The Straw Men

by Marshall, Michael

  Assuming they were actually dead.

  The idea that the last few days had been a farce, that my parents weren't dead after all, was a difficult one to face head-on. Part of my heart leapt at the idea, the part that had awakened me at some stage in every night since the phone call from Mary. Even if I hadn't cared for them, and had only wished for a chance to bawl them out about UnRealty, I wanted my parents back. But when your flesh is damaged the body gets to work within seconds. White blood cells flood into the area, repairing and patching, throwing up every sandbag they have. The body protects itself, and the same happens in the mind. It occurs sluggishly and imperfectly, a bad job done by indifferent craftsmen, but within minutes an accretion of defence mechanisms starts to form around the trauma, blunting its edges, eventually sealing it away inside scar tissue. Like a sliver of glass buried deep in a cut, the event will never go away, and often a movement will cause it to nudge a nerve ending and burn like fire for a while. However much it hurts when that happens, the last thing you want to do is take a knife and reopen the wound.

  I left the house, locking up carefully, and went next door to Mary's. She seemed both pleased and surprised to see me, and dealt coffee and cake in dangerous quantities. Feeling underhanded and unworthy of her kindness, I established in roundabout ways that my parents had seemed their normal selves in the days and weeks leading up to the accident, and that—as Officer Spurling later confirmed—Mary had identified the bodies. I knew this already. She'd told me on the phone, as I sat bonelessly in Santa Barbara. I just needed to hear it again. I could have visited the bodies at the undertakers myself, of course, instead of sitting in the hotel for two days. I hadn't, which now made me feel ashamed. I'd told myself at the time that it was important to remember them as they had been, rather than as two lengths of damaged putty. There was truth in that. But also I had been afraid, bothered by the idea, and simply unwilling.

  After I left Mary I went round to the other neighbours. A young woman opened the door almost instantly, startling me. She was confident and healthy-looking, and wearing generously paint-spattered clothes. The hallway behind her was half finished in a shade I considered ill-advised. I introduced myself and explained what had happened to their neighbours. She was already aware of events, as I'd known she would be. She expressed her condolences and we chatted for a moment. At no point did anything in her manner suggest that the accident hadn't come as a surprise, what with one or both of the Hopkins being evidently off their heads. That was that.

  I called the cops, and then went to the hospital. As I stood in the parking lot after talking to the doctor, I decided that three confirmations were enough. My parents were dead. Only a fool would follow this line of inquiry any further. I could talk to Davids the next day if I wished—I'd missed him at his office, and left a message—but I knew anything he told me would lead to the same conclusion. The note wasn't what it purported to be. It wasn't a get-out-of-grief card. It didn't undo what had happened.

  But there had to be a reason for it, even if that reason turned out to be only that one of them had not been completely sane. The note's existence meant something, and I found that I needed to know what that was.

  •••

  I searched in the garage, and then my father's workshop in the cellar of the house. I felt I should be looking for something in particular, but didn't know what, so I just poked around. Drills, routers, other handyman kit of obscure purpose. Nails and screws in a wide variety of sizes, neatly sorted. Numerous scraps of wood, rendered purposeless and inexplicable by his death. Nothing seemed obviously out of place, all was arranged with the tidiness and rigour I would have expected. If external order can be taken as an index of state of mind, my father had been the same as ever.

