The Straw Men Page 11

  •••

  I hadn't checked out of the hotel. I'd just taken the video out of the machine and left the room. I was probably thinking of going to the bar, but this time even my withered sense of propriety had deemed this an inappropriate response. Instead I'd found myself walking outside to the car, getting in, and driving away. I drove slowly around Dyersburg, twice crossing the place where my parents' car had been totalled. The video sat on the passenger seat beside me. The second time I went over the crossing I glanced at it, as if this would help in some way. It didn't, and only made me shiver, a frigid little spasm too small for anyone else to see.

  After a while I achieved escape velocity and left town. I wasn't working from the map, merely following the roads and making turns when it occurred to me to do so.

  I eventually found my way onto I 90 as the sky was beginning to lighten. I realized I needed coffee, or something, and took the turn that led me to Red Lodge at about the time things were beginning to open up.

  I felt hollow and light-headed. Hungry, perhaps, though it was difficult to tell. My mind was worn smooth, as if it had thrashed for too long and too hard in the wrong gear.

  There was no question that it was my parents in the oldest two passages on the tape. There seemed little reason to doubt that it had been my father holding the camera in the first, most recent, section. The three scenes, either individually or together, were evidently supposed to convey meaning. Why else put them on the tape? I found it difficult to even think about the last scene, the one in which it appeared that a child had been abandoned on a city street. My first overwhelming sense, that the child was an unknown sibling of the same age, was still my holding position. Everything about my mother's body language, and the way we'd been dressed, had implied it. Either the child was my twin, or they wanted me to believe that this had been the case. The latter seemed ridiculous. But was I really to credit that I once had a sister or brother, and that he or she had been abandoned somewhere? That we, as a family, had travelled away from home—a point I believed to have been deliberately made through the snippet of a train journey at the beginning of the scene and left the child somewhere? And that my father had filmed the scene? There could only have been one reason for this: an awareness that one day they might want me to know what had happened, and a realization that nothing short of film would convince me. I had rerun the segment in my mind throughout the night, trying to read it differently. I couldn't and in the end what stuck with me most was the matter-of-factness of the event. They had looked for the right place to leave the child, rejecting one, and then moving a little further up the street. They had chosen somewhere that looked well-populated, where the businesses and homes on the other side of the street suggested that the child would not remain unnoticed for long. Somehow this made it worse, not better. It made it seem more considered, more deliberate, more real. They hadn't been killing the child. Just getting rid of it. They'd planned how they'd do it, and then gone ahead and done it.

  The middle scene was less extraordinary. Once you got past the strangeness of the glimpse it yielded into the pasts of people I now realized I had never really understood, for the most part it recorded what was merely a social evening. I hadn't recognized any of the other people in the film, but that wasn't surprising. Your group of friends alters as you get older. You change, you move. People who once seemed indispensable gradually become first less crucial and then merely names on a Christmas-card list. Finally one year you grumpily observe that you haven't seen such and such in over a decade, the cards stop, and the friendship is severed except in memory, a few catchphrases and a handful of half-forgotten shared experiences. It lies dormant until the very end, when you wish that you had kept in touch, if for no other reason than it would just be nice to hear a voice whose owner knew you when you were young, who understands that your coffin-ready wilt is a joke of recent vintage and not everything you have ever been.

  The kicker was the way they had addressed the camera. The things they had said. As if they'd known or believed that I'd watch it someday. If I'd been in their position, I'd have striven for a perkier tone. 'Hi, son, how're you doing? Love from us, way back when.' My mother hadn't sounded this way at all. She'd sounded sad, resigned. The last line of my father's chimed most sharply in my head: 'I wonder what you've become.' What kind of thing was that to say, when the person you were talking to was only five or six years old, and sleeping at the time in the same room? This seemed to fit in some way with the closing down of UnRealty: a profound distrust of someone who was their son. I'm not especially proud of my life, but regardless of what I may or may not have become, I have not yet abandoned a baby on a city street, and filmed the event for posterity.

  I had no memory of my father ever owning or using a home movie camera. I certainly had no recollection of watching such films. Why bother filming your family if you're not going to all sit around some evening and watch, laughing at hairstyles and clothes and pointing out how much everyone has grown in height or waist size? If he'd once been someone who filmed such things, why did he stop? Where were the films?

  Which left only the first scene, the one shot on video, much more recently. Because of its very brevity and lack of identifiable meaning, this was the segment that seemed to provide the key. When my father had edited together this little bombshell, he must have tacked this non-event on the front for a reason. He'd said something at the end, the short phrase that the wind had obscured. I needed to know what it said. Maybe it would be a way into understanding the tape's purpose. Maybe not. But at least I would then have all of the evidence.

  I shut the car door and got out my phone. I needed help, and so I called Bobby.

  •••

  Five hours later I was back at my hotel. In the meantime I'd been to Billings, one of Montana's few stabs at a decent-sized town. In accordance with advice, and contrary to my expectations, it had proved to have a copy shop where I could do what I required. As a result I had a new DVD-ROM in my pocket.

