by Chip Jacobs
—
It was a week before Thanksgiving and Nick was alone on the deck, trying to preserve his “upside” spirit after this latest bewildering turn. Buoyed as he was by Thum’s promise, he now understood, maybe better than anyone without access to Pasadena’s smoke-filled backrooms, that the Colorado Street Bridge was like a virtuoso child conceived in a secretly adversarial household.
A rare quarrel with Fleet over dinner at Smilin’ Dan’s did his outlook little good, and it was Nick’s fault. Unwisely, he recounted the scene at Thum’s house, because he needed to tell somebody. Fleet’s response: that he’d rather hear Nick describe his fanciful dream about banana republic and chinos than listen to “another word about a bridge that nearly killed you. I’m sick of it as much as your willful gullibility.”
Nick set down a forkful of steaming chicken to glower at his best friend. “Tired as you are, I’d rather believe in something than scoff at everything. For the sake of our bond, let’s avoid this subject for the time being.”
“We better,” said Fleet, who’d recently taken another side job, mopping the floors at the Marengo Hospital, where he aimed one day to be a doctor. He’d severed ties with his dowager, saying the sex-for-tuition-assistance arrangement was “too unsavory to continue.”
Nick’s spat with him was a week ago, and it wasn’t dancing days being on the outs with your lifelong chum.
Leaning sideways on a pedestrian-bay bench, he had to think professionally now. He certainly was in familiar territory waiting for nightfall with his pocket telescope to certify that none of his eighty lamps flickered or were dark. Audition time was over.
The bridge was opening December 13, and she was just about primped for her coming-out party. From tie beams to transverse girders, every concrete member was inspected and ready. The dumpcart and its trestle track: gone. The sidewalk curbs: chiseled. The scrabbly balustrades, urn-shaped supports, and other embellishments now only needed sandblasting and cleaning. Old wood was being sawed up and given away.
Nick would head to Ivy Wall from here to collect Royo, and that was a whole other pickle. His animal was more distracted and less clairvoyant of late, which Nick ascribed to him missing Jules and the fact he was spending less time with him; since she left, there’d only been two Saturday afternoon excursions. But credit the butterscotch wolf. At the ostrich rodeos, he performed as energetically as ever to jostle laughs out of those little, emaciated faces—still flew just as high on his finale jump—even when Nick, in his modish, side-shield sunglasses, rode with desultory showmanship.
Near sunset, the deck’s lamps switched on, and Nick fished out his moleskin journal. Time to review his personal punch list before he conducted a lamp bulb-count.
Incorporation forms for “N. Chance Solar Industries” were mailed in. Train tickets for his mother to visit in February he purchased last week.
But he still owed Lilly Busch a second condolence after America gave Adolphus a send-off for the ages. Nearly a hundred thousand fans observed his funeral cortege, and a hundred eighty people, including Joseph Pabst, served as honorary pallbearers. Thirty-five cities, Pasadena included, hosted memorials. Hotels went dark, streetcars stopped rolling.
In his PS, he’d prod Lilly, begging her if he must, for any tidbit about Jules she had. He needed her new address to tell her it was safe to return; that police nailed Pasadena’s serial cat burglar trying to break into the house of lumber kingpin (and Roosevelt pal) Arthur Fleming; that he’d help exonerate her by alerting prosecutors how her research was a linchpin in the city’s application to be crowned America’s marquee small town.
Let her go for now. He shut his journal and inhaled the Arroyo, sniffing fireplace smoke from homes on the bank and the minty eucalyptus trees that poled up next to the bridge like grazing giraffes. After motorcars began gunning about, it’d unlikely be this tranquil here again.
Actually, it wasn’t even tranquil for thirty seconds.
Somebody mumbling was approaching from the other side, and Nick stood up. “Hey!” he called out. “You have to leave. The bridge isn’t open yet.”
But whoever dodged around the sawhorse barricades didn’t abide him. Indeed, the self-muttering grew louder. When a grape-bunch lamppost illuminated who it was—and where he was standing—Nick went rigid. The trespasser was walking one foot at a time, à la trapeze artist, on top of a balustrade, arms outstretched. The limb over the north side of the bridge clenched a Jack Daniels bottle too.
