Homeland

by John Jakes

  Jenkins and I spent hours in that saloon over the next couple of days. I got a quick education. Armat and Jenkins already had one projector finished. It was big and noisy. It jerked the film too hard, so the picture shook and jerked too. Gave you a headache in thirty seconds, Jenkins said. Also, the film wore out fast. Broke all the time.

  Jenkins said his partner had solved the problem. Figured out a loop system to ease the tension, bring slack film down so the sprockets only jerked it a few inches at a time, and the rest of the roll wasn’t strained so much. That was a lightning bolt of an idea. That was genius.

  Armat and Jenkins took their machine to the Cotton States Exposition, but it turned out that projected pictures weren’t any more popular than Tabb’s Kinetoscope parlor, in fact Jenkins and Armat had a riot on their hands as soon as they turned out the lights for their first show. People screamed and ran, they thought it was a trick to corner them in the dark for pickpockets or rapists. I’ve never had too favorable an impression of the intelligence of Southerners.

  They were pretty discouraged, but they wouldn’t give up. They knew that people had to be sold on living pictures, had to decide flickers were the rage of the coming age. Charlie and his partner were still convinced it would happen. Charlie convinced me.

  He’d brought one of the Atlanta projector machines to Richmond by railway express, and a couple of his short flickers, to amuse his family and the wedding guests. Another bunch of keen thinkers, that crowd. They didn’t care for anything he showed them. But I did. God, I’ll never forget. He invited me to his hotel room. He pulled the shade, shoved a big pile of drawings off the bed—he was working on refinements for the projector—and showed a little film called “Annabelle the Dancer.” Sort of a cousin to “A Chinese Dream,” but clean. The picture was practically life-size on the window shade and the wall on either side. That’s when I knew Jenkins was right, Armat was right, and Edison was a dumb, egotistical old fool spoiled by all his publicity. There in that hotel room in crappy little Richmond I had a vision. I saw the new century in all its glory. I shook the hand of C. Francis Jenkins, called him a great man, which he is, and thanked him for unveiling the future.

  The rest of the story is simple. At the hour the Jenkins wedding was scheduled, with a long wet reception to follow, I again excused myself from the continuous premature wake for Mary’s ma and went back to the hotel. I paid an old darkie bellman five dollars, practically all the money I had, to pinch a duplicate key from the front desk and then stand watch in the lobby.

  I spent almost four hours copying Charlie’s drawings. When the darkie rapped on the door and said Mr. Jenkins was back, hoisting one in the saloon, I put everything back in order, decamped quietly down the back stairs, and disappeared into the night.

  And that, kid, is how R. Sidney Shadow got into the flicker business to stay.

  Shadow leaned back with a smile. “I was off to a fast start, which just about put me even with all the bozos who got in before me. One of my big worries now is patent infringement. I’ve made a few modifications on the projector, but small, like the water cell. I’m praying Jenkins and Armat won’t catch up to me until I have enough money to hire good lawyers.”

  From the bedroom came Mary Beezer’s muffled voice, imploring. Shadow stood up. “I think Mary needs a little attention. See you later.”

  He bumped into the wall while opening the bedroom door. Steadied himself and peered around at Paul.

  “I think you’ve got the makings of a picture man, Dutch. I think you’ve got the stuff. Don’t let it swell your head.”

  On a bright, windy morning in March, pelted by soot and cinders from the rumbling El half a block to the east, the Luxograph Company created its one-minute extravaganza, “Her Burglar.” Paul had composed a short scenario, writing in pencil on three small cards; Shadow had edited and rewritten it.

  On the sunlit roof Mary sat on a stool in front of a large canvas square tacked to a frame. Jimmy had painted the canvas to resemble bricks. Cursing and complaining the whole time, he had done a sloppy job; the mortar lines were wavy.

  Colonel Shadow turned up his coat collar, pinned up the front brim of an old sombrero, and crouched behind the Luxograph camera. He’d braced the tripod with wood blocks so that the camera would remain steady on the scene to be played in front of the fake wall. Mary held an open book, an experience wholly foreign to her.

  “Here we go, Mary, start reading,” Shadow called, beginning to crank.

  “God damn it, Sid, I’m trying, I’ve got some damn cinders in my eye.”

  “Stop that, I’m reading your lips. Burglar!”

