Falling From Horses Read Online Free PDF Page A

and we piled them at the verge of the highway. It was a warm night. Some people pulled blankets from their luggage and spread them on the grass and sat or lay down to wait. Lily was just sitting on the dry ground. Finally I went over and sat down with her. The flares were still burning, and the night was saturated with a red glare.
    She was holding a little spiral-bound notebook in her lap and a pencil, and every so often she wrote something on the page. I didn’t say anything to her about the dead man, not directly, but I said, “I guess you’re writing about the wreck. Making it into a story,” and I know there was some judgment in it.
    She gave me a look—that deep crease just above the bridge of her nose that I later came to know as one of her regular features and had mostly to do with being dead tired of idiots. It’s pretty much the same look she’s giving Roy Cohn in the photograph that made the cover of
Time.
“No, I’m not writing about the wreck, but someday I might. Writers are always using their lives, and if you were a writer you’d probably be writing about rodeo.”
    When we had first started talking, she had been interested in hearing about rodeo. I had told her the rules of calf roping and bronc riding, the way a ride was judged and so forth, and then I’d told her every damn story I could remember, stories about guys getting busted up or stomped on but riding anyway, and haywire bulls breaking loose from the chutes, chased down by a clown on foot, and man-killing horses ridden until they gave up bucking, lay down, and died. I had seen a couple of these things myself, but most were stories I’d heard from other men. I was pretty sure some of them were true, but a lot of them were lies and boasts, which I also knew, and some I had only seen in movies; plus I let her think some of them had happened to me.
    If she planned to write about the wreck and the salesman lying dead over there in the high grass, at least it wouldn’t be made up: that’s what I figured she was saying to me. And this might be a good place to point out that Lily was always smarter than me, more able to see the truth in things, and the untruth.
    I don’t think we ever talked about the wreck later on, at least not in those months while we were both living in California. But there’s a bus wreck in one of her films, it might be
San Luis Obispo
, and after my wife and I went to see it, I wrote to Lily that it had been quite a few years since I had thought about our bus running off the road outside Bakersfield and that her movie had brought it back.
    She wrote that she hadn’t ever been in a wreck before that one. “And I hadn’t ever seen anybody dead—I don’t think death was real to me back then. I had a terrible wish to see what a dead man looked like, but I was afraid to walk over there and see him. You know how it is: I had to leave all that alone for a while before I could put it in my writing.”
    By then we had written back and forth many times about art, about not making demands on your art but just humbly inviting it in, and I knew this was what she meant.
    I lay back on the grass with my head pillowed on my bent arms and studied the night sky as if I didn’t give a damn whether Lily talked to me or not, and she went back to writing in her notebook. The grass had a dry late-summer smell, like it hadn’t rained in weeks, so I don’t know why, lying there, I suddenly remembered a time in January or February, right after we buried Mary Claudine, when I went out after dark and lay down on the frostbitten grass in the pasture behind the house. It was cold as hell, but I stayed out there half the night. The stars were thick in a clear sky, so bright and so numerous I couldn’t make out the constellations. The slow turn of the earth is what moves the stars in their slow spiral—I knew this—and I tried to feel it, that slow