American Dreams (47 page)

'I doubt this happened by accident,' Eddie said. 'Someone saw Bill Nix in the neighborhood day before yesterday.' Anxiously he looked back.

'There's a fire-escape window in the room where the costumes are stored.'

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He ran toward the advancing wall of flame, the two frightened women a step behind.

The heat increased, and the glare. Daphne Roosa faltered, short of breath. Fritzi caught her hand to help her along. The fire had nearly reached the door of the temporary costume shop. Fritzi well knew the risk of having nitrate film stored in a building with wooden walls, but it had always been an abstract consideration. She'd never imagined there could be real danger. The watery sting of her eyes, the suffocating smoke, the heat, the crack of crumbling plaster and lath, the crash of burning debris falling through to the floor below, told her she'd been a fool.

'Eddie, can we make it?' The door they had to pass through was half engulfed.

'Have to, there's no other way. Follow me.' He meant right through the flames. Fritzi grasped Daphne's hand more firmly. The smoke grew blinding, the heat scorching. Eddie threw his arms over his head and leaped with the agility of a deer, disappearing into the fire.

'Run, Daphne. Fast as you can,' Fritzi shouted.

'Oh, I'm scared.'

'So am I, but we'll die if we stay here. Come on!'

She fairly dragged the stout girl, one arm raised to shield her eyes. She
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leaped through a curtain of light, holding her breath so as not to suck in the poisonous smoke. She plunged into the Stygian dark of the unlit room.

All of a sudden her hand clutched empty air.

'Daphne?'

She saw Daphne laying on her side, next to a fallen dress form that must have tripped her. The doorway disappeared in flames. Daphne lay too close; her skirt caught and smoked. Out of sight behind the costumes racked on iron pipe, Eddie yelled:

'For God's sake, where are you?'

'Daphne's hurt.' The stout young woman was thrashing about, moaning.

Fritzi heard Eddie coming on the run. Daphne's skirt blazed suddenly, and she screamed.

Fritzi grabbed something from the nearest rack -- a king's velvet robe studded with imitation gems. She threw it on Daphne like a blanket, then flung herself on top, kicking and beating the flames to put them out. The smoke had grown so heavy she could see little but the glare behind it.

'Here, get up.' Eddie tugged her arm. Daphne was momentarily safe, the fire on her clothing smothered. Fritzi grabbed Eddie's arm like a life Carl Mows the Grass 293

line. The three of them stumbled between the racks to the raised window.

Down on the street, the bell in a corner fire box clanged the alarm. Voices clamored.

'Go through,' Eddie yelled, pushing Daphne Roosa out to the iron fire escape, then Fritzi. He climbed outside as Daphne started down the metal stairs. Fritzi clutched the hand rail and followed.

Somehow she misstepped. She fell toward the landing where the last flight of stairs began. The floor of the landing, an iron grating, came up to meet her, slamming her face. She felt a cruel spike of pain in her ankle.

Then it was all gone, the fire, the strident bell, Eddie, Daphne - gone into a black maw of nothing.

56 Carl Mows the Grass

Carl slept in Ryan's hayloft, warm and secure with blankets to cover him and straw to cushion him. The food was good; Rip Ryan loved to
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eat, huge meals of steak and eggs and local fruit and vegetables, though he was slow at the stove because of his arthritis.

Ryan had long ago done drawings of the barn addition. It went up fairly rapidly, thanks to Carl's strength and mobility. Once each week a local physician and a male science teacher drove out in their flivvers at different times for a flying lesson. To his amazement, Carl saw that Ryan was true to his word: he never touched the plane, just sat on a barrel by the landing strip, observing and instructing. At three thirty on a Tuesday, Carl took his first lesson.

'She's easier to pilot than a Wight plane,' Ryan said as Carl climbed up on the small, hard seat in front of the motor. 'Take the wheel in your hands. That's right. Push her forward, the plane will nose down. Pull back, she'll come up. To bank left, turn the wheel left and lean that way.

See? No harder than driving one of Mr. Ford's motor cars.'

