by Jack Finney
Lew stood clipping a carabiner to his harness; this is a metal loop with an opening in one side, called a “beaner” by climbers. The opening closed with a safety lock, and he closed it, tightening down the safety. Then he stood waiting for Harry to finish, emptying his mind of conscious thought, resisting a nagging urge to look over the side.
“All set,” Harry said, and now Lew sat down on the balcony floor, legs hanging over the side: the rule was, least experienced man goes first. Beside him the loop of webbing hung from the base of the stanchion; from the rappelling ring at the bottom of the loop hung the doubled length of eleven-millimeter perlon climbing rope, dangling two hundred feet down the ocean side of the tower. Lew reached for the rope and brought it to his lap; to the rope Harry had attached a metal device, the “descender,” and now Lew opened his beaner, clipped in the descender, refastened the beaner’s safety lock. He was ready now, harness clipped to the sliding descender of the long rope. He gripped the doubled rope length in his left hand and glanced up at Harry to smile. “See you downstairs,” he said, relieved to hear his voice come out calm.
“Right.” Harry touched his shoulder. “Take it nice and easy, enjoy yourself.”
Lew ducked head and shoulders under the middle railing, gripped the rope, squirmed forward, and slid off the edge of the balcony floor to hang suspended, legs dangling—swinging in a short, diminishing arc, twisting slowly toward the tower wall. He hadn’t plunged, clawing at the air; everything had held. He had known it would, known, but still he felt the familiar, euphoric rush of relief.
Now he extended his legs to press both rubber soles against the riveted steel face of the tower wall, his back to the ocean, the sling and rope above him angling outward, the rest of the long doubled rope dangling below him into the darkness, a two-hundred-foot tail. His left hand gripped the rope, and now he slowly relaxed it, and the ropes began sliding through his fist, his body lowering. With the rope snubbed by the metal descender through which it was threaded and controlled by the pressure of his grip, Lew lowered himself at a steady speed, the steel balcony with Harry’s face peering over it rising away like the underside of an ascending elevator.
In complete easy control of his descent, Lew watched the endless parallel rows of rivets just beyond his pumping knees rise into darkness: he could feel the small pressure of ocean air cool on his neck, and was conscious of the tendons steadily working inside the canvas of his sneakers. Walking backward down the ocean-side face of the great north tower of the bridge, he felt as happy, in the intensity of the moment, as he had ever been.
His heels bumping onto the steel-slatted floor, Lew backed down onto the next balcony below the top one; this balcony, identical with the one he had just descended from, hung wrapped around the tower leg just above the middle transverse. Unclipping his beaner from the descender, Lew turned to look down over the balcony railing. Three hundred feet below, the white blurs of two faces stared up from the walk at the base of the tower leg; and Lew thrust an arm over the railing to move his hand back and forth in a slow arc, hoping they’d see it.
Harry’s swiftly walking legs appeared out of the darkness above. “Second floor,” he called, “kitchenware, appliances, ladies’ underwear.” His body straightening, he dropped the final few feet, shaking the floor—and now they had attained the level of the second transverse, where they wished to be. “The ladies here?” Harry turned to the railing, and Lew walked to the dangling, still swaying rope to pull it down from its loop high above them now, ducking as it came spilling onto their heads and shoulders. They would use the rope again, for their next descent, but before that happened they had work to do here; and Lew walked to the railing now, and began lowering an end of the rope over the balcony rail.
On the concrete walk of the little orange-lighted bay, Jo and Shirley stood waiting, faces upturned. When the rope end appeared, swaying down into the light, Jo jumped, missed, tried again, and brought it down. Shirley took it, knelt on the walk, and tied it to the rope enclosing the coil of sailcloth. She said, “Square knot, the one useful thing I learned in Girl Scouts. You in the Girl Scouts?”
“Oh sure.”
“You like it?”
“I liked the camping.”
“Me too.” Shirley tugged the line, then they stood watching the fat white coil slide up the tower leg, bouncing outward occasionally. Shirley said softly, “Thank God they’re down off the top,” and Jo nodded, swallowing.
