by Chip Jacobs
“Mr. Chance, you’re mistaking me for someone who gives a toot. Ten days.”
Before Nick could fire any more questions at him, BF closed the door.
—
From the Carmelita fairgrounds, the staging grounds for today’s festivities, Nick gazed west at a sea of starstruck people. The bunting and streamers adorning the oyster-skinned bridge gave it the aura of a World Series game. The collective energy crackled.
“Cleans up real well, doesn’t she?”
Nick recognized Marcus’s voice before he clamped a meat hook on his shoulder. “That she does, Mr. Stonebreaker. Congratulations.”
“You, too, Chance.”
Nick turned to face him. “Where do you want me? Crowd control, registration, tours?”
“All of the above. Hope you had your cornflakes. Gonna be a long day.”
Gonna be? “Okeydoke.”
“Don’t forget,” he said, lightly pinching Nick’s arm. “I’m still expecting ostrich-riding lessons from you someday.”
“I’ve already notified the farm,” Nick said.
“Always the cutup. But I do hope to see your metal petunias win customers. You made a believer out of me, and that’s not easy.”
Nick then watched him move toward the dais with that grizzly stride of his. In the sun, his scalp really showed through his curly locks. This was a hair-losing profession.
Pomp and hyperbole commenced midafternoon with speeches high over the canyon. Five thousand people, roughly one-sixth the city’s population, listened, many crammed onto the deck. In the lead-up to today, some newspapers hyped the bridge and its environs as “splendid,” “great,” and “lovely;” others applied adjectives bordering on preemptive idolatry.
Mayor Richard L. Metcalf, the retired dry-goods merchant who succeeded Thum, was first up at the platform. The chairman of the county Board of Supervisors spoke next, drawing gasps from the crowd with a prediction: that every one of the region’s forty thousand motorcars and trucks would at sometime utilize this roadway. A Pasadena commissioner followed, invoking the record book: “We know of no concrete bridge (in America), he said, “combining as great a length and height as does this.” Finally came the formal handoff from Mercereau executive W. M. Ledbetter. “We built this structure honestly,” he said. “This is your bridge.”
Nick, listening in a cluttered mind, was glad engineers didn’t measure load tolerances by glossy embellishments. Having led tours before, he regurgitated trivia to any interested citizen: 9 major arches, 1,458 feet long, 10,000 barrels of concrete. When not spewing facts, he fixed rose boutonnieres on dignitaries’ lapels. Hung garlands from motorcar doors. Brown-nosed efficiently.
Midafternoon, whistles blew and tinny horns and trumpets sounded to herald the start of the procession. Several high-school bands paraded across the deck, playing sentimental classics majorly off-key; the clarinets alone were sonic violence. Behind them rolled VIPs in a slow-speed caravan of puttering, waxed automobiles. In their back seats were the speech-givers, members of the Board of Trade, county officials, Mercereau Company suits, and associated cronies. Many waved with crinkly smiles.
In the convoy’s rear were honchos from the Southern California Auto Club all beaming wide. Next year, the organization was sponsoring a film starring a vaudevillian at Warner’s Photoplay Theater, Trixie Joins the Auto Club. Don’t laugh. With all the new gas stations, repair shops, and motorcar dealerships popping up, it’d probably rake in the dough.
Nick, who still adored the bridge but abhorred the monkey business around it, stood on the sidewalk while the motorcade rolled, dwelling not so much on who was here as who wasn’t. The two most conspicuous ones were John Alexander Low Waddell, who was boycotting the event because rational cities don’t curve their bridges, and John Drake Mercereau, who died in that rollover automobile wreck fourteen months earlier. The bridge’s godfather, who’d kept the project alive when it appeared doomed by infighting, was another one MIA. Harry Geohegan, former Board of Trade president, was in northern Los Angeles County today, investigating the possibility of a new road into Pasadena through the Antelope Valley. As a bigwig, he’d driven the deck—yesterday.
If there was any mention of dead blue collars Nick missed it.
After the cavalcade, people flooded behind in a block of humanity, many dressed up for the coronation. There were ties under heavy coats and mufflers around necks, ostentatious hats and more than a few ascots. They’d probably reuse the same clothes in a couple weeks at the 1914 Tournament of Roses, where a bridge float was being entered.
