by Chip Jacobs
Wilde Street Blues
If there were any cosmic justice, August 1 wouldn’t have killed John Visco. And Nick certainly wouldn’t be here, listening to Marcus Stonebreaker rattle off a construction war story about a barnacle-strewn harbor of which he gave not a fraction of one scintilla. He’d still be dozing off in bed, recovering from a humdinger of a shift.
Sometimes, though, the cosmos have you cornered.
“I ever tell ya about building Mercereau’s first wharf, at Hermosa Beach?” Marcus asked, an unlit cigar between his teeth. They were sitting in his jazzy Cadillac Roadster, idling at the Carmelita fairgrounds that overlooked the shellacked-but-still-standing Colorado Street Bridge.
“No, I don’t believe so,” Nick said, yearning for his sweet pillow.
“It was a doozy.”
So, too, were the last twenty-fours. It was Marcus, after all, who’d rehired Nick just before he slogged home last night. In elaborating why, Marcus had described himself as “genuinely impressed” by how Nick joined the rescue party, particularly after he’d “nearly bought the farm earlier.” This, too: his supervisors were “mighty displeased” that there weren’t more lights illuminating the banks of a flagship project just socked in the mouth.
The upshot: Nick would be adding more solar lamps around the bridge and would remain employed on the project until it was finished, whenever that was. Marcus, never much of an apologizing sort, even apologized for firing Nick in the first place, conceding that he “can be too much of a bear casting judgment on other people’s promising ideas.”
Nick was touched by that concession, if not amused by the company grizzly acknowledging his own genus. He also knew that Marcus was a man of many motives. Why else would he have unexpectedly tapped on Nick’s door an hour after Fleet departed, insisting he required Nick’s “immediate assistance on a delicate piece of business?”
“You think a canyon is a devilish place to work in, try the ocean,” he said now. “We dealt with high tides that were supposed to be low, kelp beds wide as baseball diamonds. When our crew waded into the surf, to drive pilings, there were blue sharks all over, some six footers, snapping at legs.”
“Did anyone die?” Nick asked, eyes on the kinked metal framing and missing scaffolding pegged around the semi-buckled arch. A mini-asteroid could’ve brushed it.
“Not that I know,” Marcus said. “Point is construction is a hazardous way to earn a buck. You start digging somewhere, there’s no telling what forces you’ll unleash.”
There was no way, Nick realized, he’d write his mother anything about the collapse. He prayed the Indiana papers didn’t carry a national story about it.
“Here’s what I’m getting at,” Marcus continued. “That busted arch ain’t gonna stay down for long. If San Francisco can rebuild after its Leviathan quake, this will be a cakewalk. Debris clearance starts tomorrow.”
“Wow. That fast? Any word on Harry Collins?”
“Last I heard, he and the other fella are still alive.” Marcus then lit his stogie and notched the Roadster into gear.
From Pasadena, they took Verdugo Road, weaving around Elysian Park and the dry Los Angeles River, to Alameda Street in downtown LA. On the drive, Marcus addressed what Nick still was mulling: why he picked a neophyte like him for this assignment. Marcus said it was because “all the suits are in emergency meetings and a construction roughneck isn’t the right man for this. Nuance is required.”
Whether that was whole truth—and nothing but—was murky. At least with his job back, and a chance to peddle his lamps to Pasadena City Hall, Nick wouldn’t be shuffling off to Bloomington, and that was no small relief.
Forty-two minutes after leaving, the Roadster stopped on a dirt road in front of a rickety house on Wilde Street. It made Nick’s Green Street cottage a Swiss chalet by comparison. Under the sagging porch, Marcus repeated the game plan. “Condolences and handholding,” he said. “Steel yourself. We’re trudging into somebody’s hellhole.”
His warning resonated at the front door.
“I suppose you’re from the builder,” said the hawk-nosed man with black bangs who flung it open.
“That we are,” Marcus replied. “Mercereau Construction Company. Is Mrs. Visco in?”
“Yeah,” their greeter said. “What took you so damn long?” He tramped into the house without bothering to invite them in.
