Straw Man

by Gerry Boyle

  “Listen to me, because what I’m about to tell you is absolute fact,” Clair said. “You bother Abram, you’re dead. You bother his sister, you’re dead. You go near his farm or his family, you’re dead. Your buddies come back to Waldo County, they’re dead. And if they’re dead, you’ll be dead, too.”

  He said it without menace, as though all of it were as inevitable as the sunrise.

  “Is that clear?” he said.

  Semi nodded. Clair pulled him out of the Jeep by the shirt and let him go. He took a couple of wobbly steps, turned back, and said to me, “When can I get my phone back?”

  When I didn’t answer, he started lurching down the road toward the driveway, the bottoms of his socks brown and torn.

  On the drive back to Clair’s we were quiet, the dog taking a deep breath on the seat beside me, letting it out with a harrumph. I had Semi’s computer on my lap, his phone in my pocket. We were descending from the hills, almost to the main road, when the phone buzzed against my leg. I took it out, saw a text.

  YO WTF? U DED?

  Semi’s partners? It meant the ATF hadn’t pulled the trigger.

  I texted back:

  CLUSTR BUT OK

  I waited. The phone buzzed.

  WHO THOSE FCKN GUYS? DELTA FUCKN FORCE?

  I smiled.

  SOMETHING LIKE THAT

  A beat and a buzz and then,

  —SLICK SAYS LOAD UP N GET OUTTA HERE

  —RIGHT

  —HIS BITCH BITCHIN BIG TIME

  —SHE SHOULDA COME TO THE BONFIRE

  —GUCCI? SHE SAYIN MAINE FCKN APPALACH. AINT BOTHERN

  ME, KILR WEED @ THAT BOY SCOUT CAMP OUT.

  —WHILE IM FIGHTIN THE US ARMY

  —SUX 2 B U, SON. OUTTA HERE.

  Louis drove the speed limit, the Jeep wheeling around a bend in the tree-lined road. After five minutes Louis said, “Good to have it not be ambiguous.”

  “Pretty damn clear,” Clair said.

  “Good and evil?” I said.

  “That’s all that I want,” Louis said, the Jeep whizzing down the yellow-dappled road. “For everything to be black and freakin’ white.”

  21

  The Dump Road was clear, nobody showing. Louis pulled the Jeep up to Clair’s barn and swung it close to the door to the shop. We got out, reached back in for the firearms, and went inside. I still had the laptop and the phone, but the phone had gone still.

  Clair jacked five shells out of the shotgun, one spent, four live, and put the shotgun on the workbench. He put the live shells in a steel ammo box. Louis snapped the clip out of the AR-15 and laid both gun and clip on the bench.

  “Coffee?” Clair said. “Cup of tea? Mary would make us lunch.”

  I looked at my watch. It was 10:40. “I gotta go,” I said. “Work to do.”

  Clair nodded. Louis went to the faucet on the wall and filled a bowl for the dog. He put it down and the dog gulped like he was a camel and had just crossed a desert.

  “That last part,” I said. “Before we dropped him off.”

  Clair was putting the shotgun in a long aluminum case. Louis was wiping the AR-15 with a rag. I stood with the computer under my arm, like a Mafia accountant.

  “Telling him he’d be dead,” I said. “Did you really mean that?”

  “The only reality is in that boy’s head,” Clair said.

  “So as long as he thinks the threat is real,” I said.

  “Sometimes war is tactical,” Louis said. “Sometimes it’s psychological.”

  They put their weapons down and went to the sink to wash their hands, Clair first. He dried them on a towel that was kept on a hook, handed it to Louis.

  “Sure you don’t want lunch,” he said to me.

  “No, I’m good,” I said. “And thanks. For everything. You, too, Louis.”

  Clair sniffed. “That girl just needs somebody to stick up for her. Even though she doesn’t know it.”

  “And hopefully she never knows it,” Louis said. “Just goes on with her life. Problem solved.”

  I nodded. We all moved to the door and outside, the dog leading the way. They headed for the house, walking side by side, Clair’s silver hair contrasting with Louis’s black hair and beard. But they were the same, the way they moved, the way they carried themselves.

