The Nerviest Girl in the World Page 3

  “Seemed real, did it?” he repeated. “Well, that’s a pretty good endorsement. If the audience reacts like you did, I’ll call it a good day’s work.”

  “Mighty sorry about that,” Papa said. “I came to watch the boys, and Pearl wanted to tag along.”

  I felt my cheeks burning hot. Papa made me sound like a little tyke, or a pesky dog. I saw Frank roll his eyes.

  “Don’t trouble yourself about it,” said Mr. Corrigan cordially. I guessed he didn’t want to annoy Papa and risk losing his star riders. “You folks are welcome to watch—as long as you don’t distract my actors.” That last part was directed at me.

  “Yes, sir,” I murmured. I clapped my hands over my mouth, just to be safe.

  Mr. Corrigan laughed and turned back toward the actors. “Let’s take it right where we left off. Ready? Roll it!”

  Jack’s gun was up and aimed again. “I warned you,” he said. The trigger began to move.

  “Don’t shoot!” cried Nell from behind Bart’s back, facing toward the onlookers instead of Jack. As she spoke, she unlocked her hands from Bart’s waist and waggled them in a sort of frightened manner. Jack’s eyes went wide with surprise, and all the cowboys looked like they might fall off their horses in shock. Nell leaned to the side so Jack could see her. He lowered his gun and put his other hand to his heart, like he was about to faint or something. Bart threw his head back and laughed a big openmouthed laugh.

  They all looked a bit silly, clowning it up so much. I had to press my hands extra hard against my mouth to keep from snickering. Nobody had told me the audience couldn’t hear anything in a moving picture. There would be cards with words on them to show what the characters were saying. But the actors spoke out loud anyhow, to make it all seem more real.

  A little too real, if you asked me.

  After that, I was hooked, and so was Papa. “Finish your chores quick, Pearl,” he would say, and I’d know that meant we were going to watch the boys at work again. I don’t know why Papa bothered to tell me to be quick—I always finished my chores way before he did, even counting the after-ostrich washup. But then, what Papa had to do was less like chores and more like an occupation. We own a big spread with a creek cutting through the middle, lined with cottonwoods and sagebrush. Most of our land is fenced for cattle or sheep pasture, with a few grain fields, a big vegetable garden, and a small citrus orchard. In our courtyard we have Mama’s grapevine, a couple of fig trees that Grandma pampers like newborn babies, and a lot of manzanita bushes with their tasty berries.

  But our main crop, Papa says, is fences. As a rancher he’s required by law to keep his grazing cattle fenced in so they can’t wander onto neighbors’ cropland. Papa spends a heap of time inspecting the fence lines for breaks, or chopping rails, dragging rails, hefting rails into place. And then of course there’s all the work of tending the livestock. Even with a team of hands, it’s a mountain of chores. Especially now that his best hands, my brothers, had been swept into the picture-making business.

  Frank, who has a knack for explaining the back side of things you only see from the front—providing you can put up with his delivery, which is like a learned professor talking to a very stupid child—told me it took about a week to film a story, sometimes less. The crew went all over our part of the county, shooting scenes. If Mr. Corrigan saw a view he liked, he’d find a way to film a scene in front of it, even if that meant paying people to use their property. Frank said he liked to pick the location first and then make up a story to go with it.

  “They’re all one-reelers,” Frank explained—then overexplained. “Each story takes up one reel of film. But Corrigan says he has ideas for longer pictures—two-reelers or even more. Stories told over two reels of film, you understand. Why, he’s just brimming with ideas, Pearl—seems like he never runs out of new stories to tell.”

  Even though I squirmed at Frank’s condescending tone—not to mention the familiar, and to my ears disrespectful, way he dropped the Mr. from Mr. Corrigan’s name—I loved the way Frank’s eyes went glittery when he was enthusiastic about a topic. I could tell he was brimming with plenty of ideas of his own. When he talked about Mr. Corrigan and making pictures, it was hard to imagine him going back to a humdrum life of riding fences and roping cattle.

