Interrupt

by Tony Dwiggins

  Wayne sat cross-legged, hunched forward, eating and watching them with the same taxing attention he gave the television.

  "It's a nerve defect. The auditory nerve, it connects the inner ear to the brain. It's like a telephone system," Andy said. Wayne's eyes glazed over; he knew this story by heart. "The outer and middle ears are like the wires coming into the house, and they're working, they're conducting current. But the nerve in the inner ear, the telephone inside the house, doesn't work. And it can't be fixed." Andy took a long drink of apple juice.

  "That must have been hard for you. And his mother."

  Andy glanced at Wayne. The boy had wearied of the effort of following their conversation. "It was. In fact, she couldn't handle it."

  "So she...?"

  "Left."

  "Does she ever see him?"

  "Sometimes." When it was convenient, when Sandra happened to be in town, when he pushed it. "Did you love her?"

  Jesus. He turned away from her, toward Wayne, but his son had stretched out on the blanket, his back to them, and was idly yanking up strands of grass.

  "Yes," Andy said.

  "You must hate her for leaving."

  "Hate?" He stared down at his lunch. His stomach knotted. Did he hate Sandra? He had been angry at her for so long; if he felt anything else, it hadn't yet surfaced above the anger. "She was young," he finally said, "younger than I was." Anger, just anger. "It's better that she left."

  Nell snapped the covers back on the food containers. "That's what Ray did."

  It took Andy a moment to realize what she was talking about. "Ray left your mother?"

  She nodded. "She put him through grad school, and then the bastard left her."

  "I'm sorry. Before you showed up, no one even knew he had a family."

  "He didn't, until I showed up." Her mouth compressed.

  "You sound as if you.... well, hate him."

  "I did. I spent a lot of years so focused on him, what I wanted to say to him, what I wanted to do to him, what I wanted to happen to him. I had a picture of him, just staring out at the camera with his look. You know it. He's probably never smiled for a camera. So I would stare at this picture and pretend that he was looking right at me, that he could see the expression on my face, that he knew how I felt. God, I really hated him." She suddenly smiled. "I don't hate him now."

  He wasn't sure he believed her. Drop it, he thought. Take her hand and say, then Ray doesn't deserve a family, he doesn't deserve your loyalty. And then say, can you help me? Ray has a key to some records that I need.

  And then say, I deserve your loyalty? Shit.

  "I came up here from San Diego, that's where I was living, that's where my mother is. I was out of school, with no exactly hot prospects for a job, except for another summer selling athletic shoes. I guess I got curious, I thought I'd give him a chance. So I came up here and got a job with Pac Bell to impress my father."

  "Why did you have to impress him?"

  "I didn't know how else to approach him."

  "It's not easy to impress Ray."

  "You know what I found out? He's not always a bastard. You know what he did when I finished lineman training? He brought me up here to celebrate."

  "Here?"

  "Yeah. He brought along strawberries and champagne."

  He bought her off with champagne and strawberries. Andy had never seen Colson take a drink. The team didn't socialize outside work, except for lunches and the occasional beer at Scott's Seafood after work, and Colson didn't even join them for that. Christ, Colson popping a bottle of champagne under the oaks, offering strawberries like some Woodside yuppie.

  How about offering her sympathy? I understand. My father was a demanding jerk too. So can you help me? No. "I guess you impressed him."

  "I'll show you." She grinned and jumped up. The golden beach girl again, sunny and open, not a shadow of hatred in her. She shifted back and forth, on the balls of her feet, a runner ready to fly. "Come on."

  Andy rose, and Wayne, coming alert, scrambled up after them.

  She grabbed the unopened pack and led them to the nearest telephone pole. Wrapping an arm around it, like an old friend, she said slowly, too loud, "Wayne, this is my telephone system, this is the heart of it."

  "Just speak in a normal tone, so the words form naturally," Andy told her, eyeing the pack. What was this?

  She wet her lips. "Your dad will say the switches are the most important, and you probably think it's your TDD." Still too loud. "You want to know where the voices are?"

  Wayne nodded yes.

