Dark Whispers & Other Stories

Gunslinger

Once again, I was doing research for a historical novel when I came upon the fact that in the Los Angeles of the 1910s and 1920s, real cowboys lived in a veritable ghetto and left only during the daytime to work as silent movie extras. At night, they drank and sang sad songs of the West they'd left for fame and fortune. Eventually, that fact became this story.

He reaches Los Angeles three days early, a scrawny forty-eight-year-old man in a three-piece black Cheviot suit made of wool and far too hot for the desertlike climate here. He chews without pause on stick after stick of White’s Yucatan gum. He carries, tucked in his trousers beneath his vest, a Navy Colt that belonged to his father, a farmer from Morgan County, Missouri.

As he steps down from the train, a Negro porter accidentally bumping into him and tipping his red cap in apology, he takes one more look at the newspaper he has been reading for the last one hundred miles of his journey, the prime headline of which details President Teddy Roosevelt’s hunting trip to the Badlands, the secondary headline being concerned with the annexation by Los Angeles of San Pedro and Wilmington, thereby giving the city a harbor. But it is the third headline that holds his interest: DIRECTOR THOMAS INCE, NOW RECOVERED FROM HEART TROUBLE, STARTS NEW PICTURE THURSDAY WITH HIS FAMOUS WESTERN STAR REX SWANSON.

Today was Monday.

He finds a rooming house two blocks from a bar called The Waterhole, which is where most of the cowboys hang out. Because real ranches in the West have fallen on hard times, the cowboys had little choice but to drift to Los Angeles to become extras and stunt riders and trick shooters in the silent movie industry. Now there is a whole colony, a whole subculture of them out here, and they are much given to drink and even more given to violence. So he must be careful around them, very careful.

In the street below his room runs a trolley car, its tingling bell the friendliest sound in this arid city of ’dobe buildings for the poor and unimaginable mansions for the rich. It is said, at least back in Missouri, that at least once a day a Los Angeles police officer draws down on a man and kills him. He has no reason to doubt this as he falls asleep on the cot in the hot shabby room with its flowered vase lamp, the kerosene flame flickering into the dusk as his exhausted snoring begins.

In the morning he goes down the hall, waits till a Mexican woman comes out of the bathroom smelling sweetly of perfume, and then goes in and bathes and puts on the things he bought just before leaving Morgan County. A bank teller, he is not particularly familiar with real Western attire, but he knew it would be a mistake to buy his things new. That would mark him as a dude for certain. He had found a livery up in the northern edge of the county that had some old clothes in the back, which he bought for $1.50 total.

Now, looking at himself in the mirror, trying to be as objective as he can, he sees that he does not look so bad. Not so bad at all. The graying hair helps. Not shaving helps. And he’s always been capable of a certain blue evil eye (as are most of the men in his family). Then there are the clothes. The dusty brown Stetson creased cowhand-style. The faded denim shirt. The Levi’s with patches on knee and butt. The black Texas boots.

For the first time he loses some of his fear.

For the first time there is within him excitement.

In his room, before leaving, he writes a quick letter.

The next two days...

In the Los Angeles of the movie cowboy extra, there are certain key places to go for work. On Sunset Boulevard there is a horse barn where you wait like a farmhand to be picked for a day’s work; then there are a few studio backlots where you can stand in the baking sun all day waiting for somebody already hired to keel over and need to be replaced; and then there is Universal’s slave-galley arrangement where extras are literally herded into a big cage to wait to be called. Five dollars a day is the pay, which for some men is five times what they were getting back in the blizzard country of Montana and Wyoming and Utah.

It is into this world he slips now, making the rounds, trying to get himself hired as an extra. If he does not get on Ince’s set Thursday, if he does not get that close, then he will be unable to do what he has waited most of his life to do.

He is accepted. Or at least none of the other cowboys question him. They talk in their rough boozy way of doing stunt work — something called the “Running W” or the even more frightening “Dead Man’s Fall” are particularly popular topics — and they gossip about the movie stars themselves. Which sweet young virginal types can actually be had by just about anybody who has taken a bath in the past month. Which so-called he-men are actually prancing nancies afraid to even get close to a horse.

All this fascinates and frightens him. He wants to be back home in Morgan County, Missouri.

All that keeps him going is his memory of his father. The pennies on Father’s eyes during the wake. The waxen look in the coffin. The smell of funeral flowers. His mother weeping, weeping.

The Navy Colt burns in his waistband. Burns...

Late on Wednesday, near the corral on the Miller Brothers 101 Ranch Ince makes his two-reelers, a fat, bald casting director in jodhpurs comes over and says, “You five men there. Can you be here at sunup?”

He has traveled fifteen hundred miles and forty-one years for this moment.

All he can liken it to was his six-month stint in the Army (six months only because of what the post doctor called his “nervous condition”) — hundreds of extras milling around for a big scene in which a railroad car is to be held up and then robbers and good citizens alike are attacked by an entire tribe of savage Indians. It is in this way that the robber will become a hero — he will be forced to save the lives of the very passengers whom he was robbing.

The trolley car ran late. He did not sleep well. He urinates a lot. He paces a lot. He mooches two pre-rolls from a Texas cowhand who keeps talking about what a nancy the casting director in the jodhpurs is. The smoke, as always, makes him cough. But it helps calm him. The “nervous condition” being something he’s always suffered from.

For two hours, waiting for the casting director to call him, he wanders the ranch, looks at the rope corral, the ranch house, the two hundred yards of train track meant to simulate miles of train track. There’s even a replica of the engine from the Great Northern standing there. Everything is hot, dusty. He urinates a lot.

Around ten he sees Rex Swanson.

Rex is taller than he expected and more handsome. Dressed in a white Stetson, white Western shirt with blue pearl buttons, white sheepskin vest and matching chaps, and enough rouge and lipstick to make him look womanly. Rex has just arrived, being dispatched from the back of a limousine long enough to house thirty people. He is instantly surrounded, and in the tone of everybody about him there is a note of supplication.

Please Rex this.

Please Rex that.

Please Rex.

Rex please.

Just before lunch he sees his chance.

He has drifted over to a small stage where a painted backdrop depicts the interior of a railroad car.

It is here that Rex, in character, holds up the rich passengers, a kerchief over his face, twin silver Peacemakers shining in his hands. He demands their money, gold, jewelry.

A camera rolls; an always-angry director shouts obscenities through a megaphone. Everybody, particularly the casting director, looks nervous.

His father knocking a baseball to him. His father bouncing him on his knee. His father driving the three of them — how good it felt to be the-three-of-them, mother son father — in the buggy to Sunday church. Then his father happening to be on the train that day/so waxen in the coffin/pennies on his eyes—

He moves now.

Past the director who is already shouting at him.

Past the actors who play the passengers.

Right up to Rex himself.

“You killed my father,” he hears himself say, jerking the Navy Colt from his waistband. “Thirty-seven years ago in Morgan County, Missouri!”

Rex, frantic, shouts to somebody. “Lenny! My God, it’s that lunatic who’s been writing me letters all these years!”

“But I know who you really are. You’re really Jesse!” he says, fear gone once again, pure excitement now.

Rex — now it’s his turn to be the supplicant — says, “I’m an actor from New Jersey. I only play Jesse James in these pictures! I only play him!”

But he has come a long ways, fifteen hundred miles and forty-one years, for this moment.

He starts firing.

It takes him three bullets, but he gets it done, he does what Robert Ford only supposedly did. He kills Jesse James.

Then he turns to answer the fire of the cowboys who are now shooting at him.

He smiles. The way that special breed of men in the nickelodeons always do.

The gunslingers.