Carl wrote a line about his interest in aeroplanes. At twenty past five the rear door opened and Barney swaggered in, chewing on a cigar. He spotted Carl.
“Greetings, kid. How are you?” The altercation in Ventura might never have happened. Probably doesn’t even remember it.
“Doing all right, Barney, how about you?”
“Soon as I get a snootful I’ll be better.” He hovered by the table, a big canvas driving cap cocked on his head, a linen duster unbuttoned to show his dark purple suit, a sapphire tie pin big as a headlight. On the duster Carl noticed brown streaks—blood, he suspected.
“Have a good visit with your sister?”
“Fine, thanks. She’ll be heading back to New York by the end of May.”
“We’re getting some movie actors in here. I met one named Arbuckle last night, hell of a card. Come on up to the bar, I’ll buy a drink.”
“I just had a beer, I don’t think—”
“The boss wants to buy you a drink,” Barney cut in. Carl could tell he’d already downed a few. Reluctantly he slipped pencil and postcard in the outside pocket of his shabby corduroy coat.
“Sure, I’ll have one with you.”
Customers greeted Barney as he and Carl stepped up to the rail. Above the cut-glass decanters on the back bar hung a huge and heroic painting of Jim Jeffries in boxing tights, fists raised for combat. Barney waved his cold cigar.
“Milo, give Carl a slug of that special stock we keep for friends.”
“Beer’s fine with me.”
“I want you to try this stuff.” At these words Carl’s neck suddenly itched. He felt something unpleasant building. “Make it doubles all around, Milo.”
Barney leaned back, elbows on the bar as he surveyed his establishment. Without looking at Carl he said, “My wife told me something I didn’t like to hear, kid.”
“What’s that?”
“You talk about me behind my back. She says it ain’t complimentary. That true?”
Carl was surprised. “No. I don’t know why she’d make up such a story.”
Milo served two oversized glasses. The dark whiskey shimmered and reflected the ceiling lights, fluted trumpets of frosted glass. With a twitchy little smile Barney said, “You wouldn’t be calling Bess a liar, would you, kid?”
Hell’s fire. Ever since he’d rebuffed Bess, she’d had it in for him, even though she slept with other men she met on the exhibition circuit. Barney couldn’t be so stupid or besotted as not to suspect. Bess had singled Carl out for special punishment. Maybe men didn’t often refuse her.
“No, Barney, I’m not saying a word against your wife. I’m only saying I don’t talk behind your back.”
“Well, we got two different stories here, don’t we? Kind of hard to know which to believe. Got to think it over. Drink up.”
A few minutes ago Carl had been sated from downing a stein of Budweiser. Now he was fiercely thirsty, liking neither the drift of the conversation nor the calculating look in Barney’s eyes. He took a big drink of the strong, faintly bitter whiskey. Barney finished his double in two gulps.
“We got to sort this out, Carl. I can’t have a driver going around behind my back saying rotten things about the champ. Those fuckers in Daytona let Bob Burman take my record, but I’m still the champ, got me?”
“Barney, let’s talk about this some other—”
“Now.” Barney shoved three stiffened fingers into Carl’s chest. “We’ll talk about it now.”
Carl’s ears erupted in buzzing. He saw two tie pins, not one, on Barney’s cravat. Something sour and sick churned in his throat.
Barney smiled. “’Less you aren’t feeling so good. You look a little green, kid.”
So that was it. Nauseated and woozy, he crossed his arms over his heaving belly. Barney loved pranks, one of his favorites being knockout drops in a drink offered in friendship. Carl swung around, yelled at Milo. “God damn it, did you slip me a Mickey Finn?”
Milo dried a glass with a towel and didn’t look up. Jim Jeffries danced in his gilt frame. The electric ceiling lights began to fly around like comets. Barney was mightily amused.
“Fact is, you look like shit. Don’t need a man on my team who can’t hold his liquor.” Barney shoved his empty glass down the bar. “Hey, Milo, another double. None for this lily.”
Swaying, Carl said, “You came in here to set me up.”
“Yeah, I been meaning to settle accounts for weeks. Bess says you’re a bum. A dirty lecher.”
