At the mess tent the following day, after he filled out his employment papers and requisition needs, Marcus introduced Nick to some of what he tabbed the job’s “bridge rats.” They were a rough-hewn bunch, hardened like coal miners (minus any “Black Lung cough”). No one could doubt the men’s tradecraft.
There were the two Colorado brothers (yes, Colorado, like the street), and two John’s (Visco and Moseley); there was Ed Erickson, and J. Mulaney, C. J. Johnson, and foreman R. Reynolds. The most memorable name: B. Mum. Marcus told Nick he’d meet the project’s onsite executives, lead civil engineer C. K. Allen, of the design firm of Waddell and Harrington, and F. W. Crocker from Mercereau, later.
“Try not to embarrass me with the suits,” he said. “You’re still an asterisk.”
For the next three days, Nick was all eyes and no mouth, reminding himself not to gawk too much at the bridge’s majestic contour.
Before he got rolling, the company needed to order the parts. His pint-size lamps bore no resemblance to the much larger, conventionally powered ones that’d shine from pedestrian alcoves jutting over the deck’s sides. Once installed, they’d be beauts: forty-six fluted, cast-iron lampposts, each one hung with five fishbowl-shaped globes pinched together like grapes. Equally attractive would be the inlaid benches and urn-supported balusters that’d be carved out at the end. Everything about the viaduct shouted class.
And, speaking of class, Marcus put Nick through his own, reminding him he needed to be “a student of the bridge” in case he was asked to emcee a VIP tour as one of the few college-educated grunts. “Jot this down,” he ordered, in a first-week lecture. “This is your ‘Star Spangled Banner.’ Commit the details to memory.”
Nick scribbled Marcus’s words in his trusty, moleskin notepad. “She’ll be 1,480 feet long and twenty-eight-feet wide end to end. Height: twelve to fifteen stories above the ravine’s floor. Grade east to west: 2.65 degrees. Design: eleven open-spandrel arches, nine of those parabolic. Footing gets complicated, so just say she rests on boulders and gravel capable of handling up to 166 pounds per square foot.”
Nick’s left hand was smeared with black ink before Marcus’s didactic was halfway done. This bridge, he gloated, was to engineering what the Titanic was to cruise ships (before she sank in April): “monumental.” She’d consume eleven thousand cubic yards of concrete, plus six hundred tons of reinforcing steel.
“Now for her real singularities,” Marcus said, fake shining his nails. Besides its ultra-efficient construction and striking aesthetic, which was inspired by structures in Spain, Greece, and Italy, the bridge was being curved at an unusual fifty-two-degree angle to shorten its distance over the highest section of the gorge—a design, Marcus explained, that required a heftier foundation but less expense. “They tell me she’ll be the highest and longest of its kind anyplace. You don’t need a measuring tape to recognize she’ll be a beauty queen.”
The Colorado Street Bridge’s price tag, as Nick already knew, still angered some, strong economy and all. At inception, the tab was ball-parked around $235,000—an exorbitant sum in a time the public demanded limited, penny-pinching government. It took flesh pressing and deal making by Pasadena’s Board of Trade, its proto-chamber of commerce, to goad voters in 1911 to approve a $100,000 bond issue, money matched by Los Angeles County. An additional $13,000 was being ponied up in onetime payments from the city and wealthy interests in unincorporated San Rafael Heights across the Arroyo. Pain, in other words, spread around.
“Avoid talking dollars if you’re ever around muckety-mucks,” Marcus advised. “Distract them with the bend, how she fits into the canyon hand in glove. Stay away from the other sore points, too.”
“Other sore points?” Nick asked, looking up from his notepad. “Isn’t all the controversy over its path settled? The city was trying to do right by everyone, I heard.”
“Some free counsel, Chance. Stay clear of local politics. They can be gangrenous. I’m not from here. I do know your town grew weary of watching so much blood and mayhem when people in wagons flipped over navigating those steep trails in and out of the gorge. What was the slogan used to sell the bridge: motorcars, not horses? The whole country is going to own automobiles in ten years. Harp on that.”