Intermixed in the mob were dozens of people Nick knew. Sometimes it smacked of a life reunion. He shook quick hands and pecked the cheeks of ex-neighbors, former classmates, the doddering Gilda Figgleberry, and friends of his parents from the Indiana Colony. He hugged old Cawston workmates (RG, Waldo, Cecil) and greeted a few pasty millionaires he met through Lilly, whom he so sorely missed. When an ex-girlfriend, the one who worked at George Hale’s observatory, ran up to him, saying they should have dinner sometime, Nick wondered what Jules’s smile lines were doing.
Yet he was still on the clock, and after he spied a young boy leaning over the balustrade in a loogie-hawking contest with his older sister, he forgot about her. “Get back, kid,” he hollered. “That’s dangerous.” The boy skipped away.
Nick trailed the spectators plodding in waves, some lingering to admire the fluted lampposts, romantic sitting bays, and other accents from Waddell’s imagination. When he wasn’t on the lookout for others tilting over the sides, he picked up Wrigley gum wrappers and cigarette butts, trying to stay present in the moment and not backslide into this morning’s bleakness. A man in a black trench coat and tweed cap tapped him as he balled a dry-cleaner’s flier in his hand.
“So, this is what everybody is doing cartwheels over?” Upton Sinclair said, playing tourist with anonymity from autograph hounds and political ear-benders. “You must be in nirvana. She is spellbinding, Nick.”
“If not nirvana, a reasonable facsimile,” he said, shaking hands. “You getting much rest between Annandale tennis matches?”
Upton showed him an elbow too creaky to bend. “I had to retire my racket. My backhand was killing me more than my opponent.”
“There’s always Buford’s to build muscle,” Nick said monotone.
Stragglers wove around them, oblivious to the biggest name on the concrete. For the last half hour, they’d ogled at landmarks inspiring from these heights: the snow-peaked Sierra Madre, local bell towers, and distant whitecaps off the coast. Mostly, they fawned over how Busch Gardens still shimmered in winter—while Nick wondered whether Lilly was already feeling heat to sell it, and whether any new owner would maintain the park as it was or divvy it up for greed.
A tubby woman in a mink coat squinting to see a fairy-tale hut bumped directly into Upton’s back. She kept walking with only a curt “pardon me.”
Upton gave it little attention, for he was focusing on Nick. “Say, what’s wrong? You have a decidedly gray complexion on this momentous day. Are you indisposed?”
“No. Just harried. Interested in any trivia? Weight loads. Tedious trigonometry?”
“No. I’m curious what could be troubling somebody normally so keen.”
“Personal matters, to be honest.”
“I’m sorry,” Upton said, seizing on the dull light in Nick’s eyes.
But Nick’s mind wasn’t flat. It was now awhirl about whether to divulge everything he knew, minus anything Chester said, about this place: Waddell’s accusations, the planned land grab, that hideous movie if local millionaires had influenced the bridge’s height. Who better to wrestle out the truth than the world’s top muckraker? There’s material galore. “Since I’m running around, perhaps I could elaborate further, man-to-man. Are you available Monday? Anyplace?”
“Rats. I am not,” Upton said. “I de
part for New York first thing tomorrow. I’ve procrastinated too long here on my book, about Standard Oil. One cannot lounge outside in one’s bathrobe forever.”
Nick barely heard the last part of Upton’s eloquence as he calculated the pros and cons of how to handle this serendipitous encounter. If he tattled the wrong thing out of context, Upton’s typewriter would shred Pasadena. Should he be exposed as his source, the city would never buy a single solar lamp. They’d bind him on a one-way train to Bloomington. Then again, if he swallowed his tongue, how could he call himself a stand-up citizen who espoused sunlight as antiseptic?
“Do you have a headache?” Upton asked. “You’re grimacing.”
“Indigestion. Question: would you be amenable to me knocking on your door later tonight? I’ll be concise.”
“Sure,” Upton said. “I’m a last-minute packer, anyway. Some matters can infect the spirit, as I’ve learned firsthand.”