Not quite true, Carl discovered. Ryan first had him get the feel of the controls by sitting in the plane with the motor off. Carl slipped into the shoulder harness connected to short ailerons mounted between the ends of the upper and lower wings. When the aviator leaned left or right, it moved the ailerons via the harness. He'd have to practice to get the hang 294

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of looking over his shoulder at the engine without jerking the plane into a sudden precipitous bank when he was aloft.

His driving experience did help him learn fairly quickly. In a matter of days, Ryan fired up the engine and stood back while Carl taxied on the half-mile grass strip behind the barn. Ryan had wired the throttle so the plane couldn't lift off by accident. Carl bumped up and down the field, exhilarated by the motor roar, the wind in his face, the flare of sunlight on his old driving goggles. This exercise of beating back and forth Ryan called 'mowing the grass.' It was a staple of the Curtiss method.

When Ryan was satisfied with Carl's progress in mowing, he guided Carl through the installation of a special practice propeller that allowed the Eagle to race down the field and lift six or eight feet off the ground. Carl's first flight of about thirty-five feet, up and then gently down with a bump, set the blood to singing in his ears and made him feel like a conqueror of gravity. His second flight carried him fifty feet, ten feet above the field. The third time he made an error, pushed the control wheel too far, and slammed downward suddenly, fortunately only from a height of four feet; there was no smash-up. Ryan had built a strong plane.

In Riverside one Saturday, Carl called Los Angeles from the telephone office. He was eager to tell Fritzi that he might have found something he could do happily for the rest of his life. Of course, he'd felt the same way
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about driving, and look how that had worked out. Amid pings and whistles from the other end of the wire, Mr. Hong reported that Fritzi had left for New York.

The following Tuesday, they mounted the regular flight propeller. With his belly knotted so badly it surely must resemble one of Ryan's hands, Carl opened the throttle as he sped down the field. He drew the wheel back. With his hair flying out behind, his mouth open in soundless jubilation, he felt the lift beneath the wings. Eagle left the ground.

He leaned to the right in the shoulder harness, climbed above the barn with its wind sock, flew over the newly roofed addition, painted with white primer the day before. He climbed slowly to two hundred feet, watching the world expand to an incredible panorama of orange groves and country lanes, meandering buggies and busy workers spread beneath him in sunlit glory. For fifteen minutes he practiced long, slow turns, climbs into the eye of the sun, gliding descents. Finally he saw Ryan signal him by waving his arms like semaphore flags. Carl landed with a feathery thump and a long roll, killing the motor six feet from his mentor.

*

Ryan hobbled over to the Eagle and leaned against the lower wing.

'You've got the touch. You'll make a good aviator.'

Carl shucked out of the harness, jumped down from the hard seat. He and Ryan looked at each other with perfect and slightly melancholy understanding. Ryan voiced it:

'A few more practice flights, the bird'll be ready to leave the nest. Got to hurry up and caulk everything and finish painting so we can call it quits.'

On a lazy June afternoon with bees making noise in the flower beds Ryan cultivated near the cottage, they examined the new Dutch door in the addition. Ryan slammed it several times, then took a penknife to scrape flecks of paint from the windowpane. He declared the addition completed..

'So

what now?' he said as they returned to the cottage. Carl followed a step behind as usual, to give Ryan-time for each crabbed step.

'I'd like to get a job flying an aeroplane. Are there any jobs like that?'

With one of his rare smiles Ryan said, 'Sure, if you don't mind risking your life once or twice a day.'

'I've done it before,' Carl said. 'What are you talking about?'

In the kitchen a beef brisket simmered fragrantly in an iron pot. Ryan told him to sit down while he fetched something. He returned with a
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smudged business card with bent corners.

'This boyo passed through Redlands with his show last fall. Exhibition flyers. He told me that pilots quit on him all the time because the stunts are dangerous.'

RENE LEMAYE

'Circus of the Air'

- Rates Upon Request

The

card bore a one-line address: General Delivery, El Paso, Texas.

'Frenchman?'

'Right. Lot of them interested in planes. Bleriot, Paulhan -- he was at the Los Angeles air meet last year. Americans are behind compared to the froggies. Phis Rene told me the bartenders at the Sheldon Hotel in El Paso always know where he's appearing.'

'I'll look him up.'