  Jimmy stole into the scene. Mary had fashioned his domino mask by cutting holes in a navy blue bandanna. Jimmy looked altogether natural in the role.

  He crouched behind Mary, menacing her with upraised hands. Mary heard something, jumped up, terrified, and threw her book away. The book accidentally hit Jimmy’s head and bounced off. “Watch it! That hurt.”

  “Keep it up! Keep it up!” Shadow exclaimed, cranking. “Burglar, grab her.” Jimmy seized Mary’s wrists with more force than was necessary.

  “Policeman!” Paul rushed into the scene, wearing one of Mary’s wide belts and a toy star from the five-and-dime. Shadow had given him an old rusting Army Colt revolver, unloaded, which he brandished as he collared the villain. Jimmy raised his hands but his scowl said he didn’t like this part.

  Mary batted her eyes, threw her arms around Paul’s neck, kissed his cheek. Paul postured in a heroic manner, then snagged the burglar by the collar to lead him away.

  “All right, stop, film’s run out. Good job, everybody.”

  Paul ran downstairs to open the parlor. Shadow developed the film himself. That night, in the musty second-floor sitting room, Mary hung up a bed sheet while Paul and Jimmy wrestled the Luxograph projector from the cellar. With the arc light blazing, Shadow cranked, and there upon the sheet, the images only slightly warped by the water cell, “Her Burglar” sprang magically to life.

  Paul clapped and rocked back on his stool, laughing. “That’s wonderful.”

  “Yeah, ain’t it?” Mary said, stretching out her hand to find his in the dark. Somehow her hand landed in his lap. Paul presumed it was accidental but then she kept it there, with embarrassing results.

  “I don’t like bein’ hauled to the clink,” Jimmy said between puffs of his cigarette. “Next time I’m the good guy.”

  Shadow shut down the machine and Mary withdrew her hand after another squeeze. The room light came on. “It looks good,” the colonel said. “But it’s just a silly story. Is that what people want out of flickers, or do they want reality? That’s the bug that keeps biting me, boys and girls.”

  Mary said, “I love stories.”

  “Not dumb ones like that,” Jimmy said. “Gimme the real stuff.”

  “Why not both?” Paul asked. “The flickers can do anything. You said so yourself, colonel.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Shadow said.

  Late in March the colonel rushed to New York on an overnight train. Another new competitor, American Vitagraph, was presenting its first program at Tony Pastor’s New Fourteenth Street Theater.

  “Stuart Blackton and Al Smith showed twenty minutes’ worth,” Shadow reported glumly after he dragged back to Chicago. “Waves on the shore of Long Island. Broadway cable cars. Fire engines. In the last fifty feet, a Lehigh Valley Railroad train called the Black Diamond Express came busting out of some tunnel. Half the people jumped out of their chairs, screaming. It’s the real thing they want. Real thrills. The flickers are never going to tell stories and make it pay.”

  The last evening in March, a Tuesday, Paul was first to eat supper. As usual, he ate fast. When he wiped up the chicken gravy with a last piece of bread, Mary was amused.

  “Almost don’t need to wash ’em when you get through.” He went downstairs to relieve Jimmy, who whistled and did a little dance step on his way out. “You’re feeling good,” Paul s
aid.

  “Mary’s baking me a cake tomorrow. She’s a peach.”

  Paul’s spine prickled. “Tomorrow is your birthday?”

  “Yeah, April the first. Hey, what’s wrong? You look like you just got kissed by the bearded lady in the freak show.” Paul ran a nervous hand through his unruly hair. “Come on, Dutchie, spill.”

  “I was just thinking about an old German superstition. Nothing important.”

  Scowling, Jimmy walked back to the register. “What kind of superstition?” No reply. “What superstition?” Jimmy grabbed Paul’s shirt.

  “Let go, I’ll tell you.”

  Jimmy’s cheeks were red, his chest heaving. But he let go. “Give,” he said.

  “It’s just an old superstition, mostly among church people. They say April first is the day Judas was born. They say it’s unlucky.”

  “Hah. Some joke.”

  “Jim, I’m truly sorry I blurted it out, I wasn’t thinking.”

  “And I better never hear it again. I’ll show you who’s lucky and who ain’t, you just watch.”

