The Bridge Read Free

offspring, he was afflicted with what old bridgemen call "rambling fever."
    This made him challenging to some women, and frustrating to others, yet intriguing to most. On his first week in St. Ignace,
     while stopped at a gas station, he noticed a carload of girls nearby and, exuding all the shy and bumbling uncertainty of
     a new boy in town, addressed himself politely to the prettiest girl in the car—a Swedish beauty, a very healthy girl whose
     boyfriend had just been drafted—and thus began an unforgettable romance that would last until the next one.
    Having saved a few thousand dollars from working on the Mackinac, he became, very briefly, a student at the University of
     Arkansas and also bought a $2,700 Impala. One night in Ola, Arkansas, he cracked up the car and might have gotten into legal
     difficulty had not his date that evening been the judge's daughter.
    John Drilling seemed to live a charmed life. Of all the bridge builders who worked on the Mackinac, and who would later come
     east to work on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, young John Drilling seemed the luckiest—with the possible exception of his close
     friend, Robert Anderson.
    Anderson was luckier mainly because he had lived longer, done more, survived more; and he never lost his sunny disposition
     or incurable optimism. He was thirty-four years old when he came to the Mackinac. He had been married to one girl for a dozen
     years, to another for two weeks. He had been in auto accidents, been hit by falling tools, taken falls—once toppling forty-two
     feet—but his only visible injury was two missing inside fingers on his left hand, and he never lost its full use.
    One day on the north tower of the Mackinac, the section of catwalk upon which Anderson was standing snapped loose, and suddenly
     it came sliding down like a rollercoaster, with Anderson clinging to it as it bumped and raced down the cables, down 1,800
     feet all the way to near the bottom where the cables slope gently and straighten out before the anchorage. Anderson quietly
     got off and began the long climb up again. Fortunately for him, the Mackinac was designed by David B. Steinman, who preferred
     long, tapering backspans; had the bridge been designed by O. H. Ammann, who favored shorter, chunkier backspans, such as the
     type he was then creating for the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, Bob Anderson would have had a steeper, more abrupt ride down,
     and might have gone smashing into the anchorage and been killed. But Anderson was lucky that way.
    Off the bridge, Anderson had a boomer's luck with women. All the moving around he had done during his youth as a boomer's
     son, all the shifting from town to town and the enforced flexibility required of such living, gave him a casual air of detachment,
     an ability to be at home anywhere. Once, in Mexico, he made his home in a whorehouse. The prostitutes down there liked him
     very much, fought over him, admired his gentle manners and the fact that he treated them all like ladies. Finally the madam
     invited him in as a full-time house guest and each night Anderson would dine with them, and in the morning he stood in line
     with them awaiting his turn in the shower.
    Though he stands six feet and is broad-shouldered and erect, Bob Anderson is not a particularly handsome fellow; but he has
     bright, alert eyes, and a round, friendly, usually smiling face, and he is very disarming, a sort of Tom Jones of the bridge
     business— smooth and swift, somewhat gallant, addicted to good times and hot-blooded women, and yet never slick or tricky.
    He is also fairly lucky at gambling, having learned a bit back in Oklahoma from his uncle Manuel, a guitar-playing rogue who
     once won a whole carnival playing poker. Anderson avoids crap games, although one evening at the Nicolet, when a crap game
     got started on the floor of the men's room and he'd been invited to join, he did.
    "Oh, I was drunk that night," he said, in his slow southwestern drawl, to a