  Nell pointed up. "Up there. My job is to climb the pole and keep the voices moving."

  Wayne craned his neck to follow the pole.

  Nice, Andy thought. Wayne liked it. Andy liked her for it.

  Then she was opening the pack and setting its contents on the ground, and he froze.

  She'd brought pole-climbing gear: boots with sharp gaffs, safety belts with long leather straps, heavy gloves, orange hard hats. Two sets of gear. The smaller pair of boots had stripes of pink reflective tape; the larger pair was clearly for him.

  "Nell..."

  "I guessed on the boot size. I have a good eye for that, but I brought some heavy socks for you in case they're a little big."

  He hoped they were a little small.

  Wayne was looking over the gear. He understood.

  "If you don't want to, that's okay, but I thought you might like to give it a try. It's a thrill up there."

  "No, thanks."

  "We won't go too high."

  "I've never climbed anything."

  "I can teach you."

  "Great. Can you set bones too?"

  She was pulling on her boots. "You won't fall. I'll climb behind you, that's how sure I am that you'll do fine."

  Wayne already had a safety belt, was fooling with the strap, grinning at his dad. With his big hands and feet, grinning, he looked like an eager puppy.

  Andy took hold of the strap. "Not you, Rambo."

  Wayne let go, signed, "You climb."

  You're going to have to disappoint him, Andy told himself. Just like you disappointed Joe Faulkner.

  Andy had been eight or nine, and the family had been living in upstate New York, in the Adirondacks. The mountainous resort region was known for its gorges and rivers, and the state was still building roads to bring people to the resorts, and bridges to cross the wild waters.

  Work had finished on the bridge, and it would officially open the next morning. Joe Faulkner wanted to suspend this consummate moment in time, so he went out to the bridge precisely at sunset. He brought Andy along, because of the Roeblings.

  John Roebling had been an iron-willed civil engineer in the mid-1800s who designed dams, aqueducts, and bridges. He also built his son into a civil engineer. He named the boy Washington after a surveyor he knew and packed him off to engineering school. Joe Faulkner might never have heard of the Roeblings had it not been for their most famous engineering feat. Father and son designed and built the Brooklyn Bridge.

  From the time Andy was old enough for bedtime stories, Joe read to him from a biography of the Roeblings.

  The sun, Andy remembered the sun, lowering behind the humped Adirondacks, glazing the foamy river with a red glow. Joe walked out on his bridge, carrying a paper bag. Andy walked close behind, arms stiff at his side, staring down at his sneakers.

  It was a suspension bridge, a soaring concoction of towers and cables and stiffening trusses. Joe stopped at the middle and leaned on the railing. Andy stopped beside him.

  Joe reached into the bag and pulled out a handful of bolts and steel shavings, scraps from the construction. He stuck out his arm and let the scraps fall into the river below. He was nominally Catholic and slightly superstitious, and after every project he fed the water steel so that it would not take down his bridge.

  Joe held the bag out to his son. But Andy was frozen; he had looked down and thought he saw his own face in the water below. His stomach chur
ned wildly, like the river, and his face was slick with cold sweat.

  This was the worst it had ever been. Every time Joe had brought Andy out to one of his bridges, it had gotten worse. Andy could never tell Joe, and so Joe did not dream that his son was terrified of heights.

  "I thought he'd get a kick out of watching you," Nell was saying.

  Andy shook off Joe, then he caught Wayne's keen look. He wiped his hands on his pants. His palms were wet and his mouth was dry. He would just tell them no, he didn't like heights, he wasn't a lineman and didn't want to be a lineman, he didn't have to climb this piece of wood, he didn't have to pull some stupid macho stunt to impress his son and Colson's daughter.

  How high was the pole, anyway? He didn't look up.

  "Okay," he said, tight. If he climbed it, then she owed him one.

  The boots were maybe a half size too big.

  Suited up, he felt more at risk. All this damned equipment so he wouldn't get hurt. He caught Wayne admiring him, admiring the hard hat and the boots with their gaffs that flashed in the sun.