As he would roll a tire, Harry trundled the wheel-like coil along the balcony and around the corners to the ladder leading down to the transverse. He dropped it to the transverse, and climbed down after it. This transverse had no guard rails, and Harry unrolled the coil into a yard-wide, fifty-foot length of folded cloth, positioning it between the tower legs. As Harry worked, Lew stood on the ocean side of the balcony, hauling up the bundle of plastic pipes with its attached sacks of gravel and couplings.
On the transverse, the two men screwed pipe lengths together to form two fifty-six-foot-long pipes. One of them they filled with gravel, and capped the ends. The women had sewn sleeves across the top and bottom edges of the big sailcloth square; and Lew and Harry slid a pipe into each of these sleeves. They were nearly finished now.
The women stood waiting below, one on each side of the roadway; when the lights of an occasional car appeared, they stepped around out of sight behind the tower legs. Leaning back against the railing on the Bay side of the bridge, the green light flecks of Oakland twinkling behind her, Jo stood wondering once more whether or not she would ever again see the Levys when this was over. She felt she would not; that that was the way such things generally worked out. She shrugged a shoulder slightly, a corner of her mouth quirking; it would be an important loss.
Shirley stood across the roadway, ankles crossed, a shoulder against the riveted wall, looking over at Jo. She, too, was thinking of the coming separation of the two couples, but what she wondered, smiling, was whether or not Jo and Lew would marry. Harry thought not, but Shirley told herself that he didn’t know; and, nodding unconsciously to confirm it, she decided that they would.
Up on the second transverse the two men had unrolled a coil of thin light cable across its length. Now each twisted an end around the base of a ladder leg at opposite sides of the transverse, and the cable lay flat along the steel floor, tautly stretched clear across it. To this cable they tied the unweighted pole in its sleeve, using several forty-foot lengths of nylon rope. Finally, each tied the end of a hundred-yard roll of new orange-colored fishline to the ends of the other weighted pole. Checking both directions to make sure no cars were in sight, they dropped the spools off the San Francisco edge of the transverse to fall, unrolling as they dropped, to the roadway below.
As Lew and Harry walked back to the ocean-side balcony, and their next-to-final descent, Jo and Shirley stood taping the ends of the orange fishline high on the walls of the twin tower legs, using strips of orange-colored Mystic tape. They dropped the empty spools over the bridge rails.
The men back—first Lew, then Harry, walking down out of the darkness to drop to the walk of the little bay behind the tower leg—they were finished with the bridge for tonight, their preparations complete. Chattering, hilarious with excitement, they walked back for the van; when a car passed on the bridge approach, another behind it, they waved wildly—one driver slowly lifting an arm to respond, puzzled, the other only staring in bewildered suspicion.
In the van, rolling down Waldo Grade, the men kneeling behind the front seat, Shirley said, “What if a bridge worker goes up there tomorrow?”
“He’ll see it right away,” Harry said, “and that’ll be that. Just hope no one does, is all; they don’t go up there every day, or anything like it.”
Out of the tunnel, they rounded a long curve, and Richardson Bay bridge and the dark shoreline of Strawberry Point appeared far ahead and below like a map. Lew said, “Harry, it’s been quite a night: we could call it quits right now, if you wanted. Tomorrow nig
ht is the big one.”
Shirley said, “Yes! I vote yes. So does Jo. Democracy at work.”
But Harry was shaking his head. “No. I want it all. Not just tomorrow night—I want to fix the cop, too. Okay?”
“Sure. I do, too. Just checking is all.”
“It’s after three,” Jo said. “How do you know he hasn’t been and gone? Or that he’ll even show up tonight?”
“Well, we don’t,” Lew said. “We’re just guessing that it’s an every-night routine. But if he doesn’t show, all we lose is a little more sleep.”
At Strawberry, Jo curved off the freeway onto the service road, and slowed, leaning forward to study the driveways of the Texaco and Standard stations, the car wash beyond them, and McDonald’s after that. But no black-and-white, lights off, stood parked in any of them. Across the freeway the lights and sound of a car shot by toward the city, but here on the service road nothing moved ahead or behind. Jo swung into the Standard station, switching her lights off, and she and Shirley sat watching, motor running. “Okay,” she said then.
