by Chip Jacobs
“The thrust of the story was about the sun, so I showed him how we were parlaying it,” he said quietly.
“Do you think it’s wise back-talking me before I inform the CEO that twenty percent of our best inventory disappeared because of a self-inflicted error?”
Nick’s chin fell. “No, sir.”
Next up for Cecil was the demise of the farm’s photogenic ostrich, who presided at Cawston longer than her Roman namesake had sat on her throne. “This gaffe,” he said. “I’m not attributing to you. That lamebrain was bound to die of her own piggishness. If there’s any employee to single out it’s Otis. He oversaw the reinforcements we made to the paddock, and the cleanup. Anything to add on that front?”
“I’d prefer not to comment on him. I’m just grief-stricken about Mrs. Caesar.”
Cecil’s tone softened. “You’re still young. You’ll appreciate death is generally ridiculous. Nonetheless, I want your guarantee there’ll be no further embarrassments. And that you’ll board up that skylight.”
“You have my word,” said Nick, relieved Cecil didn’t say boo about the wireless solar lamps and solar projector he obsessed over in his off hours. Or that no one connected him to those nuisance parrots, which squealed and squawked like a contentious couple almost every dawn. “Anything else?”
Yes, Cecil said, there was. He was docking Nick’s salary twenty dollars and placing him on probation to highlight the importance of discipline. He slipped the “Sunrays in Feather Town” article in a desk drawer before adding a final thought. “If you desire a future here, stay in the present.”
Walking out a little numb, Nick summoned Royo for the trip home to Green Street. While he was getting chewed out, Royo sat in front of the administration building’s flowerbed, smacking his lips and tasting the different flowers the way Nick did some food.
—
He eyeballed his alarm clock sideways when it shook at five fifteen in the morning. He allowed himself a single yawn.
It was three Mondays since Cecil’s rebuke, and Nick had no intention of adding another. With spry movements, he blazed through a morning routine that commenced with a cleansing whiz and shave and concluded with Royo demolishing his breakfast; the dog had packed on the pounds since moving in. Nick, again, planned to be the first manager into work and the last out. No Buford’s Specials for him.
They were in Busch Gardens, which they used as a shortcut to Cawston, by six. Down here, Victorian Age serenity—fountains tinkling under grand willows, gardeners troweling colorful plants—made no concession to building cranes and steely pistons in the cities. Still, Nick regretted not stopping for coffee. At this rate, they’d arrive at the farm an hour before the gates unlocked.
Why Royo, who always clung to his heels, suddenly flew off toward a thicket of sycamores Nick had no clue. A dog capable of strutting on his hind legs, approximating human expressions, and finding lost items shouldn’t be capricious. When Nick caught up to him, he was doing something else odd. He was pawing at the door of the replica Gingerbread Hut, outside of which a sweet, ceramic grandmother stood holding a tray of fake cookies.
Nick wrenched him away by the collar before his nails scratched Adolphus Busch’s property. Royo, with that Boxer-breed sinew, though, waggled free and resumed clawing. “For a bright animal, you’re acting the moron,” Nick said with a chuckle. “The whole thing’s make-believe. There’s no lamb bone inside with your name on it.”
He turned sideways against the doorframe to re-grip the collar, which he bought at a dry goods store. In doing so, Royo’s antics became Nick’s hassle. A belt loop on the back of his trousers snagged over the hut’s antique-replica door handle. Now, he’d effectively trapped himself against the doorframe with little room to maneuver. No matter how he tried to untangle himself while restraining Royo, he couldn’t jimmy himself loose. Minutes passed.
Think, Nick. He did by letting go of his dog’s collar, unbuttoning his doorknob-ensnared pants, and then stepping out of them into his skivvies to shiver in the crisp air. After he unhooked his trousers and redressed, he flicked one of Royo’s ears in irritation.
Once they were back on the southbound trail to Cawston he checked his pocket watch, sure they had gobs of time. Sonofabitch. He was forty-minutes late, and two miles away. Two possibilities: his alarm clock malfunctioned, or he forgot how to read the hour. Only Royo knew the third option.
Nick tried acting nonchalant reaching the yard in a light sweat after jogging half the distance. “Morning, Waldo,” he said, rotating his head side to side, searching for a certain boss.
