Straw Man

by Gerry Boyle

  “Who said I was a good reporter?” I said.

  Louis looked at me, picked up his saw, and walked away.

  Problem was, even if Abram didn’t want to talk to me, I wanted to talk to him, story or no story. I wanted to keep him from going too far off course, so far he wouldn’t ever get back.

  So when it began to rain, the sound a growing hiss from high in the forest canopy, I knew where I was going. When the rain came harder and broke through the trees, I had a plan.

  We drove back to the first wood yard, the dog, who had waited all morning in the bed of my truck, up front now, draped across Louis’s lap. He was a hundred pounds of muscle, his brown eyes alert like a snake’s. The dog was quiet, and Louis was, too. The three of us were dirty and wet and smelled of oil and gas and exhaust. When we got to the yard, Clair rumbling up behind us, then driving hard up onto the trailer, Louis opened the door and the dog leapt out. Louis followed and I slid down, too. He transferred his stuff to Clair’s pickup, and then he came back and leaned on the side of the bed of my truck. The dog went to the wheel of the trailer and peed.

  “You have a good day, McMorrow,” Louis said, and I felt like we’d gotten closer somehow, with our talk of good and evil.

  “You, too, Louis,” I said.

  “I’ll be bunking in at Clair’s for a bit, doing some work up here,” he said.

  “Good. Then I’ll see you.”

  He nodded, like he was agreeing with himself, and then he said, “This Mennonite kid.”

  “Abram,” I said.

  “I’d like to meet him,” Louis said. “I think me and him, we may not be wrestling in the same class, but we’re in the same sort of fight.”

  I looked at him, waited, and hoped for more.

  “Trying to figure out who the good guys are, wondering if we’re one of them. On the right team, you know what I mean? You think you have it all figured out and then you start to get these doubts creeping in. And you know that if the thing starts to unravel, all of it comes apart. And then where are you? I mean, what’s left, if you can’t believe you’re doing the right thing?”

  “Sure,” I said, getting it. “You and Abram, I think you’d have a lot to talk about.”

  Same quandary, one guy going into battle unarmed, the other armed to the teeth.

  15

  The horses were pulling some sort of mowing bar, cutting six-foot swaths of corn. The team was at the far end of the field, and I could see the white-shirted figure at the reins. I parked under the shade of a big roadside oak and shut off the motor, the rain pattering on the truck roof. The horses were still headed away from me, not yet at the far end of the cornfield. I settled back into the seat to wait.

  As I watched, the team came to a halt. I saw the driver, presumably Abram, slip down from his seat and bend over the machinery. I reached to the glove box and fished out a pair of binoculars, rolled down my window, raised them, and focused.

  It was Abram. He was yanking on something on the bar, maybe freeing some sort of jam, the wet cornstalks bound up. I wondered if he’d be calling it quits.

  “Come on, Abram,” I said to myself. “Come on down this way.”

  And I felt something at my left shoulder. A puff of air, a whiff of tobacco.

  I turned. A big man with a dark ruff of a beard was staring at me. He was dressed like Abram. His expression was stern and foreboding.

  “You must be the Bishop,” I said.

  “You must be the reporter,” he said. “We need to talk.”

  I opened the door and slid out and stood, and he still had three inches on me. His eyes were black-brown and intense. His chest was big under the white shirt, and his muscled arms were farmer-tan against his white shirt.

  I held out my hand. He kept his hands behind his back.

  “I’ve met your son,” I said. “We had coffee at the—”

  “I know you did,” the Bishop said. “I ask that you not do that again.”

  His accent the same, Canadian, a hint of German thrown in.

  “It was off the record, if that’s—”

  “There is nothing here for you. There is no story for your newspaper. We don’t seek attention. We just want to be left alone.”

  I smiled, mollifyingly, I hoped.

  “Oh, I understand. The story I was thinking of wasn’t as much about you as it was about your reception here. How this old-fashioned way of living and farming has reinvigorated the community. How you and your Mennonite friends and relatives are bringing back farmland that had been fallow for decades. How—”

  “No one in our community will talk to you.”

