by Chip Jacobs
Before they left, Nick gave Reginald two items, one for bravery, the other for safekeeping. Upton would just have to wait.
Screwing the Pooch
How-ru. How-ruuu. How-roo-a-roo.
Royo’s distressed wail sounded less Labrador-boxer in pitch and more beagle-ish, just not like any belonging to Valley Hunt Club members in the Pasadena of yore. This hound-ish baying was a canine SOS for “Get me out of here!”
He listened to it from the threadbare patch outside of Mrs. Bang’s, close to where Reginald claimed witnessing that “evil man” dragging their muzzled friend away.
How-roooo, How-rooooooo.
It was killing Nick hearing this; killing him not knowing where the yowling was originating because of how sound pachinko-ed maddeningly off the hills. If he had any advantages here, it was his familiarity with the terrain, and the almost spooky incandescence produced by the white rainclouds, the bridge’s grape-bunch lamps, and his own silvery lights.
How-ra-u-eeeerrrrr. Arrrrrrr-huh.
Oh, no. The previous yelping signaled desperation. This last one was the muffled garble of a windpipe being crushed. Accomplishing zero where he was, he hustled down the trail toward base camp. There, he jogged parallel to the arches, looking out with an inflamed eye (and ignoring a bruised testicle).
Arrrrr-urrrrrrrr. Uhhhh.
Then the howling ceased, and Nick’s heart practically did, in concert.
“Royo,” he yelled, staring up at the moon gauzed by the clouds. “Tell me where you are.”
He ran back and forth, searching for a shallow grave around the bridge’s mammoth footings. Panting, in his second cold sweat of the day, he thought about breaking into Marcus’s tent to grab his bullhorn to demand Royo answer him. A minute passed, and hopelessness spiked.
“I’m on the bridge,” a disembodied voice whispered when all seemed lost. “Find me before I drift off.”
Oh my God. He can mind-talk, too. How could I not know that?
Nick rushed back the direction he came. Up on the deck, everything was so illuminated that someone with cataracts could’ve spotted the rope knotted around a baluster in a place he now officially despised: the pedestrian bay over the Big Whopper arch.
He raced along the curve, past the ceremonial bunting, hurtling onto the inlaid bench on the deck’s south flank. Scanning downward was the most horrific sight he’d ever seen, and he’d seen some horror in his time. Royo was swinging by his neck on a makeshift noose, tongue protruding.
“Don’t you dare die on me,” Nick hollered. “You battle!”
His hands worked frantically tugging Royo up by the five-foot lariat. His dog was twitching as Nick brought him over the rampart and laid him sideways on the bench. He undid the noose, unbuckled Royo’s collar, and, on a flier, began pushing on Royo’s distended stomach to billow air into him. He’d shadowbox his past later.
When the spasms ended and the dog went completely still, Nick hurried out a crumpled stick of Wrigley’s, waving it under Royo’s dry nose. The only sounds were a gramophone from a nearby house playing “Silent Night” and Nick’s voice. “Return,” he said chokingly. “You hear me? Anything you want. Just return.”
He curled over him, squishing foreheads. “You can’t go, boy,” he thought. “Tell the graybeard to keep his vapory mitts off.”
But it was too late: those mitts had an agenda. The only motion was the artificial movement of Royo’s stomach from Nick compressing it. He lifted the dog’s head into his lap, his tears dripping onto the animal’s grayed muzzle.
This was premeditated murder—a homicide—nothing like leading starving farm animals over the cliffs in drought-time mercy killings. This was abomination from which no optimist could recover. This needed avenging. A minute passed and the stars weren’t interceding
Or were they? Royo’s nostrils puffed, and his tail jerked. Nick stroked his snout, goading him to breathe, praying for him to live. Then came a sputter and rasp. “Amen,” Nick said, snot trickling down. “Welcome back, rascal.”
Unless he received medical attention, however, this was going to be a short homecoming. Royo regained consciousness laboring to swallow. Watching him struggle for breath, seeing the blood coating his tongue, Nick knew he needed a veterinarian—and that the Pasadena Humane Society was mere blocks away. He’d smash its doors down if need be. “You hold on,” he thought. “You have triple the grit I do.”