  He stalked out. The door at the head of the stairs closed loudly. Paul brooded on his careless mistake. Gott, solch ein Zorn! Such a temper …

  Years later, when certain events occurred between them, Paul remembered the night of March 31, 1896. He was sure that was the time Jimmy conceived a hatred of him. He was sure there was something fateful about Jimmy’s birthday after all.

  In New York, at Koster and Bial’s Music Hall, Herald Square, the Edison Vitascope System premiered on the evening of April 20. Miserably, Shadow read about it in a newspaper.

  “ ‘Sea Waves.’ ‘Umbrella Dance.’ ‘Kaiser Wilhelm Reviewing His Troops.’ ‘A Boxing Bout.’ They used two projectors—no waiting while the film was changed. That’s not all. Four of the flickers were in color! Created a sensation. Do you realize what was involved? Every single frame tinted by hand—”

  He crushed the paper and threw it under the sink. “Edison, that fraud, gets gallons of ink, and it isn’t even his machine. He bought out the inventor.”

  “Who’s that, hon?” Mary asked.

  “Tom Armat. The one who used to be in real estate. He’s a flicker tycoon now.”

  The name Armat sent a thrill of alarm through Paul. Thomas Armat had been in partnership with C. F. Jenkins, the man whose drawings the colonel had copied. If Armat had made a deal with the Edison interests, Shadow had therefore stolen from Edison, and Edison was notorious for protecting his patents the way a tigress protected cubs. Edison kept entire law firms on call.

  “Sid,” Mary said after thinking it over, “there’s just one answer. You have to get your pictures on a variety bill too.”

  “I have a fish on the line. Finally. He’s coming over Thursday. We’ll show him ‘Her Burglar.’ ”

  To the Levee came Mr. Ishmael (Iz) Pflaum, owner-manager of Pflaum’s Music Hall on South State. Mr. Pflaum was a huge St. Nicholas figure with a white fan beard. He carried a little pocket notebook filled with numbers and dollar signs.

  Pflaum plumped himself into the best chair in the sitting room, in front of the hanging bed sheet. Mary nervously placed a snack of hot wursts with German mustard on the little table at his elbow. Paul served the guest a growler of beer fresh from Freiberg’s. Jimmy had been banished to the parlor.

  Mary switched off the light. Shadow cranked the Luxograph. Paul hunched behind him, nervously shivering despite the heat thrown off by the arc. There was Mary, reading. Jimmy crept into the scene. Iz Pflaum’s hand found the wursts and carried one to his mouth every few seconds as if propelled by a motor. But he never took his eyes from the glowing bed sheet. At the end, with the lights on, the snack plate was empty.

  “Sid—” Mr. Pflaum ran his tongue over his teeth with a squishing noise. “I’ll take it. The machine there.”

  “You’ll—? Why, Iz, that’s swell. Just swell! I do have a minor problem.”

  “I don’t like problems. I don’t like people who gimme problems.”

  “I’m sorry, Iz, but this projector is the prototype. Not for sale.”

  “Then build another one. I gotta have it soon or we don’t do business.”

  “This instrument cost thr—four hundred and fifty dollars, materials alone. For a new one I’d need an advance.”

  “How much?”

  “A hundred dollars?”

  “Seventy-five. Come by tomorrow, we’ll draw up the papers. You furnish five minutes of flickers, I’ll show ’em as chasers.”

  “As what?”

  “That’s what they call ’em at Koster and Bial’s, chasers. At the end of the bill, after the midgets, the magician, the chorus girlies, and the Jap acrobats, you chase the audience out with pictures. That’s all they’re good for, clearing the house.”

  Paul wanted to argue that. It wasn’t his place. He decided Iz Pflaum was a greedy, ignorant man of no imagination.

  Pflaum put on his bowler and lumbered to the door. “One more thing. That little story was nice but I want real-life subjects. Only.”

  “Certainly, Iz, we’ll deliver, that’s the only kind of picture I want to make. ‘Her Burglar’ was an experiment. Reality, that’s the stuff. I’ll have our camera operator start filming immediately.”

  “You got a regular operator to take the pictures?”

  “Of course I do. Right here.” Shadow put his arm around Paul, who tried not to fall over.

  “Mr. Crown is young, Iz, but he’s highly talented.”

  Paul stood there with his mouth shut. Besser stumm als dumm. Mr. Pflaum grasped his hand and wrung it. “Very good, happy to know it. I didn’t realize you were this far along, Sid.”

