Free The Point Team by J.B. Hadley Page B

a bar who showed him the ad in the paper.
    “Joe, you was in the Green Berets?”
    “Mmmmm.”
    “Says here big money for combat-hardened veterans.”
    Joe looked up from his glass of beer. He was thin as a rail, with a long face, hollow cheeks, light brown hair, and long yellow
     teeth like a horse. He often got mad when people said he looked a real hillbilly, though sometimes he thought it funny, and
     his very bright blue eyes would dart about unpredictably. These eyes now lit at the words about big money his friend had just
     read.
    “Shit, that sounds right for me,” Joe said.
    “Naw,” the barman grinned. “It says combat-hardened, Joe. Man told me you was a cook over there. And all thoselittle scars on your neck and arms that you say was shrapnel, those were caused by pieces of eggshell in hot grease.”
    The barman poured Joe another draft beer while he said this and gave it to him on the house.
    “You know, if I’d been a cook in Nam, I’d a learned something,” Joe said, acknowledging the beer. “Way I came back, unless
     you want to knock off some guy who’s buggin’ you, I ain’t good to you for no other job. Not for long, anyhow. Can’t put up
     with just standing in a place doing something stupid I never wanted to do in the first place.”
    “You find yourself a nice girl, Joe, and settle down,” a wizened man down the bar offered. “She’ll take all you can give and
     knock the stuffin’ out of you. You’ll quiet down real fast.”
    “What I need is to make some good money,” Joe muttered.
    “Right now Youngstown is a great place for that,” another man at the bar remarked sardonically.
    “There’s folks here who’ve lots of bread,” Joe told him.
    “Yeah? I wish you’d bring ’em round here some time.”
    “They ain’t my friends. But I know who some of them are,” Joe said. “They ain’t hurting for money.”
    “Everyone I know in this town is as piss-poor as I am. Point out your rich friends to me some time, Joe.”
    “Maybe I will,” Joe said cryptically. He finished his beer and left.
    He drove his battered Chevy a ways before pulling over onto a waste lot. He left the engine running while he took a pair of
     Pennsylvania registration plates out of the trunk and fitted them over his Ohio plates. He pressed down on the tops of the
     plates so that the clips he had welded to the back of these plates fitted tightly. A minute’s work. He had taken the second
     pair of plates from a wrecked Toyota that had been hit by a truck out on 76 near Petersburg. Awhole family had been wiped out, he’d heard. Pennsylvania people. It was dark enough for him to switch on his lights as he
     drove along Canfield Road on the southwestern edge of the city. There was still some snow in patches.
    He pulled off Canfield Road to the meeting place and looked at his watch by the street light. Ten minutes early. You could
     always depend on a working stiff being ten minutes early, no matter where you asked him to be. There ready for the whistle
     to blow. His father had been the same way. A girl had once told him he had a factory mentality or something of that kind.
     That wasn’t because he always got places early that time, but because lying in bed in the morning made him nervous and restless.
     She had said guilty. Maybe she was right. Making love in the morning was OK with him. It was just lying in bed and doing nothing
     that got to him. There had not been a day in his mother’s life, weekdays or Sundays, when she had not already washed the breakfast
     things and mopped the kitchen floor by the time the eight o’clock news came on the radio. His father and older brothers would
     be starting their day’s work in the steel mill. He had to leave for high school in ten minutes—to get there fifteen minutes
     early, of course. He dropped out soon after. He was one of the ones who had not been surprised or upset by the rigors and
     regimented way of life in boot camp …
    Joe’s mind