by Chip Jacobs
“Folks poured off the trains in the ensuing years, repopulating the town with migrants from every nook of America. They surged in from the Jim Crow South, the Dust Bowl, and the East Coast, particularly Massachusetts and New York. Naming a city with so many sterling attributes was no simple task. Some of the early contenders were screwy—New Granada, Indianala, Muscat, Kleikos.”
“Wait. Kleikos?” Jules said. “Your city fathers were comparing themselves to Greece? Isn’t that self-aggrandizing?”
“A little,” Nick said, bladder ballooning. “Everybody, however, always says Pasadena is the Midwest in Mediterranean weather. Ultimately, leaders reverted to provenance. Pasadena translated as ‘crown of the valley’ in Weoquan, the Indian tribe that settled the lands before the white man. You probably already gleaned that from your research.”
“How could I forget?” she said.
Obviously, this wasn’t the juncture for Nick to mention that the Chances of Bloomington, Indiana, were one of Pasadena’s original families, sandwiched alphabetically between the Bristols of Iowa and the Clapps of Massachusetts.
“By now the Oldsmobile had departed the concrete streets on the westside for the unpaved road on the city’s eastern sector, where many of the town’s domestics and less well-heeled resided. Here, the homes were spaced out, the commercial buildings few. They wheeled by Eaton Wash and passed Lamanda Park. They drove by Rosemary’s Cottage, home to the ‘slow girls,’ and shotgun shacks from whose clotheslines hung long johns and hotel uniforms.” Nick described the empty spaces and ramshackle blocks filled with non-Anglo faces as “a scrappy expanse that won’t always be forsaken.”
Jules, with her head still ratcheted back, volunteered her most trenchant observation so far. “I’ve seen what being neglected means for the disenfranchised in Chicago.”
“And?”
“In the tenements, it translates into children playing marbles around diseased water.”
Nick was tempted to joke about Pasadena’s unusual sewage-to-fertilizer system; he aborted that notion, recognizing Jules lacked his zest for topical sarcasm. “Nobody,” he said, “can alter what was. We can strive for what should be.” Not bad.
“In mid-city,” he pointed out the dusty grounds of Tournament Park, home to Pasadena’s signature event: the Tournament of Roses Parade. “It relocated here, to California Boulevard, after outgrowing its original locale. Where the first New Year’s Day events enticed only several hundred spectators, at twenty-five cents a ticket, thousands of fancy dressed, smiling people now flocked to it. Reviewing stands were erected for spectators to enjoy flower-bedecked floats in the morning and thrilling competitions in the afternoon. Tug-of-wars, foot races, horse races, chariot-style ostrich races, once even a race pitting a camel against an elephant, which the pachyderm won. January-first sporting welcomed all feet.”
“Initially, tournament organizers from the exclusive Valley Hunt Club foresaw an annual football game as a central attraction. The first contest was such a rout, though, the University of Michigan walloping Stanford forty-nine-zilch, that the races replaced the gridiron action.”
“So why are we here?” Jules said, somewhat Sphinx-like.
“Because this site is emblematic. It’s our future. Pasadena,” he enthused with all that caffeine pinging through his system, “was transforming itself from a tourist hotbed and agricultural juggernaut—one still packing railcars with thousands of tons a year of sellable cabbage, butter, olives, citrus, wine, and such—into an entrepreneurial-scientific economy. Nothing typified that better than the fact that the expanding Throop College of Technology (the future Caltech) moved next door to Tournament Park. The new meets the old.”
“Duly noted,” Jules said. “Anything more?”
Duly noted? “Just a smidge,” he said, getting the message.
When Lilly’s chauffeur swung them by the Hotel Green, Nick retold the Benjamin-Harrison-dinner-fiasco story, as Fleet suggested. Boom. It was the first time Nick heard Jules laugh. “Nearby was the elevated wood cycleway linking the giant hotel and points south. A plan to extend it into Los Angeles was scotched,” he said. “Still, it gave road builders ideas.”
Up next were a couple of Greene & Greene Craftsmen houses, whose woodwork was a near aphrodisiac for certain architectural buffs. But they elicited no reaction from Jules. The orphanage bankrolled by fat cats and the billboard decreeing Pasadena “Just Like Paradise” met that same listlessness.