“Thanks,” Nick said, handing Upton his moleskin notepad and pen to write down his address. He knew Upton appreciated his drift.
“Until this evening,” Upton said, swishing his tongue over his snaggleteeth. “I hope your indigestion wanes.” He tugged his cap down over his matted, side-parted hair and then blended into the mob.
—
Nick was back at Bungalow Heaven West around seven as rainclouds swirled in from the coast. One of the largest recorded events in city annals was in the books. The bridge now belonged to anyone with a gearshift, be it a Chalmers, Buick, Cadillac, Ford, or Stutz.
To whom he belonged was a trickier matter.
Since talking to Upton hours ago, he was having second thoughts about spilling the beans to him later tonight. He wasn’t certain if he believed what his landlord intimated: that Pasadena was plotting to lunge at those western hills, using the bridge as pretext. Frankly, Nick wasn’t certain he believed what lunged out of his own mouth these days.
On the walkway in, he wished he could’ve diverted to Fleet’s to ask his advice. But he was attending a night lecture on the bile catcher of the human body: the gallbladder.
That thought didn’t persist, anyway. Not when Nick realized his door was ajar. “Crap,” he muttered. “Is there a bull’s-eye on my back?”
He poked his head through the gap and stepped in, grabbing the solar lamp he kept on his desk and raising it to strike. “I have a weapon you don’t want to get clubbed with. Anybody there?” Silence.
He toggled on the overhead light, and saw he was alone. How flummoxing, too. Nothing appeared missing or ransacked. He circled back to his door and leaned down to investigate. Yep. Someone picked his lock, as illustrated by the scuffmarks around the keyhole. Nick lumbered inside, on the brink of screaming why now? The only burglar he knew was Jules, and she wouldn’t do this to her solar boy. Could it have been someone from Edison; the coot; a double-crossing Otis?
But he stopped evaluating suspects after a thunderbolt clapped him.
Royo was missing!
Missing after Nick chastised him, before leaving on a day he didn’t bother taking him to Ivy Wall, that he was “a destructive pain in the ass.”
He immediately began searching and yelling for him everywhere he could imagine: up and down Green Street, north to Colorado Street, by the grassy lot where he rolled on his back making yummy noises. Nick pounded on neighbors’ doors, quizzing them if they’d seen him or anything hinky. No one had; they were celebrating the bridge, too. He even jogged behind a Delacey Street boardinghouse whose trashcans the imp rifled through for soup bones.
Back on his front step, he shouted, “Ro-yoooooo. Get your butt home!”
The empty echo was a dagger, so he left his door cracked and walked to his cabinet. He uncorked the schnapps that Lilly gifted him and guzzled a few fingers of it. Seeing no reason to be upright, he went to his bed and fell backward, feeling sorry for himself.
My bungalow gets broken into and he exploits it for a night romp.
Even if he neglected the fur-ball a bit, took his kinship for granted, he was still being kicked out of here thanks to his dog’s indefatigable chompers. Wrung out from everything, Nick tucked into bed and shut his eyes. Seventeen minutes later, a nagging hand wiggled his arm.
“Nick, wake up!”
His sleep center tightened its vault.
“You’ve been drinking—I can smell it. Get out of bed. It’s an emergency.”
When Nick’s breathing changed to snoring, Reginald whisked the blanket out from under his chin. He flipped onto his side, facing the wall. Reginald countered that by filling a mason jar with water and throwing its contents at the back of his head.
Nick turned over, looking at Reginald like a breaching whale. “Scram, pipsqueak. No ostrich rides today,” he said. He closed his eyes in adjournment.
Reginald’s little fingers pried them open. “This isn’t about Mrs. Cleveland. It’s about Royo,” he said in a fraught voice.
Nick yawned. “What about that ingrate? I’m sick of him.”
“You don’t mean that,” said Reginald, who evidently wasn’t leaving. “You’re best pals.”
Nick hauled himself up in bed. “Yeah, well, pals are overrated. Someone busted into my place tonight, and he’s out suckering people for food again by faking he has a limp.”
“No, he isn’t. An evil man took him. Get up.”
