Read Falling From Horses for Free Online Page B

to my chest to keep from bumping people with it. Standing was fine by me, after sitting in buses for close to thirty-six hours. When the car jerked and started rolling, we went out slowly through a subway tunnel black as night. The car was lit up inside, but the light made a mirror out of the window glass. I could see my face, a skull mask, looking back from the darkness.
    After a mile or so we came out in bright daylight, rattling right down the middle of a boulevard, past tough-looking palm trees, drugstores, movie theaters, a bank with a clock that stuck out over the sidewalk. The car stopped and started, squealed its brakes, jangled a harsh bell. A few people got off, but others got on, so it never came to the point of empty seats. After a while the tracks cut away from the busy street and up a short alley, past the back yards of stucco houses that looked parched and yellow in the afternoon light. Overalls and house dresses hung from slack wires in the side yards. Kids playing on the scraps of dried-out brown lawn hardly gave us a look; I guess at that time of day streetcars must have rattled past every five minutes, and the novelty had worn off.
    Lily, for all her tired staring, had been keeping track of where we were, and when the car rolled out onto another busy street, she looked up at me and gave my sleeve a yank. “This is Santa Monica Boulevard,” she said. “I think you ought to get off somewhere along here.”
    I didn’t see how that could be right. The street was clogged with four lanes of traffic and hemmed in on both sides by two-story buildings. We had already rolled by a J. C. Penney store, grocery fronts, cocktail bars with their neon signs lit up for the evening business. I wasn’t so ignorant as to think the town of Hollywood would be the open sagebrush land I’d seen in the cowboy pictures, but I sure hadn’t thought it would look like this, and I wondered where all the horses were kept. Every so often I saw a roof off in the distance that I took to be a barn roof, but even back then you wouldn’t have been able to see any of the stables from a streetcar on Santa Monica.
    I didn’t make a move to get off the car—I was sure she was wrong about where we were. After a few blocks Lily picked up her suitcase and stood. “I’ll get off with you. I can catch the next car.”
    I started to argue, but she pushed past me, yanked on the bell rope, and as soon as the car stopped she hopped out onto the street. I felt like I had to follow her. The tracks ran right down the middle of the boulevard, so the trolley stop was just an island between the lanes of traffic barreling by on either side. We stood there a minute, but I was irritated with her and I guess embarrassed that I had let myself be bullied into getting off, so as soon as I saw a break in the traffic I took off without saying anything to her, just bolted across the car lanes to the sidewalk and started walking along like I knew where I was going, which I sure as hell didn’t. She didn’t try very hard to catch up, but I could hear her shoes on the sidewalk behind me.
    That particular stretch of the boulevard was lined with bars and pawnshops. Several of the bars had opened their doors to the warm afternoon, and the smell when I walked by was familiar, a stale, concentrated perfume of beer and cigarettes and men’s sweat. A few men were hanging around in doorways or going in and out of the saloons. Some of them looked past me to Lily trailing behind, a brief look before moving their eyes along to something more interesting; she wasn’t a head-turning beauty on a good day, and this was at the end of a long ride on an interstate bus. But every so often a fellow would give her a harder stare, which put me on edge. A guy leaning against a parked car smiled in her direction and muttered something under his breath, and if I’d heard what he said I might have started something with