Carl noticed the barkeep pouring liniment on a rag which he rubbed on his wrist. Carl said, “Were you in the fight?”
“Nah, this is from pulling corks. I never pulled so many corks in so many quarts so fast in all my life.”
“When Barney Oldfield celebrates, he celebrates.”
“If that’s what you call it,” the barkeep said with a glance at the smashed chairs and tables. An elderly black man in plow shoes and a torn baseball jersey pushed a broom to clean up broken glass. Carl drank again. How could a day so fine end so badly?
It was Barney’s temperament. Everywhere he went, he whored and gambled, drank and started fights.
That afternoon, in front of a roaring crowd that spilled over the dunes to watch, Barney had broken his own one-mile straightaway speed record of 132, set last year when he broke the 1906 record of 127.5 set by Fred Marriott. Under a cloudless Florida sky, with gentle white combers rolling in, carrying the smell of the salt sea, Barney drove his newest racer onto the hard-packed sand of Daytona, long a favorite place for challenging a record. Barney’s 200-h.p. Benz was a chaindriven, bullet-shaped monster, white, with a gigantic four-cylinder engine cast in two blocks—the “Blitzen.”
After he’d taken Bess for a practice run, he’d jammed fresh cotton plugs in his ears, crunched a cigar stub in his teeth, snapped on his goggles, and gave the thumbs-up sign. He drove up the beach, turned back, and accelerated to start his run. Carl was standing with the team manager, Will Pickens, watching through binoculars.
Smoke and flame gouted from the rear of the Blitzen. Pickens grabbed the binoculars. Carl’s teeth clenched as the car howled back toward the timing stand. Pickens exclaimed, “Jesus Christ, he must be doing a hundred thirty-five at least. His wheels are flying off the ground. If he blows a tire or hits anything—”
The Blitzen tore by with a sound like a bomb detonating. The crowd screamed. The car shrank into the south, then came back through the trailing smoke as the chief judge, nearly hysterical, shouted out the official new record—133.4. An honest one this time.
Oil-spattered and grinning, Barney had signed autographs for nearly an hour. Then, as the sun dropped behind the western scrub land, he’d asked the location of the nearest saloon or roadhouse.
Two hours later Will Pickens had rushed him to a hospital with his scalp torn open and bleeding all over his face like a red waterfall. Carl stayed behind in the bar where the brawl had taken place, drinking.
Now it was dark. Carl’s head buzzed. His mouth tasted sour. He watched a fly crawl over hard-boiled eggs spoiling on a plate on the bar while the black man’s broom moved the pile of glass inches at a time. No hiding from the truth any longer. The dream Carl had chased to Indianapolis was a little dirty at the edges.
He heard the beach-side door open but didn’t turn; he didn’t care who came in.
The barkeep’s surprised expression changed his mind. He swung around slowly, feeling heavy, tired. The moon was up, casting phosphorescent light on the sea visible through the door. A woman walked to the bar. He smelled her before he recognized her. The perfume she wore was something like lily of the valley; he remembered his mother using that. His eyes focused.
“Bess.”
“I hoped you might still be here.” Barney’s wife avoided a direct look at Carl as she put her purse on the bar. Her white lace dress, crisp and pretty in the afternoon, was wrinkled and sweat-damp over her breasts. To the barkeep she said, “Give me a whiskey. Leave the bottle. Then leave us alone.”
With a twitch that might have been a smirk, the barkeep served up a bottle and glass, then walked around the end of the bar into a back room. To the black man Bess said, “Lay off the goddamn broom and give us some air.” The man grabbed a chair, caught a dangling cord that swung three connected heart-shaped palmetto fans on the ceiling. He sat down and worked the cord back and forth, moving the fans and stirring a little air.
Carl said, “How’s Barney?”
“Took the doctor two hours to sew up the worst, and he wasn’t finished when I left. He’ll be all right. Barney’s got a hard head. That’s because there are no brains in it.” This was the side of Bess the press and public never saw. When she hung on Barney’s arm during interviews, she was lively, affectionate, always praising him. Bess was a sensually handsome woman with a big tolerance for suffering.
