Michael Marshall: The Straw Men

'It's a game.' He shrugged. 'What bothers me is not that you're no good. It's that it doesn't bother you.'

'What?' I said, incredulous. 'You read that in some motivational management textbook? Drop a zinger at the right moment and your kid ends up chairman of the board?'

Mildly: 'Ward, don't be an asshole.'

'You're the asshole,' I snarled. 'You assumed I'd be no good and you'd be able to come out here and beat me even though you can't play at all.'

He stood for a moment, hands in the pockets of his chinos, and looked at me. It was a strange look, cool and appraising, but not empty of love. Then he smiled.

'Whatever,' he said. And he left, and I guess he walked home.

I turned back to the table, grabbed my beer and drank the rest of it in one swallow. Then I tried to smack one of his remaining balls down the end pocket and missed by a mile. At that moment I really, really hated him.

I stormed over to the bar to find Ed already had a beer waiting for me. I reached for money, but he shook his head. He'd never done that before. I sat down on a stool, didn't say anything for a few minutes.

Gradually we started talking about other things: Ed's views on local politics and feminism — he was somewhat critical of both — and a hide he was thinking of lashing together out in the woods. I didn't see Ed ever having a huge impact on the first two subjects, or getting it together to build the hide, but I listened anyway. By the time Dave wandered in I could more or less pretend that it was just business as usual.

It was an okay night. We talked, we drank, we lied. We played pool not very well. At the end I walked out to the car, and stopped when I saw a note had been pushed under one of the wipers. It was in my father's handwriting, but much smaller than usual.

'If you can't read this the first time,' it said, 'get a ride. I'll drive you out here tomorrow to pick up the car.'

I screwed the note up and hurled it away, but I drove home carefully. When I got back Mom was in bed. There was a light in Dad's study but the door was shut, so I just went upstairs.

I got up once, in the late morning, and made a cup of instant coffee. Apart from that I sat until mid-afternoon, until the sun moved across the sky and started to come directly through the window and into my eyes. This broke the spell I'd been in, and I got out of the chair knowing I'd never sit there again. It wasn't comfortable, for a start. The cushion was threadbare and lumpy, and after a couple of straight hours on it, my ass hurt. I walked back to the kitchen, rinsed my cup out, left it upside down on the side to dry. Then I changed my mind, wiped it, and put it back in the cupboard. I folded the cloth and looped it over the handle on the oven.

I stood irresolute in the hallway, wondering what to do next. Part of me believed that the filial thing to do would be to check out of the hotel and come stay here for the night. The rest of me didn't want to. Really did not want to. I wanted bright lights and a burger, a beer, someone who'd talk to me about something other than death.

Suddenly irritable and sad, I stalked back into the sitting room to retrieve my phone from the coffee table. My lower back ached, probably from sitting in that lousy chair.

The chair. Maybe it was because the light was different; the sun had moved around the yard since the morning, creating new shadows. More likely, a few hours of tears had simply cleared my head a little. Either way, now that I was looking at it, the seat cushion looked a little odd. Slowly slipping the Nokia into my pocket, I frowned at the chair. The cushion, which was an integral part of it, definitely bulged up in the centre. I reached out experimentally, prodded it. It felt a little hard.

Maybe he'd had it reupholstered, or refilled with something. Rocks, perhaps. I straightened up, ready to forget it and leave the house. My hangover was beginning to bloom. Then something else caught my attention.

There's a proper way of placing objects in relation to each other, especially if those objects are large. Some people don't see this. They'll just throw the furniture down any old how, or all against the walls, or at right angles, or so everyone can see the TV. My father always made sure stuff was placed just so, and then got riled if anybody moved it. And my father's chair wasn't in the right place. It wasn't off by much, and I don't think anybody else would have noticed it. It was too square on to the other furniture, and seemed to stand too much out on its own. It just didn't look right.

I squatted down in front of it, examined the line where the cushion was attached to the body of the seat. A strip of braid covered the join. It was worn and frayed. I grabbed one end of it and pulled. It came away easily, revealing an opening that looked like it once had been stitched.

I slipped my hand inside. My fingers navigated through some kind of dry, squishy stuff, probably cut-up chunks of foam. In the middle they found a solid object. I pulled it out.

It was a book. A paperback novel, a new-looking copy of a blockbuster thriller, the kind of thing my mother might pick up on a whim at the checkout, and skim through in an afternoon. It didn't look read. The spine was unbent, and my mother was no stickler for keeping books in pristine condition. It didn't make any sense. It couldn't have gotten in the chair by accident.

I flicked through the pages. In the middle of the book there was a small piece of paper. I pulled it out. It was a note, just one line, written in my father's handwriting.

'Ward,' it said: 'We're not dead.'

3

A stream in southern Vermont, the water clear and cold, hurrying over a bed of pale boulders between the steep banks of a valley up in the Green Mountains. The sky seems to start a few bare feet above the trees, a sheet of spun sugar frozen grey in fading light. The leaves on the ground, broken bulbs of stained-glass colours, are covered with a patchy dusting of snow. On either side of the stream, connected by a pair of old stone bridges fifty yards apart, lies the small village of Pimonta. There are perhaps twenty houses all told, though nearly a dozen of these appear solely for summer use or abandoned altogether. Next to one squats the hulk of a very old Buick, its oxidized shell now the colour of a thundercloud. A few vehicles sit in other driveways, rugged types suggesting their owners are the owners of several children and at least one dog. It is very quiet, apart from the noise of the stream, which has been flowing for so long that its clamour is more of a colour than a sound. Smoke slips sluggishly out of a few chimneys, including those of the Pimonta Inn, a refined bed-and-breakfast that backs onto the river and which is almost full in this last week of the foliage season.

A man stands on one of the bridges, leaning against the wall and looking down at the tumbling water. His name is John Zandt. He is a little under six feet tall and wearing a thick coat against the cold. The coat accentuates his shape, which is compact and broad-shouldered. He looks like a man who could carry a pair of suitcases a long way or hit someone extremely hard. Both are true. His hair is short and dark, his features harsh but well-arranged. There is a two-day growth of stubble on his chin and cheeks. He has stayed for the last week at the Pimonta Inn, living in a suite consisting of a bedroom, a bathroom and a small sitting room with a wood fire, all of which is expensively comfortable in an unkempt country style. He has spent the days walking in the mountains and valleys in the area, avoiding the marked trails, with their straggles of brightly clad hikers fretting about bears. Sometimes he has found the vestiges of old homesteads, now little more than piles of dark wood strewn amongst the undergrowth. There are no echoes to be heard, no matter how long you stand and listen, and places that were once by a path have become uncharted again. The roads found different routes, turning some spots into destinations and leaving others as wilderness, perhaps for ever.