THE TRAIL STRETCHED away ahead of them along the flank of the ridge, a ribbon of red dust winding north among the silver green sage. There were boulders on either side, one as big as a house that jutted out over the trail so that they had to duck down beside the necks of their horses. On the slope below them was a grove of oaks whose leaves rustled and clattered in the breeze and through them every so often came a glimpse of brighter green where the valley bottomed out by a creek and turned to grass.
It was the end of May and the weather was getting a little hotter every day. Not that there really was what you'd call weather in LA. It was always sunny and warm. The only thing you ever heard anybody complain about was the smog.
Tommy was leading on Chester, the sure-footed little paint pony he always rode. Cal was behind him on Amigo. Tommy liked it when it was just the two of them though it was fun too when Diane rode with them, which she had been doing a lot lately. She had to know how to ride for the movie she and Ray were going to be doing and, thanks to Cal, she was already pretty good. She would have come with them this afternoon but the studio had called her in for some last-minute hair and makeup tests.
Just three more days of school and at the weekend they would be heading off to Arizona to start filming. Tommy was so excited that for the past few days he'd hardly been able to think or talk about anything else. For two whole months they were going to be on location. Ray said they'd be able to go and see Monument Valley where all those great John Ford movies were made. And Cal was coming too, to look after the horses and be Ray's stunt double.
Suddenly Chester skittered sideways and reared and Tommy just managed to grab the horn of the saddle to save himself from falling off. Cal rode up alongside and soon had the horse calm again.
"Why did he do that?"
Cal pointed up the slope and Tommy saw a black-and-white snake slithering into a crack in the rocks.
"Wow, is it a rattlesnake?"
"California king snake."
"Are they poisonous?"
"No. The rattler's the only poisonous one around here. Hey, Tom, you did well to stay on board then."
Tommy liked the way he called him Tom. In fact he liked everything about Cal. He knew the name of every plant and tree and bird and animal. Tommy pestered him with questions and tried not to forget anything he was told. He knew that in California there were seven different kinds of hawk, eight kinds of lizard and eighteen kinds of snake, though he'd seen hardly any of them. He only wished he hadn't boasted, on one of their early rides together, about shooting birds with his BB gun in Ray's garden. Cal had frowned.
"Do you kill them to eat them?"
"Of course not."
"So why would you want to kill them?"
Tommy hadn't known what to say. He nearly blamed it all on Ray who'd shown him how to do it. But that wouldn't have been fair because the truth was he enjoyed doing it, enjoyed the stalking and being a good-enough shot to hit them. Wally Freeman liked doing it too when he came back to the house after school sometimes. The two of them would dress up and pretend to be Hawkeye and Chingachgook hunting in the forest.
Cal's question had made him feel ashamed. And later when he thought about it Tommy realized the answer was that he was simply curious. The birds were so free and quick-witted that you could never get near them. But if you shot them you could actually get to touch them and hold them and see how beautiful they were. Though when the thrill of the kill was over and he held the limp and lifeless little body in his hands and felt the warmth fading from it, he always felt a pang of remorse. After that conversation with Cal, he had vowed to himself that he would never again shoot any living creature.
Cal said there used to be a lot more wildlife up here in the hills but the way the city was starting to spread was driving the animals away. Only last week the two of them had ridden out the other way from the ranch, up onto a hill where they'd stood the horses and looked down on the bulldozers that were stirring great clouds of dust as they cleared the land for a new freeway. Cal said Mr. Maxwell, who owned the ranch, had been offered a lot of money by a real estate company that wanted to build houses on the land. Every time he turned them down, they offered more, Cal said. It was only a matter of time.
That same day they'd seen mule deer and gophers and a coyote. Most exciting of all, in a patch of dried mud beside a creek, they'd come across the tracks of a mountain lion. The paw marks were enormous. Cal said there were lots of mountain lions around but you rarely got to see them unless one jumped down from a tree and bit the top of your head off, which was how they liked to attack. Since then Tommy had scanned every tree they rode under. Cal said there were lots of mountain lions back home in Montana. And lots of grizzly bears as well which were even more dangerous, especially if you came across a mother with a cub. There used to be wolves too but they'd all been trapped or shot.
Tommy loved to get Cal talking about growing up in Montana. His mother was full-blood Blackfeet born on the reservation near a town called Browning which Cal said was a pretty dismal place. His father was a white man and they lived on a little ranch farther south on the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains. His great-grandfather on his mother's side of the family was almost a hundred years old and could remember the days when they used to hunt buffalo. There were once enormous herds of them, Cal said. So many that the land sometimes looked black. But then the railroad came and they all got shot too. Fifty million of them in little more than ten years.
