The Straw Men Read online

  Then, as one of the figures seemed to start to turn toward the camera, the screen cut back to white noise.

  •••

  I paused the tape, stared at the screen as it jumped and fretted. I didn't know what to make of what I'd seen. It wasn't what I'd expected. From the quality of the image, it looked like the footage had been obtained using a digital camcorder. I hadn't seen anything like that in the house. The video could have been shot pretty much anywhere in the mid- to Northern Rockies, Idaho, Utah, or Colorado: but it made sense for it to be somewhere in Montana, and probably nearby. I knew the kind of place it showed. Compounds for the rich, the country's most beautiful areas carved into private home-sites so the wealthy could slide down mountains without fear of bumping into anyone of average income. Some had gated security, most didn't even need it. Put one foot over the border and you knew whether you were welcome. Anyone thinking of burglary would slink right back out, stung to their very core.

  My parents probably knew people in the area who'd got themselves a home with ski-in, ski-out convenience. My father might even have sold it to them. So what?

  I restarted the tape.

  •••

  Real noise. Music, shouting, loud conversation. A face, blurred and very close up, laughing uproariously. It fell across the frame to reveal a bar in the throes of a boisterous good time. A long counter ran down one side of the room, ranks of bottles and a mirror behind. Men and women stood in droves around it, bellowing at each other, at the barmen, up at the ceiling. Most looked young, others were clearly in middle age. Everybody seemed to be smoking, and the murky yellow lighting was hazed with clouds. The walls were plastered with posters in rainbow colours or stark black-and-white. A jukebox was working overtime in the background, cranked up so loud it was distorting out both its speakers and the microphone and I couldn't even tell what the song was.

  It was obvious this scene was much older than the first on the tape. Not only did the video look like it had been converted from 8mm film, but the clothes the people were wearing—unless this had been some kind of laboriously authentic retro party—said this was an evening back in the early '70s. Terrible colours, terrible jeans, terrible hair. A look that said being 'tidy' had been judged and found wanting. My reaction was probably about the same as their parents' must have been: Who are these aliens? What do they want? And are they blind?

  The camera swept and bobbed through the bar, with a verve that suggested the operator was either under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs or very drunk indeed. At one point the picture pitched forward alarmingly, as if he or she had nearly fallen over. This was followed by a loud and prolonged belch, which degenerated into a violent coughing fit, the camera meanwhile held down so that it showed a patch of beer-slicked floor. Then it whipped back upward, and careered off into the fray as if fixed to a bumper car. My eyebrows crawled slowly up my head in bemused embarrassment, as I tried to get my head round the idea that it might be my father operating the camera. A few people waved or hooted as it moved past them, but no one called out a name.

  Then the camera swerved abruptly round a corner, revealing an extension to the main bar area with people standing and sitting all around the sides. In the middle was a pool table. Some guy was hunkered down on the other side to take a shot. He was large and had a big nose and his face was almost totally obscured with hair and moustache and sideburns. He looked like a bear with the mange. Behind him wobbled a blonde woman with long hair, leaning on a cue as if it was the only thing holding her up. She was trying very hard to focus on the game, a frown of concentration on her face, but it looked like the world was getting away from her. Her partner didn't seem like he was having a much easier time of it, and was taking a very long while lining up for his shot. Closer to the camera, on the near side of the table, was another couple, both holding pool cues. They had their backs to the camera and an arm round each other. Both had long brown hair. The girl wore a big white blouse and a long skirt in dark purples shot with green; the man sported bell-bottoms in tatty denim and an afghan waistcoat that looked only recently tamed.

  The blonde girl looked up from the table and caught sight of the camera. She let out a whoop, and pointed at it with great vigour but extreme vagueness, as if she was selecting between three different images and kept forgetting which one she'd settled for. The pool player glanced up, rolled his eyes, got back to his shot. The brown-haired couple turned round, and I realized that my earlier embarrassment had been misplaced.

  It wasn't my father running the camera. I could tell this because the brown-haired couple were my parents.

  As I stared at the image open-mouthed, my father grinned a crooked grin and flipped his middle finger at the camera. My mother stuck her tongue out. The camera abruptly swept away from them to the pool player, as he finally made his shot. He missed by a country mile.

  I paused, rewound.

  My parents turned. My father grinned, and flipped the bird. My mother stuck her tongue out.

  I paused again. I stared.

  My mother never really got large, but she got comfortable, and moved with the sedate grace of a liner being pulled by a tug. The person I saw on screen weighed about one hundred twenty pounds, and they were distributed very well. Without even realizing what I was thinking, I knew that if I'd walked into a bar and saw her looking like that and standing with another guy, then a fight would have broken out. This was someone you'd turn caveman to stand next to. Not that my father looked incapable of holding his own: he was a little heavier than I remembered him ever being, but he moved easily and with great economy. He could have been an actor. The pair of them looked fit and healthy and lustrous. They looked like real, living people, a couple that had sex. Most of all they looked young. They looked so astonishingly young.