“He’ll be good as new when the sun’s up,” she said, as though scornful of it. She swallowed her whiskey, poured another and swallowed that.
“I don’t know how he does it,” Carl said. “You’re right, he’ll get up with a bandaged head and drive like a demon if that’s what he decides to do. I can’t drink that way.”
“Looks like you’re doing it tonight.”
“Yeah, well, being around Barney sort of wears you out.”
“Tell me something that’s news.”
She poured more whiskey. The fans squeaked. The Atlantic surf murmured like a seducer; the ocean sparkled with moonlight, all the way out to Europe. Carl pinched the inner corners of his eyes but couldn’t clear his vision.
Bess’s pale, soft hand lay on his sleeve. He hadn’t seen or felt it descend.
“Carl. I don’t owe Barney anything anymore. He’s cheated on me a million times. If you come right down to it, he isn’t very original either. Just another dumb hick who got rich too fast and doesn’t know how to handle it. He’s a fancy racecar, but they forgot the brakes. You, though. You’re different.” She licked her lip, checked to be sure the barkeep was still gone. Her fingers closed.
“Keep me company tonight.”
Sweat drew the white dress down to a wet valley between her breasts. Carl’s tongue felt thick as a piece of wood. Tempted, he gazed at her for a while before he said, “Don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“The boss’s wife? He’ll never know.”
“We would.”
Anger made her sneer. “Little Lord Fauntleroy? I thought you were better than that.” She slammed her glass on the bar. “You pay for the whiskey. I came all the way back here for nothing.”
She walked out, silver as a ghost in the moonlight before she disappeared. Soon he heard the putter of an auto. He said to the old black man, “You can stop that.”
“Yessir.”
The barkeep walked out of the back room. Carl happened to be glancing at the floor. A large brown cockroach with twitching antennae stepped slowly, deliberately, over the toe of his boot.
“Party over?” the barkeep asked.
Carl shook his foot. The cockroach dropped off, and he stepped on it hard, breaking its horny brown back.
“It never started. How much for this whole bottle?”
Next day, about noon, having eaten nothing because he had the heaves most of the night, Carl sat at a wicker table on the porch of a Daytona rooming house where the team had put up. Barney was recuperating nicely at his hotel, though the suturing of his scalp had taken four hours. Under Carl’s sleeve lay the Florida Times Union from Jacksonville, with triumphant front-page headlines.
BARNEY OLDFIELD UNDISPUTED SPEED KING
OF THE UNIVERSE.
HUMAN THUNDERBOLT SETS NEW RECORD.
Kaiser Personally Telegraphs Champion—
“GREAT VICTORY IN GERMAN AUTO.”
Carl licked the tip of a pencil, picked up a postcard showing an orange grove in sickly colors. He turned it over, wrote slowly.
Dear Tess, how are you? I am not so hot these days. Am starting to think I made a bad mistake joining up with “B”
He stopped there. Read the little he’d written. What did it really mean? Should he leave the team? It would be a lot to give up. There wasn’t much to like about Barney Oldfield, but there was plenty to admire. The man had no nerves, and almost unlimited courage.
Or maybe he was just unhinged, which amounted to the same thing.
Carl loved driving. He loved the scream of wind past his goggles, the rising roar as he flamed down the stretch toward a packed grands
tand. He loved wrestling the great cars he thought of as wild animals made of iron and wire and tubing with gas coursing through instead of blood.
He loved the rush of young girls to Barney’s garage after a fairgrounds appearance. There were always plenty, and if Bess was nearby Barney couldn’t touch any of them, not right then. Any single man could find a partner for the night unless he was deaf, dumb, and stupid.
All of the giddy girls left a hollow feeling, though. None was Tess. He could never care for any of them as he still cared for her.
He grimaced at the card, threw the pencil over a startled chameleon straddling the porch rail. He tore the card in pieces and stuffed them in his shirt pocket. She didn’t want to hear his troubles. Christ, by now she might be married to that fool Wayne, or someone else.
