by Jack Finney
A mile past the Civic Center at a partly constructed building in a green-lawned industrial park beside the service road, Lew and Harry took two twenty-foot roof beams from a stack of them—heavy timbers half a foot thick, nearly a foot wide—and loaded them into the back of the van. Then Jo drove, fast, back along the narrow road—the obviously stolen beams projecting behind were a risk they had to take—and into the parking lot behind the Civic Center. Lights out, motor off, they waited. Nothing moved, the lot dark and silent, empty except for a lineup of orange-painted county road-maintenance trucks, and a single car. High on the hillside from which it projected, the great Civic Center loomed like a castle. Jo drove on, lights off, partly seeing and partly feeling her way up the dirt road at the back of the hill. Halfway up, she stopped at the padlocked gate in the high mesh fence. The men jumped down in back, dragged out the beams one at a time, and manhandled them over the fence. They climbed the fence, carried the beams on up to the Center, and dropped them in the weeds beside the road which ended here at a leveled area. Lew walked forward to the glass doors which, from up here on the hill, led directly into the top floor. He peered in: under the ceiling lighting the waxed floors shone; nothing moved. Turning away, he reached up as Jo had once done, and touched the roof edge, smiling. Back at the van, Lew tossed the bolt-cutter he had bought into the underbrush. Then they drove home.
From eleven o’clock on they tried to sleep, and presently did, lying partly dressed, women in the bedroom, the men lying on sleeping bags in the living room. Just before Lew drifted off, Harry said, “Lew?”
“Yeah.”
“This gonna work?”
“Yeah.”
“I hope so. I’d give a year of my life for a written guarantee from God.”
At two o’clock when the alarm on the floor beside him rang, it took Lew some seconds to find it and shut it off; he could not understand what the persistent sound was, and didn’t want to move and wake up. Then, heavily awake, thumb still on the stud he’d pressed, desperate to let his eyes close, he understood that he’d known what the ringing had meant, and that he was frightened.
It did not seem possible that they were actually going to do what it was time to do now. Propped on an elbow, blinking rapidly to hang onto wakefulness, he tried to find a way, a mental set, of accepting the truth; that there was almost nothing more between them and what they had said they would do. He felt unwell: was it possible he’d become sick while he slept? His stomach was an emptiness, and he was cold.
“Lew? How much you take to call off this whole fucking—”
“Don’t say it! Or we will. We’ll find reasons, and won’t do it.”
“Right: don’t think, just get up.” Lew heard Harry’s movements, and he sat up, too. From the bedroom came the murmur of Jo’s voice, and Shirley’s muffled reply. Their light snapped on, slanting through the open door onto the nap of the beige hallway rug, and Lew was grateful that it didn’t reach his eyes.
The drapes drawn, only a kitchen light on, they had coffee standing in the kitchen and living room. Lew wore his denims, blue zippered jacket, red mask-cap, and, tonight, a forest-green daypack. Harry was similarly dressed, his jacket dark green, his watch cap blue, his daypack red; and both men wore sneakers. Jo and Shirley wore pants suits, Jo’s chocolate brown, Shirley’s dark gray, and both wore berets. The coffee was too hot, Lew kept burning his lips, and he turned to the sink to cool it with water. Instead he took down the bottle of whiskey from the kitchen cupboard, and walked to the others, pouring a good slug of it into their cups and his own. It cooled his coffee and tasted good; burning his nose clear, warming him from throat to stomach in a palpable, glowing line, and what they were about to do once more became possible, just barely.
Lowering his cup, Harry said, “Bless you. Courage out of a bottle is a lot better than none at all.” He swallowed down the rest, set his cup aside, and turned toward the outer door. “Well, c’mon, Sergeant; you want to live forever?”
• • •
CHAPTE TEN
• • •
At the wheel of the van, Shirley beside her, the men hidden in the back, Jo curved onto the freeway, greenly lighted, empty and quiet in the night; far ahead across the blackness of the Bay the lighted city shimmered remotely.