  I went back up into the house and did the downstairs first. The kitchen and utility room, the sitting room, my father's den, the dining room, and the section of the porch that at some time in the past had been glassed in and turned into a sunroom. Here I was more thorough. I looked beneath every cushion, under the rugs, and behind every piece of furniture. I looked inside the cabinet, under the television, and found nothing except technology and a couple of DVDs. I took everything out of the cupboards in the kitchen, looked in the oven and the larder. I picked up and shook every book I found, whether on the bookcases in the hallway, or filed, in my mother's idiosyncratic way, among the dried pasta. There were a lot of books. It took a long time. Especially my father's study, off the half-landing, which was where I looked first. I dug through the drawers of his desk, on every shelf, and dipped into each hanging file in the oak cabinet. I even turned on his computer and took a cursory trawl through a few files, though this felt unwelcome and invasive. I wouldn't want anyone who loved me sifting through the contents of my laptop. They'd be likely to dig me up and set fire to me. It soon became obvious that it would take far too long to read everything on the machine, and that it would very likely turn out to be nothing but invoices and workaday correspondence. I left the machine on, with the idea of coming back to it if all else failed, but my father wasn't a computer buff. I didn't think he'd leave a further message anywhere he couldn't touch with his hands.

  Before long I was beginning to feel worn out. Not with the physical effort, which was negligible, but the emotional undertow. Thoroughly upending my parents' lives brought them back even more vehemently, especially the trivial things. A framed photocopy of the contract for the first house UnRealty had sold, capped by a logo that I now realized looked a little hand-drawn. By my mother, probably. A scrapbook of recipes for childhood meals, including a lasagne I could smell just by reading the ingredients.

  I took a break and spent fifteen minutes sitting in the kitchen, drinking their mineral water. I tried once again to put myself in their position, to think what might be an obvious second step. Assuming they'd left the note in the chair to attract my attention, it made sense that any further note or clue would also be in a place that had resonance. I couldn't think where that would be. I'd turned everything over. There was nothing there.

  The upstairs of the house proved just as much of a bust. I looked under the bed in their room, searched all the drawers. After a deep breath, I went through the contents of the wardrobes, paying special attention to those I recognized—my father's old jackets, my mother's battered ex-handbags. I found a few things—receipts, ticket stubs, a handful of loose change—nothing that seemed to mean anything. I lingered over a collection of old ties, neatly boxed in the back of my father's side of the closet. I'd never seen most of them.

  I even looked under the roof, pulling myself up into it via a small trapdoor in the ceiling of the upstairs hallway. My father had got as far as stringing a light up, but no further. There was nothing in the attic space but dust and two empty suitcases.

  In the end I went downstairs, and back to my father's chair. It was early evening. I had found nothing, and I was beginning to feel stupid. Perhaps I was just trying to flay a nonexistent order out of chaos. I sat in my father's chair, and read the note once again. It meant neither more nor less, however many times you read it.

  As I raised my eyes, they fell once more on the television. The chair was aligned perfectly with it, and a thought occurred to me. If I'd been right in thinking that it looked a little out of place, then perhaps its position wasn't just to help draw my attention to the cushion—but to redirect my gaze to another area entirely.

  I got up and opened the glass doors that hid the storage space underneath the television. I found exactly what I had previously. A VCR, a DVD player, and two DVDs: old movies. Nothing else.

  No tapes. That was odd.

  In the whole of the house I'd found no videotapes. There were two shelves of DVDs in the study, and a further one in the second bedroom. But not a single videotape.

  My father was a semi-professional tube watcher. For as long as I could remember, there'd been tapes lying around the house. So where were they now?

  I quickly strode back to his study. No tape
s in there either, even though there was a second VCR stowed on a low shelf. I didn't bother to search the drawers or the cabinet again. There'd been none there. There had been none anywhere in the house or the shop or garage either. I tried to think back to the Thanksgiving before last, when I'd deigned to stop by for twenty-four hours. I couldn't specifically remember seeing tapes around. I couldn't remember not seeing them. I'd been pretty drunk most of the time.

  It could be that my father had embraced DVD as the dawn of a long-awaited new age in home entertainment, declared the videotape dead, and held a bonfire in the garden. I didn't think so. Dyersburg doubtless had a dump somewhere, but I couldn't see that scenario either. Even if he'd found as the years went on that there was less and less he wanted to watch, he wasn't going to throw all the old favourites away. I started to wonder whether creating an absence of something unremarkable might be a subtle way of attracting the attention of someone who knew you well, who had an understanding of the things that should be in your environment.

