One day Jill's dad caught us cuddling on her bed. I had my hand up underneath her sweater, but I was just tickling her back, not feeling her up. Well, the guy came unglued. First he said, "What you doing letting a loser like him hang around for?" and he jerked his thumb over his shoulder at me like I was a piece of furniture. Then he turned around and said, "I suppose you figure she's an easy mark on account of her lip, huh? Huh? Huh?" like I was some kind of pervert. I swallowed and said "No, sir," and he said it back to me high and sing-songy. Then he said "Yeah, turns you on when she says 'Ih hlofh hyou,' huh?" I wanted to say something back to him, but I was only about sixteen and I was scared as hell. Jill never looked at me the same after that, or maybe I just imagined she didn't. Anyway I never could come on to her again, but I never have been able to stop thinking about her either.

    After high school I took some physics and math courses at JC and passed an exam to be a trainee in a steam plant. That’s a place where they use steam to generate electric power, not a laundry. You have to understand both the steam side and the electric side to get promoted. Some guys dropped out because they couldn't understand steam tables or resistances, or they'd spend all their time shooting the bull around the coffee machine instead of tracing out pipes and wiring, but I worked hard at it, and I kept taking courses. I like machinery. Sometimes people get all torqued because bulldozers are grading a hillside, but I love to watch those things work, planing it down to match a drawing. Once I started to take an extension course called "Values and Technology" from some long-haired prof at Sacramento State. He started off by trying to tell me that technology had gotten out of human control, so I asked him if he felt that way when he operated his word processor. He smiled and said "Technology dictates that I have to use a word processor instead of a quill pen," so I dropped his lousy course.

    In the steam plant we worked ten-day rotating shifts with four days off. If you were coming off graveyard and coming back on days it seemed like five. That's plenty of time for a trip over Donner Pass on the train and a couple of days in Reno. Maybe because I wished I was someone else, I started using a phony name over there. After awhile I got a Nevada driver's license so I'd have some ID, and opened a bank account. I'd been using my motel for my mailing address, but they didn't like holding my mail between visits, so I rented a post office box under my new name. That happens to be a federal offense, but screw it. Anyway, it got so that people in Reno knew me as this guy no one in Sacramento had ever heard of.

    Gambling is for fools, but I liked being away from everything, and the shows and food were good. I liked to walk around town watching what people do, too. I got a kick out of looking at stuff in hardware stores, wondering who buys it to do what. After awhile some of the clerks got to know me a little. I liked that, too. One day just for the hell of it I told one of them that I needed to get rid of some boulders but I didn't know how to do it. He said, "Well, Chet, sounds like some dynamite might do it for you," and he explained to me how to place the charges so they'd break up the rocks. I couldn't back out then and say "Hey, just kidding" without looking like some kind of jerk, so I left the store with three sticks of dynamite and caps.

    Pretty soon I was driving around Reno with dynamite in the trunk of my rental car. I had the blasting caps up front in the footwell so that if I got rear-ended they wouldn't detonate and set off the whole works. The problem I had was that I didn't know what to do with the stuff. I mean, you can't just drive up and throw a bunch of dynamite into a supermarket trash bin. For one thing, suppose somebody saw me and yelled "Hey, you!" and wrote down my license plate? And I don't know what they do with garbage around there--suppose they burn the stuff, and the whole public dump was to blow sky high and fling garbage onto everybody within a mile of the place? I couldn't just walk into my motel with a box of dynamite, either, or take it back to Sacramento on the train, or stash it in a locker at the Greyhound. For a minute I thought maybe I should buy a piece of land like I told the clerk, so at least I'd have a place to leave the stuff.

    What I finally decided to do was drive my rental car back to Sacramento so I could store the dynamite in the garage at my apartment. Then I'd drive back to Reno, turn the car in, and take the train back home. Somewhere on the trip up the Truckee River canyon on Interstate 80 I started thinking about how cold and lonely the Sierras looked, and that started me thinking about how lonely I felt, and about this business with Jill years back. So instead of driving straight home, I turned up into Carmichael and drove through our old neighborhood. She didn't still live there--she was in college somewhere, I'd heard--but the street looked about the same, except that the trees seemed bigger. I could see through people's front windows because it was getting dark and they had their lights turned on inside. I even saw the old s.o.b himself, sitting in his recliner with his feet up, reading his newspaper. I remembered that I'd been there once when his wife had caught him reading Playboy. She'd kicked him in the shins and told him to read the Bible. Great family. Why Jill turned out so gentle was beyond me. Anyway, I drove on to my place, unloaded my dynamite, then drove back over Donner Pass, feeling churned up inside.

    It must have been a couple of months before I got my bright idea. Then I started driving past the house about every day. It was easy to know when the guy was about to take off for a vacation, because he liked to show off his camper and his boat and his dirt bikes in the driveway for about a week before. One day I saw that all the vacation gear was gone, so figured the house was vacant, but I phoned a few times just to make sure.

    Behind his house on the next street over there was a two story apartment building with a couple of tin starbursts on a stucco front and a swimming pool in a courtyard inside. The carports were around in back. A cinderblock wall behind them marked the property line. I came back one night at about 2 a.m. and coasted my pickup back past the apartment house carports, parked by the wall, climbed onto the cab roof, and dropped over the wall into his back yard. I had to hope that nobody felt like looking out the window just then.

    The guy had a big elaborate lock on his front door. That's supposed to prove his home is his castle, I guess. But around in back where I was there was a glass slider that opened onto a deck. I lifted it right out of its track, no big deal. Inside he'd left a light on and the drapes open, so I had to crawl over to the fireplace to keep from being seen. It was easy to tuck the dynamite between the gas logs. The front log was even hollowed out a little for me. Then I went home and waited for some cold weather. The gas jets under those logs are aimed down because the flames are supposed to spread out under the fake ashes and make them glow, so it might take a few seconds to get around to blowing him and his Barcalounger into the backyard fence. The shape of the hearth would give him the full benefit of the blast, too. Then little bits of red paper would rain down on whatever's left of him like confetti at New Year's.

    I felt pretty safe. I couldn’t think of any way that the cops would connect me with him. I haven’t lived there for years, and I haven’t kept in touch with anybody. What are the cops going to do? Ask if the guy humiliated some kid who lived on the block years ago? Anyway, I bet that lots of people don’t like him. Like I said, I’ve been watching the news since the first cold weather, hoping for a headline about how he got blown to hell so I could say, "Tough beans, you jerk," but so far, nothing. The other day, I got really curious and drove through the neighborhood mid-morning, when most people are at work or school. A realtor’s sign was stuck in his front lawn saying the place is in escrow. Oh, shit.