Point Of Impact

“Not ten years. More than a year. I’m not sure.”

“You could live without it that easily?”

“I had other things to keep me busy.”

“I don’t believe you.”

He paused, considering it.

“I didn’t want the complications. Someone said, ‘Simplify, simplify.’ ”

“Ann Landers?”

“No,” he said earnestly, “it was some old guy called Thoreau. He went and lived by himself, too, as I understand it. Anyway. I wanted to simplify. No wants, no needs, no hungers. Only rifles. Crazy as hell now that I think of it.”

“So you went off and became Henry Thoreau of Walden, Arkansas?” Julie said.

“I was at my best with a rifle in my hand. I always loved rifles. So I decided to live in such a way that the rifle would be all I needed. And I succeeded.”

“Were you happy up there in your trailer in the mountains without any people?”

“I didn’t know it then. I suppose now that I was. I was raised and then trained not to think a lot about how I feel.”

It was twilight of the third day since he’d been awake. The sun suffused the room with an orange glow. The quality of light was almost liquid and held everything it touched in perfect serenity. Her face had acquired a grave look in this fantastic light; and he loved the way she had of slyly making him see how ridiculous he could be. She seemed like some kind of angel to him, so radiant a savior that he could not hold her strong gaze and instead looked out the window, to where the mountains stood like a savage old bear’s teeth on the rim of the earth. He remembered looking at her picture in the boonies. Donny always had it with him.

“Why is it men like you always have to be so alone?” she asked. “Why do you want to live by yourself and contrive situations under which you can go against everybody to prove how smart and tough and brave you are?”

Bob had no answer.

“You see, you make it so terrible for us,” she said. “For the women. Because normal men want to be like you, they learn about you from movie versions of you, and they try for that same laconic spirit, that Hemingway stoicism. They manufacture themselves in your image but they don’t have the guts or the power to bring it off. So they just exile themselves from us, pretending to be you and to have your power, and we can never reach them. Are you aware that Donny was scared every single day? He was so scared. He was no hero. He was a scared kid, but he believed in you.”

“It doesn’t matter if he was scared. He did his job; that made him a man. That made him as much man as there is.”

“I’d rather have a little less man, who is alive now and could sleep with me, and be father to the children I never had and never will have. His being a ‘man’ didn’t do me a hell of a lot of good. It’s the same craziness that makes these poor Indian boys cut each other up on Saturday night. What do they get out of it, I wonder?”

“It can’t be explained,” he said. “It can be foolish as all get-out, yes, ma’am. It doesn’t make much sense. But I was just taught to hurt no man except the man who hurt me and mine. I have no other star to steer by. That and to do my duty as I understand it. If I followed those two rules, I’d be okay.”

It was so quiet you’d have thought it was the last second before a nuclear bomb was to go off, ending life on this earth. But instead, through the metal walls of the trailer, there came the shriek of a child.

Something came into her eyes and onto her face that he’d never seen before; it was pain.

“And I suppose the joke is, none of us care about that kind of man, the kind that you want to be. What we want is the kind that would stick around and be there the next morning. Mow the grass. Bring home a paycheck. That kind of man. And I see how funny that is now,” she said, her anguish suddenly palpable. “You come in here, and I care for you, patch you up, and hide your car and get myself so deep into this I can never, ever get out, and never, ever have a normal life…and you don’t care. You have to go off. And be a ‘man.’ ”

After a time, he said, “I didn’t just come here because I had to. I came because I wanted to. A long time ago in Vietnam when Donny Fenn showed me his young wife’s picture, I had a moment where I hated him for having such a woman waiting for him. A part of me wanted him not to make it, and wanted to have you for me. But that passed when I saw what a damn fine boy he was, and how he deserved the very very best. And he had it, I see that now.”

She touched him. A woman hadn’t touched him in years, really touched him so that he could feel her wanting in it. Maybe no woman had ever touched him like that. It had been many years.

“What do you want from me, Sergeant?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It makes going back to it hard. Truth is, I never ever stopped thinking about that picture and the fine woman Donny Fenn had waiting for him.”

“That’s why you kept writing?”

“I suppose it is. And you’d just send ’em back, unopened.”

“I knew if I opened them, I was lost.”

“Are you lost now?”

“No, I don’t suppose so. I know where I’m headed. I can’t stop it. Straight into catastrophe, and I don’t even want to stop it.”

He drew her to him. In the kiss there was an extraordinary sense of release. He felt himself sliding away, down a drain, surrounded by warm, urgent, healing liquids. He thought he’d slide until he died. He was also overwhelmed by smoothness. Everything about her was smooth; she was smooth everywhere, he’d never imagined that a person could be so smooth.

The explosion, so long in coming, seemed to build until it could not be held back, and bucked out of him in a series of emptying spasms. He was falling through floors toward solid earth, each one halting him for just a splinter of a second; and then he fell through to another one, and then another. He fell and fell and fell, stunned at the distance of the fall and how far it took him from himself.

“My God,” he said.

“Oh, my God,” she said.

The days passed. She was on the day shift and during it he stayed in the trailer and read what she had brought him from a trip to seven bookstores and every newsstand in Tucson. He told her to get everything. And she did. He read it all, the events of two weeks, then three weeks, then four weeks ago. He read about the Kennedy assassination, about other famous assassinations. He made copious notes and worked steadily, trying to find a line through the material.

When he learned that the hero policeman of New Orleans, Leon Timmons, had been killed in one of those stupid, pointless urban accidents, shot by a mugger during an attempt to prevent a crime, it didn’t surprise him. He just breathed heavily. Timmons had been a link; of course he had to die. These boys were sealing themselves off, leaving no possible leads into their organization. They were pros. This bothered him but it also relieved him; it meant he didn’t have to go back to New Orleans, for now there was nothing in New Orleans. But where would he go? He didn’t yet know.

One night, NBC news did a special on it. He taped it on her VCR, taking notes. He watched it over and over, the diagrams, the interviews, the speculations. But particularly he watched that terrible moment when the bullet came shrieking out of nowhere and seemed to blow the president from his feet, while it had really just been the force of the other man, the archbishop Roberto Lopez, who had gone into him as the bullet opened in him and destroyed his brain.

Bob thought: It was a great shot.

Over twelve hundred yards from that damn church steeple, shooting into a very complicated sight picture, no matter how good his scope, shooting at a downward angle. Lots of problems to solve, and you solved them all.

Oh, my oh my, but you’re a good boy, he thought.

Not but five, maybe six men in the world could hit a shot like that, or have the perfect confidence to risk everything on making it.

Bob realized the shooter was the key.

The whole plan, all the elaborate seduction of himself, the manipulations, the subterfuge, all of it rested only