The Englishman's Boy (9 page)

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 days
he 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, scribbles
on 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, Monthlie.” The old woman who answers my knock is thin as a straight razor and wears a black dress so shiny it looks wet.

“I’d like to speak to Mr. McAdoo,” I say.

“Not here.”

“When do you expect him back?”

“Don’t. Moved out.”

“Do you have a forwarding address for him?”

“Nothing to forward. He never got mail.”

I think for a moment, hand on the screen door. “He didn’t happen to skip out on the rent by any chance, did he?”

“What’s it to you?”

“I’m a business associate,” I tell her. “It’s possible I might be able to settle any debts. Collect any personal belongings he might have left behind.”

A shrewd, cold look passes over her face and then she dismisses the opportunity with a regretful, weary shake of the head. “No, he paid in full. Always did. He’s a punctual man.”

“Do you have a guess where he went to?”

“No.”

“Did he say anything? Give any reasons for leaving?”

Mother Reardon cocks her head, shoots me a look like a bright-eyed scrawny bird. “Business associate, you said?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“Then you ought to know him to be closed-mouthed. Never said
much more to anybody than a word at the supper table. ‘Pass the butter.’ ‘Pass the beans.’ That’s all he ever asked from anybody, that they pass him what he paid for.”

“So he just up and left.”

“That’s right. Came out of his room one Sunday morning with his duffel bag packed and asked what he owed. Left without breakfast.”

“On the run?”

“No. He wasn’t in any particular hurry.”

“I talked to a man this afternoon. He mentioned something about a director. Did Mr. McAdoo ever say anything about a director?”

“I heard him say a thing or two about directors. None of it good. I feel the same way. Movie people don’t get into my house if I can help it. They’re all whores and thieves. Except for the cowboys. They may be rough but they’re honest.”

“Did he have any visitors?”

“A few young fellows came by. Just to sit with him. They admired Mr. McAdoo. Wanted to hear about the old days. Once I heard him tell them, ‘Don’t ask me about the old days. Let the dead bury the dead. I ain’t dead.’ ”

“What do you think he meant by that?”

“I don’t think he meant anything. It’s just something an old man might say.”

“Do you know the names of any of those young fellows?”

“No.”

“And you have no idea why he left?”

“Could be any number of reasons. Could be money, he hadn’t worked in some time. I’ll carry people I trust until they find work. Mr. McAdoo I trusted, but he never asked me to carry him.”

“You mentioned there might be a number of reasons. What other reasons?”

She considers a moment. “I came in the house the night before he moved out. I’d been visiting my sister. It was dark. Saturday night the boys are usually out. I walked in the living room and threw the light switch. Mr. McAdoo was sitting by the radio.” She paused. “He was crying. That’s the last thing I expected to see … Shorty McAdoo
crying. He’s a tough old bird. I thought, Lord God, what’s this? His face was all wet with tears, he wiped them off with his hands. I said to him, ‘Mr. McAdoo, are you feeling poorly? Anything I can get you?’ He said, ‘No, the light coming on so sudden made my eyes burn.’ I said, ‘Well, let me get you a cool cloth for them.’ I went out and ran some water on a washcloth; I knew it wasn’t the light. He slipped out before I came back. Maybe he got bad news about family. Maybe he learned he ain’t well.”

“Anything else?”

She shook her head.

In the next few days I make no more progress. Groping for a lead, I go to the obvious places and ask the obvious questions. I spend an unfruitful afternoon loafing around the Sunset Barn, where a lot of the Western stars stable their horses. It’s a popular place for corral buzzards who perch on the rail fences hoping to get noticed by somebody important. For young men who hail from Montana, Arizona, Texas, and Oklahoma, the Sunset Barn is what the drugstore counter was later to become for the corn-fed beauties of the Midwest, the rosy-cheeked milkmaids of Minnesota; it’s
the
place to get discovered. They drawl and spit, do rope tricks, and show off their bandy-legged struts. I don’t find Shorty McAdoo here, nor do I discover any reliable information as to his whereabouts.

The next day I motor out to Mixville, the ranch where the great Western star Tom Mix produces his horse operas. The ranch foreman knows McAdoo but has little to say about him. He was there three months before doing a picture, but nobody has seen him since. “He’s a tumbleweed,” he says. “Blows in and blows out.” I leave my number and ask him to call if Shorty happens to blow in. The only profit in this wasted day is catching a glimpse of Tom Mix in a lurid purple tuxedo, matching purple stetson and boots, easing himself behind the wheel of his white Rolls-Royce with the fourteen-karat-gold initials TM on the doors. He puts the evening’s sunset to shame.

Each night I am required to call Fitzsimmons to make a report on
my progress or lack of it. Fitzsimmons wants results and he wants them fast.

“You got expense money – spread it around.”

“If anybody knew anything, I would. But they don’t.”

“How do you know if they know anything until you offer a little fucking incentive? Get the rag out, Vincent. You’re getting paid a hundred and fifty dollars a week to get results. A hundred and fifty is a lot of money.”

“I know how much money it is, Mr. Fitzsimmons. And the rag was out the minute I signed on. There’s a lot of ground to cover and I assure you I’m covering it. It seems everybody has heard
about
Shorty McAdoo but nobody
knows
him. No wife, no kids, no friends. A fucking loner. He could be anyplace, doing anything. He might be dying in some flophouse. He might be making a movie. He might have fucked off to Kansas, or Montana, or Arkansas – anyplace they need somebody to serenade cows from a horse. I don’t know. But I’m looking.”