Presently, near stalling, the van crested Waldo, then picked up speed, rolling down toward the lighted tunnel. Inside the tunnel, framed in the dome-shaped opening of its other end, the great towers of Golden Gate Bridge appeared, rising black against the night sky, the beacons at their tops winking red, the orange-yellow lights of the great span arcing across the black water.
On the bridge she slowed; headlights had appeared in her big side rear-view. They grew, the mirror glaring, the car drew abreast and passed, its driver glancing over at her. Then once more there was nothing behind, and only the single pair of rapidly shrinking tail lights ahead.
Jo leaned toward the windshield to stare out; first, at the long, empty, lighted roadway; then, lifting her eyes reluctantly, up at the enormity of its soaring north tower straddling the roadway like a giant ladder—a leg on each side, four huge transverses like rungs between them. In the orange light of the bridge lamps the first thirty feet of the great twin tower legs showed rust-red; beyond reach of the lights they turned abruptly black, endlessly rising into the night sky. The tower was so high, she thought, terrifyingly so, higher than in daylight, the winking red beacons at its top remote as the lights of a plane.
The rivet-studded red base of the ocean-side tower leg grew in her windshield to the size of a small building; then they were beside it, Jo braking, checking her rear-view, still blank and empty. She stopped, and the van’s rear doors flung open, banging the sides hard; then the body jounced as Lew and Harry jumped down onto the roadway.
Instantly Harry seized the rolled-up sailcloth, heaving it up onto his shoulder. Beside him Lew stood dragging out the taped-together bundle of long plastic pipes. Harry swung away, trotting to the low, dirt-splashed steel divider between roadway and sidewalk. He jumped up onto it, down onto the walk, and ran across it. Lew followed, the long pipes balanced on one shoulder, a swaying plastic sack dangling from each end. They ran around the great tower base onto the little railed and concrete-paved bay facing the ocean behind it. Here, completely hidden from the roadway by the tremendous steel wall of the tower base, they dropped their burdens to the walk.
Back they ran, hurdling the short barrier to the roadway, and hopped up into the van, pulling the doors closed; it had taken less than fifteen seconds. At the slam of the doors Jo started up, the roadway still empty as far ahead and behind as she could see. On each side of the bridge ahead lay blackness, but between the railings the long empty roadway seemed warm and enclosed under the orange lights, artificial in its motionlessness. Shirley, sitting beside Jo, murmured, “It’s fake, a stage set. Wouldn’t surprise me if the chorus of West Side Story came climbing up over the rails.”
Jo smiled tightly, nodding: she was watching at the right, following the long, slow curve of the immense support cable; black high above where it thinned into invisibility against the night; turning orange-red where it curved, thickening, down into the light. Just ahead at the halfway point of the long empty bridge, the barrel-thick cable seemed almost to touch the railing beside it. Jo slowed, then braked to a stop directly beside this center point, the rear doors of the van banging open again. They slammed shut immediately, she watched the two men run across her right-view mirror to the walk, and far ahead the lights of an approaching car appeared.
Before it could see she was stopped she drove on toward it, nothing else to do; a truck, she realized, from the height of its headlights. It moved slowly, and Jo continued on toward the city. If the lights of still another car should appear, she would have to drive on through the line of booths, paying toll, to wait somewhere on the other side, then return.
Van and truck, an aluminum-sided U-Haul, she could see now, crawled toward each other. They passed, a you
ng black man wearing an enormous lopsided knit cap, glancing at her impassively. Nothing else had appeared, and Jo slowed, watching the pattern of red and yellow rear lights dwindle in her mirror. Then she stopped the van completely to wait, eyes moving between rear-view and windshield, until the bridge should be completely clear.
Two minutes . . . three; then the distant lights in her mirror vanished, cut off by the curve of the approach at the other end of the bridge. Jo checked—nothing coming now from behind or ahead—drove forward, then swung the wheel hard for the U-turn, and Shirley said, “Whee!”
“You like that?”
“Love it. I’ll bet it’s the first U-turn on the Golden Gate Bridge in twenty-five years.”
Glad of the distraction, Jo said, “Well, we aim to please!” and swung the wheel hard again, holding it this time and the van made a complete tight circle, pressing Shirley against her door. “How’s that?” Jo straightened, and they rolled on, back toward Marin.