  * * *

  “Bill said we’d find them here,” Papa told me, steering his horse off the main road down a rutted path that led to the Cooper house. We knew Mr. and Mrs. Cooper from church. I’d been to their house once when Mama sent me to deliver some tomato starts to Mrs. Cooper. She’d brought me into her little kitchen and given me two big fresh-cooked doughnuts still warm from the kettle of oil she’d fried them in. Her house was tiny compared to ours, with thin wooden walls instead of thick stucco. It sat at the end of a lonely path that dipped down a hill, with a big mesa rising behind it.

  My brothers, decked out like they were fixing to drive a herd to the stockyards for slaughter, were standing in front of the house in a group of other cowboys and a man wearing a farmer’s chore clothes and a flat-topped hat. To my surprise I realized the farmer was none other than Bart, the evil cowboy from the week before!

  Mr. Corrigan was huddled with the cowboys and the farmer man, talking a mile a minute. Nearby, Nell, the young lady with all the ringlets, stood cooling herself with a Chinese fan. She looked hot today and a bit cross. An older lady joined her and offered her a tin cup of something. Nell gave her a grateful smile and drank deeply. I swallowed, suddenly aware of the heat and wishing I had a cup of water myself.

  There was a flurry of activity in front of the house. My brothers and the other cowboys moved off to the side of the house, near the kitchen garden.

  “Take a couple of steps back,” called Mr. Corrigan. “We’re catching your shadows.”

  “Watch out for my cabbages!” called Mrs. Cooper in an anxious voice. I hadn’t noticed she was standing near the clump of people around the camera. She fixed Mr. Corrigan with a fretful glare. “I won’t have them trampling my garden.”

  “We’ll take care, won’t we, lads?” said Mr. Corrigan soothingly. “All right, Nell, step into the house. On my call, come out and sweep the porch steps, and give us a nice dreamy face, full to the camera. Stop on this mark”—he pointed at the ground just in front of the steps—“and maybe lean on your broom a little. You’re troubled by your father’s determination to marry you off. You’re so deep in your thoughts you don’t hear the kidnappers sneaking up behind you.” He turned to the cowboy cluster. “Kidnappers—got your marks?”

  “Yes, sir,” answered Ike.

  “All right, then. Camera!” bellowed Mr. Corrigan. The camera operator began turning his crank.

  “Action!” yelled Mr. Corrigan. The house door opened and Nell came down the steps with her broom. She gave it a few listless strokes over the steps, looking straight ahead with a worried expression. I don’t know how she knew where to stop, because she never glanced down, but somehow she stopped right where Mr. Corrigan had pointed and rested her chin on her hands on the tip of the broom. Her big eyes had that dark charcoal-pencil smudge around the lashes again. The sun made a fluffy halo of her hair. She gave a sorrowful sigh, staring ahead toward the camera.

  “Kidnappers, go!” called Mr. Corrigan. The bunch of cowboys, led by my brother Ike, began to tiptoe toward Nell. They crept up behind her, making an awful ruckus, but she didn’t seem to notice. The biggest cowboy grabbed her by the waist and she screamed and kicked her legs. Bill tied a kerchief over her face. I knew it was make-believe but it was frightening to watch, and I found myself reaching over to clutch Papa’s hand. Mr. Corrigan was calling out encouragement to the actors. Three or four of the cowboys lifted Nell and carried her away.

  “Cut!” yelled Mr. Corrigan. The cowboys set Nell down and she raised the flap of the kerchief so she could see. Mr. Corrigan was conferring with the man behind the camera. Fr
ank saw Papa and me watching and gave us an enthusiastic wave. This caught Nell’s eye and she smiled in my direction. A second ago she had been shrieking with terror—it sounded so real, I’d been really afraid for her—but now she was laughing with the cowboys, calm and merry. It was all a big lark.

  “All right, that’s it for the house,” said Mr. Corrigan. “Let’s set up for the barn shots.”

  * * *

  Papa and I weren’t the only ones who started showing up to watch the filming, especially when it happened in town. The next time they shot a scene on Straight Street—Mr. Corrigan wanted the livery stable in the background, Frank said—the crowd of gawkers was so big that Mr. Corrigan had to shout into his megaphone to make everyone move out of range of the camera’s round eye. The crowd scattered like minnows when you throw a rock into the creek, and then it re-formed itself behind the camera operator’s back, where Papa and I had learned to stand.

