by Chip Jacobs
“Not to be argumentative,” Nick said, “but I’ve ridden a Cawston ostrich here, and the only time she acted up was a day the hammers were really banging and a boy scampered toward her.”
Chester shrugged as he rose, his sneer easing into a smirk. “If I were in your shoes, I’d be asking questions, too. But you might be surprised by what concrete can do.”
Nick got up, as well, and shook Chester’s hand. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
Striding out of the mess tent, however, Nick mind was already closed. Next time, he’d restrict his comments to the upcoming baseball season or the spectacular fire that razed another landmark, the La Pintoresca Hotel. Failing that, he’d amuse the table with stories of ostriches that resembled notable Americans.
Spring Street’s Graybeard
Saturday afternoons belonged to him. They were Nick’s me-time, his greedy-time—his time to recharge the battery he depleted five-and-a-half days a week sweating the details of his special lamps. Jaunts with Royo into the hurly-burly of Los Angeles were his outlet, and it only was a Red Car trip away.
Not that it was a cinch getting his dog aboard because, barring emergencies, animals were prohibited on the Pacific Electric’s spiffy trains. Initially, Nick circumvented that regulation by purchasing three tickets and sweet-talking the conductors. Lately, though, he’d been managing it by buying only two fares, with no blandishment required. Royo would just hop up the steps, grin at the drivers, and they beckoned him aboard. Nick’s former canyon dog was a charmer of humans, uniformed and otherwise.
Today they boarded at their usual spot: the Santa Fe depot near the flyover bridge linking the Hotel Green’s twin buildings. The trolley was pretty full, and a few starchy passengers cast reproving glances when they climbed on. To maintain a low profile, they walked to the rear to stand by the brass grip-pole there. Everybody else ignored them, bound up in their own worlds.
In front of them was a cross section of the times: parents dragging fidgety children to department stores to purchase clothes they didn’t want; Fedora-topped businessmen headed for weekend meetings; scullery maids gabbing with black men in red bellboy uniforms. Diverse as this mix was to observe, Nick fantasized about spacing out for the next thirty minutes.
Well, no one ever gets everything they desire.
In the row ahead of him was Constance Prunell, a wealthy busybody belittling a slender Chinese lady in a dry cleaner’s smock sitting next to her. Like Lilly, Constance was forever in the newspapers, except for more judgmental reasons. She was on the board of numerous civic organizations, most prominently as chairwoman of the Committee to Eradicate Eyesores, which advocated for the demolition of blighted properties it viewed as unseemly for a city of pronounced architecture. Edison Electric’s rail-maintenance barn, pre-disaster, was Number Seven on the committee’s list of proposed teardowns; Buford’s stand was Number Three. To Nick, she was the worst strain of elitism: someone who freely took out her self-loathing on people with less “status” than her, someone who decided what was beautiful and what was vulgar. She didn’t represent his Pasadena.
The ham-faced fifty-year-old with preternaturally round eyes was quietly pressuring the Asian woman to vacate the bench they were sharing so she could hog it to herself. Nick, from five feet back, heard her say, “I won’t permit my clothes to be washed by your leprous kind so why should I have to sit near one now?” She topped that with something about “opium dens” and “squirrel-eaters.” Her victim may not have understood English well, but she comprehended she was being demeaned as sub-human and was about to cry.
Uh-uh. Nick wasn’t having this, not so much out of civic gallantry as personal irritation. He dropped Royo’s leash and visualized how he wanted his mutt to roust her. Royo enacted it, too, trotting a few steps up the aisle and cutting right into the bench where Prunell was hectoring that woman. Tada. Constance bristled when Nick’s “diseased mongrel” squished past her legs to nuzzle up against the object of her cruelty.
“He can’t be here.” Constance said. “This is an outrage! There are regulations.”
“Oh yeah?” Nick said, tilting forward and flashing his dog’s hole-clipped ticket at her. “Good news. There’s an empty seat up front. We wouldn’t want you catching anything.”
“The nerve,” she said. “I’m allergic, I’ll have you know.”
Constance trundled up the aisle, her round eyes sweeping the train for an eyewitness to corroborate her odious treatment. By the time she forced another passenger to scoot over for her, she was pledging to write authorities about this. And if there was anything she’d mastered, besides preemptive intolerance, it was the complaint letter.