The main room had no lights on, only fluttering candles. A crucifix hung crookedly on the wall, and the air inside wasn’t only muggy but pungent. In the corner, an olive-skinned woman with swollen eyes cradled a baby in a rocking chair. Marcus removed his bowler and Nick his cap approaching her.
“Ma’am,” Marcus said solemnly. “We apologize for disturbing you unannounced like this. We’re representatives from your husband’s employer. Unfortunately, we bear tragic news. John was killed yesterday afternoon.”
The woman looked at them blankly, or through them.
“Juana already knows,” said the door-answerer. “A neighbor who read the morning paper was here at first light. You ought to have seen her flail. It’d rip the heart out of your chest.”
“It took us a while to identity his next of kin,” Marcus said. “And you are?”
“Ernest Scuzzi, John’s friend. We met mortaring brick on a theater up the street. He’d been letting me live here after some hard-luck times. I’m speaking for the family. Or what’s left of it.”
“All right,” Marcus said.
“Juana can understand English,” Ernest said. “She don’t speak it so good. She had a premonition that John was dead when he didn’t come home.” He strode to the side of the room, where he loitered his fingers over a candle. Nick watched him, thinking he was a human Molotov cocktail primed to detonate. They were roughly the same age.
“This is a tough situation,” said Marcus.
“Situation?” Ernest said, sauntering back toward Marcus, who was far bigger than him. “That’s what you think this is?”
Marcus held up his palms in a peacemaking gesture. “We need to introduce ourselves. I’m Marcus Stonebreaker, construction chief for the Colorado Street Bridge. Nick Chance here is my colleague.”
Marcus extended his hand, which Scuzzi disregarded. He glared at Nick, whose eyes were gravitating onto Juana’s cherubic baby.
“Nick Chance, huh? You used to work at Cawston, didn’t ya?”
“That’s me,” Nick said.
“Isn’t that a kick?” Ernest said.
“Why’s that?” Marcus asked.
“None of your fucking business.”
Wordlessly, Juana rose, handed the child to Ernest, and motioned that he take the baby out the back door so they could have some privacy. Ernest, looking demoted, obliged. Juana then pointed them to sit on a Craftsman-style bench.
“John make,” she said just above a whisper. “From spare wood.”
“Handsome,” Marcus said.
“Please,” Juana said once she sat down. “Tell truth. Did mi esposo suffer? Were his insides spilled? Was he fear muerte?”
Marcus clasped her hands in his. “No. Mrs. Visco, not at all. Now, I can’t lie. He might’ve been scared, but that only lasted a few seconds. Being the good Christian I see you are, rest assured the Good Lord was there to lift him up. No pain. Comprendo?”
Juana smiled (all lips, no teeth) and exhaled. “Oh, gracias, señor. Gracias.” She looked sideways toward Nick and his bandaged fingers on the opposite end of the bench.
“Tus manos? Your hands?”
“Just scratches, ma’am; nothing that won’t heal,” Nick said, trying to erase the image of her husband’s body from yesterday. “What can we do for you?”
“That’s right,” Marcus added. “We’re here extending sympathies.”
At his comment, Juana began weeping in that gloomy room. Its reek—a blend of tortillas; turpe
ntine, which blue-collars used to clean grease off their skin; soiled diapers; and mustiness—was its own fragrance of despair.
Marcus passed Juana his handkerchief. She blew snot into it hesitantly, as if she didn’t want to soil its quality fabric. “Breathe, Mrs. Visco,” he said. “The darkness won’t last.”
Even had she understood his message, she would have probably doubted its veracity today. But she heaved and sighed, trying to steady herself. In mutilated syntax, she itemized her star-crossed past to these strangers. The premature death of her first husband in San Diego: consigned her to work sweatshop hours for money. A second spouse left her cold. Now John was dead for the sake of a roadway she’d never use.
“Shame. A damn shame,” Marcus said, air-washing his hands. He inquired where her older children were. With a neighbor, she mumbled.
Ernest returned from outdoors, done with his temporary banishment, and laid Juana’s baby in its Sears-bought cradle, which was the only store-bought furniture there.
“How old is the cute, little tyke?” Nick asked. “Three months?”
