Falling From Horses Read Online Free PDF Page B

she said, “There are more stars here than in Seattle.”
    â€œThat’s because cities have all those street lights and neon signs that shine too much light back up in the sky. They wash out the stars.”
    â€œI know that,” she said. “You don’t have to keep on acting so smart.” But she didn’t sound annoyed.
    In
Hard Light
, one of the movies she wrote for RKO, there’s a boy who escapes the fighting and shouting in his house—his father’s a falling-down drunk—by going out at night to study the constellations. Lily called me up a few weeks before that picture came out to let me know that the boy in
Hard Light
wasn’t me. She didn’t need to say so. By then I knew that it was Lily who had grown up with family battles—not brutal abuse but slamming doors, shouting; both of her parents drank. She had escaped from it into books and writing and movies.
    â€œI’m so tired,” she said after a while. “I haven’t really been able to sleep in the bus.” Well, she had been sleeping, but I didn’t call her on it.
    I said, “You could try to sleep right now. That other bus might be a while.”
    After a minute she said, “I guess I’m too keyed up.”
    We fell silent. Then she said, “When you get down there, have you got a place to stay?”
    I said, “I figure I’ll just get a hotel.” I didn’t tell her I only had enough money for a couple of nights in a flophouse.
    â€œYou should look for a place around Gower Street,” she said. “A lot of the cowboy pictures are made close to there.” She knew quite a lot about Hollywood, which she was glad to tell me without prompting, and I was glad to learn from her. She’d learned most of it by close study of
Photoplay
and
Modern Screen
, but I can’t fault her for it, since most of what she told me turned out to be true.
    When I asked her where she’d be staying, she told me she had a room waiting for her at the Hollywood Studio Club, which was a kind of sorority for women who worked in the movie business, not only the actresses and starlets but the secretaries and office girls. She would be sharing with the other girls who worked in the agent’s office, a three-bed dormitory room that had a sink and two closets. One of the secretaries had married and moved over to Santa Monica with her husband, and Lily would be taking that girl’s place.
    â€œI hope I can sleep when I get there,” she said, “but it’ll still be the middle of the day, so I guess I’ll have to wait until the other girls are ready for bed.”
    It began to gray toward daylight. Some black-and-white dairy cows were standing in the field beyond the wrecked fence, and the state policeman was standing near the dead man as if to keep the cows from walking on the body. I could have told him no cow would ever walk on a human body, living or dead. No horse, either. What I figured he should be worried about was the hole in the fence. If somebody didn’t patch it up, those cows would be through it and walking up the highway just as soon as we were gone.
    Finally the other bus came from the south, and we watched it jockey back and forth in the road to get turned around and headed back toward Bakersfield. It was still running headlights, which swept across the car lying upside down with its tires in the air and the trooper standing near the dead man. Down there in the dry weeds you could just see a bit of the blanket covering the body.
    We shuffled onto the bus without speaking and rode into Bakersfield in silence. At the station a smiling man stepped onto the bus and told us, “Breakfast is on the Greyhound Lines, folks. Step right next door to Betty’s Biscuits, they’re expecting you all, and the griddle is hot.”
    So I had a stack of hotcakes courtesy of Greyhound, and Lily ate up every bit of her eggs and sausage—not a word