by Chip Jacobs
He hustled back toward base camp. The first person he encountered was the requisition clerk. He was scurrying around with shovels, pickaxes, and spades cradled in his arms. “Where should I go?” Nick asked.
“There,” the clerk said, aiming his elbow at a cluster of men encircling a pile of rubble. “They need all the diggers they can muster. Just watch your head.”
Nick took a trenching shovel from the clerk’s bundle and approached. From what he could tell, it was one of two ongoing excavation efforts under the Big Whopper.
At the mound, he listened to the shurrup, shurrup of metal-tipped instruments tunneling into debris. He wedged his way into a gap to add his shovel, going at it with inflamed palms. Every scoop ached.
James “C. J.” Johnson, concrete-raker, was trapped in a waist-high mishmash of broken timbers, concrete (both drying mush and semi-hardened stuff), and miscellaneous detritus. If that wasn’t enough of a befuddling sight, a pair of wood beams crisscrossed over the Missouri native. Nick asked a fellow digger about them, and he said they’d landed around CJ after he’d fallen. They resembled the frame of a steeple.
Nick, remembering John Visco, tried to avoid staring directly at CJ but he couldn’t help but catch glimpses when he leaned in to scoop. He’d been carried off the deck, too, and the results were stomach curling. One of CJ’s eyes was a destroyed, along with bloody gashes around it and an ear, and an arm was misshapen. He’d undoubtedly suffered other injuries, inside and out, that’d only be revealed once he was untangled from the pointy heap.
After about twenty minutes of life-saving shoveling, with hands and shoulders burning in pain from gripping that strap, Nick needed to step away to refortify himself. He looked north again and was astounded to see the throng of onlookers was double what it’d been, now with seventy or more people. In there were haberdashers, grocers, and chimney sweeps, off-duty Red Car conductors and clock factory employees. You couldn’t fault them. What’d happened here, on a civic showcase across a rugged canyon, was legacy being written.
In the front of the pack, a round-faced Episcopalian minister preached to those watching the all-out effort to spare CJ’s life. “Believers: focus on the miracle within the misfortune,” he said at a sermon pitch. “Psalms 91: ‘he will cover you in feathers, and under his wings you will find refuge.’ It’s not unreasonable to believe the wood trussed over our brother there is protecting him, so he may attend to other Earthly business.” People listened respectfully to his homily, some muttering “amen” afterward. Others lifted up on tiptoes, craning for a better view of the triage.
Back on shovel duty, Nick resumed scooping. A couple of the men now were speaking softly to CJ, reassuring him he’d be all right, that he was fortunate, that they’d free him soon, even though he veered in and out of consciousness. One man clambered onto the pile to trench a path directly in front of him, so it’d be quicker to pluck him out once they’d reduced the debris.
Twenty minutes later, the diggers hefted him out of it. Bystanders applauded as CJ was lain on a stretcher and deposited into an ambulance idling on the dirt road normally traversed by company trucks. He’d be rush-ed to Marengo Hospital, on a pepper-tree-lined avenue, in grave condition.
Nick by then was a pincushion of conflicting emotions: determination to keep going, frustration he wasn’t able to scoop better, not to mention astonishment at what he’d been through on what was supposedly an indestructible hulk.
He’d need, though, to dissect that later because Marcus was now standing on the same chair Wink was before hollering into his bullhorn for people to evacuate again. Maybe thirty seconds later, a transverse beam that probably weighed more than a Model T tumbled down end over end, slamming into a stack of neatly arranged lumber earmarked for the job’s last arch. The impact scattered the wood, as if it were nothing, and rocked the earth. The aftermath was more group panic; more pointing upward at what else might drop, more spectators covering their mouths.
Nick ran toward the tent area south of the bridge to get separation, eyes craned backward in case a bigger section toppled. Then boom. After twenty strides he collided head-on with somebody else not looking where they were going. The force knocked the shovel from his hands and sent him rearward onto his keister. But even with the crud in the air, Nick had no trouble identifying who flattened him.
“Otis?” Nick said, getting up. “What are you doing here?”