  Either that, or I was losing objectivity, running too far and fast with a meaningless ball. I'd already searched the house. It didn't matter that I now had an idea—however spurious—of what to look for. I already hadn't found it. I was getting hungry, and also angry. If there had been something they had thought I needed telling, why the subterfuge? Why not just tell me on the phone? Leave a letter with Davids? Send an email? It made no sense.

  But I knew by then that when I left the house, it would be for good. It was better to be sure. You want that scar tissue as tough as it can be.

  I turned the outside lights on and went and had a look around the porch. None of the boards in the decking was loose, and I couldn't see how there could be much of a crawl space underneath. There was a large wooden box around one side, but a tiring couple of minutes established it held nothing but firewood and spiders. I walked down the couple of steps to the yard, took a few paces back, and stared irritably up at the house.

  Chimney, horizontal boards, windowpanes. The upper rooms. Their bedroom. The guest room.

  I went back inside. As I passed my father's study, something caught the corner of my eye. I stopped, took a pace back, and looked in, not certain what I had seen. I got it after a second or two: the VCR.

  Like an idiot, I hadn't actually looked inside either of the tape machines. I checked the one in the living room first. It was empty. Then I walked into the study, bent down and peered at the machine until I found the Eject button. I pressed it and there was an irritable whirring sound, but nothing happened. Then I realized this was because there was black duct tape across the slot.

  As a warning not to put a tape in, or to prevent my father from doing so accidentally? Hardly—if the machine was screwed, he'd just replace it.

  I tried pulling the tape off, but it was of a strength sufficient to bond planets together. I got my knife out of my jacket pocket. It has two blades. One is large and sharp and designed for cutting things. The other is a screwdriver. It's surprising how often you need one right after the other. I flipped the sharp blade out and sliced through the centre of the tape.

  There was something inside the slot. I cut and pulled at the remaining obstruction until the Eject button worked. The machine whirred aggressively, and popped its slot.

  It ejected a videotape, a standard VHS. I took it out and stared at it for a long time.

  As I was slowly straightening up, my father called from the stairs.

  'Ward? Is that you?' he said.

  •••

  After a moment of light-headed shock, my body tried to move quickly toward a safe place it evidently believed existed somewhere else. It wanted to be some other place altogether. It didn't know where. Perhaps Alabama. It tried every direction at once, to be on the safe side.

  I leapt backward, dropping the tape and coming close to sprawling full-length on the floor. I snatched the tape up from the ground and stuffed it in my pocket, doing so barely consciously, feeling caught and guilty and in danger. Footsteps made their way up the last few stairs, paused for a moment, and then headed toward the study door. I didn't want to see who made them.

  It hadn't been my father, of course. Just a voice that wasn't entirely dissimilar, coming out of nowhere in a quiet house. The person I saw on the landing was Harold Davids, looking old and nervous and bad-tempered.

  'Goodness,' he said. 'You scared the life out of me.'

  I breathed out like a cough. 'Tell me about it.'

  Davids's eyes drifted down to my hands, and I realized that I was still holding my knife. I flipped the blade back in, started to drop it in my pocket, realized the tape was there.

  'What are you doing here?' I asked, trying to sound polite.

  'I got your message from this afternoon,' he said, slowly raising his eyes back up to look at my face. 'I called the hotel. You weren't in your room, so I wondered if you might be here.'

  'I didn't hear the doorbell.'

  'The front door was ajar,' he said, somewhat testily. 'I became concerned that someone might have heard the house was unoccupied, and broken in.'

  'No,' I said. 'It's just me.'

  'So I see. I shall consider the crisis over.' He raised a good-humoured eyebrow, and my heartbeat slowly returned to normal.

  Back in the hall he asked why I'd called. I said it was nothing, a minor point in the will's legalese that I'd subsequently puzzled out for myself. He nodded distantly and wandered through into the sitting room.

