He told me that a long time ago, there had been five people who were friends.
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Harold and Mary and Ed were born in Hunter's Rock, and grew up together. They'd lived small-town lives and there are worse things than that. Then they happened to meet two young newcomers in a bar and afterwards the five were always hanging around together.
My parents were already married, but soon found they could not have children. Gradually they realized this wasn't the end of the world. They had each other, enjoyed life as friends and lovers. There were many things to do and find: the years would not pass slowly, nor would they never be happy, just because when they closed the door at night it would only ever be the two of them in their cave. They got on with their lives, tried to accept the cards they'd been dealt. A couple of years passed in work and sleep and Friday nights, long games of pool that nobody lost.
Then the world tilted, and they came to realize that passing on genetic material isn't the only way of making your mark on the universe. Suddenly came an era that I suppose I've never really understood. In a flat cultural plain, mountains and gullies appeared, splitting the ground on which people stood. Demonstrations in the streets. Sit-ins on campus, students and faculty pulling together for the first time. Fights in restaurants that wouldn't allow blacks to eat at the same lunch counter. Police firing on citizens, children turning on their parents. Marches. Shouts of nigger-lover, fascist, queer, commie. Ideas hammered into weapons. Long evenings in people's houses getting stoned, talking about what should be done, talking about new ways of being, talking about talking about talking.
They were older than most activists. They had the time and energy to spare — and more perspective than either the teenagers or the angrily oppressed. Beth Hopkins got involved in the unionization of black domestic workers. Harold gave free legal advice to those who couldn't afford it, or to those whose race had always meant they caught the sharp end of the legislative stick. Don Hopkins set up a campaign to prevent whole neighbourhoods being demolished to make way for the beltways that were the first steps toward the post-modern American city, where the undesirables are fenced out of the centre by six-lane rivers of hurtling steel, and inequality is enshrined in the landscape. Mary and Ed were merely followers, but they helped out wherever they could, and whenever Ed was sober. Mary loved Harold, and Ed just wanted some people to hang around. They held down their jobs and worked in their spare time, these older warriors, people who by this stage were over that dread age of thirty and thus able to temper enthusiasm with a sense of what was important: to concentrate on activities that might actually help people, rather than just yield a warm glow inside and the chance to screw some other excitable young thing flushed with the adrenaline of protest.
For two years they waved banners and fists, gave their time and money and heart. A few things changed. Most did not. The status quo has stamina. Loud guitar and free love can only change so much. Gradually the flavour of the times soured, as the same old forces simmered together for another year. It was Harold who first noticed what was going on. He realized that the people coming to him for legal advice, veterans of hot afternoons spent bellowing at the cops, were in worse and worse shape when they showed up at his door. That peaceful resistance was generating more wounds as the months went by, and that the bruises and scars he was seeing were not all the responsibility of the police. That there were factions within the beautiful people, and that these divisions were growing more telling and violent than those between them and the authorities. That there were groups whose aims seemed much more simple and retrograde than progress, whose agenda held no action points, only darkness.
At first the others disagreed. It was just the dream going flat, a trend Don had predicted long before. The natural divisions were resurfacing, that was all: their flames fanned by the frustrated realization that the People's Republic of America was as far away as ever. But then the deaths began. The demonstrations where both cops and students would be found on the ground with glass bottles in their faces. The street fights that bubbled seemingly out of nothing. The rock concerts where a scuffle would break out and bodies and a gun would be found when the crowd scattered. The explosions that took the lives of innocent bystanders without advancing any sane cause by a yard. Some of these events were the work of people who thought they were doing the right thing, that armed struggle was the only way forward. But the worst events were created by people who had a different plan altogether. The people with the guns and the dynamite were more organized than the freedom fighters, and predated both them and their cause. There was a cuckoo in the tie-dyed nest, rubbing its wings and preparing to fly.
Many people backed out at that stage. The Summer of Love was already fading into the Autumn of Jaded Apathy, and drugs had laid many out cold on the slab. Ed wanted out. Mary did, too. They had only really been in it for the excitement, after all, for something to do with their friends. Politics as social life, slogan as fashion accessory. Even Harold wavered. He was a lawyer. His soul yearned for order.
'But Beth and Don,' Harold said, his voice dry and quiet, 'they couldn't leave it alone.'
They asked questions, tracking lines of conflict. They traced the printers of certain hate sheets, and their authors, and found that the bad grammar and hint of madness were often fake. They looked for the friend of a friend of a friend, the one who people thought had maybe been the one who brought the gun to the demo, or who had first broken a bottle, or could broker you an introduction to the people who were really doing something, not just talking. They looked, and they started to find.
Eventually the threats began. Two of their friends were found badly beaten, left for dead in the back of a car. Another disappeared one afternoon and was never seen again. Harold found himself without a
job, the first sign that these people were a good deal better connected than the students and hippies whose protest they were hijacking.