“Marvelous. The fine for that must be ten thousand dollars.”
Driving on back across the bridge they became silent, and each leaned toward the windshield, eyes searching. Approaching the point where the cable dipped lowest, Jo slowed, but the little ladder and platform beside it stood empty. She slowed still further, eyes moving along the great main cable, then Shirley cried, “There they are!” and Jo saw them, and shoved in the brake pedal.
After a moment she said, “Oh, my god.” Then they sat motionless, staring up through the glass. Above and beyond the bridge lighting, the two small figures moved—flickered—along the dark cable in tandem. That was all, two blurs of movement no longer recognizable as men. Hardly darker than the sky against which they were just visible, they moved upward along the black line that, high, high above, faded away in the sky. Shirley turned suddenly and crawled over the seat. Stooped under the skylight, she slid it aside and stood erect in the opening, head and neck protruding above the roof. Jo set the parking brake and joined her. From this foreshortened angle the moving shadows seemed to advance very slowly; but within a minute, the women’s heads gradually tilting upward, the two vague blots had moved perceptibly higher, then seemed to stop.
“I can’t watch any more”—Jo reached for the seat back. “I hate this.” She crawled forward, Shirley following. Glancing at each other as Jo released the brake, each saw that the other’s face had gone white.
They drove on, and up on the great ocean-side cable high in the darkness above them Lew clung to the handholds saying, “Jesus. Oh, Jesus,” and could not move.
“Lew, for crysake,” Harry said, “we don’t have to do this stupid thing. We can just turn around—”
“No. No. I’m all right. I looked down, that’s all; dumb thing to do. You okay?”
“As okay as you can be when you’re scared shitless. I’ll tell you something else not to do: don’t look up. I nearly puked. I saw the red beacon, and oh, man, it’s way up. You say the word, and I’ll race you down.”
“No, it’s okay.” Focusing all his will power into his right foot, Lew made it lift off the cable, and plant itself six inches ahead. Then the left, and—the handhold wires sliding slowly and roughly through his curled palms, a film of sweat breaking out all over his body—he walked on. They’d climbed higher than this, and more dangerously: up nearly vertical cliffs. But in daylight. No one belonged up here in the dead of night.
One foot, then the other: he made himself a mechanical man, achieving a kind of rigid calm. Then he said to himself that that wasn’t enough. It wasn’t why he was here, walking up the main cable of Golden Gate Bridge. God damn it, he said silently, this is something to remember forever!
The ascent was steepening, they were having to lean into it now. But Lew forced his head to turn left, and stare off into the void. That’s the ocean, he said. Another few steps, and he deliberately looked straight down to the right. The lighted bridge was an aerial photograph of itself, its narrowness emphasized by the limitless blackness beyond its sides. Toes pressing, calves tensing, he climbed on, the terror still waiting but forced outside him and held off. As nearly as possible he began to enjoy what they were doing again, appreciating its strangeness; and, the fear postponed, his exhilaration gradually returned.
Off the bridge approach, Jo parked just beyond it, out of sight of the freeway around the first bend of the dirt road leading to a small oceanside state park. She and Shirley walked back onto the bridge and to the north tower, then around it onto the little railed bay on its ocean side. Looking up the riveted red wall of the tower, they could see only the darkness into which it rose; and they sat down to wait on the rolled-up coil of sailcloth Harry had dropped here.
Five hundred feet directly above them the men climbed the final dozen yards, the cable slanting up at nearly sixty degrees here, their bodies tilted sharply back; each step up now took the strength of an arm tugging on the handhold to bring the torso along. Now the huge, winking red beacon stood incredibly close above them, the great two-foot lens reddening Lew’s sneakers, turning the air itself a blinding pink, then mercifully blackening, over and again.
Three steps to go, Lew’s arm trembling. Two steps, one, then his hand lifted from the handhold to close down on the rung of the small steel ladder leading from cable down to the great topmost transverse. He swung off onto the ladder, Harry followed, then they stood safe, safe, safe between the waist-high guard rails of the gloriously flat steel surface.
