The Ledge (3 page)

My shoulders feel pressed from the sides as they squeeze through the snow bridge. Then the battering and scraping and squeezing suddenly stop. For maybe half a second I’m relieved.

Then I get it: It’s not that I’ve stopped falling; I’ve been spit out the bottom of the snow bridge. I frantically wave my arms and legs in the blackness, but feel nothing. I’m no longer touching anything. With no sensory input, for a split second I feel magically suspended in midair. In reality, though, I’m accelerating down.

In a vain attempt to stop, I swing my ice ax blindly in front of me as I fall. It swishes though the air. I can’t reach either side of the
crevasse. My gut warns that I am going for a big ride. I start guessing how far I’m falling.

Ten feet
.

Mike’s on his belly, digging in hard with his ax and boots—the fall should be short.

When he gets hold, the rope will jerk taut and stop me—any second now.

I feel no reassuring yank of the rope.

Twenty feet
.

I try to swing my ice ax again, desperate to hook something, but my arm feels funny; the nylon leash has slipped off my wrist. My ax is gone.

I can’t stop myself now.

Thirty feet
.

I’m going too fast. Mike should have stopped me by now—something’s wrong
.

Barely controlled fear erupts into terror. I’ve been falling feet-first, but now the high-centered weight of my pack rotates me sideways as I plummet. Instinctively, I jab my arm out into the darkness, groping for a place to grab hold. I can’t see it, but I feel an ice wall, hard as concrete, race past my gloved fingers, the nylon screaming as it skims along.

Forty feet
.

We’re almost out of rope.

Fifty feet
.

If I’m really in fifty feet, that means Mike’s been dragged almost to the crevasse lip. He’s running out of space …

C’mon, Mike! … Dig in! … Dig in! … Stop us!

The rope tied to my waist harness jerks, and for a brief instant I think Mike’s done it, that his ax and boots finally caught hold and he’s arrested my fall.

We’re going to be okay …

Then the rope goes slack and I accelerate even more madly than before.

Lost in my own fear, fifty feet below him, I can’t hear or see Mike. But I suddenly feel his presence. I know he’s here—I have dragged my friend into the crevasse with me.

Without Mike as a counterweight, digging in, we’re both headed for the bottom. Roped together, we soar through the blackness.

We’ve had it
.

DAD WRAPPED THE
rope around his waist twice and briskly tied the knot without a word. I heard his voice in my mind anyway, repeating the mantra he’d taught me for tying a proper bowline: “The rabbit comes out of the hole, around the tree, and back in the hole.”

I was twelve years old.

The tawny braided manila rope draped along the leg of his paint-splattered pants. He handed me his lifeline and our fingers touched. His wide calluses made my hands seem pathetically soft.

“Do ya understand what ya hafta do?” he asked as we stood on the building’s roof.

“Yeah, I think I got it.”

“Good. I outweigh ya, so back over the other side.”

The big storage shed hunkered in a remote corner of the federal Natick Labs in Natick, Massachusetts. I slid my butt off the building’s crest and moved downhill two feet. Struggling for purchase on the slick metal roof, I edged one boot against a panel seam and dug my other heel into a jagged rivethead. From below us, back down the ladder, I heard a steady mechanical hum. The spray gun idled, ready for Dad to squeeze the trigger and shoot a thick coat of protective tar onto the roof.

Having me on the opposite side from Dad let me see him but gave us some mechanical advantage in case he fell. The extra force required to drag me back up and over the roof’s apex should slow us both enough so that I could probably stop him.

It was my first time pulling ropes for anyone, and I was terrified. Dad was going to spray, and I’d been recruited to hold his safety line. I knew that once he started, the big pneumatic pump would chug out viscous tar so fast that Dad would have to run back and forth to prevent a thick mess we would then have to clean up. With the tar flying and Dad scrambling, my job was to pull in rope when he ran toward me and feed out slack when he scampered away. Take in the rope too slowly, and the excess would pile up and trip him. Feed out slack too slowly, and the line could jerk him off his feet. If Dad stumbled for any reason, I had to make sure he didn’t plunge off the roof to the pavement thirty feet below. If I blew it, my dad was going to hit the ground.