Nick did—to go to the kitchen. He tore off some stale pumpernickel, mashing it into his mouth. “How do you know, anyway?”
“Because I was in the fairgrounds after mother and I walked that boring bridge with a million other people. She let me stay behind to buy cotton candy.”
“For the love of God, kid, shut up about the sweets and finish before I boot you.”
“I’m trying to tell you I saw a man there dragging Royo down the hill. He’d wrapped something around his mouth so he wouldn’t bark. Do something! He was suffering.”
“Wrong pooch,” Nick said, thinking back on the day of the movie shoot, when Waldo contended that he glimpsed Royo loose on Orange Grove. They both needed their eyes checked.
“It was Royo. He’s got a bigger head than other half-breeds, and a darker tail.”
“And who is this supposed dognapper?” Nick asked derisively. “The bogeyman?”
“I don’t know. He has black hair. Don’t let him kill Royo.”
“You’re seeing things that don’t exist.”
“Let’s go find out,” Reginald said, stomping his foot. “Our friend deserves that.”
“You do it,” Nick said, returning to bed. “I’ve done plenty for the kids and animals of Pasadena. I’ll hunt for him tomorrow. He’s a survivor.”
Reginald stormed toward the transom, looking bigger than his years. “You know who the real ingrate is? It’s you. I’m going to find him, and when I do, I’m keeping him.”
Soon he was out on the pathway in Nick’s flower-filled front yard.
Keeping him? A wrath Nick didn’t want to acknowledge had been smoldering inside him shot through him with volcanic force. He bolted from bed, ran up behind the boy, and spun him around. He then lifted Reginald up by his armpits as his legs scissored air trying to escape. “Who made you judge and jury, huh?” he said.
“Nobody,” Reginald said, getting teary. “But even a pipsqueak like me know there’s something wrong with you. You tried acting happy during our shows. You pretended to be okay when you and Jules bought me a sarsa-parilla. But you haven’t been the same Nick, not since the bridge accident.”
Words, for once, failed him, as he hoisted his grade-school accuser three feet off the ground. Also failing him: any awareness that a wild parrot was flapping its wings ten feet above in preparation to release a goopy, white shit-bomb on the side of his livid neck.
When Nick looked up after it did, Reginald capitalized. He jammed his right thumb into Nick’s squishy left eyeball
while simultaneously kicking him in his right gonad. Poke. Whack.
Nick dropped Reginald onto the brick walkway and fell to his knees, hurting so badly he didn’t know what to clutch first. Reginald’s foot to his nut-sack knocked the breath out of him; had the eyeball in white-hot pain been shoved any deeper into his skull, he would’ve have forgotten his times-tables, if not most of 1912.
He attempted getting up without success. Reginald observed it from ten yards away at the low picket fence, where he scampered for protection.
When Nick spoke again, he spoke one-eyed in a higher register, like a Cyclops entering puberty might. “What you said before, about me being a different Nick, you were on the money.”
“I was?” Reginald said, with a look of wonder and a dash of pride.
“Somebody once warned me that not everything that glistens is gold, but I wouldn’t listen. Just because the bridge was stunning; just because she was daring.”
“What does that have to do with Royo?” Reginald asked, edging nearer.
“Everything. And he’s tried telling me. Him, the Spring Street graybeard.”
“You’re talking gobbledygook, but your heart’s back, I can tell.”
Then a second epiphany clocked him: Royo didn’t tuck tail to gambol off amid a burglary. He was the reason for the break-in—the only reason. Taken by someone who loathed his “owner.”
“You’re right about something else, kid,” Nick said, voice less falsetto. “Somebody did swipe him. Now help this dingbat inside before I pee blood. We have a plan to craft.”
It was simple: Nick would dash to Busch Gardens to save Royo, if he was savable. Reginald, meantime, would run home and then to the police should he not hear from Nick within twenty-four hours.
“But I want to go with you,” Reginald pleaded. “To help. I can fight.”
“You proved that. It’s too risky for you.”
“But.”
“‘But’ and ‘why’ are your two favorite words. Thank God for that.”
“You know what: you’re still my hero.”
“Pick better heroes next time,” Nick said, as his gouged eye started to open.