They stood on the topmost rung, wide as a road, of the tremendous, ladderlike north tower of Golden Gate Bridge, faces reddening and darkening, and they grinned at each other. Harry stuck out his hand, and said, “Hey, pardner, we climbed the god-damn bridge.” They shook, Lew saying, “Should have brought some wine, we could have drunk a toast,” and Harry said, “Hey, yeah. How come you forgot?”
For perhaps two minutes they strolled the wide, high surface, feeling slightly stunned, tasting the joy of sanctuary attained. Gripping the railing then, they leaned forward to stare down at the strip, astonishingly narrow, that was the six-lane lighted roadway of the bridge. They watched a small dark rectangle push a pair of finger-length beams along it, till it passed directly under them and vanished. Harry said, “Yow.” Then, loud as he could yell it, “Yow, yow, yow, yow!” HEY, down there! Look at us!”
Forearms on the railing, ankles crossed, they stared out across the Bay at the city lying darkly on its hills, its grid of streets picked out by dots of light. To the left stood the heaped shapes of its lighted downtown buildings shimmering distantly through the layers of night-time air; from them a dotted line across blackness, the lights of the Bay Bridge, led to the freckles of pale green light that meant Oakland.
They turned to the opposite rail to look out at the smoothly undulating Marin hill shapes against the sky, striped with the white winding of the freeway. Then they walked back toward the black nothingness of the ocean. Occasionally a remote dab of dingy white flickered on the blackness, an infinitely removed whitecap, and Lew said, “Harry, I was scared; I tell you I was scared. But this is worth it.”
“Yeah, look at us. Up here.”
And then, as they walked on, across the eighty-foot length of the huge topmost transverse of the tower, looking out over several counties spread across the night below, the prolonged moment of attaining it faded; and when they reached the ocean side of the tower again it was gone.
This was not their final goal but only a way-stop. It wasn’t the topmost transverse but the middle one they had to reach, the second up from the roadway. They could not reach it from below—the great support cable led only up here. To reach the lower transverse they had first to climb to the top, then come down to the middle transverse; not down the cable—down the sheer wall of the tower leg, smooth and blank as the side of a windowless building fifty stories high. It was time to start, and Lew felt the tension re-forming: this was going to be worse.
The small ladder they had descended from cable to transverse led past a railed balcony. This
balcony, made of thin steel rods and slats, was four-sided. It hung wrapped around the very top of the tower leg—higher than the transverse they stood on, lower than the great main cable. Lew climbed the ladder, Harry behind him, and halfway up it he stepped off onto the balcony. It was narrower than he could have wished, his right shoulder lightly brushing the side of the tower as he walked to the first corner. The steel rods on which he stepped were spaced more widely than he would have preferred; some were loose, rattling as his foot left them, the very soles of his feet conscious of the long black distance beneath them.
Harry following, Lew turned the right-angled corner, and as they walked on in the new direction toward the ocean, Lew saw themselves again as from a distance; two matchstick figures moving across the south face of the Marin tower at its very top; he wondered if Jo and Shirley stood far below at just this moment, heads tipped back to watch them. Passing under the great support cable, almost brushing his cap, Lew reached up to slap its cold solidity and, hearing the echoless smack, realized he’d become bored with being frightened. He knew what he was about to do, knew how to do it, felt sure of himself, and the elation of what they were doing tonight roared back.
Again they turned a corner, to move across the ocean-side face of the tower. At midpoint they stopped, and from his daypack each brought out a climbing harness of wide red webbing. They stepped into these and buckled them at the waist. Then Lew took out a small flashlight; Harry a rope coil, a fistful of webbing, and a rappelling ring: a two-inch metal circle, a slim doughnut of steel. Squatting at the base of one of the stanchions supporting the rails of the platform, Lew held the flashlight for Harry, a hand cupped under it to shield it from view below. Harry slipped an end of the webbing through the rappelling ring and knotted both ends around the base of the stanchion. He stood up, and tested this knot, gripping the rappelling ring in his hands and yanking till the stanchion shook. “Hold a horse,” he said, squatted again, and began threading an end of the rope coil through the rappelling ring.