  I saw Walter Murray and Mary Mason and some other kids from school in the crowd. Walter was a good egg, the kind of kid who shook your hand if you beat him at a footrace or skunked him in a spelling bee. Mary, though…somehow I never could seem to get past the front porch with Mary, as Grandma would say. I’d known her since the first grade, but she was a town girl and I was a ranch kid. We only ever saw each other at school, and even there we didn’t talk much. At recess Mary sat in the courtyard with the other town girls, while I mostly hunted lizards or played games with the ranch kids. I didn’t like sitting next to Mary because she always wrinkled her nose like she smelled something bad—when I know for a fact I don’t smell like anything except soap and (if Papa lets me ride Apple to school) horses. Personally, I think the smell of horse is one of the best smells in the world. I don’t mean their manure, although even that smells sort of homey and cheerful—just plain horse scent, a little like hay and a little like leather, and a little like fresh-turned earth on a hot summer day. It’s the smell of my father and brothers coming in from a hard day’s work, with hat lines pressed into their hair and dust on their boots.

  I waved hello at Walter and let it spill over to Mary, a little, to be polite. But she didn’t notice me at all; she was goggling at Nell, who on this day was playing the part of a rich young lady who’d been kidnapped by bad guys. Nell’s long curls trailed out over her shoulders in perfect coils. Mary’s hand went to her own hair and she started twirling her locks into spirals. They uncoiled as soon as she took her finger out. Mary’s brow wrinkled up and her mouth went thin with concentration.

  I studied her, wondering what she was pondering so hard. She must have felt my gaze, because she suddenly looked in my direction and caught me staring. She made a face at me as if to say, What are you looking at? I shrugged and looked quickly away. Prissy Mary Mason wasn’t one-tenth as interesting to look at as the bustle of the Flying Q gang when they were getting ready to do a scene.

  But after Mr. Corrigan called “Action!” and Nell went back to screaming and struggling at her bonds, Mary Mason drew my eye again. She was watching the scene with big round eyes and making funny little jerking motions with her hands behind her back, tossing her head, opening and closing her mouth like a fish. I gaped at her, wondering if she was having a fit.

  Then it struck me—she was copying Nell. Her fish mouth was a silent imitation of Nell screaming. I looked back and forth between them. Nell’s arms were tied behind her back, and so were Mary’s, only the rope was invisible. Nell looked directly at the camera and yelled, “Help!” and Mary’s mouth opened in wordless echo. She was starring in her very own moving picture, a silent performance just like the real thing.

  I had to stifle a snort. Imagine a kid like Mary Mason acting in the pictures—what a hoot!

  That summer I shot up two inches at least. Grandma, who did most of the sewing, lowered the hems on all my dresses twice and then declared she was done until I stopped gaining leg overnight. “I can’t keep up with you, Pearl,” she sighed. “Borrow some trousers from your brothers if you don’t want to go around showing your knees.”

  Music to my ears. You can ride in a dress but it’s not the most practical garment. Some women ride sidesaddle, with both legs on the same side of the horse. You risk your neck trying to do real jumps that way, and even a simple gallop can be treacherous—your bottom keeps wanting to slide right off the saddle. Your other option is to hike up your skirts so you can ride properly, with a leg squeezing each side of the horse. That’s how I usually rode but it does mean showing your knees to the world, and a good bit of petticoat. Mama had tolerated it when I was a little kid, because she knew I was a lot safer with a foot in each stirrup. But I could tell from the way she eyed my bare knees that my hitch-up-the-skirt days were numbered. So I was thrilled when Grandma gave up on keeping me decently clothed and sent me to the boys’ ragbag.

  I rummaged through the basket of Frank’s outgrown clothes and found a pair of pants he’d worn when he was twelve or thirteen. Only one knee hole, and I patched it myself. It wasn’t the neatest stitching job, but I didn’t want to risk taking it to Grandma and having her decide the pants were too tatty for a girl. They were worn buttery-soft in the seat because Frank spent most of his time on the back of a horse.

