The Straw Men 3-Book Thriller Collection: The Straw Men, The Lonely Dead, Blood of Angels. Michael Marshall
Africa. The space you grew up in is not like normal space. You know it so intimately, have sat and stood and lain down in its every corner. It’s where you think many things for the first time, and as a result it stretches like the time before Christmas, as you live there and wait to grow up. It holds you.
‘This is my room,’ I said, quietly and to myself. Seeing it on the video had been strange. But this was not. The place I’d come from hadn’t changed. Not everything in my life had been erased. I shut the door again on the way out, as if to keep something in.
Downstairs the woman was perched against the table in the kitchen. ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘You’ve been very kind.’
She shushed this away, and I looked around the kitchen for a moment. The appliances had been updated, but the cabinets were still the same: strong and made of good wood, they’d presumably found no reason to replace them. My father’s handiwork lived on.
It was then that I remembered the evening from long ago, eating lasagne with him. A cloth hung on an oven handle, a game of pool that didn’t work out. I opened my mouth and then shut it again.
Stepping out of the house was one of the strangest things, the act of leaving that particular inside to return to the outside where I lived now. I was almost surprised to see the big white car on the other side of the street, Bobby still sitting inside, and I noticed how much cars look like huge bugs these days.
I waved to the woman and walked down the path, not quickly, just as you normally would. By the time I was opening the car door the house was shut again behind me, shut and left behind.
Bobby was sitting reading the rental agreement for the car.
‘Jesus, these things are boring,’ he said. ‘I mean, really. They should hire some writer. Get him to spice it up a little.’
‘You’re a bad man,’ I said. ‘But thank you.’
He shoved the sheaf of papers back in the glove compartment. ‘So I guess we’ve done with Hunter’s Rock.’
‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘What’s on your mind?’
‘How about they already knew, when we were born, that they were going to do what they did. Maybe, I don’t know – maybe they thought they could only support one child or something.’
Bobby looked dubious. ‘I know,’ I admitted. ‘But either way, say they knew they were going to get rid of one of us. But they also knew that one day they were going to die, and that I might do what I’m doing now. I might come home, look around. And I might find out from the hospital that I’d been one of two.’
‘So they have you born somewhere else, and in that case all you find out is there’s a minor mystery about which particular hospital you arrived in, not that you had a twin they abandoned.’
‘That’s what I’m thinking.’
‘But how come the Agency didn’t find a problem when you joined?’
‘I was very useful to them at the time. My guess is they skimped on the background checks for expedience, and by then I’m one of the team and who cares?’
Bobby considered it. ‘Best we’ve got. But this is still weird. Your parents went to all that trouble to hide this, why then leave documentary evidence of what they did?’
‘Maybe something happened recently that meant they changed their minds about letting me know.’
I realized that the woman might be watching out of the window, so I started the car up and pulled away.
‘I’m thinking that maybe we’ve been looking in the wrong directions. There are three chunks on that video. First one shows a place I could go find. The Halls. Last one tells me something I didn’t know. Middle section shows two places. First the house, where I’ve just been, thanks to you. Nothing there. The other was a bar. I don’t recognize it. It’s nowhere I’ve ever been.’
‘So?’ We were at a junction.
‘Bear with me,’ I said, and took a left. A turn that would eventually lead us, assuming it was still there, to a bar I used to go to.
It was never a place you’d go on purpose, unless chance had made it your habitual haunt. I was expecting it to have gone one of two ways: spruced up with an eating room addition and lots of perky waitresses in red-and-white, or bulldozed and under cheap housing where people shouted a lot after dark. In fact, progress seemed to have simply ignored Lazy Ed’s altogether: unlike genteel decay, which had settled into it like damp.
The interior was empty and silent. The wood of the bar and the stools looked about as scuffed up as they always had. The pool table was still in place, along with most of the dust, some of it maybe even mine. There were a few additions here and there, high-water marks of progress. The neon MILLER sign had been replaced with one for Bud Lite, and the calendar on the wall showed young ladies closer to their natural state than it had in my day. Natural, at least, in their state of undress, if not in the shape or constitution of their breasts. Somewhere, probably hidden very well, would be a plaque warning pregnant women against drinking – though had such a person been coming here for her kicks the warning would likely be lost on her on account of her being blind or deranged. Women have higher standards. That’s why they’re a civilizing influence on young men. You have to find somewhere nice to get them drunk.
Bobby leaned back against the pool table, gazing around. ‘Same as it ever was?’
‘Like I never went away.’
I went up to the bar, feeling nervous. I used to just call out Ed’s name. That was twenty years ago, and doing it now would be like going back to school and expecting the teachers to recognize you. The last thing anyone needs is to learn that in the grand scheme of things they were always just ‘some kid’.
A man emerged from out the back, wiping his hands on a cloth that could only be making them dirtier. He raised his chin in a greeting that was cordial but of limited enthusiasm. He was about my age, maybe a little older, fat, and already going bald. I love it when I see contemporaries losing their hair. It perks me right up.
‘Hi,’ I said. ‘Was looking for Ed.’
‘Found him,’ he replied.
‘The one I had in mind would be about thirty years older.’
‘You mean Lazy. He ain’t here.’
‘You can’t be an Ed junior.’ Ed didn’t have any kids. He wasn’t even married.
‘Shit no,’ the man said, as if disquieted by the idea. ‘Just a coincidence. I’m the new owner. Have been since Ed retired.’
I tried to hide my disappointment. ‘Retired.’ I didn’t want to seem too pushy.
‘Couple years. Still,’ the guy said. ‘Saved me having to make a new sign.’
‘Whole place looks the same, actually,’ I ventured.
The man shook his head wearily. ‘Don’t I know it. When Lazy sold up he made a condition. Said he was selling a business, not his second home. Had to be left this way until he died.’
‘And you went for it?’
‘I got it very cheap. And Lazy is pretty old.’
‘How’s he going to know whether you kept the agreement?’
‘Still comes in. Most every day. You wait around, chances are you’ll see him.’ He must have seen me smile, and added: ‘One thing though. He may not be quite the way you remember him.’
I started a tab, and went over to where Bobby was sitting. We drank beer and played pool for a while. Bobby won.
We