“Ya ready?”

“I guess so.”

“There’s no ‘I guess so.’ Ya have to keep me on the roof.”

“I know. But what if I get tired or can’t hang on?”

“Wrap the rope around your arm or your leg. Bite it with your teeth. I don’t care; just hang on. Remember, there’s no letting go.”

Trying to look brave, I nodded my head at Dad, and he nodded back. He pulled the trigger, the spray gun screamed like a jet, and high-pressure tar blasted out. Dad dashed down the sloped roof, and my arms flailed as I let out slack. When he got one step from the edge he extended his reach and coated all the way to the drop-off. Then he scurried up the roof, spraying his way back toward the ridgeline. Loose rope piled around and on me as I yarded it in.

We maintained this frantic pace for a few minutes before Dad released the trigger. He stopped near the roof crest, a jumbled cocoon of slack rope coiling around me. We both panted for a minute, inadvertently
pulling the heavy petroleum vapors deep into our lungs. Dad broke the silence.

“This baby pumps out some juice.”

“Boy, I’ll say.”

“Ya doin’ all right?”

“It’s wild, but I got it.”

“Keep it up.”

He hit the trigger again and the mêlée resumed. We had started at six
A.M
. to beat the July heat. Now it was seven o’clock, and warmth boiled off the metal roof and mixed with the muggy New England air.

By midmorning we had the job almost half done. During a break, Dad checked the thermometer he had placed on the roof surface and blew out a low, long whistle.

“It’s maxed out past a hundred and twenty,” he said. “Gettin’ awful warm up here.”

“Maybe we can finish today, though,” I interjected. “Should we just keep going?”

He looked at the sun, then the thermometer again, then at me, thinking.

“Nope,” he said after a three-second pause. “Better quit before someone gets hurt.”

We returned to the job site the next morning in the dark, and climbed onto the roof at first light. As the sun crept higher, the gun screamed, Dad scrambled, and my tired arms spooled the rope in and out once again. Coarse fibers protruding from the three twisted manila strands pricked at fresh blisters on my hands, but tacky tar blotches on the rope gave me a good grip. By ten
A.M.
, we had finished.

That evening, when I took my regular seat at the dinner table, I was surprised to see my green paycheck centered, almost ceremonially, facedown on my empty white plate. Puzzled, I flipped it over.
Dad gave me a sideways glance while he sipped his scotch and water. The amount was double my normal pay.

“There’s a mistake. You paid me too much.”

“No mistake,” he said. “Pulling my ropes, ya did the work of a full painter. So ya should get paid like a full painter from now on.”

Thrilled but stunned, I looked across the table at Mom. She said softly, “Your father said you worked hard. Take it.”

“I didn’t go off the roof,” Dad said, “so ya did your job right. Ya earned it.”

I lifted my milk and clinked glasses with Dad.

“Atta boy, Jim.”

AS FAR BACK
as I can remember, I hung around my dad and uncle as they operated their painting business out of our barn. Two stories tall, with white clapboard siding, it sat beside our century-old house in Concord, Massachusetts. Behind its massive sliding doors, several rough-hewn horse stalls converted to shelving overflowed with ladders, brushes, and hundreds of half-empty paint cans. The aging building leaned a little to the west, and there were a few dinner-plate-sized holes in the wide-plank flooring of the rope-storage loft upstairs, but it served fine as a paint shop. I didn’t appreciate at the time how hard their work was, and how vital; my dad had four kids, Uncle Bob had five, and as co-owners of the business they could lose their shirts or make a year’s profit with a single job.

