Straw Man

by Gerry Boyle

  “Shut them down and things might get back on track.”

  “Or it could just exacerbate things,” I said.

  “Those are the choices,” he said.

  We leaned some more, watched wasps moving in and out of a nest at the peak of the barn.

  “How ’bout I step in,” Clair said. “Mary gave up trying to fix me years ago.”

  “But you guys do fine.”

  “Only two things she asks: Don’t get hurt, and don’t stay out late.”

  I smiled.

  “Feel like it’s my battle, them coming after my family.”

  “I’m not thinking of a battle,” he said. “More like establishing a no-fly zone. This road and wherever the girls go.”

  “You think they’ll get it?” I said.

  “One way or the other,” Clair said, his flat tone a statement of absolute fact.

  He pushed away from the fence and I followed him back through the barn to the shop. He went to the metal cabinet at the end of the workbench, fished a key out of his pockets, and bent to the padlock.

  “I’m picturing them doing some sort of drive-by,” Clair said. “They pull up beside you on some back road, a shotgun out the window.”

  “Sounds about right.”

  He swung the heavy doors open. There were rifles, shotguns, handguns in brackets on the inside of the door.

  “You want that Glock now?” Clair said.

  I hesitated, thought of Roxanne, a handgun confirming her worst fears. And wouldn’t Welt have a field day with a Glock.

  “The nine millimeter,” he said. “Accurate, and pretty good stopping power.”

  I still hesitated. Roxanne. Sophie.

  “You’re no good to them dead, Jack,” Clair said. “Or in a coma. I’m serious. And these boys are, too. I’ve seen Billy’s type before. You saw how he wanted that fight. Guys like him, they’re time bombs.”

  I nodded.

  “Okay.”

  Clair reached to the cabinet door and took out a black handgun. He slid a drawer open and took out two extra clips, a box of ammo, put it all down on the bench. I opened the box and started thumbing cartridges into the spring-loaded clips.

  “I’m all for pacifism,” Clair said. “But I’m not gonna die for it.”

  9

  I walked out to my truck and put the Glock under the seat. I was locking the truck when I heard Sophie’s burbling voice. She was trotting down the path, Roxanne trailing after her. Sophie saw me and called, “Daddy, we’re going to see Pokey.” I waved and walked back to the barn.

  The pony was at the door to the paddock, poking his head out like a dog in a doghouse. Clair was paring slices of apple and handing them to Roxanne, who was holding Sophie up so she could feed them to Pokey. Pokey was gumming them off Sophie’s small hand, chewing in his deliberate way. He was a pony who had seen everything before and preferred to take things slow.

  “Pokey was starvalating,” I said.

  “Yes, he has to eat or he’ll get skinny,” Sophie said.

  “That’s right, honeybun,” Clair said. “Don’t want him wasting away.”

  Roxanne smiled coldly, said nothing.

  That was the tone of the afternoon and evening. Clair saddled Pokey and Sophie rode him around and around the paddock, Pokey walking at his stately pace and Sophie making clicking sounds that kept him from stopping. Roxanne and I stood by the paddock fence. I tried to begin a conversation and got the smile back. No more.

  After Pokey we went back home, Sophie running in front of us. They went inside and I walked around the house from the back deck, slipped into the woods, and picked my way up to the road. From behind the screen of small yellowing maples, I looked right and left.

  No Dodge truck. Nobody in sight.

  I stood there for five minutes, watching. A white Chevy sedan came from the direction of Clair’s, but it was Mrs. Fortin, the white-haired widow who lived a half mile up on the right.

  A few more minutes and I went back to the house, making my way through the woods at the perimeter of the yard. Chickadees flitted around me, nuthatches, too. A red squirrel scolded from a tree, alerted by the crunching of my boots in the dry sticks and forest duff.

  Good, I thought. Nice and noisy.

  I went inside and Roxanne and Sophie were making dinner. There was salmon cooking in the microwave and Roxanne was cutting zucchini into slices and dropping them into a pan of boiling water. Sophie was standing on a chair, stirring a pot of macaroni and cheese with a wooden spoon.

