American Dreams (54 page)

'You, ah, you've been away a long time, Mr. I Iardin.'

'Longer than I expected, that's true. After I poked around Alaska for six months, I drifted down here again. Went to Mexico for a month, but they're shooting gringos on sight, so I got out. Sailed from Corpus Christi on an empty cattle boat to Havana, caught another to the Argentine, worked with those gaucho cowboys till I hankered to hear English again.'

He leaned against the wagon, smiling. 'You here with anyone, Miss Crown?'

'Please, it's Fritzi. I came with Mr. Chaplin over there. He's an actor at Keystone.' Charlie had gathered three amply endowed young ladies and was mugging and cavorting for them. 'I understand you're working for Mr.

Ince at the moment?'

'Right, I'm an extra player in the new picture with that scissorbill, Hart.'

'Scissorbill?'

'Old Texas expression. Means somebody who can't throw a loop or do anything else the right way. A tenderfoot - or some dude pretending to be a real cowboy.' His scorn was gentle, but it was real.

'That's right, you're from Texas--'

'Yes'm, up toward Oklahoma. Little spot in the road called Muleshoe.

You go to Lubbock, then you ask for a map.'

He rested a boot heel on the spoke of a wagon wheel and smiled that Inceville

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melting smile. She couldn't get enough of him, the strong, lean look of his throat, his vivid dark eyes, his long hair dancing a little in the night wind.

He smelled pleasantly of bay rum or some other tonic. She was nearly delirious.

'Do you have family in Texas?'

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His smile remained, but it seemed a little hollow. 'One sister, that's all.'

'Do you go back to visit?'

'Haven't lately. Right now I've got to pick up another stake. Money's pretty easy to make in this business. I can steal a job from a scissorbill every time.'

The squeeze box and fiddle swung into the waltz from 'The Merry Widow.' Loy said, 'Care to walk around the ranch?'

'Why don't we dance?'

'Well, now.' He made a soft sucking sound with his teeth. 'I must admit I don't know how to do that. Just never learned.'

'You can learn, it isn't hard.' She picked up his hand and led him to the crowded floor. 'Right hand goes around my waist, left hand up here in the air. That's the idea. Here we go, Mr. Hardin. One-two-three, one-two three - that's the idea.'

A few seconds passed without mishap; he seemed to be getting the hang of it. Then suddenly his boot crushed down on her left toe. Her leg nearly buckled. 'Oh, my Lord, I'm sorry.'

'It's nothing, I hardly felt it!' she cried, smiling to hide the pain. His grip on her waist strengthened. His hand held hers more firmly. He swung her.

He danced. The terror in his face turned to amazement, then to pleasure.

They waltzed under the colored lanterns and the California stars. It was absurdly old-fashioned and deliriously romantic. Fritzi forgot her aching toe. She thought that if her bliss became any more intense, she would perish on the spot.

For the next hour she and Loy Hardin walked and talked. That is, she let him talk. He soon dropped into an easy, conversational familiarity, friend to friend. He talked about all the cowboys pouring into Hollywood, most of whom he dismissed as scissor-bills, most especially Broncho Billy Anderson ('I don't care if he is big-time famous; he's just a stage johnny with a pot belly'). He mentioned one cowboy friend, Tom Mix of Oklahoma, whom he respected as the genuine article. He respected Windy too. Windy was an honest-to-God cowhand from Idaho.

'Drinks way too much, though.'

'Yet he does dangerous work, diving off bridges and such.'

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'Says it's easy to do those things when he's lit. No fear. I can't talk him out of it. Wish 1 could. I'd hate to lose him.'

Charlie came over with his arm around one of the girls, whom he introduced as Princess Laughing Water. She responded with a loony giggle.

'We should start back to town, dear heart,' Charlie said to Fritzi.

She hesitated, wishing Loy would draw her aside, ask to see her again.

Did she dare ask him? Somehow she couldn't do it.

"I hope we'll see each other again, Loyal.'

That'd be fun.' Oh Lord,>n? Was that all?

'Might work in one of your pictures, you never know,' he added.

Oblivious to Charlie's stare, she plunged ahead. 'It would be pleasant to meet sometime before that.'