The shaken Chinese woman scratched Royo’s ears in appreciation. Before she alighted, she flashed Nick a wounded smile. He and Royo then moved onto the bench still warm from the confrontation, and Nick barely revisited the incident again. There was too much else spinning in his head.
It was on these adventures where he was trying to ascertain, by experimentation, if Royo truly could read his mind by culling his brainwaves. On last week’s excursion, Nick gestured at a salted-pretzel vendor outside one of the Red Car stations, thinking, but not vocalizing, how he’d like to split one, if Royo were so inclined. Without any prompting, his dog jiggled his head. To determine if this was a fluke, Nick later pointed at something revolting—two crows fighting over a rat carcass in an alley—and mentally asked Royo his opinion. The dog leaned back against the trolley bench—and covered his eyes with his paws.
His clairvoyance, if that’s what this was, wasn’t an everyday power, just the same. Sometimes, he failed to react when Nick prodded him. Instead, Royo stared at him as if Nick was trying to force the issue, or neglecting the bigger picture.
Today was their fourth Saturday rompabout into Los Angeles together. On prior outings, they pedaled a glass-bottomed boat on a small, mossy lake in mid-city, and rode a bumper car at the Venice Plunge. They wandered around a snobby Hollywood art gallery, where a woman was aghast that Nick flipped Royo a wadded-up stick of Wrigley’s, and even more offended when Nick pretended to speak French to him.
A trip to a MacArthur Park lion show, where an animal trainer rode a man-eater inside a cage for the audience, was the most mind-bending act they sightsaw. Motivated by it, Nick created a new bedazzlement for the ostrich rodeo. At this afternoon’s show, Royo got a running start, leapt off a stool, and soared through a bamboo hoop that Reginald nervously held aloft. Where did Royo land: on Nick’s shoulders as he trotted Mrs. C in a circle.
“Bravo, flying dog,” the kids shrieked rhythmically. “Bravo, ostrich man.”
Now, bumping along in the Red Car this winter day, Nick posed himself this. What constituted the greater spectacle: his communion with a wily, intermittently clairvoyant canine, when telepathy and séances were all the rage (and the focus of scientific studies), or the pandemonium of downtown Los Angeles, America’s former murder capital? It was a toss-up.
Here on Spring Street, the crowds were thicker, the buildings higher, the ads gaudier than Pasadena. Here, the merchants’ awnings were grimed in soot, and the black overheard wires tangled like spiderwebs. Its busy intersections, where trolleys, carriages, automobiles, and bicycle messengers vied for the same space as gladiators would, made Colorado Street at peak hours seem a backwater.
Where Pasadena, the Crown City, was tidy, insular, and Apollonian, Los Angeles was a merry-go-round of perpetual motion, brazen humanity, and sin-for-sale. Where Pasadenans cultivated literary salons and scientific orations, newsboys here hawked scandals (raided brothels) and municipal firsts (William Mulholland’s coming aqueduct) with the timbre of rival Chihuahuas. Pasadena was beef tenderloin and white wine, its southwesterly big brother a sizzling hot dog and cold draft.
You even could get trampled here if you weren’t alert. In their first seven minutes on the thoroughfare, Nick and Royo needed to squish in next
to a barbershop pole to dodge the sidewalk masses—that covey of Evangelical women, chanting about repentance in poufy dresses; that clutch of businessmen nattering on about “venal landlords” fast behind them. Who needed vaudeville at Clune’s, either, when the weirdos of Los Angeles ambled in the open air? In front of the alcove where they stood waddled four trained ducks; on their fluffy, white backs were painted advertisements for a health food store and a honky-tonk. Soon came pamphleteers promoting nickelodeons and “affordable land,” then a quartet of curly mustachioed singers practicing harmonies for a gig.
For Nick, keeping Royo leashed at his side in this Dionysian setting required strong hands and bribery. “I told you’d it be a zoo,” he said over the thrum. “Behave yourself and there could be a bratwurst in your future. Hear that?”
Royo’s chin bounced.