Nonetheless, they went to Colorado Street, past Clune’s Theater, by Vroman’s, then the One Hundred Percenters’ club building. At Fair Oaks, they dipped south so Jules could soak in the Raymond Hotel where blimps from the dirigible factory nearby hovered over the luxury building’s tree-plastered hill.
Going this route involved passing Buford’s and the Pacific Electric Railway maintenance barn, which Nick was dumbfounded to see was almost fully rebuilt. Gratitude, survivor’s guilt: they all cascaded inside of him dredging up that fiery shock wave. He still had no lucid recollection of what happened to him between the blast and Buford’s consoling face over him on the sidewalk. Fleet said disrupted memory was consistent with head injuries, and Nick accepted that, Fleet being a future doctor (and he being a master of compartmentalization).
The last stop on the Jules Cumbersmith educational tour was at the old Carmelita fairgrounds. It was at the intersection of Orange Grove Boulevard, north of where the Busches and other big spenders lived, and Colorado Street’s dead-end dip into the Arroyo Seco. Over the precipice sparkled Pasadena’s coming automobile bridge, the very quintessence of the city’s concrete tomorrow.
“Mere yards to the north,” Nick said, believing this was history Jules truly needed to appreciate, “was the rustic world of James W. Scoville. In the late nineteenth century, he built a private dam out of boulders and a hydraulic pumping station out of concrete to trap mountain-fed waters vital to irrigating the area’s orange groves. Without them, or the well-trafficked carriage/footbridge over his complex, who knows how fast the city would’ve developed? Scoville’s pay scale augured Pasadena progressiveness, too. He compensated laborers by the number of their dependents.”
“If we weren’t called Pasadena, we could’ve been named after him. Better than Kleikos, right?”
Today, Mr. Mercereau’s creation dwarfed Mr. Scoville’s. Nick hoped Jules understood that implicitly. Yet her engagement with anything was tepid, at best. In two hours, she uttered fewer than two hundred words, including “got it” and “duly noted.” She did yawn eight times, the last after Nick described his hometown’s hottest industries: real estate, law, and the roaring automobile trade.
“Some know-nothings gripe that Pasadena revolves around chic places like the Valley Hunt Club and Millionaire’s Row,” Nick said in closing. “That it’s old money and priggish, too picturesque for its own good. To them I say, ‘Remove your blinders.’ Our stock-and-trade is decency. If we were a passing fancy, we wouldn’t be risking our necks building a first-class bridge for the benefit of all. Any comment? Jules?”
He looked in the mirror. She was asleep, mouth open. Nick fake-coughed.
“What’d I miss?” she asked.
“Nothing,” he grumbled. “Driver, I think we’re done.”
After they dropped her off, Nick asked Lilly’s chauffer to pull over after twenty yards so he could run up somebody’s driveway to whiz behind a hedge.
—
He scarcely cared that his narration was a warm glass of sleep-inducing milk; that his city of kaleidoscopic flowers, five hundred bird species, and galaxy-plumbing telescopes was so colorless to her. Pasadena didn’t need Jules’s approval, and he didn’t need to deceive himself that she was anything but a paycheck mercenary with dry ice in her veins. After all, he was employed on the most intricate piece of derring-do engineering in America while she shuffled papers for Lilly’s vanity project.
In the
last week, Nick had taken the components the Mercereau Company requisitioned for him and fashioned the two solar-powered lamps required for his audition. He also re-traipsed around the slopes on the bridge’s eastern banks, obsessing over the ideal spots for his lights. This was the grueling side of being an inventor, and one where you needed to remain hypervigilant. One misstep in the irregular terrain could snap your ankle in a gopher hole. One distraction could plant your foot on the tail of a venomous Copperhead. Because of that, Nick always swiveled his eyes between the sky and the ground, ears constantly listening for rattles.
Five days after he played tour guide for Jules’s benefit, Marcus stayed late with him on the bridge deck to assess how well, in Marcus’s terminology, Nick’s “little metal petunias” performed. Intimidate Nick as he did, there was no doubt that Marcus was astute. Even though Nick’s inventions glowed as he vowed they would, Marcus said he’d reserve judgment until he returned the next morning at six to confirm they still were shining.