“No. Tiene tres semanas de edad. Tres semanas y nunca volverá a ver a su padre. ¿Donde está las justicia en eso?”
“Come again, Mrs. Visco?” Nick said.
She didn’t answer, but Ernest did, leaning against a termite-chewed column.
“She said he’s three weeks old and will never see his father again. Where’s the justice in that?”
After that soul-crusher, Marcus took interest in his boots; Nick flexed his left palm.
Then Juana tilted up on the bench. She needed to put her grief on ice to learn the practical facts while she could. For the next few minutes, Ernest translated her questions and Marcus responded: Where was John’s body (at a Pasadena mortuary); when would it be released (after an official inquest into his cause of death); how could she afford to bury him, let alone subsist? (the company would furnish a posthumous severance)? Lastly, why was she so cursed: “Because,” Marcus said, “I suppose you’re a little like Job.”
“I want you to know,” he added, “that John was a superb carpenter, the best of the bunch. Kept his nose to the grindstone. Said concrete was his future, if memory serves.”
Juana, again through Ernest, said she valued hearing that, and wanted them to know about her John: the John who’d been brought to America from Italy as a child; the John who enrolled in English classes so he could better his family’s standard of living.
“A fine man, Mrs. Visco. Eternal peace to him.”
Nobody said anything, not even smoldering Ernest.
When the stillness broke, it was Juana doing the breaking. Without warning, she pushed off the bench and threw Marcus’s damp handkerchief at his lap. She didn’t say goodbye. She hustled out the front door in her sandals, calling her dead husband’s name as she jogged down Wilde Street. “John, my John?” she cried. “You come home now. No more pretend you’re gone. World lying about you.”
Marcus and Nick went to the open door, observing her lose it in her black mourner’s dress. Every ten feet she pivoted her head, shrieking for her beloved.
“She’s berserk,” Ernest said, walking up behind them. “She teeter-totters between expecting him to breeze in and saying she’s returning to Mexico. John never should’ve taken that job. He would’ve been safer operating a hot-air balloon.”
Nick spun Ernest’s direction so aggressively that Marcus half stepped between them. But with his bandaged palms, and a career on the line, Nick wasn’t going to swing on him. He was going to defend what he still believed in.
“The Mercereau Company is no fly-by-night operation, I’ll have you know. It’s a respected company trying to do right after an atrocious mishap. Thousands have died building the Panama Canal. Are you going to condemn it, too?”
Ernest rolled his eyes. “Apples and oranges. How much is your respected company willing to spare? I want specifics, not cheap sympathy.”
“We were thinking a hundred and twenty dollars,” Marcus said in a perfectly reasonable voice.
Juana’s cooing infant interrupted the doorstep confrontation. Ernest walked over to the white cradle, stroking the child’s bald, brown skull. Its innocence seemed to pacify him; well, that or hearing about the money. His scowl was gone when he rejoined them. “A hundred and twenty?” he said. “The family would mightily appreciate that.”
Marcus stepped onto the porch, putting his derby on. “We’ll expedite it,” he said. “Please reiterate our condolences to Juana. We’re all hurting today.” He then walked back to his Roadster.
“And forgive my outburst,” Nick said from the stoop. “I’ve never done this before.”
“Fair enough,” Ernest said with a penetrating look. “Just promise me this. If there’s someone responsible for what happened, don’t let any fixers sweep it under the rug. John shouldn’t be construction fodder.”
“Will do,” Nick said. “Pasadena’s an honest town.”
“Incidentally,” Ernest said, tugging on his collar in the broiling heat. “I’ve been working at Cawston the last few months. Mr. Jenks told us rookies we could do a lot worse than emulate you, far as being industrious. He misses you.”
“And I him,” Nick said. “Best of luck to you and everyone there, feathered and otherwise. And God bless the Viscos.” He bobbed his chin in goodbye.
By then, Juana was nowhere around.
—
Nick unwrapped his bandages after Marcus dropped him off at the bungalow. Jules brought dinner later: takeout from Smilin’ Dan’s. He abstained from questioning her about her whereabouts last night, knowing she divulged things at her own clip. After dinner, Nick strummed his guitar to a folksy tune to exercise his sore fingers and lift his spirits after his time in Juana Visco’s sorrow.