'Well, sure, let's see about that.' When? Where? she cried silently. He shook her hand but didn't follow up. Charlie cleared his throat.

Slowly, reluctantly, Fritzi took her hand from the Texan's. Charlie saw the effect Loy had on her, grasped her elbow to steady her as they walked away. She'd have turned around and walked backward for a last glimpse of him if it wouldn't have made her look like an idiot.

On the drive back along the moonlit Pacific shore, Charlie said, is that cowboy the person you referred to when you told me there was someone else?' Fritzi nodded, seeing Loy's face in the white circle of the moon. 'You fancy him, eh?'

i do. 1 can't quite explain why.'

'Who can explain amour? And why bother? Just enjoy it. What do you know about the fellow?'

i le's from Texas. 1 le's footloose. That's about all.'

'I'm not sure he's the marrying kind. Could be more the hotel-room kind. I'm an expert on that breed, being one myself.'

She laughed and gigged him with her elbow.

'Don't I know it.'

63 Mercenaries

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Back in December 1913, Rene had decided he didn't like the meager income the air show produced; he wanted to make more. I le'd therefore listened to overtures from two gentlemen who approached him in Mercenaries

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Presidio, Texas. The gentlemen wore white linen suits and panama hats in lieu of army uniforms.

They offered Rene an attractive proposition and, the troupe being a dictatorship rather than a democracy, he accepted. He gave his men the option of coming along to fly for the Federals in the war zone. To Carl's regret, all of them, including Harvard, agreed. The officers in mufti left for California to buy a $5,000 biplane from the Martin company, to be modified and equipped like Sonora, the bomber flown by rebel mercenaries in northwestern Mexico.

Two weeks later, Rene and Tom Long piled into a pair of trucks carrying the crated pieces of the Martin. They bribed officials at the border and crossed without difficulty. To Carl and Harvard fell the job of taking the Curtiss and the Bleriot across. They flew at night, a short trip but a dangerous one. Rene and Tom lit flares in the desert to mark their landing field. A down draft almost hurled Carl and the Bleriot into the ground on the first approach. He sliced off the top of a towering candelabra cactus with his left wing, roared upward at full throttle, came around again, and landed safely, his throat tight and dry with fear.

At a Federal-held town in Sonora they assembled and tested the Martin.

From there, working south in short hops, they reached their base in central Mexico by late January. As mercenaries they were well treated, given the honorary title of Capitdn and a base wage of $300 a month, plus $50

for every scouting or messenger flight. The government was always late with pay envelopes, they soon discovered.

They traveled on a special train which always seemed to be retreating southward. Three flatcars carried the planes, along with portable loading ramps. Two Benz touring cars used by staff officers rode on a fourth one.

A converted boxcar served as a machine shop, another as a magazine for storing aerial bombs. The train was a copy of one that Villa ran on the line farther north.

The three pilots and Tom were billeted in a private rail car bought or stolen from some Texas cattle baron. It had Pullman berths, red plush swivel chairs anchored to the floor, a mahogany dining table and chairs, and a separate galley with an icebox for which there was no ice. A spectacular
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set of steer horns decorated a bulkhead.

They were cared for by a ragged and skinny servant, a brown Indian boy of fourteen or so whose unpronounceable name had been abandoned in favor of Bert. Bert had run away from home in the Yucatan after his 340

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father fell a hundred feet from a chicle tree he was slashing to get the sap that was boiled to make chewing gum.

'It is terrible work,' Bert said to Carl with a mournful shake of his shaggy head. 'Way up high, just a rope holding you, and you got to swing the machete hard to gash the tree. My father, he cut the rope instead of the tree. He died. My mother wanted me to take his place, I said no, she beat me, so I ran away. Very much happier now. You like my cooking, Capitdn Carl?'

'The bread you bake's always black and your scrambled eggs chew like rubber, but your personality makes up for it.'

'That Harvard, he don' like me or my cooking.'

'Don't take it to heart. He doesn't like anybody.'

Bert slept under the railway car in good weather, or in the vestibule if they were traveling or it was raining. He had a pet, a three-foot hog nose snake with a snout like a small shovel. Bert called it Anselmo. He kept it in a box and let it out occasionally to burrow for toads, its favorite food.

