Angel Landing by Alice Hoffman Read Free Book Online Page A

it,” Finn said. “I don’t want to act crazy, because I’m not.” His breath poured out like steam, like the hard breath of a runner. “I don’t feel like I’m crazy,” Finn whispered. “I’m not,” he said.
    â€œOf course you’re not,” I agreed. I had to agree; if I had thought he was crazy, even for a minute, I could never have stayed with him. I could never have asked him to tell me what happened.
    â€œI want to know everything,” I said. “Everything that happened that day, everything that happened afterward.”
    Finn nodded, resigned. Then he reached for a cigarette, one of the dozen he would go through that night; his fingers were long, the fingers of a painter or a pianist, skin and bones much too fine for dynamite. When he exhaled, the smoke moved upward, encircling us, then drifting higher, to the oak trees. There were still some crickets who had survived the first frosts, but their song was slow, not at all a sound of summer.
    â€œAll right,” Finn agreed. “I’ll tell you what happened. But you don’t have to testify for me when I come to trial. You don’t even have to believe me.”
    That’s what he told me, and I nodded, but I knew, even before he began to speak, as I sat shivering, that I would believe every word he said.

FOUR
    F INN’S BOOT HEELS ECHOED as they hit the cement when he walked from his car to the gates of the power plant. It was too early for Finn to talk: he was a man who was used to solitude, and any kind of conversation jarred at such an early hour. So, he simply nodded when he recognized another welder; he nodded again to the shop steward when he picked up his brass and the stamp which engraved each welder’s initials into every piece of work he did. It was the first Wednesday in November. Finn had recently turned twenty-nine, and he had already begun to think about being thirty.
    Michael Finn was a loner, and sometimes it got to him. He spent his lunch hour by himself in his car, and he refused invitations to meet other welders at the Modern Times Bar after work. But today Finn didn’t feel lonely. His bootsteps were steady; and, although he hadn’t bothered to shave and had had very little sleep the night before, he felt alive. He felt ready. When he reached his locker, he slipped a brown paper bag inside before reaching for his protective suede jacket. Anyone watching might have thought the bag contained Finn’s lunch. But Finn never ate lunch; instead he sat in his car, smoking cigarettes and listening to cassette tapes of the Rolling Stones.
    Finn slammed the metal locker shut. When he walked down the corridors to the room he had been assigned to, no one would have had any reason to be suspicious. Other workers thought him strange, but not as much so as ten years before, when they found his long hair a personal insult. If Finn was not accepted, he was never baited or bothered. Even if he was known for his unfriendliness, even if he could work for days without talking to anyone, his father, Danny Finn, who was the foreman of the second unit of the plant, could be found at the Modern Times Bar every day at lunchtime; and Finn’s grandfather, John, had been one of the union’s founding members.
    Michael Finn had been a welder for nearly eleven years. He felt like an old man, he wondered if he was aging too quickly, or if, perhaps, each working day somehow had lasted months. He was missing something; he had become different, had grown apart from the friends he once had. These friends had gone off to state universities upstate, or they had gotten jobs in stores, or joined the police department, one had opened a health food store in East Hampton. But after graduating from high school, Finn had gone to work with his father, and from that day on his back was in pain, as if the spine had somehow curved with sadness. And although Finn had rented his apartment above the