Angel Landing

by Alice Hoffman

  I took Minnie’s arm and led her to the door. My aunt looked back at the nurse. “That woman knows nothing about suffering,” Minnie said.

  Outside, there was a stiff harbor wind which coated our lips with salt; we walked quickly, Minnie took giant steps, I trotted to keep up with her.

  “The situation at Mercy isn’t good,” I called to my aunt. “But I certainly hope you don’t expect me to get into it. Outreach has nothing to do with other agencies in town.”

  Minnie stopped at a street corner. “You?” she said. “Not you. Me. I intend to do something about it.”

  “Really?” I said. “Just what do you intend to do?”

  But Minnie didn’t answer; she had covered her mouth with her long woolen scarf; she walked faster toward home and I followed closely, up the porch steps and then into the kitchen. Minnie immediately began cutting up carrots and broccoli, without even bothering to remove her scarf or her coat.

  “The director of the home thinks I’m there to play Bingo,” Minnie said as she threw the bamboo steamer onto the stove and lit the burner. “To read off Bingo numbers.” Minnie shook her head. “But I have a plan. And I wanted a witness to see how bad conditions are at Mercy. Just in case.”

  “In case of what?” I asked, suspicious of what a woman who had spent fifty years writing nasty letters to congressmen might now do if provoked.

  “They may ask me to give up my job,” Minnie continued. “I wouldn’t think of quitting. But whether they like it or not, I’m going to make sure that every woman at Mercy is wearing knee socks by the end of the week.”

  “Do you think it’s wise for you to work so hard at Mercy?”

  “Wise?” Minnie handed me a washed carrot. “Who cares about that? I’m talking about something important, I’m talking about warm legs.” She started cutting up the rest of the carrots. “Eat that,” she instructed me.

  Right then Minnie seemed stronger than I, younger somehow. “Are you planning other reforms at Mercy?”

  Minnie’s knife was now poised over a bunch of radishes. “I sure am. This is just the beginning.”

  “All right,” I agreed. “I’ll write up an unofficial memo at Outreach. I’ll be your witness.”

  “Naturally,” Minnie said. “How could you say no?”

  Suddenly I was tired. I had been trying not to think about Michael Finn, but it was nearly seven o’clock and Finn might already be pulling on his boots and starting to walk toward the high school, he might already be waiting.

  Minnie stirred the steamed vegetables into a large cast-iron pot, she added tomato sauce and tapped the wooden spoon on the rim. “You don’t look so good,” she said to me. “Did you take your brewer’s yeast tablet today?”

  “Someone came into Outreach today and told me that he had bombed the nuclear power plant.”

  Minnie scowled. “Stay away from him,” she told me.

  “He’s probably a liar,” I said. “He’s deluded.”

  “It might be true,” Minnie warned. “But bombers can bring you heartache. Believe me.”

  “Oh, Minnie,” I said. “What do you know about bombers?”

  “Plenty,” Minnie said. She poured the vegetable stew into a blue-rimmed bowl. “I used to be in love with one.”

  “You?” I said.

  “He was a union man, a presser; he made bombs for the union strikes. In the summers, when he wasn’t on strike, he came out here to stay with his brother.” Minnie tasted the stew and pursed her lips. “He fell in love with me.”

  “While you were married?” I asked, astounded, not thinking Minnie had ever looked at a man other than Uncle Alex.

  “Not everything has to be sex,” Minnie snapped. “I know what you’re thinking. Nowadays everything is sex; back then it was love.”

  “Did the police ever catch up with him?” I asked. “Did he go to trial?”

  “The police?” Minnie laughed. “This was the thirties. There was so much union trouble, so many bombers, nobody even bothered to look for him. Later, he became an antique dealer. He had a shop in Manhattan, on Seventy-second Street. He stopped coming to Fishers Cove after I gave him the brushoff. He never visited his brother again. But what could I do? I was too busy to fool around with him. I was married.”

  “That was a long time ago.” I smiled. “The old days.”

  “Old days, new days, a bomber is a bomber. You want to be smart?” Minnie said to me. “Don’t see him again.”

  During dinner I found that I could barely eat, although the vegetable stew wasn’t as bad as usual. It grew closer and closer to eight; by the time we were having tea I had begun to watch the minute hand on the clock above the stove. I had to go; rules of etiquette, rules of the heart all seemed out of place; Michael Finn was too special a case, and if he was already waiting, he might become more and more nervous, he might even be thinking about leaving the field before I got there. Much too soon the time came; I lied to Minnie, assuring her I would be back early from Carter’s, then I walked out into the cold November night.

  The high school had been built between the old and new sections of town; it was a good walk from Minnie’s, and by the time I reached the field my nose was running, my fingers were numb. There was a slight moon that night and the bleachers cast long shadows in the hard autumn dirt. When I had walked halfway across the field I thought I heard breathing, but no one was there, the only things moving were the oak trees which bordered the field. I waited for Finn behind the bleachers, standing among fallen leaves and empty beer bottles, watching the moon’s reflection in the narrow glass panels of the auditorium.