It rained that night, and any cheaply made devices would’ve malfunctioned if water leaked into the seals. But when a sleepy Nick met a grumpy Marcus at dawn, the devices were still casting their exotic, silvery light.
“I’ll be, Chance. They passed muster,” Marcus said. “I expected they’d fritz out. You’re authorized to add another ten.”
“I knew they’d work,” Nick said.
“Hold on. All you did was remove yourself from probation. You get all twelve twinkling and then I, and I alone will decide whether to consider more. You flub it and your patron won’t save you. Clear?”
“As a bell,” Nick said.
Marcus scribbled checkmarks on the to-do list on his clipboard and walked off the deck, already preoccupied by his next headache.
—
Insofar as overall workplace camaraderie went, the retail feather business was simpler to acclimate to than rough-and-tumble construction. Working offsite those first weeks, Nick barely had any interaction with the company’s rank and file. When he did cross paths with the grungy, suspender-wearing crew, they reacted with cursory nods and wary glances.
He didn’t begrudge them for mistrusting him, for whispering about him, for asking which crony greased his hiring. His rationale for being here—installing solar lamps when society was just beginning to plug appliances into electrical sockets—must’ve sounded flimsy in an industry where you proved yourself on narrow planks at ticklish altitudes. If he was going to fraternize, mess-tent lunches were Nick’s best venue. Eating tended to soften folks up.
He tried to ease in already with the bridge rats by seating himself at the far end of their tables, committed to more observation than speaking. Today, he set his tray down in a center seat, ready for further contact. Another outsider, a pasty company accountant who tucked his tie into his shirt, pulled up a chair simultaneously. And how did the men react? Their gossip ground to an awkward halt.
“How’s everyone faring today?” Nick piped up with studied innocence. “Same old, same old?”
A man in a rawhide vest, who managed the horses, bailed him out from the stony silence. “We were just grousing about the frost. Half the farmers around here are using smudge pots to combat it. In a few weeks we may need to employ some ourselves. My fingers are blueing.”
“Yep, springtime can’t come soon enough for me, either,” Nick said, trying to spark dialogue. “I’m overworking my fireplace.”
Had someone else joined in, Nick was ready with a corny joke about “what was so great about the so-called ‘Great Freeze of 1912?’” No one did. This was worse than Jules’s silent treatment. Technically, these were colleagues.
At a table diagonal to them—the mess tent had ten total, eight for the working stiffs, one for management, and another brimming with food—someone was being serenaded with a rousing “Happy Birthday.” Whatever the division of labor at base camp, Nick intuited a comradeship that didn’t welcome just anybody new with a smile and a lunch tray.
So, he recommitted to lunch, assuming he’d need longer to fit in than he calculated. Besides, while the fare here wasn’t Buford’s caliber, it was surprisingly good. Ham roll, corn on the cob, gingersnaps, iced tea: the management was savvy. Contented stomachs made for productive hands.
While he chewed, the bridge rats chatted among themselves, though they weren’t shy about burping and farting for public consumption. When the tie-tucked bean counter left, more animated banter resumed. Nick exhaled, realizing he wasn’t the conversation-killer. This could be his moment to connect, if he posed a more original question.
“Excuse me,” he said to the general table. “What’s it like on the scaffolding with no safety nets? Is it always trapeze walking, or does it become another day at the job?”
A rosy-cheeked man from Boston chuckled aloofly, as if only a wet-behind-the-ears nob would vocalize such a naive comment; his buddy, one of the Colorado brothers, elbowed him to stop. Nick cringed at himself as the seconds ticked by. He took a massive bite of ham roll, if only to stuff something in his mouth besides boot leather.
“Let me tell ya, it hardens the concentration,” finally said Chester Filkins, a pock-skinned, carpenter/concrete-raker whose defining feature was a caterpillar-shaped scar threading down his neck. “You’re petrified at first. One wrong move and it’s curtains. After a while, you acclimate to imitating a Billy Goat.”
Now I’m getting someplace. Nick nodded and chewed.
