Harry Vincent, detective, is sitting in a car parked just off Hollywood Boulevard and Cahuenga Avenue, keeping a grey frame building known as the Waterhole under surveillance. The Waterhole is a cowboy hangout famous in Hollywood, one part speakeasy, one part hiring hall. Inside the Waterhole, cowboys play poker and drink illegal whisky served in china teacups while they wait for picture directors short of extras to drop by and offer them work. Nobody but cowboys and directors ever frequent this establishment; tinhorns and curiosity-seekers are not made to feel welcome in the Waterhole. Even the cops give it a wide berth and pretend they don’t know porch-climber is sold there. Prohibition may be the law, but the police have decided meddling with cowboys and their simple pleasures is more trouble than it’s worth.
I’ve been sitting here for over two hours watching the entrance, hoping to spot Shorty McAdoo among the patrons who stagger in and out of the Waterhole on high-heeled riding boots, but no such luck. There’s no use putting it off any longer; the time has arrived to meddle with the cowboys.
After the hot California sunshine, the shuttered gloom of the Waterhole leaves me blind. I stand just inside the doorway, blinking, smelling the place – horse and sweat, tobacco and leather, the rank fumes of raw alcohol – before I see it. Then I begin to make out smoke, swirling like fog in the light of a few tin-shaded ceiling lamps, coiling and curdling greasy yellow under the naked bulbs like milk poured into vinegar. I decipher a crowd of stetsons, the tall hat-crowns wrapped in smoke, toadstools in a shifting ground mist. The toadstools tip back from cards and rose-patterned teacups containing illegal whisky. The glaring light skates down the faces like water down a cliff. They know I’m not a director, so I’m met with nothing but stony, inhospitable stares.
Directors of Westerns like flamboyance, it photographs well, which accounts for the way these boys are duded up. The bigger the hat, the gaudier the costume, the better the chance of being picked for a job. As I wend my way through the tables to the bar, I can sense their hostility; it’s a little bit like being dropped into a carnival where all the sideshow attractions resent you for looking at them. And it’s hard to ignore the extravagant costuming, screaming for attention the way it does. Beaded Indian vests and brass-studded leather gauntlets, big Mexican spurs with sunburst rowels, chaps of every style – bat-wing, stovepipe, angora – flashy shirts and towering hats, polka-dot bandannas the size of small tablecloths knotted around necks. Streetwalkers dolled up to catch the eye of men they despise.
I ask the man behind the bar to pour me what everybody else is having. Apparently everybody else is drinking flat, cold tea. I hold the teacup the way all the cowpokes do, not by the handle, but wrapped in my fist, and nonchalantly inquire of the bartender whether he’s seen Shorty lately.
“Shorty who?” he wants to know. “They’re all Shorty, or Slim, or Tex, or Yakima.”
“Shorty McAdoo.”
“I suppose you’re going to tell me you’re a friend of his.”
“No.”
“That’s good. Because if you did, you’d be a goddamn liar.”
“When’s the last time you saw him?”
“Four, five weeks ago. Maybe longer.”
“But generally he’s a regular?”
“Nothing regular about McAdoo. He comes. He goes. Some days he talks. Some days he don’t. Some days he drinks. Some days he don’t. I’d call him pretty unregular.”
“Where do you think I might locate him?”
The big man pushes himself away from the bar, putting distance between us, folds his arms protectively over a baywindow girded in a filthy apron. “What you want with McAdoo?”
“He’d thank you if you were to point me in his direction. There’s money in it for him.”
“He ain’t given to thanks.”
“Then maybe I could do it on his behalf,” I say, taking out the envelope of expense money I’ve been provided with, fishing a ten-spot from it which I lay on the counter. “Where’s he live?”
The bartender eyes the money, but he isn’t sure. “He ain’t going to thank me if you’re police.”
“It’s customary to hire cops with two good legs. You saw me cross the bar.”
“It ain’t a bar,” he says.
“All right, I’ll call it a tea shop if it makes you any happier.” It doesn’t seem to.
“This about that director?”