He sat on the porch as the wet heat ripened and drenched him in his own sweat. The sun broiled his eyes; finally he had to raise his hand and shield them. The base of his skull hurt again. He wondered where this dangerous drift was carrying him.
51. Liberty Rising
Fritzi left the big red car at Sunset and Alessandro, in the district called Edendale. Following B.B.’s directions, she walked north in the morning sunshine, avoiding puddles in the road that hadn’t completely dried. Even in damp winter a hint of sweet roses and oranges pleased the air.
Edendale was rural, mostly stables, one or two ramshackle stores, some cottages and shanties. After nearly a mile she saw Pal’s stout owner waving a hanky from the front of a weedy lot.
“You found it. Sorry for the walk. You won’t have to ride shank’s mare too much longer. I’ll shop for the car soon.” B.B. worked her hand while she cast a suspicious eye at what appeared to be distinctly rundown real estate.
“Well, what do you think of it?”
Fritzi shaded her eyes with her palm. “It’s very—large.”
“Three point eight acres. We got a good lease, for the whole year, even though we’ll head back to New York come spring.” He urged her forward through yellowed weeds that left tiny burrs on her skirt. “Couldn’t do it any other way. Fella who used to own it hacked up his wife and went to prison. Property’s in the hands of a bank.”
“That’s heartwarming,” Fritzi said under her breath.
They went up the rotted steps to the main house, a weather-battered relic with peeling paint and shutters hanging by a single hinge. Somewhere out back hammers rang. She thought she heard Eddie’s voice.
“Offices will be in here and upstairs,” B.B. said as she dodged a cobweb in the entrance. “Al’s already set up in the dining room. He’s staying in a hotel downtown, like me. There’s a study or den we’ll fix up for a projection room. Hello, Al.” B.B. waved at his partner. Kelly was seated behind a massive dining room table littered with bills, trade papers, and account books.
Kelly greeted them with a grunt, handed Fritzi a blue-covered document. “Your contract. Look it over and sign before you go.”
“We start a new Lone Indian picture in two days,” B.B. said. “Till they finish the stage we’ll shoot outdoors, place that Eddie found called Daisy Dell.” Fritzi examined the document, a stupefying blur of therefores and whereases. Something in the first paragraph caught her eye.
“This contract’s with something called Liberty Pictures.”
“We got a new partner,” Kelly said.
“That’s right. He’s bringing in a lot of working capital,” B.B. said.
“Who is he?”
Kelly answered. “Name’s Ham Hayman. One of Benny’s Hebraic kinsmen. From up in Frisco. Started as a furrier but switched to moving pictures.”
“Al, how many times I got to tell you? People are calling them motion pictures now. Motion.” Explaining to Fritzi: “Lots of bad reaction to pictures moving all the time. Moving, jittering—it makes people nervous. Motion sounds classier. I read it in the World.”
Kelly said, “Hayman runs one theater, but he isn’t primarily an exhibitor, he’s an exchange man. Owns a string of ’em all the way through Nevada to Colorado and down to Arizona. Independent,” Kelly added, as though he smelled bad cheese. “I told B.B. it’s a mistake to throw in with independent exchanges. We should join the trust and distribute through Kennedy’s General Filmco.”
“We bought the new camera, that’s enough.” B.B. soothed Fritzi: “Don’t you worry, the independents are doing just fine. Getting stronger and stronger. Day before yesterday I heard Gaumont of Paris is about to pull out of the trust, and Eastman’s about to start selling raw stock to everybody, not just trust companies. Carl Laemmle at IMP has a slogan—‘Bust the trust’—well, it’s happening.”
Fritzi said, “That’s all very fine, but I don’t understand the name change.”
“For his capital Hayman gets some leverage,” Kelly told her. “Hayman says a horse bit him when he was nine. The pony had to go.”
“We already have a swell new symbol picked out,” B.B. said.
“Let me guess. The Statue of Liberty?”
“Give the girl a prize,” Kelly said. “Sign the contract today, Fritzi.” He bent his head over a ledger, as if she and B.B. didn’t exist.
