Blunt Darts

encouraged passersby to drive up them and that gravel driveways did not. Also, gravel drives were more genteel and therefore more in keeping with the “overall Kinnington environment.” It must have been a great environment for the poor kid, I thought.
    We slowed about half a mile after the driveway and took a right onto a narrower but still paved road. At Stephen’s direction, I pulled to a stop near an old stone fence marker.
    “This is it,” he said.
    I eased out of the driver’s side, but Stephen stumbled in the dark and into some bushes as he was swinging open the door.
    “You all right?” I whispered.
    “Yes,” he said. “Just a few scratches.”
    I could hear him scuffling back up to the car and gently closing the door. We left his knapsack in the car. The crickets were chirping madly, and there was a scent of freshly mowed grass in the warm, heavy night air.
    “Come on over here,” he said from the other side of the car. “The path is right here.”
    I moved around to the back of the car and fumbled with Blakey’s keys at the trunk as my eyes tried to adjust to what night vision the moon would allow me.
    “What are you doing?” asked Stephen.
    “I’m checking for a flashlight. Look in the glove compartment, will you?”
    “Don’t bother. I searched the car at the ranger station. There’s no flashlight.”
    I pocketed the keys and reminded myself that things would probably progress faster if I left the lead to the genius.
    I was pretty stiff from our drive as we started up the path. The moon was just bright enough to allow me to see where I was walking. The path was only two feet wide, but some worn spots indicated it used to be wider. Stephen obviously was at ease climbing it, partly youth and partly familiarity.
    “Did you clear this path yourself?” I whispered.
    “No,” he laughed softly, getting a few steps ahead, then waiting for me to catch up. “The men who cleared the underbrush and deadwood from the grounds here used this because it was easier than carrying the stuff up past the house to the driveway. My uncle and my father used to play on it as kids, too.”
    I stopped and looked around. Even in the weak light, I could see a lot of brush intruding on the trail and deadwood alongside of it. “Looks like it’s been a while since the landscapers have been around.”
    Stephen’s voice had no laughter in it now. “It has. The judge and Blakey do... did what there was to be done.”
    I looked at him quizzically, but in the moonlight I couldn’t read his face and he probably couldn’t see mine. “Your grandmother told me that you have over seventy-five acres here. Why the hell doesn’t your father have someone come to take care of this stuff?”
    Stephen turned up the trail. “You’ll see,” he said flatly as I began after him again.
    I tried to go slowly, on the theory that the less frequently I had to breathe, the better my ribs would feel. After about five minutes of climbing, however, the throbbing pain was distracting me and increasing with every step.
    I noticed I was focusing my eyes on the ground. Not just the path under me, but the yard or so in front of me as well, my head bobbing slightly. That snapped me back for a moment to Vietnam. When I was there, MP lieutenants were shuttled into infantry platoons if the infantry companies were short of young officers. I hated patrols in the jungle, or “the bush” as the troops called it, and I was terrified of land mines, which killed or maimed so unpredictably that they would have seemed whimsical in a less personal setting. The Cong would stretch thin wire across the trails as trips for the mines. You bobbed your head to vary the moonlight hitting the path ahead of you in the hope that a change in the angle of light and sight would pick up a stretched wire that the point man might have missed. It had been a long time since I had been reminded of that, and I hoped it would be a longer time before the memory surfaced again.
    Lost in thought, I nearly fell over a stone or maybe an exposed root in the path. I cursed under my breath as I stumbled and my rib shrieked.
    “Are you all right?” whispered Stephen, just ahead and out of sight.
    “Just a few scratches,” I mimicked.
    He laughed softly again and urged me on.
    Just as I thought I would have to call a rest, Stephen let me catch up to him on the trail. “We have to go off the path a little ways here.”
    “Why?”
    “You’ll see,” he said, turning into