  As I walked through the lobby I remembered that I'd only booked for a couple of days after the funeral, and stopped by the desk to extend. The girl nodded absently, not taking her eyes off a television tuned to a global news channel. The newscaster was rehashing the scant details that had so far emerged in the mass killing in England, which I'd heard about on the radio on the way out to Billings. It didn't seem like they'd found out anything new. They were repeating the same stuff over and over, like a ritual, breathing it into myth. The guy had barricaded himself somewhere for a couple hours, then killed himself. Probably at this very moment his house was being torn apart by the cops, trying to find some explanation, somebody or something to blame.

  'Terrible thing,' I said, mainly to check if I had genuinely caught the receptionist's attention. Hospitality boards in the lobby indicated that the hotel would be hosting a comprehensive slate of corporate brainstorms and deep-thinks over the rest of the week, and I didn't want to suddenly find myself without a room.

  She didn't respond immediately, and I was about to try again when I noticed that she was crying. Her eyes were full, and one tear had escaped to run nearly invisibly down one cheek.

  'Are you okay?' I asked, surprised.

  She turned her head toward me as if dreaming, nodded slowly. 'Extra two days. Room 304. That's fine, sir.'

  'Great. Are you all right?'

  She quickly wiped the back of one hand across her cheek. 'Oh, yes,' she said. 'It's just sad.'

  Then she turned back to the television again.

  I watched her as I stood in the elevator, waiting for the doors to close. The lobby was deserted. She was still staring at the screen, motionless, as if looking out of a window. She couldn't have been more caught up in this event—which had taken place thousands of miles away in a country she'd probably never even visited—if she'd lost a relative of her own in it. I wish I could say that it exacted the same degree of unthinking empathy from me, but it didn't. It wasn't that I didn't care, more that I coul
dn't get the feeling to sink to my heart out of my head. It wasn't like the World Trade Center, something vile and astonishing within our own borders, happening to people who'd saved coins of the same currency in their piggybanks when they were children. I knew intellectually that shouldn't make a difference, but it seemed to. I didn't know these people.

  When I was inside my room I got my laptop out of the wardrobe, put it down on the table, and fired her up. While I waited, I got the DVD-ROM out of my pocket. My father's videotape was hidden in the tyre well of the rental car. What I had on the disk was a digitized version of it. When the PowerBook had gone through its wakeup routine—a shower, slurp of coffee, quick read of the newspaper, whatever the hell else it is that takes it so long—I stuck the cartridge in the slot in the side. It appeared as a disk on the desktop. The video had been saved onto it as four very large MPEG files. It had been too long to digitize at full resolution and still fit on one disk: so, while I was at one of the workstations in the Billings copy shop with no one hovering over me, I ripped the first and last sections down at high resolution, together with the portion of the middle section that had taken place at my parents' house. The long section in the bar I'd laid down at a lower frame rate. It still took a while. The whole shebang barely fit on the eighteen-gig disk.

  First I tried using CastingAgent, an old piece of editing shareware that is buggy as shit but sometimes lets you do things other software won't. It crashed so conclusively I had to hard boot the computer. So then I reverted to standard stuff, and got the movie playing on the screen.

  I spooled forward to the end of the first section, the one taken somewhere up in the mountains, and took a clipping of the last ten seconds. I saved this to the hard disk. Then I used MPEGSplit to axe out the video portion of the file, leaving me with just the audio track. I knew what the picture showed: a group of people wearing black coats, standing in a loose group. What I wanted to know was what had been said by the cameraman.

  I saved the file, swapped out of the video software, and launched a professional battery of sound-processing applications—SoundStage, SFXlab, AudioMelt Pro. For the next half-hour I jiggered the track, trying different filters to see what they brought up. Increasing the amplitude just made it sound worse, but louder; scattershot down-sampling and noise reduction made it muddier. The best I could tell was that it was two or three words.

  So then I got serious, and took another audio clip from the section of the tape just before the dialogue. I analysed the frequencies of the background wind, then set up a band-pass filter. I ran this on the other section of the tape, and it started to sound clearer. A little more refining and slowly the noises began to coalesce into words. Un craunen? Vren ouwnen? When I'd done all I could, I got some headphones out of the laptop bag and put them on. I set the track to loop and closed my eyes.

  After about forty times through I got it. 'The Straw Men.'

  I stopped the loop; took the headphones off. I was pretty sure that was it. The Straw Men. Problem was, it was meaningless. Sounded like an indie rock band—though I doubted that the people on the tape had earned a living through under-produced caterwauling. The members of bands don't live together in ski resorts. They build themselves mock-Tudor mansions on opposite sides of the planet, and only meet up when they're being paid. All I'd done was add another layer of inexplicability to what was captured on the tape. I watched the video again, running it off the DVD just in case the different format helped me to notice something new. Nothing struck me.

  I sat in the chair for a while, staring into space, feeling the night catching up with me. Every now and then I heard the sound of someone walking past my door in the corridor, and from outside came the occasional swish of cars or floating fragments of distant conversations between people I didn't know and would never meet. None of this meant anything to me either.

  •••

  At just after six my cell phone rang, jerking me out of half-sleep. I picked it up blearily.

  'Yo,' said a voice. In the background there was the sound of other voices, and muffled music. 'Ward, it's Bobby.'

