by Chip Jacobs
His examination confirmed Nick’s assessment that hospitalization was unnecessary. How his best friend was capable of taking the Red Car and walking from the depot to here, carrying that load in his arms, was an ode to adrenaline; well, adrenaline and shock.
During Nick’s post-concussion siesta, Fleet dug into his doctor-to-be medical bag to triage him. He splinted Nick’s wrist, disinfected a forearm abrasion, and probed for signs of internal hemorrhaging, of which there were none.
Still, Nick awoke in pain, and Fleet handed him three Bayer aspirin and a finger of “strictly therapeutic” Irish whiskey. The chunk of ice Fleet put in one of Nick’s clean socks rested on his neck.
“How’s the criminal doing?” Nick asked, once he could lean up in bed. He scanned over at the dog, whose singed tail was gauzed and lacerations dabbed with hydrogen peroxide. Fleet also converted Nick’s favorite cereal bowl into his guest’s water dish.
“Like you: battered pretty good, but nothing broken. I patched him up. You’ve sure been tempting fate lately”
“What can I say? I crave excitement.”
“And I’d like you in one piece. Do you remember anything before being knocked on your keister?”
Nick tilted his head back, which made him dizzy, so he tilted it back. “Only bits and pieces. Mainly chasing that thing after it snagged my sandwich, and then waking up in the center of bedlam.”
“While I was checking the pooch, by the way, I found a scrub oak leaf in his paws.”
“That’s nice. Can you stop talking so loudly, or at all? My head!”
“Sorry. Aren’t you intrigued to hear my brilliant deduction?” Fleet stretched his arms; he’d been here for hours, mostly in Nick’s hardback desk chair.
“Not really.”
“Too bad. Your visitor is a canyon dweller. He’s got hillside musk all over him. He must forage in town to steal food from suckers like you.”
“Gosh, that is brilliant,” said Nick. “What’s next? You deduce fleas?”
“Funny—for you. I’m assuming you don’t recall what you babbled when I got you to bed and asked you the story about the dog. You mumbled something about someone seeing him drag you away from peril.”
“Oh yeah. I did forget that,” Nick said, kneading his temples. “I don’t believe it, though. I merely felt sorry for the thing.”
Fleet cocked a patchy eyebrow. “Then let me introduce you to the evidence. Lean up.”
Nick wanted to say no thanks, but Fleet had a persistent intellect to go with his inappropriate mouth. “Okeydoke. Make it snappy.” He bent forward with a grunt, and Fleet wiggled two fingers under Nick’s grimy, ash-streaked collar. They touched skin. “Feel that?”
“Unfortunately. That’s my best work shirt.”
Fleet helped settle Nick back against his headboard. “Those two holes, old man, are from teeth, or rather, canine incisors. His. I checked. I believe he did rescue you, unless you have an alternative explanation for the teeth marks. That animal executed something superhuman. Question is what are you going to do?”
Fleet got up and walked to Nick’s stove, setting the teakettle to boil. His dark-wood bungalow was identical to Nick’s. They were newly built, chockablock with Craftsmen amenities, including a water closet, a leaded-glass window, a pantry, a closet, and built-in shelves.
“I don’t know,” Nick said. “I wanted to murder him before. But I guess I owe him. What kind of creep would I be if I booted him, especially hearing stories about strays disappearing off the streets?”
Fleet set out two tea mugs. “I heard about that, too. It’s repulsive. I hope it’s not some maniac on the loose. Then again, our landlord might chloroform you if he discovers you’re violating the lease by keeping a pet here. He spent ample money on this place.”
Nick sank into his comfy bed. “True, though he doesn’t have a key, does he? And he hasn’t swung by for an inspection yet. I’ll give it a whirl for a few weeks. How much damage can a scrawny canyon dog instigate?”
After tea, Fleet returned to his bungalow and liver diagrams. Nick followed the dog into sleep-land.
—
The next day was Sunday, and Nick and the boxer-Labrador mix he decided to call Royo, on account of his past home in the Arroyo Seco, were on the mend. His right wrist only hurt when he moved it, which made him glad he was a southpaw and had more aspirin.
