by Bryan Hurt
After Gordon had been on the tower a month Ellie started hearing about his friend Captain Mangual. Gordon made it sound like he’d known him all his life. “Who’s Captain Mangual?” she asked him, after having waited for him to explain. “And why are there two captains out there?” He told her that Captain Mangual didn’t work on the tower but on the AKL-17, the ship that supplied the tower. “And he has time to visit you on the tower?” she asked. No, they got to know each other by radio, Gordon told her. So he was quite the guy, huh? she wanted to know, and then she got even more irritated when he answered that Honey, there was nothing that this guy could not do.
Captain Mangual’s ship was specially outfitted to unload cargo between the legs of the tower, but it had to be positioned just so, in whatever seas, and it sometimes took three hours just to get its mooring set. And it was no small ship: 177 feet from stem to stern. He had to have the patience of a saint, boy. And then he had to hold the ship as steady as possible under the crane that unloaded the cargo or personnel onto the tower. The poor crane operator would just get a load in the bucket and the boat would drop fifty feet and then come back up just as fast. And when stuff was unloaded onto the boat, the load got dropped onto this bouncing and pitching cargo area and once it was free the deckhands had to get it lashed down before it squashed them flat. Ellie said it sounded like the crane operator and the deckhands had it harder than Captain Mangual, and Gordon said No no no as though he hadn’t been getting through at all, and told her that Captain Mangual was the guy who made it all possible by doing a million different things to keep the boat in that one same spot no matter what. He started to give an example and then gave up. Oh, Ellie finally said, into the silence. After they hung up she caught sight of her expression in the mirror in the foyer, and snapped at herself: “Stupid.”
The butterfingers who’d dropped the transmitter drawer was Jeannette’s husband Louie, and the first snapshot he’d sent back to her from the tower showed what looked like a circle of boys in lifejackets high in the air on a fairground ride, on the back of which he’d printed On the Crane. He’d explained later that that was how the guys got from the ship to the tower, and that spare parts and supplies were always unloaded first since if a load was going to be smashed or lost it was better that it be the Coca-Cola pallets. She asked how high the thing lifted them and he said over a hundred feet and she exclaimed that it looked dangerous and he told her that the rule was no lifting in winds over forty knots since at that wind speed the loads spun like tops. And besides, two guys were always on safety lines trying to control the bucket’s swinging. She asked if they couldn’t just go up the stairs. “Baby, from the ship’s deck if I had a baseball I could barely hit the tower platform. And I was All-State,” he said. “Does anything ever fall?” she asked. “I think the crane operators drop stuff on purpose to shake us up before it’s our turn,” he told her. When it was their turn, though, it was funny how everybody stopped joking once they were up in the air.
“So are you keeping busy?” she asked. “You know, I am a Grade Five, so I’m as much a specialist as the tech sergeants,” he said. She told him that that was very impressive, and he answered that whenever she was ready to stop teasing him, that would be great, and she asked how he was getting along otherwise and he said the same as always: he kept to himself and didn’t bother anyone. Those were his mottos, along with: stay friendly and don’t question stupid orders.
The new policy was that the helicopters would bring in everything except the fuel and the very heavy equipment. The choppers never shut off their engines so while you stood there in the noise and wind the guys coming off duty had to peel off their baggy yellow survival suits and hand them over to the guys coming on, and during the ride everyone did some serious sweating and handed over some pretty funky suits. She asked if the helicopters flew in all sorts of weather and he answered that he guessed they had to, since they carried the mail and the beer. He said that you only got helicopter work in the armpits of the world, since in regular places the operating costs were too high because of everything that was always going wrong and needing to be replaced. But when the helicopters came in, the double rotors made their own storm and in the middle of all of that, this giant thing just set down as lightly as a leaf. And then you waited until the rotors lost enough speed to start drooping like they were worn out from the trip.
