American Dreams by John Jakes Page A

pleasant afternoon sunshine. The dying day washed the square in pale yellows and umbers. Paper trash and pigeon droppings and peanut hulls collected at her feet. The air rang with the curses of cabmen, the clatter of buried traction chains, the neighing of horses, the chanting of newsboys, the violins and squeeze boxes of corner musicians, the horns of taxis, .the popping of gasoline engines, clamorous voices speaking foreign tongues - all the music of New York that she loved. Today she didn't hear it. She was busy marking ads.
    On a nearby path a man shouted, i need four supers.' He held up four fingers. 'Pay is sixty cents.' Fritzi guessed the stranger was one of the freelances called super captains. They worked the square around this time every day, rounding up supernumeraries for evening performances.
    Fritzi. had disliked her work as a super in The Mongol's Bride. It wasn't acting; supers never rehearsed. They showed up for costumes and minimal instructions thirty-five minutes before curtain. Most didn't know or care what play they were in. Many were lowlifes who needed drinking money, and the super captains weren't much better.
    It was no time to be choosy, though. She raised her hand.
    The man came to her bench. He wore an old but clean corduroy jacket and pants, a blue railroad bandanna knotted in the open throat of a work shirt. In his thirties, he had a pleasant face, deeply lined. He tipped his Page 73

    cap.
    'Hello, dear. Earl's my name.' His eyes were oddly unsettling, a strange light brown, gold-speckled.
    'Are you hiring for a performance tonight?'
    'Yes, but I can only use gents. Sorry.' He smiled. He had a wide mouth, allowing a display of large teeth of spectacular perfection and whiteness.
    Though his smile made him attractive in a rough way, somehow he scared her,
    Looking Fritzi up and down, he Said, 'I haven't seen you before. Been missing something. I don't do this work regularly, you understand.'
    'I don't do it at all if I can help it.' She started to edge away.
    He followed. 'Actress, are you?' She nodded, kept moving. 'Care to join me for a beer after I round up my four?'
    'No, thank you.' She spun and hurried off.
    When she glanced back, he was coming after her, scowling -- offended by her refusal. Others were looking at him; he stopped, yelled after her:
    'Go walk the streets, slut, I don't give a damn.' He pivoted and went off the other way. 'Four here, I need four tonight.'
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    Striving
    She ran for two blocks before slowing and looking back. Why had the man upset her so? Something about his eyes, his angry insistence --
    Or was she reacting too strongly, unnerved by her encounters with Oh Oh and the Bowery 'agent'? Without knowing the answer, she was thankful to escape the stranger and have New York's teeming crowds around her, hiding her.
    13 Smashup
    In the twenty-second lap, Artie Flugel in the little Mason deliberately whipped into a skid ahead of Carl, spewing dust over Carl's windscreen and blinding him. It was a dangerous trick of experienced drivers.
    Artie wanted to win not only the purse but a five-dollar side bet with Carl.
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    Coming out of the turn in a thick tan cloud, Carl took the middle of the straightaway by instinct alone. The dust blew away; the grandstand and pits loomed in the sunshine. Three more laps to catch Artie, who was already sprinting into the next turn, toward the backstretch. Through the oil-specked lenses of his secondhand Zeiss goggles, Carl saw spectators sitting on the white rail fence at the turn beyond the stands. Damn fools.
    The track was in a northern suburb of Detroit. The race was the closing event of the day, a hot, dry Sunday in early summer. Carl worked six days a week at Henry Ford's auto plant, and on the seventh day he raced.
    Today, four earlier races had rutted the track and torn out chunks of the hard soil the drivers called gumbo. A piece of it flew up over the radiator and hit the windscreen, cracking it. Above the engine roar Carl