Chester wasn’t done answering. “You got to harden yourself up there,” he said. “You sure can’t cry about the money.”
“Amen to that,” said rebar-clipper Harry Collins, raising his iced tea.
The Mercereau Company, as Nick was learning, paid its men more than typical contractors, up to $4.50 a day, depending on skill and experience, on account of the perils. Untested him was making three.
Now that he asked a decent question, he repeated his name for those who didn’t know it, and the other seven men at the table introduced themselves, some with more juice than others. He wasn’t intending to say anything more. Someone else did, though.
“Yeah, but Billy Goats don’t hear what we do, do they?” muttered Darby Nixon, a beanie-wearing, oval-faced wirepuller with a dab of mustard on his weak chin.
“Quiet, Darb,” Chester said, in a scolding tone. “Keep your damn voice down. Those suits got big ears.”
“Hear what?” Nick asked, when he probably should’ve allowed the remark to pass.
Some of the table bridge rats glared at one another and pivoted their heads to check for eavesdroppers. Darby’s comment, it seemed, casually injected an incendiary topic.
“Stick around long enough and you’ll hear it, or feel it,” Darby said at a lower pitch.
Nick crunched a gingersnap, trying to act unfazed.
“Best we can tell the action is coming under the deck,” Darby added. “This thing’s got a will of her own.”
Chester, the table’s tacit leader, lost it at that, plucking Darby’s beanie off his head and jamming it into his lap. “Quit talking out of school. We don’t know this fella from Adam.”
Darby, humiliated, put his cap back on. “Yes, we do. He’s noodling with those lamps. And don’t touch me again, bub.” He balled his napkin, picked up his tray, and tromped off in anger.
When the whistle blew for the afternoon shift, everybody else left the tense scene, too. It was now just Nick, Chester, and the elephant in the mess tent that Darby invited in. A minute passed while they finished their sandwiches.
“Darb’s a reckless lug, but he’s not wrong,” Chester said in a muted voice across the table. The suits think the rattling and shaking we told them about is nothing. Claim any disturbances are from normal, concrete settling or creaky forms. I don’t know. Never experienced nothing like it at twenty other jobs.”
Nick snagged a stray piece of ham and abandoned discretion. “Would
it be impertinent for me to ask, Chester, if anybody’s calibrated this, scientifically speaking?”
Chester glowered. “Scientifically? You’re a college boy, aren’t you, greenie?”
“Yes. And I’ve read about objects vibrating rather strangely if their frequencies are the same as something else nearby that shakes first. It’s physics.”
“Physics, yeah, I should’ve thought of that,” Chester said mockingly. While he wasn’t as daunting as Marcus, the menacing scar by his jugular was a “proceed carefully” sign.
Despite it, Nick pressed on, unwilling to be bullied. “Just because you’re a veteran doesn’t invalidate my question, and Darby broached the subject.”
Nick, new guy, wiped his face and scooted the bench away. A second later, Chester curled his finger for him to sit down, which Nick did, reluctantly.
“I didn’t mean to snap at you. What do I know about science? I started working at fourteen. But I’ve been around, and I ain’t never heard a bridge rattle like this, or talk.”
“Talk? How?”
“Lean forward,” Chester said, sweeping his paranoid eyes around the room again. “It goes How-uuuuuuuu-kkkkk. How-uuuuuuuuuuuuu-kkk.”
Nick maintained a neutral expression to mask his skeptical mind. He waited a respectful minute before answering. “That sounded similar to a whale I’ve heard off the coast at Redondo Beach. Those noises can carry surprisingly far inland.”
“I suppose, I suppose,” Chester said. “What about the wildlife gone missing?”
“Missing?”
“Raccoons, deer, coyotes: you don’t see none of them anymore. Only things around are those lippy parrots. You got to get into Busch Garden ponds before there’s anything with a tail.”
Nick let that poppycock have its airtime. He didn’t doubt Chester and Darby believed what they said, not unless they were fooling with him. Sailors, he knew, were often superstitious, and some bridge rats must be in the club. They were confusing frequency transfers or reverberating noises—whales, faraway building jobs—for campfire-story bunkum. As for the missing animals: it was winter hibernation time!