Marcus’s thrust, while gruffly enunciated, resonated with Nick’s conviction in progress. The lives that’d be spared by this roadway, the time economized once drivers could reach Los Angeles, the beach, and points west with a minute ride over the Arroyo more than justified the cost.
How serious was the bridge’s whip-cracking grizzly about Nick’s trivia retention? Serious enough that on Nick’s third day there, after he returned to base camp from planting small yellow flags to evaluate locations for his trial lamps, Marcus hollered at him to come over. “Rookie,” he said, standing above one of the subsurface footings that gripped the Earth like the leg of a claw-foot bathtub. “Tell me about the primary spans.”
“Two sets of parabolic ribs, squared in form, connected by tie beams. The spandrel columns on top carry transverse and longitudinal beams.”
“Not bad for someone who didn’t know a tie beam from Ty Cobb before. You got a decent memory. The road surface?”
“Nine to eleven inches.”
“Project dates?”
“Started in July. Finished by spring.”
“Almost. Gonna take a tad longer to snip the ribbon. We’re estimating summer now.”
“Okeydoke,” Nick said.
“You know what? You’re ready?”
“For what?”
“Not to be a virgin anymore.”
“Pardon, sir?”
The next day, Marcus brought Nick to meet foreman Harold Prescott, “Wink” to his friends on account of an eye twitch. Wink took him someplace he only fantasized about: onto the barebones deck.
“Stay sharp every second up here,” Wink shouted over the diesel engine churning sand, cement, and gravel into wet concrete from the eastern bank. The smoky machine spun with a cyclical racket that vibrated Nick’s boots. “Distracted people don’t last.”
Nick then followed Wink into a makeshift tunnel, which was created by the elevated trestle track for the concrete-bearing dumpcart; wood supports propped that rail high over the deck. Looking west in the slatted light beneath it, the bridge appeared to stretch into golden infinity.
“Keep your ass put while I check on today’s pour,” Wink yelled.
“Done,” Nick shouted back, feeling official.
Stomach-curling to others, the altitude didn’t bother Nick. While Wink ventured out, vanishing into the tunnel, Nick spread his boots for stability. These coordinates sure beat gawking at the bridge from Mrs. Grover Cleveland’s mane. It also changed his perspective. Some locals, for example, compared the company’s tight orchestration to a beehive. Nick, standing where he was now, realized that was the wrong insect metaphor. It was more tantamount to an ant colony.
From his locale, he watched heavy trucks dump their gravel payloads at an outcropping close to where he performed his ostrich rodeos, during which he now wore sunglasses to infuse showbiz flair for the kids. He heard bridge rats communicating from different levels of scaffolding, truncated lingo and whistle sequences. He observed horses, grouped in teams to hoist the timbers needed to mold concrete members, nicker under the stress. When they levered up packs of rebar—long, rods inserted into the drying concrete to strengthen it—they wiggled midair, reminding Nick of giant pencil mustaches.
Lastly was the snow-globe view, for off the deck’s flanks was a breathtaking panorama. Take your pick: the Mount Lowe Railway, Busch Gardens, Los Angeles’s nubby skyline, the squiggly lines of the blue Pacific, scrub forest. You could lose yourself up here. And Nick did with his dreamy expression.
“Hey! What’d I tell you about keeping focused?” Wink hollered from twenty feet away. “Maybe I should’ve described how a cracked skull looks.”
“That’s not necessary,” Nick called back. “I’ll do better my second time. Promise.”
They lingered for another ten minutes, squatting as the dumpcart rumbled slowly overhead. After the vehicle reached the far edge of the deck, Wink described how workers raked the chunky, oatmeal-ish slush from it into a pivoting tin chute called a distribution hopper. From there the goop was funneled into wooden forms known as “falsework.” Once the concrete inside those molds dried, it birthed another structural bone. Steel-welded troughs were hauled out to transfer concrete to the lower levels.
“Time to go,” Wink said. “I’ll notify Marcus you didn’t shit yourself.”
—
“Come in, my dear Nick,” Lilly said, looking insubstantial in the foyer of her Orange Grove manor. “You must be pooped. A tall glass of lemonade should do you wonders.”