“Got the dimes?” Harry said, and from her pants pocket Shirley brought a small handful of dimes, and passed two of them back. From under the seat she pulled out a slim blue-and-silver package, a roll of aluminum foil, tore off a ragged scrap from each corner, and passed them back.
The rear doors opened, the men slid out, eased the doors shut, and Jo immediately drove on, down the driveway back onto the service road. Watching her rear-view, she saw Lew and Harry walk quickly across its face toward the pair of phone booths at the edge of the lot.
Each in a booth, doors left open, no light coming on, the men wrapped their foil fragments loosely around the dimes Shirley had given them. Then they stuffed them into the coin slots, forcing them down, the foil crumpling and packing the slots. Leaving his booth, Lew saw the van stopped in the car-wash driveway next door, Shirley inside the phone booth there. He and Harry walked quickly along the side of the white-painted station and turned the corner at the rear. Safely out of sight, they stood watching the van leave the car wash, then swing into McDonald’s to stop beside the phone booth there.
Standing in the star-lit darkness behind the station, it seemed to Lew that these were the first moments of relative calm in many hours, though he knew it had been less than two. He began to stretch slowly, enjoying it, arms out at his sides, fingers clenching and splaying. Then he walked in a slow circle, stomping softly, working the last of the climb and descent from his muscles, it seemed, preparing for what might come next. Harry sat down, his back against the rear wall of the station, then Lew joined him, and they sat silent and listening, waiting.
He arrived twenty minutes later: they heard the motor, a tappet ticking, then the small bumper scrape on concrete as the car jounced up the driveway; heard the faint brake squeal, then the parking brake ratchet. Silently they stood up . . . heard leather on concrete out front, fading as he walked to the other side of the building. On rubber toes they ran to the other back corner, stopped just short of it . . . heard the slight key jangle, then the quiet distinct snick of key sliding into lock. From out front the hollow click of a loudspeaker coming to life; behind a slight fuzz of static, a woman’s distant monotone spoke a few unintelligible words. Harry nudged Lew, eyes pleased, to whisper, “Roof speaker’s on; means the engine’s running.” From around the corner, the chain-rattle of garage door rolling up . . . the snap of a light switch . . . footsteps receding across concrete . . . a moment’s pause. Then a coin rattled down a slot, and they whirled and ran hard along the back, full speed on tiptoes, around the corner, and along the side to the front.
There it stood, the black-and-white, facing south away from them, exhaust purring quietly, clouding gray in the night air. On the driver’s door, standing slightly ajar, MILL VALLEY POLICE, dim but readable in the starlight. Moving very fast they walked silently toward it, Lew first to yank open the driver’s door, slide under the wheel and—lifting a uniform cap out of the way—across the seat. Right behind him, Harry slipped in under the wheel, slowly pulled the door closed till the latch clicked, then pressed down the lock knob, and rolled up the window to within an inch of the top. He found the parking-brake handle, very slowly released it, set his foot on the brake pedal, and pushed the shift lever to DRIVE. Then he turned to grin at Lew who grinned back, their eyes elated. Watching the yellow patch of light spilling from the side of the garage, they waited.
Overhead the roof speaker suddenly squawked, and they jumped. Harry irritatedly jerked his head at Lew to find the cutoff switch. Lew pushed a toggle and they heard the speaker-hum snip off. In the same moment, as though Lew had caused this too, the light at the side of the building snapped out, and the garage door clattered down.
For just a moment in the dim starlight, they couldn’t quite be certain it was he: only the top of his black-haired head visible, eyes on the filled Styrofoam cup suspended from his spidered fingers, he appeared walking slowly around the corner in uniform. For a moment longer they watched, then grinned as they recognized him—and Harry blasted the horn.