—
At last, Ernest Scuzzi was seeing the worm turn his way. He wouldn’t be observing this tender scene from the leafy shadows of the bridge’s western entrance otherwise.
Until now, the pattern always repeated for the sharp-nosed, high-school dropout from Des Moines. A construction site would hire him and, within a few months of getting acquainted, sack him. He needed a do-over, so when John Visco agreed to let him stay in his tiny guest room, Ernest resolved to try sidelining his blackest impulses.
John’s death, just below where he was now, proved an ironic test, for it deprived Ernest of the one person who still believed he was redeemable. In attending the hearing at the mortuary housing John’s corpse, Ernest expected justice but only heard about “faulty” lumber. He wanted someone to be prosecuted, not coroner Calvin Hartwell citing jurisdictional technicality for handcuffing him. Ernest stalked him outside to denounce the whitewash, which Jules overheard, but words only get you so far.
Even so, he might’ve forgotten Nick’s broken promise that the guilty would pay—if he didn’t happen to see Nick again. And he did, by pure luck, or fate, on a Santa Monica Ferris wheel one Saturday evening in September. The Goody Two Shoes was yucking it up with a blonde and his idiotic dog, which smirked and sat upright in the seat exactly like his owner. Such rage encased Ernest’s throat.
Everything, as always, soon unraveled. Two weeks ago, he showed up to Cawston drunk; the next day, he made a rough play for the sexual favors of a gift shop cashier, and Cecil Jenks fired him. Juana, alarmed by Ernest’s shifty eyes, ordered him to move out that night. Ernest decamped to a Los Angeles flophouse, where shaving the next morning, his razor encountered a gumball-sized lump along the base of his neck. There was one under an armpit, too.
At least that brought clarity. Reckoning he had a death sentence, he planned to hop a train to Denver to live out his final days in a Rocky Mountain haze of booze and brothels. First, he’d get justice for John. And he’d make it poetic. Two days back, he returned to Cawston to ask for his last paycheck rather than having it mailed. When the secretary left the room to speak with the payroll czar about it, he swiped Nick’s Green Street address from a file drawer.
Ernest knew Nick would be gone all today at the bridge, so he broke into his bungalow in the late afternoon. Royo growled and sprang at him, but it wasn’t anything Otis couldn’t subdue. After he looped a rag around the dog’s mouth, he used one of the ropes with him to yank him into the canyon; they’d then hid under oaks until the deck was vacant. Up there, Ernest converted his other rope into a noose, untied the dog’s mouth, and hung him from the lamppost. In loitering around to enjoy the torment, he was ecstatic dwelling on how Nick was losing something that believed in him.
Just imagine Ernest’s sadistic joy when Nick himself materialized, trying to rescue a pal closer to death than resuscitation. Two murders for the price of one: yessiree, that worm had turned.
—
Pfsssshhhhhhh: Nick’s hands were sliding under his dog’s chest as that rustling noise from the bottom of the arch perked up his ears. Ten seconds: that was all he’d need to identify the monster that did this. He’d hotfoot Royo to the humane society.
In stepping onto the bench and leaning over, not once did Nick weigh the possibility he was being lured into a vulnerable position. For he was: the rustling was the sound of a boot crashing into the vegetation below—the boot Ernest removed and chucked there over Nick’s head.
R
oyo understood this scenario was possible, for the graybeard had been whispering to him in his dreams that Nick was only allotted so many chances to wake up—to swat away the inanities and vanities of everyday life to be the real him. Accept that as he must, Royo couldn’t watch the human he loved get a face-full of karma. When Ernest ran up from behind with a wicked smile and shoved Nick over the edge, Royo kept his eyes sealed.
Aaaaaaaaaah,” Nick shrieked somersaulting downward at thirty-two-feet per second, “Royo. Oh, God! Aaaaaaag.”
He bounced into the hardpack, missing any cushioning brush or oaks. The blunt force impact did to him what it did to others: it rearranged an intact anatomy into splintered remnants. Blood spilled everywhere it shouldn’t, including from a perforated intestine bulging from his abdomen like pink sausage.