Though he’d prefer a Budweiser and a washcloth for a French shower, he said, “Count me in.”
It was Saturday, and he spent the morning tramping around the rutted hillsides, revising lamp locales for maximum sunbeam collection. That his socks now were peppered with prickly foxtails or that he tripped over a buried rock mattered little. Marcus needed to be dazzled.
After his half-day shift, he rode Mrs. Cleveland, who RG generously brought up from Cawston, for another ostrich rodeo. Today there were twenty children in attendance. This being his fifth show, he allowed little Reginald, whom he ran into earlier at the soda fountain, to arrange the hoops and small jumps he added to make the show livelier. And it was. Now he felt whooped.
Lacquered in sweat, he followed Lilly into the depths of the city’s most talked-about residence. “After me,” she said. “We’ll relax in the parlor.”
Ivy Wall was paneled and upholstered, decorated in Old World luxury with crystal chandeliers and valuable artwork. Every inch of hardwood floor was buffed flawlessly, every Persian rug priceless. Her husband’s personalized Pullman railcar was reputed to be similarly resplendent.
They passed walls hung with photographs of the imperial-bearded, barrel-chested Adolphus—doppelganger, perhaps, for the future “Rich Uncle Pennybags” on the Monopoly board. Lilly’s hubby had hooded eyes and, now, a beard that lengthened as his hair thinned. The photos showed him hobnobbing with presidents Roosevelt and Taft, the head of Harvard, even rival Frederick Pabst. In some shots, they posed with the clubbiness of poker buddies.
“It’s good to have friends in high places,” Lilly chirped, noticing Nick’s bulging eyes. “Did you know that Adolphus predicted that Andrew (as in Carnegie) and JP (think Morgan) would covet houses here after he showed them around? He was correct, though sometimes I wish he hadn’t said a peep. I wanted to keep Pasadena our secret.”
Nick, who always considered the city’s “wintering tycoons” more of a curiosity than emblematic of what spawned Pasadena’s exceptionalism, tried not hyperventilating. Every ten steps, it seemed, were fresh flowers in costly vases. How could this be, he marveled: him here weeks removed from his drunken escapades in Busch Gardens? He’d bumbled upward.
Strolling to Lilly’s parlor, they passed a side window out of which loomed another sumptuous property radiating palatial ambience. This was “The Blossoms,” which Adolphus purchased from tobacco magnate George S. Myers for a then-home sales-price record: $165,000. And what did the Busches do with it? They converted it into a guesthouse. But when you’re president of the company producing the “King of Beers,” selling more than a million barrels a year, you can spend as a king would.
Adolphus, one of twenty-two children, emigrated from Germany, entering the brewery business in his early twenties. St. Louis, home to many of America’s first-generation German immigrants, was an obvious place for him to settle. Those Germans knew their beer, and Adolphus wanted to win their loyalty. Love Lilly as he did, his marriage to her was strategic. His father-in-law was veteran brew-meister Eberhard Anheuser.
After Adolphus joined his company, he set about crafting a hard-to-make, crisp lager that’d appeal to his native countrymen and Americans alike. By the 1870s, he was making headway, partly by rewriting the rules of beer-ology. Under him, Budweiser became the first United States-produced beer to be pasteurized and distributed nationally on refrigerated railcars, which were replenished by icehouses along the tracks. Besides ensuring his product didn’t spoil, he also mastered brand marketing, product giveaways, and opened his plant to public tours.
Budweiser’s little big man was a different sort of new money tycoon, flamboyant and philanthropic, bombastic and unvindictive, except when it came to backstabbing politicians. He was unrepentant about flaunting his wealth but also enjoyed fraternizing with working stiffs. Nick recalled that a few locals carped that he’d thrown his money around to snap up excessive acreage. The majority felt otherwise, swooning for Busch Gardens, even if it sat in a city founded by teetotalers and only was open part time.
Adolphus spoke with a diminishing German accent in a booming, often blustery voice. What he rarely talked much about, though, was the myth that he bootstrapped his way to the top as an immigrant who began without two nickels to rub together. This simply wasn’t true. Even so, he deserved his place as one of the planet’s mightiest businessmen.