  She said, “It’s turning bright orange.”

  Roxanne said, “Sophie, you are an excellent cook.”

  We chatted woodenly while we ate, the conversation revolving around Sophie. She talked about Salandra and her doll Chiquita, which Salandra’s mom had gotten her in Mexico. Chiquita had black hair in braids. Sophie was glad she had brown hair because it was the same color as Pokey’s. Welt had said he liked Sophie’s curls. Salandra’s hair was blonde like her mom’s, but her mom lived in a different house. That gave Salandra two houses. She had toys at each house, but some special toys she took back and forth. Like Chiquita.

  Then Sophie asked to be excused and slid down. Roxanne popped up and started to clear the table. I got up and started to help but she said, “That’s okay, I’ll do this,” and took the plate from my hand and put it in the sink. She loaded the dishwasher and started in on the pans, her back to me.

  I gave Sophie her bath, a sudsy, sloshy one that left water all over the floor. I mopped up while she got into her pajamas and we went to the window seat in her room and waited to see if deer would show up at the edge of the woods. Sophie chattered until, on cue, a doe emerged. We stayed still, staring through the window screen, until a husky fawn picked its way out of the woods, too.

  “Hello, mommy and baby deer,” Sophie whispered. And then Roxanne closed a cupboard door and the deer spooked, vaulting back into the underbrush.

  We went downstairs and sat on the couch and read books. Roxanne poked her head in and said five minutes until bedtime, and five minutes later came back and scooped Sophie up. I kissed her good night and she said, “I’m glad you scared away the bad guys, Daddy.”

  Attagirl, I thought. “Me, too,” I said.

  Roxanne didn’t come back downstairs. I heard her moving around, then the squeak of a chair in our bedroom. I walked to the hallway and looked up and the bedroom door was closed, so I went to the study at the back of the house and opened my laptop. I read about Old Order Mennonites—how they were founded by a guy named Menno Simon in Germany in the 1500s, which makes them a hundred years older than the Amish, an offshoot.

  Five hundred years later, still going. Abram and Miriam, Victor and Sarah, out there in the field with the plows, the girls in their white bonnets. How did they not get sucked away by Twitter and hip-hop and YouTube? Or maybe some of them did.

  I leaned back in my chair. The room had grown dark and the laptop glowed. Tomorrow was Sunday, and I assumed the Mennonites would be in church, probably on hard benches, probably for a long time. The forecast was for rain, heavy at times, which would keep us from going back into the Hoddings’ woods.

  That left two choices: Stay home and endure hours of the big chill, or ask Clair to keep an eye on things, and go and do some work.

  Did gun sellers take Sunday off?

  I fired off a few e-mails and called it a bad day.

  Roxanne was asleep when I went up, curled up on her two-foot strip of bed. I slept badly, had a dream that Welt had moved in with us and kept wearing my clothes. As Roxanne said, my dreams were as impenetrable as air.

  I got up with Sophie at six, grilled blueberry pancakes after she stirred the blueberries into the batter herself. When Roxanne came down, the coffee was made and I was sipping a cup of tea. Sophie had saved her mom two pancakes but nibbled away half of one.

  Roxanne poured a cup of coffee. Sophie skittered upstairs to get dressed. Roxanne ate the pancakes, drank her coffee, read the New York Time
s online. I took a shower and got dressed and when I came back down, Roxanne hadn’t moved and still hadn’t said a word to me.

  “I think I’m going to do some work,” I said.

  “Okay.”

  “I’ll talk to Clair on the way out. He knows the situation. He’ll be on duty.”

  “Right.”

  “Are you staying home this morning?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you call him if you decide to go out? And I’ll have my phone on.”

  “Okay.”

  “And I’ll be back after lunch. I’m just hitting a few gun sellers. I won’t be far.”

  “Right.”

  “So I’ll see you.”

  “Yup.”

  I gathered my stuff—notebooks, recorder, GPS, and the $1,000 in cash from Outland magazine. Grabbing my rain jacket from the hook in the shed, I walked quickly to the truck. A dense mist was falling, and the air was heavy. I leaned down, felt the cold metal. The Glock was under the seat.

