Straw Man

by Gerry Boyle

  We sat and Sophie’s hands fell away and I reached over and took Roxanne’s in mine.

  “I believe in it, you know,” she said. “The nonviolence. The peace project. I still do.”

  “And I didn’t not believe in it,” I said. “I just didn’t believe in him.”

  “Welt believes in it, too,” Roxanne said. “He’s just—”

  She searched for the word. I waited.

  A womanizer, I thought.

  “Flawed,” she said.

  A coward, I thought.

  “I told him I was through with working with him. He got all huffy and hurt and said he’d find another partner if I wasn’t interested. I think he expected me to change my mind. When I wouldn’t he said he needed to get away, go where people were way more chill.”

  “Napa?” I said.

  “To go stay with his ex-wife or wherever. He ran.”

  I smiled inside.

  “Nonviolence,” I said. “It isn’t for the faint of heart.”

  We sat and watched Sophie for a minute, maybe two. She rubbed at her nose and then fell back asleep, the lamb clutched to her chest.

  “A lot of what I said, it still stands,” Roxanne said. “About the example we set for her. About what she sees.”

  “I know. I’ll keep it in mind.”

  “I’m not expecting you to turn into—”

  She paused.

  “Him?” I said.

  “Oh, Jack. I don’t even really expect you to change much at all.”

  “I’m an old dog,” I said.

  She smiled at me.

  “Not that old,” she said.

  So I carried Sophie upstairs and we tucked her in, one of us on each side of her bed. And then we went to our room, which smelled of paint and scoured wood and the new rug. There were fresh sheets and blankets and we turned them back, took off our clothes in unison, and climbed in. We pulled the covers back up and, in the dark, quietly made love. And when we fell back, my arm around Roxanne’s shoulders, her head on my chest, we didn’t speak.

  There was nothing to say, nothing that wasn’t understood, nothing that we could keep from each other, even if we’d tried.

  POSTSCRIPT

  We gave statements, each of us. This was in Bangor, at the attorney general’s office, up by City Hall. Cook was there, and an assistant AG, a young woman who listened hard and asked good questions. When I was done they looked at me, then at each other. Hit the button to turn off the recorder and leaned back.

  “Pretty much the same as the kid told it,” Cook said.

  “I don’t think he thinks he did anything wrong,” I said.

  “I go to church every Sunday,” Cook said. “Thou shalt not kill. As far as I know, that’s still in there.”

  “Victor found a loophole,” I said. “The Book of Enoch.”

  “Hey,” Cook said. “Once you’re prepared to die and go to hell, it really opens up your options.”

  Clair had been wrong. Billy lasted fifteen days before succumbing to an infection that lodged around his heart. Rousseau came to the house to tell me that he had “expired,” that no charges would be filed, that the AG’s office had ruled the death justified.

  “Good riddance,” I said.

  He stood there in the doorway and said, “I know. Some are more regrettable than others.”

  “Have you told Louis?”

  “Been trying,” Rousseau said. “Haven’t been able to locate him. A lot of woods down there.”

  “He’ll be glad to hear it,” I said. “He took this kind of hard.”

  “Shouldn’t,” the cop said.

  “Easy for us to say.”

  “Yes,” Rousseau said. “I suppose it is.”

  We stood. There didn’t seem like there was much left to say, but Rousseau lingered.

  “You know,” he began, “you’re not what I thought. Not dirty.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “But you’re still not squeaky clean.”

  I shrugged.

  “The way I see it, you won’t leave well enough alone. You’re the kid who always wants to give the wasp nest one more poke with the stick.”

  “Some people don’t deserve to be left alone,” I said. “They deserve to be punished. ‘All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.’ ”

  “Someone said that, right?”

  “Edmund Burke. Smart guy.”

  “Well, good luck to you, Mr. McMorrow. I have a feeling our paths will keep crossing.”

  “No doubt,” I said.

  “Watch that you don’t go too far. You or your friends. Because the law is the law.”

  “Right.”

  “And that’s what we enforce. Not some battle between good and evil.”

  “Understood,” I said.

  He shook my hand and we looked each other in the eye. Neither of us blinked. When he’d left, the last police car gone down the road, I walked to my truck. I started it and pulled out and drove north and then west. I stopped by the field, where the horses were pulling a harrow. The Bishop held the reins.

  I climbed the fence and crossed the furrows and stopped six feet in front of the horses. He tugged the reins and the horses pulled up, dropping their heads. I walked around them and up to the side of the harrow.

  “We love our children,” I said. “We want to protect them.”

  “Sometimes that’s not God’s will,” the Bishop said.