“What director?” The way I say it he knows I don’t have a clue what he is talking about.
“Shorty may be an old man,” he says. “But he’s a fucking grudgeful old man.”
“I don’t intend to give him any reason to hold a grudge. Against me or anybody else. I like to be everybody’s friend.”
He picks up the bill, crushing it in his fist as if he wants it out of sight before anybody notices. “This is all I know. Two months ago somebody said he was bunking at Mother Reardon’s.”
“Who’s Mother Reardon?”
“She runs a boarding house. She likes cowboys. Gives them a preference on rooms.”
“Address?”
The bartender takes a stub of pencil from behind his ear, scribbles on a torn envelope. “I ain’t promising nothing. It’s just what I heard – that he might be there. Cowboys don’t stop long in one place.”
“I understand,” I say.
He passes me the paper. “If you find him, don’t bother mentioning me. I don’t want no credit on this one.”
Mother Reardon’s is a shabby little bungalow not far from the empty lot on the corner of Sunset and Hollywood boulevards where Griffith constructed the gargantuan Babylon set for his film Intolerance. A hand-lettered sign on a piece of cardboard in the front window says, “Room and Board, Weeklie, Monthlie.” The old woman who answers my knock is thin as a straight razor and wears a black dress so shiny it looks wet.
“I’d like to speak to Mr. McAdoo,” I say.
“Not here.”
“When do you expect him back?”
“Don’t. Moved out.”
“Do you have a forwarding address for him?”
“Nothing to forward. He never got mail.”
I think for a moment, hand on the screen door. “He didn’t happen to skip out on the rent by any chance, did he?”
“What’s it to you?”
“I’m a business associate,” I tell her. “It’s possible I might be able to settle any debts. Collect any personal belongings he might have left behind.”
A shrewd, cold look passes over her face and then she dismisses the opportunity with a regretful, weary shake of the head. “No, he paid in full. Always did. He’s a punctual man.”
“Do you have a guess where he went to?”
“No.”
“Did he say anything? Give any reasons for leaving?”
Mother Reardon cocks her head, shoots me a look like a bright-eyed scrawny bird. “Business associate, you said?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“Then you ought to know him to be closed-mouthed. Never said much more to anybody than a word at the supper table. ‘Pass the butter.’ ‘Pass the beans.’ That’s all he ever asked from anybody, that they pass him what he paid for.”
“So he just up and left.”
“That’s right. Came out of his room one Sunday morning with his duffel bag packed and asked what he owed. Left without breakfast.”
“On the run?”
“No. He wasn’t in any particular hurry.”
“I talked to a man this afternoon. He mentioned something about a director. Did Mr. McAdoo ever say anything about a director?”
“I heard him say a thing or two about directors. None of it good. I feel the same way. Movie people don’t get into my house if I can help it. They’re all whores and thieves. Except for the cowboys. They may be rough but they’re honest.”
“Did he have any visitors?”
“A few young fellows came by. Just to sit with him. They admired Mr. McAdoo. Wanted to hear about the old days. Once I heard him tell them, ‘Don’t ask me about the old days. Let the dead bury the dead. I ain’t dead.’ ”
“What do you think he meant by that?”
“I don’t think he meant anything. It’s just something an old man might say.”
“Do you know the names of any of those young fellows?”
“No.”
“And you have no idea why he left?”
“Could be any number of reasons. Could be money, he hadn’t worked in some time. I’ll carry people I trust until they find work. Mr. McAdoo I trusted, but he never asked me to carry him.”
“You mentioned there might be a number of reasons. What other reasons?”
She considers a moment. “I came in the house the night before he moved out. I’d been visiting my sister. It was dark. Saturday night the boys are usually out. I walked in the living room and threw the light switch. Mr. McAdoo was sitting by the radio.” She paused. “He was crying. That’s the last thing I expected to see… Shorty McAdoo crying. He’s a tough old bird. I thought, Lord God, what’s this? His face was all wet with tears, he wiped them off with his hands. I said to him, ‘Mr. McAdoo, are you feeling poorly? Anything I can get you?’ He said, ‘No, the light coming on so sudden made my eyes burn.’ I said, ‘Well, let me get you a cool cloth for them.’ I went out and ran some water on a washcloth; I knew it wasn’t the light. He slipped out before I came back. Maybe he got bad news about family. Maybe he learned he ain’t well.”
