by Chip Jacobs
They walked an elegant hallway, dipping into an enormous room with a crenellated ceiling. The only people in there were two stern-looking men reading The Saturday Evening Post in green wingback chairs. Nick and Jules spun around and left, sticking their heads in other public spaces in the citadel of paneled wealth many called the West Coast’s Waldorf Astoria. In every corner were brass vases and potted ferns.
On their stroll out, they passed the main dining room crowded with guests being fussed over by tuxedoed waiters. The jasmine-entwined pergola beyond the open doors perfumed the air with a sweetness even a socialist would find intoxicating. Though full, Nick couldn’t help salivating about today’s chef special: turkey legs brushed with Bordelaise sauce.
Heading back to town, Jules was her typically quiet daytime self. She let her smile lines and expressive eyes do her talking, and Nick loved her even more.
“I think that completes your education of Pasadena and its surround-ings,” he said. “I’ll request Lilly order you a cap and gown.”
In that moment, his future tickled him again: after his first major payday, he’d treat her to an overnight stay at the Raymond, however indifferent they were to wealth and privilege, just to say they had.
—
Early the next sunrise, Nick swayed on his heels in the middle of the deck, almost sugary with anticipation. His lamps were shining well, save for the two embedded in the ice plant directly under Mrs. Bangs’s boardinghouse, which flickered every few minutes. He was unconcerned. Truly. Sometimes, the phosphorous gel inside the globes wasn’t coated as evenly as they should’ve been, and the spots with too little of it caused the bulbs to sort of wink. He’d improved how he applied the stuff by using a denser paintbrush and would recoat the problematic ones later today. Marcus’s haggard eyes probably would miss them.
Tonight, he’d write Amy Chance a long-delayed letter so celebratory, so uplifting she’d junk her worry beads. Perhaps, she’d move back to Pasadena.
Dear mother, I’m without doubt on my path to a solar future.
Waiting for Marcus, Nick had time to scan the newspaper he squished into his work gunnysack. The front page was your usual catalog of other people’s pain. Winds of war gusting in the Balkans, an industrial fire killing fifty-five in New York.
Deeper in were stories of cultural change resonating more with him today. One, about a lady doctor in Chicago arrested for ditching a traditional “bathing skirt” for a more skin-tight suit model, would infuriate Jules. Another, about a St. Louis housewife who declared she was in contact, through her Ouija Board, with a woman dead for two hundred years, to him was sensationalistic bunk.
“Ahem,” Marcus said from behind, just as Nick finished the story about the Ouija Board woman. “I didn’t want to make you jump out of your socks again. You ready?”
Marcus was toting his usual accessories: an unlit cigar, a mug of coffee, and his shopworn clipboard. The only difference today: he had a pair of binoculars and a face not as saggy as before.
“Let’s have at it,” Nick said.
“Let’s.” Marcus’s inspection routine followed the previous ones. He tugged a stubby pencil from behind his hairy ear and got busy walking around scrawling checkmarks on the light site plan. With more lamps for him to inspect today, it took him double the time to ensure each one was still glowing through the night. Using binoculars was wise.
Nick could practically taste those Bordelaise-dipped turkey legs.
“You gave it your all, Chance,” Marcus said twelve minutes later, blasé as someone saying good morning. “Sorry. You’re out.”
“Excuse me?” Nick said, intestines curling like a wisteria vine.
“Excuse what? You promised me every single lamp would be functioning, and I’m counting five that aren’t cutting the mustard. Close doesn’t win you anything with me.”
“You’re mistaken. Two were wavering a little before you arrived, which I should’ve mentioned, but they’re simple fixes.”
“Says you. I just counted five either blinking or dead, and I know my math. Care to look?”
Marcus held out the binoculars. Nick waved them off, digging into his gunnysack for the pocket telescope in a rush. Now, he was the one traipsing around in the dimness under the concrete dumpcart track tallying lights, instead of standing where he was waiting for Marcus’s judgment. He was the one trudging back manufacturing explanations.
The man was right. Five were malfunctioning, meaning three more with shoddily applied phosphorous were now on the fritz since Marcus turned up.
