by Chip Jacobs
He sprang up when he saw it was Waldo, knocking the clipboard out of his hand. “You better store an extra pair of pants here when I jump out at you because you’re going to wet yourself in fright.”
“I’ll give that some consideration,” Waldo said with a snicker. “I popped over to tell you that I’m unable to make it today. I’ve got a roof-full of drying feathers to oversee.”
“Product in, product out,” said a recovered Nick. “I suppose I’m going solo.”
—
Nick and Mrs. Grover Cleveland, together again, had their heads lost in different galaxies. Nick’s was tilted forty-five degrees, watching a man in overalls impersonate a lunch-pail Tarzan. Up seven stories, the carpenter was swinging by a waist-cinched rope to zip around and hammer nails into forms for the bridge’s next soaring arch, as if there was nothing to it.
Mrs. Cleveland, flame-red lips curled in a pout, had her attention pointed downward. She was nibbling baby lizards and tasty pebbles after earlier gamboling around Cawston’s yard on this bone-dry October day. As Nick must’ve lectured a thousand tourists, it was a wive’s tale ostriches stuck their heads in the sand when frightened. They did it to forage.
The sun’s position alerted Nick they should head back. “Whatever you’re chewing will be here next week,” he told Mrs. C, spinning her away from the structure increasingly looming over the canyon’s boulders and trees. He pushed her into a trot.
Unlike their previous excursion, it wasn’t a competitive Model T or Reginald’s exuberance injecting distraction this time. It was something weightier yet also lighter: the giggling of ten white-shirted kids sitting cross-legged in a horseshoe pattern on one of Busch Garden’s manicured hummocks—kids amazed to watch Nick bop by on his ostrich before the trail back to Cawston dipped into the woodlands. Hearing the group laughter behind him, Nick halted Mrs. C, wheeling around to pinpoint the source.
The youngsters hailed from local hospitals, sanitariums, and Mrs. Bang’s boardinghouse, each with a spirit-pummeling diagnosis that shackled them mostly inside. Tumors, missing appendages, swampy lungs, hemophilia, encephalitis, bone decay, leukemia: that was their childhood. One little girl required an attendant just to stay upright.
The thickset nurse in charge wished the rider either gave them a cheery wave or never materialized at all, for it seemed cruel to tease those sweet, shrunken faces with such a bewitching sight when all they knew were unfair surprises. Like dying before adulthood. “Don’t be sad, sweeties,” the nurse told them. “How about we sing a song? Those not well enough, clap.”
Clap? That’s all they have? Nick, hoisting himself up off Mrs. C’s back by grabbing a tree branch, got a notion. A moment later, he burst out of the tree line seated backward on his ostrich, waving his beanie carnival-barker style. Paw-rump. “Greetings, ladies and gentlemen,” he called out. “Ready for your entertainment?” Back he came for another pass, this time reclined sideways on his mount like she were a mobile chaise lounge.
In his last run, Nick attempted an untried stunt, shifting his butt from the bird’s withers to over its left wing. Mistake. Fabulous as slapstick, it left Mrs. C unbalanced and touchy. In reaction, she cut a sharp right off the path in front of their audience, bee-lining for protective shade. Her twitchy motion caused Nick to lose his grip and eat it, tumbling and rolling to a standstill on Busch Gardens’ gravel. Awk-awwwwwwwww, Mrs. C screeched when a hobbling Nick retrieved her.
The audience was in hysterics as Nick bowed. Some of the kids even tried imitating his clumsy fall. They mistook his crash for a theatrical finale, and why spoil that? “Ahem, my good lady, where are your manners?” Nick said, hambone. “You’ve neglected to curtsy for our crowd?” Now pecking at an acorn, she disregarded him. The rolling chortles continued as Nick cast his eyes upward in faux pique.
And, when he did, he noticed a distressing presence: a billowing mushroom cloud of smoke from an apparent brushfire north of where they were. Layered in gray and black, the plume coiled up a thousand feet. Nick sniffed the air, smelling a woodsy char hinting that hundreds of trees were aflame. He bowed again, spun Mrs. C around, and remounted. He had no plan, only a compulsion to know if what he was eyeballing might rampage east into Pasadena as a city killer.