Otis got to his feet, too, tamping his chin to see if it was bleeding. It wasn’t. “They hired me a week ago to saw falsework. I knew I’d run into you eventually, just not like this.”
Nick kneaded his left shoulder. “And you decided not to seek me out first?”
“We didn’t part on a high note at Cawston, did we? I needed the money.”
“’Kay. Whatever.”
“Where were you when it happened?”
“I don’t want to talk about it. And I need to get back to lend a hand. See ya.”
Otis flipped Nick a quick salute, and Nick wouldn’t see him for a while.
Jesus: Otis, of all people. Soon he was back at the spot he’d run from, listening to Marcus seethe into his bullhorn
“Goddamn it,” he bellowed. “I need lookouts stationed right this instant. Three down here, one on the deck. I don’t care if they wear a tie or clean the shitters. We don’t know if she’s a levee about to break. While we’re at it, push those onlookers back. This isn’t a Vaudeville show.”
As Marcus took charge of the scene, Nick watched Lei Wong, the lone Asian on the job, dart up to him. He volunteered to watch a sub-column that rescuers were eyeing anxiously. He also saw the crowd had swelled, whatever Marcus’s irritation. Percy Fixx and two other members of the Board of Trade were now there, as well as some Busch Gardens’ landscapers eager to pitch in. Police in their Bowery-esque uniforms were working crowd control, stretching a rope to steer folks back. The cops looked thunderstruck themselves.
Still, the chaos eased after that transverse beam hit the lumber. Nick waited behind a ring of men working furiously to extricate the last man still buried. Between his body aches and dehydration, he knew his shovel would be contributing diminishing returns once it was his turn. When those diggers filthed in sweat and dirt stepped back to get their wind, he heard them predicting it’d be hours before they could leave. After Nick got close to Harry Collins, he appreciated why. Harry was engulfed up to his neck, mainly in soupy, wet concrete, along with gnarled metal and snapped two-by-fours in a pile that appeared impregnable.
Increasingly out of it, Nick was oblivious that inside the horde of lookie-loos were faces worried that he was dead.
Jules waited until a police officer was distracted mollifying a retired engineer, who was rankled that nobody was taking his advice about structural shoring-up, to skirt under the barrier rope. She walked toward the sound of working pickaxes, crowbars, and spades, calling out, “Nick. Is there a Nick Chance present?”
He turned in the direction of her voice, unsure if he was imagining it. As he did, the first set of diggers, the acrobatic Colorado brothers among them, recommenced whacking away at the debris just about mummifying poor Harry Collins.
Jules was squinting, looking for him as he trudged around the side of unscathed Arch Number Eight. “Jules,” he said. “Here!”
She rushed up and looped her arms around him. “Thank heavens,” she said, eyes big. “We had no idea where you were.”
Nick melted into her and kissed her neck. “I was up there, when it struck, when it came down,” he said still hugging her. “A bunch of us dangled for our lives. I feared I’d never see you again.”
“That’s over now.”
“You won’t believe it. Chester. He was the one who saved me. He and a parrot.”
She pulled back, caressing his cheek. “That’s incredible. Are you injured?”
He displayed his red-welted palms, which made her cringe. “Don’t su
ppose you have any water on you?” he asked.
“No, but I saw a man passing out canteens a second ago. Stay here.”
People keep telling me that. Jules was aces, back soon with a half-full canteen. He drank it dry. “Thanks. I was wilting.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Since the morning shift. I, um, I’m not thinking lucidly.” He might’ve dropped if she didn’t catch him by the waist.
“If I may, you’re not fine,” she said. “You’re in shock. We should whisk you home.”
But the accident soundtrack—Marcus yelling instructions, nickering horses, the constant shurrup, shurrup of tools clawing at the muck around Harry—wouldn’t relent. “I can’t,” he said in a raspy voice. “Not yet. And what’s with the we?”
He got his answer as Royo raced up and immediately slapped his front paws onto Nick’s hips. Nick tilted down, petting him and touching foreheads. You knew, didn’t you? Nick thought. Royo didn’t nod. He licked Nick’s nose.
Lilly, in a light summer sweater and pearls, waddled over next to join the Nick’s-alive party.