"So, did they give you a part in the movie yet?" Cal said.
Tommy laughed.
"Not yet. Ray says he's working on it."
"We'll have to figure something out. Maybe I'll just have to give you a job as a wrangler."
The movie was called The Forsaken. Everybody said the script was brilliant. Tommy had tried reading it but all the scene numbers and camera directions—exteriors and interiors and fades and pans and tracking shots, all that sort of stuff—got in the way and he couldn't really tell what was going on. But Diane had told him the story. It wasn't exactly a western, at least not the sort of western Tommy liked. There were cars and planes in it and people talking on the telephone and not a single Indian.
It was more of a love story than anything. Diane was to play an Englishwoman called Helen who was married to a rich man called Dexter Dearborn. They lived on a beautiful ranch at the edge of the desert but Dexter wasn't at all nice to her or to anybody else for that matter. He owned an oil company and was always away on business or sneaking off to town to visit his girlfriend, so Helen got really sad and bored and lonely. Until Dexter's brother Harry came to stay.
This was Ray's part. Harry had once been a famous rodeo rider but had been badly injured and forced to retire and was now broke and sad and lonely and drank too much, but was basically a really nice guy. To help him out, Dexter had given him the job of looking after the ranch. Of course, this being a movie, Helen and Harry had to fall in love and for a while everything, as Diane said, was lovey-dovey and hunky-dory. But not for long. One night Dexter arrived home unexpectedly and caught them kissing and started hitting Helen. So Harry went to the rescue and in the fight that followed killed Dexter and got sent to the electric chair, so it all ended in tears. Nobody seemed to know why the movie was called The Forsaken, but Ray said that didn't matter, it was just a good title.
The fact that it was going ahead seemed to have made everybody happy again after all the bad things that had happened at the end of last year. Along with the wedding of course.
Ray and Diane had married last month on the day after the Russians sent Yuri Gagarin up into space (though Ray said this hadn't actually happened and was all faked in a TV studio and that the Americans got there first when they sent Alan Shepard into space three weeks later).
Ray had been keen to make the wedding a big event and invite lots of people but Diane hadn't wanted that so in the end it was just the three of them. They drove to Las Vegas in the open Cadillac and stayed in an enormous suite in a wonderful new hotel called the Tropicana. They were treated like royalty and were even given a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce to ride around in. The next morning they got up before dawn and drove for hours across the desert to see the Grand Canyon which was so vast and strange it was like being on the moon or Mars or somewhere.
The following evening, back in Vegas, Ray and Diane got married in a little chapel that was decorated with thousands of fairy lights. Diane looked amazing. Her dress was made of white satin covered in rhinestones and she had white lilies in her hair. Tommy wore a white suit that had been made specially for him by one of the costume designers at Paramount. Ray was in a white suit too and they had matching white Stetsons and bootlace ties. The priest had black hair all slicked back like Elvis and for a moment Tommy thought that's who he actually was.
The wedding was supposed to be a secret but somebody must have tipped off the newspapers because when they came outside there were lots of photographers and the three of them had to stand there on the steps smiling blindly at the popping flashbulbs while everybody shouted Diane! Ray! Over here! Diane! One of them even called out Tommy! It was the first time in his life he had ever felt famous. The following day they flew to Hawaii for the honeymoon and there were photographers there too and a picture of the three of them with garlands around their necks was on the front page of the local newspaper.
"Okay, Tom, shall we let these guys have a run?"
By now he and Cal had ridden down through the oaks and into the valley where the ground was flatter and greener and the air smelled warm and sweet. Tommy gently pressed his heels into Chester's sides the way Cal had shown him and the little paint launched himself forward. They loped along the creek and for the final few hundred yards took the horses up to a gallop. Tommy loved the thundering thump of the hooves and the rush of warm wind in his face. His hat blew off but Cal leaned out of his saddle and plucked it off the ground and handed it back to him when they slowed back to a walk. They rode up out of the valley and along the narrow dirt trail that skirted the final hill and then they saw the corrals and Cal's little house below them and Diane waiting for them beside the yellow Galaxie. She waved.
"How's my star pupil?" Cal said as they rode up.
"Hey, I thought I was your star pupil," Tommy said.
They laughed.
"That's what he tells all his pupils," Diane said. "Wish I could have come with you fellas. How was the ride?"
"We saw a California king snake."
"You did?"
"They're not poisonous though. The rattler's the only poisonous one around here. Chester spooked but I stayed on, didn't I, Cal?"
"You sure did. Stuck there like glue. He did good. I'll be out of a job if he gets any better."