  The scene lasted about another five minutes. Nothing in particular happened, except that I got to see my father playing pool, back when he'd have looked at me as I am now and seen an older man. And he could play. He could really play. When the bear man missed his shot and reeled back from the table, my father turned from the camera and bent over the green. He didn't bother to go round to find the easiest shot: he just took the one in front of him and fired it off. It went down. He started moving then, prowling round the table, glancing with the intent nonchalance you see in people who expect to pot the balls, who've come to the table with that in mind. The next shot went home, too, rolled a foot down a cushion, and the one after that—as if the ball had been snapped back into the pocket on a piece of elastic. My mother cheered and slapped my father on the ass. He made an ambitious reversed double into the centre pocket and then sunk the black from halfway down the table, turning away before it was even down. Game over, man.

  He winked at the bearlike guy, who rolled his eyes again. Just as the bear was used to the camera wielder being an asshole, he was clearly also accustomed to being trashed by my father at pool. This was business as usual. These were people who knew each other very well.

  Nothing in particular happened, except that my mother began dancing with the blonde girl. Then she started doing a kind of side-to-side ragdoll thing, arms and legs turning in different directions, fingers clicking. I'd seen this done in films, on television, by professional dancers. But I'd never really seen it properly until I saw my mother doing it, rattling along to the music, mouth half-open and eyes half-shut.

  You go girl, I found myself thinking. You really did go.

  Nothing in particular happened, except while the bear was laboriously resetting the table I saw my father sit back on a stool and slug back a few swallows of beer. My mother—still dancing—winked at him, and he winked back, and I realized they weren't quite as drunk as everyone else in the room. They were having a fine old time, but they had jobs and when Monday morning came they'd be able to do them. Come to think of it, my father must already have been a realtor, despite the weekend afghan and scraggy T-shirt. The extra few pounds actually kind of suited him. He had a breadth of shoulder that
could accommodate the weight and look powerful rather than fat. Much more and he could have been heading for out-of-shape, but for the time being he merely looked like someone you'd be careful not to bang into if he was heading across the floor carrying a tray of beers. I could tell that the weight must have been a fairly recent acquisition, however, and that he wasn't comfortable with it. Every now and then he rolled his shoulders back, ostensibly out of a desire to remove kinks from leaning down to rocket balls around the table. But also, I suspected, to make sure his shoulders were held square. Later he'd discovered jogging, and the gym, and never looked this way again. But on the tape of that evening I saw him do something: it was trivial, and innocuous, but as I sat in the hotel room in Dyersburg and watched it a small sound escaped from my mouth, like I'd been gently punched in the stomach.

  As he lit a cigarette—and I'd never known that he'd once smoked—he absently lifted the patch of T-shirt lying over his midriff, and let it fall again—so it hung a little better over what was only a pretty small belly. I rewound, played it again. And then again, leaning forward, squinting against the grain in the background of the video. The movement was unmistakable. I've done it myself. In all the time I knew my father, I don't think I ever saw him do something that naked, a thing so explicable and personal. It was the act of a man who was aware of his body, and a perceived flaw in it, even in the midst of a rocking evening. It was an adjustment he'd made before, but which was not yet habitual enough to be a tic. Even more than the T-shirt itself, the pitchers of beer and the vibrant good cheer, my mother's dancing and the fact that my father could evidently once wield a pool cue with the best of them, that little movement made it inconceivable that they were now dead. The table was finally set up for play again, and my father got up and prepared to break, squaring up like the cue ball was going to receive a whack it'd remember the rest of its spherical little life. The scene stopped abruptly right at that moment, as if a reel of film had run out.

  Before I could hit pause again, it had cut directly to something else.

  A different interior. A house. A living room. Dark, lit with candles. The picture quality was murky, the film stock not coping well with the low light. Music on quietly in the background, and this time I recognized it as coming from the soundtrack to Hair. A herd of wine bottles stood on the floor in varying states of emptiness, and there were several overflowing ashtrays.

  My mother was half-reclining on a low couch, singing along, singing an early morning singing song. The bear-guy's head was more or less on her lap, and he was rolling a joint on his chest.

  'Put the sodomy one on again,' he slurred. 'Put it on.'

  The camera panned smoothly to the side, showing another man lying facedown on the ground. The blonde girl was sitting behind him, tending a neat row of candles in saucers that had been laid on the guy's back. He had evidently been comatose long enough to count as furniture, and my guess was he was the man who'd been operating the camera in the bar. The girl was inclining slowly and unpredictably from the waist, staying upright by pure force of will. Now there was less going on around her, it was obvious she was older than she had at first appeared. Not in her teens, but late twenties, maybe even thirty—and a little old to be part of this scene. I realized that if I was watching the very early '70s, then my parents had to be around the same age.

  Which meant that I'd already been born.

  'Put it on,' the bear insisted, and the camera jerked back to him, swinging in close to his face. 'Put it on.'

  'No,' said a voice very close to the microphone, laughing, confirming that it was now my father who was running the camera. He was making a better job of it than passed-out man had done. 'We've played that song like a million times.'