Something about being in Ivy Wall reminded Nick’s of an anecdote about Adolphus’s sway. Supposedly, he once abandoned guests, among them an aide-de-camp to German Kaiser Wilhelm I, at an affair here to seethe in private over what he considered President Taft’s personal betrayal of him: Taft’s decision to publicly denounce alcohol for the crime and moral decay of the American male. So pervasive was Adolphus’s clout that the Kaiser’s man couldn’t complain about being snubbed, and Taft, a jolly, hail-fellow sort, scrambled to make amends.
Not that Nick questioned Lilly about any details.
“Sit down,” she told him, pointing toward a Queen Anne chair in her sun-kissed parlor, which overlooked the upper gardens.
“You sure, Lilly? I’m gamy.”
“Nothing baking soda won’t address later. I have sons. Now, tell me: were the children amused by your larks today?”
“Yes, if their mirth was any barometer. They implored me to attempt a handstand. I was contemplating bringing my new dog next time to distract them.”
Nick’s benefactor giggled as a servant rolled in a sterling silver tray with two glasses of iced lemonade and finger sandwiches. Next to them, horrifically, was a crystal dish of marzipan candies. He tamped down his cowlick and swigged lemonade. “Mrs. Busch, sorry, I keep forgetting, Lilly: I cannot thank you sufficiently for helping me to line up this job. To know I’m contributing to the bridge, well, I could die happily.”
“All I did was place a call. You took it from there. But, I must confess to harboring a stealthy reason for inviting you here this afternoon. I have another favor to request; I hope it was all right passing you a note to visit me here through the (Mercereau) company.”
Here it comes; more terms. “Think nothing of it. I’m in your debt,” he said after swallowing a mouthful of cucumber sandwich. “Anything you require.”
“This won’t take more than a few hours. Have you heard of the Pasadena Perfect Committee?”
“I can’t say that I have.”
“You’re about to, then.”
The committee, she explained, was tasked with compiling the city’s application for America’s “Most Beautiful Small Town” competition, a contest loaded with entries from the Atlantic seaboard. She volunteered to be a cochairwoman and was assigned to memorialize the Arroyo’s history tracing back to Pasadena’s founding “Indiana Colony.” What she was too polite to articulate: the effort was becoming a vanity project that gobbled everybody’s time.
“See those papers?” she said, brow crinkled. “It’s my personal Alps. And that’s from the last six months.”
Across the room, Nick spied a Victorian table buckling with documents, folders, and reports three-feet high. A baby ostrich could’ve hidden behind it. Lilly pressed her chin into her beaded collar, frazzled at the sight of the paper mountain.
“Since you told me you grew up here, I was hoping you might help the assistant I retained to organize the material into a quick city history lesson. My chauffeur can drive you two, so there’d be no walking, just talking. You thrive at that.”
Nick, on his third tea sandwich, covered his mouth. “I’d be honored.”
“Good, good, good. Don’t let my assistant’s quiet demeanor mislead you. She’s extremely bright and efficient at her job. She’s from Chicago and, how can I put it, unfamiliar with her new setting. Studying old reports is no substitute for hearing it from a native son. A few hours pointing out representative sights are all I ask.”
“Piece of cake,” Nick said, thinking he lifted a weight from her. But, he realized a heavier one lurked in her baggy eyes.
“Much appreciated, my dear Nick. Would it be a bother for me,” she paused, “to share an admission difficult for me to divulge to others?”
“Of course not,” Nick said, unsure what to say.
“My attention is elsewhere. Adolphus, my darling strudel bear, is not well. Not well at all. I’d be with him in Germany today, but he forbade me from traveling there because he refuses to distress me. His lungs are awful. It’s cruel enough we lost our boy, Peter. I fear Adolphus may join him soon.”
Nick went still. Peter Busch was a prodigal son who died under mysterious circumstances; there was gossip that he contracted a virulent infection after being pricked by a girlfriend’s hairpin. “I’m certain your husband has retained the best doctors.”