They got off the horses and led them to the corral. Tommy unhitched Chester's cinch and lifted off the saddle and hung it over the rail then rubbed the horse's back where he was all sweaty. Cal said they loved this. Then Tommy led both horses to the water tank and stood watching them drink while Cal and Diane chatted by the car. Since Diane started riding, the two of them had become really good friends.
On the way home Tommy asked her why someone as nice as Cal didn't have a wife and Diane said sometimes it took a long time to meet the right person and anyhow not everybody wanted to get married. Some people just liked it better living on their own.
"If you'd met Cal before you met Ray, would you have wanted to marry him?"
Diane laughed.
"What's so funny about that?"
"Nothing. Just you and your questions."
* * *
They flew to Arizona in Herb's Lockheed Lodestar, watching its shadow slide below them. The mountains were pink and corrugate and gashed with dried-out riverbeds and secret lakes that flashed the lowering sun at them. Tommy got a second chance to see the Grand Canyon and they gazed down on it trying to figure out where they'd stood the previous month but the scale was too immense to make sense of. A little later Herb told the pilot to make a detour so they could take a look at Monument Valley and they flew in low with tilted wings and circled among the towers that blazed red and vast like the fiery citadels of some wasted race of giants, their eastern walls shadowed and purple against an orange sky.
Herb was sitting beside Tommy at the window and he kept pointing out the landmarks, places where Ford had shot famous scenes for The Searchers and Stagecoach. Tommy watched wide-eyed and even though Ray had seen the place before, he too felt a kind of childlike awe. He put his arm around Diane and she smiled and nuzzled against his neck and kissed him.
Ray had never believed in fate or destiny or whatever else people liked to thank or blame for what befell them. If everything was preordained, etched in the sky by some invisible, almighty hand, leaving no scope for choice or change, what the hell was the point of being here? His philosophy was rather that life was like a mean cop who, given half a chance, would kick you in the balls. Sometimes, though, the sonofabitch got bored and looked away and that was when you had to grab all you could, like a shoplifter, stuff your pockets full before he turned his evil eye back upon you. Survival was merely a matter of low cunning and had nothing whatsoever to do with luck. He had to concede however that during the past few months the cop seemed to have been more than usually distracted.
Just when Ray thought he'd lost it all—career, fiancee, self-esteem, the whole damn shooting match—suddenly here he was, flying high with one of Hollywood's big-shot producers, married to the woman of his dreams and about to become what he'd always known he could be and should be: a real movie star.
He'd never heard back from Jack Warner about what he thought of The Forsaken. The idiot had probably filed the script in the garbage the moment the meeting was over. This was, after all, the same genius who'd turned down Gone with the Wind, saying nobody would want to go see a picture about the Civil War. It gave Ray a twinge of vindictive pleasure to think that the old bastard would doubtless know by now that The Forsaken was happening without him at another studio.
That this should be so was entirely thanks to Herb Kanter and his unwavering belief (and considerable investment) in Diane. It had been the quickest deal Ray had ever known. Once she'd flown back after Christmas and forgiven him and everything between them was okay again, Diane had at last read Steve Shelby's script. She loved it and agreed there was a great part for her. She showed it to Herb who read it that same night and said he loved it too. He got Terence Redfield on board to direct, pitched it to Paramount and bingo: the following day the suits gave them the green light.
Almost the entire crew who'd been geared up for the Gary Cooper picture were simply going to move across to The Forsaken. Poor old Coop had finally pegged out just a couple of weeks ago. Along with the rest of the nation, Ray had mouthed all the right sentiments, of course: what a tragedy, what a terrible loss it was et cetera. But secretly he saw the great man's demise as a blessing, a useful narrowing of the competition.
He later learned that Redfield, the sneaky little shit, had tried to get Steve McQueen or Bill Holden to play Harry—even though the part, the whole movie, for christsake, had been written with Ray in mind. Luckily both these assholes were tied up with other projects and Herb managed to convince Redfield that casting the former Red McGraw as a washed-up rodeo star had the kind of resonance the public loved. Added to which there was great publicity to be had from Ray and Diane being a real-life couple. In this, Herb had already been proved right. Both Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper had written about it and every paper and magazine that printed their wedding pictures had also mentioned the movie by name. Tipping off those snappers in Las Vegas was the best stroke Ray had pulled in a long time.
The downside was that his fee for the movie was peanuts and the budget and shooting schedule were tight as a rat's ass. This was because there were no big-name stars involved and because Paramount's financial woes were getting worse by the day. For sure, making The Forsaken was going to be tough. But what the hell. It was a movie, a real big-screen movie. Montane and Reed, up there together at last. The thought of it almost gave him a hard-on.