Pleased as a father with a new infant, B.B. took her out through the dusty kitchen to a barn that would store scenery and house the company’s property and paint shops. “Dressing rooms over here.” Fritzi was dismayed. He was pointing at horse stalls that smelled of manure. “Don’t worry, don’t worry, we’ll hang up blankets.”
The center of activity seemed to be the rear of the lot, specifically a primitive construction B.B. proudly referred to as their stage. She saw carpenters on ladders, and two familiar faces—Eddie and Jock Ferguson, who was tinkering with an unfamiliar camera. Was this the new one B.B. had referred to?
“Right, it’s a Bianchi,” he said. “Named after the Eyetalian who used to work for Edison. Jock says it’s lousy. Breaks down all the time. The image shakes and shimmies like Little Egypt. But it don’t violate any patents. We’ll shoot with old faithful but keep this one for display. If detectives show up, it should keep them scratching their heads, huh?”
He chuckled, but the beautiful sunshine had a touch of chill suddenly. She saw Pearly again, the moment he fell under the train at City Hall station. She often had nightmares about it.
Jock kissed her cheek to welcome her. Eddie escorted her onto the stage, a large rectangular platform with a bare wooden floor. “We can shoot at least two interiors at the same time,” he said. “Three if we crowd them together. B.B. and Kelly want to step up production to three reels a week—one comedy, one drama, one western or Indian picture. That’s the standard for successful independents.”
B.B. planted himself in front of Fritzi, cheerful as a cherub. “Well, my gel, what’s your opinion now?”
Somewhat bewildered, she smiled. “There’s certainly a lot happening.”
“And you’re part of it. A big part.”
Eddie put his arm around her. “The new Indian scenario’s ready if you want to read it.”
She said, “Of course.”
Fritzi’s bewilderment became amazement. The winds of change were certainly blowing. A new partner was already putting his mark on the company, which had a new name. A new camera was operating on a new site called a lot. In this strange new business both the product and the people were “movies.”
She’d never admit it to Hobart, or any of her Broadway chums, but she was suddenly eager to go to work.
Ham Hayman made his first appearance in late January, having moved from the Bay Area to Los Angeles to work more directly in production. He was a small, fastidious man with pale hands, curly hair, and foxy eyes.
Eddie said Hayman not only provided much needed production capital, but paid a ten percent premium into the partnership for every finished and delivered negative. For this he had exclusive distribution rights to all Liberty pictures within the territory covered by his exchanges.
Hayman showed up regularly on the lot, bringing with him str
ong opinions which he shared with actors, crew—anyone within earshot. One of them led to a certain person being hired.
“How can we speed up production without more scripts? We need a regular story department,” Hayman complained within Fritzi’s hearing. She didn’t forget the remark. At an opportune moment she politely asked B.B. to talk to a young woman of her acquaintance who had sold one or two scenarios. Fritzi slipped a reference to Hayman into the conversation. B.B. cheerfully agreed.
That night Lily dithered with excitement while Fritzi counseled her about the meeting two days hence. “Take the stories you’ve sold, and anything you’re working on. You want to impress him that you’re literary.”
“Hell, that’s the last thing I am, literary,” Lily said, with a lift of one shoulder that pushed her breast forward inside her blouse, which was thin and quite revealing. The moment seemed to speak eloquently of what Lily was and was not.
“Haven’t you read any novels or poetry?”
“I like Poe, his scary stuff. And Dickens, I’ve read a few of his. Big words but interesting characters.”
“Can you quote anything from either one?”
“Come on, Fritzi. I could hardly wait to get out the school door when I was legal age to leave.”
Fritzi sat beside her on the bed in the larger bedroom, pondering. “Then we need to work up something that might charm Mr. Pelzer. Something worthy but not too obscure.” She thought of a dozen poems she’d committed to memory in school. “Tennyson. He’s just right. Listen to this.”
On her feet, she put her palm on her bosom and declaimed:
“Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, O sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.”
Lily lifted her flounced skirt and scratched her thigh. “I don’t get it.”