Straw Man

by Gerry Boyle

  And there they were.

  The van slowed to a roll as they saw me, my truck—no exit. Then the driver continued on, stopped twenty feet from me. The motor ticked. They stared. The white guy with the goatee and the baseball hat. The other, black, maybe Caribbean, head shaved clean. No expression, either of them.

  And then, simultaneously, they opened their doors and got out. Closed the doors, the motor still running. Walked toward me and stopped six feet away.

  Jeans. Black T-shirts. Bulked up, but not overly so. An air of authority that is the hardest thing to disguise.

  “Cops,” I said.

  “ATF,” the Caribbean guy said.

  “ID?”

  He pursed his lips, on the verge of telling me to screw off. Then he reached into his jeans, took out a leather ID holder, and flipped it open. He stepped forward and held it up. I peered at it, then at his face.

  Ramos, Joseph R.

  Special Agent.

  The other guy moved up and put his ID in my face.

  O’Day, Terrence G.

  Special Agent.

  He had more hair in the photo, no goatee.

  “Pleased to meet you, Mr. McMorrow,” Ramos said.

  They’d run the plate.

  “Likewise,” I said. “And just so you know, I’ve got a gun.”

  “Where?” O’Day said.

  “Waist. Behind me. I didn’t know who you were or why you were following me.”

  “Got a carry permit?” Goatee said.

  “Yes.”

  “Produce it. After you put the gun on the hood of your truck, just so there’s no misunderstanding,” he said.

  He moved around and behind me, and I heard his gun slip out of a holster somewhere. I turned, lifted my shirt, eased the Glock up and out with two fingers. Moving to the truck, I laid the gun on the hood. I turned back, took my place in front of them. O’Day was putting his gun back into his waistband. I slowly held out my wallet and showed my card. They handed it back and forth.

  “You always carry a loaded firearm?” Ramos said.

  “This is Maine. It’s a gun culture.”

  “So we noticed,” O’Day said.

  The accent was Boston, the pieces falling into place. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms checking on private gun sales in rural Maine. Massachusetts was a destination for Maine guns. They stake out some sellers and see the same blue Toyota pickup making the rounds.

  “I’m a reporter,” I said, cutting to the chase.

  “For who?” Ramos said.

  I told him.

  “This magazine issues firearms to its reporters?”

  “I’m freelance,” I said.

  “Uh-huh,” O’Day said.

  “I’ve had some run-ins of late.”

  A red squirrel chittered somewhere in the trees above us. A blue jay called. It was their move, and they had to decide how much to tell me, how much to ask.

  “So you must know what we’re up here for,” Ramos said.

  “I’m thinking a Maine gun was picked up at a Boston homicide. You came up to see how that might have happened.”

  “Dorchester,” O’Day said. “Intervale Street. And then we see you. Keep turning up at private sellers.”

  “I’m mostly just talking,” I said.

  Ramos looked toward the Glock on the hood of the truck.

  “I borrowed that from a friend. For protection. I’m going to buy two or three guns, but I haven’t found the right ones yet.”

  “This is for your story?” O’Day said.

  “Right. So if you have a few minutes, I’d love to know about the homicide that triggered your investigation. I’d like to know if this is a trend. How many hands the guns go through from Maine to Boston. If it’s an organized thing or just random. If it’s an organized thing, how much profit is made by the time the gun gets down there. And why are you in Waldo County.”

  “That’s all?” Ramos said.

  “My turn for questions,” O’Day said. “Guy making the rounds looking at handguns. Has connections to New York and is carrying a loaded Glock. Decides somebody’s following him, so he lures them into the woods and then blocks the road so they can’t get out. What kind of reporter is that?”

  “Thorough?” I said.

  “Move your vehicle,” Ramos said.

  I did, after I gave Ramos my card and asked who I should talk to in Boston. He gave me a name, Brenda Gleeson, said if I called the main number, they’d get a message to her. And then I took my gun and put it back in the truck, backed into the woods to let them pass.

