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The Misfits
Arthur Miller
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eBook - ePub
The Misfits
Arthur Miller
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About This Book
Discover the cinema-novelization of Arthur Miller's 1961 American western film, The Misfits, which was directed by John Huston and went on to be one of the most popular cult films of the 1960s. A story of four lost souls - the beautiful Roslyn who has never belonged to anyone or anything, and three other misfits who roam the open land existing on the little money made from riding in rodeos and rounding up wild horses - who meet in Reno to discover that freedom has its price, and the heart its rules. The Misfits starred Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe and Montgomery Cliff. Based on a short story of the same name, originally published in 1957, this cinema novel of the film includes an introduction by Arthur Miller himself.
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ELEVEN
The first rays of dawn are brightening the sky. Perce is on the truck bed, cranking gas from the drum into the plane. Guido is on top of the wing, holding the hose and peering into the tank.
Gay walks over to a mound partially covered with drift sand. He reaches down, grasps something, and pulls; a tarpaulin is peeled off, revealing a dozen truck tires. On the wing Guido raises his hand, peering into the tank, and calls: “Okay, hold it!”
Gay calls to them from the pile of tires: “Let’s go, Perce, gimme a hand here!”
Perce hops off the truck, gets in behind the wheel, and backs to the tires. Guido clambers down off the wing, reaches into the opensided cockpit, and draws out a shotgun pistol, which he proceeds to load from a box of shells.
Roslyn, who is rolling up the bedrolls and tying them, happens to look and sees the pistol in Guido’s hand, hesitates, then returns to her job. The dog comes up to her. She smiles down at the animal, then with some initial fear reaches down and pats it. Happily she calls: “She’s not snapping any more, Gay!”
Gay is just heaving a truck tire onto the bed of the truck with Perce’s help. He turns to her, smiling. “Things generally look a little different in the morning.”
Guido calls from the plane: “I guess I’m ready, Gay!”
He is drawing out of the plane a shredded Air Force jacket whose lamb’s-wool lining is visible through slits in the outside leather. He and Gay go to each wingtip and unlash the plane. Perce goes to the tail and unlashes it. Roslyn comes near and watches now. Perce now comes alongside her and stands. Gay walks back to the cockpit with Guido.
Gay: “How you want her?”
Guido looks up at the sky, holding a palm up to feel the breeze. He points: “That way.”
Gay goes to the tail, lifts it, and swings the plane to face the direction of take-off. Then he walks along the plane to the propeller and waits. Guido is about to get into the cockpit.
Roslyn, as though to relieve the weirdly charged atmosphere, calls rather gaily to Guido: “Boy, that’s some jacket! Little breezy, isn’t it?”
Guido: “Went on a lot of missions in this thing. Wouldn’t take a hundred dollars for it ... bulletproof.” They chuckle as he climbs in and sits. To Roslyn: “Glad you decided to stay with us. Probably never see this again in history, y’know.”
Roslyn: “Take care, now.”
Guido mutely thanks her for her solicitude. “Okay, boy, turn your partner and do-si-do! Switch off!”
Gay glances behind him to see if there is any obstruction to his back step, reaches up, turns the propeller several times. Guido slips his goggles on.
Guido: “Switch on! With feeling now!” They laugh. Gay turns the propeller until it is horizontal and pulls down hard, but the engine does not start. “And again! And let us pray.” Gay with special care grasps the propeller, pulls down. The engine huffs and dies. “That’s that damn car gas for ya. Okay, let’s try her again.”
Again Gay yanks down on the propeller. The engine smokes, huffs, and with a sudden resolution clatters up to a roar. Guido straps himself in, lays the pistol in his lap, and with a wave to them guns the engine. The plane moves away from them, gains speed, and takes the air. Now it wheels in air and comes back, roaring over their heads and away toward the mountains. They turn with it.
The three squint against the prop blast. Gay is the first to move; he looks for an instant at Perce and Roslyn. They feel his glance. Without reason, they feel separated from him, and he smiles.
Gay: “Here we go.” He turns toward the truck and starts to walk, Perce and Roslyn following him.