Lilly’s fingers quivered gripping her lemonade. Her other hand was loaded down with a bracelet enameled with that Budweiser eagle. “Yes,” she said, “the finest doctors money can buy, and yet none can quell his cough.” She cleared a sudden frog in her throat. “I doubt he’ll ever return here. Oh, how he cherished chasing his grandkids around Hansel and Gretel in the gardens. Ich bin gebrochen.”
“Pardon.”
“I’m brokenhearted. If he goes, we’ll be a ship without its captain.”
Aha. She’s suffering. I must remind her of a son. “Lilly, don’t give up hope. Your husband has defied the odds his entire life. The Rockefellers aren’t like that. I’ll pray for him.”
Nick felt horrible. One minute, Adolphus’s Pullman was smashing the land-speed record, arriving here from St. Louis in a blurring fifty-eight hours; the next Lilly is contemplating a funeral cortege aboard it.
“Bless you, my boy. Maybe my daughters are right when they assert I get ahead of myself.”
Movement from the parlor’s entryway broke her sadness. A woman in a veal-colored dress wiggled her derriere into the partially ajar French doors to open them. She was taller than diminutive Lilly. Nick couldn’t glimpse her face as she backed in to unload a fresh armful of documents on the committee-designated table.
“My regrets, ma’am,” she said. “I was unaware you were entertaining. I wanted to alert you that I finished.”
“So quickly? I assumed it’d take you a week to sort through that stack?”
“It wasn’t that onerous. I have a system.”
Lilly’s Girl Friday wheeled around, and Nick mouth fell open—again. It was her, the knockout from the church service from which Fleet nearly got them booted; the one who temporarily paralyzed Nick’s capacity to speak. Now she looked through him. Nick chugged the last of his lemonade to steady his composure.
“Jules Cumbersmith, please make the acquaintance of Nicholas Chance. He’s a fine young man who works on the bridge and hails from here. Of all the people I’ve considered to educate you further about Pasadena, he’s the best.”
Nick popped up to shake her hand with a clammy palm. She offered back a fish-cold hand, more of a side pinky than grip, and a courtesy smile. “Pleasure,” he said overeagerly for someone trying not to act eager. “Weren’t you at the memorial for Mr. Mercereau?”
“Yes,” she answered in a one-word shutdown. “Lilly: does this appear suitable?” She handed her a one-page summary of something on onion paper.
Lilly ran a bauble-loaded finger down it. “Superlative. I say that every time. You can scoot home.”
Fiery-eyed Jules gave Nick a titular nod and spun in such a rush it fanned her dress behind into a frilly bell. Nick hadn’t moved from where he stood.
“You can sit down,” Lilly said, looking cheerier. “If you can hear me.”
“Whoops,” he said. He parked his sidetracked self in his chair.
“Can you amplify further on what you’d like me to—?” Nick lost his train of thought when Jules appeared through the picture window outside the parlor. “Uh, what was I saying? Oh, yes, the educational tour.”
“Nick, my dear, I wouldn’t raise my hopes.”
“Hopes, about her? Nah. I was pondering on what side of town to commence. I prefer brunettes, anyway.”
“Your expression says otherwise.”
By the time Nick departed Ivy Wall, he came away knowing more about the woman he pretended was of no interest to him. Jules, Lilly let slip, was twenty-seven, educated at Northwestern University. She was a diehard suffragette, cryptic about her off time and past, and a literary aficionado of Upton Sinclair and the Brontë sisters.
“She’s singular, that one,” Lilly said, escorting Nick out. “I’d stick with local girls. Can you be here next Sunday for the tour?”
Nick yearned it were tomorrow. “I can squeeze that in.”
—
That evening inside Nick’s bungalow, where Royo smacked his lips impersonating a hungry Nick, Fleet pitched Saturday night dinner at the Hotel Maryland to celebrate Nick’s new job. Rose-covered pergolas, brass spittoons, elaborate sauces.
“I don’t know,” Nick said, reclining perilously back in his desk chair. “My spats are at the dry cleaners.” He suggested Debussey’s, a tasty deli up the road from Buford’s.
