The Straw Men

by Marshall, Michael

  'I'm okay,' Bobby muttered, as I climbed in the driver's side and started the engine. I jumped on the pedal and sent us hurtling down the street. 'I'm fine.'

  'You've been shot, you asshole.'

  'Slow down.' There was a stop sign right ahead, and traffic to be contended with. I eased off the pedal and by chance managed to squeeze through a gap and into the far lane. 'Where are you going?'

  'The hospital, Bobby.'

  'We can't go there,' he said. 'Not after that.'

  'Spurling will back us up.'

  'All he knows is a lot of shooting went down. They both got shot and a civilian wound up dead.'

  'He knows that McGregor pushed it. And I can get us out on the highway and find the nearest hospital out of town.'

  'Where they'll still have to report it and we'll still have shot some cops.'

  'Bobby, you've been shot. I don't want to have to explain that to you again.'

  While I kept us heading west, ducking back and forth between the lines of cars, he gingerly removed his hand from his arm. I glanced across. A fresh glot of blood tipped out, but not as much as I'd expected. Wincing, he pulled the fabric around the hole aside and peered at what lay underneath.

  'There's a chunk missing,' he admitted. 'Which is not ideal. But I'll live. And we have a need more urgent than medical support.'

  'And what's that?'

  'Guns,' he said, slumping back in the seat. 'Big fucking guns.'

  •••

  I left Bobby in the car while I ran across to the store. It was raining hard now, and the clouds were getting darker. Before I swung open the door I took a moment to gather myself. Many retailers like to cultivate the impression that they're selling machines that are only theoretically weapons. You don't want to run into a gun shop looking like you're thinking of using one right this minute.

  Inside, a long thin space. A glass counter displaying handguns like jewellery, and behind it racks and racks of rifles on the wall. No customers and no reinforced shield. Just one white-haired fat guy in a dark blue shirt, standing around waiting for business.

  'Help you?' The man placed two large hands on the counter. On the wall behind him were two posters showing the faces of well-known Middle Eastern terrorists. 'Wanted Dead' the legend said. 'Or Alive' had been crossed out.

  'Want to buy some guns,' I said.

  'Only sell frozen yogurt here. Keep meaning to take that damned sign down.'

  I laughed heartily. He laughed, too. It was all very cool. We were having a great time.

  'So. What kind of thing you looking for?'

  'Two rifles with eight hundred rounds, forty clips of soft 45 and I don't care what kind, whatever's cheapest. Two vests, expensive, one large and one medium.'

  'Whoa,' he said, still cheerful. 'Planning on starting a war?'

  'No. But boy do we have a rodent problem.' His smile faded, and I was suddenly aware that he was looking at my cheek. I put my hand up and wiped it. It came away with a small smear of blood. 'As you can see, it's getting completely out of hand.'

  He didn't laugh this time. 'Don't know as I can sell you all that.'

  I got out a Gold American Express card and he was soon smiling again. He totalled up the cost of the items by hand, allowing me a discount on the ammunition. If you buy in bulk the unit cost of eight hundred potential deaths is actually very reasonable.

  He told me the total and I waved my hand, anxious that he just get on with it. I glanced out the window at Bobby. He had his jacket off and was wrapping a bandage round the wound. I'd picked this up at a veterinary supply store on the way through town, along with safety pins and microgauze. He was wincing a lot. I turned back just in time.

  'Don't do that,' I said, pulling out my gun and pointing it at the guy's chest.

  He froze, eyes still on me, hand a few inches from the phone. 'Don't tell me. Couple days ago a cop came in here, told you not to sell anything to someone by the name of Ward Hopkins?'

  'That's correct.'

  'But you're going to do it anyway, right?'

  'No, sir. I am not.'

  I took a step closer, and raised the gun so it was pointing at his head. I felt exhausted and frightened. He shook his head, and reached for the phone again. 'I ain't selling you nothing.'

  The telephone was an old-fashioned model, and made an extraordinary sound when the bullet ripped into it. The man jumped back, very shaken.