“Anything else?”
She shook her head.
In the next few days I make no more progress. Groping for a lead, I go to the obvious places and ask the obvious questions. I spend an unfruitful afternoon loafing around the Sunset Barn, where a lot of the Western stars stable their horses. It’s a popular place for corral buzzards who perch on the rail fences hoping to get noticed by somebody important. For young men who hail from Montana, Arizona, Texas, and Oklahoma, the Sunset Barn is what the drugstore counter was later to become for the corn-fed beauties of the Midwest, the rosy-cheeked milkmaids of Minnesota; it’s the place to get discovered. They drawl and spit, do rope tricks, and show off their bandy-legged struts. I don’t find Shorty McAdoo here, nor do I discover any reliable information as to his whereabouts.
The next day I motor out to Mixville, the ranch where the great Western star Tom Mix produces his horse operas. The ranch foreman knows McAdoo but has little to say about him. He was there three months before doing a picture, but nobody has seen him since. “He’s a tumbleweed,” he says. “Blows in and blows out.” I leave my number and ask him to call if Shorty happens to blow in. The only profit in this wasted day is catching a glimpse of Tom Mix in a lurid purple tuxedo, matching purple stetson and boots, easing himself behind the wheel of his white Rolls-Royce with the fourteen-karat-gold initials TM on the doors. He puts the evening’s sunset to shame.
Each night I am required to call Fitzsimmons to make a report on my progress or lack of it. Fitzsimmons wants results and he wants them fast.
“You got expense money – spread it around.”
“If anybody knew anything, I would. But they don’t.”
“How do you know if they know anything until you offer a little fucking incentive? Get the rag out, Vincent. You’re getting paid a hundred and fifty dollars a week to get results. A hundred and fifty is a lot of money.”
“I know how much money it is, Mr. Fitzsimmons. And the rag was out the minute I signed on. There’s a lot of ground to cover and I assure you I’m covering it. It seems everybody has heard about Shorty McAdoo but nobody knows him. No wife, no kids, no friends. A fucking loner. He could be anyplace, doing anything. He might be dying in some flophouse. He might be making a movie. He might have fucked off to Kansas, or Montana, or Arkansas – anyplace they need somebody to serenade cows from a horse. I don’t know. But I’m looking.”
“Shit.”
“And what’s the point of phoning you every night and going through this song and dance? Half the time you’re not in. I call a dozen times; I’m up until midnight trying to get through to you. Why can’t I call only if I have news?”
“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. “Miles,” he says, “Miles. That’s right. I put breakfast out for Miles. On that table. By his bed. I didn’t forget.”
“Shorty wants his saddle back. He asked me to collect it for him.”
The kid resumes scooting his ass back and forth on the saddle-seat, quicker and quicker, he’s riding away. Then suddenly he freezes, both hands lock tight on the horn, knuckles white. It has caught up to him. “He don’t,” he says.
“Yes, he does.”
“He don’t want this here old saddle.”
“Right now, Wylie. He wants it now. Today.”
Wylie blinks so hard his eyelids blur.
“I’ve got a car parked outside. I’ll deliver you. You can hand it over to Shorty personally.”
“I ain’t even had a horse under it yet,” says the kid, jumping to his feet, pulling at the crotch of his trousers. “But if Shorty wants her back -”
“He does.”
When we get to the car I inquire of Wylie whether he drives. He nods solemnly.
“All right,” I say, “take the wheel. Working the clutch is hard on this bum leg of mine. I don’t drive unless I have to.”