I loved the ever-changing crowd of men arriving each morning—beater station wagons and rusty vans backing up, their occupants grabbing job orders, loading paint buckets. After an energetic scrum of preparation, the convoy would pull out. As a preschooler I often asked to go to the job site, too, and since I usually couldn’t, Dad sometimes appeased me by handing me brushes and a bucket of water and telling me to “paint” the wooden bulkhead that led to our
fieldstone cellar. Brushing the water on the green boards made their dark surfaces glisten, just as if they had a fresh coat.

At age nine I worked several forty-hour weeks during the summer for Lincoln Painting Company, scraping off old paint and cleaning brushes. Dad paid me ten cents an hour. At age ten, I worked full-time for half the summer, as well as some weekends during the school year. Dad had taught me how to walk sloped roofs and how to spray paint by the time I was twelve. On hundreds of jobs, I observed my father interacting with his partner, his customers, his crews. I watched and listened and learned.

I can still hear his voice in my head.

“Think it through before ya commit … Make sure ya know what you’re doing … Better hit it early … You’re tired today? Well, hired, tired, fired … Stick with it until ya get the job done … Do it like ya mean it.”

And more than that, I can feel in my bones the lessons I took away from all of it. That when you committed to “foot” a ladder, anchoring it while another man climbed high, you could never, ever leave your partner; even if the ladder slid away and fell, you rode it to the ground, protecting him as best you could all the way. That when you “pulled rope”—keeping hold of another painter’s safety line to prevent him from falling to the ground—you dedicated yourself to hanging on for all you were worth. If your partner took a tumble, you never let go of the rope, even if it yanked you off the building, too.

Just before I pulled rope for Dad on an extra-slippery roof, he said to me, “If I go off and hit the ground, ya’d better be coming off the roof right behind me, still holding my rope.”

Once, I was on a roof with our foreman, Rocco Ciraso, and a new hire. As a scrawny twelve-year-old, I was too light to anchor Rocco, whose beer belly and thick-limbed Harley-riding physique brought him in at about 230 pounds, so the untested new guy was
going to pull Rocco’s rope. Even after Rocco drilled into him the importance of never letting go, the guy seemed noncommittal. Rocco didn’t trust him, so I didn’t either.

“Stick out your arm,” Rocco ordered.

When he did, Rocco tied the rope to the shocked man’s wrist. When the newbie complained and reached for the knot, Rocco gave him the cold stare he had perfected back in his badass biker days and warned, “Leave it on.”

“There,” Rocco said after cinching the knot tighter. “Now I know you’ll try hard.”

He did try hard that day, and he did okay, but he never came back. When Rocco told my father the next day why the new guy quit, I heard Dad reply, “Fine. If he’s not going to stick with it, then we’re better off without him.”

DAD AND UNCLE
Bob did a lot of industrial painting for the federal government. In the summer of 1976, they won the bid to paint the Wyman Avenue bridge, a primary access point for traffic entering the Portsmouth naval base. About three hundred feet long and two lanes wide, the unassuming metal structure looked like most other highway spans. The job seemed straightforward: Sandblast the faded gray paint off the bridge’s steel underpinnings, then spray two fresh coats back on.

Nothing on the job went right. The bridge stood on the border between New Hampshire and Maine where the Piscataqua River meets the sea, and saltwater mist filled the air. So we had to sandblast and paint in small, inefficient chunks, or risk the newly cleaned steel rusting and needing to be stripped all over again.

On summer break after eighth grade, I joined Dad on the job site. I scraped metal handrails, shoveled sand, and tried lugging one-hundred-pound sandbags. Because I outweighed the bulging brown
paper bags by just twenty pounds, initially I could not move them very far. By the summer’s end, I could carry them with ease.

Each workday started when Dad and I pulled out of the driveway at five-thirty
A.M.
, so we’d be the first ones on-site by seven o’clock. We were the last to leave, at around six each evening, which got us home by seven-thirty for a reheated dinner.

Dad and Uncle Bob taught me about sandblasting so Dad and I could work alone some weekends. He blasted; I tended the sand pot.