“Everybody up, nice and calm,” the nurse told her charges once she, too, understood a potential disaster was at hand. “We can sing inside Mrs. Bang’s.”
—
He knotted a green bandana around his mouth and dug his boots into the crumbly hill on his town’s side of the upper Arroyo. From his belt loop, Nick unhitched the retractable mariner’s telescope he’d purchased at Vroman’s Bookstore to zoom in on bridge construction. Squinting, he peeked through the brass eyepiece, hoping for optical clarity but only feeling exasperation. An impenetrable wall of smoke and buzzing embers that looked like a million drunken bees was all he could discern. He spent oodles of time as a child around here, so at least he had a mental map to access.
On the canyon floor below, he knew, were the flatlands and farmland of unincorporated Linda Vista, where the Sierra Madre mountain range tapered away into the Crescenta Valley. Here, the present-day—ice delivery, telephones lines, legal services, electricity—was subservient to the agrarian past of citrus belts and sleepy, red-tile ranchos there; farmers, working their plots in a checkerboard layout, harvested and exported lemons, blood oranges, tomatoes, grapefruit, tangerines, mandarin apricots, and twenty other cash crops. Question was: would these flames render them all scorched history?
To truly know meant edging closer; meant being a risk-taker isolated with an agitated ostrich. The hot Santa Ana winds swirling were already making Mrs. C stomp her hooves, and Nick could empathize. The gusts, as always, carried an ominous energy of Old Testament consequences. When they jostled the oak branches around him with that shushing sound, the hair on his forearms bristled.
This is too important to miss. After a pat and a treat to reassure Mrs. C, he remounted her and rode down the trail toward the ashy canyon. A mile or so away was Devil’s Gate Dam Park, where local ghost stories flourished, and a man was recently blown into a tree testing an experimental motorcar. No one else was around.
They stopped at the trestle bridge that Myron Hunt, Pasadena’s architectural prodigy, designed to deliver passage from one part of the valley to the other. Few traversed it much anymore; in a couple years, no doubt, it’d be scrap wood from the bygone horse-and-buggy era. Crossing the Arroyo by foot or hoof anymore was going the way of the porkpie hat.
But the bridge’s end post would come in handy tying off Nick’s jittery bird. “No wandering away,” he said, tossing her an orange. “I’ll be back before you digest that.”
He jogged along a dirt road that took him to the nape of the fire-gnarled hills. Along the way, he coughed and tamped his watery eyes with his bandana. It wasn’t until a prolonged Santa Ana gust blew away a lower veil of smoke that the moonscape destruction revealed itself. Up on the summit, orange tongues of flame spiked thirty feet into the sunless murk.
This was bad. Uncontained, the brushfire could plow west into La Crescenta, the backside of sleepy Glendale, or worse: it could leapfrog east, taking out Pasadena’s exclusive Prospect Park neighborhood. Nick reminded himself not to stand there, ogling destruction; not to stand there listening to chaparral sizzle. But that’s what he was doing when a mighty oak snapped mid-trunk and log-sledded downward toward a trailhead. He assumed it’d slide to a stop a safe distance from him. He was wrong. It slammed into a boulder twenty yards away.
When nothing more barreled down, he sidestepped up the blackened slope to investigate the damage. Above him, small battalions of separately organized men, perhaps a hundred total, swung picks, shovels, and hoes trenching firebreaks. Some wore Pasadena Fire Department uniforms; others were civilian volunteers. The rest were Mexican laborers troweling away at unburned vegetation, barely acknowledged. Even so, he could se
e the motley firefighters were making good progress. He was preparing to turn back just as an angry voice hollered upslope: “You little cretins should be ashamed of yourselves. Go!”
On the other end of Nick’s telescope was a bearded fire captain gesturing at a cluster of laughing, prepubescent boys skipping away. The captain shook his fist at them, and then climbed back toward his men. Nick adjusted his lens, trying to fathom what the boys did, and then came upon one of the ghastliest visions ever.
The heap of dead and dying jackrabbits and rattlesnakes was about two feet high and three wide. The forest animals must’ve been loping and slithering away in panic as the wildfires torched their homes when the hooligans ambushed them with clubs and sticks for their sadistic gratification.