“Shit.”

“And what’s the point of phoning you every night and going through this song and dance? Half the time you’re not in. I call a dozen times; I’m up until midnight trying to get through to you. Why can’t I call only if I have news?”

“Mr. Chance wants it that way. That’s why.”

“Then stop chewing my ass. I’m doing my best.”

“You think your ass been chewed, Vincent? Your ass ain’t even been nipped.”

The next ten days I spend bouncing back and forth over dirt roads in the San Fernando Valley, the Mojave Desert, the sierras of Lone Pine, all the favoured locations for dusters. I locate fourteen or fifteen crews employing hundreds of cowboys. I had no idea there were so many cowpokes in Hollywood, but talking to them I learn they’ve been drifting into town for ten years, jumping off cattle-cars in the Los Angeles stockyards, going AWOL from Wild West shows and rodeos, riding in
from the small family spreads which dot southern California. They’re all refugees from a vanishing West. The cessation of hostilities in Europe has meant the end of the beef boom, the big spreads in Wyoming and Montana are cutting back herds and cutting loose wranglers. Cowhands wander into Hollywood, chasing rumours that five dollars a day can be earned as stunt men and extras in the Western pictures which Broncho Billy, William S. Hart, Tom Mix, and Art Accord have made famous. Maybe they’ll get famous, too. Or at least passably prosperous on five dollars a day, boxed lunch provided. The only problem is there’s too many cowboys and too few jobs.

A lot of these cowpokes won’t give me the time of day when I mention Shorty McAdoo, maybe because I look like a subpoena-server. Sometimes the young ones, the green boys, talk, but they usually know nothing about McAdoo. To them he’s as much a rumour as he is to me. They don’t know where he lives, who his friends are. Slowly, it dawns on me that I’m chasing a reputation as much as a man.

On the weekend I drive out to the cowboy star Hoot Gibson’s Saugus Ranch to take in the rodeo he throws there every Sunday, sit parked on hot bleacher-boards under a brassy, breathless sky, scanning the crowd for the grizzled, haunted face I’d seen projected on Chance’s screen. I don’t find it. Delayed by a flat tire, I get back to my apartment late that night, exhausted, my leg throbbing like a rotten tooth. I’m in no mood to phone Fitz. He can wait until morning. Or maybe even until tomorrow night. Fuck him.

I climb into bed and no sooner does my head drop on the pillow than the phone rings. It goes on and on, drilling into my head, then stops. Fifteen minutes later, it starts again. I know who it is. I get up and take the receiver off the hook. On my way back to the bedroom I can still hear the tinny sound of Fitzsimmons, shouting down the line.

At dawn, I drive out to Universal City where more white hats ride the range than on any other spread in southern California. The program feature is king at Universal and the king of program features is the Western, cheap to make and profitable. Uncle Carl Laemmle has many
of the biggest Western stars under contract – Harry Carey, Neal Hart, Jack Hoxie, Art Accord, Peter Morrison, Hoot Gibson. Universal City is, as its name implies, a metropolis of sorts, a two-hundred-and-thirty-acre hive with its own police, fire department, street-cleaning crews, shops, forges, mills, prop departments, stages, outdoor sets, and a variety of scenery made to order for Westerns, and Uncle Carl is mayor of it all. This Western factory also has its own herds of cattle, horses, and mules, grazing a huge pasture, ready to serve at a moment’s notice. But it also requires a reliable reserve of two-legged stock to work as doubles, stunt men, and extras. Uncle Carl’s solution to the problem of ready supply is to construct a big hiring tank fenced with wire to hold cowboys corralled inside the studio gates and out of mischief until they are needed. Anybody looking for employment is penned there until Universal directors give him the nod and cut him out of the remuda for a day’s shooting.

I get to Universal City just as the sun is beginning to spread itself on the north Hollywood hills, and already the pen holds forty hands. The scene reminds me of a prison camp, wire and posts, boot-trampled dirt, faces stamped with jailhouse emotions – boredom, apathy, bravado, sullen viciousness. I let myself in at the gate and begin to wander among the men. A small group throws craps on a horse blanket, two play mumblety-peg with a sheath knife big enough to chop sugar cane with; others doze propped up against fenceposts, big hats tipped down to shield eyes from the rising sun. A few stand in silent communion, rolling cigarettes; a number clutch the fence-wires, eyes fixed on the brightening hills as if anticipating the cavalry will ride down from the heights and rescue them.

I drift along, nodding and smiling, trying to strike up a conversation. As the sun warms and starts to take the chill off them, the extras get marginally friendlier and unbend a little, accept cigarettes, pass commonplace remarks about the weather and the promise of the day.

I keep doggedly nudging conversation in the direction of Shorty McAdoo. Finally, in one knot of middle-aged wranglers I manage to awaken some response. One of them claims he’s heard Shorty pulled stakes and headed for Bakersfield. Wichita, says another. Somebody
contradicts both of them. No, McAdoo’s still in the Los Angeles area. The only thing they can agree on is that nobody has seen him on any set or location for at least a month.