'Have you got money for a rail ticket?'

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'I don't need a ticket. I jump on freights.'

'Isn't that dangerous?'

'No more dangerous than flying.' Or working for Barney. 'Got to dodge the railroad bulls, that's all. They'll break your legs faster than a bad jump from a moving train.'

'Well, you may be just the kind of crazy damn fool the Frenchman wants.'

He shuffled and bobbed his way to the stove. They tore into the hearty meal of roast, boiled potatoes, California snap beans, and homemade sourdough bread washed down with some bourbon whiskey Ryan kept for special occasions. Ryan said, 'I've liked your company. I'll hate to see you go.

'I appreciate what you taught me.'

'Send a new aeronaut out into the world, it's like sending yourself.

Well, almost.' He saluted Carl with the whiskey, then knocked it back in
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swift gulps.

'Marie didn't like this flying business, or any of the new things, the new inventions. She didn't understand the thrill of going up. Looking at the cloud castles, the toy towns, the little people. It takes your problems and squeezes them way down, till they don't seem so important anymore.'

Ryan ran his hand along the polished stick lying on the empty chair between them.

'Till they don't hurt so much.'

'You're right,' Carl agreed. 'I felt that the very first time I left the ground.'

Maybe a new chapter was beginning for him. He wondered what Tess would have said about it.

57 Decision

Fritzi recuperated in the same New York I lospital where she'd visited Eddie. A doctor named Lilyveldt attended her, a handsome and austere man with a silver beard. He was aware of the circumstances of her fall and let her know immediately that he came of an old New York family that disapproved of actors. During his examinations he offered unsubtle advice about leaving the profession as soon as possible.

Decision

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Apparently she'd wrenched her left ankle badly as she started to tumble down the last rungs of the fire escape. She remembered the spike of hot pain before she passed out, but nothing beyond that - not the impact that turned her forehead purple as eggplant, or the bloody gashing of her scalp that required six stitches. They'd shaved away her unruly blond hair to sew up the wound. When the dressing was changed, she saw herself in a hand mirror. She looked like a woman whose large bald spot had slipped to the right side of her head. It made her giggle.

Eddie's wife, Rita, volunteered to pick up her mail and bring it to the hospital. The first batch contained a yellow envelope - a cable from Paul.

He would be in the States shortly to confer with his American publisher, then undertake a month-long lecture tour in the Midwest and South, filming as he went. She couldn't wait to hear news of Julie and the children, especially the new baby girl, Francesca Carlotta, whom they called Lottie.

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B.B. brought candy, white roses in tissue paper, and apologies. 'It's my fault you're hurt this way.'

'I don't hold anyone responsible, except the man who set the fire.'

'Nix,' B.B. said emphatically. 'Police picked up a tip. The bum was standing around swilling beer and bragging in a Third Avenue saloon.

For a criminal, that fellow has the brains of an ant. They sweated him at the precinct house, and he broke down right away. He's going to the pen.

He pulled a chair close, chafed her hand while he said, 'Liberty's talent is too valuable to risk this way. Sophie and I talked it over for hours.

Here's what I decided. End of summer, I'm closing down production in New York. Not much left of the office anyway, the fire gutted most of the building. It's back to California.'

, A lump formed in her throat. 'For good?'

'Right.' The way he chafed her hand told of his anxiety. 'We want you to go with us, you know that. I'm offering you a raise to ninety-five dollars a week. A hundred if I can squeeze Al. How do you feel about that?'

Fritzi lay back on the rough pillow, her mind in a whirl. 'Honestly, I don't know.'

'Well, please decide soon, that's all I ask. Just yesterday I telegraphed lily to tell her she's on the payroll starting in September.' B.B. patted her again, then put his chair back where it belonged. He twiddled his hat brim nervously. 'Please consider what Liberty Pictures is offering you, Fritzi. You got a great future.'

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She thought of the scornful Dr. Lilyveldt. 'Thank you. I promise I'll think about it.'

He waddled away down the aisle, tipping his hat to matrons and patients. Fritzi sighed. To throw her lot entirely with Liberty in California not only seemed cowardly, but a commitment to mediocrity. Yet that was a step better than not eating, wasn't it?