Michael Marshall - The Straw Men

I walked quickly round the room, packing up my few bits and pieces.

'Christ,' Bobby said, his voice harsh and strange. I turned to see him still on the phone. 'Turn the television on.'

'It is on.'

'Not local shit. CNN or something.'

I flipped through the channels until I found it.

The footage was hand-held and shaky. A big grey building in some urban environment. A school. It

had obviously been filmed earlier in the day, because it was still light.

'We got it,' Bobby said into the phone. 'I'll call you back.'

I flipped the mute off, and we listened as the voice-over put the death toll at thirty-two, with many still missing and half the building still unsearched. It was unclear whether the two pupils shot by police had been solely responsible for the atrocity, or whether a third individual had been involved. Rifles and a large home-made incendiary device had been involved.

The camera roved around the devastation, catching glimpses of knots of children and teachers, faces shocked white in the lamp glare. The ambient sound was down in the mix, but you could still hear the sirens and sobbing. A woman staggered past, supported on both sides by paramedics, her face entirely covered in blood.

'Where is this?'

'Evanston, Maine.' Bobby closed his eyes.

The TV cut to live footage. The scene was calmer now, all but a few bystanders held back from the school by incident tape. A man in a tan coat held a microphone, flicker-lit by blue flashing lights. Two additional bodies had been found. Jane Mathews and Frances Lack, both eleven years of age.

Back to earlier footage. Fire trucks, ambulances. Wounded people, both children and adults, lying on the ground, being attended to. Others on the ground with no one holding their hand. People to whom no one could make a difference any more.

'Holy fuck,' I said, pointing at the screen. The camera panned along the street opposite the school, at people standing watching the gate to hell that had been opened. Amongst them was a tall blond man with a large shoulder bag, caught from behind. Unusually, he was not craning to get a better view, like everyone around him, but was standing calm and still. The cameraman didn't notice him, and passed on along the line, a slow pan of appalled shock.

'I've seen that guy before,' I said.

A blond man, at The Halls, with a blue shoulder bag.

Bobby spent a chunk of the flight on the phone. I overheard him talking to three different people, arranging for tapes to be couriered to Dyersburg airport. Then he sat quiet and stared into his complimentary coffee for a while.

I looked at him. 'They're sure it's just these kids?'

'Their homes are being turned upside down as we speak, but nothing's come up so far. Isn't some global hatred thing this time. This was the handiwork of two well-adjusted young Americans, so far as anyone can tell. The mood in general is not buoyant.'

I could believe this. The atmosphere among the other travellers was subdued, and even the pilot's

'Well, here we are on board' speech had been extremely muted.

'I didn't hear you telling anyone about what happened to us today.'

He laughed harshly. 'Right. 'Hey, we just killed a couple guys in the woods, and when we got back to the hotel this friend of mine saw another guy on TV he thinks he recognizes'? This is not high concept, Ward, and you are not exactly remembered fondly. The Agency's cleaned itself up a little, my friend. They'd throw me out even more happily than they did you.

'They didn't throw me out. I walked.'

'One step ahead of a polygraph subpoena.'

'Whatever,' I snapped. 'Bobby, that was the guy.'

'You said you barely saw him up there. You admitted you didn't see his face.'

'I know. But it was him.'

'I believe you,' he said, and suddenly he looked serious. 'Weird thing, I thought I knew him, too.'

'What? Where from?'

'Don't know. Christ, by the time I saw what you were pointing at he was gone. But there was

something familiar about him.'

It was dark by the time we landed. The car I'd left in the airport lot was gone, presumably retrieved by its rental firm. Bobby went to the other desk and got us a new vehicle. All they had was a very large

Ford. I fetched it from their lot and swung around to wait by the main exit.

Bobby eventually came out of the terminal with a small box under his arm.

'Cool,' he said tersely, as he climbed in the front. 'Room for the kids and a whole week's shopping.

Let's go find us a Publix.'

'Least we can sleep in it if we have to.'

'I'm not even going to think about that.'

'You're getting soft, soldier.'

'Yes I am, and that means I don't have to eat broccoli any more, to paraphrase an esteemed former

president.'

'Esteemed by whom?'

'His mother.'

Bobby still had the keys to the room he'd taken at the Sacagawea. After checking that it didn't seem to be occupied by anybody else, he went off to negotiate with the management.

I hunted down a couple of cans of iced tea and then let myself back into the room. It brought to mind long-ago vacations even more strongly than the pool at the motel outside Hunter's Rock. Fifty or more years of people briefly inhabiting the same space, camping out in the middle of a journey. The chair I sat in could once have held someone watching Gilligan's Island broadcast for the first time, to whom the tune was not a hot-wired piece of race memory. One day someone else might sit there, in their silicon-enhanced space-clothes sipping a no-sugar, no-caffeine, no-flavour moon drink, and think the

same thing of Friends: 'Hey — look at all the skinny people. And what was the deal with the hair?'

Bobby returned with a massive VCR under his arm.

'Old fool hadn't even noticed I'd left,' he said. 'Though he was sharp enough over a deposit for this

piece of archaeology. I think you may actually have to wind it up.'

Once the machine was connected to the room's near-collectible television, Bobby perched on the end of the bed and ripped open the package he'd picked up at the airport. Inside were a couple of VHS

tapes. He quickly checked the labels, and stuck one of them inside the machine.

'This is unedited,' he explained, as he pressed the PLAY button. 'Viewer discretion is advised.'

The cameraman had arrived at the scene of the school bombing very soon after the initial explosion.

In most of America's big cities there's a market for freelance news crews, two-person units who roam the city like ownerless dogs. They scan official radio bands and often get to the jumpers and pileups and bullet-scarred bars ahead of the cops, in search of freak-show footage to help the networks and cable channels fulfil their ever-expanding screen-minute quota. Something about the quality of the camerawork suggested this kind of provenance, though I could have been wrong. Confronted with these scenes it's possible my own hands wouldn't have been too steady either. When you see atrocities on television it's easy to forget that — in spite of the impression of verity — the news has already been sanitized for our protection. We watch people standing round mass graves in Bosnia and the rough-and-ready quality of the footage helps us forget that we're not being shown what's inside, or what those dusty fragments mean to the people who are actually there, rather than watching safely through a thick piece of glass in a living room on the other side of the world. Even the wall-to-wall coverage of the World Trade Center horror steered clear of showing us what the emergency services saw. We're so used to being edited, so infected with the sleight of hand of the media, that we're more aware of what's been added than of what has been taken away. It doesn't matter how many 'making of advertumentaries we watch, the latex monster will still scare us in context: and when watching the news we do not question why the pan ended at a particular moment, what was splattered across the frame we did not see. It's soft-core news, set up without the money shot. We're allowed to hear the screams, but at an acceptable and contextualized volume — all the while listening to a voice whose sombre outrage is in itself a kind of reassurance. 'This is wrong,' the voice implicitly tell us. 'This is bad. But it is rare, and it will be made better. This will pass, and in the end it will all be okay.'