“Otis!” Nick hollered. “Get down. That’s a fourteen-story drop.”
Otis glanced at Nick and continued on. He might’ve been dumbfounded to see Nick if he weren’t sloshed.
“C’mon,” Nick said, moving toward him, palms up. “Whatever is eating you isn’t worth it.”
Otis waved his bottle at Nick, and the gesture so unbalanced him that he almost plunged into the nothingness. Only by flapping his opposite arm did he regain any equilibrium. “What’s eating me?” Otis said with a slur. “You’re a riot.” He kept going.
Coyly, Nick dipped behind him and when Otis’s right arm dipped, he snatched his wrist and yanked him off the balustrade. He came down directly on Nick, causing them to roll in a heap onto the sidewalk. The whiskey bottle that slipped from Otis’s mitt exploded in the center of the deck.
“What the hell’s wrong with you?” Nick said, getting up. “You trying to off yourself?”
Five men had already died around the bridge if you counted not Chester’s conspiracy-theory-death but a recent suicide. Last week, a Busch Gardens’ worker found a superior court judge lying by the water-spouting elephant statue. The judge, inconsolable after his wife’s death, killed himself by overdosing on laudanum, an opium tincture favored by Victorian-era writers. Nick couldn’t let Otis become number six.
He tried hoisting him up, but Otis pushed Nick’s hands away and staggered onto his feet unaided. “You might say,” he said, “I was on the fence, if there was one.”
Nick scowled. “That’s not funny.”
“Once upon a time, I believed it was that unholy ostrich stink that made my sinuses pound night and day. Now I assume it’s my destiny.”
“Is it this desperate?”
Otis ignored him and started walking east in the middle of the road, past where his spilled whiskey was now a brown, amoeba-shaped blotch that somebody would have to mop up. “You owe me a bottle,” he said.
Nick went up and blocked his path. Otis shouldered past, leaving Nick no resort but to walk next to him.
“If fair was fair,” Otis said, stinking of Kentucky mash, “I never would’ve had to work at the farm. I could’ve gone to an Ivy League school. But those slick talkers who duped my father out of selling his lots on Oak Knoll with their champagne promises bankrupted him. They put him in the ground and stranded me on my own.”
“That was, what, twenty years back, during the land speculation?” Nick said. “Wounds heal.”
“I have some fresher ones,” he said. “You should know.”
Even a few sheets to the wind, Otis had a way with words.
Eighteen months ago, after Nick was promoted at Cawston, he was also on an entrepreneurial roll. For two weeks, he toiled into the wee hours in a shed behind the feather dye house, obsessing over an idea. He wanted to try adapting the business’s solar-powered water pump into a miniature-lamp prototype. So, he gobbled articles on the subject. Overcame snags. Learned to shape mirrors. Dodged a fiery chemical blast.
And then eureka: one night at three o’clock a test lamp glowed silvery outside an ostrich pen by Cawston’s fake mini pyramids, which wasn’t too shabby for someone who bombed high school chemistry. But his prototype had an Achilles Heel: anemic staying power. The crumbled glass and earthenware that stored heat from the sun during the day activated the filament and phosphorous gel only for a crummy few hours at night. No company or city would buy something
that didn’t shine from dusk to dawn.
After another all-nighter trying to crack the problem, Nick griped about it to Otis—the pre-sullen Otis that Cawston also harbored big plans for because of his science aptitude. It took him a single afternoon of reverse engineering to diagnose the glitch. “Try thicker, black glass to boost the charge,” he said. “It’ll absorb wavelengths better than lighter elements.”
A mentally fried Nick said why not. And when he substituted opaque glass for black shards, his world lit up. The prototype blazed for eight hours! A promising bust was now a toehold to wireless energy.
Cecil Jenks, Nick’s milquetoast boss, was wholly impressed, complimenting his protégé’s tenacity, his ingenuity. Exhorted him to plug it at the next world’s fair in London, and to patent it first. This could rate up there with Marconi and Pasteur. Months removed from his father’s funeral, Nick believed he’d done his family proud.
