The Straw Men by Michael Marshall

had a breadth of shoulder that could accommodate the weight and look powerful rather than fat. Much more and he could have been heading for out-of-shape, but for the time being he merely looked like someone you’d be careful not to bang into if he was heading across the floor carrying a tray of beers. I could tell that the weight must have been a fairly recent acquisition, however, and that he wasn’t comfortable with it. Every nowand then he rolled his shoulders back, ostensibly out of a desire to remove kinks from leaning down to rocket balls around the table. But also, I suspected, to make sure his shoulders were held square. Later he’d discovered jogging, and the gym, and never looked this way again. But on the tape of that evening I saw him do something: It was trivial, and innocuous, but as I sat in the hotel room in Dyersburg and watched it a small sound escaped from my mouth, like I’d been gently punched in the stomach.
    As he lit a cigarette—and I’d never known that he’d once smoked—he absently lifted the patch of T-shirt lying over his midriff, and let it fall again—so it hung a little better over what was only a pretty small belly. I rewound, played it again. And then again, leaning forward, squinting against the grain in the background of the video. The movement was unmistakable. I’ve done it myself. In all the time I knew my father, I don’t think I ever saw him do something that naked, a thing so explicable and personal. It was the act of a man who was aware of his body, and a perceived flaw in it, even in the midst of a rocking evening. It was an adjustment he’d made before, but which was not yet habitual enough to be a tic. Even more than the T-shirt itself, the pitchers of beer and the vibrant good cheer, my mother’s dancing and the fact that my father could evidently once wield a pool cue with the best of them, that little movement made it inconceivable that they were now dead.
    The table was finally set up for play again, and my father got up and prepared to break, squaring up like the cue ball was going to receive a whack it’d remember the rest of its spherical little life. The scene stopped abruptly right at that moment, as if a reel of film had run out.
    Before I could hit pause again, it had cut directly to something else.
    A different interior. A house. A living room. Dark, lit with candles. The picture quality was murky, the film stocknot coping well with the low light. Music on quietly in the background, and this time I recognized it as coming from the soundtrack to Hair . A herd of wine bottles stood on the floor in varying states of emptiness, and there were several overflowing ashtrays.
    My mother was half-reclining on a low couch, singing along, singing an early morning singing song. The bear-guy’s head was more or less on her lap, and he was rolling a joint on his chest.
    “Put the sodomy one on again,” he slurred. “Put it on.”
    The camera panned smoothly to the side, showing another man lying facedown on the ground. The blonde girl was sitting behind him, tending a neat row of candles in saucers that had been laid on the guy’s back. He had evidently been comatose long enough to count as furniture, and my guess was he was the man who’d been operating the camera in the bar. The girl was inclining slowly and unpredictably from the waist, staying upright by pure force of will. Now there was less going on around her, it was obvious she was older than she had at first appeared. Not in her teens, but late twenties, maybe even thirty—and a little old to be part of this scene. I realized that if I was watching the very early ’70s, then my parents had to be around the same age.
    Which meant that I’d already been born.
    “Put it on,” the bear insisted, and the camera jerked back to him, swinging in close to his face. “Put it on.”
    “No,” said a voice very close to the microphone, laughing, confirming that it was now my father who was running the camera.