“Relax. Cecil is en route to a meeting downtown. You oversleep?”
“A fairy-tale hut accosted me. Don’t ask.”
“Not even if you’re on the upside?”
“Not even.”
Nick walked his usual rounds by midafternoon, finding everything running smoothly; his tardiness was a hiccup just Waldo noticed. Cawston’s assistant manager now leaned against the gift shop counter, tallying the day’s haul. Shoppers enticed by ads and discounts that Nick suggested were bumping into one another for the hot sellers. So brisk was the spending that clerks twice emptied the cash registers’ jingling drawers to make room for fresh cash. That heinous cat burglar would soon be a memory.
Nick snapped rubber bands around greenbacks and entered numbers in the ledger. Lucrative day so far: $480, the highest non-holiday total ever. He took a breath and glanced out the window. There was Royo, capering with a baby ostrich in a pen while tourists howled in laughter.
Yet two hours from quitting time was two hours too long. Otis was here, pushing aside the curtain separating the gift shop from the stockroom. He used to supervise this store, a plum job reserved for management up-and-comers. That was before Otis curdled into a dark version of himself. It wasn’t only his beef with Nick, over one of Nick’s inventions, that warped him. It was the chronic sinus pain torturing him.
Nick hoped that he would spin around and leave. He didn’t; Otis sidled up next to him to chew the fat. “I don’t know what it is about these cockamamie animals, but people can’t seem to stay away,” he said, all civil-like.
“Seems so,” said Nick, who’d resumed counting bills to discourage conversation.
“Of course, that won’t bring Mrs. Caesar back. Everyone’s putting that on me.”
“C’mon. That’s not true.”
“Yes, it is. And speaking of the truth, I should jump on the loudspeaker right now to recount this farm’s history. Customers should know Edwin Cawston, our revered founder, stole the very ostriches he used to create this venture from South Africa. In the dead of night, in cages: that’s a fact they don’t tout in the brochures.”
“You well know there’s more to the story,” said Nick, eyes downward. “Incidentally, aren’t you supposed to be drawing up the next paddock improvements?”
“So serious. I’m only talking shop with a valued colleague.”
“Please, Otis.”
“Don’t get your knickers in a knot. Tell you what: I’ll disappear if you lay out what happened to your father; may he rest in peace. Cecil always reminds us we’re family.”
Nick slapped down a roll of quarters on the counter. Otis continued on.
“Was it true what the scuttlebutt said? That the train that struck him launched him thirty yards? All the way into the fields?”
Nick flexed his recovered wrist and exhaled. Don’t take the bait.
“That must’ve been messy. Closed casket funeral, I’m assuming.”
Nick, without looking up, said in a still-poised voice, “You’re not going to provoke me with despicable insults. We all have a vested stake in how much these people buy.”
Otis scooted closer so both of them stood shoulder to shoulder with their backs to the customers. “I can’t describe how elated I was watching you knocked down a peg for the burglary.”
“And I can’t tell you how perplexing it is that someone who rode lunchtimes with us, who inspired me when I wanted to fling my tools, is behaving like this.”
Otis leaned in. “You know the source of my displeasure with you. And I know your father was a suicidal wreck. Let’s hope you’re not the fruit of his deranged tree.”
Nick didn’t flinch or threaten. He calmly shut the ledger and tucked his fountain pen into his shirt pocket. He then bobbed his head—and socked Otis under his left eye with his right elbow. Nobody else saw the lightning blow. So much for not being baited.
Otis patted where Nick clobbered him and grinned. Coolly himself, he pushed Nick’s shoulder and connected with a sharp right hook to his jaw. The punch sent Nick backward into an unsuspecting cashier, a chatty, gap-toothed woman who nearly tripped into a spinning cabinet of miniature glass ostriches.
“Holy smoke,” Otis said with yippee. “That felt good.”
The feather-shop donnybrook was on. Skills-wise, pugilist Jack “the Galveston Giant” had nothing to fear.
The combatants shifted from behind the cramped counter space into the browsing area. Nick, who hadn’t been in a fight since seventh grade, popped Otis in the nose, driving him into the “Affordable Boas.” Customers backpedaled against the wall, some appalled, some rapt. There were gasps, a solitary: “What are you ignoramuses doing?” Mothers snatched their roaming kids. Registers ceased ringing.
