by Chip Jacobs
“Let that persist,” Fleet said, “and your Zygomaticus Major (a crucial facial muscle) may snap off your cheekbone. I hope she’s worth it.” He hesitated next before continuing. “Speaking of injuries, my besotted chum, come clean. Tell Dr. Norwood whether you’ve experienced any lingering effects from that explosion? Regular headaches? Memory loss? Disorientation? Injuries to the neocortex don’t always present immediately.”
“None. Never felt better. Why are you bringing this up? You were studying toe warts and hemorrhoids last week.”
“Because, I know you. You can be sneaky sometimes about acknowledging what’s transpiring between your ears.”
“Old man, you have textbook on the brain.”
If Nick told him everything, Fleet would’ve been more than inquisitive. He would’ve marched Nick to a neurologist for an extensive look under his hood.
Nick wasn’t divulging to Fleet, or anyone for that matter, anything about Royo’s sporadic mindreading. It seemed too intimate to disclose, too special. Besides, he’d persuaded himself that the dog’s powers were grounded in science, not mysticism. Royo’s genetic wiring must’ve endowed him with an anomalous capacity for brainwave detection, if not the ability to comprehend English. Someday, Nick was certain, researchers would document the phenomenon specific to hyper-intelligent animals with statistical tables and photos of autopsied brains in highfalutin technical journals.
His other learning curve made this delusion simpler to rationalize.
Consider how well he described the Mercereau Company’s formula to erect a hundred-year structure for potentially millions of automobile trips, in unpredictable soil, and in earthquake country no less. Asked by Jules at their picnic for a general explanation, he compared it to “baking a layer cake—a structurally webbed layer cake that’d crack your teeth.”
Every arch, he told her, hewed to the same recipe. Step One was pouring and then burying the footings, each the rough dimension of Cormoran’s calves from “Jack and the Beanstalk,” to support the tremendous weight coming above it. Step Two: harnessing those footings to the parabolic arches that suffused the bridge with its Romanesque majesty. Step Three: adding everything else—the blocky, arch-linking ribs, the open spandrel columns, the transverse girders, the mini beams and struts you barely noticed—into a superstructure that’d gird the deck for perpetuity. Expansion joints throughout let the concrete breathe.
Step Four in Nick’s metaphor: slathering the frosting. Once the heavy construction was done, the company still needed to finish the deck, scallop the roadway curbs, mold the balusters, and chisel the “flying” pedestrian bays and benches. Lastly it’d install the grape-bunch lamps, which Nick predicted one day would be “upgraded” to his wireless models.
“Don’t forget,” he said, “that without lumber to mold every block of concrete, that cake wouldn’t get out of the oven.”
With each shift, Nick also appreciated what was hazy prior: folks wanted that webbed-together roadway opened something fierce.
Even with several arches to go, the bridge was shaping up to be the most tectonic public-works endeavor in the whole San Gabriel Valley. Every day on the eastern bank off Orange Grove, clusters of pedestrians assembled behind barricades to gape at the future. Merchants, retirees, aspiring engineers, high school kids, maids, aging Union soldiers; something about the job’s immensity transcended people’s class and past. You’d have to handcuff artists to keep them away, too. Braving thistles and insect nips, they planted their butts on the hillsides, painting and sketching those arches in creative strokes. Nick filled with pride noting their dedication.
But one day, on the bridge’s western bank outside town, he discovered another clique of people seemingly less attuned to whimsy. Nobody here was scrawling charcoal lithographs or ogling as molded concrete defied gravity by engineering technique. Nick, who’d trod across the ravine to evaluate solar-lamp locations for this side of the structure, decided to postpone his work a few minutes. He was deputizing himself to spy.
He crouched himself behind a stand of oaks, extracted his telescope, and aimed it at the hills under the gopher-riddled Annandale County Club. A swarm of men in fedoras and heavy boots were walking around boulders and brush there with alacrity in their steps. Above them, a boss gripping what Nick assumed was a topographical map instructed them what to do. That mainly entailed squinting through transits and jabbing poles with measurements on them into the soil.