  “So I’m assuming somebody loved Victor,” I said. “How did he get so far off track?”

  The Bishop looked away, his expression softening.

  “His father and mother left the community. They made Victor choose.

  He chose to stay. He remained with his faith.”

  “And when the others started to question, he was threatened,” I said, understanding. “If they were right, he’d chosen wrong.”

  “They weren’t leaving,” the Bishop said. “They were coming back.”

  I didn’t reply.

  “All violence comes from fear,” he said. “Victor was afraid of his own weakness. He was afraid he wasn’t worthy of my daughter. He was afraid of being abandoned again.”

  “So he had to take on this other identity. This alter ego, like Spiderman.”

  “Abaddon, the angel of darkness,” the Bishop said.

  “Darkness,” I said. “He got that part right.”

  I looked at the Bishop, thought to hold out my hand, but didn’t.

  He nodded, snapped the reins, and the horses lurched forward. Then he yanked the reins back and the horses paused and he turned back to me.

  “I pray for Abram every day,” he said. “I pray for you, too.”

  And he snapped the reins again and the horses ambled away, furrows trailing in their wake.

  It was colder, the days shorter, maples flaring orange over our heads, the leaves illuminated like lanterns by the midday sun. We were dropping the trees, then limbing them, leaving the crimson and yellow bouquets strewn like colorful clothes stripped from a corpse.

  Clair was skidding the logs out. Louis and I were cutting. We fastened the cables and stepped out of the way as the diesel roared and the logs were lifted, and then they were dragged down the trail, the ground gashed in their wake.

  Louis had been gone for a couple of weeks, then had shown up without warning. We’d told him the Boston cops had backed off, that the threat of charges from Dorchester was just a way to pressure us to talk about Semi and the guns. Now there was nothing more to say.

  Louis had said, “Okay. Let’s get to work.”

  So that day we were working, a selective cut on more of the Hoddings’ lot, another payment due for the nursing home. Clair and the skidder disappeared down the trail in a plume of blue smoke, and Louis and I walked to the truck, and lunch.

  Friend, the dog, looked up from his bed in the back of Louis’s Jeep and wagged.

  “McMorrow,” Louis said, sitting on the tailgate, opening his lunchbox.


  “Yeah.”

  “I let you down.”

  I shook my head.

  “Nobody knew what was coming.”

  “I left before the job was done,” Louis said. “Started to head into a dark place in my head and had to navigate it alone.”

  “I hope you sorted things out.”

  He took a bite of sandwich and chewed and swallowed. Then he said, “I’ve got to know the triggers,” Louis said. “Spent a lot of time making them full automatic. Had to be, to survive over there. A second slow and you were dead. But now I have to learn to put the triggers on manual, keep the safety on.”

  He looked at me.

  “I was changed by all of it,” Louis said, “and now I have to change again. Not back to what I was, but into something new. Anyway, my problem. I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “I had serious backup.”

  He opened his water bottle, tipped it back, and drank. Held it out and dribbled some on the dog’s tongue.

  “Don’t get between a tiger and her cub?” he said.

  “Exactly,” I said.

  “She’s a keeper, Jack.”

  “Yes.”

  “You know I mean that in a good way.”

  “I know,” I said. “And I agree. She is.”

  Clair rumbled up on the skidder, shut it off, and climbed down. He went to the truck and took his lunch basket from behind the seat, then sat beside Louis on the tailgate of the Jeep.

  Louis finished his ham-and-cheese sandwich. I had peanut butter and jelly, which Sophie had made for both of us that morning. Clair opened a thermos of Mary’s vegetable soup.

  A pair of crows flew over, circled back in case we might be deer hunters, leaving offal behind. Louis broke a piece of his sandwich off and tossed it a few feet away. He looked at the dog and waited, then said, “Okay.” The dog bounded off the truck and scarfed the morsel down. Then he stood and raised his head, sniffing the air.

  We looked through the trees, saw nothing. Then, from the distance, we heard a chain saw start. It sputtered, stalled, started again, and revved up.

  “How far your friends own?” Louis said.

  “That direction? All the way to the marsh,” Clair said. “Two miles north and almost as far to the south.”

  The saw slowed, the chain biting into a log, then the motor wound up again.

  Louis looked at us and waited. I looked at Clair and he looked at me.

  “It’s only trees,” he said.

  “They’ll grow back,” Louis said.

  “And it’s only one guy cutting,” I said. “How much could he take?”

  A second saw started.

  “Then again,” Clair said, “there’s right.”

  “And there’s wrong,” I said.

  “We could talk to ’em,” Clair said.

  “I suppose,” Louis said. “Talking never hurt anybody.”