  “I understand, Bishop, but this is a free country. They can decline, but you can’t prevent me from asking—”

  “And you are forbidden from talking to Abram.”

  I hesitated. His expression hadn’t changed, and his position, arms behind his back like a bodyguard, hadn’t either.

  “I’m not part of your church, sir,” I said.

  “Stay away from my son.”

  This time it was an order, and I wondered if his hands were clenched behind his back to keep from breaking a Mennonite edict against physical violence. I held my hands out to calm him.

  “I understand what you’re saying, but you don’t have authority over me. And I like your son. He’s a good guy. I mean, I don’t want to bother him. We were just—”

  “I’m speaking to you as his father.”

  “I see that.”

  “He isn’t himself,” the Bishop said. “I think there are bad influences, wicked influences, that are trying to lure him away from God’s path. It’s always the way. It’s a narrow path we walk.”

  “Well, that’s not me, just so you know. I don’t want to lure Abram away from anything. We were just having a conversation.”

  “He told me you told him about New York.”

  “Yeah. I lived there for a long time. I grew up there. He was asking; your daughter Miriam, she was asking, too. They were just curious.”

  The hands came out from behind his back, the right clenched into a fist. He put it in front of my face and shook it.

  “You are forbidden to talk to my daughter.”

  “Okay, okay,” I said. “Easy. I spoke to her once, in a group of young people. Right here on the edge of the field. I was just curious about the community here, and they were curious about me.”

  “You’re Jack McMorrow,” the Bishop said.

  “That’s right.”

  “I’ve been told that you’re a violent person.”

  I looked at him.

  “Well, it’s all relative, I guess. But I don’t consider myself—”

  “Do you know the way to hell, Mr. McMorrow?”

  “Uh, doing very bad things?”

  “ ‘Wide is the gate, and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat,’ ” the Bishop said.

  “I’m sure,” I said. “No lack of bad people in the world. Sometimes it seems like evil is the rule, not the—”

  “The wicked shall be turned into hell, and all the nations that forget God. The fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers and whore-mongerers and sorcerers and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone.”

  His eyes were burning, too, his voice cracking with emotion.

  “I try to tell the truth,” I said.

  “I do not want my son to go to hell,” the Bishop bellowed. “I will not let him be led astray.”

  A big finger flicked out of the fist like a switchblade and pointed at my nose. “Stay away from my son. Stay away from my family. Stay away from our farm. Stay away from this community.”

  I reached out and took his wrist and pushed the fist away from my face. His tendons flexed and I could feel his arm start to cock, but then he relaxed and let his arm fall to his side.

  The other cheek turning.

  I started to form the words that would warn the Bisho
p about the likes of Semi and Billy, but I caught myself.

  “How old is Abram?” I said.

  “He’s nineteen.”

  “And his sister? Miriam?”

  “She’s eighteen.”

  “Then they’re legal adults, adults in most other ways. If you’ve done your job, then you shouldn’t have anything to worry about.”

  “Don’t tell me how to do my job,” the Bishop said. “The Lord tells me how to do my job.”

  There was a pause, no logical rejoinder to make to that. I heard the clinking of chains and turned to see the horses and Abram starting back toward us, the cutter bar clanking and the corn falling flat.

  “They’ve been told not to speak with you,” the Bishop said. “There is no story here. Go.”

  He pointed to the horizon, like I was being cast out of the Garden of Eden. I half turned back toward the truck, then stopped and turned back. His arm was still raised, as if in some sort of trembling salute.

  “With all due respect, sir, for your faith and your position,” I said, “this is a public road, and I can stay here all day if I choose to. And any story I’d write? That’s the least of your problems.”

  I got back in the truck, and with a last glance at Abram approaching with the horses, I started the motor and drove off. As I rattled down the road, I thought, And the least of mine.