And in the end my mother was followed one night, and abducted, and driven some distance and held in the car at knifepoint while someone whose face she couldn't see explained that if they didn't stop digging then their next homes would be shallow and for ever and in a forest where nobody walked. She was raped, by four men, before being thrown out of the car on the edge of town, naked and with her hair cut off.
After that my father changed. He hunted them down. For four months he and my mother left the world and everyone in it behind, plunging deeper into darkness until they found the candle shedding light in its centre. The others never knew the details of what went on during this time, only that my parents had changed. They still saw the Hopkinses, but now that they were no longer fighting the good fight there didn't seem as much to hold the group together. Don began to talk about strange things, about some big, loose conspiracy run by people trying to break down our society from within. The other three wouldn't listen, not at first. It sounded too much like the ravings of a couple whose grip on reality was no longer reliable.
And then one night the two of them had come into the bar where they all usually met. Mary had been drunk, after an argument with Davids, and didn't even speak to them. My father had taken Harold to one side and talked to him urgently. At first Harold had been reluctant, but in the end the three left together, leaving Mary in the bar with Lazy Ed. These two did the obvious thing and got shit-faced and then went into the woods and slept together. By the Lost Pond, in fact. Harold and Mary had stopped living with each other pretty soon afterwards.
The other three had driven for four hours to a place up in the hills of southern Oregon. They had been armed, and they came upon the place quietly. My mother and father had somewhat lost their perspective by this point, though they might have believed they had found it — that they had learned the harsh lesson that when it comes to the struggle between the people who believed in life, and those who believed in death, the battle had to be fought on the latter's terms.
The camp was in a clearing half a mile off the road, deep in the forest. A
cluster of cabins, hand-built and arranged in a circle, the way things used to be. After my mother had looked at each man and confirmed they had been involved in the incident, the three moved quickly, and they shot everyone they found.
* * *
There was silence in Harold's living room.
'You went in and shot everyone? My parents shot people?'
'Not the women and children,' Davids said. 'And we didn't shoot to kill. But we shot the men. Each of
them. In the leg. Or the shoulder. Or the balls. Depending.'
'I don't blame them,' I said. I didn't know whether I meant this or not. I probably did. 'If what you're saying is true, then I don't blame either of them for what they did.'
'Oh it's true,' he said. 'I was there. The last man we found was the one who'd held the knife to your mother's throat. We didn't realize it then, but this wasn't just some group of rednecks off on their own. They had a cause. They've always been around. Your parents found this man sitting alone in his cabin. And your father, the great Don Hopkins, junior realtor, put a gun to his face and shot him dead.'
I tried to see that night, to see my father in that position, and I realized I had never really known him at all. I felt as if information was spilling out of my eyes.
'Then they heard a sound from the other room in the cabin, and Beth went through. The man's wife had left him, or he'd killed her. Either way she'd left their children behind. Twins, barely six months old, wrapped together in a little cot and now orphans. Two little children, exactly what Beth most wanted and couldn't have.' Davids shook his head. 'At least, that's the way they told it. I wasn't there for that part. Perhaps they saw the children first. Maybe Beth found the little ones and your father thought he saw a way to make up for what had been done to her. Maybe they decided that they were allowed one shot to kill.'
'My parents weren't liars,' I said.
'So you knew about all this, did you?'
'They weren't liars,' I repeated, uselessly. 'And this is all crap.'
'What happened to the children?' Bobby asked.
'We brought them back to Hunter's Rock. Don and Beth raised them for a while. But in the end it was decided that they had to be separated. Beth was very, very unhappy about the idea, and so was your father, but the rest of us decided that it simply wasn't safe. The babies weren't the only thing taken from the man's cabin. We found a lot of papers and books. Some were very, very old. There was proof that your parents had been right. There was a conspiracy. The people up in the woods were part of it. Beth and Don thought that they would be able to change the way you were, that environment was more important. It was very big back then, that idea. Not so popular now, of course, not with all this fuss about the human DNA thing and all that. Now everyone thinks that chemicals explain everything.'
'The babies were split up,' Bobby said.
'They kept one, and the other was taken far away. The idea was that they might stand more of a chance if they didn't have each other to reinforce the way they were. Or maybe it was a neat little experiment, Ward, cooked up by your father. Nature versus nurture. I didn't ever really understand.'
'Versus what nature, Harold? If this is true, and all this happened, why the big fear about the nature of
the babies?'
'Well,' he said. 'Because of your genes, of course. Because you were so non-viral. So pure.'
'Jesus Christ,' I shouted, 'You don't believe that shit, do you? You don't really think…' I stopped,
suddenly blindsided. 'Wait a minute. This has to do with the social virus idea?'
'Of course. But how do you know about it?'
'We found The Straw Men's Web site.'
'But how do you even know about them?'
'Dad left a video,' I said. 'I had just found it when you came to the house that time. It had all of you on
it, though I didn't realize at first. He left me a note, too. Saying they weren't dead.' Davids shook his head, and smiled faintly. 'Don,' he said. 'He always planned ahead.' His smile was
affectionate, but not only that.
