Free The Englishman's Boy by Guy Vanderhaeghe Page B

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 dayshe 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, scribbleson 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,