That night Jeannette lay in bed thinking about what a boy her Louie was, and then about another one of the boys she’d dated before him. The other boy had painted flames on his car and had asked her to call him Shiv. She fell asleep thinking of him, sitting in Louie’s television chair, and when she woke, her blinds were open and an old man wearing suspenders and no shirt was standing on her front lawn and looking in at her.
The guy Louie really wished Jeannette could meet, though, was Frankie Recupido, one of the divers and a real Ernie Kovacs type. Louie had been told to watch out for him even before he’d set foot on deck, and it wasn’t hard to see why: he was always pulling stunts like stuffing cut-up rubber bands into someone’s pipe tobacco. On his first flight to the tower he’d emptied a can of vegetable soup into his sick bag before takeoff and then had pretended to throw up so he could call out a few minutes later that he was hungry before he ate it. He kept the non-coms and enlisted men in moonshine he called plonk that he made from sugar and banana peels and whatever else he scrounged from the cook. He’d gotten into fights for twice punting the basketball off the platform after arguments during games. They’d had to launch a lifeboat to recover the ball. In bad weather he went out to the railings at the edge of the platform and howled into the wind like a wolf.
Jeannette said he sounded like someone to keep away from but Louie said he was a good guy who really missed his kids. His previous station had been Guam and his family had gone out there with him but he’d been away so much in the eastern and southern Pacific that he said he’d been lucky to see them three weeks a year. Frankie said that two-thirds of the divers he knew were divorced or separated, since whenever the water heater shut down or a kid broke a finger or the roof sprung a leak you were offshore, and after a while the wife got fed up. He said that his wife had told him that for her in Guam the last straw had been the spiders that hung upside down from the living room ceiling. He said that when she’d first seen one their little girl had said, “What is that? A cat?”
Louie found it funny that the one thing that Jeannette couldn’t get over about Frankie was that the nudes over his bunk were framed. When he’d told her that, she’d just kept repeating, “Framed?” until he’d finally said, “You know what? Whether or not you’d run screaming from a guy like that onshore is beside the point. Here the point is: Can he do his job?”
Because boy they needed somebody to be doing that job. From day one the official logs for the tower had listed unusual motions and sounds reported by personnel onboard, and the design engineers had already visited three or four times and agreed that the bracing and joints had not been as effective in stabilizing the platform as had been anticipated. They’d identified the damaged braces and pins as the most likely elements responsible. Which meant that guys like Frankie were carrying out constant underwater inspections and bolt-tightenings. The problem, the engineers told them, was that the defective portions were weakening not only their immediate area but also shifting stress onto the non-defective areas.
And even going down as often as they did, Frankie and the other divers couldn’t keep up with the accumulating damage. Even in good weather the braces’ movements under the constant wave loads kept wearing down the pin joints. And what would happen in bad weather? The engineers had already figured that one serious storm would cause as much wear on a given pin as a full year of normal weather. Frankie would tighten bolts and the next day when he checked them again they’d be so loose he could turn them with his hand. So the engineers finally came up with something new, and big T bolts were flown out and installed at the loosest points to provide more rigidity
. And that helped some, but then a few weeks after that the engineers checked the thing again and word was that they’d told the Air Force that without radical measures the condition would only continue to worsen with the ultimate loss of the tower the most likely result. So above-water X bracing was designed and installed in the summer of 1960. The guys felt the difference right away but when Ellie asked Gordon why he didn’t sound more relieved, he told her what Captain Mangual had told him, when he’d first seen all that new rigamarole above the surface: because it filled in the space beneath the platform with its crisscrossing diagonals, waves that would have otherwise passed underneath the platform would now collide head-on with all that brace work. When she asked why that was a problem, Gordon answered that it was like when you were standing in the surf and you saw a big wave coming: you wanted to turn sideways to it, and not expose your whole chest to the wallop.