“I couldn’t restrain him; he’s your guardian,” she said in an accent soothing to Nick ears. “None of us could stand the prospect of losing you. Dear boy, won’t you come back?”
“You two reading off the same script?” he said, hearing the shurrup, shurrup again. “Just a little more time. My city, catch me?” Yeah, and if they knew I’d been fired, they’d drag me away.
Against their wishes, Nick returned for a last round of shoveling. By seven, with sunset looming and weak oil lamps set up to watch for other wreckage threatening to plunge, Harry only was dug halfway out. He was groaning something awful now, complaining of excruciating pain in places nobody could reach. The hardening concrete was squeezing him to death. “I can’t last,” he kept repeating. “I can’t.”
“Never mind, old man,” one of his rescuers said. “We’ll have you out soon.”
Marcus, overhearing this, left the area to confer with Wink, an engineer, and R. H. Newcomb, a well-respected Pasadena doctor who’d hurried down here with his black medical bag. With the three others observing him, Marcus scribbled a design on his clipboard and presented it to the doctor. “That,” RH said, “should get the job done.”
Marcus called out orders, and in no time there was a burst of sparks from the sawmill, followed by the pounding of multiple hammers. Marcus and others soon dragged over a hastily cobbled, C-shaped winch approximately eight-feet high. The excavation paused while it was hauled to the edge of the mound. Wink then strung a rope through a set of pulleys on its top and knotted it around the doctor’s waist. A couple diggers stood on the winch’s base to stabilize it, and Wink levered the physician up over Harry.
Levitating above him, the physician extracted a pre-cocked hypodermic needle filled with a yellow liquid. While one hand snatched Harry by the hair in a steadying maneuver, his other jabbed the needle directly into Harry’s temple area. “There,” RH said. “That should dull the pain afflicting you.”
After the doctor and the winch were removed, the men resumed shoveling by lamplight to unfetter now-passed-out Harry. There still were hundreds of pounds of construction wreckage encasing him.
Standing there, Nick was too fatigued to do anything more. So, he walked his jelly self over to his support unit, which had returned behind the crowd-control rope. Half the crowd had dissipated.
“If you can make it to Ivy Wall, I’ll have my chauffeur take you home,” Lilly said.
“Aww, thanks, Lilly” Nick said. “At this point, you can just strap me to the hood.”
The three of them plus Royo set out for the trailhead leading to the Busches’s estate. None of them expected Marcus to gently grip Nick’s elbow from behind, asking to talk.
Neither exhibited any emotion during their brief conversation. Both were too whipsawed. When Marcus tried shaking hands at the end, Nick showed him his palms and Marcus patted Nick’s shoulder. He then left to supervise the rest of Harry’s untangling.
“What did he want?” Jules asked snidely. “Another ounce of blood?”
“Sort of,” Nick answered, leaning on her. “In a good way.”
—
He stood at his kitchen window, captivated by the moon in the inky, night sky. Dust still was in his throat from yesterday’s drama, so Nick bent over his sink to slurp water directly from the faucet. When he returned to the window and gazed out, something celestially disturbing was occurring. The moon was gone.
He blinked twice, thinking it was exhaustion, and checked again. The moon remained missing, but there was something in his courtyard even harder to comprehend: a scaled-down and completed Colorado Street Bridge. This is what happens when you have bridge on the brain: uninvited hallucinations.
Nick fisted his eye sockets to make it skedaddle, yet all that did was incite it to shape-shift. A predatory insect, with spiny legs for arches and onyx eyes for lamps, was its first incarnation. A flash of bright light later, it was a black sun outlined in flickering orange. Nick gripped his counter, hoping this would end. There was a second flash, and the bridge was restored to its Beaux Arts Luster, kind of. Instead of automobiles puttering across it, people were leaping from its sides—leaping by the dozens—each one silhouetted in luminescent purple the exact shade as the light misting off the Sierra Madre range at sunset.
The last mirage from his window wasn’t a concrete Zelig. It was a Colorado Street he’d never seen before: a street with a wide-glassed store advertising an unintelligible product.
