The Bridge Read Free Page A

friend some days later. "I was so drunk I could
     hardly see. But I jes' kept rolling them dice, and all I was seeing was sevens and elevens, sevens and elevens, Jee-sus Kee-rist, all night long it went like that, and I kept winning and drinking and winning some more. Finally lots of other folks came
     jamming in, hearing all the noise and all, and in this men's toilet room there's some women and tourists who also came in
     jes' watching me roll those sevens and elevens.
    "Next morning I woke up with a helluva hangover, but on my bureau I seen this pile of money. And when I felt inside my pockets
     they were stuffed with bills, crumpled up like dried leaves. And when I counted it all, it came to more than one thousand
     dollars. And that day on the bridge, there was guys coming up to me and saying, 'Here, Bob, here's the fifty I borrowed last
     night,' or, 'Here's the hundred,' and I didn't even remember they borrowed it. Jee-sus Kee-rist, what a night!"
    When Bob Anderson finally left the Mackinac job and St. Ignace, he had managed to save five thousand dollars, and, not knowing
     what else to do with it, he bought a round-trip airplane ticket and went flying off to Tangier, Paris, and Switzerland—"whoring
     and drinking," as he put it—and then, flat broke, except for his return ticket, he went back to St. Ignace and married a lean,
     lovely brunette he'd been unable to forget.
    And not long after that, he packed his things and his new wife, and along with dozens of other boomers—with John Drilling
     and Drag-Up, with Ace Cowan and Jack Kelly and other veterans of the Mackinac and the Nicolet—he began the long road trip
     eastward to try his luck in New York.

CHAPTER TWO
    PANIC IN
BROOKLYN
    "You sonamabitchl" the old Italian shoemaker cried, standing in the doorway of the Brooklyn real estate office, glaring at the men who sat behind
     desks in the rear of the room. "You sonamabitch" he repeated when nobody looked up.
    "Hey" snapped one of the men, jumping up from his desk, "who are you talking to?"
    "You," said the shoemaker, his small, disheveled figure leaning against the door unsteadily, as if he'd been drinking, his
     tiny dark eyes angry and bloodshot. "You take-a my store . . . you no give-a me notting, you . . ."
    "Now listen here," said the real estate man, quickly walking to where the shoemaker stood and looking down at him hard, "we
     will have none of that talk around here. In fact I am going to call the cops . . ."
    He grabbed the phone nearest him and began to dial. The shoemaker watched for a moment, not seeming to care. Then he shrugged
     to himself and slowly turned and, without another word, walked out the door and shuffled down the street. The real estate
     man, putting down the telephone, watched the shoemaker go. He did not chase him. He wanted nothing further to do with him—
     neither with him nor with any of those boisterous people who had been making so much noise lately, cursing or signing petitions or issuing threats, as if
     it had been the real estate mens idea to build the Verrazano Narrows Bridge and the big highway leading up to it, the highway that would cut into the Bay Ridge
     section of Brooklyn where seven thousand people now lived, where eight hundred buildings now stood—including a shoestore—and
     would level everything in its path into a long, smooth piece of concrete.
    No, it was not their idea, it was the idea of Robert Moses and his Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority to build the bridge
     and its adjoining highways—but the real estate men, hired by the Authority, were getting most of the direct blame because
     it was they, not Moses, who had to face the people and say, "Abandon your homes—we must build a bridge."
    Some people, particularly old people, panicked. Many of them pleaded with the Authority's representatives and prayed to God
     not to destroy these homes where their children had been born, where their husbands had died. Others panicked with anger,