Michael Marshall: The Straw Men

things to either get better or worse.

'Sorry,' I muttered. 'Misunderstanding.'

I put the gun back in my jacket, swept the papers up off the table, and lurched out. I got halfway across the lobby before I fell over, taking a table, a large vase and a hundred bucks' worth of flowers down with me.

At three o'clock in the morning, frigid with iced water, I was lying on my back on the bed in my room.

I had been talked to by both the hotel management and the local police, who'd been understanding, while insisting I relinquish the gun for the duration of my stay. I let the funeral carry the day. I do have a licence to carry a concealed weapon, which surprised them. But they observed, reasonably enough, that the licence doesn't say I can wave it around in bars. The papers from Davids's office, the ones that announced I now had 1.8 million dollars cash, were carefully laid out on the heater to dry. I was no longer angry at anybody. The fact that my father's last will and testament now smelled of spilt beer seemed to effectively make his point.

After a while I rolled over, picked up the phone, and dialled a number. The phone rang six times, and then an answering machine kicked in. A voice I knew better than my own said that Mr and Mrs Hopkins were sorry they couldn't answer the phone, but that I should leave a message. They'd get back to me.

2

At ten o'clock the next morning I stood, pale and penitent, at the end of my parents' driveway. I was wearing a clean shirt. I had eaten some breakfast. I had apologized to everyone I could find in the hotel, right down to the guy who cleaned the pool. I was amazed that I hadn't spent the night in a cell. I felt like shit.

The house sat near the end of a narrow and hilly road on the mountainside of Dyersburg's main residential area. I'd been a little surprised by it when they moved. The lot was decent-sized, about half an acre, with a couple of old trees shading the side of the house. Properties of similar size bordered it, home to nice late Victorians, that no one looked too obsessed about painting. A neat hedge marked the edge of both sides of the property. Mary lived in the next house up, and she wasn't anything like wealthy. A college professor and his post-grad wife had recently moved in on the other side. I think my dad actually sold them the house. Again, decent people — but unlikely to bathe in champagne. The house itself was a two-storey, with a graceful wraparound porch, a workshop in the cellar and a garage round the back. It was, without question, a nice-looking and well-appointed house in a good neighbourhood. Someone wanted to set you up there, you wouldn't complain. But neither would Homes of the Rich and Famous be doing a showcase special anytime soon.

I waved across the fence in case Mary happened to be looking out the window, and walked slowly up the path. It felt as if I was approaching an impostor. My parents' real house, the one I'd grown up in, lay a long time in the past and a thousand miles west. I'd never been back to Hunter's Rock since they moved, but I could remember that house like the back of my hand. The arrangement of its rooms would probably always define my understanding of domestic space. The one in front of me was like a second wife, taken too late in life to have a relationship with the children that extended beyond distant cordiality.

A galvanized trashcan stood to one side of the door, the lid raised by the full bag inside. There were no newspapers on the porch. I assumed Davids had seen to that. The right thing to do, but it made the house look as if it already had a dust sheet over it. I pulled the unfamiliar keys from my pocket and unlocked the door.

It was so quiet inside that the house seemed to throb. I picked up the few pieces of mail, junk for the most part, and put them on the side table. Then I wandered for a while, walking from room to room, looking at things. The rooms felt like preview galleries for some strange yard sale, each object coming from a different home and priced well below its value. Even the things that went together — the books in my father's study, my mother's collection of 1930s English pottery, neatly arrayed on the antique pine dresser in the sitting room — seemed hermetically sealed from my touch and from time. I had no idea what to do with these things. Put them in boxes and store them somewhere to gather dust? Sell them, keep the money, or give it to some worthy cause? Live within this tableau, knowing that in the objects' minds I would never have anything more than a second-hand regard for them?

The only thing that seemed to make any kind of sense was leaving everything as it was, walking out of the house and never coming back. This wasn't my life. It wasn't anybody's, not any more. Apart from the single wedding picture in the hall, there weren't even any photographs. There never had been in our family.

In the end I wound up back in the sitting room. This faced down the garden toward the road, and had big, wide windows that transformed the cold light outside into warmth. There was a couch and armchair, in matching genteel prints. A compact little widescreen television, on a stand fronted with smoked glass. Also my father's chair, a battered warhorse in green fabric and dark wood, the only piece of furniture in the room that they'd brought from the previous house. A new biography of Frank Lloyd Wright was on the coffee table, my father's place marked with a receipt from Denford's Market. Eight days previously one of them had bought a variety of cold cuts, a carrot cake (fancy), five large bottles of mineral water, some low-fat milk and a bottle of vitamins. Most of these must have been amongst the fridge contents that Mary had thrown away. The mineral water was maybe still around, along with the vitamins. Perhaps I'd have some later.

In the meantime I sat in my father's chair. I ran my hands along the worn grain of the armrests, then laid them in my lap and looked down the garden.

And for a long time, in savage bursts, I cried.

Much later, I remembered an evening from long ago. I would have been seventeen, back when we lived in California. It was Friday night, and I was due to meet the guys at a bar out on a back road just outside town. Lazy Ed's was one of those shoebox-with-a-parking-lot beer dens that look like they've been designed by Mormons to make drinking seem not just un-Godly but drab and sad and dead-end hopeless. Ed realized that he wasn't in a position to be picky, and as we were never any trouble and kept feeding quarters into the pool table and juke box — Blondie, Bowie and good old Bruce Stringbean, back in the glory days of Molly Ringwald and Mondrian colours — our juvie custom was fine by him.

My mother was out, gone to a crony of hers to do whatever it is women do when there aren't any men around to clutter up the place and look bored and not listen with sufficient gravity to stories about people they've never met, and who anyway sound kind of dull, if their troubles are anything to judge by. At six o'clock Dad and I were sitting at the big table in the kitchen, eating some lasagne she'd left in the fridge, and avoiding the salad. My mind was on other things. I have no idea what. I can no more get back inside the head of my seventeen-year-old self than I could that of a tribesman in Borneo.

It was a while before I'd realized Dad had finished, and was watching me. I looked back at him. 'What?' I said, affably enough.

He pushed his plate back. 'Going out tonight?'

I nodded slowly, full of teenage bafflement, and got back to shovelling food into my head.

I should have understood right away what he was asking. But I didn't get it, in the same way I didn't get why there remained a small pile of salad on his otherwise spotless plate. I didn't want that green shit, so I didn't take any. He didn't want it either, but he took some — even though Mom wasn't there to see. I can understand now that the pile in the bowl had to get smaller, or when she got back she'd go on about how we weren't eating right. Simply dumping some of it straight in the trash would have seemed dishonest, whereas if it spent some time on a plate — went, in effect, via his meal — then it was okay. But back then, it seemed inexplicably stupid.