  'Such a lovely room,' he said, after a moment. 'I shall miss it. I'll stop by every now and then, if I may, for any residual mail.'

  'Great.' I didn't bear him any ill will, but I didn't want to spend any more time in the house. I went back up to my father's study to turn off the computer. I'd noticed earlier that he had a ffiz! drive, and on impulse I dumped a backup onto the disk in the machine.

  By the time I'd turned it all off and gone back out, Davids was standing at the front door, looking brisk once again.

  I walked with him down the path. He seemed in no hurry to get back to his business, and asked about my plans for the house. I told him I didn't know whether I'd be keeping or selling it, and accepted the implied offer of his services in either event. We stood by his big black car for a further five minutes, talking about something or other. I think he might have been giving me restaurant recommendations. I wasn't feeling hungry any more.

  In the end he lowered himself into the driver's seat and strapped in with the thoroughness of a man who had no intention of dying, ever. He took a last look up at the dark shape of the house, and then nodded gravely at me. I suspected that something between us had changed, and wondered whether Davids had filed for later consideration the question of what Don Hopkins's son might be doing with a knife that was so clearly not ornamental.

  I waited until he was safely round the corner, and then ran to my car and drove the other way.

  Chapter 6

  A small amount of money and only a little flattery got me a VCR in my room. Either the hotel was better than I'd thought, or my stunt in the bar had convinced the management that I was a guest whose needs were worth meeting. I waited with increasing impatience while a monumentally stupid youth made a mess of a very simple cabling job, and then shooed him out.

  I took the tape from my pocket, and carefully inspected it. There was no writing on it anywhere. From the amount of videotape on the spool, it looked like it would run to about fifteen or twenty minutes, half an hour at the most.

  I waited until my room-service coffee arrived. I wanted my environment just so. Eventually it came, still fairly warm. Miraculously, there were no fries with it.

  I put the tape in the machine.

  •••

  Four seconds of data hash, the white noise of null information.

  Then the sound of wind, and a view of a high mountain pasture. In the distance, a postcard view of snow-covered peaks across a range—seen too briefly to identify. The foreground was a gentle slope covered in snow, cut o
ff by a stern-looking building: no obvious coffee shop, or ski-wear emporium. There was no one around, no cars in the small lot. Out of season. The camera panned to show another administrative-looking structure, and severe grey clouds above. This view was held for a few seconds, the sound of a sleeve flapping in the wind discernible in the background.

  Cut to an interior. The camera was held low, as if covertly, and the scene only lasted a few seconds. I rewound, paused the clearest image. It wasn't the world's best VCR, and the frozen picture jumped a little, but I could make out the public area of what looked like a ski lodge, with a cathedral ceiling. A long desk ran along one side, presumably the reception, but currently deserted. There was a large painting on the wall behind it, the usual easy nonsense by some overpaid and under-talented fraud. I could see the left-hand side of a towering fireplace, constructed out of river rock. An ornamental fire generated well-behaved ambience in the bottom. Nut-brown leather armchairs were carefully arranged around low coffee tables, each featuring a heavily varnished wooden sculpture celebrating the sentimentally revered wildlife of the old West: an eagle, a bear, a Native American—none of whom survived the old West in any great numbers.

  I flipped the tape off pause and, on second viewing, saw that someone had been about to enter the area just before the scene cut. There was a shadow along the wall of a corridor leading off the top of the space, the sound of footsteps on stone.

  Then a final exterior, back out in the parking lot. A little time must have passed since the first shot—assuming it had even been taken on the same day. The wind had dropped and the sky was a clear and savage blue. A medium shot of the stern building, which I assumed must have been the one we were just inside. A number of figures stood in the snow in front of it. There were perhaps seven or eight of them, though it was difficult to tell because they were all dressed in dark clothing, and standing close together, as if in conversation. No faces were visible, and all I could hear was the wind—except for right at the end, when whoever was holding the camera said something, a short sentence. I listened to it three times. It remained inaudible.