  It was a short drive back down to the main road, black clouds rolling over the treetops to the east. As I zigzagged my way south, I glanced at the shrouded driveways that burrowed into the woods: a rusty chain strung between trees, a sign that said KEEP OUT!!!, a faded yellow school bus, tires flat and saplings grown up all around it. A leaf-littered pickup blocking a road, its windshield riddled with bullet holes.

  Who were these people, hidden away in the Maine woods? Idolaters and fornicators? Sorcerers and whoremongerers? How did he wall himself off? How did the Bishop expect to keep his community—and his children—pure?

  I guess you just prayed.

  It was five miles to the Belle View. Time for a cup of tea and, with the Mennonite story mired, some serious regrouping. I followed an old couple in an old pickup, their two white heads bobbing on the bumps. They drove below the speed limit, no rush at their age, and pulled into the restaurant lot in front of me. They parked and I pulled in next to them, watched as the old guy got out and hobbled around and opened his wife’s door.

  Chivalry isn’t totally dead, I thought, but the wife said, “You keep saying you’re gonna fix that door.”

  I watched them in the mirror as they crossed the lot to the restaurant. He held the door and she toddled through. I smiled, got out, was at the end of my truck when the big Dodge flatbed pulled in.

  Baby Fat at the wheel. Billy in the middle. Beefy on the far side. The truck slid to a halt. Baby Fat smiled and waved for me to cross. I hesitated, then started, and he floored the accelerator, then the brakes again, stopping six inches from my right hip.

  “You done?” I said.

  They were out of the truck on both sides, grinning as they approached me. I turned and stood my ground. They stopped just short of me, Billy saying, “Just want to clear the air.”

  He was red-faced and unshaven, the bottle scar showing on his neck, tobacco stains on his teeth and the corner of his mouth. Baby Fat had his chin thrust out, his camo hat on backwards, a roll of flab circling his waist. Beefy was a step back, closer to the truck.

  He had a chew going, too, and he spat at my feet.

  “Cancer of the mouth,” I said. “Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of guys.”

  “Shit, McMorrow,” Billy said. “Just when we try to make up, you go getting all ornery.”

  I didn’t answer, the three of us facing each other like it was the O.K. Corral.

  “So, nothing to say?” Beefy said.

  I shook my head.

  “Think you’re a real tough guy, picking on a guy with a busted arm,” Billy said. “Buncha witnesses to take your side.”

  I tried to stay calm, but the words welled up and out.

  “Takes a real tough guy to follow a woman around. You have something to say to me, just say it. Right now. You want to go, we can do that, too. Right here. Right now.”

  I looked at Billy, then at Baby Fat, then back at Beefy. Their grins were sagging. Baby Fat took a shuffling half step toward me and turned, ready to swing. “You sorry son of a—”

  Billy reached out with his good arm.

  “I see what you’re doing, reporter boy,” he said. “Get him to throw the first punch, old farts watching out the window. Get us locked up and you go on your pussy-ass way.”

  He leered.

  “No worries, McMorrow. We ain’t here to beat the shit outta you.”

  He pulled Baby Fat back and they both moved past Beefy toward their truck.

  “We was just gonna talk, you know?”

  They were moving away now, by the truck doors. They got in, slammed the doors shut. I moved toward my truck, the Glock under the seat. Baby Fat revved the motor and spun the tires, stopped beside me. Billy leaned over Baby Fat toward the driver’s window, spat on the ground at my feet.

  “What I was gonna say, reporter boy, is you got one sweet old lady. Pretty as a picture, and that ass? That ass is to freakin’ die for.”

  “You come near her again, I’ll blow your head off,” I said.

  Billy gave a snort, wiped spittle from his chin with his forearm.

  “There you go again. Just when I try to pay you a compliment, you go making threats.”

  “Not a threat. A fact,” I said.

  Beefy smiled now, showing stained teeth, dark grit in his gums. “She don’t want to be looked at, McMorrow, she oughta close the curtains,” he said.