The marquee of the theater across the street was itself pandering capitalism in bold-relief letters. A nickel bought you a variety act headlined by “juggling pituitary giants” or a peep show. Nick didn’t covet any of that, certainly not without Fleet. He coveted a Coke, and Royo could use water from a drugstore soda fountain half a block up Spring Street. What luck, too, for not twenty feet beyond it was Cawston’s national headquarters. Nick, exhilarated as he was about working on the bridge, was intrigued about the merchandise the company was hyping in his absence.
Yet, he should’ve been more careful, because on his fourth, energetic stride toward the soda fountain, his right shoelace caught a loose sidewalk board, and he pitched onto his knees. Royo’s leash stretched taut when he tripped, spurring the dog to look back at its klutzy holder. People veered around him while he freed and retied his bootlace, no worse for the stumble.
It was in straightening up that Nick discerned a nattily dressed gent of about seventy observing him with an unnerving grin. A knowing grin. He leaned against a narrow storefront twenty feet up Spring Street, tipping his Boater at him. Classic con man: flattery before stealing you blind. Let him rope another sucker.
Nick, clutching Royo’s leash, tried swerving around him on the people-packed sidewalk. That strategy tanked. The character snatched Nick by the collar of his winter coat and yanked him into the doorway, effortlessly.
“Mister,” he remarked in a sonorous voice, releasing Nick’s jacket. “That’s one enchanted pooch you have there.”
Nick tried getting away, but, strangely, his feet wouldn’t budge. Like they were stuck in concrete. “Hey, what’s the big idea?”
“Excellent question,” said the man with the finely clipped gray beard.
“Let me go or I’ll pop you in the beezer and find a cop.”
“That won’t be necessary,” the graybeard answered. “Nor will this take long.”
How’s he doing this? with his boots still moored, Nick twirled his head, searching for explanations. A clue was right there in the storefront glass.
“Messages From the Other Side: Ten Cents” read a sign in indigo letters. “Readings by Guinevere Adler, acolyte of the Purple Mother.” Everyone knew about the Purple Mother. Katherine Tingley was the spiritual theosophist hounded by the Los Angeles Times and other moral gatekeepers in the early 1900s for operating a so-called “spook’s nest” near San Diego. She contended that her cocker spaniel was a reincarnated associate.
Nick scowled at the huckster that, he had to acknowledge, employed one talented tailor. His black, pinstriped suit was manufactured from such luminous fabric that its borders appeared to halo light. Must’ve been a fluky reflection from the afternoon sun. “You know, it’s against the law to put folks under trances without their permission,” Nick said. “What’s your game?”
“This isn’t a game, and you’re not under any spell,” the graybeard responded, eyes agleam. “The name’s MZ and I’ve been expecting you, Nick.”
“Hey, how’d you know my name?” he said snappishly. His feet weren’t going anyplace.
“I know what I know,” his captor said with a theatrical lilt. “I’d lack credibility if I called you Henry. My industry has its standards. You should feel honored I know your name. You’re among a group of people selected to debunk history’s greatest myth.”
“What? That the abominable snowman is a guy in a costume?”
“Clever,” he said with a dissolving smile. “I sincerely recommend you wake up to the role you’ve been designated to play, unless you want the cycle to chew you up and spit you out. My advice: tail the voice.”
Nick assumed he was referring to Royo, who, for all his smarts, now was licking his privates as if there were steak drippings on them, oblivious to his master being shaken down on their Saturday jaunt. The denizens of Spring Street didn’t care, either, blurring past them on their way to sales, shows, or a Coke, like the one Nick was supposed to be guzzling. “Who writes your material?” he said. “A sauced poet?”
“You’d be impressed if you knew. Anyway, if you fail to recognize me upon our next encounter, it means you’re still searching for the light in the road. Good day now.”
When Nick tried lifting his boots again, they were free, and he wasted no time hurrying across Spring Street with Royo ahead of an oncoming truck. They began scurrying back toward the train depot, but not before Nick turned for a final look at the graybeard. He was tracking him while also holding open his jacket for Nick’s viewing pleasure. Inside the purple-velvet lining were dozens of sparkling pocket watches—props, obviously, to scare the unsuspecting about their days running out unless they paid him for intervention.
