Guy Vanderhaeghe - The Englishman’s Boy

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.