It was his stomach requiring attention, since he’d eaten little after his infamous to-go sandwich went up in flames. He needed to go to the market to restock, because his accidental companion had already devoured the meager rations Nick had around: raw carrots, apple slices, sugar cookies.
Nick returned home from Nash Brothers with two bags of groceries—and the realization that underfed Royo was making up for missed meals. In the ninety minutes he was away, the scavenger ransacked the bungalow. He snagged a near-empty box of Nabisco crackers that Nick kept on his pantry’s bottom shelf as well as the beef jerky he forgot about in a coat jacket. He teethed the legs of Nick’s varnished dresser, as clear by the wood chips on the floor, and capped off his impromptu buffet by munching part of a small ostrich quill he plucked from Nick’s desk.
Nick was miffed. Royo was alert.
He walked over toward the dog, who Nick could tell had jumped on his neatly made, pine bed while he was shopping and returned to his blanket before he’d comeback. “You and me, boy,” he said, crouching down to wag a finger in the dog’s taupe and black face, “need to agree on who runs the show around here, if I decide to keep you. Catch me?”
Royo listened to Nick’s ground rules, cocking his square head and perking his triangular ears. Nick took that as acceptance, and then checked the abrasions that Fleet slathered in ointment. They didn’t appear inflamed, so Nick tousled Royo’s mangy fur. When Nick did that, however, the dog bared his teeth and growled.
“Watch it,” he said. “And display a little gratitude. You can trust me.”
Nick tried a different approach, letting Royo sniff his hands before he cupped the mutt’s chin in them and scratched his whiskers. This time, Royo didn’t snarl. His brown, saucer eyes stared penetratingly into Nick’s. Something must’ve clicked.
The dog angled his squiggly-browed forehead down, as if it were a friendship invitation, and Nick went with his instinct, which had advanced him this far in life. They touched foreheads. While it hurt his ginger neck, the skin-to-fur contact brought an overwhelming sensation of familiarity, of brotherhood.
Nick retracted his head, stunned. And Royo mouthed his first unbidden word: Roooh.
“Was that hello? I don’t speak bowwow.”
Ruuuuus.
“If you’re as industrious as you are ravenous, you’ll find a way to communicate. Just refrain from any further pillaging. I need this lease.”
Nick unpacked his groceries and then flopped facedown on his bed. He shook out of a light nap thirty minutes later, feeling Royo’s sandpapery tongue giving his cheeks an introductory lick. From then on, Royo abandoned his corner blanket, commandeering the wall side of Nick’s bed as his.
Coverage of the rail-barn explosion in the papers reinforced Nick’s gratitude to be alive. Lower down in the stories, after references to the dead railcar mechanic and passerby who tried extinguishing the fire, was a mention of an “injured pedestrian and dog” who disappeared before the ambulance arrived for them. Nick was relieved to go unnamed, knowing Cawston’s new bosses were sensitive about unsanctioned publicity.
Later that day, before turning in, Nick grabbed his catgut-strung acoustic guitar to see if his recovering wrist could bend. He strummed a few chords from an Al Jolson song, and Royo, un-spurred, hopped down from the bed. “A music enthusiast,” Nick said to him. “Shame you don’t play snare drum.”
Royo padded over to the corner facing him, listening. Nick switched from Jolson to one of his meandering originals, �
��Pasadena Sun,” and could hardly fathom it when Royo performed his own original act. Pressing his mane against the wall, the dog managed to rise up on his hind legs and, unbelievably, walked eight tottering steps. Eight. As he did, his dark, rubbery lips upturned in a way you’d associate with a smirking teenager. Nick was so flabbergasted he stopped playing, which seemed to spur Royo to drop down onto all four legs. Could he have been trained at the circus, and escaped the Big Top for a vagabond life? “That was astonishing,” Nick said. “You can move upright.”
Royo, for the first time, next approached him, wagging his bandaged tail with that leer still on his lips. He wanted his butt rubbed and maneuvered himself to be scratched. Nick obliged, thinking he should immediately alert his friend about the trick he just witnessed. Then he recalled something Fleet remarked earlier: “If that runt could tug someone more than five times his weight to safety, other mysteries must reside in him.”