Guido lifts his goggles and looks up at the clear blue sky. His lips move as though in prayer. He lowers his goggles and looks down. The barrier face of the mountains suddenly passes under the plane. Now the sharp interior walls and steep valleys show, manless, half in shadow, with patches of grass here and there. A hidden secret world is opened. The plane flies just within the crests of the mountains, turning with the valleys, which Guido scans through the open-sided cockpit. Suddenly his head moves sharply.
Instantly he pulls the stick back; the plane abruptly climbs. Now he banks and turns, the plane shuddering on uneven steps of air. Now he checks his instruments and grasps the pistol in his right hand. With a glance over the side to aim himself, he presses the stick forward and dives.
The herd is coming up to him fast. Now the animals start to gallop along the wall of the valley. Guido flattens his dive and zooms in over the horses, his wingtips only yards from the valley walls. He pulls the stick back and the plane noses upward; he points the pistol down as he passes over the herd, and fires. With the shot the horses surge ahead even faster. He is conscious of having held his breath, of having felt a strange tremor in his engine at the moment of acceleration. With a sigh he flies toward the sky, turns tightly, lines himself up with the herd, and once more starts his dive.
The truck bumps along on the sage desert, but now it crosses a border where the sage and soil end and a prehistoric lake bed begins. It is a floor of clay, entirely bare, white, and flat as a table. Now the truck halts close to a little hummock bordering the lake bed.
Perce emerges as the engine is turned off. He looks around as Roslyn comes down out of the cab. Gay comes from the other side of the truck and walks around to them where they stand scanning the lake bed. The silence is absolute. There is no wind.
Roslyn: “It’s . . . like a dream!”
Set between mountain ranges the lake bed stretches about twenty-five miles wide and as long as the eye can see. Not a blade of grass or stone mars its absolutely flat surface, from which heat waves rise. In the distance it glistens like ice.
Perce: “I seen a picture of the moon once. Looked just like this.”
Gay: “He’ll be drivin’ the horses out of that pass.”
She and Perce look toward an opening in the mountain face perhaps a mile away. “Does anybody own this land?”
“Government, probably. Just call it God’s country. Perce? Let’s get that drum off.”
Gay goes to the truck, hops onto the bed, and proceeds to unlash the gasoline drum. Perce stands on the ground and helps jimmy the drum to the edge of the truck. Now Gay hops down and both men let it down to the ground and roll it off to one side. Roslyn watches for a moment, then goes to the cab and leans in. The dog is quivering on the floor of the cab. She reaches toward it tentatively.
Gay goes to one of the tires; he draws a rope from inside it and experimentally circles it over his head and throws it.
Perce, seeing him occupied, walks over to the cab and looks in from the side opposite to that of Roslyn. She is pressing her face against the dog’s. Then she reaches up to the rearview mirror, turns it to look at herself, sees Perce, and smiles.
He speaks as though voicing a premonition: “I’d be a little careful what I said to Gay. For a while out here.”
Gay’s face appears beside his. “Got to get the glasses.”
Perce steps aside. Gay moves into the truck doorway, hardly looking at Roslyn, who now shakes dust out of her hair in the rearview mirror. He reaches behind the seat and draws out a large binocular case. Looking at her now, grinning, an uncertainty still in his eyes, he takes the binoculars out of the case and puts the glasses to his eyes. Perce is watching him. He holds the glasses up to his eyes for a long moment, looking toward the pass.
She steps over to Gay, forcing a bright tone: “See anything?”
Gay, putting the glasses on a tire on the truck bed: “Climb up, make yourself comfortable. He’ll be awhile yet.”
He gives her a boost. She mounts the truck bed. He climbs up and sits inside a pile of two tires, his legs hanging over the edge at the knees, his armpits supporting his trunk.
Gay: “Go ahead. It’s comfortable.”
She does as he did; Perce mounts onto the truck.
Roslyn: “It is comfortable! Try it, Perce.”
Perce does the same. The three sit in silence as Gay again raises the glasses and looks through them.
Gay turns to her. “You lookin’ real good today, honey. Maybe tonight we go down to Reno and dance, okay?”
“Okay.”
“I’d of brought your umbrella for you but I didn’t think of it.”
“I’m all right. It’s not too hot.”
She reaches over and touches his knee reassuringly, for she sees his anxiety about her. Now she withdraws her hand, and scans the lake bed.