“What’d I tell you?” Marcus said. “You got sloppy, didn’t you? Sloppy or cocky: they bleed together.”
“That’s not so!” Nick said, cheeks flushing. “I worked my ass off. If my hunch is right, it’s not the design. It’s how I coated the globes with phosphorous. Or outright defective gel.”
“Flies in your ointment aren’t my concern. You know how many balls I have in the air.”
Or mine in a vice? Nick exhaled, trying to stay professional. “I appreciate that, sir. But glitches notwithstanding, I have forty-three out of forty-eight working. That’s a pretty nifty average for cutting-age devices. We’re making history.”
Marcus scoffed openly. “History? That’s some hubris, son. Your metal petunias just aren’t ready.”
Nick wanted to slap his stubbled, grizzly face. “So you’re going to throw it all away because of a minor issue? Let’s meet tomorrow and you’ll observe perfection.”
Marcus’s head vanished in a plume of smoke from the cigar he now lit. “Think of it from my perspective, Chance,” he said after a puff. “The bean counters have me by the short and curlies after we hired a third shift. Your politicians want this done, like yesterday. You knew all along that your endeavor was a concession to the Busches. If you strike it big with these later, you’ll thank us for field-testing them.”
“No disrespect: I’d like to appeal to your superior. You’re being rash. I grew up here, and this shadowy canyon is going to give people trouble. Remember the truck that flew over?”
“Going over my head,” Marcus said. “That’s cute. Decision’s made. It’s never fun being expendable.”
Expendable? After all the miles he’d logged tramping the slopes, all the cuts and chemical burns he’d suffered, the rattlers he nearly stepped on, the bullshit he’d stomached? Pursed lips, eyes downcast: Nick was a poster boy of hangdog blues.
He turned to leave, for where he wasn’t sure.
Behind him, Marcus blew a smoke ring and took pity. “Tell you what,” he said, piping up. “Since you abstained from stirring the pot with the Nellies, I’ll grant ya another week. We need utility men up here while we pour columns for (Arch) Number Nine. After our gal opens to traffic, you remove your lamps and walk. Deal?”
Nick deplored himself for his prudent reply: “Deal.”
Striding off, Marcus whistled what used to be one of Nick’s favorite childhood ditties: “She’ll Be Coming ’Round the Mountain.”
He decided to inform neither Jules nor Lilly of his predicament until he’d crafted a Plan B (with a meager seventy-three dollars in savings). Only Fleet heard the truth, the strands of which braided such a sad-sack tale of failure that he didn’t try cheering Nick up with customary sarcasm. Two firings in less than a year: for someone convinced destiny is what you build, Nick had a knack for disassembly.
So, yes, there are things you never want to write your mother, like keeping a room handy for her wisecracking, self-torpedoing boy. If he couldn’t persuade Aubrey Eneas to hire him in Arizona, where he was experimenting with a bigger solar motor, he’d have no choice but to relocate to Bloomington to hawk lamps to Luddite farmers. It’d be a living death, a psychic bludgeoning without the people he loved and the mountains he needed.
Snap, Crackle, and Drop
On August 1, 1913, Nick awoke with chest pain—ches
t pain from having the better part of a fifty-two-pound dog lying sideways over him, panting musky morning breath into his face. How else to kick off his last day on the Colorado Street Bridge?
“The devil you looking at?” Nick asked, stretching. “My tonsils?”
Royo crooked his head sideways at him, scrunching his expressive brow into wavy shapes. It didn’t take clairvoyance for him to recognize that he was staring at a Nick who’d lost some voltage, a Nick coming to grips with the enormity of his screw-up.
You can’t pay bills with fickle prototypes. And you can’t deny when a springboard to your future becomes a trapdoor to the cornfields.
“Least we’re in it together, boy,” Nick said, scratching Royo’s whiskers. “Tell you what: I’ll buy us scarecrow back there; first you chew it, then I’ll drench it with gasoline and torch it.”
Royo, boxy head still angled, panted closer. He was nervous, hating the pain he sensed was about to be inflicted for the greater good.
