The Straw Men Read Online Free PDF

engines. They probably smelled that way, too. Dad would have smelled the way he always did, which I wasn’t aware of then but can summon up now as clearlyas if he was standing behind me: a dry, clean, correct smell, like neatly stacked firewood.
    “You want to come play pool?” I asked, checking that I hadn’t lost my mind.
    He shrugged. “Your mother’s out. There’s nothing on the box.”
    “You got nothing salted away on tape?” This was inconceivable. Dad had a relationship with the VCR like some fathers had with a favored old hound, and racks of neatly labeled tapes on the shelves in his study. I’d do exactly the same now, of course, if I lived anywhere in particular. I’d stamp them with bar codes if I had the time. But back then it was the thing about him that most strongly put me in mind of fascist police states.
    He didn’t answer. I cleared the scraps off my own plate, thoughtlessly making a good job of it because I was at an age when showing my love for my mother was difficult, and ensuring her precious dishwasher didn’t get clogged with shit was something I could do without anyone realizing I was doing it, including myself. I didn’t want Dad to come out to the bar. It was that simple. I had a routine for going out. I enjoyed the drive. It was me time. Plus the guys were going to find it weird. It was weird, for fuck’s sake. My friend Dave would likely be stoned out of his gourd when he arrived, and might freak out there and then if he saw me standing with a representative of all that was authoritarian and straight-backed and wrinkly.
    I looked across at him, wondering how to put this. The plates were stowed. The remaining salad was back in the fridge. He’d wiped the counter down. If a team of forensic scientists happened to swoop midevening and tried to find evidence of any food-eating activity, they’d be right out of luck. It annoyed the hell out of me. But when he folded the cloth and looped it over the handle on the oven, I had my first ever intimation of what I would feel in earnest, nearly twenty years later, on the day I sat wet-faced in his chair inan empty house in Dyersburg. A realization that his presence was not unavoidable or a given; that one day there would be too much salad in the bowl and cloths that remained unfolded.
    “Yeah, whatever,” I said.
    I quickly started to freak about how the other guys were going to react, and hustled us out of the house forty minutes early. I figured this might give us as much as an hour before we had to deal with anyone else, as the other guys were always late.
    We drove out to Ed’s, Dad sitting in the passenger seat and not saying much. When I drew up outside the bar he peered out the windshield. “This is where you go?”
    I said it was, a little defensively. He grunted. On the way across the lot it occurred to me that turning up with my dad was going to bring into focus any doubts Ed might be entertaining about my age, but it was too late to turn back. It wasn’t like we looked very similar. Maybe he’d think Dad was some older guy I knew. Like a senator, or something.
    Inside was nearly empty. A couple of old farts I didn’t know were hunkered down over a table in the corner. The place never really stuttered into life until late, and it was a precarious form of vitality, the kind that two consecutive bad choices on the jukebox could kill stone dead. As we stood at the counter waiting for Ed to make his own good time out of the back, Dad leaned back against the bar and looked around. There wasn’t a great deal to see. Battered stools, venerable dust, a pool table, interior twilight and neon. I didn’t want him to like it. Ed came out eventually, grinned when he saw me. Usually I’d drink my first beer sitting gassing with him, and probably he was anticipating this was going to happen tonight.
    But then he caught sight of Dad, and stopped. Not like he’d run into a wall or anything, but he hesitated, and his smile faded, to be