  'Yes, you are,' I explained. 'Otherwise I'll just shoot you and take what I need and you're in no position to whine because the gun I'm holding was bought from this very establishment. Guess what? This is how they get used.'

  The guy stood still for a moment, working out which way to jump. I really, really hoped he'd just do as I asked, because I wasn't going to shoot him and he probably knew it.

  Then his eyes flickered. I turned and saw that a young guy was heading toward the store. He was carrying a bag of sandwiches and wearing the same kind of shirt the fat guy was wearing.

  I swore, lunged forward, and grabbed as many boxes as I could carry.

  'You've been no help at all,' I snapped, and ran out the door, smacking straight into the younger guy and sending him sprawling into a puddle.

  I jumped in the car, throwing the boxes of bullets into Bobby's lap. 'Didn't go well.'

  'So I see,' Bobby said, watching the fat man as he came out the door holding a large rifle.

  I slammed my foot on the pedal and reversed away from the building, as the first shot went high of the car. The younger guy made his feet again and ran into the store, pushing the other guy aside. I hit the brake and skid-turned the vehicle around, and then sent it hurtling back onto the road as a bullet took out one of the back passenger windows.

  'Guy in the store had my name on a list.' I took a hard right turn. I wasn't heading anywhere in particular. Just getting us out of the centre of town. 'One question's answered, at least. How The Straw Men managed to get to my folks' house so quickly after I roughed Chip up last time. They didn't have to come at all. They had McGregor already here in town.'

  'Adds up.'

  'Something else that makes sense: McGregor and Spurling were the cops at the scene of my parents' accident. Except maybe McGregor was a little earlier at the scene.'

  'And is now back at Dyersburg PD dripping blood on the floor and chanting our names. We're deeply fucked, Ward—very deeply fucked. What are we going to do?'

  There was only one person in town I could think of who might stand a chance of wanting to help me. I said his name.

  'Good call,' Bobby nodded, wincing as he settled back into his seat. 'Way things are going, an attorney's going to come in handy.'

  •••

  According to the card he'd given me after the funeral, Harold Davids's house was right on the other side of town. Unlike the area where my parents had lived, with its hills and twisting streets, the houses here were laid out in a regular grid—albeit a grid with big squares and nice-looking houses sitting in them.

  When we pulled up outside we could see that the porch light was on, along with one deeper in the house. There was a car that looked like the one I'd seen Davids in, parked a little way along the street. We sat for a moment, to check we weren't being followed, and then got out.

  I rang the doorbell. There was no reply. Of course.

  'Shit,' I said. 'Now what?'

  'Call him,' Bobby said, watching down the street. I pulled out the cell phone and tried Davids's office number. Then I tried the home number, in case he disregarded the doorbell in the evenings or was deep in some show and hadn't noticed. We could hear at least two handsets ringing on different floors of the house, but after eight rings a machine picked up. The tape gave his work number, but there was no mention of a cell phone.

  'We can't just stand here,' I said. 'Neighbourhood like this, someone's going to put in a call to the cops.'

  Bobby turned the door handle. It was locked. He reached in his pocket and got out a small tool. I was on the verge of protes
ting, but didn't. We had nowhere else to go. He had just levered the tool into the lock when suddenly there was the sound of the door being unlocked from the inside. We both jumped.

  The door was opened five inches. Harold Davids's face was just visible through the gap.

  'Harold,' I said.

  'Ward? Is that you?' He opened the door a little wider. He looked as nervous as hell. 'Good Lord,' he said. 'What happened to him?'

  'He's been shot,' I said.

  'Shot,' he said, carefully. 'By whom?'

  'Bad guys,' I said. 'Look, I know this is not what you meant when you said I should call on you. But we're in trouble. And I don't have anyone else left.'

  'Ward. I…'

  'Please,' I said. 'If not for me, then for Dad.'

  He looked at me long and hard, then stood aside and let us in.