Royo, as usual, teetered up on his hind legs and walked to the acoustic melody. This time, though, he introduced a wrinkle, clapping his front-paws together, diviner-like, during his steps. His audience chuckled at the circus-dog spectacle of it, assuming he was hamming it up for them. And yet neither Nick nor Jules seized on the real crux of the stunt: Royo’s paws were aimed at the bridge.
The Arroyo Secco’s Faulty Tower
Down in the Arroyo the next morning, Nick’s new mission was to reverse the past. Or rather, his previous week there, when he’d begun removing the solar lamps that Marcus now instructed him to reinstall, along with a bevy of new ones. “If we need eighty of your little metal petunias to address the shadows,” he’d said driving back from Los Angeles yesterday, “so be it.”
Who was Nick to argue with a so-be-it? He’d be toiling backbreaking hours again to get it done, but that wasn’t too steep a price to pay. It just needed to wait, at least today. When he saw Wink at seven a.m., he asked him what he could do. The area under the Big Whopper remained a vast wasteland of rubble, with sawhorses up prohibiting anyone from going beneath it without permission.
“Nothing. Just tend to your lamps,” Wink said confidently, his eye twitching less than it was on Friday. “This crew’s resilient. It’ll have the debris gone in a jiff. You’ll probably see new falsework up in weeks.”
Wink’s bravado juxtaposed with the somber aura as the morning shift straggled in like the walking wounded. Workers hugged and shook hands with pronounced heaviness. There was no macho bantering anymore, no one sword fighting with rolled-up blueprints, no gleeful donut eating. They’d lost friends, suffered close calls themselves.
Nick noticed this all, as well as something else distinct. The bridge rats were warmer to him, some even calling him by name. Jesus Colorado grasped his hand when passing by to collect his hammer. One of the fellas he’d dug with to free C. J. Johnson poured him a cup of mess-tent coffee before he poured his own. “I wish I didn’t have to grip a shovel for a year,” the man said.
“Me, too,” replied Nick.
Elsewhere in th
e bridge ecosystem, it was a walking-on-eggshells atmosphere. From Pasadena’s official corridors of powers to its Board of Trade, this marked the darkest August weekend in collective memory. Project engineers and chief inspectors, for their part, barely experienced any weekend. They’d been at the jobsite nonstop since the collapse, probing the battered arch from its flanks in order to rush out a damage assessment.
On Sunday, preachers citywide grieved the dead and injured, leading parishioners in a moment of silence. Several Los Angeles County Supervisors, representing taxpayers on the hook for about half the project’s tab, weren’t able to attend their own services. They’d spent part of the day in Pasadena for a firsthand look at the roadway everyone was depending on. They’d departed without comment, probably none too happy.
City Public Works Commissioner T. D. Allin attempted erasing some of the apprehension in an update to reporters. Don’t let the bridge’s disemboweled visage fool you, he said. There was no obvious harm to either of the arch’s two primary spans, or their spandrel columns. In fact, only one portion of Arch Number Nine’s falsework, a thirty-foot-by-sixty-foot-section, would need rebuilding. Total replacement cost: fifteen hundred dollars (less than the tab for a handful of luxury bathrooms at the Myron-Hunt-renovated Huntington Hotel).
Better yet, Allin emphasized, the setback only would tack a month or so onto the project. The other bullet dodged: the disaster hour. If the shaking occurred fifteen minutes earlier, instead of at quitting time, another dozen men on the shift would’ve been up there, meaning it could’ve been a mass-casualty event.
As a whole, Allin said, Pasadena’s gemstone structure passed its “severe test” with flying colors. He’d be “satisfied” if there was traffic over it by Thanksgiving.
How that timeline squared with a supposed Labor Day premiere, the latest in a spool of delays, was taboo that no journalist broached openly. Neither were there explanations about the maze of contradictory information, such as which concrete members were destroyed. Same for the three-hundred-ton gorilla in the room: what specifically precipitated this mishap? Allin’s working theory: the concrete dumpcart must’ve rammed into something.
