idea of firebombing Arnie's car is okay, but you've got moral scruples about breaking some glass?'
'No,' I said. 'But who's going to get close enough to her to break the glass with a hammer, Leigh? You?'
She looked at me, biting at her soft lower lip. She said nothing.
The next idea had been mine. Dynamite.
Leigh thought about it and shook her head.
'I could get it without too much sweat, I think,' I said. I still saw Brad Jeffries from time to time, and Brad still worked for Penn-DOT, and Penn-DOT had enough dynamite to put Three Rivers Stadium on the moon. I thought that maybe I could borrow the right key without Brad knowing I had borrowed it - he had a way of getting tanked up when the Penguins were on the tube. Borrow the key to the explosives shed during the third period of one game, I thought, and return it to his ring in the third period of another. The chance that he would be wanting explosives in January, and thus realize his key was missing, was small indeed. It was a deception, another betrayal - but it was a way to end things.
'No,' she said.
'Why not?' To me, dynamite seemed to offer the kind of utter finality the situation demanded.
'Because Arnie keeps it parked in his driveway now. Do you really want to send shrapnel flying all over a suburban neighbourhood? Risking a piece of flying glass cutting off some little kid's head?'
I winced. I hadn't thought of that, but now that she mentioned it, the image seemed sharp and clear and hideous. And that got me thinking about other things. Lighting a bundle of dynamite with your cigarillo and then tossing it overhand at the object you wanted to destroy . . . that might look okay on the Saturday afternoon Westerns they showed on channel 22, but in real life there were blasting caps and contact points to deal with. Still, I held onto the idea as long as I could.
'If we did it at night?'
'Still pretty dangerous,' she said. 'And you know it, too.
It's all over your face.'
A long, long pause.
'What about the crusher at Darnell's? ' she asked finally.
'Same basic objection as before,' I said. 'Who gets to drive her down there? You, me, or Arnie?'
And that was where matters stood.
'What was it today?' I asked her.
'He wanted me to go out with him tonight,' she said. 'Bowling this time.' In previous days it had been the movies, out for dinner, over to watch TV at his house, proposed study-dates. Christine figured in all of them as the mode of transport. 'He's getting ugly about it, and I'm running out of excuses. If we're going to do something, we ought to do it soon.'
I nodded. Failure to find a satisfactory method was one thing. The other thing holding us back had been my leg. Now the cast was off, and although I was on stern doctor's orders to use my crutches, I had tested the left leg without them. There was some pain, but not as much as I had feared.
Those things, yeah - but mostly there had been us. Discovering each other. And although it's going to sound stinking, r guess I ought to add something else, if this thing is going to stay straight (and I promised myself when I began to tell the tale that I'd stop if I found I couldn't get it straight or keep it straight). The spice of danger had added something to what I felt for her - and, I think, to what she felt for me. He was my best friend, but there was still a dirty, senseless attraction in the idea that we were seeing each other behind his back. I felt that each time I drew her into my arms, each time my hand slipped over the firm swelling of her breasts. The sneaking around. Can you tell me why that should have an attraction? But it did. For the first time in my life, I had fallen for a girl. I had slipped before, but this time I had taken the grand head-over-heels tumble. And I loved it. I loved her. That constant sense of betrayal, though . . . that was a snakelike thing, both a shame and a crazy sort of goad. We could tell each other (and we did) that we were keeping our mouths shut to protect our families and ourselves.