  He couldn't help noticing the way the belt looped around Nell's hips. She had rolled down the legs of her corduroys and tucked them into the boots, but the short blouse still exposed her midriff when she raised her arms to put on her hard hat.

  Sex and fear, he thought.

  No telephone pole is totally straight, Nell was explaining, so you have to find the side that leans away from you and start climbing there. He found the leaning-away side and shoved against it, hard. If he had detected the slightest movement he would have ripped off his gear.

  Strike the gaff cleanly into the pole to get your foothold, she was saying. Heels together, toes and knees out from the pole.

  He had one foot off the ground and looked back at Wayne. The boy gave him a thumbs-up and watched with serious attention.

  He moved up and checked his position. Heels together, toes and knees out. The belt chafed as he moved the strap up the pole. He would climb it as fast as he could and keep his eyes locked on the worn pine in front of his nose.

  He felt a slight shudder in the pole and froze, then realized that Nell had started below him and what he felt was the vibration of her gaff chunking into the wood. He climbed, already feeling his thigh muscles working.

  "Keep your butt out," she said.

  He wished she were climbing in front of him.

  "You're doing fine. Okay? Rest whenever you want."

  "Great," he yelled. He was already sweating, his hands steaming inside the rough gloves. He could see blue sky beyond the pole that filled most of his field of view, and a bit of horizon where the sky met the grasses. He would climb slowly, the hell with fast.

  "I climbed with Ray, when we came up here."

  He jerked his head around and looked down. She was right below him, he saw her orange hard hat, her brown arms, her pink corduroys, and below that the ground, far enough, the grass trampled, Wayne foreshortened, flickering at the edge of his vision. His stomach cramped and he snapped his head back up in desperation and pressed his cheek against the pole. Jesus.

  "It was sort of a ceremony," she said, and she was now beginning to pant. "Me becoming a lineman."

  If he didn't pull a stupid trick like that again, if he just kept his eyes steady front.

  She taught Colson how to climb? So what was this, a re-enactment?

  "You okay?"

  He couldn't answer, but he moved his right leg upward, knee locked into position as instructed, and kicked his gaff hard into the pine. He inched up the strap, brought up his left leg, dug in the gaff. The left gaff wobbled, it wasn't in far enough, sweet Jesus it wasn't holding. He wrapped his arms around the pole and jabbed again with his left foot.

  He remembered, with gut-sick clarity, the part in the Roebling biography when tragedy struck. There was a surveying accident on the Brooklyn Bridge project, and it killed John Roebling. Washington Roebling, too, met with an accident on the project, and although it didn't kill him it crippled him for life. The project continued, and the legend was somberly repeated: every bridge demands a life.

  Andy's left foot was dangling in the free air.

  "Trust your safety belt," Nell yelled, "get back into position."

  He got the left gaff in. Was he in position? he thought, paralyzed. She didn't say, she didn't tell him. He could smell the preservative in the wood, he could feel the sun like a heat pump on his back. Then the nausea and dizziness circled him, came at him, hit him like double fists. He didn't dare close his eyes, that was the worst thing in the world. He looked hard at the pole, he gripped it until he thought his fingers would snap, but he had to hold the pole still. Please, God. He was dying.

  She was touching him, he felt her hand on his right ankle. She said something but he couldn't hear it.

  He swallowed, to hold back the nausea, and said, "I'm coming down." It was a whisper, it wasn't even that. It was a prayer.

  He expelled a breath, hard. "I'm coming down."

  She heard. She was tapping his right boot, a gentle tug.

  Move it. He had to get down.

  "Just reverse it, slow and easy."

  He got the gaff out and his foot hung in the air. Then the headache came, a third fist, and he knew he wouldn't make it.

  She had hold of his foot, tugging it down. He wanted to scream at her to let go, but he flexed and moved down and had the presence of mind to wait for her to let go before he dug in the gaff.

  In a prolonged mime they climbed down, Nell tapping his boot when he froze. She didn't coax him and he was deeply grateful.

  But for the safety strap lashing him to the pole, he would have collapsed when he touched ground.

  She was holding Wayne back, casually, and he was grateful again.