Gay, for a moment, continues looking at her profile. He has sensed the dampened quality of her feeling. He turns and glances at Perce, who is on his other side. Perce is staring toward the pass, clearly preoccupied.
For a moment Gay sits staring straight ahead; then he turns to her. “I forgot to tell you something last night.”
She looks at him with quick interest.
“Lots of cow outfits use the pastures up in those mountains, and when they find the mustangs there they just shoot ’em and leave ’em for the buzzards. ’Cause they eat up all the good grass, see.”
She nods that she understands, but he sees he has not pierced her dampened air, and he turns to Perce.
“You know that, don’t you, Perce?”
“Huh? Oh sure, I know that.”
“Whyn’t you say so?”
“I just said so.”
Gay raises the glasses. “Nothin’ but misfit horses, that’s all they are, honey.”
He studies the pass through the glasses. Putting the glasses down, he turns to her with a warm memory in his eyes. “Wished you’d been here in the old days.” Stretching an arm toward the pass: “They’d come pourin’ out of those passes, three, four, five hundred at a time. And we’d build us a big corral out here and funnel them right in. Some of them were real beautiful animals, too. Made sweet riding horses.”
For a moment she feels the breadth of his memories. “It must have been wonderful.”
“Best life any man could’ve had.”
“I wished I’d been here ... then.”
Perce: “I hear something.”
Gay: “What?”
Perce: “Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.”
Gay: “It’s my watch.”
Roslyn: “Boy, it’s quiet here! You can hear your skin against your clothes.” She tries to laugh.
Gay, exhaling, relaxing in the tire: “Ayah!” He leans back, closing his eyes. Perce and Roslyn, in effect, are becoming joined by a viewpoint toward Gay, who at every moment seems to be gathered up by a quickening forward rhythm. They look at each other, forced, as it were, to an awareness of looking on him with the same eyes.
Perce: “I hear something!”
Gay listens. He raises the glasses, sees nothing, puts them down.
Gay: “What?”
Perce: “Engine, sounds like.”
They listen.
Gay: “Where?”
Perce, indicating with an open hand the general direction of the pass: “Out that way.”
Gay, after listening for a moment: “Too soon. He wouldn’t be in pass yet.”
Roslyn: “Wait.” She listens. “I hear it.”
Gay strains to hear. Now a certain pique is noticeable in him because he can’t hear it. “No—just your blood pumpin’ in your head, is all.”
Roslyn: “Ssh.”
Gay watches her. Perse is also tensed to listen.
Gay: “I always had the best ears of anybody, so don’t tell me you—”
Perce, suddenly pointing, and screwing up out of the tire to sit on its rim: “Isn’t that him?”
The three look into the distant sky, Roslyn and Gay trying to locate the plane, at the same time wriggling out of the tires, to sit on the rims.
She suddenly cries out and points. “I see it! There! Look, Gay!”
Almost insulted, he scans the sky, then unwillingly raises the glasses and sees the mountain pass up close; flying out of it is the plane, tiny even in the glasses. He puts down the glasses, blinks his eyes hard. “He never worked this fast before. I’d’ve seen him but I didn’t expect him so soon.”
Perce: “I could see him glinting in the sun. It was the glint. That’s why.”
Gay seems to accept the apology. Now, very distantly, an explosion is heard.
Roslyn: “What’s that?”
Gay: “He fired a shot.”
She watches the pass with growing apprehension and fascination. Perce glances at her in concern, then back to the pass. They are all perspiring now in the warming sun.
Gay: “I’ve sat here waitin’ two-three hours before he come out. That’s why I didn’t see him.” Now, however, he glances at Perce and nods. “You got good eyes, though, boy.” He raises the glasses again. Silence. They watch the pass. The sun is higher; heat waves rise around them like a transparent sea. Suddenly Gay straightens.
“There they come. One ... two ... three ... four ... five ... six. I guess he’ll go back for the others now.”
Perce: “Give me a look, heh?”
Gay hands Perce the binoculars. “See the others yet?”
“No. There’s ... six. And a little colt.”
Roslyn’s flesh moves; she shifts the position of one hand to relax her tension.
Gay notices her shock without facing her, and he asks Perce: “You sure?...