The squeamish might’ve fled but the two careened into a wire rack holding souvenir postcards near the door. This toppled the rack, spraying images of ostriches in men’s hats or with celebrities across the floor. The basket of small, individually sold feathers that rested on top of the display went sailing, too, filling the gift shop airspace with floating plumes you’d either imagine from a stardust dream—or a barnyard atrocity.
They twirled next into a shelf containing a row of Cawston pens and ink refills. Several of the vials exploded when they struck the floor. One splattered the trousers of an erudite-looking man with matted brown hair, leaving his trouser cuffs an archipelago of streaky black. Round three was less compelling, if still a must-see. Otis grabbed Nick by his tattered collar, Nick grabbed him back, and the two whirled into another tchotchke rack of ostrich key chains and pillboxes. Tuckering out, they threw feeble punches the other easily dodged. Every time they stepped, they crunched merchandise that an hour earlier was carefully arrayed.
The three-minute bout ended when two haggard ostrich wranglers separated them. Few customers bought much afterward.
—
Cawston’s Going-Places junior executive was going places all right, south mostly. Nick knew it listening to Cecil enunciate terms like “inexcusable actions” and “appalling judgment.” Nick, with his split lip and scraped chin, slumped in that familiar chair.
For Cecil, it wasn’t the skylight-break-in or the demise of Mrs. Julius Caesar that induced him to chug pink bicarbonate before informing Nick of the obvious. It was the fact that Nick lost his temper on the same day that Pasadena Mayor William Thum had traveled to Cawston to discuss a company storefront at a prime locale on Colorado Street.
“Congratulations, Nick,” said Cecil, itching under his collar with no restraint. “You couldn’t have picked a more opportune juncture to sabotage that opportunity if you tried.”
Thum, Cecil said, requested the meeting be pushed up two weeks, something Nick would’ve known if he were “present at the morning briefing today instead of being God knows where.” Wasn’t he aware of how “supremely busy” the mayor was overseeing the bridge and a half dozen other municipal projects? Thum was a businessman himself, co-inventor of the popular Tangleet-brand flypaper, making him “the one dealmaker with whom the farm needed to curry favor.”
Nick tried blaming his faulty watch, his stretch of bad fortune. He played the honor card, saying any decent son would’ve slugged someone spewing the type of “reprehensible slander” that Otis did.
“Stop,” Cecil finally said. “It’s too late.”
“With due respect, it shouldn’t be,” Nick said in a snippy tone while sitting up. “The sum total of my contributions, from improving the solar pump to streamlining how we bring feathers to market, should allot me reconsideration. Whenever you put me in charge of a task, I’ve delivered. Doesn’t that buy me something?”
Cecil angled forward in his chair, pushing the bicarbonate bottle to the side. He wasn’t itching anymore. “What it buys you is severance and an open invitation to ride Mrs. Cleveland when she’s not in service. You’re obviously free to take your solar ideas unencumbered.”
“Tell that to the bill collectors,” Nick muttered, rubbing an inflamed knuckle. “Forgive me if I’m being curt.”
“During your fisticuffs with Otis, whom I’ve already fired, did you happen to notice a gentleman wearing wire-rimmed spectacles and a tartan vest?”
“Not really. I was occupied.”
“You should have. That was William Thum, Nick. The mayor. Unlike you, he arrived early for our discussion, and was browsing in the gift shop when you and Otis resorted to playground tempest. It was his pants that you spoiled with our best ink. We begged him to let us pay for his dry cleaning, but he was too magnanimous. Quite the spectacle you gave him.”
The room went silent as Cecil pretended to flyspeck a sales report and Nick hung his head. After a minute, Cecil got up, walked around behind Nick, and placed his hand on a shoulder that Otis nearly dislocated. “Glance out there,” Cecil said, pointing toward a line of ostriches being sheared. “This isn’t the tightknit venture you joined out of USC. It’s cutthroat. The bankers that control us would slaughter our entire stock and sleep soundly that night for the right offer. We’re on borrowed time.”
Nick squinted through the glass, seeing baskets packed with brown, black, and white feathers that’d be sold across America. “Is that supposed to make me feel chipper on my last day at a place to which I’ve given my all?”
