by Chip Jacobs
But then he pondered it deeper: if the dumpcart over them wasn’t rumbling anymore, and the other equipment was just switched off for economy, what was stoking the trembling, the one now vibrating both ankles?
Before he could ask the foreman about it, or question if A. J. Pearson’s machine shop was revving up, came a bloodcurdling crack. Everyone in Nick’s group heard it.
Something under the deck just snapped. Something ominous.
A second, sharper jolt shook the planks and then wham-bam, a rapid-fire chain of unwelcome noises: the creak of splintering wood and a mushy roar. The next sound was the most petrifying yet: the violent crash of wreckage hammering into the earth. Besides filling the terrified ears of the afternoon shift, the reverberation ping-ponged from base camp, off the Arroyo’s hillsides, into Millionaire’s Row, and points beyond.
Scarier still, three men on the lower scaffolds were swept away so abruptly that you might’ve wondered if they’d shown up to work at all. C. J. Johnson (concrete raker), Harry Collins (rebar clipper), and John Visco (carpenter) had vanished. Snatched from the heights in an avalanche of wet concrete and jagged debris, they were now embedded in the canyon floor.
Those remaining on the bridge found themselves stranded on a quivering house of cards roughly one hundred thirty feet above the ground. When everything is hemmed together, one small failure can provoke ungodly damage.
Nick peered down at his feet again and then lifted his head with goldfish eyes. Some of the planks on the levels directly below him were flipping on edge and dropping like toothpicks; their metal supports had bowed. “Help,” he cried out. “What do we do?”
Nobody answered. But it was far from quiet.
“Oh, Mother of God. She’s going. Jump!” someone yelled.
You could appreciate the logic, what with nails and fasteners in the falsework popping out and rakes and shovels pitching over the side. Every board, including Nick’s, was oscillating and swaying. A second collapse seemed to be building.
Workers’ salty exclamations acknowledged they were in a full-blown disaster: “Christ!” they said; “Shit-shit-shit;” “Ahhhhhh, motherfucker!”
A jelly chinned bridge rat down the scaffold from Nick shrieked, “Get off the boards or you’re dead.” He heeded his own advice, leaping diagonally into one of the rounded nooks of the adjacent—and finished —Arch Number Eight to the left.
In forty seconds, three hundred tons of man and material had already plummeted.
Hopper-operator Angus Freeman, a redheaded Scotsman, as well as a second cousin to Adolphus Busch’s head landscaper, went airborne next. He threw himself four feet toward the crown of one the Big Whopper’s main arches. He struck it chest high, and nearly fell, but was able to drag himself up onto his stomach.
“Go,” Angus shouted at Nick once he turned around.
“Where?” Nick shouted back, spreading his boots to keep from tumbling. Angus’s position was too far for him to jump.
“Anywhere,” Angus yelled. “Do it or you’re dust.”
Anywhere? Nick bent his knees, searching across the deck for any reachable cranny or ledge. Blanks. His plank shook hard again, and he knew he needed to leap soon or it was death guaranteed.
“Go!” Angus said, clapping his hands.
Here goes everything. Nick flung himself at the only object within view: an eighteen-inch-long leather strap bolted into the underside of a pedestrian viewing bay jutting over the deck. Midair for what seemed forever, a chilling thought occurred to him: what if the strap sheared off from his weight?
But it held firm as Nick snatched the grainy length with both palms and clutched it firmly, swaying two feet from the rim of the deck.
“Well done, lad!” Angus exclaimed. “Well done. Someone will get to you. Stay calm.”
“I’ll try,” Nick said.
Angus waved, gyrated around on his belly, and crawled into the depths of the arch to seek help. He wasn’t doing any good there; if nothing else, he could play the bagpipe at a funeral.
Nick took a deep a breath and tightened his grip. He then swiveled his head in his new surroundings and couldn’t believe his company. At least seven other men were hanging along the deck’s edge or deeper underneath it; seven men hanging like cuts of meat gripping concrete ledges, un-snipped rebar, and leather straps. There were no nets, no safety harnesses. Only upper body muscle and sheer will was preventing them from splattering.