“Let me tell you”—Carl grabbed the bar as his knees went rubber on him—“about your sweet, innocent wife.” Barney picked up the refilled glass and threw the liquor in Carl’s face.
“You say one word about her, I’ll kill you, you son of a bitch.”
Carl cocked his fist, stepped away from the bar. He wound up to hit Barney, but before he could swing, the room tilted and he felt himself going down. The back of his head slammed the floor. One flying hand upset a bar spittoon, dumping foul brown water all over his sleeve. His other arm stretched out toward the door. Barney stomped on it.
“You bum. You miserable, lying bum. Call my wife a liar, will you?” Barney kicked Carl’s ribs. “You’re through. You’re fired.” He pulled out a silver money clip in the shape of a dollar sign and contemptuously dropped a couple of bills on Carl’s shirt.
Conversation in the saloon had stopped. All Carl heard was a vast rushing in his ears. His eyesight dimmed despite his resolve to stay awake. He rolled his head from side to side, picking up sawdust. He hoped he wouldn’t puke all over himself.
“Couple of you boys throw this bum in the alley,” Barney said. “Then it’s time to celebrate. The old exterminator just got rid of some vermin. Barney Oldfield buys the next round.”
Rough hands seized Carl’s wrists, wrenched his arms over his head, dragged him across the floor. That was all he remembered.
He left his seedy downtown hotel that night, all his worldly possessions packed in one leather grip with a broken clasp. Barney had paid him a whole three dollars to call it quits. Carl had four dollars of his own. He didn’t need to waste money on Pacific Electric carfare. Besides, he didn’t have a destination in mind.
He thought of his sister. Could she find him a spare bed for the night? Pride canceled that thought almost at once. He’d sleep out in the country somewhere, free.
He turned up the collar of his coat and trudged out of the central city. His head hurt. His mouth tasted like sewage, and he wondered if he could ever again put so much as a crust of bread in his aching gut. That bastard Barney. Couldn’t deal with him man to man, had to trick him and get the upper hand before he threw him out.
He lugged his grip through residential neighborhoods where parlor lights shone. No one had left a lamp burning for him.
He heard oil derricks chugging in back yards. A steam car full of revelers ran him off the road. A train wailed its whistle in the night. He wondered where the road would carry him now. He wondered if there’d ever be an end to that road. Around midnight, still hurting and retching occasionally, he lay down in the heady sweetness of an orange grove and slept.
Dusty and sweaty, Carl raised his arm in front of his eyes to hide the red sun. What he’d glimpsed from far down the road, distorted by wavy heat devils, took on clarity and detail.
The machine sat on its tail and two oversized, solid wheels, next to a red barn with a limp wind sock on its roof peak. The biplane’s yellow wings were patched in many places. The pilot’s seat was small, directly in front of the pusher motor. In front of the seat was a control rod with a wheel. Carl had read enough to know the plane resembled those built and flown by Glenn Curtiss, especially the “Golden Flyer” that had won an upset victory at the 1909 Rheims air show. Early Wright planes had skids and no seat; the pilot lay on his stomach on the lower wing to—what was the word? Aviate.
A sign on the barn advertised
RIVERSIDE SCHOOL OF AERONAUTICS
—Professional I
nstruction—
A. R. (RIP) RYAN, OWNER-AERONAUT
From inside the barn came the sound of hammering. Carl walked to the doors, tested them; a chain rattled when he tried to pull them apart. Around the corner he discovered a regular door, open. He walked in, saw a man on his knees with a hammer. The hammer struck a spark from a big nail head, glanced off. The nail was bent into a curved L; the man swore. He was trying to drive the nail with a misshapen hand. His fingers were gnarled as old roots.
Too hungry to be deterred by the man’s anger, Carl stepped into a shaft of daylight falling through a crack in the barn siding. “Hello,” he said. “Got any work here?”
Rip Ryan of Riverside was bent as a hilltop sapling tormented by the wind. Time had carved gullies in his sun-browned cheek; worry had dug them across his forehead. Not more than forty, he had a full head of white hair. He laid his hammer down and took a good ten seconds to rise to a standing position.
“There might be some work,” he said after Carl introduced himself. “I know there’s some coffee. Leave your grip and come on.”