  They did, Ramos giving me a two-fingered salute. I saluted back, and followed them out to the road. They went left, I went right. Fifty yards down the road, I’d decided: This story was getting better by the minute. But at a cost.

  It all swirled around in my head: Billy and Baby Fat, Welt and his goddamn PowerPoint, the gun sellers and their varied sense of right and wrong, Semi picking up an assault rifle. For what purpose? Target shooting? To join a militia? To pick me off from a hundred yards? Or would it be Clair? Or Louis?

  It had clouded up, matching my mood, weather rolling in from the west like the dust cloud over an invading army. I thought of driving out to the school, but would that just inflame matters more? Besides, Clair was there, on sentry duty. I slowed, picked up my phone, and punched him in. His cell buzzed and then he said, “Yessuh.”

  “How are things out there?” I said.

  “Quiet,” he said. “Kids are on the swings. Roxanne and the other dad are sitting at the picnic table, doing stuff on their computers.”

  “PowerPoint,” I said.

  “Good times,” Clair said. “Sometimes I think we can’t see the forest or the trees.”

  “Will you call me when they leave?”

  “Roger that.”

  “What’s Louis up to?”

  “Lying low, I think. This thing’s still bugging him.”

  “We shouldn’t forget that he’s the one they’d target,” I said. “Though they’d have to find him first.”

  “Not forgetting,” Clair said. “Not for a second.”

  The clouds had darkened to the west, and I put the phone down and turned on the radio, fiddled until I found a weather report. Thunderstorms moving in, possibly with hail. I drove north, vaguely headed for the Mennonite farms on the hills north of Hyde, thinking I might meet someone out there, might move a step closer to getting this promised story actually under way. I wove my way on back roads, climbing toward the ridgetop, my mind flitting. The Boston cops. Billy and Baby Fat. Roxanne and Welt. Around and around.

  I crossed parallel to the ridge, took a right, and bounced over the ruts in the gravel road. The farms were a half mile up, the fields here spiked with seven-foot-high Mennonite corn. The road curved and, lost in thought, I had to yank the wheel to get the truck out of the oncoming lane. And then there was someone walking. I slowed, started to wave. Saw Abram and stopped.

  He had been walking toward me, away from the farm. I got out of the truck, waited as he turned around and approached. He looked somber, troubled.

  “Hey,” I said. “Everything okay?”

  He looked at me, and, with an odd directness, said, “No.”

  “You want to talk about it?”

  “I don’t know,” Abram said.

  “Where you headed?”

  “Just away. Everybody’s at service.”

  “Not you?”

  “I said I was sick.”

  “Not true?”

  “No,” he said. “It was a lie.”

  He said it like a lie was a big deal. Mennonite boy, let me introduce you to the rest of the world.

  We stood there, an odd sort of pair in an unlikely place, a ridgetop in a forgotten corner of a forgotten county. The clouds were billowing and the new leaves were turning over, showing their pale undersides. Storm sign.

  “Do you drink coffee?” I said.

  “Sure,” Abram said.

  “Hop in.�
�

  He seemed to think about it, turned back toward the farm as though to make sure nobody was watching. And then he came around, opened the door. I moved my notebooks and pens from the passenger seat.

  We rode in silence for the six miles to the restaurant. I figured I wouldn’t push him. He’d either want to talk or he wouldn’t.

  He didn’t say anything for the first few minutes that we sat in the booth at the Belle View. Belle put down placemats and Abram appeared absorbed by the advertisements: trucking, excavation, a dog groomer. The coffee came and he looked up and then around the table. He spooned in sugar, opened two creamers. Stirred the milky concoction with his spoon and said, “What if he’s wrong?”

  I sipped my coffee, put the mug back down.

  “Who?”

  “The Bishop. My father.”

  “Wrong about what?”

  “Everything,” he said. He raised the mug in both hands and slurped. Wiped his mouth with the paper napkin.