  His house was a good deal smaller than my parents' home, but even just the hallway seemed to contain about three times as much stuff. Prints, local art objects, books on a little oak case that looked like it had been made on purpose. In the background was the measured sound of classical music for solo piano.

  'Go straight through,' he said. 'And be careful of the rug. You're dripping blood. Both of you.'

  The living-room walls were covered in reproduction paintings, not a single one of which I recognized. The lighting was sparse, just a couple of tall standard lamps throwing shadows. No television, but a small and expensive-looking CD player from which the music was coming. There was an old-looking piano, the top covered in photographs, some framed, others simply propped up. An ornate carpet lay in front of the couch, the edges a little frayed.

  'I'll get a towel,' Davids said. He hesitated in the doorway for a moment, and then disappeared.

  While he was gone Bobby stood in the middle of the room, holding his arm, making sure that anything that fell out of it went on the floorboards. I looked around the room. Other people's things are so inexplicable. Especially older people. I remembered one time, on a whim, buying my father an old calculator for Christmas. I saw it in an antiques store and thought it looked cool and that he might like it. When he unwrapped it he stared at me, and said thanks in an odd way. I told him I wasn't getting the impression it was the most exciting thing he'd ever received. Without saying another word he took me through to his study, opened a drawer. There, beneath many years' accumulation of pens and paperclips, was an old calculator. It was even the same model. Davids's life was my yard sale: my retro was my father's once-newfangled. You are insulated from those you care about most by decades of durable time, like glass that seems clean but is a foot thick and impossible to break. You think you're right there with them, but when you try to touch, your hand can't even get near.

  Davids came back in with a cloth that Bobby took and wrapped around his arm. Then Davids sat down in one of the armchairs and looked at the floor. He looked tired and pale, and much older than when I'd seen him before. One of the lamps was just to one side of the chair, etching lines into his forehead and accentuating the planes of his face.

  'You're going to have to tell me what's happened, Ward. And I can't guarantee I can do much to help. My field is contracts, not … gunfire.'

  He pushed his hands through his hair and looked up at me, and that's when a small pale light went on in the back of my head.

  I turned, looked at the top of the piano, and then back at Davids.

  'You're staring, Ward.'

  I opened my mouth to say something, but found nothing there. I closed it again.

  'What is it? What have you done?'

  His choice of words, which I'm sure was accidental, somehow convinced me. The way they rhymed with 'have become.'

  Finally I managed to speak.

  'When did you meet my folks, exactly?'

  '1995,' he said, promptly. 'The year they arrived.'

  'Not before that?'

  'No. How could I have done?'

  'Maybe run into them at some stage. Somehow. People's paths cross in mysterious ways. Almost like there's something going on that even they don't know about.'

  He looked down, back at the floor. 'You're being odd, Ward.'

  'How long have you lived in Dyersburg?'

  'All my life, as I believe you know.'

  'So the name Lazy Ed wouldn't mean anything to you?'

  'No.' He didn't look up, but there was no hesitation, no off note in his voice. 'Strange name, if you ask me.'

  Bobby was staring at me now.

  'Terrible thing,' I said. 'I never even knew his surname. Just knew him as Lazy. Not a great epitaph, but I suppose it doesn't really matter now he's dead.'

  'I'm sorry to hear that a friend of yours is dead, Ward, but I really don't understand what you're driving at.'

  I took the picture off the piano. It wasn't a group shot. There were only a couple of those, and they were black-and-white, fading mementos of people long dead, frozen stiff in front of a technology they didn't really trust. The one I held was an informal single portrait in colour, taken by some friend long ago, with that washed out and pastel look where the reds retain their fire and the blues stay rich but everything else seemed locked back in a different time, as if the light that reflected off those surfaces was fading, no longer strong enough to reach the present day; as if that era itself was being unmade as fewer and fewer people survived who could remember the feeling of its sun on their face. A young man, in a forest.

  'Play the Sodomy one,' I said, looking at a Harold from long ago. 'Put it on Don, big Don man the Don, put it on, Don, put it on.'

  'Stop it, Ward.' This time there was a faint quaver in his voice.