  Leaning against the pole, he unstrapped himself and yanked off the hard hat. He couldn't look at them. He held up a hand in a wave to them and walked off stiffly in the opposite direction.

  He heard Nell saying to Wayne, "Let's go get some cookies."

  There was a stand of oaks, and the knee-high grass, and he fell into it and heaved up his lunch.

  On the bridge, on the bridge when Andy wouldn't take the bag from Joe, Joe had looked closely at his son and seen the fear. Andy had not been able to hold back the hysteria, and he sobbed out. Joe grabbed him roughly by the shoulders, shaking him, but Andy couldn't stop. Then Joe had slapped him full across the face.

  Andy forced himself to get up, and walked through the oaks until he stopped shaking.

  Nell met him halfway back to the blanket, where Wayne waited, and handed him a can of apple juice. He drank it steadily down. She didn't look at him, just walked beside him.

  "You think of everything."

  "Why didn't you tell me you're acrophobic?"

  He concentrated on the oaks ahead and breathed slowly and evenly. The juice stayed down.

  "I didn't think you'd notice."

  Wayne couldn't wait; he loped over to them and fell into step beside Andy. Andy punched his son's shoulder lightly and let his hand rest there.

  Joe Faulkner had said to Andy, days after the incident, that the slap was the only way to bring Andy to his senses. Andy hadn't believed that. He knew that his father had slapped him because he had failed. You're not engineer material, Joe meant. An engineer who was afraid of heights could never build a bridge.

  He would get no help from the memory of Joe Faulkner,

  He was conscious of Nell on his left side, walking close. He slipped his left hand into his pocket. "Nell, when I called you I called to ask a favor." He figured he had earned it.

  "Sure."

  "Don't say sure yet." He took a slow deep breath. "I need some records, they're records of telephone calls. They're on mag tape, magnetic tape, you know, a tape reel. The tape is in my file cabinet." Unless the Robocop took it, but why assume the worst? "The problem is, the file cabinet is locked, and I don't have access because I'm suspended." She knew that. "But I need that tape. I can't clear mys
elf without the records on that tape." He swallowed. "Your father has a key to the lock, probably in his desk."

  "You want me to ask my father for the key?" She didn't miss a beat.

  He had never before been glad Wayne was deaf.

  "I don't think that would work. I think the only way is if you could get into the drawer and find the key." Get into? Say it straight. Break into, burglarize, steal. Andy turned to look her full in the face. "The desk is locked. You'd have to somehow get the key to the desk, which would likely be on your father's key ring, or you'd have to break into the desk. Then you'd have to go unlock my file cabinet and get the tape. It's in. the front of the bottom drawer. And you'd have to return the key to your father's desk, all of this without having anyone see you." Without getting caught.

  Her eyes, warming, gold like the grasses, sympathetic and amused like that morning in his cubicle.

  "Sure," she said.

  Sure. He shivered. Hey, Dad, he thought, it's different with telecom engineers. No lives for bridges.

  CHAPTER 8

  No way in. Doors locked, windows locked, she wasn't careless.

  Not knowing what to expect, Interrupt brought it all. Pry bar, bolt cutters, glass cutter, duct tape, volt-ohm meter, wire, screwdrivers, whatever implements were handy and could be crammed into the toolbox.

  There hadn't been time to plan, hadn't been time to think it through.

  The one absolute necessity Interrupt had attached to the lineman's belt: the automatic, with a pair of leather gloves draped over it.

  Already, deep inside Interrupt's head, the pressure was beginning to build.

  She lived in a duplex. The neighbor's unit was dark; sleeping, or, please, not home. Her unit was dark downstairs, lighted upstairs.

  The best place, only place really, was the back patio door. French door, wood frame with flaking paint. Good. Double-keyed dead bolt. Bad.

  Try it.

  Interrupt pulled on a pair of latex gloves, took the glass cutter from the toolbox, and scored an arc near the door latch. A squeak, like boots on hard snow. Interrupt jerked the cutter away, hand already sweaty in the glove.

  Silence. Nothing happened.

  Come on, you've cut glass before. Interrupt took a breath. Not like this.