  They were warriors. I was a reporter. The difference had never been so clear. I headed home to write.

  The house was quiet, the breakfast mess still on the counter. I started the kettle, put cereal away, dishes in the dishwasher. Then I took a sponge and wiped the counter, then the table. I scrubbed the wood, picked flecks of dried food off with my thumbnail. And when it was clean, I wiped it dry with a towel. The water was starting to boil and I got a mug from the cupboard, dropped in a tea bag. Barry’s Irish Breakfast. The water boiled and I poured.

  I took Semi’s laptop and phone and placed them on the kitchen table. I tapped the phone on, went to the list of recent calls. Took a photo of the screen with my phone and e-mailed it to myself. Then I put both phones down.

  I opened the laptop and clicked through to the video. I dragged it to the trash. Did the same with the photos. Then I emptied the trash folder. Did the same with the phone. Then I went to Gmail, deleted the e-mail Semi had sent to himself.

  I scrolled through the photos on the phone. Trucks, guys drinking beer, girls drinking beer. A party with young women grinning and pulling tank-top straps off their shoulders. A party at a lake, everybody in shorts and bikinis, guys holding girls up over their shoulders. Nothing like the video of Miriam.

  When I hit winter, the trucks were replaced by snowmobiles. When I hit fall, there were four-wheelers, Semi with a dead deer, its tongue lolling. I thought of Semi’s open-mouthed screams when Louis started to slice.

  I sipped the tea. Went back to the laptop. The folder marked Photos was mostly trucks and motorcycles, four-wheelers and snowmobiles. Amid the pickups was a folder marked SENZIB. I looked at it. BIZNES backwards. I opened the folder, saw that it contained a single Word document, slugged SNUG.

  Semi was a lot of things. Cryptographer wasn’t one of them.

  It was a list of guns. There were twenty-two of them, mostly handguns, three rifles, four shotguns. Next to each entry was the price paid. In the third column was something less intelligible, but I assumed it had to do with drugs: OC, 50. SK, 80g. CC, and numbers like 2 and 5 and 8.

  Oxycodone? Cocaine? Ounces? SK, I didn’t know.

  The third column was all figures, hundreds, two thousand. Semi’s drug income? The profit after he sold the drugs, figured in the cost of the guns?

  This was the business he’d brought Abram into. This was the business he was protecting by blackmail. All of it pretty crude. All of it deadly. Drugs to end lives slowly. Guns to snuff lives out in an instant.

  I sat back in my chair. The laptop was chock-full of evidence, would have to go to the ATF. I’d have to invent some sort of story as to how it had come to be in my possession. The phone, too. He’d left them in my truck? But as it unraveled, would the Miriam video come out?

  I hit PRINT, enabled the wireless printer, heard the pages come whirring out. Two of them—more insurance. I reached for the phone, pulled up the list of recent calls. Most were numbers, not names, the callers showing various area codes. TracPhones. I got out a legal pad and copied the numbers for the past week.

  Then I scrolled through iPhoto again. More trucks and drunk guys. I went through the hard drive. Nothing jumped out. No folder of videos of women at parties. But he knew where to post the video of Miriam, and maybe he already had. Maybe he was a better liar than we had given him credit for.

  What was the website Abram had mentioned? Ferret something. With Xs.

  I went to the browser, typed it in. Pulled up an artist. Then an actual ferret site, saying the animals required a high-protein diet, like kitten food. I tried XFerret, got the same pages. Tried XXXferretXXX—and the website appeared.

  It was a home page of thumbnails,
naked people of all shapes and sizes. Most of them were having sex, some shot from a distance, some showing only the most private of parts, like something out of a perverted anatomy book.

  There were women with stage names—Candy von Lyck, Arianna Luste—who apparently had followings among the viewers. Men and women in every conceivable human perambulation. Clips of old porn movies. Debbie Does Dallas 2. Other titles in French, Italian, German. Fuzzy three-minute clips, filmed in somebody’s bedroom, by a swimming pool.

  I scrolled down, and it continued, an endless X-rated newsreel, explicit to the point of looking like something from a medical textbook. People posted them by the dozens every day. There were abbreviations and acronyms that meant something to people who frequented this world, lists of categories on the side of the page. Top rated. Most viewed. Most commented.