'But if all this happened in Hunter's Rock,' Bobby said, 'how come you all came here?'
'We hung together for a few more years. We had some good nights, but it wasn't the way it had been. After a while I left. I came to Dyersburg. To start again. Mary came out a year later. It didn't work. But she stayed in town. For a long time after that, we were out of contact with the others. Partly it was thought to be for the best. Also, well… we'd done some pretty bad things. On the night it had seemed the right thing to do. We got caught up in it, I guess. Frustration that nothing in the world had changed, despite everything we had done, and we were still at the mercy of men like that. But afterwards it wasn't something that any of us really wanted to remember. For Mary and Ed it wasn't so bad. They hadn't actually been there. But they were our friends, and so part of the blame bled off onto them. They knew about it, and kept it a secret with us.'
'My father and Ed bumped into each other once,' I said. 'Long time ago. I was there. They pretended they'd never met each other.'
'Not surprised,' Davids said. 'I don't think your father really trusted Ed to keep quiet. Though he did.'
'Did you know he was dead?'
'Not until you said so,' he said. 'I knew about Mary. I didn't think they'd go back for him. He wasn't
even there.'
A car drove past outside, and Davids's head turned like it was on a string. He waited until the sound had disappeared. I'd never seen a man who looked more as if he was expecting bad things to turn up at
his door.
'If you guys were supposed to be keeping apart, how come my parents relocated up here?'
'After over twenty years, and nothing happening, nobody coming for us, I guess Don started to feel that it was over. He was sometimes out this way on business, and he visited me a couple of times, and we shot a little pool, got to talking about old times. Before that bad night. The fun we'd had. The period when we felt like we were going to change the world. At first it was strange, and then it was like the other decades hadn't happened. He brought your mother up here for a weekend, and eventually they decided to move. Get the old gang back together. Be young again.'
'So how come they never told me that you'd known each other before?'
'Because…' Davids sighed. 'Because The Halls started construction just before they settled here, and Don got to hear about it. He got in touch, pitched to them. He wanted the business. He got it. And after a while he started to think there was something weird going on. After that, he decided we had to go back to pretending. He didn't really grow old, Don. Not like the rest of us. Your mother either, I guess. Most of us, comes a time when you're prepared to let things lie. Not Don. You put a secret in front of him, and
he had to know what it was. He had to understand.'
I nodded. This was true. 'So what happened?'
'He started poking around. Trying to find out who was behind the development, what they were up to. He became convinced it was the same people he'd run into years before, in Oregon. Well, not the same guys, but a better connected example of the same kind of people. That they were part of some worldwide movement. Some hidden group, moving behind the scenes.' He shook his head.
'You didn't think so?'
'I don't know what I thought. I just wanted him to leave it alone. Some people put too high a premium on the truth, Ward. Sometimes the truth isn't what you want to know. Sometimes the truth is best left to
itself.'
'And they found him out.'
'They realized someone was poking around. Couldn't tie it to him, but there were a very limited
number of people it could be. Things started to get harder for Don. Little things. I think they must have someone here in town.'
'They do,' I said. 'He's the man who shot Bobby. He's a policeman.'
'Oh Christ,' Davids said. 'Tell me he's dead.'
'What happened to my parents, Harold? What happened that night?'
'Don decided they had to leave, to disappear. It wasn't a story he could take to anyone. Even if they believed it, he'd have been admitting to murder. But I think he'd also decided that he was going to deal with them for good. I don't know how the hell he thought he was going to do that. The four of us had a combined age of about two hundred and fifty years. But… we were going to fake their death, make it look like they were out of the picture. Let The Straw Men think it was over. It was all organized.'
My heart skipped a beat, remembering the note left inside my father's chair, and realizing that he could have closed up UnRealty to make The Straw Men think it was all over, before coming back for them in some way. He'd done it to protect me. It wasn't because he'd distrusted me, and it didn't mean that they were…
Davids saw my face, and shook his head.
'They got to them first,' he said. 'Two days before we were going to do it. They were going to drive up to Lake Ely on the Sunday, go boating in the afternoon. Have an accident. Bodies never found. Then on Friday… well, you know what happened. They're dead, Ward. I'm sorry. They weren't supposed to be. But they're really dead. And soon, probably tonight, I will be too. And then it will all be over.'
'Fuck that,' Bobby said. 'Fuck that from here to there.' He unwrapped the towel from his arm. It was pretty bloody, but no more came out of the hole in his shirt. 'I'm good to go. Let's get up there and start
fucking these people around.'
Davids just shook his head. He looked jumpy. 'We're better off staying here.'
'Sir, with respect, I think not,' Bobby said. 'Last couple days have seen concerted culling of your old
crew. If they knew about Lazy Ed, they sure as fuck know about you.'
I was only dimly aware of either of them. I was trying to absorb what I had been told, was trying to realign everything I had thought I'd known about my family. About myself. Davids looked at me.
'It's all true,' he said. 'And I can prove it. Give me a minute, and I can prove it.' He stood up and left
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