  'My man,' I said, rubbing my eyes. 'Thanks for the tip. Place in Billings worked out just fine.'

  'Cool,' he said. 'But that's not why I'm calling. I'm in some place, what the fuck, the Sacagawea I think it's called. Kind of a bar thing. Kind of. On the big main street. Huge-ass great sign.'

  Suddenly I was awake. 'You're in Dyersburg?'

  'Sure am. Flew in.'

  'Why the hell did you do that?'

  'Well, thing is, after you called, I was kind of bored. Picked up on something you said, did a little poking around.'

  'Poking around in what?'

  'Some stuff. Ward, get your butt down here. Got a beer sitting waiting for you. I got something to tell, my friend, and I'm not doing it over the phone.'

  'Why?' I was already packing up the computer.

  'Because it's going to freak you out.'

  Chapter 10

  The Sacagawea is a large motel on the main drag. It has a huge multicoloured neon sign that can be seen from about half a mile in either direction, drawing the unwary like a magnet. I'd stayed there for about ten minutes once, the first time I'd come to visit my parents. The room I was given was a museum-standard tableau of cheap '60s design and had carpets like an unloved dog. At first I thought this was kind of funky, until I looked closer and realized it simply hadn't been redecorated since around the time I was born. On discovering there was no room service I checked the hell out again. I won't stay in a hotel without room service. I just won't stand for it.

  The lobby was small and damp and smelt strongly of chlorine, presumably because of the tiny swimming pool in the next room. The wizened old twonk behind the reception desk directed me upstairs, doing so without recourse to speech but with a curious look. When I got to the bar I could see why. It wasn't humming with life. There was a service island in the middle, a lone waitress, and a rank of archaic slot machines over on the side with equally superannuated people placidly feeding coins into them. As a species, we really know how to live. A long bank of large windows at the front of the room gave a view over the parking lot and the drizzle of traffic tootling up and down the street. A few couples were dotted around the room, talking loudly, as if in the hope this would goose the room into having something approaching atmosphere. It wasn't working.

  Sitting at a table up against the window was Bobby Nygard.

  'What the fuck is this Sacagawea shit?' was the first thing he said.

  I sat down opposite. 'Sacagawea was the name of the Amerind maiden who hung with Lewis and Clark. Helped them work deals with the locals, not get killed, that kind of thing. The expedition passed by not far from here, on the way to the Bitterroot Mountains.'

  'Thank you, professor. But are you allowed to say 'maiden' these days? Isn't it kind of sexist or something?'

  'Probably,' I said. 'And you know what? I don't give a shit. It's better than 'squaw' anyhow.'

  'Is it, though? Maybe not. Maybe it's like 'nigger'. Assumed as a badge of pride. Absorption of the terms of the oppressor.'

  'Be that as it may, Bobby. It's good to see you.'

  He winked, and we touched glasses. Bobby looked pretty much the same as he ever had, though I hadn't met him face-to-face in two years. A little shorter than me, a little broader. Cropped hair, a face that always seemed slightly flushed, and the general air of someone you could take a baseball bat to without him being overly bothered. Used to be in the Forces, and sometimes still seems as if he is—though not the kind of army you see in the news.

  After we'd taken a drink, Bobby set his glass back on the table and looked around the room. 'Kind of a shithole, I'd say.'

  'So why are you here?'

  'Fucking great sign outside. Got me in its tractor beam. Why? There a better hotel in town?'

  'No, I mean why did you come to Dyersburg?'

  'I'll come to that. Meantime, how you doing? Sorry about your loss, man.'

&nbs
p; Suddenly, maybe because I was sitting with someone I counted as a friend, the death of my parents hit me again. Hit me hard, and unexpectedly, as I knew it probably would every now and then for the rest of my life, regardless of what they had done. I started to say something, but didn't. I just felt too tired and confused and sad. Bobby clinked his glass against mine once more, and we drank. He let a silence settle for a while, then changed the subject.

  'So. What are you doing these days? You never said.'

  'Not much,' I said.

  He raised an eyebrow. 'Not much as in 'Don't ask'?'

  'No. Just nothing worth talking about. There may be a job or two I haven't tried yet, but I doubt they'll be much different. Seems that I'd always rather be working something on the side, and employers still don't understand what a key role that is in a modern economy.'

  'Timidity and commercial short-sightedness,' he nodded, flagging for another couple beers. 'Ain't that always the way.'

  After the waitress, who was young and depressed-looking, got us our drinks, we chatted for a while. That former employment I mentioned was with the CIA. I worked for them for nine years, which is how I met Bobby. We got along immediately. Most of the time I was in the field, though by the end I was doing a lot of media surveillance. I left when the Agency introduced annual lie detector tests a few years back. Lot of people left the service then, indignant at the implied distrust after they'd put themselves on the line for their country. Me, I got out because I'd done some things. Not terrible things, I should add. Just the kind of things they put you in prison for. The CIA may not be the world's most straightforward organization, but they prefer their employees to avoid actual felonies most of the time. I'd used a few contacts to make a little money, bled a little cash out from between the cracks. There were some incidents. A guy got killed. That was all.