Free Falling From Horses by Molly Gloss Page B

it, so strips of flypaper were hanging everywhere, black with flies, and the furniture and rugs were tracked with mud, furred with horsehair and dog hair, and most everything had a coat of dust on it. Dirty dishes were piled on all the tables and on every surface in the kitchen. Plus Harold had a habit of dropping dirty clothes wherever he happened to be standing when he shucked them off, so there were jeans and shirts and underwear on the floors in every damn room. Harold had been divorced for ten years when I met him and was apparently uninterested in marrying again. I always wondered if his habit of dropping his trousers any-old-where was the reason for his divorce or something he discovered as a benefit of living alone.
    The condition of the house didn’t surprise me much; in the past year and more, I had become acquainted with the habits of bachelors who lived close to horses. What surprised me was the remarkableness of this big, fancy place tucked up in the hills, half a mile down a dirt road. I guess Harold had been asked about it so often that he didn’t wait for the question to come up. While he was running hot water into a pan in the kitchen sink and stirring Epsom salts into it, he told me that some silent-movie actress—he said her name, but it didn’t mean a thing to me—had built the house up here to get away from her adoring public. He had bought it cheap right after she died, bought it fully furnished from money he’d made selling his ranch up in Napa Valley when his wife divorced him. He built the corrals and sheds and opened Diamond Barns in 1929, a couple of months before the Crash. “I was just lucky that the cowboy movies never did crash,” he said, “or not much. And when they started pumping out all those second features and chapter pictures, the horse-renting business took a nice upswing.” He said this as though his luck was all still a surprise to him.
    After I went to work at Diamond, I learned there were plenty of bigger stables scattered around the valley and in Culver City and up in the Hollywood Hills. Lionel Comport had a stable that specialized in renting swaybacked nags for those occasions when you were looking for an easy laugh; and Fat Jones had a big place that supplied the studios not only with horses, burros, and mules, but oxen, Spanish longhorn cattle, and every kind of wagon, even chariots. Over at the Hudkin Brothers, and maybe at some of the other stables too, star horses and specialty horses had their own box stalls with their names on the door.
    Diamond was more of a shoestring outfit, without a single trick pony and nothing in the way of fancy props or silver-trimmed saddles. Harold had just six or seven acres and thirty or so horses and mules in a handful of corrals, plus a stagecoach and a couple of wagons. This wasn’t much, ranked against the big stables, but he was close to town, tucked into a corner of the park, where penny-pinching studios could shoot their outdoor scenes cheaply, and he was handy to a couple of the smaller movie ranches in the Santa Monica Mountains. Singing-cowboy pictures were on the rise back then, heavy with actors who hadn’t ever put a boot in a stirrup, and Harold staked his reputation on renting out livestock that was thoroughly broke, horses that were proof against even a tenderfoot actor without a bit of riding experience. This meant that Diamond Barns, small as it was, had about as much work as it could handle.
    Harold might have had even more business if he hadn’t had a rule against renting out his horses for stunts and falls. In those days, whenever stunts were involved, you could just about count on horses being tripped with a Running W or run into a pitfall or galloped through a candy-glass window, and Harold didn’t want his horses used roughly. He always said he was running things on a tight budget and didn’t want to be hauling dead horses to the glue factory or selling off the