“No,” Ceil said solemnly. “It’s supposed to jog your memory of what I told you when I promoted you. You’re bound for something bigger than peddling quills for snobby hats.”
The First Lady of Budweiser
The jobless one sprinted off the line of scrimmage, head-faked Fleet, and ran clear, momentarily forgetting about his whirlwind destruction of Cawston’s souvenir shop. Into his outstretched hands Waldo dropped a teardrop pass on a blanket of emerald turf. Another long completion, another laughably easy touchdown: Nick’s “team” was now ahead twenty-eight to fourteen in a game fueled by Budweiser.
He was still trotting ahead in celebration when he twisted around to trash talk Fleet. “You call that defense?” he yelled back. “That was simpler than stealing licorice from Helen Keller.”
Fleet might’ve gotten beat, but Lady Karma wouldn’t. Nick never saw the ceramic dwarf in his path. Not on this moonlit night in Busch Gardens. His waist smashed into the gnome, somewhere near its rakish, alpine hat, and Nick somersaulted over him onto the grass. A body that’d taken its lumps on Fair Oaks Avenue, on Mrs. Grover Cleveland, and in his scrape with Otis added a borderline hip pointer to its chart.
“I’ll gladly yield another score if you duplicate that,” Fleet shouted. Like the others, he was shoeless, with cuffs rolled up, and shit-faced. “How’s your pelvic bone?”
Nick picked himself up and hobbled back. “Better than your coordination.” He vowed to return tomorrow to repair the decapitated gnome with bonding glue, if he remembered.
He then lofted the leather football to his quarterback. Waldo, who had a rifle arm, was a crummy receiver, especially in the dappled light. He tipped Nick’s throw so the ball bounced straight up and came down, naturally, on RG’s head. Everyone snorted, except for Royo, who fetched the ball in his chops. Gregory “Gilly” Brook tried grabbing it from him, but the animal juked him, daring him to try again. Sandlot football wasn’t no
rmally this hysterical.
Gilly, at thirty-seven, was older than the other four. As a veteran Busch Gardens’ landscaper, he was entrusted with caring for the expensive geraniums and yellow roses. He was a bony, everyman sort with receding brown hair and a missing right pinkie from a childhood accident at his father’s Nevada sawmill.
Nick met Gilly when his Elks Club toured Cawston. There, the two discovered a common passion: after-work suds and fun. While Gilly’s club-mates in fez hats made fools of themselves around the ostrich pens, Gilly confided to Nick about how he jerry-rigged an inexhaustible supply of beer—and, no less, in a city patrolled by a temperance movement that’d love nothing more than for the Anheuser-Busch Company to go belly up.
Few employees, Gilly said, knew about Adolphus’s private stash; how the tycoon stored Budweiser reserves for parties in barrels kept in a refrigerated shed between his Ivy Wall mansion and the canyon bluff. Learning the vats were replenished with little scrutiny, Gilly devised a plan. One night, he tapped a vat by connecting it to a soldered drainage pipe. After he flushed out his so-called “beer pipe” with bleach and water, he camouflaged it in ice plant downslope into the gardens and installed a valve. Gravity was the barkeep. Turn the nozzle to imbibe workingman champagne. Smartly, Gilly appropriated only small amounts.
Meeting for the first time tonight, Nick’s old friends became Gilly’s new ones. They decreed him Adolphus Junior for his sneaky idea. And Buford: what do you call him besides a munificent sandwich savant? Before they liquored up ahead of their unauthorized game, they traveled to his shack and brought back dinner to eat al fresco at the gardens’ “Snow White” table. (Knowing what he did about Nick’s close call, and now learning about his termination at Cawston, Buford raised no stink about packaging these sandwiches to go.)
While appreciative to all, Nick mostly owed Fleet thanks for arranging the Friday night tomfoolery. Two days earlier he burst into Nick’s curtain-pulled bungalow, announcing that the deadline for Nick’s sulking was expiring. He suggested they ride up the Mount Lowe railway for some fresh air head-clearing. At that, Nick raised his stubbled chin. What about, he countered, an ‘Everything’s Okeydoke’ party. I am an idealist, after all.”