Pop: another light bulb went off. These men without identifying insignias weren’t from these parts. They were from Los Angeles City Hall. And they weren’t benign. The city and its real estate proxies already were exploiting the terminus of the Owens Valley Aqueduct in the San Fernando Valley as an excuse to snatch and annex wide swaths of property from private owners. If Nick’s gut and scope were correct, Los Angeles’s next conquest was in its battle-planning phase. It’d expand its northeast reach here.
The timing begged for it. Completion of the Colorado Street Bridge would turn the unincorporated hills of San Rafael Heights and Linda Vista into exceptionally valuable real estate—real estate too tantalizing not to try poaching. It’d lead to development that’d be worth tens of millions of dollars, and corresponding political clout, for the first city that nabbed the acreage.
Wealthy landowners and others with property here were split on this issue, some amenable to being swallowed up by Los Angeles, others vehemently opposed. A divide-and-conquer campaign would likely resolve that. Who then was going to repel the land sharks of Los Angeles? Henry Huntington would rake his profits whoever he answered to, and it wasn’t like Hattie’s vegetarian colony could rig Linda Vista with booby traps. With automobile traffic about to roll, this side of the Arroyo Seco was ripe for the taking.
And should Los Angeles acquire first dibs, Pasadena would have egg all over its face. Few organizations would be wiping off more yoke, either, than the city’s Board of Trade, the hard-charging booster group responsible for convincing voters to approve a hundred-thousand-dollar bond issue for the bridge two years ago. To this day, it still gloated about what a bargain it struck, since Pasadena taxpayers were contributing just 47 percent of the total cost of a job that was 60 percent inside city limits. (The county and private deep pockets were ponying up the balance.) How sweet would that deal look in retrospect, Nick asked himself, if Los Angeles hoisted its flag across the canyon? If it snuck in at the last minute to reap the corollary benefits of Pasadena’s sparkling bridge?
He collapsed his scope. Tried not to succumb to cynicism. Every day walking home from work with Royo, he bought the afternoon newspaper where, alongside stories about unrest in China, or fasting fads, or President Wilson’s new Federal Trade Commission, were tucked-in articles about “the bridge effect.” Longtime residents in white-shoe Prospect Park and elsewhere were selling off their own holdings to syndicates and individuals pining to build new neighborhoods. The LA Times was involved, too, lobbying for “a great public park” throughout the entire Arroyo.
This is what happens, he concluded, when you live in a “veritable paradise” about to get infinitely more reachable.
—
“Are you absolutely certain that you desire to hear this?” Jules asked.
“Try me,” Nick said, sandwich in hand. “I always find humor when people exaggerate, regardless of what they’re representing.”
They were enjoying the second sunset picnic of their budding courtship, this time on the grassy hammock in the Devil’s Gate Dam area roughly a mile north of the bridge. Jules, who earned more as Lilly’s Girl Friday than Nick did as Marcus’s “lamp boy,” organized a meal that put Nick’s to shame. Onto a blanket she unpacked deli-bought roast-pork sandwiches, tins of applesauce, carrots, vanilla wafers, and sweet tea in mason jars.
“All right, here goes,” said Jules, reading from an index card with some of her Pasadena Perfect research on it, which she’d toted as en
tertainment (with Nick’s advanced permission). “After the real estate crash of the 1880s, your town fathers were so apprehensive about the declining population that they decided to nationally advertise the city’s advantages. Or should I say embellish them. One pamphlet described Pasadena as ‘a Mediterranean without the marshes and malaria.’ Another declared the land so fertile that cash crops grew tall enough to pluck from horseback.”
Nick looked at her cockeyed. “Maybe tall enough to grab from a Shetland pony,” he said. “You ought to read some of Cawston’s advertisements. You’d think feathers conferred eternal happiness. Truth and advertising: never shall they meet.”
“You’re taking this exceptionally well,” Jules said, handing him a napkin. She wore a yellow dress and black sunglasses, suffragette chic. He was in black trousers that he trimmed at the knees for the warm season ahead. Though he scissored them raggedly and drew pejorative glances from seniors who deemed them slovenly, Nick prioritized comfort above decorum.
“I’m not a blind patriot,” he said. “I consider myself more as a realist Pollyanna.”
