down to shield eyes from the rising sun. A few stand in silent communion, rolling cigarettes; a number clutch the fence-wires, eyes fixed on the brightening hills as if anticipating the cavalry will ride down from the heights and rescue them.
I drift along, nodding and smiling, trying to strike up a conversation. As the sun warms and starts to take the chill off them, the extras get marginally friendlier and unbend a little, accept cigarettes, pass commonplace remarks about the weather and the promise of the day.
I keep doggedly nudging conversation in the direction of Shorty McAdoo. Finally, in one knot of middle-aged wranglers I manage to awaken some response. One of them claims he’s heard Shorty pulled stakes and headed for Bakersfield. Wichita, says another. Somebody contradicts both of them. No, McAdoo’s still in the Los Angeles area. The only thing they can agree on is that nobody has seen him on any set or location for at least a month.
“He ain’t working because of that deal with Coster,” says a fellow wearing a black hat with a silver-dollar hatband.
None of the others seem to know what the deal with Coster is.
“Look at this goddamn place. Not a stamp’s worth of shade. Not a dipper of water to be had. Old Shorty had something to say to these high-handed bastards,” he mutters. “Said her with a hammer.” He taps his front teeth with a finger. “Knocked a few spokes out of Coster’s wheel with a shoeing hammer, is what I heard.”
“Well, if that’s the case,” says a fellow in a Canadian stetson, “Coster’ll be able to suck dick all the better for it.”
They all laugh.
“Story is it had something to do with simple Wylie’s brother,” says the silver-dollar hatband, tilting his head in a meaningful way toward a solitary kid sitting on a saddle.
“Wylie’s twin, you mean,” a tall, lanky man corrects him.
“Go on, they don’t look no way similar.”
“They ain’t identical. But maybe they split a brain between the two of them because one’s every bit as identical dumb as the other,” asserts the tall man.
Everybody turns to look at the kid.
He has been riding that saddle since I arrived, scrunched down on it with his knees up around his ears, secluded in a lonesome corner of the coop. The stray-dog air of him, the wistful, sad-assed, clinging-vine look of him had kept me clear. He looks like the sort of kid that a kind word will stick to you like flypaper.
“Yes,” concedes the tall man, “could be it had something to do with Wylie’s brother. Because Wylie’s setting on Shorty’s saddle over there. I recognized it right away. Shorty hung a pair of army stirrups on his rig. Steel stirrups. I recognized a weld on the off-stirrup. Shorty had his off-stirrup mended once.”
Before he finishes, I am crossing the tank, hasty and awkward, stiff leg swinging like a gate on rusty hinges. When Wylie spots me coming, he pulls off his hat and crushes it to his chest just the way cowboys do in the movies when the time rolls around to propose to their sweethearts. His jug-handle ears, horse-clipper haircut with haystack top and white-wall temples cut a sorry sight.
“Morning,” I greet him.
When he cranes back his neck to peer up at me, his mouth falls open like a nestling begging for the worm. Everything about him is a plea, the timid eyes, the bottom lip chapped raw from hours of anxious sucking. He clamps down on it now, begins to nurse, the corners of his mouth collapsing in little tugs.
“Morning,” I repeat. Just a little louder.
He leaves off sucking; the eyes scoot from side to side, avoiding mine. “Yessir,” he says.
I poke the saddle with my toe. “I understand the owner of this saddle is Shorty McAdoo.”
His panicked eyes cut back and forth between the saddle and my face. He talks very quickly, as if what he’s saying is a recitation committed to memory. “He borrowed me this saddle. Them picture men’ll hire you sooner you got a saddle your own self. And Miles he got busted up and that was bad and I had to hock my own saddle and so old Shorty he says to me, ‘Wylie, you ride this rig of mine for a while. Might turn your luck. It always done right by me,’ that’s what Shorty said and I been riding her. Rub that luck off her. That’s what I been doing, riding her -” He breaks off, looks up to check if I understand, if all is clear.
“But it was only a loan,” I say.
He disregards me, plunges on. “Shorty said to me, he said, ‘Wylie, you look after this here saddle of mine.’ That’s what he said, Shorty said.” He commences to rock back and forth on the saddle-seat. “Shorty said that. I’m a-watching it for him. I’m a-watching it like a son of a bitch.”
“Until he wants it back.”
“He borrowed me his own saddle, so’s I could get work,” Wylie repeats stubbornly. “I found twenty dollar in the saddlebags. I know who put it there. Twenty dollars.” The skittish eyes zoom off; he’s thought of something else.