An eerie silence pervaded initially, one condemned man taking stock of the other. That didn’t last. The danglers reacted as anybody would: they screamed for rescue by colleagues or their creator—a discordant chorus of voices piggybacking on the other.
“Help!” they bawled. “Get me out of here,” they sobbed. “Down here,” they screeched.
Nobody in the mad scramble at base camp, though, could do anything immediately to save them. Suits, whose tents rattled with earthquake force when the collapse struck, were ordering everyone under the deck to run for their lives. It took them a few minutes to point up and gasp at the carnage: the hanging men, the slanted debris threatening to drop.
Nick clenched his hands in a death grip around a strap, whose intended function was lost on him. Dig deep. Slow breaths. He drew himself up a couple inches in case his perspiring hands slipped. On his last thrust, he rammed the top of his head into the bottom of the structure. Any harder and he would’ve knocked himself out. That would’ve been it.
Darby dangled to his left, arms around a wedge of concrete bulging from the side. The wirepuller’s signature tweed beanie was history; it’d flown off when he’d jumped. “If I go,” he said, staring at Nick with semi-catatonic eyes, “have them put me in my best blue shirt.”
“I will, but we’re getting out of this,” Nick said. “They’ll mount a rescue.” This he said for his own sake as much as for the Nellie.
The Colorado brothers were on the other side of Darby. They, too, were hanging from the leather bands, which they knew were there to secure construction ropes or hold tools. Unlike the others, they weren’t pale or caterwauling for “Help!” every other breath. Uh-uh. They were speaking calmly in Spanish, reminiscing about the hairy moments they’d survived as kids in Mexico around drunken thieves and natural disasters. Their next topic was how to rescue themselves.
Nick couldn’t rip his eyes away from their do-or-die acrobatics for one second.
The brothers first twisted around on their straps to face outward. They began swinging to and fro next in a pendulum motion. Once they had good momentum, they started kicking their legs up high over their heads like audacious kids on a swing set. It wasn’t long before they’d scissor-clamped their calves around a pair of two-by-fours on the deck bracing the dumpcart’s track. No longer clutching their straps, they now were hanging upside down.
For their trapeze-esque finale, they embarked on what were effectively zero gravity sit-ups. Their objective: to heave themselves upward enough to wrap their arms around the same wooden supports where their legs were hitched. Their faces were beet red, and Nick wasn’t certain if he could bear to watch anymore. But he did. On their eleventh attempt, the siblings exchanged kindred smiles, grunted loudly, and stretched, reaching their fingertips as far as they could go. To make it, they needed to un-hook their legs from the support, meaning, for a second, they were attached to nothing except the belief this wasn’t how they’d perish.
They did it, and did it with uncanny synchronicity. The brothers popped to their feet, hugged, and kissed their crucifixes. Within a minute, Jesus Colorado was bending his entire wingspan downward to lift Darby up.
“You’re an angel,” he said, choking tears. “I’ll grab the ladder.”
Ladder? Nick plum forgot that workers stationed a few of them to move around the scaffolding levels when they weren’t in a ballsy mood to lash ropes around their waists to arrive there quicker. Then he heard foot
falls running the opposite direction of him. “Don’t forget me. I’ll take a ladder,” he screeched. His hands were cramping badly.
“Me, neither,” added another dangler in a clearer sightline than Nick. “Throw me a rope. Anything.”
Six minutes: that’s how long they’d been swinging.
Nick doubted how much longer he could hold on; five minutes max. When a plume of dust from the debris bilged up, he shut his eyes and re-clenched his moist strap.
But fresh terror circulated as the deck vibrated again, as if any of the survivors needed that excitement. Was the entire structure about to crumble? Was this the inevitable encore of a job with a whistle-clean safety record? Perhaps. That, however, wasn’t the cause now. The dumpcart operator was bringing the vehicle back to the bank, lest it plunge over the side to crush workers below.
To avoid feeling hopeless in the most lethal moment of his twenty-seven years, Nick distracted himself with memory tricks. He cycled through every relative he could picture, every girl he’d been sweet on, and every big Pasadena event he’d attended. He ran through everything Royo filched from his pantry or possessions he’d annihilated, and that was a healthy list. By the time another man was hoisted to safety, Nick was running low on diversionary material. Almost.