  “We’re Old Order Mennonite, which is pretty strict. Pretty hard-core even for Old Order. The Bishop, my dad, he came to Maine because he thought the Ontario folks were sliding. It’s God and the Bible for the Bishop, and how you have to do it a certain way so you don’t go to hell. But I don’t know.”

  I looked at him. Waited.

  “Lately, it keeps sort of getting into my head. This last time I was reading a National Geographic. It was in the break room at work.”

  “Where’s work?”

  “The toy factory. In Thornhill.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And there was this story about this tribe way out in the jungle in Borneo. They have some religion, worshipping rain gods or whatever, and they think they have it all figured out.”

  “Well, for their purposes they do,” I said.

  “The Bishop, I was telling him about them, about how they had never heard of Jesus, and he said they were lost and they’d burn in hell. I said, ‘But how are they supposed to believe in something they never heard of?’ He said he’d have to think about that, but there was no way they were going to heaven.”

  “Luck of the draw,” I said.

  Abram took a nervous gulp of coffee. His hands clenched the mug tightly, fingers flexing. Belle came up and asked if we wanted refills, and he held his mug out. She poured and he set to adding his sugar and cream.

  He stirred, gathering himself up.

  “It’s just that, those people in the jungle, they probably have a Bishop guy, too. He’s probably saying you have to do this and that, sacrifice a goat or whatever, to get into heaven, or whatever they call it. So why should they go to hell? It makes me wonder if the whole thing is . . . I don’t know.”

  He paused, deciding whether to say it.

  “Just made up.”

  He drank some more coffee, looked down at the table, and shook his head.

  “You must think I’m weird, going on about all this stuff, and me hardly knowing you. It’s just that—”

  “You had to let it out,” I said. “And you can’t do that when you’re with your family.”

  “No way.”

  “Do you know people your age who aren’t Mennonite?”

  “Yeah, from work. But they’re not into talking about religion and all that. They just talk about sports and hunting and getting loaded, and their trucks and hot babes and stuff.”

  “Hard to jump in with your crisis of faith.”

  Abram looked at me and smiled.

  “If you want to talk about your truck, feel free,” he said.

  I smiled back and sipped my coffee. He was a good kid, smart and thoughtful, and that was never easy. Belle swung by again and asked if we wanted menus. Abram said no, he had to go.

  “It’s natural to question things,” I said.

  “Not in my world,” he said. “Not natural at all.”

  “Does your family know you’re having a hard time?”

  “They think it’s because I’m hanging out with these guys at the shop. Sinners and everything. They want me to just work on the farm, settle down. There’s a girl in Ontario, we’re supposed to be getting set up.”

  “To have a date?”

  “To get married,” Abram said.

  “Big step,” I said.

  “I know. I mean, farming’s fine, but if I do that I’ll be right here the rest of my life. The Bishop, he’d rather write sermons than run the farm, really. So he needs me to help work the place. But I want to get out and try some things. I don’t know, just experience stuff.”

  “Don’t you get that year where you go out and see the outside world?”

  “That’s Amish,” Abram said. “We don’t have Rumspringa.”

  “So for you to break loose, you really have to break loose.”

  “Exactly. Because of the Bishop being my father and all.”

  “You always call him ‘the Bishop’?”

  “It’s what he is.”

  “He’s your dad, too. And being a bishop is his job. I don’t expect my daughter to call me ‘the reporter.’ ”

  “It’s different,” Abram said. “It’s not like it’s his job. It’s more like it’s his—”

  “Identity?”

  “Right.”

  “Does he love you?”

  Abram looked taken aback, like it was a weird question.

  “Sure,” he said. And then he looked away. “But it’s like he treats me like everybody else. He’s the Bishop, so he cares about everybody.”

  “Huh.”

  My turn to look away. Belle swished by, coffeepot in hand.

  “So it’s hard to confide in him?”

  “About this? I’d have forty people praying for my soul, trying to keep me out of hell. The Bishop did a whole talk on hell last week. ‘Wide is the gate, and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction.’ ”

  “You must know all this by heart,” I said.