His fall wasn’t entirely negative, morbidly droll as that may sound. Because of the shock and paralysis, Nick wasn’t in crippling pain like Harry Collins was during his rubble imprisonment. Nor was his brain without electricity, for how else could he watch a neural nickelodeon of himself heaved into the sky by the Pacific Electric rail-barn fireball, and then a tail-singed Royo tug him to safety down smoky Fair Oaks Avenue? How else could he watch himself dangle by a leather strap from this very bridge?”
In his real time of dying, a sonnet next filled Nick’s head. It must’ve been a passage from Henry David Thoreau, his father’s favorite writer, or a prophecy of where he was headed.
Fly away leave today,
Way up high in the night
—
Fifteen stories above, Ernest took Royo’s un-clasped collar as his trophy, and trotted off with one boot missing. Happy enough to squeal, he’d be in Denver in two days and dead himself inside a month.
After he left, Royo raised his mangled neck in that pedestrian bay carved for romance and panoramas and jumped down off the bench. He forced his wheezing self along the trail to where he intuited Nick lay. The graybeard—wrongly besmirched as a Svengali, huckster, hypnotist, puppeteer, and private dick—still guided him, though Royo wished brutality wasn’t the medium by which this story unfurled.
By the time his face loomed over Nick, the butterscotch wolf no longer aspired to be human. He was too jaded a creature for that now. You think a husky would shove a Doberman Pincher to his death because he was too timid to rat out the city he loved? The jury was in: those highest up the food chain were the Earth’s most diabolical. That’s why his human was imprinted into the dirt—with oozing brain matter and a leg angling forty-five degrees—as the Colorado Street Bridge’s inaugural murder victim.
“I knew you’d come, boy,” Nick thought seeing Royo, unable to talk. “What a mess of things I’ve made.”
Royo collapsed next to him. “What can I say? Man struggles, we snuggle,” he responded clairvoyantly. “Admit it: you were too caught up in your own hurly burly to realize that, on some days, I could speak.”
“You’re the voice I was supposed to tail. And here I wanted to punch that graybeard.”
“Regrettable, though I’m not permitted to confide much more.”
“At least confess you broke into my pantry again. I can smell your breath.”
“Daugherty’s potato chips. If it crunches, I need it in my mouth: cereal, wood, tennis rackets.” The dog let out a scraping cough and continued. “I must show you something.”
Royo lifted a shaky paw onto Nick’s dislocated shoulder, just as he lifted it onto Edna Hollister’s before leukemia took her. Nick, though, didn’t view the afterlife; he viewed an earlier life, one on a mountaintop pasture on a brilliant day before Thaddeus Lowe and Adolphus Busch arrived. He was Tommy, the little boy attacked by carnivorous eagles, and Royo was Remy, the land mammal who saved him.
“So that’s why birds of prey mortified me. You’ve rescued me twice now, and I’ve returned the favor once. I failed you.” A tear rolled from Nick’s bloody eyeball.
“No, you failed yourself and your town. But I’m not crucifying you. How often is a canyon dog permitted to slurp Budweiser, or make sick children giggle, let alone watch someone decapitate a clay elf?”
“If we’re tied together, why couldn’t I have remembered our lives before? I’m not a bad egg. I’m the history buff—the Teddy Stumper.”
Royo’s own tears splashed onto Nick’s face. Yes, dogs can cry, among other surprises.
“It brings me no pleasure informing you of this as you fade out. Your actions haven’t merited rewarding you with memories of who’ve you been.”
“Why?”
“You never risked enough when it mattered.”
“Aw, not much longer, boy. Something’s barreling at me. Listen. When I go, you live to the fullest. You find somebody who appreciates your rapscallion spirit.”
Royo licked Nick’s face for the last time. “Why? I already found that in your Green Street bungalow. If only—”
“Sap, are my lights glowing?”
Royo whimpered. “Still incorrigible, Nick. But yes, brighter than ever.”
“Bravo, flying dog!”
“Bravo, ostrich man!”
That was a wrap. Nicolas Augustus Chance died still believing the sun rose in his Pasadena.
—
On this day of civic accomplishment, many living near the bridge heard the plaintive howling that next rang out; one homeowner cracked wry about Baskerville hounds.
A couple of entrepreneurs resembling the future Laurel & Hardy comedy team chalked the sound up to a manic coyote closing in on somebody’s pussycat. Last month, Nick himself chased the pair off after they snuck onto the deck to test launch a parachute they hoped to sell to local aviation startups. “You may have interrupted us tonight, but you can’t forever,” the fatty of the two shouted at Nick.