The Gift Shop
Six weeks later, Nick—for the price of a greasy sandwich and that fireball—had in his new roommate both a plaything and uncanny attendant.
Despite his itinerant past, Royo had no trouble adapting to being a domesticated dog in a city that prided itself on its benevolent treatment of animals. He learned to shake hands with his paws and play dead on the first try. He’d spring high to catch bouncing tennis balls and entertained himself by staring in the mirror. To Nick’s dismay, he continued gnawing furniture, but how could he stay cross when Royo revealed his inner spirit at Busch Gardens by chasing swans and hurtling ceramic elves?
Yet, he was more than a rascal, one that knew not to crap in the bungalow when Nick cooped him up during the day. He was a periodic butler. After a stressful sixteen-hour shift from which Nick was ready to keel over, he fetched Nick’s starchy nightshirt from underneath his pillow. When Nick returned home with a wrenched back from repairing Cawston’s solar-powered water pump, Royo was on the case. He negotiated his snout into the low glass cabinet storing the minty camphor rub and woofed.
And that was for starters, because Royo had some Saint Anthony, finder of lost objects, in his frisky soul. Misplaced keys, a missing boot, a mislaid gasket: Nick simply cursed frustration about their unknown whereabouts and Royo would commence his search, poking his head underneath heavy objects, behind doors, or wherever need be to locate the vanished items. To indicate he found them, he splayed on his belly and swished his tail, metronome-esque.
“I should take you to the old Devil’s Gate gold mine,” Nick said after recovering a pen. “You find a vein and it’s goodbye ostriches.”
His colleagues recognized there was something unique about the dog whenever Nick brought him to the farm as his tagalong. The loud, yummy gurgling Royo emoted rolling on his back in dry grass was a Victrola of ecstasy; his perceptive head tilt observing the ostriches’ strange mating rituals and pack-trotting suggested data collection. That Royo would stick his cold nose under Nick’s armpit to shake him out of his daydreaming further engrained the impression he was different. “He’s as irregular as a bearded lady,” a feather-drier once said. “Only smarter.”
Nick’s boss, Cawston general manager Cecil Jenks, told Nick he could continue bringing him, as long as he didn’t disrupt production. Nobody else received such special dispensations, but, honestly, they weren’t “going-places Nick.” A recent Scientific American article gave him prestige to burn within the company. (Not that he confided to Jenks, or anyone at the farm, that he and Royo nearly burned to death on Fair Oaks Avenue.)
The flattering cover story was the best publicity the farm could drum up absent a Madison Avenue ad campaign. And this was free. Cawston’s groundbreaking employment of sun power, the article said, was reaping fat dividends, a gamble its competitors were too timid to attempt. Along with descriptions about the budgetary advantages of solar-to-steam energy were mechanical diagrams about the equipment, as well as photographs of curious ostriches peeking around the farm’s most popular tourist prop: scale-model Egyptian pyramids. Aubrey Eneas was portrayed as an adaptive genius, Nick the hometown product who kept the machinery humming.
Cecil, whose wispy blond hair was dwarfed by a large, trapezoidal forehead, was uncharacteristically giddy about the story. He appreciated what an endorsement from Scientific American meant: leverage, even relevancy. His higher-ups were green-eyeshade sorts working out of a Spring Street building in downtown Los Angeles. Cecil long suspected that they’d fire-sell the business in a downturn. Someday, the ostrich-fashion bubble would pop, as all fads do.
That wasn’t now; the proof was in the ledger. Once the “Sunrays in Feather Town” issue reached the stands, mail-order sales tripled. For Nick, those column inches devoted to him were career pixie dust, or, at a minimum, grist for a raise. Many around Pasadena, where residential, solar-fired water heaters were already in vogue, read it.
As such, it was tragicomic how swiftly Nick’s positive notoriety backfired in his sanguine face; almost farcical how a month after the article appeared, he was knelt down on the gift store roof, feeling lower than guano.
It was here, through a skylight, where a cat burglar busted in. Any literate crook could’ve done it. Indeed, Nick’s explanation to Scientific American about how he persuaded Cawston’s to install a pair of four-foot-by-four-foot glass-panels to further reduce the farm’s electricity bill was an instruction guide. The burglar, armed only with a screwdriver and rope, lowered himself into a virtual Tiffany’s of stealable loot.