Betty Bakke was the first in her family to hear any reports about Hurricane Donna, from a spinster aunt whose telegram announced a ruined vacation in Miami Beach, and Betty asked in her phone call to Roy that night if the hurricane was something that the men on the tower needed to worry about, and Roy answered that gee, he sure hoped not. He asked how she was holding up all by herself for so long and she said that so many people now said a version of Poor you to her that she really was starting to manage a tragic look. She told him she’d learned how to run the sewing machine and had made curtains and bedspreads. She said she was trying to be as self-sufficient as possible. She was doing volunteer work at the Airman’s Closet on the base, stocking donated items for the E4s with dependents. He complimented her on being such a Samaritan and she said that she mostly stood behind the counter embarrassed while the less fortunate families picked over what was available. She said she never knew whether to wear her hat to work so she always carried it in her hand. It was only after they’d gotten off the phone that Betty had realized that she hadn’t asked what the tower was supposed to do if the hurricane was headed their way.
Edna Kovarick hadn’t heard about the hurricane until it was halfway up the North Carolina coast, but when she called Wilbur he was inside the radome watching the height-finder antenna rock in its yoke while it made its 360-degree sweep, so he had to call her back. She asked about the storm and he told her that they had an evacuation procedure in place and that if the thing got anywhere near them he was sure they’d all be safe on dry land before she knew it. Then they talked about babies. She reminded Wilbur of the story her sister had told them of carrying her infant on the train in an open wicker suitcase as a crib. Maybe they’d get started on that when he got back, he said. Maybe, she said, feeling wonderful at the notion of it, but looking at their little bathroom nook and wondering what it would be like to bathe a newborn in a shower bath.
Hurricane Donna had already killed 125 people in the Caribbean and Florida by the time Air Force weathermen predicted that it would hit the tower dead-on. The evacuation was duly ordered and the coast guard cutter along with Captain Mangual’s AKL-17 dispatched from New York Harbor. But the Air Force wanted to wait until the last possible moment so that the Russian spy trawlers that were always loitering around the tower wouldn’t get any free access to the classified equipment, so by the time the two ships arrived on-site the outer edge of the hurricane had hit. On the first attempts to use the crane its bucket was blown into the ocean and the guys on it barely rescued, so the whole evacuation was called off. Captain Phelan called everyone into the mess and gave them the bad news that they were going to have to ride out the storm. By that point wave crests were already visible through the windows and with every impact the whole platform screeched and groaned and jolted before settling back into its position. Before the first half of the storm was over, the flying bridge underneath had torn loose and they could see through the lower hatches that it was flailing and smashing itself against the two downwind legs, and then the eye passed over, and the storm hit from the other direction. The whole thing took eight hours and for the last three there was nothing but shrieking and grinding noises from the legs below. At one point during the worst of it Roy dropped in on the captain in his quarters and asked how long Gordon thought they’d float if they went over. Float? Gordon answered. He was hunkered down in his chair. He told Roy that the tower had never been designed for watertight integrity. For all intents and purposes it was a building that someone had hung out over the sea on stilts.
The rest of the time they talked about other subjects. Roy said that he’d heard that as electronics got more portable these systems could be airborne instead of platform-based. And what would they do with the platforms then? Maybe turn them into prisons, Gordon suggested. Roy told him that during that last really bad movement poor Laino had upchucked into the sink and it had flown back into his face. An hour before the storm’s end, the two of them looked in on everyone, and then Gordon wrote in his daily log Men’s morale OK. Once the storm was over, he added in caps never again.
When Ellie finally got through on the phone once the weather had cleared, her husband sounded like someone who’d been hit by a car. She asked how he was doing and he told her they were all still standing, but just barely. The maintenance platform beneath the main one was gone. The catwalks above it just stopped where the waves had snapped the steel. The roof panel on the avionics hangar had rolled up like the top of a sardine can. The colonel who’d flown out from Otis had told him at the end of their inspection tour, “I can’t believe you all stayed. I would have ordered everyone off.” Gordon said he had just stared at him.
