Above the measured snap of gunfire and the coughs and screams of the dying, the distant sound of approaching sirens became evident. The gunmen fired for perhaps another twenty seconds, clearing a small pocket by the counter where the mother and her girls had found temporary respite. Then they stopped.
They looked around the room, faces betraying no reaction to what they'd done. The younger of the two — the boy called Billy — took a step back, and shut his eyes. The other man shot him point-blank in the face. While Billy's body still languidly spasmed on the floor, the man squatted to wash his hands in the blood. He stood again to write something on the glass door, working calmly, in big dripping letters, then surveyed the room once more, calmly, at his ease. He didn't even glance at the cop cars hurtling up Main, far too late to influence an event that would finally put Palmerston back on the map.
Then, when he was good and ready, the man jumped through the shattered window behind the Campbells' bodies and disappeared: escaping, it was believed, along the track of the old railroad line. He was never apprehended. No one was ever able to give a clear description of his face, and in time it was as if he slipped out of the event and into shadow. The blame ended up being wholly Billy's: a young boy who had only been doing what he was told, by a man he'd thought was a new friend.
When he heard the sound of the police cars pulling up outside, Pete Harris tried to sit up, tried to gather the strength to push the Campbells' bodies off. He failed, but succeeded in raising his head far enough to see what had been written in blood on the doors.
The letters had dripped, and his eyesight was clouded by a white light in his head, but the words were clear enough. They said 'The Straw Men.' Eleven years passed.
Part 1
Of the hill, not on the hill… Frank Lloyd Wright, on the architecture of Taliesin
1
The funeral was a nice affair, in that it was well-attended and people dressed appropriately and nobody stood up at any point and said 'You realize this means they're dead.' It was held in a church on the edge of town. I had no idea what denomination it might be, still less why it should have been stipulated in the instructions left with Harold Davids. So far as I'd known, my parents had no religious views save a kind of amiable atheism and the unspoken belief that if God did exist he probably drove a nice car, most likely of American manufacture.
Organization for the event had been efficiently undertaken by Davids's office, leaving me with little to do except wait to turn up. I spent most of the two days in the lounge of the Best Western. I knew I should go up to the house, but I couldn't face it. I read most of a bad novel and leafed through a large number of hotel-style magazines, without learning anything except that you can pay an awful lot of money for a watch. Early each morning I left the hotel, intending to walk along the main street, but got no further than the parking lot. I knew what was on offer along the shopping drag of Dyersburg, Montana, and I was in the market for neither ski gear nor 'art'. I ate in the hotel restaurant in the evenings, had room-service sandwiches delivered to the bar at lunch. All meals were accompanied by fries whose texture suggested that a number of industrial processes had intervened between the soil and my plate. It was impossible not to have fries. I discussed the matter on two occasions with the waitresses, but relented in the face of mounting panic in their eyes.
After the preacher had explained to everyone why death was not the complete downer it might at first appear, we filed out of the church. I was sorry to leave. It had felt safe in there. Outside it was very cold, and the air was crisp and silent. Behind the graveyard rose the foothills of the Gallatin range, the peaks in the distance muted, as if painted on glass. Two side-by-side plots had been prepared. There were about fifteen people on hand to witness the burial. Davids was there, and someone who appeared to be his assistant. Mary stood close to me, white hair strictly pulled back in a bun, her lined face battered smooth with the cold. A couple of the others I thought I vaguely recognized.
More words were said by the priest, comforting lies in which to swaddle these events. Possibly they made a difference to some of the mourners. I could barely hear them, concentrating as I was on stopping my head from exploding. Then a couple of men — whose job it was, who did this kind of thing every week — efficiently lowered the coffins into the ground. Ropes were gently fed through their hands, and the coffins came to measured rest six feet below the flat plain on which the living still stood. A few more sentences of balm were offered, but muttered quickly now — as if the church recognized that the time to make its pitch was running out. You can't put people in wooden boxes under the ground without the audience realizing that something very amiss is afoot.
A final quiet pronouncement, and that was that. It was done. Nothing would ever happen to Donald and Beth Hopkins again. Nothing that bore thinking about, at least.
Some of the mourners lingered for a moment, aimless now. Then I was alone. I stood there as two people. One whose throat was locked into fiery stone, and who could not imagine ever moving again; another who was aware of his iconic stature beside the graves, and also that, a little distance away, people were driving past in cars and listening to the Dixie Chicks and worrying vaguely about money.
Both sides of me found the other ridiculous. I knew that I couldn't stand there for ever. They wouldn't expect me to. It would make no sense, would change nothing, and it really was very cold. When I finally looked up I saw Mary was also still present, standing only a few feet away. Her eyes were dry, harsh with a knowledge that such a fate would be hers before very long and that it was neither a laughing nor a crying matter. I pursed my lips, and she reached out and laid her hand on my arm. Neither of us said anything for a while.
When she'd called me, three days before, I had been sitting on the deck of a nice, small hotel on De la Vina in Santa Barbara. I was temporarily unemployed, or unemployed again, and using my scant savings on an undeserved vacation. I was sitting with a good bottle of local merlot in front of me, and efficiently making it go away. It wasn't the first of the evening, and so when my cellular rang I was inclined to let the message service pick it up. But when I glanced at the phone I saw who the caller was.
I hit the TALK button. 'Hey,' I said.
'Ward,' she replied. And then nothing.
Finally I heard a sound down the line. The noise was soft, glutinous. 'Mary?' I asked quickly. 'Are
you okay?'
'Oh, Ward,' she said, her voice sounding cracked and very old. I sat up straight in my seat then, in the vain hope that faux readiness, last-minute rigour, would somehow limit the weight with which this hammer
was going to fall.
'What is it?'
'Ward, you'd better come here.'
In the end I got her to tell me. A car crash in the centre of Dyersburg. Both dead on arrival.
I'd known immediately it would be something like that, I suppose. If it hadn't involved both of them then it wouldn't be Mary on the phone. But even now, as I stood with her in the graveyard looking down upon their coffins, I was unable to truly understand a sentence framing their death with its full weight. I also could not now return the call that my mother had left on my machine, a week before. I just hadn't gotten round to it. I hadn't expected them to be erased from the surface of the earth without warning, and put below it, down where they couldn't hear me.
Abruptly I realized that I didn't want to be standing near their bodies any more. I took a step back from the graves. Mary dug in the pocket of her coat and brought out something attached to a small cardboard label. A set of keys.
'I put out the trash this morning,' she said, 'and took a few things out of the refrigerator. Milk and such. Don't want them smelling it up. Everything else I just left.'