  Bobby took the photo from me.

  'This picture must be from a few years earlier,' I said. 'Harold's younger and thinner than in the video. Hadn't grown his hair yet.'

  I turned to Davids. 'You must have been, what—five, six years older than them and Ed, about the same age as Mary. And now you're the only one left. And that's why you didn't answer the door when we rang, and you're not picking up the phone tonight.'

  Davids was staring at me. He looked about a hundred years old, and very frightened.

  'Oh fuck,' he said, the words coming out as one shuddering breath.

  I wanted to grab him, shake him until he talked, until he made me understand what had been going on, until he gave me some means of comprehending my life. But just as he'd shed eighty pounds in the last thirty years, in twenty seconds his face had lost everything I'd previously seen in him, the look you get through a lifetime of telling people where they stand in the eyes of written law. He looked thin, and frail, and even more afraid than I was.

  'Tell me,' was all I said.

  In the end it was fast and didn't take long.

  He told me that a long time ago, there had been five people who were friends.

  Chapter 32

  Harold and Mary and Ed were born in Hunter's Rock, and grew up together. They'd lived small-town lives and there are worse things than that. Then they happened to meet two young newcomers in a bar and afterwards the five were always hanging around together.

  My parents were already married, but soon found they could not have children. Gradually they realized this wasn't the end of the world. They had each other, enjoyed life as friends and lovers. There were many things to do and find: the years would not pass slowly, nor would they never be happy, just because when they closed the door at night it would only ever be the two of them in their cave. They got on with their lives, tried to accept the cards they'd been dealt. A couple of years passed in work and sleep and Friday nights, long games of pool that nobody lost.

  Then the world tilted, and they came to realize that passing on genetic material isn't the only way of making your mark on the universe. Suddenly came an era that I suppose I've never really understood. In a flat cultural plain, mountains and gullies appeared, splitting the ground on which people stood. Demonstrations in the streets. Sit-ins on campus, students and faculty pulling together for the first time
. Fights in restaurants that wouldn't allow blacks to eat at the same lunch counter. Police firing on citizens, children turning on their parents. Marches. Shouts of nigger-lover, fascist, queer, commie. Ideas hammered into weapons. Long evenings in people's houses getting stoned, talking about what should be done, talking about new ways of being, talking about talking about talking.

  They were older than most activists. They had the time and energy to spare—and more perspective than either the teenagers or the angrily oppressed. Beth Hopkins got involved in the unionization of black domestic workers. Harold gave free legal advice to those who couldn't afford it, or to those whose race had always meant they caught the sharp end of the legislative stick. Don Hopkins set up a campaign to prevent whole neighbourhoods being demolished to make way for the beltways that were the first steps toward the post-modern American city, where the undesirables are fenced out of the centre by six-lane rivers of hurtling steel, and inequality is enshrined in the landscape. Mary and Ed were merely followers, but they helped out wherever they could, and whenever Ed was sober. Mary loved Harold, and Ed just wanted some people to hang around. They held down their jobs and worked in their spare time, these older warriors, people who by this stage were over that dread age of thirty and thus able to temper enthusiasm with a sense of what was important: to concentrate on activities that might actually help people, rather than just yield a warm glow inside and the chance to screw some other excitable young thing flushed with the adrenaline of protest.

  For two years they waved banners and fists, gave their time and money and heart. A few things changed. Most did not. The status quo has stamina. Loud guitar and free love can only change so much. Gradually the flavour of the times soured, as the same old forces simmered together for another year. It was Harold who first noticed what was going on. He realized that the people coming to him for legal advice, veterans of hot afternoons spent bellowing at the cops, were in worse and worse shape when they showed up at his door. That peaceful resistance was generating more wounds as the months went by, and that the bruises and scars he was seeing were not all the responsibility of the police. That there were factions within the beautiful people, and that these divisions were growing more telling and violent than those between them and the authorities. That there were groups whose aims seemed much more simple and retrograde than progress, whose agenda held no action points, only darkness.