  What on earth did they say? Who were these people?

  But in the last two days there had been no Miriam video posted, that I could tell. But there was a search box.

  I hesitated, then typed. AMISH.

  The wheel turned and I felt myself holding my breath. If Miriam were on here, all of what had happened that morning would be for naught. Semi would have won. Evil would have triumphed.

  The wheel rotated and the page reloaded. Two hits: a movie, one of the porn actors named Jeremy Amish; some sick joke. Another movie, Amish Buggy Whips. I didn’t want to know.

  And that was it.

  I paused. Would Semi have used Miriam’s real name?

  I searched. More this time. A German woman. A clip called “vintage,” the women in the thumbnail with eighties bangs and leg warmers, nothing else. A movie: Molly & Miriam Frolic Down Under.

  No Mennonite Miriam from Prosperity, Maine.

  I was relieved, but it was too soon. I went back a page, wondering what Semi might have called it, if he had posted it. Amish Chick. Amish Babe. Party Babe? There would be thousands. Something to do with Maine?

  I tried Maine Party Babe. Got blurry photos of three naked women, none under forty. Back to the home page.

  And one of the photos caught my eye.

  It was a young woman, blonde like Miriam, pretty like Miriam, maybe in her late teens, like Miriam. But not Miriam. She was in what looked like a dorm room, grappling with a much bigger guy. Her expression could have been passion or it could have been terror.

  Could they do that? Post videos of sexual assaults?

  It didn’t seem possible, in this public website with hundreds of thousands of viewers. But how could you really tell the difference? How would you know that Miriam would die of humiliation if she knew what had happened? How would you know that it would be a shame from which she might never recover?

  How many of these people had been filmed as they were being damaged, sentenced to depression and ruined marriages and alcoholism and drug addiction?

  I put the cursor on the blonde woman in the dorm room, hesitated, then clicked. A video came up, a hissing audio. A television on in the background, a sportscaster talking about baseball. The guy, pale and hairless with a pendulous gut, was on top of the woman who was not Miriam. Her head was thrown back and she looked like she was being suffocated by his weight. The guy was moving. The woman’s mouth was open and she continued to stare at the ceiling. The guy moved faster and was grunting, then panting, short of breath. The woman closed her eyes and clamped her mouth shut, like she was trying to transport herself to someplace far, far away.

  And then she said, “Oh my God”—not like she was in the throes of passion, but like she couldn’t believe what was happening.

  I felt sick. Clicked off the website. Closed the laptop and sat back in my chair. It was like I’d been swept into some funhouse of perversion, filled with naked men who hated naked women. It was graphic violence without blood, although if I’d dug deeper on the website, I probably could have found that, too.

  I looked around the room. The daisies that Roxanne had picked and arranged in a vase on the kitchen table. Sophie’s drawings on the refrigerator door: princesses and ponies. A photo of Sophie on Pokey, excited and proud. How many of the young women on the website had come from homes with photos just like these? At what point did things go wrong?

  When I looked back at the laptop screen, I felt disoriented, like the porn site had shaken my foundation. The computer itself seemed different, a portal to a dark and cruel and sinister place.

  I reached out and quit the browser, like I was sealing the opening to a dangerous mine shaft. But the threat wasn’t to me. It was to a sweet young woman and her good but misguided brother, who, at that moment, was probably desperately afraid, overwhelmed by guilt, racked by self-loathing.

  That was something I could help with.

  The ATF could wait.

  It was 12:20 when I drove past the south end of the farm. The sun was high, the sky was a vivid September blue, the remaining corn was trembling in the breeze.

  Abram wasn’t in the field. I eased to the roadside under the oak trees and parked, got out binoculars, and scanned the farmyard. There were women and children around the bakery, a horse coming from the barns pulling a wagon.

  I focused.

  It was Victor driving.

  I looked closely as the rig turned and started across the farmyard.

  Wearing bonnet and long skirt, Miriam was beside him.

  The wagon was filled with vegetables, tomatoes showing. The farm stand was fifty yards south of me, same side of the road. I watched through the binoculars, and could see that Miriam looked somber, Victor, too.