“Pass,” said Fleet, who leaned against a sink nowhere as tidy as Nick’s bed. “We just autopsied a bilious food inspector who basically ate himself to death.”
“Relevance?”
“Debussey’s sells cottage cheese in big scoops, and it reminds me of cadaver cellulose.”
Nick fast-balled a gasket at Fleet, who ducked just in time. “Why do you always have to be so specific about your revolting dissections when you know it nauseates me?”
“I apologize. Apologize for not sending you an embalmed cat after you hid a live toad inside my baked potato last April Fool’s.”
“’Kay. Point taken.”
“What about this place?” Fleet performed a curt bow, hands in praying position. “Understand?”
“You’re a real credit to your race, you know that? Let’s go.”
They soon were ladling wooden spoons into miso soup at a far corner table at Manako’s Japanese restaurant on upper Fair Oaks. Under paper lanterns, customers worked and fumbled chopsticks, scraped dishes, and dropped steamed rice into their laps. The bow-tied Japanese waitstaff laughed about it in private.
Fleet was peppy now that he had some walkaround money from the dowager paying him for sex, meaning he no longer needed to borrow so much from Nick. He emptied his miso in throaty slurps. He and Nick next laid waste to everything set before them: soy cucumbers, sesame chicken, and possibly squid they didn’t order.
Between bites, Nick told Fleet about his encounter with Jules Cumbersmith and Lilly’s serendipitous favor.
“You including the Hotel Green on your itinerary?” Fleet asked.
“How can I not?”
Nick immediately regretted saying this. Fleet enjoyed a semi-photographic memory that enabled him to recite blocks of text he read years ago and score well on medical school exams even if his subject mastery was so-so. Whenever he could razz Nick about what he revered—the hometown whose cape he draped himself in—he did.
“You should entertain this Chicago dame about what happened at that hotel,” he said. “It’s history, too.”
Nick twirled chopsticks while Fleet recounted the debacle. Only years after its inception, Pasadena tried impressing the first president to visit it, Benjamin Harrison, with a swanky, two-hundred-person dinner. On this anticipated night at the Hotel Green, high rollers clinked glasses and gave toasts amid polished cutlery buffed to Emily Post standards. What could go wrong? Liquor. Behind the kitchen doors, “colored” waiters hired from Los Angeles uncorked the hooch reserved for later. Hors d’oeuvres, as a result, were stalled, follow-up courses sidetracked. The help left a path of empty wine bottles in their wake.
“Should your Ms. Cumbersmith not be amused,” Fleet said, “I’d revisit your infatuation with her.”
Nick hated admitting it. Fleet, in all his obnoxiousness, made sense. “Benjamin Harrison is in then.”
Fleet, later in the meal, did something uncharacteristic. He turned sincere. “Look. I know we express ourselves by teasing, but I’m proud of you. Wiring cash to your mother, standing up against Otis, staying faithful to your lights, well, that’s mettle in my book.”
Nick slow-punched Fleet in the shoulder, affection for emotionally constipated men. Then he saw he left a cube of tofu in his soup. He spooned it up and beamed his pal a knavish look. “Should we try again? Tonight could be our night for a soy free throw.”
“We do have juvenile reputations to uphold,” said Fleet.
He slanted his head back and opened his mouth. The last time they attempted this, the gelatinous blob ricocheted off Fleet’s nose and onto another customer’s table, which the diners there didn’t find terribly farcical. This time Nick gave it better arc. The tofu landed directly on Fleet’s tongue.
They erupted in laughter, which now caused half the restaurant to gawk at them. Nick lofted his menu to shield his blushing face; Fleet almost choked getting the cube down. By the time they caught their breath, a woman in a crude burlap dress and Indian necklace was sashaying toward them. She sat down at their table, self-invited.
“The initiative us businesswomen have to take,” she said. “Heya, Nick. You still interested in nuts?” She raised a brown paper bag she brought over from her seat.
“Yes, I think. Meet my friend, Fleet Burdett.”
“Pleasure, Hattie Bergstron.” For a farmer unfairly maligned for witch-hood and lesbianism, she made burlap look respectable. “What do you say? For a nickel, these almonds will nourish you as nature intended.”
