The Straw Men Read Online Free PDF Page A

I REMEMBERED an evening from long ago. I would have been seventeen, back when we lived in California. It was Friday night, and I was due to meet the guys at a bar out on a back road just outside town. Lazy Ed’s was one of those shoebox-with-a-parking-lotbeer dens that look like they’ve been designed by Mormons to make drinking seem not just un-Godly but drab and sad and dead-end hopeless. Ed realized that he wasn’t in a position to be picky, and as we were never any trouble and kept feeding quarters into the pool table and jukebox—Blondie, Bowie, and good old Bruce Springsteen, back in the glory days of Molly Ringwald and Mondrian colors—our juvie custom was fine by him.
    My mother was out, gone to a crony of hers to do whatever it is women do when there aren’t any men around to clutter up the place and look bored. At six o’clock Dad and I were sitting at the big table in the kitchen, eating some lasagna she’d left in the fridge, and avoiding the salad. My mind was on other things. I have no idea what. I can no more get back inside the head of my seventeen-year-old self than I could that of a tribesman in Borneo.
    It was a while before I’d realized Dad had finished, and was watching me. I looked back at him. “What?” I said, affably enough.
    He pushed his plate back. “Going out tonight?”
    I nodded slowly, full of teenage bafflement, and got back to shoveling food into my head.
    I should have understood right away what he was asking. But I didn’t get it, in the same way I didn’t get why there remained a small pile of salad on his otherwise spotless plate. I didn’t want that green shit, so I didn’t take any. He didn’t want it either, but he took some—even though Mom wasn’t there to see. I can understand now that the pile in the bowl had to get smaller, or when she got back she’d go on about how we weren’t eating right. Simply dumping some of it straight in the trash would have seemed dishonest, whereas if it spent some time on a plate—went, in effect, via his meal—then it was okay. But back then, it seemed inexplicably stupid.
    I finished up, and found that Dad was still sitting there. This was unlike him. Usually, once a food event was over,he was all business. Get the plates in the washer. Take the garbage out. Get the coffee on. Get on to the next thing. Chop fucking chop.
    “So what are you going to do? Watch the tube?” I asked, making an effort. It felt very grown up.
    He stood and took his plate over to the side. There was a pause, and then he said: “I was wondering.”
    This didn’t sound very interesting. “Wondering what?”
    “Whether you’d play a couple of frames with an old guy.”
    I stared at his back. The tone of his inquiry was greatly at odds with his usual confidence, especially the mawkish attempt at self-deprecation. I found it hard to believe he thought I’d take the deception seriously. He wasn’t old. He jogged. He whipped younger men at tennis and golf. He was, furthermore, the last person in the world I could imagine playing pool. He just didn’t fit the type. If you drew a Venn diagram with circles for “people who looked like they played pool,” “people who looked like they might,” and “people who looked like they wouldn’t, but maybe did,” then he would have been on a different sheet of paper altogether. He was dressed that night, as he so often was, in a neatly pressed pair of sandy chinos and a fresh white linen shirt, neither of them from anywhere as mass market as The Gap. He was tall and tan with silvering hair and had the kind of bone structure that makes people want to vote for you. He looked like he should be leaning on the rail of a good-length boat off Palm Beach or Jupiter Island, talking about art. Most likely about some art he was trying to sell you. I, on the other hand, was wearing regulation black Levi’s and a black T-shirt. Both looked like they’d been used to make fine adjustments to the insides of car