As a child, “perseverance” was only a word on a vocabulary sheet until his father took him hiking one summer day in Rubio Canyon. Nathaniel Chance challenged his nine-year-old to push himself to the brink. How long, he’d asked Nick, could he hold his breath under water in a pond? “When you’re frantic for oxygen, imagine lying in a cool meadow under a jacaranda. Transport yourself there when the pressure ratchets. The grit’s in you, boy: I swear it.” Seventy-eight seconds was how long he’d remained submerged, and his father rewarded him with a Smilin’ Dan’s sarsaparilla. Thank you.
Still, his shoulders then weren’t about to tear out of their sockets like now. His desperation wasn’t as raw as now. A meadow wasn’t beckoning him; a grave was. “Help! I’m about to drop,” shouted Nick—the last man hanging. By the lack of ruckus, no one realized he was still there.
He said his goodbyes. Royo, Jules, Mom, Fleet, Mrs. Grover Cleveland: remember me when you see a solar machine, or a cowlick. Lord, make it quick.”
Then, miraculously, he detected movement above, movement that brushed euphoria through every nerve ending. He stared up, anxious to see an extended arm. Yet it wasn’t a limb. It was an absurdity you couldn’t invent.
A wild green parrot with a scarlet head and opinionated beak was perched on the lip of the pedestrian bay. Ye-yonk, yonk, ye-yonk-yonk, it cawed.
“Why are you jerks always following me?” Nick said, with a scowl. “Beat it!”
Ye-ye-ye-yonk. Eeeh, ehhhhhhheh.
Nick’s moist palms were constricting so acutely he was taking turns gripping the strap one-handed to shake pain out of the other.
Ye-yonk, yonk.
“You know, if it weren’t for me, you’d be inside some millionaire’s cage instead of winging around the Arroyo.”
When the bird flapped away, Nick resigned himself to the fact that this was the end. He’d exhausted his near misses: that coot’s knife toss, the fireball on Fair Oaks. Pasadena always smelled flowery to him. In his last seconds it reeked of wet concrete. He’d count to seventy-eight in homage to—”
“Hey, college boy. Loop your armpits under this. Don’t got all day.”
What? He recognized that voice, that abrasive voice.
Chester Hockney was flat on his gut, lowering his brown belt over the side of the deck. He’d pre-clasped the buckle into a makeshift harness.
“Oh, bless you,” said a spacey Nick. “Are you real?”
“Well, I ain’t a physics book. After you get that around you, cross your arms over your chest so you don’t slip when I lurch you up.”
“Okay.” Nick clenched his teeth and clinched himself, knowing the danger hadn’t passed.
Chester, who’d double-wrapped the belt’s end around his fists, still needed to shift from lying flat into a sitting position to lever Nick to safety. But when he rolled onto his side in the awkward transition, he couldn’t maintain his grip, and Nick dropped a foot to a jerky stop, twirling sideways.
“Hey!” Nick yelled.
“Hey, yourself. I’m trying.” And Chester was, breathing so hard that rubbery scar near his jugular pulsed. He leaned backward, grunting “ooof” and tugged. This reeled Nick up only eighteen inches.
“Christ,” Chester remarked. “What’d you eat for breakfast? Horseshoes?”
If Darby didn’t tear over just then, who knows what would’ve happened. Quickly, he squatted behind Chester, bear-hugged his chest, and tilted him backward with every muscle he had. The two-man action turned the rim of the deck into a more effective fulcrum.
The two Nellies yanked and hefted, pulled and strained, winching Nick up an agonizing inch at a time. After three minutes of this struggle, Nick was able to stretch his tiring arms out once they were parallel with the deck. Somehow, Chester grabbed him, rolling him over top of his sweaty body.
Absurdity Number Two: Nick spent his first seconds of salvation sprawled sideways over the man with whom he’d bickered with about science versus the paranormal. Chester himself lay back over Darby as if they were practicing a clumsy two-man luge.