Two minutes ago, they made good on their promise, returning in a jalopy while clueless about what just happened here. Like Ernest, neither bungler appreciated that they, too, were bit players in the celestially orchestrated Nick Chance Awakening Project. That’s why their prototype parachute, the one created with too little chute for their experimental payload (fifty pounds of bricks in a wicker basket), was destined to fail.
Royo, draped over Nick’s body, sensed this was how he’d pack it in. Arrruggghhhhhhhh, he yelped when the weight clobbered him. And then there was no pain as a wheel of purple light spun toward them.
Both he and Nick were gone, but we’re nowhere near an end.
—
Overnight on December 13, 1913, the storm clouds helping to radiate that eerie light uncorked a downpour that gobsmacked even old-timers like A. C. Vroman. Citrus trees snapped. Red-tile ranchos you could get for a bargain leaked. Upton Sinclair believed that’s why Nick didn’t knock: Mother Nature waylaid him.
The normally gurgling stream under the bridge within hours transformed intself into a churning river of destruction. The muddy tide sucked away everything not lashed down: deflated balloons, construction nails, a parachute, much of the Scoville footbridge, as well as the bodies of a twenty-eight-year-old man and his frisky Lab-boxer. The already sodden banks around the roadway contributed to this fast-moving flotsam. When the top layer slid away, it carried down tons of dirt as well as every one of Nick’s eighty solar lamps; they didn’t even survive one official night. The ruins cascaded into the Los Angeles River, before bobbing or sinking in the Pacific Ocean.
After the storm, Fleet’s search efforts to locate Nick and Royo went nowhere, despite his canvassing the town and presurring reporters to write about their disappearances. When the two never returned, he supposed they’d bailed on Pasadena to begin anew somewhere else and had their reasons for not communicating. Fleet didn’t know whether to be furious at them or mystified about them. Nick’s mother, Amy, was caught in that same ambivalence, once she bawled her eyeballs out and told God to take her, too.
Oddly, those emotions proved eph
emeral. Six months later, Amy Chance and Fleet began forgetting details about Nick—his smile, his catchwords, his favorite sandwich—as if he were sun-bleaching figure in an aging photograph. This same specific forgetting also befell Jules, the lonely Portland suffragette, widow Lilly Busch, chef Buford, young Reginald, and Nick’s closest Cawston friends. After the initial panic and dread over the pair’s whereabouts, everybody went about their lives, always loving and missing Nick and Royo, but not able to fully grasp them in their mind’s eye anymore. Once Fleet died, following a long career as a joke-cracking doctor, traces of him then faded, too. Indeed, somebody rummaging through vintage yearbooks or government records would’ve found nothing about him, Nick, and some of the others. As if they never existed.
Presented these facts, ’ol Chester would’ve reminded you that Pasadena’s blindingly beautiful bridge wasn’t inert by any means; that it must’ve been visiting amnesia on folks for reasons beyond their pointy heads (and certainly any Mercereau Company suit). Not an entirely bad guess for somebody making a living with a hammer and a sneer.
In any other news, completion of the Colorado Street Bridge thrust Pasadena over the top to win the blue-ribbon prize early in 1914 for “America’s Best Small Town.” In doing so, Nick’s Crown City beat out Annapolis, Reno, Greenville, and Cape Cod; nothing in Indiana made the cut. In August, citizens, in a low turnout election, voted to annex Linda Vista and the San Rafael Heights. This time, nobody gave any lofty speeches.
Failing Mac
This flannel will pop over your Levi’s. Pair it with some Timberlands and cowabunga; you’ll be a grunge god fighting off the ladies. Hey, mister, are you okay?”
Jorge Silva’s customer, alive but not living by most New Age standards, didn’t answer. He was too distracted by something outside the plate-glass window of Colorado Boulevard’s Banana Republic.
The effeminate sales clerk in Beatles’ bangs and a paisley shirt jiggled the man’s shoulder with one hand, while his other extended the red-and-black, long-sleeve shirt he was peddling. “I can buzz my manager if you need medical attention. My cousin is an epileptic. He gets this way sometimes.”