Point of Impact Read Online Free PDF Page B

people singing something loud and crazy. What are they so goddamned happy for inside that shaky little white clapboard building anyhow?
    Out beyond the church was the little graveyard, andthere among the Washingtons and the Lincolns and the Delanos of Polk County was one spindly marker for a man named Bo Stark. Bob just looked at it. The wind howled and roared through the trees, the moon was a raggedy-assed streetlamp, the music pumped and blasted, the black people were singing up a storm, beating the devil down.
    Bo Stark was his own age, and the only white man in the cemetery because no other cemetery would have him. He’d come from a fine family and had known Bob all through high school. They’d gone to the same doctor, the same dentist, played on the same football team. But Bo’s people had money; he’d gone on to the university in Fayetteville and from there had joined the Army and spent a year as a lieutenant in the 101st Airborne, another fool for duty who’d believed in it all. And after that, nothing. Bo Stark had gone a man and come home a no-account. The war got inside him and never let him go. One bad thing turned to another; couldn’t hold a job, wouldn’t pay back loans, was searching for the death he’d only just missed in the Land of Bad Things. Two weeks after the war in the desert was over, after the mighty victory and the celebration, one Sunday night he’d finally killed a man in a bar with a knife in Little Rock and when the police found him in his daddy’s garage in Blue Eye, he’d blown a .45 through the roof of his mouth.
    So Bob stood there as the wind brought cold memories from the cold ground out at him, and looked at the marker: BO STARK , it said, 1946–1991. AIRBORNE ALL THE WAY .
    He came here when he was frightened, because in the radiance of the glowing church, standing over the body of the man who could have been and was almost him, he could see it in the stone: BOB LEE SWAGGER , 1946–1992 USMC SEMPER F IDELIS .
    Now he looked at it, and realized it was time to do that which could kill him fastest of all possible dangers: to go back. He wondered if he had the Pure-D stones for it.
    He still thought of it as The World. It was the place where all things were, where women and liquor and pleasure and temptation commingled. Now he was back in it. He landed at Baltimore–Washington International Airport after a crazed flight that took him to St. Louis from Little Rock, then east. He was worried that his rifle, with the bright orange airline tag on the handle of the gun case, hadn’t made the trip; you always worried that some person in the airlines system would see the thing and snap it up.
    But sure enough, the case came out of the luggage chute and moved along to him on the rubber belt so that he could pluck it up.
    “Damn,” someone said, “hunting season’s long over, pardner.” It was early January, though surprisingly mild.
    “Just a target rifle,” Bob said easily to the man, scooping up the case. He felt a little silly with the long, hard thing, so weirdly shaped among all the other luggage, and knowing that he himself looked so cowboylike to these Eastern people, in his best black Tony Lamas, a nice pair of Levi’s, a pointed-collar shirt with string tie and a black Stetson, all under a sheepskin coat, his best coat.
    Getting the car turned out to be no problem at all as the reservation in his name was waiting and the girl at the counter was especially ingratiating. She thought he was some kind of cowboy hero; her eyes lit with joy at what he took to be his incredibleness and when he called her “ma’am,” she was doubly pleased.
    He left the airport, found his way to the Baltimore Washington Parkway, from there to the BaltimoreBeltway, and then west out I–70, across Maryland. Even in the yellowed state of high, dead winter, he could see that it was a lovely place, rolling, not so savage as Arkansas. Soon he came to mountains, old, humped things, ridge after