By their next phone call a week later the news was even worse. There were multiple fractures in the new X bracing, and Frankie and the other divers were reporting that two of the submarine diagonals in the middle tier had torn loose. That had meant a visit to the tower by the entire design engineering team. They had shown up with their Mae Wests over their business suits and had huddled for three hours with the divers in the mess and then had come to Gordon’s quarters in a group with a plan for cable bracing that would extend from 25 to 125 feet below the surface and bypass the damaged tier. He said he’d asked if that would really work and that they’d all been pretty gung ho about it. They’d have to fabricate special cables with sufficient tensile strength but those should be ready by the first of the year.
By the first of the year, though, Frankie and the other divers had discovered more fractures on the lowest tiers, the 125-foot level where the bottoms of the cables were supposed to be anchored. When the engineers heard that, they threw up their hands and said that stabilizing the tower was going to be such a massive undertaking that it would have to be put off until the spring, when conditions would be more favorable.
“So they’ll just evacuate you until the spring, then?” Jeannette asked Louie once Louie had passed that news along on his leave. They’d been lying together and Louie answered that he didn’t see what else the Air Force could do, given the shape the thing was in. And Jeannette startled him by shouting, “Don’t lie to me about this,” and rolling away. And after he’d driven back to base, she found under her pillow a note that read I love you SO much paper-clipped to a booklet entitled SAFETY TIPS FOR LIVING ALONE.
A week after that Gordon woke Ellie up with a phone call at 1:00 a.m. to report that the engineers had told the Air Force that the entire bracing system on the A-B side was no longer effective and they were no longer able to give an estimate as to the tower’s remaining capabilities. Maybe it still retained 30 percent of its strength, maybe 40, maybe 50. But whatever the numbers they didn’t want to encourage the Air Force to think that it was safe. So the Air Force had scheduled the evacuation for February 1. Ellie cheered so loudly she woke Larry. Then she thought: that’s three weeks away. Why February 1? she asked, and Gordon answered that a lot of guys were getting off the next day, but a skeleton crew of twenty-eight was being left behind to keep things going and so the Russians wouldn’t swarm all over the thing the minute they left. How were the Russians going to get
on it with no one working the cranes? Ellie wanted to know, and Gordon told her he’d asked his superior officer the same question. And what did he say? Ellie wanted to know. He’d said it wasn’t as though the Air Force couldn’t assume some risk here, Gordon told her. And that the only way to keep someone entirely safe from the ocean was to leave him on land.
So when Louie rotated back onto the tower a week after the New Year as part of that skeleton crew, Frankie was standing there on the helipad waiting to take his survival suit. After he had climbed into it, Frankie shook Louie’s hand and told him that it had been great knowing him and that he wasn’t coming back. And Louie said, “You mean you guys have already finished the repairs?” and Frankie told him, “I mean I’m not coming back.”
Wilbur told Edna on the phone that he wasn’t even supposed to still be there and that he’d been due to rotate out but that his replacement hadn’t reported. He said that for the guys left behind the atmosphere was like homeroom in junior high on a winter morning: everyone just kept to themselves and those who didn’t were surly. The weather was always winter morning, too, windy and dark and cold. Because they were shorthanded, he now worked as a plotter behind the radar-scope operator, which meant longer hours, which was probably good since no one could sleep anyhow.
Ellie said that Gordon had to get off there but he asked what he was supposed to do: he was the commanding officer. While she sat on the phone trying to think of what to offer in response he said that it had occurred to him that confidence was like a little air bubble that shrank every time something went wrong. He said he’d installed a plumb line in his cabin over his desk to check just how badly the tower was doing and that the plumb line now never stopped making this wild figure eight. He asked where Ellie had been when he’d called earlier and she said she’d been driving Larry around on his paper route. “Why? Should I stay near the phone?” she asked, and he said yes.
