waited. Nothing come. I rolled over, staggered to my feet. I’d have swore there weren’t another soul in a hundred miles. Indians was gone, like smoke in a wind.
“Couple of hours I walked in circles looking for my pistol. Where there’s three Indians could be more. Found my hat. Found a dead prairie chicken laying where the hail had killed it. Sight of that, hunger came over me so fierce I pulled the feathers off it, ate it raw where I stood. It’d been one long stretch since I’d took food.
“Found my hat, found the chicken, but never found the Colt. When candle-lighting come, I turned south and tramped for the border. Walked like a dead man. Walked all night. Sun rose and I found the third thing, my horse stepping south too.”
There is a long pause. I hear him suck at the reefer but no light shows; it has gone out in his fingers. I lift my pencil from the paper but he starts to talk again, his voice no longer deliberate and hard, but mournful and echoing like it had begun.
“Them old-timey, genuine Indians used to go off solitary in the wilderness so’s to find their creature spirit,” he says. “That’s where they learned it, in the wilderness.”
I ask what he means by creature spirit.
“Creature spirit,” he reiterates. “Spirit they shared with some creature – grizzly spirit, elk spirit, coyote spirit, crow spirit. Hardship and the country taught them it.” There is another pause. “What you make of mine?”
“Your what?”
“You ain’t been listening, have you?” he says.
The next morning I type up a transcription of the interviews. In the end, I send only the last one because it has about it the ring of naked honesty that Chance is after. I believe it marks progress, shows how McAdoo, under my prompting, is slowly moving nearer and nearer to what we are seeking – the truth.
That night as I am getting ready for bed a knock comes at my door. There is a note from Chance by messenger. The note reads:
Dear Harry,
A picture about a lunatic lost on the plains is not what I had in mind. Press him about Indian wars.
Sincerely,
Damon Ira Chance
16
Chance’s curtly dismissive note about the McAdoo interview recounting the thunderstorm on the prairie and his playing pig for the Indians leaves me feeling idiotic and abashed. It worries me even more when the next week’s worth of transcripts is passed over unacknowledged and uncommented upon. I am not pleasing Mr. Chance.
I berate myself for my stupid assumption that words on the page can convey what I have learned about McAdoo. Which is that he has something he needs to tell. What this is I can’t say, but I sense the weight, the pressure of it behind everything he said that night. Words on the page are not capable of communicating this. It had been the burial, the drawing in of night, the incessant wind, the way McAdoo held himself in the chair, the flick of the boot slamming closed the stove door, the sudden darkness, the voice playing scales in the darkness, beginning flat as dictation, then growing troubled, self-questioning. All this I suddenly see as more important than what he said; the
That’s why what I’ve given him seems to Chance inadequate, pedestrian, a labour of diligence rather than imagination. But I am not just an unimaginative stenographer. I am not. To use Chance’s favourite word, I have intuited whatever is to be got from McAdoo will not be got for the asking, simply, easily. It will have to be won.
Shorty McAdoo is no braggart. Chance could find a hundred cowboys here in Hollywood who, in a few hours, could tell enough colourful lies to fill any number of movie screens. But Chance’s ambition is to go beyond entertaining lies, to make a great film, a truthful film. That is what he has set his heart on. And I want to tell him only delicacy and patience will extract the truth from Shorty McAdoo.
I have my pride. It galls me that Chance might have written me off, that I might be underestimated, unappreciated, misunderstood. I need to meet with him face to face and explain all this, or at least talk to him on the telephone.
The problem is I can’t reach him. When I phone his office, his receptionist says he is busy and can’t speak to me. I’m beginning to suspect Fitzsimmons has given her orders not to let me talk to Chance.
I need some kind of breakthrough with McAdoo. So I buy the pistol.
“What’s this?” demands McAdoo.
“What does it look like?” He refers to the revolver I bought in a pawnshop in L.A., hoping it would be useful in coaxing a revelation out of him.
“That ain’t what I mean. What I mean is, why you showing it to me?”
“I want you to teach me to shoot.”
“Put that away before somebody gets hurt.”
“Come on, Shorty. You know about guns. That first day I came here, the day you went back to the bunkhouse and put your jacket on – I saw the pistol in the waistband of your pants.”
“You wouldn’t have, I didn’t intend you to. And in case you didn’t I showed it to you. Remember?”
“So it was a warning?”
“I’m a careful man.”
“Teach me to shoot.”
“I ain’t a shootist. Never was.”
“You said you intended to knock those Indians off their ponies. What did that mean?”
“Means I was in fear of my life.”
“Sounds like fancy shooting. Sounds like a shootist to me.”
“That close, you just point and squeeze. It’s much of a muchness to pointing your finger.” He points his finger at me by way of illustration.
I proffer the revolver to him. “Show me.” For a moment, I’m sure he is going to refuse point-blank, but he takes it, weighs it in his hand. Then he sweeps the muzzle up and down in broad strokes, like a painter running a brush up and down a picket fence, smooth and calculated. Repeating this action several times he says, “Wait here,” and strides off. It is obvious from the length, the deliberation of each step that he is pacing off a distance. I begin to count to myself, seven, eight, nine. McAdoo halts, swings back to me. “Don’t you move now, Harry,” he warns me.
The sharp, flat crack, the spray of dirt pattering on my right pant leg seem simultaneous with the movement of the pistol barrel. Again, the glint of the barrel travelling through the hot sunshine, the loud pistol report, the eruption of dirt by my left boot.
I stand locked to the spot, a weightless sensation in my bowels, my head dizzily adrift. His voice snaps me back into focus. “Just point and squeeze,” he says mildly. “Point and squeeze.”
“For the love of Christ, Shorty!”
McAdoo casually ambles back to me, the pistol dangling loosely by his side. My eyes don’t leave the revolver until we are face to face again. “There’s your lesson,” he says, holding up the gun innocent in the palm of his hand. “Take it.”
I take it because the weapon seems safer in my hands than in his. My tongue is cracked leather in a dry wool sock.
“I ain’t no shootist,” he says quietly, “but here’s a fact. A carrying piece has got but one business. That business is man-killing.”
I am having trouble with my tongue, it feels numb.
“This gun ain’t about fancy shooting, it’s about stomach. This gun ain’t got but one earthly use but dropping a man. A man who can see your face and whose face you can see. It ain’t no play toy. I knew boys could shoot the
