You could never forget stuff like that, not really. But he learned somehow not to let it rag him most of the time; he could ride it out in the mountains or in the solitude.
Bob sat at what had passed for a kitchen table. His rebuilt hip ached a bit, all that plastic instead of cartilage. He could feel what he called his own personal night passing over him. Of course the time of day had nothing to do with it. What he called his own personal night was about the feeling of being nothing, of having no worth, of having spent himself in a war nobody cared about, and having given up everything that was important and good. In other days, this was what got Bob off on his drinking, and drunk, he turned mean as shit.
But now he didn’t drink, and instead he threw on a coat and went out into the harsh Arkansas night and walked the mile or so downhill. Inside Aurora Baptist, some kind of service was going on. He heard the black 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, and there 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 FIDELIS.
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 Baltimore Beltway, 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 ridge of them. In three hours, beyond Cumberland, he found himself in Maryland’s wildest pastures in its farthest, westernmost regions, not wild like the Ouachitas but nevertheless free of the poison taint of the city and just barely tame enough to accommodate the most provisional sort of farming. It looked to be fine deer country, way out in Garrett County. He was searching for a town called Accident, and halfway between it and nowhere, just where they’d said it would be, he found the small Ramada Inn nestled under the mountains. He checked in, his reservations all made and an envelope waiting for him with a hearty welcoming letter and detailed instructions on how to reach the headquarters of Accutech at its shooting facility a few miles down the road. There was also his per diem, ten crisp twenty-dollar bills.
Bob went to his room and lay down on the bed and didn’t go out anymore that night. He just thought it all out, trying not to be bothered that he had been followed his whole long trip out from the airport by a very good surveillance team.
Like everything associated with RamDyne, the trailer was small and seedy and cheap. The outfit never did anything first-class and seemed only to have cretins of the prison guard mentality working for it, like the horrid Jack Payne. And now it was jammed with men Dobbler was supposedly briefing.
The doctor sighed, looking at the dull faces in his audience.
“Er, could I have your attention please?”
He couldn’t. They paid him no attention at all. He was irrelevant to them.
How far he’d fallen and how fast! Once the youngest member of the Harvard Medical School psychiatric faculty and the sole proprietor of one of the most flourishing private practices in the Cambridge-Greater Boston area, he’d had the life he’d dreamed of and worked for so furiously. One day, however, when he was tired and his resources nearly depleted, on a last appointment, he’d let his discipline slip. He’d touched a woman. Why had he done it? He didn’t know. In the nanosecond before he did it, it hadn’t even been in his mind. But he did it. He’d touched her and when she looked at him he realized that she wanted him to touch her more, the sexual savagery that spilled out stunned him. He made love to her right there in the office. It was the start of his out-of-control phase, abetted by a severe amphetamine habit. He seduced nine patients. Inevitably one had gone to the police; the charge was rape. The squalor played itself out over six melancholy months, climaxing in his acceptance of a plea-bargained second-degree assault conviction, which delivered him, courtesy of a feminist judge, to the ungentle ministrations of Russell Isandhlwana. The symmetry was perfect, even awesome – justice at its finest: Dobbler had fucked nine neurotic women in his office; in prison he was fucked by an immense man, who called him his dickhole.
And now, he was Raymond Shreck’s dickhole. Not sexually, of course, but even Dobbler found a certain black humor in the irony: he’d gone from the ignominy of the prison to somehow secure a position in subservience to a man with the same (though somewhat modulated) sense of physical power and ruthlessness as Russell Isandhlwana, a man whom, like Russell, he totally feared but whom he needed for protection and strength.