Although the encounter with women here was only visual, the sights Ranny saw through the peephole were etched so clearly that they pushed those dimly-remembered physical experiences with prostitutes to the dark recesses of his mind. The hours of voyeurism at night and the desperate moments snatched through the day supplied him with images that he would be able to call up and enjoy for years to come. He had no illusions about ever enjoying any physical sex with these girls. Besides being underage, none of them would be at all interested in a man twice their age who was not particularly attractive, and he had no desire to force sex on a woman who wasn't willing, so rape wasn't something he considered. He did fantasize at night in bed that one of the young lovelies he had seen that day would walk up to him, in her tight T-shirt and tighter jeans, and say, "Mister, I'm really horny and I'm tired of these young boys who don't know what they're doing. I want a real man, and my pickup has a camper shell with a bed in it. Would you please come back there with me and see if you can satisfy me?". But he knew that was a fantasy with much less chance of ever becoming a reality than his dream of winning the lottery, so he contented himself with accumulating more unforgettable images.
It all came to an abrupt end, though, and Ranny was very lucky to have escaped without being caught. The knowledge of what might be hidden on the other side of that wall drew him like a magnet, and he had taken risks time and again in going out of his way to take trash to that particular dumpster so that he could enjoy one more vision. He had been there during his shift one night, breathing heavily, his eye pressed to the hole. One hand clutched a crumpled cardboard box as alibi and rested on the edge of the open trash bin, the other hand slowly rubbed the bulge on the front of his pants. Suddenly he heard a truck coming down the alleyway toward him, and he had barely had time to pull his head away from the wall and make a show of cramming the cardboard box well down into the bin and closing the lid when the truck stopped beside him. It was the foreman, and he yelled, " Come on, Ranny, the boss wants a bunch of us up at the main building right now! Jump in, and let's go!"
There had been no time nor opportunity to replace the plug, the plug which provided the innocent appearance of a knot in a board, a knot which happened to have a small nail stuck in it. Ranny was so shaken by the close call that he went home right after his shift, and was almost asleep when he remembered that he hadn't put the plug back. He reset set his alarm for 10 minutes earlier, so that he'd get to work on time tomorrow to replace it then. Unfortunately, when he clocked in the next morning there was the palpable excitement and tension in the air which told him that something was up, and when he whispered to a co-worker to ask what was going on, he was told, "There's going to be hell to pay! The boss found a peephole in the girls' shower room wall, and they think one of us did it."