Under One Roof: How a Tough Old Woman in a Little Old House Changed My Life. Barry Martin

for Mike’s. He’s been there since about a week before forever. Besides, he was outside the perimeter of the shopping mall site anyway, so it wasn’t a big deal. Not like Edith’s house.

      There were other issues on the project, though. For one thing, the soil on the site was contaminated with lead. It wasn’t that much of a surprise; lead is usually a by-product of manufacturing. The material was all fill that had been brought in back in the twenties to bring the site above sea level. The fill must have been contaminated with the residual lead from some kind of plant – a smelter, maybe – and there was a little arsenic in the soil, too. It all had to go.

      So there we were, digging twelve feet down on a rectangular city block, which meant we had 48,000 tons of contaminated material to dig out and haul away so it could be disposed of properly. It was a long and noisy process, but Edith didn’t seem to mind. In fact, I think she was enjoying all the hubbub going on all around her. She would come out and watch the goings-on and wave to the workers when they’d walk by, and they’d wave back with a friendly “Hi, Edith, how’s it going?” All in all, a pretty copacetic relationship.

      It wasn’t just the soil we were concerned about. On a job like this, when you’re digging a huge hole, you also have to worry about the pressure of trucks going by on the adjacent roads. You have to sink massive I-beams, three feet wide, into the ground for support. You have to stick them twice as far in as they’re going to stick out, so basically the beams were about forty feet long. It was a big deal, but it had to be done: no beams, and the road could have collapsed into the hole.

      You never know what you’re going to find once you start digging. One afternoon, when I was walking by the far end of the lot, I noticed that the track hoe had something big in its jaw. As I got closer, I saw a big metal tank of some kind, maybe an old oil drum or something. My first thought was, hey, we could cut that in half and make a nice little site barbecue – but when I got a little closer, I could see that it was actually shaped like something more dangerous.

      A bomb, in fact.

      It looked like one of those bombs they used for carpet-bombing during World War II. It didn’t have fins on the back, but it did have four bolts where the fins could be attached. I asked the track hoe operator what he thought it was, and he said, “I dunno, but there’s a whole bunch of them right over there.”

      Sure enough, there was a pile of about ten of those things, sitting in plain view. I immediately told the track hoe operator what I thought they were. He got white as a sheet, and just froze in place.

      I told everyone to move away from the site, and dialed 911.

      “What is your emergency, sir?” the operator asked.

      “I think I’ve found a bomb,” I said. I mean, how else was I going to put it?

      There was silence on the other end. Finally, she spoke, as though she was speaking to a crazy person: “A what, sir?”

      I figured she might think she’s talking to a crazy person, but she’s not going to be talking to a dead crazy person. I told her again that I thought I’d found a bomb.

      Within minutes, two police cars showed up. They were treating the whole incident pretty nonchalantly until they saw the thing, at which point their demeanor became all business. They called the bomb squad from their cell phones, because they didn’t want to put it out over the radio and give the media a chance to get wind of it and panic everybody. I noticed that one of the workers on the site – one of the environmental guys who worked for the owner – was still at his post. “Excuse me,” I said to him. “What part of ‘this could be a bomb and it could blow up’ did you not understand?” He got up and, with a big sigh, slowly walked away.

      Ten minutes later, the bomb squad, the FBI, and a bunch more police cars were on the scene, along with my bosses from Ledcor. We watched from the street as officers swarmed all over the site. I went up to the guy at the big black bomb squad truck parked on the street, and asked him if he’d like me to open a gate so he could pull the truck onto the site. “No, I got a million bucks’ worth of equipment on here,” he said. “Anything blows up, I can’t take a chance.”

      I looked over at all the cops.

      “Well, there sure are a lot of guys standing around the thing,” I said. “Are they okay to be there?”

      “We lose those officers,” he deadpanned, “we can get new ones. But this equipment is hard to replace.”

      Just then, the guy who had been so reluctant to take this seriously was striding up to me. He seemed to think it was his job to read me the riot act: he was “officially putting me on notice” that Ledcor was responsible for this site. He started grilling me about why we weren’t securing the perimeter, and telling me that the safety of everyone was our responsibility. He was just ranting. I tried to calm him down a few times, and point out that the police had the scene under control, but the more I tried to reassure him, the wilder his ranting got. Finally, I put one hand on his collar, grabbed his arm with the other, and escorted him off the premises. The cops looked over and didn’t bat an eye, except for one who I swear was trying to stifle a big grin.