By the time they reached Medicine Springs the sun had gone down and the airstrip was but a dim black scar on the fading red of the desert. As the Lodestar touched down it caught a gust of wind and bounced and lurched sideways and everyone gasped then laughed when it steadied. They climbed out and the air was still hot and Diane stood with her eyes closed, breathing it deeply and saying how she loved the smell of the desert. Ray pretended to agree but in truth it carried too many memories of his drilling days, backbreaking work and eating dirt on some godforsaken Texan plain.
Frank Dawson, the line producer, was waiting to meet them with his assistant and a couple of brand-new Chevy trucks. Ray had never worked with the guy but had heard only good things about him, that he was tough but fair. He was six-foot-six with the chest of a bull wrestler. They all shook hands and Frank put their bags in the back of one of the trucks. Herb had to go straight into a series of meetings and went off with the assistant, saying he'd see them in a couple of hours at the little get-together he'd arranged at the Hungry Horse. Frank would drive them to the motel.
Medicine Springs was a one-street town that squatted forlornly below a dome of red sandstone that Frank Dawson said was a thousand feet tall and was once some kind of sacred place for Indians. There were apparently some ancient rock paintings at the top of it, he said. The town had a hardware store, a Laundromat, a grocery store, a gas station, four bars (including the Hungry Horse) and, by the look of it as they drove through, a world record for the number of mangy dogs. Three times Dawson had to stop and hoot the horn to get the varmints to move out of the road. There were groups of young Indian guys hanging around on the sidewalk, smoking cigarettes. They turned and watched without a flicker of a smile as the movie stars drove by in their gleaming vehicle.
"Are they Indians?" Tommy asked.
"Navajo," Dawson said.
"They don't look very happy."
"They sure don't."
The production had booked every room in town. There were two motels and Dawson assured them they were staying in the nicer one, though this wasn't a word that sprang readily to mind when they pulled up outside. It stood on slightly raised ground at the southern edge of town. There was a big plastic cactus outside and a red neon sign that said Motel Casa Rosa. The last two letters were faulty and kept fizzing and flickering out.
The reception area was about ten feet square, painted a pale green and lit from the ceiling by a single fluorescent box. There was a small Mexican woman with sad eyes behind the desk. She nodded and smiled when Dawson introduced Ray and Diane, saying they were the movie's main stars who'd just flown in from Hollywood.
"Jesus, Frank," Ray whispered while she turned to get the keys. "This is the nice place?"
"I think I said nicer. You should see where I'm staying."
They were in rooms six and seven, the woman told them as she led them around to the rear of the building, the best rooms they had, with a linking door and mountain views. There was also a view of a rusty yellow bulldozer standing in a deep pit, piled around with earth. The woman announced proudly that this was to be the swimming pool.
"Terrific," Ray said.
Something scuffled as the woman opened the door. The room was small and hot and dingy, the screens at the window torn. On a midget-sized table stood a big bouquet of flowers and a basket of fruit. There was a card from Herb, wishing them luck for the shoot.
"That's so sweet," Diane said. "Thank you."
A cockroach scurried out from the fruit and disappeared over the edge of the table. Diane didn't notice but Tommy did and gave Ray a look.
"Frank," Ray said. "Can I have a word? Diane, why don't you show Tommy his room?"
Dawson followed him outside again and the two of them stood facing each other at the edge of the pit. Ray lit a cigarette and didn't offer one.
"Did I get the date wrong? Is it April first?"
"I'm sorry?"
"Is this some kind of joke? What are you doing, putting us in a shit-hole like this?"
"Ray, this is the best accommodation available. Sometimes it can be a little basic when you're on location. You have to make allowances."
"Allowances! We've got a kid with us, for christsake! Did you see that roach? The goddamn place ought to be condemned. And don't tell me what it's like being on location, as if I'm some kind of wet-eared kid."
For a long moment the two men stood staring at each other. The motel woman was watching. Dawson was the first to blink.
"I'll have a word with Herb."
"Yeah. You do that, pal. We're not staying here, okay? You got that?"
Diane said that he'd been too harsh, but Ray told her she didn't understand how the movie business worked. These guys were paid to squeeze every goddamn cent and did this kind of thing to test you, to see what they could get away with. If you didn't stand up to them they walked all over you. You had to show them right from the start that they needed to treat you with respect.
Sure enough, within twenty minutes, Herb Kanter was on the phone saying he was sorry and that he was already trying to sort out somewhere better for them. A car for their personal use was on its way to them and would it be okay if Leanne, the girl they'd hired to be Tommy's nanny, came to see them first thing in the morning?
"Anything you need, Ray, please don't hesitate. Just call me."
"See what I mean?" Ray said when he hung up.