“Realist Pollyanna—isn’t that incongruous?”
By him sat Royo, head twitching at Nick’s every movement, because a distracted Nick was a Nick who spilled food he could snag. Jules lay sideways, cupping her chin in her hands, her head slanted at an angle that magnified the nuanced shades in her blonde hair; Nick drooled to kiss her. His own mental birdie suggested he wait.
Jules was reserved though smiley while hiking here from town. Nick, limping with a bruised lumbar from a fall at today’s ostrich rodeo, was learning this was no accident. Her inner spark flared when afternoons became early evenings. She alerted him this might happen.
Nick went without lunch today and Royo’s belly was a bottomless pit. Now they were ingesting every crumb.
“Slow down, you two,” Jules said. “You’re going to eat yourself to sleep. You need to hear what I uncovered in that moldy journal from the Alpine Tavern.”
“Ah, yes, the day your allergies turned into our matchmaker,” Nick replied. “I toast them with a wafer.”
“Hey,” she said. “Leave me a few.”
Nick saw that Jules was so busy trying to amuse him with florid propaganda for a city that didn’t require it, as well as setting out this feast, that her own food was untouched. “I propose a deal,” he said. “I’ll entertain you with a campfire tale so you can catch up eating and then you can reciprocate. Beware: the Bandit’s Ghost is not for the faint of heart.”
“Ready,” she said. “I’m partial to spook stories. I even had a Northwestern professor who told us ghosts are the best teachers for the living.”
“This one supposedly happened just over there.” He pointed toward a craggy rock formation reputed by locals to resemble Satan’s profile. A small lake formed by pale boulders shimmered ripples off of it. North a half-mile was the steel-and-wood Devil’s Gate Bridge, circa 1893 which Nick already disparaged as a technological weakling.
He chomped his fourth wafer and began. Some years back, he explained, a notorious Mexican gang stashed gold, silver, and other booty from a robbery inside the walls of a cavern behind the Devil’s Gate face. Lawmen on horseback pursued the thieves, eventually apprehending ringleader Juan Flores. But they gave him no trial. They gave him a tree, from which they hanged him. Flores’s partner-in-crime, a bandito named Rodriguez, escaped, fleeing south of the border on a fast horse.
“You know crooks,” Nick said. “Money is their religion.”
Sure enough, Rodriguez snuck back to Devil’s Gate with a two-pronged plan. He’d slither down into the pitch-black cave on a rope with a pickax while a lookout maintained watch outside. “He should’ve stayed in Mexico,” Nick said. “Something was waiting for him in the dark.”
“Something?” Jules asked.
“Yes, one very dead Juan Flores, according to legend. ‘Leave!’ the ghost warned his friend, lest he, too, tumble into the entrance of hell. Rodriguez didn’t believe it.”
The lookout heard a spine-tingling scream next, and then the crackle of disintegrating rock. Rodriguez was gone. “Needless to say,” Nick said, “the thief bailed out of there, never returning to Pasadena, whatever its advocates said about the magical climate.”
“Ooh, not bad,” said Jules. “Not Mary Shelley, but decent.”
“Top it if you can,” Nick said. “I expect gooseflesh.” He wedged a blade of grass in his mouth and ordered Royo to chase squirrels, of which he was particularly adept.
Jules set down the remains of her sandwich and tucked her hair behind her ears. “Challenge accepted, though my story doesn’t involve phantoms. It’s about a spectacular dog.”
She said she’d learned about him from an abstract mention in her Pasadena Perfect files. When she told Lilly that she wanted to visit the Alpine Tavern to assess the story’s validity, her employer encouraged her to go. The Arroyo’s humane legacy with animals needed fleshing out. Jules didn’t inform Lilly that she already exhumed archives about early Pasadena showing things weren’t always so humane.
“Enlighten me,” Nick said, challenging her.
She obliged him. During last century’s droughts, some farmers elected to lead their starving horses and cattle to quick deaths over the sides of the Arroyo to spare the animals suffering and themselves money. People later chloroformed feral cats and “skunked” canines. Teenagers themselves played a game where they attempted snatching chickens buried up to their necks as they galloped by on horseback.