“Their mothers should make them sleep next to live snake holes for that,” said a woman who Nick didn’t see come over, riveted as he was by the scaly, furry death mound.
He lowered the eyepiece to view a skinny woman about his age—a curious gal with a masculine jaw, warm eyes, and wavy, light-brown hair.
“You part of the crew?” she asked with a spunky voice.
Nick tugged down his bandana. “Nope. Just came to size up how far this thing was spreading.”
“A voyeur? I wish someone was watching my property when it kicked up.”
“And why’s that?” Nick said, hacking twice.
She pointed toward acreage still domed in grayish-charcoal smoke. “The fire flattened one of our greenhouses this morning before any help arrived. We lost half our picked crops.”
“My sympathies. Here’s hoping you can rebuild. I’m Nick, by the way. Nick Chance.”
“Pleased to meet cha. Name’s Hattie Bergstron.” They shook hands, Hattie with a wiry grip. “I have to rebuild. A girl has gotta earn her keep.”
When Hattie doubled over to cough herself, Nick peered again through his telescope at the animal corpses. He regretted it, for he saw a baby jackrabbit trying to wiggle loose before a diamondback on its last gasp bit him. Nick collapsed his scope after that.
“Did you say Bergstron? Wasn’t there an article about you recently?”
“Yeah, if you call that yellow journalism an article. Just because we run a vegetarian colony here that nobody bothers to understand, those reporters labeled us a coven. Accused us of lesbianism, witchcraft. We’re none of those things. We’re pioneers.”
“I’m not judging you,” Nick said, thick-tongued. “I thought your name sounded familiar.”
“We live simply, grow food to sell. We still have our fun, though.” She winked.
Up behind Hattie walked a tall, waifish woman whom Hattie introduced as her friend Maude. A bandage covered part of a pink burn mark on her hand.
“Hopefully, they’ll have this doused by nightfall,” Nick said to reorient the subject. “Anybody else lose any property?”
“They sure did,” Hattie said. “Some of the richest people anywhere.”
Nick was stumped. The only wealthy, hillside property owners he knew lived on Pasadena’s eastern banks near the bridge, not these tree-packed lands.
“You ever hear of Henry Huntington?”
“The railroad baron? Who hasn’t?”
“He owns something in the order of three thousand acres. Another fat cat just bought in, too. He’s planning to build a mansion, then a public park to outdo Busch Gardens.”
“Only a fool would attempt that. No replicating Eden.”
“Call me a socialist, but I’m leery of millionaires buying up local nature to feed their vanity. What about the rest of us?”
Nick saw Hattie’s animated face starting to pinch. “Say, what do you grow? Specifically?”
“Nuts, heirloom tomatoes, radishes—anything without a mother. We don’t bother with citrus. There’s too much competition, and too little water with so much pumping going on. Can I interest you in any singed walnuts?”
“Tell you what. We meet again I’ll give you my business. I better skedaddle now, though. I got a vexed ostrich waiting for me. Best wishes rebuilding.”
“An ostrich?” Hattie said with a tired smile. “I hear they’re peculiar.”
“They are.”
Twelve minutes later in that smoky air whooshing around the valley, Nick found Mrs. C bucking against her rope, and with good cause. Not far away, Myron Hunt’s Linda Vista Bridge was smoldering. They took the long way home to Cawston.
—
Fleet Burdett was the most entertaining jokester Nick could’ve ever befriended. Having attended grade school, Pasadena High School, and USC together, where they studied and caroused in equal measure, they were closer than Nick was with RG and Waldo, however fond he was of those work goofballs.
Fleet, with his pale eyes, maize-colored hair, and self-proclaimed “Viking blood,” was an original: a science nerd with a cutup personality. Now a second-year student at the USC College of Medicine, he also was loyal as a Bassett Hound, a friend for all occasions. He was there through Nick’s darkest nights and brightest successes. Just think twice before inviting him to a public funeral.
Pasadenans had flocked to a high-beamed Unitarian church on Marengo Avenue to honor the laudatory life of builder John Drake Mercereau. He had died, just shy of his fiftieth birthday, with another man in a horrific motorcar accident two weeks earlier, when his vehicle somersaulted two hundred feet off a ridge near a dam his company was erecting north of Los Angeles.
