Angel Landing by Alice Hoffman Read Free Book Online Page B

sporting goods store on the day of his eighteenth birthday, although he could have invited someone up to his place for marijuana or to listen to records, he never had company. He was, suddenly, much too old for anyone his age. Even the women he dated rarely agreed to go out with him a second time; Finn was too peculiar, too wrapped up in silence, and his eyes were too blue. Often, the women he dated grew afraid, and when they talked about Finn to their friends they laughed in the hopes that laughter would help them forget Finn’s piercing eyes.
    Sometimes, when he looked at his own hands, Finn was amazed; they seemed more like his father’s hands than his own—they were callused, and the nails were split. But that day in early November, the feeling of age did not surround him; his eyes in the mirror were filled with passion. His knees did not ache as he climbed down from the scaffolding when the lunch whistle blew; his hand seemed smooth and strong as he turned off his welding machine. By the time he walked down the corridor and opened his locker door, Finn felt truly young; he was dizzy with possibilities. It was then he knelt and picked up the brown paper bag.
    If he had been caught, if someone had wrestled him to the floor and ripped the paper bag from his hands, nothing could have been proven against him. There was no dynamite, no TNT, not one Molotov cocktail. Finn knew nothing about dangerous explosives; it would have taken him months of study to learn how to make a bomb, and Finn hadn’t had the idea for months. What he intended to do was not even a plan; it was more like a storm of thoughts that encircled him, so that every step he took was soft and far off the ground, as if his ideas had sprung from the sky.
    When he first began taking a check valve apart in the basement, beneath the sporting goods store, Finn did not know exactly why he had brought home the two-inch black iron valve. The reason came to him slowly: he would create a fault. He reversed the tappet, and reamed the valve until it was half of its original thickness. The steam that poured through the piping system during testing would build up pressure and blow out the valve Finn had tampered with. An oxyacetylene torch unit was stored nearby. There would be an explosion. Suddenly, simply, all of the work that had been done on the second unit would be blown away.
    Finn tucked the paper bag into the front pocket of his suede jacket. He walked in circles in the parking lot through the half-hour lunch break. He couldn’t stand still, he couldn’t sit down, he dared not talk to anyone. When the whistle blew once more, and other men returned from the Modern Times or the deli on Route 18, Finn climbed back up the scaffold carefully, as if he carried a sack of diamonds, or a bag of gold.
    It was one-thirty by the time he had welded the valve into place. He admired his work; the welding was beautiful, as neat as a dime—so neat that the inspectors wouldn’t think to X-ray the welds for porosity. Finn’s work never showed the little air holes that could appear between the welding beads. No one had any reason to be suspicious. His initials would be in place. And what fool would stamp his own treason? Only a man like Finn, after eleven years with the taste of iron in his mouth and the smell of metal caught in his nose. It was not so much a calculated act as it was a last-chance effort; if his life kept on the way it was going, Finn couldn’t have survived. He would not have wanted to.
    That afternoon, at the end of the working day, Finn said hello to men he usually ignored. He thought, briefly, of joining some other welders at the Modern Times; but he knew he would have ordered only one beer, and he would have left it untouched. So, Finn left the power plant right on time—at four—and he walked across the parking lot to his car. That day Finn was certain that there was nothing left of him that anyone could take away. He