Nick, confronting his biggest professional blunder, was dejected, though not distraught, having learned to compartmentalize his troubles to remain the eternal optimist he was. The issue was what to do: seal up the skylight to thwart future break-ins or reinforce the panels? He stood up, thinking/hoping that company insurance would cover the losses. It was only money, and he was fortunate to be breathing. He also was fortunate to find levity from this elevation; from the roof, he could see a group of white-turbaned Shriners teasing what they believed was a real ostrich. It was stuffed.
RG’s two-pinkie whistle snapped him back. Nick shuddered, knowing RG only used that signal to herald problems (including the time he locked himself in the outhouse on a one-hundred-degree day). Nick dismounted the roof ladder as he always did: leaping backward over the last rungs.
“You’re white as a sheet,” Nick said. “Who died?”
RG, still wheezing from the run over, shook his head. “Not the best figure of speech today, Nick.”
They soon were darting across the yard toward the main paddock. When they reached there, a gaggle of workers stood inside the dim light looking despondent. Stunned. Some were even crying and hugging. Cawston had lost an icon. Mrs. Julius Caesar was gone.
Nick hunkered down next to her, stroking the bird’s limp, pointed head. For years, she was the public face of the operation as Cawston’s most commercialized, recognized, photo-shot bird. But Father Time didn’t kill her; gluttony did, as evident from the three-inch-long construction nail protruding sideways through her narrow esophagus. After a lifetime of hatching profitable baby ostriches and thrilling the masses, Mrs. Julius Caesar asphyxiated alone in her hay-floored chute.
“She must’ve gone out thrashing,” said Gus, a wind-burned wrangler. “It’s dismaying. She was such a character.”
“Anybody have any notion how these escaped our attention?” Nick asked, projecting calm when he wanted to break something. He held aloft another long nail that his fingers stumbled over.
“You tell us. You’re the one Mr. Jenks put in charge,” said Otis Norwood, stepping forward from the grain barrels stacked along a wall. Nick’s onetime friend was one of those people with the facial geometry to be classically handsome—far-spaced eyes under thick brown hair, lantern jaw—if his perennial scowl didn’t nullify it. “But I suppose you’re spread mighty thin, what with your solar doohickeys and magazine interviews.”
Otis’s barb set off grousing from
other mourners in the barn. Two onlookers in high boots drifted out, back to their chores. Nick held his tongue, bringing Mrs. Caesar’s head into his lap, contemplating her funeral.
“We should bury her behind the paddock,” he said. “Let’s pour some of those red pebbles she enjoyed gobbling in the hole.”
“And the photograph of her with Teddy Roosevelt,” said Agnes, a raspy-voiced maintenance woman who’d worked at Cawston forever. “Those two had a connection. She nibbled his mustache when he visited.”
“Good idea,” said Nick, speaking up. “We’ve suffered a real loss here, people. No getting around that. It’s all right to feel blue. The best way to honor her is to ensure there aren’t more nails around that could jeopardize her friends. Can someone please go through the whole area with a rake?”
After two workers volunteered, Otis not one of them, everyone else started filing out. The mood was so glum you could hear straw rustling under their boots.
The next afternoon, Nick sat awkwardly in his boss’s office in the same wicker chair he’d worn a groove in during the past three years. From it, he and Cecil planned seasonal goods, troubleshot problems. Only two months ago here, after Cecil praised Nick for doing “a crackerjack job” following a record quarter, they polished off a quarter bottle of absinthe. Today that wicker dug into Nick’s flesh.
Cecil’s forefinger stabbed a copy of the Scientific American article. Indictment-style, it was pointed to where Nick gloated about “the beauty of the skylight” for the world (and underworld) to read. Nick knew Cecil was furious because Cecil was itching under his collar, which he did instead of yelling to keep his hypertension under control.
“I warned you before the journalist arrived not to say anything that could harm the company,” he said through gnashed teeth. “You’ve never been one to brag, Nick, you did let yourself get cocky.”