“How cornball,” he said to Royo, who peered at Nick with eyebrows as narrow as Charlie Chaplin’s. “His crystal ball must be in the repair shop.”
Rather than taking the trolley to where they started out, the depot closest to Nick’s Green Street cottage in Bungalow Heaven West, they rode the other Pacific Electric line to Pasadena. This route whipped trains around a hairpin turn and then over a white-knuckle trestle bridge at Garvanza near Highland Park. Many predicated a trolley eventually would sail over the side here, killing everyone onboard when it crashed, sardine-can-like, into the scrubland hundreds of feet below. Nick, believing the alarm overblown, usually watched passengers dig their fingers into the wooden benches as the train listed and click-clacked over the gorge. Today, after the phony mind-trip with the graybeard, he lost interest in observing fear ripple through the Red Car. He needed to glimpse the most scientific object in his universe: the bridge.
And before they de-boarded for that, Nick first needed to dissect a boot. So he removed one and, in the flickering sunlight through the trolley window examined its worn-down heel. Yep. As he guessed, there were a half dozen, exposed nail-heads that hidden magnets under the wood sidewalk could’ve latched onto as part of a rip-off. That huckster was cunning; the intrigue was how he knew his name, and there had to be a logical answer. By the time they disembarked, Nick wasn’t nearly as unnerved as he was boarding.
He and Royo were at the top of a trailhead between Ivy Wall and Mrs. Bangs, preparing to amble toward base camp, when events again rearranged the itinerary. This time it was a distant rumble Nick could sense trembling his ankles. In lieu of winding down the embankment, they turned right. First time Nick ever heard of the shop now demanding to be heard.
He and Royo hugged the path that snaked around the Arroyo’s eastern rim. With every step north, the vibration heightened and a rattling noise began surging with it. Five minutes later they came upon a garage-size building overrun, or concealed, by thick, brown vegetation. Nick swatted away the branches, battling through the prickly brush until they reached a nondescript, windowless structure. “A. J. Pearson’s Industrial Testing: By Appointments Only,” said painted letters over the door. Nick had never heard of the shop before.
He pressed his hand against the outer wall. It quivered so intensely it almost tickled. Some type of heavy machinery, something perhaps for a newfangled truck, was blasting full throttle
inside and convulsing the surrounding terrain. Nick banged twice on the door. No one answered, which wasn’t surprising. You could’ve run a herd of wildebeests into that wall and no one would’ve noticed.
Ruuuuun. Errrrrrrrrrrrr. Ruuuuun. Ka-ka-ka.
Homeowners certainly would’ve protested this insane noise and juddering if the place wasn’t so isolated from development. For his part, Royo cared little about zoning. The industrial racket made him revolt against his leash.
“Give me another minute, boy,” Nick thought, hoping Royo picked it up over the clamor. “We’re on to something.”
Ruuuuun. Errrrrrrrrrrrr.
Nick decided to skip any close-up view of the bridge and walk home after his accidental discovery. By Orange Grove Boulevard, he’d put the Spring Street fraudster behind them. A bigger mystery was solved: the bridge was a victim to the wails and frequency vibrations from this overlooked machine shop.
“There’s your ghost, Chester,” Nick muttered to himself. “Physics.”
Boot Camp for Bridge Rats
When he wasn’t on the deck squinting through his pocket telescope, or in the field scribbling notes for his lamps, Nick was a student of cutting-edge construction. His first lesson: in 1912, no sharp minds built with Old World brute force anymore. They worked with Progressive Age economy of motion.
Consider the gravel needed to batch concrete for the bridge’s prodigious appetite. It’d be wasteful trucking the stuff in from distant mining pits when the pebbly rocks were abundant near the jobsite. Workers swinging pickaxes and shovels to excavate it from the slopes bookending the construction zone solved that problem. Resource optimization wasn’t sexy. It was just smart.
The diesel-powered mixer, which churned that gravel, cement, and water into concrete, was another example. It spun its mixes next to where the driverless dumpcart ascended its oval trestle track. Doing this shortened the time needed to deliver the mush, so bridge rats weren’t waiting around to channel it into the wooden forms. Retaining the flexibility to add a second dumpcart was another inspired advancement.