Amid all the attaboys, though, he neglected to credit Otis for the breakthrough. Once Otis requested Nick correct the oversight to advance him up Cawston’s management chain too, Nick did mention it—at the tail end of an exhausting meeting, where he and Cecil debated marketing pink and baby-blue feathers for newborns.
Nick, appreciating he’d wronged a friend, this just as Otis’s sinus affliction reared up, eventually took Otis behind an ostrich paddock to announce he’d dish him three percent of future profits from his lamps. Otis erupted, slamming the retroactive offer as “chickenfeed reparations” by someone who “camouflaged raw ambition behind sunny enthusiasm.” Nick called him ungracious, and they were never close again.
“I betrayed you, all right,” Nick said, standing again in front of Otis and creasing his brow as Royo did when distraught. “It was petty. And I don’t have a time machine to undo it. You’re too bright to be at a sawmill. I want you to be the old Otis—the one who howled with me when Mrs. Julius Caesar stole one of those Shriner’s hats and galloped off.”
“That Otis is dead and gone. Like Mrs. Caesar.”
“Stop being fatalistic. You’re young. Go apply to Throop Institute or USC.”
“Too late.”
“Despise me as you may, I’m giving you twenty percent of profits, in perpetuity. There’s going to be money next year, too. I’m founding a company.”
“Twenty?” Otis said, eyes wider now. He wiped his unshaven face with his shirt sleeve; the man was out in fifty-degree weather with no jacket.
“Yes. And if it makes you feel any better, my jaw still aches from where your elbow said hello during our scrape. I’m trying to be civil.”
“Or your guilty conscience is killing you.”
Nick bit his lip before responding. “My guilty conscience also could’ve just let you fall. Don’t forget what you said about me being the fruit of my father’s deranged tree.”
Otis, who could’ve had it all with his film-star-worthy face and crackerjack mind, appeared to sober up some being reminded of this. “That’s the challenge, isn’t it, Nick? Not allowing life’s haymakers to rearrange one’s molecular composition to unleash the ogre.” He paused. “I’ll forgive you if you forgive me?”
Nick didn’t hesitate. “Done!”
“You know what’d boost your offer from good to great?”
“Don’t mention Jack Daniels. Or anything about feathers.”
“I wasn’t. How about if I take ten percent but become your first employee? I know my way around wavelengths, and you have a grasp on the sun. What do you say?”
“I say we should explore the idea further on January second. Hopefully, I’ll have recovered from my own hangover by then. Swing by my bungalow”
They shook hands, and Otis walked away not staggering as much.
The Downside of Pageantry
On the Saturday that Pasadenans fretted might never arrive, Nick was alarmed. Something was demonstrably wrong with the wonder mutt.
For two days, Royo barely touched his food, be it dog chow, saltines smeared with Crisco or, as a last resort, cornflakes with beef-jerky topping. And it wasn’t only a weak appetite that was so concerning. His jet-black muzzle was graying, almost overnight. The expressive tail that poked straight out when he was engaged, or wagged propeller-esque when joyous hung limp—or curled between his legs.
By eight in the morning, his mutt was circling the bungalow, whining and panting more than he did August 1. Nick bent down to touch foreheads, trying impatiently to arouse his clairvoyance. “You can’t be sick,” he thought. “Understand? I have too much to do.”
The animal didn’t nod, couldn’t nod, despite hearing every syllable of Nick’s brainwave. Between his furry ears was a premonition—a premonition that if Nick failed to wake up, they’d finish this day with dirt on their backs. And there wasn’t anything the bravest of rascals could do to forestall it.
Nick snatched his guitar and strummed some angry chords. No circus-dog walking, just room circling and sniveling, lamenting what might be.
“What am I supposed to do with you?” Nick said. “Pour you Budweiser so you pass out until I return home?
He put Royo’s distress on his back burner and got dressed. He was bobby-pinning a yellow carnation to his lapel, which identified him as an event guide, as another hassle cropped up. Someone rapped on his front door. Nick stabbed his finger in surprise.