Wylie takes it at face value. Behind the wheel he doesn’t head the car back to Los Angeles as I expect him to, but bucks it out into the wilderness which still clings to the skirts of Hollywood like a burr, racketing us down dirt roads which unfurl lazy pennants of dust under our tires. Most of the countryside we are crossing is unoccupied, state lease land and tracts in the hands of speculators hoping to cash in on the next boom in real estate. But it isn’t entirely deserted. Here and there I manage to spot some small frame farmhouse; occasionally we encounter a flivver or farm wagon creaking along the road. Whenever Wylie spies another vehicle, even a couple of hundred yards up the road, he immediately slows to a turtle’s crawl and surrenders so much of the thoroughfare he nearly has us in the ditch. When the approaching vehicle has gone safely by he turns a sly look of pride on me. And I smile back my approval of his skilful, life-preserving manoeuvre and wonder how much further we have to go to find McAdoo and whether Wylie has any notion whatsoever of where he is taking us.
Then, all at once, he is talking again, rattling away very fast, something about Running W’s and his twin brother, Miles. A Running W is how horses were thrown in movie action scenes before the SPCA got a stop put to it. A Running W worked like this. A post called a deadman was driven solidly into the ground, out of camera view. Two lines of piano wire were run from the horse’s fetlocks up its front legs and back underneath the girth of the saddle; the remaining several hundred feet of piano wire were coiled beside the deadman and the ends of the coils snubbed tight to the post buried in the ground. The stunt man’s job was to ride a horse at a hard gallop until it ran out of line and the wire yanked its legs out from under it, crashing them to the ground. The Running W killed a lot of horses, hurt and crippled a lot of men. It was not popular with cowhands.
“Miles and me and Shorty we were working for Mr. Coster in the Valley. It’s how it happened. The Running W done it. He was bad, Mr. Coster.”
“Whoa,” I say, feigning ignorance. “Who’s Coster?” Any more information I can collect may prove useful.
“The director, the director!” he exclaims excitedly. “All day long he wants this shot. ‘Spectacular!’ he keeps hollering. ‘I want spectacular! Give me some goddamn spectacular!’ But it ain’t the stunt men’s fault. They tried, didn’t they? It’s the horses, that’s what Shorty said. It’s the horses. Because they all been throwed lots of times. And they know what’s coming soon as them pianer wires get put on their legs. They know. Shorty says they won’t run flat out because them horses know they going to get took down hard at the end. So they don’t gallop terrible hard. They’re smart horses. They been hurt before, them horses. They don’t want to get hurt again, do they?”
“Makes sense to me.”
“So Mr. Coster keeps trying. One horse and then he tries another horse and another horse and another horse. But Mr. Coster ain’t satisfied. He wants spectacular! And the stunt fellers keep going down with the horses and rattling off the hard pan like peas on the bottom of the bucket.
“So Mr. Coster gets the horse wrangler to bring out this big old black gelding – they call him Locomotive – and Locomotive he’s never been throwed with pianer wires before so he don’t know it and he’s a terrible big old horse, a croppy Shorty called him. Know what’s a croppy?”
I don’t.
“Because somebody cut his ears to warn everybody he’s a mean horse, a bad horse, fellers do that, Shorty says, crop their ears. And the stunt fellers they don’t want to ride no horse never been throwed – on top of he’s mean. And Mr. Coster takes to cursing them all for cowards, gutless wonders he calls them, and all that he calls them, and so they all quit on Mr. Coster.
“So he says to the rest of us fellers, extras and all, he says, ‘Who’s going to show he’s a man? Who’s going to ride old Locomotive double the wages?’ and I was going to, but Shorty says to me, ‘Don’t you ride that crop-eared cunt, he’s a killer. Stay off him, Wylie.’ And I done it, I stayed off that Locomotive but my brother didn’t. He rode him.”
“Why did he ride him, Wylie?”