The cup dropped, split, a black gout of steaming coffee dashed over the man’s skinny ankles as his head shot up, and Pearley’s wedge-shaped face stared at them, eyes bright with fright, feet suddenly dancing as the scalding coffee bit through the white cloth of his socks. Harry howled a wild banshee-shriek of laughter, and shot the car forward, black-streaking the concrete. They bounced down onto the road, swung into the freeway-entrance almost directly ahead, and as Harry straightened in the lane they saw the man—motionless, long jaw hanging open—suddenly whirl and run toward the phone booths, both of them yelled with glee.
Harry held to the outside lane at a steady sixty-five, ten miles over the limit but easily acceptable, they felt certain, in a police car on a nearly empty road. After half a mile Lew handed the blue uniform cap to Harry, who put it on and grinned; it was half a size too small, but he left it.
Four trucks passed on the other side, nothing on this, and in just under eight minutes by Lew’s timing they had passed San Rafael, and were approaching the Civic Center. Then the lights of a car approached on the other side of the freeway; and in passing they saw the red dome light and green-and-white car of a deputy sheriff. Could he be hunting them, could Pearley possibly have reached a working phone so soon? They hadn’t planned what they’d do if this happened. The driver glanced over at them, lifted a hand in greeting, and Harry responded equally casually. Another mile, and he slowed for the turnoff, then onto the road they’d ridden early in the evening with Jo. Back along the road then, winding a little, up and down the occasional slight hill.
At the entrance to the back parking lot of the Civic Center Harry switched off the headlights, drove forward, and stopped, waiting for his eyes to adjust. Without lights then, he drove forward in low gear, foot on the brake, half seeing, half feeling his way. He found the dark bulk of the van, parked in the same place it had been earlier, and he pulled in beside it on the driver’s side, and turned off the motor. Lew rolled down his window, and two feet away at the wheel of the van Jo said softly, anxiously, “Any trouble?”
“No, he’s probably still hunting for a phone that works.”
Shirley got out, closed her door silently, and walked past the front of the van carrying Harry’s folded tripod, camera and flash attachment mounted. Lew put out his arm to take it, but Shirley brushed past to the rear door, and Jo got out of the van. “Hey, what’re you doing?” Lew said.
“Coming along. We want to watch.”
“No,” Harry said, but Lew said, “Harry, if they get one of us, they’ve got us all. Let ’em come,” and the women climbed into the back.
Listening, watching, they waited through a dozen seconds more. Then Harry drove on, lights out, creeping along in the ruts, the car slowly jouncing on its shocks up the hill to stop at the wire mesh fence. Lew got out, found the bolt cutters in the grass, and cut the lock chain. He threw the cutters down the hillside and opened the
gate; Harry drove on through, Lew following on foot.
Harry stopped in the leveled area at the end of the long building which projected from the hillside here. Motor off, they got out, and the women watched as Lew and Harry carried the long beams they had left here to the narrow, slightly domed blue roof. One end of each foot-wide, six-inch-thick plank they set on the edge of the roof just above their heads, positioning them four feet apart, and stomped the other ends of the twenty-foot beams into the ground. Then, Lew squatting on the roof edge guiding him with the shielded flashlight, Harry slowly drove the police car up the ramp and onto the roof.
The roof ruler straight, wide as a road, and only slightly higher-crowned, he drove slowly on, keeping meticulously to the center: following on foot the others could hear the steady faint ripple of rubber on tile.
A dozen feet short of the end, Harry stopped, overlooking the asphalted entranceway five stories below. Parking brake pushed to its final rachet, gear lever in PARK, he got out, and they stood listening. Nothing moved, no shout sounded.
Harry set up his tripod at the front of the roof, facing the car and the open front door labeled MILL VALLEY POLICE. Twisting the lens to focus, he watched the others arrange themselves. Lew lounged at full length along the hood, his grinning head propped on an elbow before the windshield. The women stood each with a foot on the front bumper: Shirley with the shotgun from the front-seat rack held negligently in the crook of one arm, Jo with Pearley’s pistol carelessly dangling from the trigger guard; both smiling sardonically at the camera in classic Bonnie and Clyde pose.