The knock was too restrained to be Marcus. And it couldn’t be Fleet, who Nick knew was gone all day at USC medical school. Thankfully, they’d reconciled since their quarrel, and were planning to spend Christmas together. On New Year’s Day afternoon, after the Tournament, they’d even attend the fun-filled “Karnival of Komikal Knights,” a lampooning, counter parade of clowns and fringe acts with an acronym somebody really should’ve thought through.
As he sucked blood from his fingertip, Nick peeked out the side window. No! “Whoever it is, give me a minute,” he yelled to his waiting landlord, the starchy B. F. Noble. “I need to locate my trousers.”
Doing his best burlesque dancer routine, Nick ripped off his clothes and launched into artifice. He seized Royo by the mane and bowled him under his bed. He took dirty laundry from his hamper next, stuffing them in front of him. Then he scooped up Royo’s water and food bowls and concealed them behind potato chips in the pantry.
“Mr. Noble, what a pleasant surprise,” Nick said at the door, out of breath and in his boxers. “What can I do for you?”
“Nothing,” Noble said with a grunt, blowing past Nick. Even in the weakest of morning light the bungalow exhibited a startling complement of canine criminality: divots, nail scratches, gnarled furniture legs, to say nothing of the tufts of tan fur that’d gathered in the corners like incriminating tumbleweeds.
“Shelve the malarkey,” said BF, a mirthless sixty-three-year-old with an aquiline nose and a gait suggestive of someone grinding a carrot between his butt cheeks. “You’re boarding a dog in here in direct violation of our lease. Don’t bother dissembling. The evidence is marring my property. I’ve also heard barks emanate.”
“Mr. Noble,” Nick said with contrived indignation. “I resent your insinuation. And I must go. We’re christening the Colorado Street Bridge at two, and I’m going to be busier than a one-armed paper hanger.”
“By all means leave, then,” BF said. “I’ll show myself out.”
“Suit yourself,” Nick said, faking calm and re-dressing in a cold sweat.
While he did, BF became a man possessed, scouring for the destructive critter he knew his tenant was hiding. He whipped open the closet door and checked the water closet. He peeked under Nick’s desk, where Royo’s leash lay out in the open. Then he lowered onto his knees in front of Nick’s bed. Every garment that his tenant packed under there BF rototilled out.
His stretched his arms underneath the bedframe until they felt a warm body. “I gotcha, you stowaway,” BF said. “Present yourself!”
&nbs
p; Royo belly-crawled out, bleating Roooooh in shame.
BF stood up, clapping fur from his hands. “Mr. Chance, you’re one insolent individual. Your vandal has chewed and scratched the renovated cottage I rented you at an affordable rate, partly on account of your family name. I cannot overlook such a willful offense.”
“Consider me admonished,” Nick said, buttoning his shirt. “I’ll reimburse the damages.”
“No, consider yourself evicted! You two rule-breakers are to be gone in ten days. I’ll bill you for the repairs.”
“But can’t we forge a compromise?” Nick asked, trying to wriggle his way out of another mess. “I’ll pay extra rent. Fashion you a free solar lamp.”
“I don’t care if Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders storm in to your defense,” BF said, arms crossed.
Teddy. It’s always Teddy. “Where am I, or we, supposed to live? You can hardly find a room. Pasadena’s thriving again.”
The landlord marched toward the door, butt protruding behind. “That isn’t my problem. Buy a tent. There’ll be a slew of new homes in the western Arroyo soon. I may invest there myself.”
“Come again?”
“The San Rafael Heights and Linda Vista: the city is planning to annex them early next year. And it couldn’t have happened without the bridge; I heard they’re contemplating running water lines beneath it.”
Nick went over to him, shaking his cowlick-haired head. “You’re mistaken. I’ve been on those hills. It’s Los Angeles scheming to acquire them. The bridge is just a road, not a real estate deal.”
BF’s expression shifted from aggravated to smug. “Before you started with the Mercereau Company, you were at Cawston, correct?”
“As everybody reminds me, yes.”
“Well, if you deluded yourself that the bridge wouldn’t redraw Pasadena’s map, you dug your head into the sand like those repellent birds.”
Nick dabbed perspiration from his neck. “That’s an old wives’ tale. Ostriches have small heads. They’d suffocate if they burrowed them.”