“You saved my life, you pair,” Nick said, tapping Chester’s shin.
Everybody caught their breath and pressed onto their feet. Under all of their shirts were moon stains. Nick unclasped the belt and handed it to Chester.
“If either of you are beer men, the Budweiser is on me. I know a guy.”
Chester lit a Camel and said, “Count me in. You don’t owe us nothin’, though. Up here, we’re brothers.”
“Thank God you heard me.” Nick said, trying to windmill his tender shoulders.
“That was the queerness of it,” Chester said, after a long drag. “I didn’t hear you. I was about to rush off to the mess below when I saw one of those parrots everybody is always raving about making a commotion. After it flew away, I looked down and there were you, all by your lonesome.”
Hearing that, Nick leaned over and puked the remains of his saltines-and-salami breakfast. He sleeved his mouth afterward, and hugged the pock-skinned carpenter. “Don’t sell yourself short,” he whispered. “You came through in the clutch.”
“Yeah,” Chester said after Nick released him. “Remember that when the suits tell you that everything is hunky-dory.”
Nick dug out a stick of Wrigley’s from his back pocket and chewed it on the now-deserted deck. Everyone else had trudged off in stupors, hustled to the bottom, or been swept away in the concrete avalanche.
“I’m going down there,” Nick said, kneading his hands.
“So are we,” Chester added. “Could be any of us smashed up.”
Rubble Soldiers
They split up as soon as they hit base camp, or what was formerly base camp. Where there’d been military-caliber precision fifteen minutes earlier was a mothership of horror now. People were running in circles, running while hollering at colleagues to “get back,” or running just because everybody else was. One suit crouched outside the administrative tent with the traumatized daze of a general watching his troops lanced by surprise arrows.
Nick hadn’t been here for more than ninety seconds before Wink Prescott stood on a chair and shouted, “We need lookouts. More’s going to plummet!”
Plenty, Nick realized, already had at ground zero. The area under and around Arch Number Nine was a jumble of broken concrete, splintered wood, bent metal, and barrels worth of little parts. The dust cloud whipped up by the fallen wreckage was rendering the air a gauzy, dirt brown whose particles quickly lodged in your throat.
When he squinted upward, he appreciated why scouts were needed. Beneath the tattered arch were rows of scaffolding an
d framing skewed at cockamamie angles. A number of the arch’s sub-beams and columns, some still encased in wooden forms, tilted or teetered precariously, appearing as if the meekest vibration would rain them down.
If they went, would the monster parabolic arches be so compromised they’d follow?
Beat up as he was, Nick still felt adrenaline gushing through him. He was in the grip of an unfurling tragedy, and survivors have responsibilities. He only wished someone detailed what they were.
“Run, people!” Wink shouted again from his chair. “Get away.” The medley of jarred wood and steel that boomed with a hollow thump proved he was no Chicken Little.
Since others were dashing for cover, Nick did, as well. He sprinted diagonally under the buckled arch, toward the bridge’s northern side, and stopped by the Scoville footbridge. He waited for another crash, hearing only agitated voices. Go back. You’re doing jack here.
He wheeled around to cut directly under the arch this time when he came upon four blue collars knelt around a person lying in the open. They’d encircled one of men thrown off the deck in the collapse’s earliest moments. Nick never saw anything so gruesome before.
The spill didn’t merely kill John Visco. It dismantled him. Caved his skull in. Bent his limbs at angles physiology never intended. Pummeled his spine. Nick only knew the carpenter/concrete man, a soft-spoken Italian immigrant, from chin nods and cap tips. He kneeled, too.
A long-necked woodcutter from Alabama closed John’s marbly, dark eyes, for even a dead man shouldn’t have to witness what’d become of him. The woodcutter removed his cap and bowed his head, and the others followed. “Ask Saint Peter to carry him through the pearly gates after this. Now git. Nothing more to be done here.”
Nick crossed himself and rose, trying to shed the image, and sensed something behind him. It was a crowd, a crowd gathering between the Scoville property and the hill winding down into the Arroyo from Orange Grove Boulevard; a crowd that must’ve heard the deafening blast and rushed here to offer help or rubberneck calamity.