Michael Marshall: The Straw Men

I finished up, and found that Dad was still sitting there. This was unlike him. Usually, once a food event was over, he was all business. Get the plates in the washer. Take the garbage out. Get the coffee on. Get on to the next thing. Chop fucking chop.

'So what are you going to do? Watch the tube?' I asked, making an effort. It felt very grown up.

He stood and took his plate over to the side. There was a pause, and then he said: 'I was wondering.'

This didn't sound very interesting. 'Wondering what?'

'Whether you'd play a couple of frames with an old guy.'

I stared at his back. The tone of his inquiry was greatly at odds with his usual confidence, especially the mawkish attempt at self-deprecation. I found it hard to believe he thought I'd take the deception seriously. He wasn't old. He jogged. He whipped younger men at tennis and golf. He was, furthermore, the last person in the world I could imagine playing pool. He just didn't fit the type. If you drew a Venn diagram with circles for 'People who looked like they played pool', 'People who looked like they might' and 'People who looked like they wouldn't, but maybe did,' then he would have been on a different sheet of paper altogether. He was dressed that night, as he so often was, in a neatly pressed pair of sandy chinos and a fresh white linen shirt, neither of them from anywhere as mass-market as The Gap. He was tall and tan with silvering dark hair and had the kind of bone structure that makes people want to vote for you. He looked like he should be leaning on the rail of a good-length boat off Palm Beach or Jupiter Island, talking about art. Most likely about some art he was trying to sell you. I, on the other hand, was fair and skinny and wearing regulation black Levi's and a black T-shirt. Both looked like they'd been used to make fine adjustments to the insides of car engines. They probably smelled that way, too. Dad would have smelled the way he always did, which I wasn't aware of then but can summon up now as clearly as if he was standing behind me: a dry, clean, correct smell, like neatly stacked firewood.

'You want to come play pool?' I asked, checking that I hadn't lost my mind.

He shrugged. 'Your mother's out. There's nothing on the box.'

'You got nothing salted away on tape?' This was inconceivable. Dad had a relationship with the VCR like some fathers had with a favoured old hound, and racks of neatly labelled tapes on the shelves in his study. I'd do exactly the same now, of course, if I lived anywhere in particular. I'd have them stamped with bar codes if I had the time. But back then it was the thing about him that most strongly put me in mind of fascist police states.

He didn't answer. I cleared the scraps off my own plate, thoughtlessly making a good job of it because I was at an age when showing my love for my mother was difficult, and ensuring her precious dishwasher didn't get clogged with shit was something I could do without anyone realizing I was doing it, including myself. I didn't want Dad to come out to the bar. It was that simple. I had a routine for going out. I enjoyed the drive. It was me time. Plus the guys were going to find it weird. It was weird, for fuck's sake. My friend Dave would likely be stoned out of his gourd when he arrived, and might freak out there and then if he saw me standing with a representative of all that was authoritarian and straight-backed and wrinkly.

I looked across at him, wondering how to put this. The plates were stowed. The remaining salad was back in the fridge. He'd wiped the counter down. If a team of forensic scientists happened to swoop mid-evening and tried to find evidence of any food-eating activity, they'd be right out of luck. It annoyed the hell out of me. But when he folded the cloth and looped it over the handle, on the oven, I had my first ever intimation of what I would feel in earnest, nearly twenty years later, on the day I sat wet-faced in his chair in an empty house in Dyersburg. A realization that his presence was not unavoidable or a given; that one day there would be too much salad in the bowl and cloths that remained unfolded.

'Yeah, whatever,' I said.

I quickly started to freak about how the other guys were going to react, and hustled us out of the house forty minutes early. I figured this might give us as much as an hour before we had to deal with anyone else, as the other guys were always late.

We drove out to Ed's, Dad sitting in the passenger seat and not saying much. When I drew up outside the bar he peered out the windshield. 'This is where you go?'

I said it was, a little defensively. He grunted. On the way across the lot it occurred to me that turning up with my dad was going to bring into focus any doubts Ed might be entertaining about my age, but it was too late to turn back. It wasn't like we looked very similar. Maybe he'd think Dad was some older guy I knew. Like a senator, or something.

Inside was nearly empty. A couple old farts I didn't know were hunkered down over a table in the corner. The place never really stuttered into life until late, and it was a precarious form of vitality, the kind that two consecutive bad choices on the jukebox could kill stone dead. As we stood at the counter waiting for Ed to make his own good time out of the back, Dad leaned back against the bar and looked around. There wasn't a great deal to see. Battered stools, venerable dust, a pool table, interior twilight and neon. I didn't want him to like it. Ed came out eventually, grinned when he saw me. Usually I'd drink my first beer sitting gassing with him, and probably he was anticipating this was going to happen tonight.

But then he caught sight of Dad, and stopped. Not like he'd run into a wall or anything, but he hesitated, and his smile faded, to be replaced by an expression I couldn't interpret. Dad wasn't the usual kind of guy who spent time in that bar, and I guess Ed was wondering what kind of bizarre map-reading error had brought him there. Dad turned to look at him, and nodded. Ed nodded back.

I really wanted this over with. 'My dad,' I said.

Ed nodded once more, and another great male social interaction ground to a close.

I asked for two beers. As I waited I watched my father as he walked over to the pool table. As a kid I'd got used to the fact that people would come up to him in stores and start talking to him, assuming he was the manager and the only person who could sort out whatever trivia they were spiralling up into psychodrama. Being able to look equally at home in a scummy bar was kind of a trick, and I felt a flicker of respect for him. It was a very specific and limited type of regard, the kind you allow someone who displays a quality you think you might one day aspire to, but it was there all the same.

I joined him at the table, and after that the bonding session went rapidly downhill. I won all three games. They were long, slow games. It wasn't that he was so terrible, but every shot he played was five percent out, and I had the run of the table. We didn't talk much. We just leant down, took our shots, endured the misses. After the second game slouched to a conclusion he went and bought himself another beer while I racked the balls up. I'd been kind of hoping he'd stick at one, so I still had most of mine left. Then we played the last game, which was a little better, but still basically excruciating. At the end of it he put his cue back in the rack.

'That it?' I asked, trying to sound nonchalant. I was so relieved I took the risk of holding up another quarter.

He shook his head. 'Not giving you much of a challenge.'

'So — aren't you going to say 'Hey kid, you're good,' or something like that?'

'No,' he said, mildly. 'Because you're not.'

I stared at him, stricken as a five-year-old. 'Yeah, well,' I eventually managed. 'Thanks for the ego-boost.'