  Louis’s big-wheeled Jeep was parked at Clair’s barn. I went in and they were standing in the shop talking. When I came in they nodded and paused, like whatever they were discussing was private. Louis looked a little ragged, like he’d been up for hours. A bad night.

  “Hey, Jack,” he said, like it was an effort.

  “Louis,” I said. “How you doing?”

  “Oh, you know,” he said.

  “Still bugging him, the way that argument escalated,” Clair said, always straightforward. “I told him that guy and the chubby one were nosing around Roxanne and Sophie yesterday.”

  “Deserved everything he got and more,” I said. “I wouldn’t lose a minute’s sleep over it.”

  Louis smiled like it was easy for me to say, and he was right. I wasn’t carrying his baggage, wasn’t haunted by his memories.

  “Going out,” I said. “Two or three hours. Would you mind—”

  “On it,” Clair said. “They staying put?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  I left, heard their voices as their conversation resumed.

  There was nobody in sight on the drive out. I went east up to the first intersection, then turned around and drove west to the main road. A car passed with an old couple dressed up, probably headed for church. An SUV with some college kids, driving east toward the coast. Me, I was bound for a guy in a small town called Davidson, fifteen miles to the northwest. Gene had advertised a Taurus nine-millimeter handgun, fifteen cartridges in the clip and one in the chamber. A hundred rounds of ammo. Five hundred dollars. Cash, no checks. And the buyer had to have a Maine driver’s license, and no felony convictions.

  I was golden.

  Davidson was on the edge of the Dixville hills, a long ridge that ran north-south. There had been farms on the ridges, but most were gone now, woods creeping into the pastures, barns sinking into the ground. Everywhere I looked there were reminders that nearly everything we did was for naught.

  I’d plugged Gene’s address into the GPS and it guided me off Route 202, the main road, and up and over the ridge. On the east side of the ridge, where the road dropped into marshy hollows, I zigzagged through the woods, past trailers and farmhouses, home-built cabins ringed by broken-down pickups and cars and snowmobiles.

  And then the GPS went blank. I slowed, looked down each driveway through the rain. One led to a ramshackle trailer that looked like it hadn’t seen $500 cash in many years. The next was posted with signs nailed to trees: PRIVATE PROPERTY—NO TRESPASSING.

  I turned in.

  The house, a neat log cabin, was in a clearing at the end of a long right-hand turn. The pickup in the driveway was big and new, a $40,000 Ford. There was a life-size deer target on the lawn and a chain-link kennel out back. A Rottweiler was barking at me through the fence.

  I got out and went to the side door. There was a sign that said FORGET THE DOG. BEWARE OF OWNER. Before I could knock, the door swung open.

  The guy on the other side was in his seventies, short and trim, with a gray beard and cropped hair the same length. He pushed the storm door open and held it, and I said, “Gene?”

  He had a handgun in a holster on his hip.

  “Yes, but you missed it.”

  “The gun?”

  “Just sold it. Woulda called you off, but it was too late. Surprised you didn’t see him on the way in.”

  “Didn’t see anybody.”

  “Yeah, sorry. Paid cash. Nice kid.”

  “Well, that’s the way it goes,” I said. “So, you sell a lot of guns?”

  “When I have something I don’t need.”

  The rain fell. The dog barked. Gene’s arm wasn’t getting tired, holding the door open.

  “Listen, Gene, I’m a writer.”

  His eyes narrowed, face tightened.

  “For magazines. Live down the road in Prosperity. I was interested in the Taurus. I have a Glock nine millimeter in the truck, but it only holds ten rounds.”

  “Fifteen’s a sight better,” Gene said.

  “Sure is. Listen, I’m thinking of doing a story on gun sales in Maine. How we go about our business here, same as ever.”

  “Not exactly,” he said.

  Gene called it as he saw it, writer or no writer.

  “That right?”

  “People aren’t the same. Druggies and thieves and every other kind of bum. Nobody works. Why should they, handing out the welfare hand over fist. Sucking off the government tit, all they do. Heads down in the public trough.”