  'That's cause it's cool,' the bear said, nodding vigorously. 'It's, like, what it says is… aw, shit.' The camera pulled back to show that he'd dropped the joint. He looked bereft. 'Shit. Now I got to start again. I been rolling that fucker all my life, man. I've been rolling it since before I was born. Fucking Thomas Jefferson started that fucker off, left it to me in his will. Said I could finish the joint or have Monticello. I said fuck the building, I want the spliff. All my life I've been rolling it, like a good and faithful servant. And now it's gone.'

  'Gone,' intoned the blonde girl. She started giggling.

  Without missing a beat of 'Good Morning Starshine', my mother reached forward and took the gear from the bear's fumbling paws. She held the paper expertly in one hand, levelled the tobacco with an index finger, reached for the dope.

  'Roll 'em, Beth,' crowed the bear, much cheered by this turn of events. 'Roll 'em, roll 'em, roll 'em.' The camera zoomed in on the joint, then back out again. It was already nearly done.

  By this stage my eyebrows were raised so high they were hovering over my head. My mother had just rolled a joint.

  'Put it on,' the bear wheedled. 'Put on the sodomy song. Come on Don, big Don man the Don, put it on Don, put it on.' In the background my mother kept singing.

  The camera swerved and started walking out of the room, and into a hallway. A pile of coats lay on the floor where they'd been dropped. I saw that there was a kitchen off to the left, and a flight of stairs on the right. It was our old house, the one in Hunter's Rock. Every aspect of the furnishing and decor was different from the way I remembered it, but the spaces were the same.

  I watched, wide-eyed, as the camera walked across the hall and then started up the stairs. For a moment there was little more than swirling darkness, and from downstairs the muffled sound of bear-guy bellowing. 'Sodomy… fellatio… cunnilingus… pederasty…' without any attempt to approximate a tune.

  My father made it to the upper landing, paused a moment, muttered something under his breath. Then started forward again, and I realized with a lurch where he was going. It was quiet below now, and all I could hear was his breathing and the quiet swish of his feet on the carpet as he pushed open the door to my room.

  At first it was dark, but gradually enough light seeped in from the landing to show my bed against the wall, and me sleeping in it. I must have been about five. All you could see was the top of my head, a patch of cheek where the light struck it. A little of one shoulder, in dark pyjamas. The wall was a kind of mottled green colour, and the carpet brown, as they always had been.

  He stood there a full two minutes, not saying or doing anything. Just holding the camera, and watching me sleep.

  I sat and watched, too, barely breathing.

  The quality of the ambient sound on the tape changed after a while, as if a different song had started downstairs. Then there was a soft noise, could have been footsteps on carpet. They stopped, and I knew, knew without seeing or hearing anything to confirm it, that my mother was now standing next to my father.

  The camera stayed on the boy in the bed, on me, for a few moments longer. Then it moved, slowly, panning round to the left. At first I assumed they were leaving, but then I realized the camera was being pivoted, turned to face the other way.

  It turned a hundred and eighty degrees, and stopped.

  My parents were looking directly into the lens. Their faces filled the frame: not crowded together, just side by side. Neither looked drunk or stoned. They seemed to be looking right at me.

  'Hello, Ward,' my mother said, softly. 'I wonder how old you are now.'

  She glanced over the camera, presumably at the sleeping shape in the bed. 'I wonder how old you are,' she repeated, and there was something in her voice that was sad and off-key.

  My father was still looking into the camera. He was maybe five, six years younger than I am now. He, too, spoke quietly, but without a great deal of affection in his eyes.

  'And I wonder what you've become.'

  •••

  White noise. Someone clanked past my hotel room with a trolley.

  I didn't pause the tape. I couldn't move.

  •••

  The last scene was from 8mm, too, but the colours were more faded, washed out, pale surfaces
bleached to pure light. Dark hairlines and spots popped and flickered all over the screen, making movements behind them feel measured and distanced.

  A blaze of hazy yellow sunshine through a big window. Outside, trees rushing past, leaves blurred into sound. The steady beat of a train, and some other quiet noise I couldn't place.

  My mother's face, younger still. Hair shorter, and black with lacquer. Looking out of the window at the passing countryside. She turned her head, looked at the camera. Her eyes seemed far away. She smiled faintly. The camera was slowly lowered.

  Abrupt cut to a wide city street. I couldn't tell where it might be, and my attention was caught by the shapes and colours of the cars parked by the sides of the road, and the clothes worn by the few passers-by. The cars had panache, the suits didn't, the dresses were on the short side. I didn't know enough about such things to date it on the dime, but I guessed we were now back in the late '60s.

  The camera moved forward at an even walking pace. Every now and then the back of my mother's head wandered into the left side of the frame, as if my father was slightly behind her and to the right. It wasn't obvious what he was supposed to be recording. It wasn't an especially interesting street. There was what looked like a department store on the right, and a small square on the left. There were leaves on the trees, but they looked tired. He kept the camera high, panning neither up nor down nor to the sides. They made no attempt to point anything out, or to communicate with each other. After a while they crossed a road and then turned off down a cross street.

  Cut to a different street again. This was a little narrower, as if further from the centre of town. They seemed to be walking up a steep hill. My mother was in front of the camera, seen from the shoulders up. She stopped.