Nick, though never meeting the man, was here paying his respects, for it was Mercereau’s firm assembling the bridge he considered his hometown’s legacy achievement. He cajoled Fleet to attend the Saturday service with him in the misguided assumption he’d button his politically cynical lips in the high-ceilinged house of the Lord.
“He’s in the hereafter now,” Fleet said in a loud whisper near the memorial’s end. “You think Mercereau cares two cents that people know wires were pulled to land him the job?”
Nick elbowed him. “Next time you’re at school, find out if there’s elixir for diarrhea of the mouth. You can’t indict someone with no proof—at their own wake.”
Fleet clucked his tongue. “Why do you take everything about the city so personally? I’m only asserting that the lapdog press should’ve mentioned the coincidence involving the dearly departed. Nick, the man submitted the winning low bid when someone with nearly his exact name, from the same home state, was a Pasadena commissioner (councilman) until a few years ago. Harrumph.”
Up at the pulpit, a speaker described Mercereau as a “man of the highest integrity.” Back in the pews, Nick would see his contrarian pal loading more ammunition.
“Indict him for sinking the Titanic and Pasadena’s fly invasion, while you’re at it,” Nick said, muffling a smirk. “There’s not a shred of evidence those two Mercereaus were related, let alone in cahoots. They spelled their names differently, so they weren’t siblings, either.”
“Well, I have a lab mate with loose lips, and his uncle is in the One Hundred Percenters club—you know, the bankers, the moneymen that work the levers, along with those gents at the Board of Trade. Let’s just say they’re certain rooting interests at city hall.”
“Shhhhh,” said a shiny, bald elder in the pew in front of them. “Be respectful or leave. A man died.”
“Rumors aren’t facts,” Nick murmured a respectful pause later. “Let’s examine your scruples. Aren’t you bedding a dowager to assist with your tuition?”
“Yes,” Fleet murmured back. “We have an arrangement. But that’s hardly germane to a bridge some have duped themselves into believing was born from Immaculate Conception. You know what Mark Twain, your favorite writer, would say?”
“That I should sucker punch you and toss you in the Mississippi?”
“That politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason.”
This time, the elde
r contorted around to give the two his stink eye.
J. D. Mercereau, as his eulogizers attested, was a man geared to self-reinvention. After migrating here from New York to invest in real estate, he promptly lost his savings in the 1886 land depression/scandal that nearly destroyed Pasadena, then only a dozen years old. To scrape by, he and his family tried reselling orange-tree seeds. When that failed, he grabbed a pencil, sketching engineering designs on wrapping paper.
That was the ticket. Small-bridge contracts flowered into work erecting piers at local beaches, then a breakwater, and then county assignments. The roadway over the Arroyo would’ve been Mercereau’s crowning accomplishment.
The minister requested everyone stand to sing “Nearer My God to Thee.” The way the sun poured through the stained glass made you think he was close, too. Nick and Fleet rose with the hundreds there, Fleet whispering, “Death is proving to be JD’s champion public relations man, no?”
Nick failed to hear it. He was in the sudden orbit of a higher force.
Drinking her in from across the aisle, his head swapped some oxygen for helium. It was her eyes—luminous, hazel eyes that that weren’t just dazzling but knowing. It was her wheat-colored hair and strong chin, the pixie eyeteeth, the ruby-shaped face. And it wasn’t only her beauty that captivated him. It was a self-possessed aura that declared her a planet unto herself.
The vision in the belted, black taffeta dress wasn’t from here; Nick, the get-around bachelor, knew that much. Nor, either, was she oblivious to his attraction. During the hymn’s verse about the “sun, moon, and stars,” the woman lowered her hymnal to locate the origin of the heat field directed on her. She found it in Nick’s open-piehole expression, and then redirected her steely gaze forward.
Bowled over by her, he couldn’t wait to clump down in the pew to start breathing normally again. So much for the composure of a guy able to chat up Rose princesses and other head-turners that made his buddies stammer monosyllabic come-ons. Once he was composed enough to point her out, irreverent Fleet didn’t miss a beat.