Nick shot up in bed the moment his night terror scattered into black dots. It was six in the morning and his now-bandaged palms smelled of tincture. Slumped next to him, on his hardback desk chair, was a snoring Fleet. Royo was asleep, too, on the wall side of Nick’s bed. He was experiencing his own nightmare based on his arf, arfs and twitching paws. On the nightstand were a damp washcloth and the remains of Fleet’s midnight snack, a half-eaten bag of Fig Newton’s.
He crept out of bed and edged toward the kitchen window. Hallelujah: there were rose bushes in his courtyard and a Pasadena peach-tangerine sunrise above it. The sinister bridge from his nightmare was vapor. A creaking floorboard, though, stirred Royo, who jumped off the bed for a wake-up shake. It jarred Fleet so, now, no one was sleeping.
“Sorry,” Nick said. “Were you on vigil all night?”
“More or less,” he said, arching his back.
“Last thing I remember you were tugging off my boots. Jules, I think, was warming a can of pork and beans for me.”
“She was. You ate half of it, gave me a condensed version of events, and proclaimed your desire to pass out. How are you faring? Achy? Beffudled?”
Nick flexed his fingertips and tried rotating his arms, which made him wince. “I won’t be executing any ostrich tricks today, but I’ll recover. I do appreciate you taking care of my hands. From now on, I’m going to quit comparing your bedside manner to Dr. Jekyll.”
“You should. I also must note your latest mishap is costing me study time. Did I mention how much I detest organic chemistry?”
“Would coffee help?”
“It couldn’t hurt.”
Nick switched the stove on with his wrists. “Tell me: how did you get enlisted into nursemaiding me again?”
Fleet shifted from Nick’s desk chair onto his bed and leaned back, folding his hands behind him. “Jules. After she shepherded you in here, she knocked on my door asking me to examine you. She stayed for a few hours while you slept. Later, she checked her watch, and said she had a business appointment she needed to attend.”
Nick set out two mugs. “That’s curious. Who has an appointment late Saturday night?”
“I doubt she’s two-timing you, if that’s what you’re intimating. She’s bananas for you, galling taste notwithstanding. But I will contend she’s odd. She
reminds me of a Busch Gardens duck: calm at the surface, kinetic legs below. As opposed to Hattie: that woman conceals nothing. Don’t tie yourself in knots. Jules probably needs the extra dough.”
“Suppose you’re right,” Nick said. After a pause, he continued: “Speaking of odd, I just had the most extraordinary nightmare, and it all transpired outside my kitchen window. Most of it was about the bridge.”
“Unsurprising, everything considered. What did it entail?”
“That’s the rub. The details are fraying every second I’m awake. What’s glued in my brain was the last scene.”
“Do tell.”
“This will sound loony, but have you ever heard of a store, in Pasadena or anywhere, called Banana Republic. Or a product pronounced, I think, as chinos, like rhinos.”
Fleet scrunched his face. A banana republic, as he understood it, was a derogatory term for a tropical backwater governed by a tin-pot dictator. And “Chinos” might’ve been a strain of dermatitis. “I unequivocally can say no, Nick, I haven’t. That was quite some dream. Be honest: you didn’t conk your head in yesterday’s bustle, did you?”
Nick assured him he didn’t, and elaborated further about what’d unfolded, including running into Otis and how R. H. Newcomb injected morphine directly into Harry Collins’s forehead, which Fleet said he didn’t know was possible. After they sipped coffee, he rechecked Nick’s hands, and Nick said he needed more shuteye. Fleet dubbed that a good idea and walked toward the door.
At the entryway, he turned. “Nick, as your oldest friend, I suggest that you consider visiting a neurologist. Just out of precaution. You’ve been roughed up over these last months; the explosion, this. Your skull isn’t made of iron.”
From bed, with Royo’s chin on his chest, Nick said: “Pass. My acuity is tiptop. Plus, I have you.”
Fleet smiled saying goodbye. Outside Nick’s bungalow, that expression shriveled into a frown. Nick’s dream wasn’t the only alarming neurological symptom. Fleet had twice spied Nick nuzzling foreheads with Royo, as if he were trying to convey something psychically.