“I promised.” Nick dug a nickel from his trousers. Hattie dropped it in her cleavage.
“I hope I’m not intruding on you rapscallions.” She said that she and Maude were sampling “traditional city food,” minus any meat, after selling out all the nuts and fresh produce from their stand at the intersection of Orange Grove and Colorado Street.
Intruding? The instant sexual alchemy between her and Fleet was as thick as their goo-goo eyes over the table’s soy sauce. Hattie couldn’t wait to regale him with her story about her commune’s migration from Pennsylvania to the hills outside Pasadena, and how it was ostracized for eschewing dairy, spices, and war. She was an animated talker.
Fleet kicked Nick under the table to signal he intended to pursue this vegan Annie Oakley. “So,” he said, “no one inside your group consumes eggs or starches, either? I ask this purely out of nutritional curiosity, being a future doctor.”
“Nope. We do cultivate grapes for homemade wine. As a scientist, you ought to observe the fermentation process.”
“I definitely should.”
Nick prophesized where this was going: impending nudity. Fleet and Hattie agreed that they needed to dispose of that wine tonight, lest it spoil in another victory for the city’s moralizing prohibitionists. Up rocketed Nick’s hand for the bill.
While he waited for it to escape this hormones-derailed dinner, Fleet tried further impressing Hattie, who was boyishly cute for a woman and definitely self-assured. He regurgitated the Hotel Green story.
Not to be outdone, she told her own presidentially themed tale. About six weeks ago, she explained she noticed that someone stole a little-known, gold-embossed plaque near her stand. Inscribing it was Teddy Roosevelt’s warning to city politicians during his 1903 visit to the Arroyo Seco. Hattie knew neither the identity nor motive of whoever removed it. But she remembered its phrasing, which she theatrically repeated: “Mr. Roosevelt said, ‘what a splendid natural park you have right here! Oh, Mr. Mayor—’”
“Don’t let them spoil that,” Nick said, completing the sentence. “I heard him say that in person.”
As soon as his words died out, Fleet’s expression turned impish again. Just like that, Nick recognized he stepped into a self-loaded wolf trap. He didn’t need Fleet dredging up his long-ago brush with Roosevelt. Ever. Now, he kicked Fleet under the table, and Fleet took mercy on him.
Hattie didn’t notice it; she just finished her memory about the mysterious plaque. “I’ll never forget when I saw it went missing. It was the very second that I heard the explosion from that grim accident at the Pacific Electric facility.”
“Check,” Nick said again, waving his arm. He didn’t fancy rehashing that incident, either, even though it brought an inimitable dog into his life—a dog, Nick suspected, that could occasionally read his mind.
Meal over, bill divided, he moseyed along Colorado Street, where you often needed to pivot sideways to avoid colliding with nuzzling couples or messenger boys. When he entered his bungalow, there was Royo, reclined up against Nick’s headboard like a person reading a book, except he wasn’t reading. He had Nick’s belt in his chops for a good chew. Shamed, Royo dropped his leather aperitif and brought his front paws together, as if bowing in contrition.
“Nice try,” said Nick, who was getting used to this.
He clumped down at his desk to tinker in his Saturday night solitude with another gadget he wasn’t ready to demonstrate to anyone. He popped in a stick of Wrigley’s Spearmint of which he went through a couple packs a week. Royo, immediately, was at his legs, begging for his own stick. “There’s no way,” Nick said. “You don’t chew. You inhale.”
Nick changed his mind when Royo whimpered again. Yep: he could chew gum, too. “You’re some kind of freak,” he said, fluffing Royo’s ears.
Over in Linda Vista, Fleet and Hattie downed Hattie’s homegrown Cabernet at a fortuitous time. Most of the hillside colony had boarded a train to San Diego to scope out a potential new home. At midnight, the couple’s incantations echoed so far that a homeowner in Prospect Park across the valley mistook the squealing for the annoying green parrots.
Ignorant man: didn’t he know the chartreuse birds cawed youch, youch, yeow-chhhh, not a carnal yes, yes, yes, yeeees?