  “My whole life, it’s been drilled into me,” Abram said. “Thessalonians. ‘The Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven with his mighty angels, in flaming fire taking vengeance on them that know not God, and that obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.’ ”

  He grinned, gave a little snort.

  “The flaming fires. With the ‘abominable and murderers and whoremongerers and sorcerers and idolaters and all liars.’ That’s Revelation twenty-one, eighteen. And the doubters.”

  “If you believe in all that.”

  “And if I don’t,” Abram said, “that’s the worst sin of all.”

  He drank the last of his coffee, lifting the mug up so I could see the trademark on the bottom. Put the mug down and wiped his mouth again with the paper napkin. Folded the napkin and placed it neatly next to the mug, like he didn’t want any evidence that he’d been there.

  “I’m sure it’s tough,” I said. “But this is the way I look at it: I don’t think God let all these billions of people set up all of these religions so he could pull the rug out from under them. ‘Hah. You thought you were doing the right thing your whole life, but you know what? You’re wrong.’ ”

  Abram looked halfway interested, so I kept going.

  “I think we have different versions of pretty much the same thing. You do the best you can, and you’re kind and you try to help other people, and you do the good things that Jesus or Mohammed or whoever showed you. And then maybe you go to heaven. Or you don’t. But, in the meantime, you made the world a little better place.”

  He looked at me skeptically.

  “Right. Like that’s gonna fly at my house,” Abram said. “We believe, or they believe, that the Bible is the only truth. But how do you know that?”

  “That’s why they call it faith, I guess,” I said.

  Abram dug in his pockets.

  “I got it,” I said.

  He stood, said, “Thanks. Sorry to dump all this on you.”

  “It’s fine. I hope it helped.”

  “My sisters, they’d freak if they knew. They think I’m this perfect
brother. That’s the thing. If I go one way or the other, they’re gonna want to follow. Miriam, at least. She thinks I’m just great.”

  He shook his head, said, “Thanks again,” and started to walk away.

  “I’ll give you a ride back,” I said.

  “That’s okay,” Abram said, over his shoulder. “I like to walk.”

  He pushed out the door. I left money on the table, said thanks to Belle as she came and picked up the mugs. She said, “We don’t get the Mennonites in here much.”

  “Well, if you get any of them, it will be Abram,” I said.

  “The rebel of the crowd?”

  “No, he just thinks a lot.”

  I left the restaurant and walked to my truck. It was starting to rain in spattering gusts, so I figured I’d ask Abram again if he’d like a lift, at least to somewhere close to home. I looked down the road and saw him walking, but as I pulled out, a truck passed me, moving fast.

  It was a red pickup. The red pickup, the Chevy Semi had been driving. I followed, slowed as the truck pulled over. It was Semi behind the wheel, and he waited as Abram climbed in. I glanced over as I passed them, saw Semi reach over and give Abram a slap on the shoulder.

  Semi was smiling. Abram, I couldn’t tell.

  12

  Semi caught up to me a mile down the road, passed me on a curve, the truck exhaust blaring. Abram didn’t look over. As the truck went by I saw a decal on the back window, the figure of a naked woman and the words Country girls do it in the mud.

  If Abram was stepping out with Semi, it was a big step indeed.

  I mulled it over as I took the back roads, checking the mirror the whole way. The Mennonite story had the potential to be even better than I’d envisioned, if Abram would talk on the record. For twenty-first-century Mennonite youth, a culture clash . . .

  The gun story could be way better, too, if there was a real homicide for a hook. So things were looking up on the writing front. Now if Roxanne would only realize that Welt was a smug, patronizing, lecherous bastard, and Billy and Baby Fat would get locked up for ten years, all would be well with the world.

  If only . . .

  Roxanne’s car wasn’t in the driveway, so I continued on to Clair’s. He wasn’t back either, but Louis’s Jeep was parked by the barn. I swung in, saw the lights on in the shop, and went inside. The music was on, some Celtic dirge. Louis was leaning on his elbows on the workbench, reading a book. His big dog was stretched out on the floor by the woodstove. They both looked up.