'Anselmo good at catching rats too. Won't hurt you. Scared of people.

Sees you, he just hiss and play dead.'

Carl flew at five hundred feet above the dusty foothills of the Sierra Madre Oriental in Mexico. At the insistence of Major Ruiz, the army liaison officer attached to their unit, he'd stuffed an old geologic map in the pocket of his duck jacket. For aerial navigation it was useless; he followed the main railway line snaking northward to the town of Zacatecas, now in rebel hands. The plane was a Bleriot, one of many built on the plan of the Model XI that Louis Bleriot flew across the Channel in 1909, when he became the first to accomplish that feat.

Carl sat in the open above the wing of the small monoplane, his hair tossing, his red silk scarf snapping, his goggles flashing with reflections of distant lightning. Far away on his left, the mountains ran across the sky in ragged silhouette.

The dangers of this kind of flying weren't exaggerated. A hostile enemy was only one of them. There were no air fields, no ground crews, not even
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qualified auto mechanics here in the central provinces. The aviation gas supplied by the government was of poor quality, sometimes causing unexpected stalls or complete shutdown. On a scouting trip over Gomez Palacio before the rebels captured it, Rene had lost power and fought his plane to a near crash landing on a dirt road. Beleaguered Federalistas managed to Mercenaries

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find enough gas for him to take off again, but it was a close call.

Carl pulled back on the small wheel at the top of the control stick. The plane climbed, but not fast enough to miss the dark gray raincloud that quickly soaked his clothes and streaked his goggles. Just as suddenly he was through it, into a cloud-dappled blue sky. Great cathedral shafts of light fell on the land. He saw_ a farmer trudging behind a wooden plow and ox team. The man took off his straw hat and gazed up at Carl, whether in awe or dread, he couldn't tell.

He passed over fields where beans and maize grew. He passed over casitas, little huts with walls of wattle and gabled roofs covered with

reeds. He flew above a town market, low enough to see the piles of gourds and pumpkins, the strings of chilies, the baskets of red and yellow tomatoes.

Buzzards strutted in the dirt lanes between the stalls. Vendors and women shopping shielded their eyes to look at the plane, but one child, a little girl, waved at him. When a plane came from the south, it must be a government plane.

Twenty or thirty kilometers back, he'd dropped the last cigarettes and oranges brought along in a gunny sack tied to his seat. Most of the oranges went to some children yelling and waving beside a well in the village of Ojocaliente. Since the Indians and mestizos of the countryside were basically in sympathy with the revolution, throwing treats from a spy plane was good insurance in case the engine quit or the plane was shot down.

His only protection now was the holstered revolver on his hip.

On across the town he flew, passing above its central square, whose finest building was a Baroque church painted red with yellow trim. The country people loved their churches bright. Carl liked the effect. In fact, he liked Mexico, and the Mexicans, so industrious despite their lives of grueling toil, so friendly and warm provided you were on the right side. Not even the Germans washed their clothes as often as a Mexican housewife did.'

Far ahead, a white eye opened. A locomotive rounding a bend with its headlight burning. A military train. Closer than expected.

He watched the headlight grow and blaze. This was what he had been sent to discover: how far the Tiger of the North had come in his steady march to the capital. All through the spring of 1914 the Federalistas had
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retreated while one town after another fell - Gomez Palacio, the rail junction at Torreon, Tampico, on the coast. The rebels took Zacatecas on June 24, four days before the assassination of someone named Archduke Ferdinand in the faraway Balkans.

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Despite the rebel successes, General Villa had lately fallen out with his titular commander, Carranza. Villa had disappeared in the north, ostensibly negotiating for coal and supplies. His subordinates were presently in charge, probing south but with less vigor than before. Sometimes the rebels advanced fifty kilometers, then withdrew their horsemen and their war trains half the distance, only to probe again a few days later. The Federals had to remain watchful. Pilots like Carl were their eyes.

He wiped his goggles. The stick-and-rudder Bleriot flew easily one handed. Forward and backward motion of the stick controlled descent and climb. To the left or right, the stick operated the wing warp and elevators.

Foot pedals worked the rudder.