  I would too, if I could get away with it. But by the time I’ve tended the ostriches and done my house chores, the sun is high and the heat is starting to rise up from the baked earth. It’s hard to care about riding, or anything really, when the sun is baking you into a cracker.

  At least—that goes for riding Apple. Dinah is another story. Dinah gallops so hard and fast that we make our own wind, and it’s better than a dunking in the pond. So when, on a hot afternoon, Papa told me Dinah needed a good run, I had her saddled up before you could say Jack Robinson.

  The boys were filming at the Sanchez ranch out near Carter’s Bluff that day, and Papa said I could go watch as long as I didn’t get in the way. He didn’t have to tell me twice.

  As usual, Dinah attempted to choose our direction. I know her tricks, though, and I yanked hard on the reins to set her lolloping toward the bluff. They were in the middle of filming a scene when we arrived; I could tell at a distance from the way Mr. Corrigan was pulling at his hair. Whenever the camera was rolling, his hands went to the top of his head and clutched big fistfuls of hair. If the scene went smoothly, the hands slid back down. But if he wasn’t happy with how things went, he tugged at his hair until it stood out in spikes and waves all over. He never wore a hat, which was a source of endless discussion amongst my cowboy brothers. They couldn’t understand how he could see anything at all, squinting in the sun, let alone see so sharply he could tell if an actor’s eyebrows were showing surprise instead of suspicion.

  All I could see was a bunch of cowhands tearing around on horseback like a rodeo without a crowd. Mr. Corrigan was calling out instructions to them—“Now, Jack, you fire your gun at Ike. Ike, count to two and then slump over like you’ve been shot. It’d be swell if you could kinda hang off the saddle and let the horse run off with you. Think you can manage that?”

  “Sure thing, Mr. C.,” said Ike confidently.

  It sounded simple enough to me but there was a whole bunch more talking and pointing, and a couple of practice runs for the actors to pace their horses from one mark on the ground to another, before they finally got down to filming the scene. I’d climbed down from Dinah to let her graze a bit in the field, where she wouldn’t be in anybody’s way, but when it sounded like Mr. Corrigan was ready to film the scene, I got back in the saddle. The pretend guns the fellas were using didn’t fire as loudly as real ones, but they made a pretty sharp pop sound when the smoke came out—that’s all it was, a pop and some smoke—and I was afraid Dinah might startle and bolt. I took a firm hold of the reins and kept my legs tight around her sides to let her know I was in charge for once. Anyway, I could see the action better from up there.

  Everything went perfe
ctly, at first. Mr. Corrigan called out instructions through his megaphone and the cowboys got into their starting positions. The costume lady had stuck a big black mustache on Ike. I had to shove my hand in my mouth to keep from guffawing. I thought he looked ridiculous but Mr. Corrigan seemed satisfied. He called out for the camera operator to start the film rolling. Then: “Action!” he cried, pointing at Ike.

  Ike waved his gun around and Jack, the handsome bushy-haired actor, waved his gun back, and both of them hollered at each other but it was mostly nonsense. Didn’t matter what they said, since no one would be hearing their words. Seemed like Ike was doing a lot of talking for someone who was only supposed to be a rider, but I’d noticed the distinction between actors and cowboys was getting a little blurry. Seemed like Mr. Corrigan kept wanting the bad guys in his stories to do a lot of fancy riding.

  It was funny to think this rowdy, noisy scene would flicker in silence when people finally got to watch it. I hoped I would be one of them. Surely, Mama and Papa would take us all to see it in town when the picture was finished. Frank had explained that Mr. Corrigan had to send the film back east to be developed, and then someone would give it a bath in special chemicals that made the pictures appear, then cut it into pieces and stitch them back together and put in a bunch of writing to show what the actors were saying. I hoped whoever did that part was a person with a good imagination, because it seemed like he’d have to invent a whole lot of conversation. He certainly couldn’t write down what Ike and the others were yelling today, which was mostly a loud description of what they were doing to each other.

  “I’m gonna shoot you right through the heart!” yelled Ike, pointing his gun at Jack.

  “Not if I shoot you first!” hollered Jack, aiming back.