Read Falling From Horses for Free Online

about how it was too much food for a girl to choke down.

4
    THE SUN WAS WELL UP IN A CLEAR SKY when we left Bakersfield on a fresh bus. Flat orchard country stretched away on both sides of the road, and low, lion-colored mountains stood all along the southern horizon. Around ten o’clock we stopped for gas and water and a restroom break at the bottom of those mountains, and I bought some oranges from a stand next to the bus station, not a fruit stand, but a funny place shaped just like a big orange, with a hole cut out for the walkup window. This wasn’t quite the same thing as buying them right off the tree, but those oranges were as sweet as candy and so full of juice I had it running down my arms and chin, all sticky, and had to wash up afterward in the men’s room.
    By the time we started up the Grapevine, the air was light and dry and hot. We pulled down the bus windows, and the whine of tires on the pavement was so loud we didn’t bother to talk. The cutbanks on both sides of the highway were raw red earth, the dry slopes scattered with scrub oak, chaparral, and cottonwoods—country I had seen in a lot of cowboy movies. The pavement widened into three lanes, and cars started to pass us in the middle lane as we ground down into low gear. Traffic thickened, and there were plenty of cars and trucks and buses in the slow lane with us, and rigs pulled over with steam boiling out of their radiators.
    We stopped for lunch in San Fernando. I still had some oranges left, and I bought myself a piece of butterscotch pie; then I ate most of Lily’s chicken-fried steak, which she pushed toward me when she’d barely eaten half.
    That last leg into LA, the stretch from San Fernando to Glendale, was mostly groves of oranges and lemons in those days, their big, neatly planted squares bounded by windbreaks of poplars. Every so often you’d see a house with gingerbread trim or a stucco house with Spanish-style balconies and red-tiled roof standing higher than the orange trees but shaded by a big old elm or a beech. Sometimes you’d see oil rigs pumping up and down, right out there in the middle of the orchards, and every so often rows of deep green eucalyptus or palm trees lining a straight stretch of road, or big fields of beans worked by Japanese people.
    We rolled through Burbank and then Glendale’s rows of little shops and half-built suburbs. What I remember is clean, wide boulevards, palm trees, Spanish-looking stucco houses with bright-flowering vines—orange trumpet vine or red bougainvillea—growing up the porch posts, and fields of pink geraniums in the front yards. You could smell the sweetness of the orange trees even through the stink of exhaust. A kind of fairytale land, I thought at the time. I’d never seen anything like that country in my life.
    We crossed the Los Angeles River eight or nine times, although I didn’t know it, seeing nothing below the bridges but a mud-caked channel. Somewhere around the last bridge I got my first glimpse of the city of Los Angeles, a knot of tall buildings way off on the valley floor with a grid of streets and dusty trees and houses spread out like skirts around it. We were in baking sun by then, and the whole city shimmered under a yellow-blue dome. One of the passengers started singing “California, Here We Come,” as if we hadn’t been in California for a day and a half already, and quite a few others joined in. Some of them had become quite friendly after the wreck, as if they’d been in a battle together, and there was some exchanging of addresses. I didn’t ask for Lily’s, and she didn’t offer.
    About five years later I would take the grand tour of Europe on the army’s nickel—Paris and Rome, the whole shooting match—but at nineteen I hadn’t spent any time in a town bigger than Prineville or Burns. Los Angeles in those days wasn’t what it is now, but it was every bit the big