Carl followed him to a tiny cottage near the barn. It was slow going, for the small, wiry man listed to the left at every other step. Crooked fingers clutched the knob of a polished stick. “Arthritis,” he said when he caught Carl staring. “Curse of my life.”
Ryan poured coffee from a blue enamel pot. They sat on opposite sides of a scarred table. To start conversation Carl said, “Are you a native, Mr. Ryan?”
Ryan snorted. “Hell, do I look like some Spaniard with a land grant? Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. Big city. Hated it. The smoke, the noise, the crowding. Lived in a tenement with bad air, no windows, a toilet pail in the corner. My old man swamped out the horsecar barns. Irishman, no education. Died of too much whiskey. My sainted mother followed him two years later. I was seventeen.”
He drank from his tin cup with a noisy sucking sound. Carl didn’t say anything more; listen to someone attentively, they thought well of you.
“Put myself through business college,” Ryan went on. “Read all the promotional books about southern California peddled by the railroads. Beautiful scenery. Clear skies. Healthful air. Soon as I could, I came out here. Went to work over in Redlands. Been there?”
“No, only heard of it.”
“Kept books for the biggest feed and grain dealer in the county. Hated that too. Office no bigger than a two-hole privy. Didn’t see all these blue skies they brag about, except on Sunday. Married a local girl, name of Marie Morrison. Wanted to have children but somehow we couldn’t. One Sunday when Marie was visiting her parents in Bakersfield, I blew two dollars on a ten-minute airplane ride at a fair. God A’mighty”—his whole demeanor changed, the air of sour complaint gone—“it was like ascending to heaven. It was like having a woman the first time.”
Ryan’s beatific look faded quickly. He picked up his tin cup, barely able to fit his fingers around the handle. They were like hooks bending in different directions.
“Knew then and there I couldn’t stay in Redlands. Couldn’t tell Marie, though, she depended on me. Agonized for three months. Sleepless nights. Stomach in knots, bowels tied up for days. Finally one Monday morning I just quit. When I came home and broke the news, Marie cursed me and locked herself in the bedroom. I knew that was the end, though she didn’t leave for good until two months later.”
He tilted his head to a streaked and grimy window where Carl saw the tips of the biplane’s doped wings. “I had some savings. I put the Eagle together from drawings in magazines. That’s what I christened her, the Eagle. Took me a year and three months to finish. I sorted oranges for the growers’ cooperative, picked lettuce and sugar beets, God damn miserable stoop labor, to pay for it. But I was happy.”
“Who taught you to fly?”
“Pilot who knew Glenn Curtiss back East. You know who Curtiss is?”
Carl nodded. Like the Wright brothers, young Curtiss had owned a bicycle shop, in upstate New York. Before he built and raced his own planes in competition with the Wrights, Curtiss was a familiar name in motorcycle racing—a chaser of land speed records, like Barney. One of his early patrons was the inventor Alexander Graham Bell. Curtiss adapted his compact and well-regarded motorcycle engine for airplanes and tried to sell it to Wilbur and Orville Wright. They dismissed him. So he went into business to compete with them. He was most famous for winning the Coupe Internationale, Gordon Bennett’s trophy for the fastest twenty kilometers around the pylons at the international air meet in Rheims, France, two years ago.
“The Curtiss method,” Ryan mused. “It’s peculiar, but it works. I soared like an angel. I was a new man. Forty-four years old and I felt life was just starting. Had a terrible accident one afternoon, flying near here. A freak lightning storm hit the Eagle. I crashed into telephone wires, an aviator’s worst nightmare. The wires stopped the fall, and I walked off with a few scratches. I thought I had a charmed life. Then”—a twist of his mouth as he held up his malformed hands—“this. I’d felt it coming on for a while. My old man suffered from it, one reason he drank. It hit me bad. I barely managed to rebuild the Eagle by myself. I can’t fly her anymore, but I can teach others. The Curtiss method. I never touch the plane. You have any desire to fly?”
“I do, definitely.”
“Then I can teach you. No cost, but you’d have to help me build an addition to the barn. Been waiting for someone to come along who could do it.”