Forty minutes later, Nick patted him goodbye at Ivy Wall, where Jules, luckily, was away on committee business. When Nick spun to leave, Royo barraged him with pistol-sharp barks. The butterscotch wolf galloped toward him next, doing something even ordinary dogs do when they’re jittery: he squatted on Nick’s boots and whimpered.
Nick bent over, smooshing foreheads to console him. The salami and saltines they’d had for breakfast lurked hot on his mutt’s breath now. “What’s unsettling you today? Go torment Maty while you can. We’re probably short-timers here.”
But the clingy animal wouldn’t budge, and Nick lacked the energy to coddle him. So he let him read his mind. “Everything’s okeydoke so long as we’re breathing. Catch me?”
He unlatched the gate and turned toward the switchback, trying to bat away self-martyrdom as Royo’s staccato Ruf-ruf-ruffff-rohrrr echoed over the bluff.
The zeitgeist at base camp that morning was one-hundred-eighty degrees different than his. People were spunky, even punch-drunk. Blue collars gobbled complimentary pastries and horsed around limbering up. The esprit de corps wasn’t lost on the button-down executives. Two engineers, in fact, jousted with rolled up blueprints, pretending to be musketeers, not the brains of this operation.
Perfect. All that was missing were a laudatory cable from President Wilson and an organ-grinding chimp.
Nick didn’t feel much better when a usually hard-nosed foreman approached him with a lively step, apprising him he wasn’t “needed to pinch-hit up top pouring concrete. You’re free to do, um, whatever it is you’ve been doing.”
Just as well. He’d only worked light construction there about four hours this week. Hence, he reverted to his primary activity: dismantling the solar array that he’d hoped Pasadena would toast him for inventing.
There must be more to his firing, he bitched to Fleet last night. “How can there not be? On my worst day, I had almost ninety percent of my lamps working. I wonder if that Edison Electric fella is involved?”
“Two words,” Fleet responded, influenced by a med-school urology class that kept him knee deep in the male vas deferens and corpus spongiosum. “Pecker-head politics.”
“I hope not,” Nick gruffed. “And wasn’t that three words?”
“On the upside,” a term he shelved this week, it was less arduous removing his inventions than installing them. Setting them up, he’d grappled with a round robin of backaches, lacerations, sunburns, and aching soles. This week was about ruptured pride; about putting his optimism through the ringer by breaking down each metal-and-glass lamp and heaping them on a tarp to drag across the hillsides or carry over the Scoville footbridge. It was about staging a brave face inside the requisition tent, where a mousy clerk with a bowl haircut inventoried the parts.
On this Friday of cottony clouds, the two men from the Automobile Club of Southern California astride the eastern bank didn’t have to fabricate any expressions. They were there, bursting their britches in the sunshine, whacking a road sign into the ground with a mallet. On their panel were two arrows fraught with symbolism. One pointed west, notifying motorists that downtown Los Angeles was twenty miles away. The other arrow faced east, telling them that New York City was twenty-eight hundred miles the opposite direction. Soon, you could get there from here.
The second the bridge’s celebratory ribbons were snipped was the second dirt streets and old buggies were closer to obsolescence in the birth of a true, American road system. From now on, people would expect nothing less than modern concrete streets for their crank-started motorcars. No longer, either, would locals have to take circuitous routes, including Huntington Drive to the south, to travel any distance. The Red Cars would remain the backbone of the working class’s transportation, but a pathway zipping you in and out of town via a short crossing would be seductive.
Just not for Nick. At his final mess-tent lunch, he picked at his mac-and-cheese at a table overrun by fresh hires. Afterward, he slung that grimy tarp, which he started to think was inscribed with a Scarlet Letter, over his shoulder. For the next five hours, he’d continue decommissioning what a mere four days ago was his million-dollar idea.
“Chance,” Marcus shouted at him emerging from the outhouse. “Glad I saw you. McClaren went home an hour ago—stomach virus. Suspect I have it, too. We need you to sub in on the hopper. The fellas will show you what to do. Try not to bumble it.”