  “Huh,” I said. “So how does that affect you selling a gun?”

  “I suss ’em out before I sell them anything. I’m not having some shitbum buying my guns, going out and holding up a goddamn drugstore.”

  “I see.”

  “Before I sell you a gun, I want to know you’re on the right side of the equation.”

  “Of course.”

  “Worked hard for a living.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Concrete work. Slabs, foundations. Forty years. My own business. Poured enough concrete to go from here to goddamn Bangor and back.”

  “No kidding.”

  “So don’t come here looking to buy a firearm with your money from welfare and thieving and drugging,” Gene said.

  “So what was the kid like who bought the Taurus?”

  “Farm kid,” Gene said. “Very polite.”

  “Paid cash?”

  “Cash money.”

  “What was he going to do with the handgun?”

  He looked at me like the question was a bit irrelevant, but said, “He said he and his father hunt bear. Need a handgun, you get in close with one of them big boys. You can get in trouble real fast if one of ’em charges and you can’t bring your long gun to bear.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Sold him a holster, too. Fits under your jacket, keeps the gun out of the weather.”

  I looked at his sidearm.

  “This holster’s okay for around the house,” Gene said.

  “Looks like it,” I said.

  The rain had picked up since I was standing at the door. The dog had found a rhythm, hitting the fence and barking.

  “How you like that Glock?” Gene said.

  “Serves the purpose.”

  “Glock’s a good firearm. I went to a Kimber, though. Light, quick, lots of punch. And made in the U.S.A.”

  “That right,” I said.

  “You bust in here, be the last thing you do.”

  “Who’d be crazy enough to do that?”

  “Drugs turn them into animals,” Gene said. “They don’t know what they’re doing.”

  “True,” I said. “Listen, Gene, you think I could use your comments in my story?”

  “I don’t give a damn.”

  “What’s your last name?”

  “Lisbon. Like the town near Lewiston.”

  Not Portugal.

  “Gotcha,” I said, and I slipped my notebook out and wrote that down. Like I’d forget.

>   “Federal government doesn’t want us to be strong. Wants us to be weak so we can be ruled. The absolute truth. Only democracy we’re going to have left is the one we fight for.”

  “Right.”

  “You come in my home and threaten my family, you better be prepared to pay the consequences.”

  The rain fell. Gene stood guard at the door.

  “You have a family here, Gene?” I said.

  “No, just me and the dog. Wife passed a few years back, and my boy, he works in the Gulf. On oil rigs. See him once a year. Christmas.”

  “I see. But if somebody did come here in a threatening way . . . ”

  “I can’t guarantee that man’s safety,” Gene said.

  I wrote that down. The quote about the feds. The one about the consequences.

  “But the farm kid, he was okay?”

  “Oh, yeah. And I can smell scum a mile away,” he said. “He was a good kid.”

  “So I passed the test?” I said.

  “If you didn’t, we wouldn’t be standing here,” Gene said.

  I smiled and thanked him. The dog had stopped barking. He liked me, too.

  10

  I sat in my truck at the end of the driveway and went over my notes, filling in where words were missing or the ones that were there were illegible. I liked this guy, screening the kids who bought his handguns. But I wondered what kind of bear would take fifteen rounds to bring down.

  I put the notebook on the seat, tapped my phone, and started off. The call dropped and I tapped it again as I came off the top of a rise near the main road. As I waited for a tractor-trailer to pass, Roxanne answered. The truck roared. She waited.

  “Hi,” I said. “How you doing?”

  “Fine,” she said, but didn’t elaborate.

  “Good. How’s Sophie?”

  “She’s fine, too.”

  “What’s she doing?”

  “Playing upstairs.”

  “Oh, good. So she’s okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Seen Clair?”

  “No, but . . . ”

  The words trailed off.

  “Right,” I said. “That doesn’t mean he isn’t there.”

  “No,” Roxanne said.

  A long pause. A pickup pulled up behind me, a big Dodge, but this one was black. I swung out onto the road, holding the wheel with my knees as I shifted.