“Because Mr. Coster says if he does, next picture he’ll give him a part, Miles. And Shorty, he warned Miles, too. But Miles ain’t too smart, Miles ain’t, and he believed Mr. Coster and disbelieved Shorty. But Shorty knows how Miles is so he helped him anyways, see? Shorty, he thought her all out. He paced off just as far as the pianer wire was going to run out on Locomotive and he marked the spot with a hankerchief, pegged it on the ground and he says to Miles, he says to Miles, he says, ‘Miles, when you see that there white hankerchief coming up on you, you kick your feet out of them stirrups because when that fucking widow-maker runs out of wire he’ll go ass over tea-kettle and when he does you ain’t going to want to get hung up in them stirrups – you going to want to get throwed clear. Throwed clear, understand? Otherwise, you going to smash up bad, like an apple crate. You understand me, Miles? You get your boots out of them stirrups the minute you see that white hankerchief.’ ”
“Let me guess,” I say. “Miles didn’t.”
Wylie drops his voice to a whisper. “No, he didn’t. Miles was a-spurring Locomotive flat out, they was both going full chisel, and Miles was a-watching for that hankerchief and a-watching for that hankerchief and a-watching for that hankerchief, and then Locomotive wrecked, done a somersault and Miles was planted in them stirrups and Locomotive landed on him flush. He hurt him deep down inside, and Miles he been shitting bloody stool ever since and he don’t walk too good.”
“So why did he miss the handkerchief?”
“Mr. Coster sent the cameraman to go pick up that hankerchief when nobody was looking. So’s he’d get spectacular. Wasn’t no hankerchief to see. That’s how it was done. I was going to go at him right then and there. I wanted to, but Shorty said no. Shorty said, ‘Don’t get mad, get even.’ That’s what Shorty said.”
“And I hear Shorty did get even. With a shoeing hammer.”
“Croppy,” says Wylie, twisting nervously in his seat. “ ‘Mark a bad horse,’ says Shorty. ‘So’s everybody knows him.’ ” Suddenly, Wylie hits the brakes. I grab the dash and brace myself. The scenery jolts, the sky slants as the car slithers and shimmies on locked wheels through the soft dirt, slides to a stop. A breath of dust sighs into the car, chalks my teeth. A few yards behind and to the right of us a lane runs off the road past a dilapidated mailbox on a drunken post, crosses a skimpy brown pasture scribbled with sage and greasewood, edges up a low knoll and disappears out of sight behind it.
“Almost missed Shorty’s turn-off,” he announces.
I hold Wylie by the arm, follow the lane with my eyes. At the end of it there must be a house.
“Wylie,” I say, “I’ve got something to confess to you.”
I begin by telling him how proud I am of him, how proud Shorty is of him. I say that I hadn’t been able to believe anybody in his circumstances would be so incorruptible. I tell him I had argued with Shorty that he would never see his saddle again, that Wylie would sell or pawn it before you could say Mother Mabel. But Shorty had believed in him. Shorty had said that Wylie was a true-blue man to ride the river with. And Wylie had proved it was true. He had kept good care of Shorty’s property, hadn’t hesitated for a second when asked to return it, no matter how badly he needed it for his work.
“Let me shake your hand.” I shake it. Then I take twenty dollars out of the expense-money envelope. “For your time, Wylie. I was going to prove a point to Shorty, but the point got proved to me. I got to eat humble pie.”
“Shorty don’t want his saddle?”
“No,” I say, “not just at present.” I pause. “Your luck seems to be changing, Wylie. You keep rubbing luck off of McAdoo’s rig, you may end up the next William S. Hart. Now let me drive. Let me chauffeur one fine man wherever he wants to go.”
“We ain’t going to see Shorty?”
“Not today. He’s busy.”
“Shorty don’t borrow his saddle to just anybody!” Wylie crows triumphantly, as I turn the car around in the middle of the road. “Not everybody gets to ride Shorty’s saddle!”
I offer to take him home but he prefers to be dropped off outside of Universal. It doesn’t make any sense because most of the day’s shooting will be well under way and none starting. But perhaps he believes me, believes his luck has turned. I drop him off outside the pen, deserted at this hour, a wind scrubbing dust into the air off the beaten earth, scurrying bits of candy wrapper along and sticking them to the wire fence. I watch as he stumps toward it, Shorty’s magic humped clumsily on his shoulder, stirrup leathers flapping, stirrups bouncing, his stupid faith that the old man’s luck has the power to work a miracle in his own life intact.