“Sure,” Nick said. “I wouldn’t want to taint the glory.”
“Don’t be brash. I’ll be sorry seeing you go. I was hoping you’d teach me to ride an ostrich for the inaugural party. Scoot.”
On the plank immediately below the deck, Nick was part of a six-man “pour team.” Another dozen or so bridge rats were underneath them preparing new falsework or prying off the forms from beams and columns whose concrete was dry. They’d already finished Arch Number Nine’s most daunting features: its buried footings, two parabolic spans, and open-spandrel columns. The job ahead was webbing the “smaller” pieces—the span-tying ribs, the transverse beams—into the superstructure. Though still latticed in scaffolding and metal framing, the arch was supposed to be done in weeks.
Maybe it was his crustiness, but Nick doubted what the suits were estimating: that the entire project would be ready for christening by Labor Day. He’d seen the finishing punch list. It ran five single-spaced pages. Then again, what did he know?
Today, he was just another set of arms in a place where dawdling equaled failure. As soon as the robotically operated dumpcart idled above them with its load, the clock began ticking to deliver the concrete where it needed to go before it hardened.
Over and over, the process repeated. The team tilted the cart, feverishly raking its pre-mixed batch through its attached hopper into a movable steel funnel, something, it seemed to Nick, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz’s Tin Man could’ve donned as a party hat. The funnel was then swiveled over the open end of a falsework mold awaiting the pebbly goop. A swivel of a handle later and it poured in there with slushy force. A rebar man next snaked reinforcing poles into the mush before it set.
This was how you erected a roadway in the sky.
The grunt work and concentration required made the afternoon blur by. Everything here was specialized, be it the know-how operating the machines and tools, or the whistles and slashing hand gestures that blue collars relied on to communicate. Every shift was a ragtag fraternity whose members hailed from all over, with splattered trousers and fat paychecks the common denominator.
In between pours that afternoon, Nick snapped mental photographs from his vantage, believing he’d regret it if he didn’t. To the north, he eyeballed the milk-white funicular creeping up Mount Lowe, and the scrubby land across from Linda Vista the city hoped to grade into a verdant park. (Park? Ten years later, the Rose Bowl stadium was there.) On the other side, he squinted at the shiny greens of Busch Gardens, thick today with sun-worshippers and parasol twirlers.
Twenty minutes later, still thrashing inside, he lamented allowing himself time for any nostalgia, any maudlin farewell. His personal connection to the bridge was about kaput, and, going forward, the harshness of his disappointment over his lamps wasn’t going to be easily quarantined in the lockbox of his mind.
So, when no one was watching, Nick scrabbled onto the deck and vanished under the dumpcart’s track. If he couldn’t visit Echo Mountain to air out his spleen, this was a decent alternative. “God damn my luck,” he hollered beneath the construction racket. “I’m in a river of shit over five bad lights. How’s that fair? I’m an inventor, for Chrissakes.” He felt lighter after venting some of his black singe of resentment.
Around four forty-five, he and the rest of the pour team listened to the foreman’s closing speech. “Nearly quitting time, boys. Let’s make this pour our best one yet.”
They’d already funneled an impressive one hundred cubic yards today.
“You heard the man,” head-Nellie/carpenter Chester added, pumping his fist. “Good, tight seal, no mud left in the cart.”
Nick didn’t know Chester was here until now, and what did it matter if he was working on a lower plank before? He wasn’t wasting his last minutes here stewing in bitterness, not when he still loved this beautiful bridge that he was proud his city commissioned. Stop bellyaching. You’ve led a charmed existence compared to most of these men.
Dwelling on that rather than self-pity, he was the first to snatch the hopper on the final pour. Afterward, he wiped gunk from his ungloved hands onto his trousers while the shift commenced their daily mop-up duties.
At about five, comic relief arrived for this bittersweet afternoon. It was fluky, really—fluky that Nick saw the ends of his shoelaces jitterbugging around the tops of his boots. He wanted to giggle, for they reminded him of centipedes twitching on a scorching sidewalk.