“I’m your man,” Carl said.
“Thought you might be when you walked in,” Ryan said.
54. No Laughing Matter
After B.B. hired her, Lily jumped into her new duties with enthusiasm. She worked late with her bedroom door shut and Fritzi admonished to stay out. Lily’s boudoir table, once cluttered with perfumes and cosmetic jars, overflowed with books and newspapers she combed for ideas.
Her first story before the camera, one reel, was Madolyn’s March. Lily had picked up on Sophie Pelzer’s passion for the suffrage cause when she met B.B.’s wife. Kelly complained that the subject was too controversial, but he was overruled.
The heroine of Lily’s scenario was a small-town girl who went to a nickelodeon where she saw the famous, often jailed English suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst, on her 1909 visit to New York. Without actually showing a theater screen, Eddie cleverly cut in actuality footage of Mrs. Pankhurst coming down the gangplank of a White Star liner, to a tumultuous welcome, then parading in front of Carnegie Hall with her American sisters. Instantly converted, Madolyn staged a one-girl march in her town, represented by a Hollywood residential street. A nasty sheriff jailed Madolyn, but her lawyer fiancé, after a largely unmotivated epiphany, won her freedom and swore to love, honor, and support a suffrage amendment after they were married.
Lily’s quixotic spelling of the heroine’s name charmed B.B. Amused, she said to Fritzi, “Hell, you think I know the right way to spell anything? I just wrote it down the way it sounded. I don’t guess I’ll ever tell him that!”
When Eddie finished Madolyn’s March, with Madge Singleton, a New York actress who’d appeared in several Pal pictures, he cast Fritzi in A Merry Mix-Up, a silly comedy he concocted in an afternoon. Fritzi objected to another comedy part, to no avail. She played twin sisters, Tess and Bess. Each had a suitor, brothers. The actor hired as one of them was a pie-faced young man named Roscoe Arbuckle. He was sweet-natured and round as a tub. Like most actors he was sociable and garrulous. He told Fritzi he’d been a scene shifter in vaudeville, a black face monologist, and a tenor in musicals before he began working as a movie extra. He went by the name Fatty.
In the story, much confusion ensued because Fatty and the other suitor, Pete, couldn’t tell the twins apart until the penultimate scene, in which a rowboat tipped, dumping Tess into Echo Park Lake, near downtown Los Angeles. Since Tess was the twin who couldn’t swim, Fatty recognized his brother’s sweetheart when he rescued her. This prepared everyone for the ending, a double wedding at the altar, s
hot double exposure, two Fritzis.
Because Fritzi made a mild fuss about the slapstick, Eddie hired a utility player to handle the fall from the rowboat. He was an odd little man named Windy White. About five feet five, he had a wrinkled brown face, a sunburned bald head, and legs like parentheses. He said hardly a word to anyone.
For the shot he donned bloomers, a dress, and a wig. He tumbled out of the rowboat on cue, using a lot of hammy gestures, the acting style inherited from nineteenth-century stage melodrama. A more restrained technique suitable to the camera was coming in, but not for this picture.
After a second take, Windy trudged out of the lake and doffed his dripping wig to Fritzi. She noticed he was trailing a cloud of whiskey fumes. His eyes didn’t quite focus. He’d stood in for her drunk, she realized with a start. What a foolish, risky way to make five dollars.
For a close-up, Eddie placed her in the lake about six feet from the bank. A prop man dumped two buckets of water over her, then adorned her head with smelly strands of seaweed. After the shot the water continued to drip off her nose and chin and elbows. Her makeup melted and ran. Ellen Terry chose to keep quiet, which was a blessing.
Sometime before, B.B. had bought the promised automobile. Though he could have chosen a cheap and efficient Model T, Reo, or Brush that cost under $700, his nature impelled him to a long, sleek top-of-the-line Packard with bucket seats, large brass acetylene lamps, and a gleaming brass side horn. Sophie Pelzer chose the color, royal blue. Rumored price, $2,700. Kelly fumed.
B.B. garaged the Packard in the barn on the lot. “It’s beautiful,” Fritzi said when he showed it to her. “I’m afraid it’ll take me a year to learn to operate it.”