“Appalling,” Nick said, patting down his cowlick. “Though is it fair to judge what happened in history by today’s standards? We did once burn supposed witches at the stake. They’d ship you to Timbuktu for replicating that behavior now. Tell me about this dog?”
“Gladly,” Jules replied. “And sadly. Remy. Popular history forgot him.”
Remy was a young, mixed-breed pooch owned by the Difford family, who were among the first to migrate to Pasadena from the Midwest’s plains. To explore their new climes, they hiked up to Mount Wilson one shining afternoon. The parents wanted their daughter and younger son to stomp in fresh streams, observe wildlife, appreciate that America wasn’t completely flat.
But amid the serenity of a mountain picnic, four-year-old Tommy wandered into an open field, unbeknownst to his folks. They assumed the brown-haired boy was still behind them, fashioning a miniature teepee out of sticks and leaves. “It proved a deadly assumption,” Jules said. “Two lurking bald eagles with seven-foot wingspans spotted a child by himself.”
“Uh-oh,” whispered Nick, skin crawling.
For their surprise attack, the birds swooped down in the harsh glare of the sun. In seconds, two sets of black talons ripped into Tommy’s bony shoulders to clutch him. Tommy’s parents sprinted toward him once he cried out in pain. Thirty yards away, they pelted the shrieking, yellow-beaked hunters with stones. Yelled at them to fly off. But the animals bore no intention of retreat. He was food, and they lifted the writhing child several feet off the ground.
Enter land mammal on the job: Remy. The Difford family dog catapulted himself into the fray, clamping his fangs into one of the eagle’s hideous claws. The bird squawked and counterattacked, pecking Remy’s head bloody until the dog unclenched his teeth and fell. Bighearted Remy, though, leaped back up, this time grabbing one of Tommy’s boots. A tug-of-war ensued, producing an unforgettable visual, in which the dog yanked down on the boy and the eagles pulled up.
The aerial killers—America’s national emblem (and the Anheuser-Busch’s corporate symbol)—relented after a few minutes in this intense fight for Tommy. Their talons released him and, in a riot of flapping black feathers, they winged off.
“Tommy’s parents,” Jules said, “hugged him tight, believing the sinister creatures gone. That was their second error.”
With babies to feed a mountain away, the eagles returned
. This time they dug their hooks into the canine, hefting him up by his mane.
“Remmmmmmy!” Tommy wailed. “Not my dog.”
His death yelp ricocheted off the treetops. Three blips soon disappeared into the atmosphere.
“Is that not the creepiest story you’ve ever heard?” Jules asked. “It so shocked me that I needed to sit down in the tavern’s rocking chair to gather myself. I kept imagining Remy’s expression being dragged up; how he’d sacrificed himself for the boy he loved. Your city cares about animals, but the animals care right back. Nick, are you listening?”
He was, unfortunately, and now he had a vacant stare and a rapid pulse. Eagles and their ilk (hawks, osprey, vultures) always seemed monstrous to him, not awe-inspiring. He favored ostriches and peacocks, ornithology’s village idiots. “So,” he asked, after a second, “what became of the family?”
Jules said they recounted their story to a friend of Thaddeus Lowe, sold their house on Euclid Avenue, and relocated to San Francisco. They might’ve died in a house fire not long after that.
“Okay, okay,” he said. “I concede. You out-petrified me at my own game.”
“I did, didn’t I?”
“Yeah, the question is whether the story is apocryphal. It feels rather dubious that your tale ended up in a journal, and not in a book or authenticated article.”
“I’ve been thinking about it within the context of what else I’ve gleaned,” Jules said. “Publicizing the existence of bloodthirsty eagles would’ve been detrimental to wooing new citizens to the foothills, wouldn’t you think?”
She’s quick. Nick poured himself more iced tea to rid his mind of those flesh-shredding talons. “Allow me to quote Napoleon Bonaparte, who, by the way, was an ardent believer in solar-powered steam engines.”
“Is there no subject where you cannot insert your obsession?”
“Probably not. ‘History,’ Napoleon remarked, ‘is a version of the past that people have agreed upon.’”