  “That’s all right, Iz, most people don’t realize Chicago Luxograph is such a thriving firm. Let me show you down the stairs. Some of the treads are broken. The carpenter’s been due here for weeks …”

  After the colonel and Iz went out, Paul and Mary laughed and hugged each other.

  Mary had a delicious aura of warmth and beer. With a quick glance at the door, she caressed his cheek. “You had a big one in the dark the other night.”

  “Mary, you embarrass me. You’re the colonel’s wife.”

  “Ah, not legally. I could be your girl at the same time.”

  He thought fast. “I guess I’ll be too busy, I have just been promoted.”

  She laughed again. “Paul, you’re a sketch.” She kissed him, quickly but ardently, with her lips and her tongue.

  Thus on that evening, fate in the person of Ishmael Pflaum decided forever the direction of the Chicago Luxograph Company, and Paul’s life.

  Twenty miles southwest of Chicago, under boiling gray clouds, they set up the camera. They pushed the claw legs into the gravel ballast between the rail ties. The precious Luxograph sat in the middle of the right-of-way belonging to the Wabash, St. Louis and Pacific—“The Banner Railroad.”

  Paul was extremely tense. Storm wind out of the blackening northwest bent waist-high cornstalks in the fields on either side of the track. A stutter of thunder made the two wagon horses prance; Mary had trouble controlling them from the driving seat. She clutched her straw bonnet. “It’s going to be a devil of a storm, Sid, you better hurry.”

  Shadow paced up and down the track with loping strides. He revealed his inner state by his hunched shoulders, the crow’s feet around his squinted eyes, the way he snatched his gold watch out of the pocket of his frock coat and nearly dropped it. “Four minutes. The Cannonball’s never late unless there’s a blizzard, a derailment, or a bridge washed out.”

  Everyone wanted sensational locomotive footage on their flicker programs, including Iz Pflaum. The New York Central’s Empire State and the Lehigh Valley’s Black Diamond were already drawing crowds. Sid Shadow aimed to please his client with the crack train of the Wabash line.

  Paul turned his cap so the bill pointed backward. The wind plucked and pushed at his faded blue shirt. He’d tucked his pants into heavy work shoes. It seemed approp
riate attire for a camera operator; racy, modern …

  “He’s waving! He’s waving!” Shadow exclaimed, dancing up and down.

  “Sid, he’s waving!” Mary shrieked.

  “I see him waving!” Paul cried.

  About a half mile to the north, standing on a trackside storage box, Jimmy Daws was signaling with his hat. Paul chewed his lip. Pieces of cornstalk, twigs, and other debris whirled by. Dust clouds spun. A streak of lightning forked down to the horizon. Thunder followed almost at once; the storm was close.

  Over the top of the camera Paul spied a dot of white light. It rapidly grew larger. Shadow said, “Just remember, crank steadily. I’ll hang on to the tripod. For God’s sake don’t lose your nerve.”

  Paul felt the ground vibrate. Faintly at first, then more and more strongly. Jimmy jumped off the storage box, moving back from the track and possible danger. The headlight glared. Hellish horns of vapor and dust spurted from under the iron locomotive hurtling toward them.

  Fat drops of rain began to splash Paul’s face. But he was oblivious of the storm. There was only the train, and the task, and the knot in his belly …

  “Lens cap, lens cap!” Shadow screamed. Paul yanked it off.

  “Start cranking.”

  Paul cranked, counting one-two, one-two silently, timing his two cranks per second. The rails hummed. The earth shook. The whistle of the Cannonball howled. The engineer saw them. The headlight grew big as the sun. Right below it, on the round front plate of the locomotive, Paul recognized the line’s painted emblem, an unfurled flag.

  The Cannonball kept coming. Growing huge. Filling the world …

  One-two, one two …

  “Keep cranking, keep cranking,” Shadow breathed. “Oh my God, this is sensational! Spectacular!”

  The whistle screamed.

  Lightning flared.

  Thunder exploded. One-two, one-two …

  Rain fell harder. Paul’s arm and wrist ached from cranking; his back ached from crouching. He wanted to throw the Luxograph over and jump. If he didn’t, they’d be crushed. He could now read the slogan painted in the center of the emblem on the front of the locomotive. “Follow the Flag” …