  Had she found out? Could Victor keep such a secret?

  I sat and waited as the horse clopped toward me. They were fifty yards out when Victor saw my truck. He frowned, gave the reins a shake, and the horse moved to the far side of the drive. Miriam saw me, too, and looked serious and somber. Another shake and the horse picked up the pace, swung across the lawn behind the farm stand, and stopped. I got out of the truck and walked over.

  They were unloading crates of vegetables: tomatoes, zucchini, corn, cucumbers. Victor put a crate of zucchini on the ground by the farm-stand tables, looked up at me.

  “Hey, Victor,” I said.

  He nodded, turned, and started back to the wagon. Miriam came with a crate of corn, flashed a brief smile. She stepped behind the tables and started spreading the corn.

  “Hi, Miriam,” I said. “Abram around?”

  “He’s in the west field, digging postholes for a fence.”

  “Fence for what?” I said.

  “To keep the deer out,” she said.

  “Hot work at midday,” I said.

  “Yes,” Miriam said. “I’m sure he’s tired.”

  “Late night?”

  She looked away, rearranged the ears of corn. Victor came over with a crate of cukes, dropped it at her feet like a tribute. He paused, looked at me, and said, “The Bishop won’t be pleased to see you.”

  “Why is that?”

  “He thinks you’re a bad influence. On Abram and us.”

  “Because I gave you a lift last night?”

  “You’re a disruptive presence, he says,” Victor said. “As a people, we have the right to be left alone.”

  “Fair enough,” I said. “I won’t disrupt anymore. But I need to speak to Abram.”

  “The Bishop says you’re drawing Abram away from God.”

  “Whoa,” I said. “He overestimates my influence. By a lot.”

  “He says you are a nonbeliever and Abram shouldn’t be listening to you.”

  “I’ve been doing most of the listening,” I said. “And how does he know what I believe?”

  “He just knows.”

  “Must be nice to be omniscient,” I said. “Comes in handy, I bet, around us mere mortals.”

  Miriam looked at me, shook her head.

  “Don’t say that,” she said. “The Bishop just wants us not to stray.”

  “I’m sorry, Miriam,” I said. “I don’t want you to stray, either.”

/>   I looked at her, felt like I could see through her shirt. I looked back at Victor.

  “The Bishop wants us to stay with our own people,” he said. “Mixing is bad because there are people who will try to lead us away. And if you stray, even for a short time, God may not forgive you.”

  “I thought Christianity was all about forgiveness,” I said.

  “There are limits,” he said, looking at me steadily like he had some of the Bishop’s power. “ ‘God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell.’ ”

  “There’s some tough love,” I said.

  “ ‘The Lord knoweth how to deliver the godly out of temptations, and to reserve the unjust unto the day of judgment to be punished.’ ”

  “I’m sure he does. You going to see Abram?”

  “I guess I can.”

  “Would you tell him I’ll meet him on the other side of the west field? I need to talk to him. It’s important.”

  “Abram should stay on our side of the fence, I think,” Victor said.

  “I’ll talk through it,” I said. “Ten minutes.”

  I said good-bye to Miriam, and she gave me a shy smile as she laid cucumbers out in rows. I prayed that she’d never know what had happened. Victor seemed protective of her, maybe possessive, maybe even a little domineering. The junior Bishop. He and Abram. Semi and his two buddies. What was the likelihood that the secret would be kept? By the time I was in the truck, Victor was halfway to the bakery, the horse going at its steady single speed. I drove down the road a half mile, took a right, and continued on another half mile and took another right. It was a single-lane dirt road, woods on the right and fallow field on the left, then a field of cabbage, green heads with floppy outer leaves. I passed the cabbage patch lot, then came to another section of corn, uncut and eight feet high. I pulled in on the far side of the road, parked, and waited.

  It was quiet on the edge of the woods, until you listened. I heard nuthatches, blue jays, acorns dropping from the trees, knocking on limbs as they ricocheted to the ground.

  Minutes passed. Five, ten, fifteen, I thought about leaving but didn’t. Ten minutes more and I turned the key in the ignition.