  “Or maybe she likes being looked at,” Billy said. “Lotta chicks get off on it. Hey, maybe that goat farmer, he likes looking at her, too. Maybe does more than look.”

  Billy fell back into the truck as Baby Fat hit the throttle. Gravel sprayed and the exhaust blared. And then the truck slid to a halt again. Billy called, “We’re coming, reporter boy. We’re coming for you. We bang your old lady, that’s fucking gravy.”

  The truck lurched forward and peeled out of the parking lot, headed east.

  I sat in the booth and sipped my tea. Put pen to notebook paper but wrote nothing. Belle came over and asked me if I was okay. I said I was, but not much more.

  “My sister-in-law’s niece, I talked to her,” she said. “She said she can’t talk to you. If Billy found out, he’d come and kill her.”

  She paused, bent toward me, wiping the edge of my table with a cloth.

  “She said he’s a psychopath and a predator. A sex predator. She thinks he molested their babysitter, but she won’t talk either.”

  “Why is somebody like that even loose?” I said.

  Belle tucked the cloth in the back of her jeans. “Because nobody’s taken him out,” she said.

  16

  The first gun seller was a place called Frankie’s Gun Traders, in the town of Dixville, fifteen miles north. I drove fast, porpoising over the Dixville Hills. There were mist-covered mountains rising on the distant horizon, but I saw little of the view, my hands clenching the wheel, eyes on the road. My neck was stiff as I craned for the landmarks the guy had described: a fieldstone signpost, a chicken barn turned into apartments, an abandoned church with no steeple.

  And then I turned. Drove the prescribed half mile down a side road. Saw the sign and then the shop, a converted garage appended to a ranch house in the middle of a field.

  The guy’s name was Darrell, not Frankie. He was neatly bearded, my age, brisk. He was making money on volume, selling Czech knockoffs. New semiautomatic pistols in three calibers: .380, .40, and .45. The guns ranged in price from $155 to $210. He lined up all three on the counter for me to inspect. “What you got here is pretty much protection guns,” he said. “Does the same job as a Glock but for hundreds less.”

  The guns looked lethal but chea
p, like they might kill somebody or they might just blow up in your hand. I pulled out my wallet and some of Outland’s cash, and bought a .45 and a box of ammunition. He asked for my driver’s license and I laid it on the counter. My name went on the bottom of a very long list of names.

  When he turned to put the gun in a box, I ran quickly down the list.

  “What happens if you don’t have an ID?” I said.

  “No deal,” Darrell said. “Maine license or carry permit.”

  “That happen very often?”

  “Once in a while. It’s in the ad, but they figure they’ll sweet-talk me. I tell ’em to take their money and hit the road.”

  And with that, our business was done.

  It was 12:55. The next stop was another ten miles northwest: Detroit, which the locals pronounced DEE-troit, to differentiate it from its beleaguered namesake. Detroit, Maine, while not exactly downtrodden, wasn’t in its prime, either. The town’s heyday was when small farms filled the countryside, or maybe when egg farmers had built chicken barns. The chickens were gone, most of the farms, too, pastures grown up with poplar. But commerce went on, in this case being transacted by a guy named Sam, who, according to the ad, was selling a Marlin .308 caliber rifle with a Bushnell scope, and a Smith & Wesson nine-millimeter handgun with two holsters and four seventeen-round magazines.

  The rifle was sold. The handgun was still available.

  Sam was older, maybe seventy, thinning white hair tied in a ponytail, the whole thing tied back by a Sylvester Stallone–style headband. He had a bull’s-eye tattoo on his left forearm, a military insignia—an eagle clutching a rifle in its talons—on the right. His expression was vigilant, eyes narrowed.

  “You in the service?” I said.

  “Yeah, but the fighting ended before I could get over to ’Nam.”

  “Too bad.”

  “I was ready,” Sam said.

  “I’m sure.”

  “Didn’t know I’d end up fighting for my rights back home the rest of my life.”

  “How’s that?”