  It was after eight and Finn had still not arrived. If I had headed back across the field, if I had run, I could have made it back to Minnie’s in ten minutes. I remember, then, that Lark’s EMOTE group was meeting that night; I remembered I was in the field for a reason. When I closed my eyes it was as if Lark had found me. Envy touched me, purpose made me hold ground; I tried to think of the book that might spring from my work with Michael Finn. I wondered how high the fees were on the social-work lecture circuit. While I was thinking about fortune, anticipating fame, I suddenly heard something move, something was out there. I noticed now that there were owls in the oak trees; their wings fluttered above my head. When the earth behind me was crushed beneath someone’s step, I turned as quickly as I could.

  “Michael Finn?” I called.

  “It’s me,” he answered.

  I looked closely at the man who now stood beside me. He could have been anyone, an impostor, a criminal.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” Finn said. “I thought you might decide not to see me.”

  The owls suddenly took flight; they hooted and called across the clear sky.

  “This is a ridiculous place to meet,” I said.

  Finn nodded solemnly and went to sit on the lowest rung of bleachers.

  “Sugar?” he said. He had brought two cups of coffee with him in a paper bag and now offered me one. I sat across from him on the bleachers; the night was so frigid, even the coffee didn’t seem hot.

  Finn’s head was bowed. “I wish I had someone to talk to,” he said.

  Although he didn’t seem to be addressing me, I answered anyway. “You do. That’s why I’m here, isn’t it?”

  Finn looked up at me. “You?” he said. “I don’t know,” he shook his head. “I’m going to jail. I’m going for a long time.”

  “Why don’t you get some of your fears out,” I suggested. “Talk about it.”

  Finn smiled. “Going to jail isn’t just a fear. It’s going to happen.” He spoke quite softly, but his words were fragments of iron. His eyes now seemed dangerously wide. I was there, sitting across from a stranger, I was conversing with a criminal in a forgotten, deserted place. The longer we sat together the more certain I was that Finn was who he claimed to be. His honesty and guilt were evident in every word, in the tension of his body. The man I spoke with was the bomber, the lunatic of everyone’s dreams, the man our town f
eared most.

  “Relax,” I said.

  Finn’s eyes focused. “I’m scared,” he admitted. “This isn’t the way I was supposed to feel.”

  Slowly, Finn’s voice was taking me over, entering my bones.

  “Well, here’s your chance,” Finn laughed. “Do some therapy. Tell me that fear is normal.”

  “It is,” I nodded. “It’s perfectly normal for you to be anxious about the possibility of prison.”

  “Possibility,” Finn smiled bitterly. Finn looked like a nearly perfect statue which had been damaged. “When I first came to you at Outreach I had a plan,” Finn now told me. “If I acted crazy enough I thought you would agree to be a witness at my trial. I’d plead insanity, you’d give the evidence. But I don’t want to do 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.

  “Of 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.

  “I 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.

  “All 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

  FINN’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 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 sat in his Camaro, but he did not start the engine. And, as the other men began to drive away, Michael Finn waited.

  It happened quickly. Only one apprentice, who lost half his thumb, was hurt—everyone else had already left for the day when the testing crew turned on the steam. Finn was not alone when the roof blew; other welders were gathered around the coffee truck, and Finn got out of his car and raced toward the truck. And he watched just as innocently as the others, as if some other man had caused the spark.

  The first thing to go was the roof; Finn had not known a roof could blow so high. And when the fire on the second floor began, Finn had not imagined that the fire had a sound, its own hissing voice.

  “Holy shit,” the men gathered around the coffee truck said. “Fucking incredible.”

  Finn stood still as the sirens began to scream. “Was anyone hurt?” he asked.

  “Who the hell knows,” another welder shrugged. “Fucking incredible,” he whispered.

  The fire trucks pulled up, and their hoses began to splash water on the burning plant. Finn watched with real amazement as the sky filled with fire.

  “This will put the schedule back a while,” someone said, “and give us another year’s worth of work.” He grinned.

  “Well, then,” the coffee vendor said to the shivering group. “It must be an act of God.”

  Finn stood without speaking. But whenever he thought someone might have spoken to him, he turned quickly, as if he held his heart in his hand. When the other men tired of watching the explosion, when the firemen had drenched the plant leaving only sticky ash behind, Finn felt he had to turn away. He did not want to seem suspicious, but he could have watched for hours, forever. When he drove out of the parking lot, Finn realized for the first time that he had not thought beyond this one act of treason. To the other welders the explosion meant that their work would last longer—months longer, perhaps even a year. But to Finn the explosion meant only that he would not be able to sleep that night.