Moving Day: A Thriller

by Jonathan Stone

  Even after all these years, he finds he still has the extra perspective, the extra appreciation, of a foreigner in America. Yet he also feels the homeland pride, the sense of custody and connection, of being an American. A European American, an American European: he is having it both ways or inhabits some no-man’s-land in between.

  And these sun-soaked, shimmering vistas. These picturesque farmhouses. This epic sky. Does it all shimmer like this because it is in some sense more real, more meaningful to him than to the next elderly traveler—who takes it for granted, who has known only this? Or does it shimmer this way because it is unreal—a fantasy, a borrowed view, a vision through glass that can be snatched away? Does his fractured past, a world and lifetime away, render this landscape more real? Or less? It fascinates him that he cannot really know.

  West of Chicago, they switch their style: they begin to stay in motels and bed-and-breakfasts. After the Four Seasons, the motels and B and Bs seem not so much a comedown as an adventure. To get the flavor, the whiff, of authentic America. (Though Rose doesn’t ask explicitly, she also senses it is now time to be less recognizable. Now time to blend in, in order to watch.)

  He had expected to experience immensity, and yet, with the hours ticking by, there’s an increasing sense of smallness. A manageability. Maybe it’s the big, insulating Mercedes. Maybe it’s the focused insistence of the little, black blinking device. The hours tick by, the landscape remains unchanged. But this now makes it seem small and knowable to him, rather than the reverse. Perhaps it’s his age: the huge clumps of time folding in on themselves, time that moved so slowly as a child, streaming along unrecognizably now. Perhaps it’s his hidden purpose, which holds him focused, unopen. Perhaps it’s the sum of his past experience, which leaves no room for new experience.

  The pretense of a tour has fast evaporated. “We should be seeing caves. Looking at statues,” Rose says with forced jolliness. “We should be stopping at sights with postcard stands. We should be holding our guide books up to shield our eyes in the sun. Turning up our noses at cheap souvenirs, then buying them at the last second,” she says, accepting that it will never happen, that this is a different cross-country trip they’re making, but half meaning it, too. Half crying out for normalcy, for the foolish things, the standard activities and memories of older American couples.

  He thinks about the device’s chancy battery connection, the extra draw on the watch’s power. The longer the device must deliver its signal, the more time there is for something to go wrong. It should be fine, according to its printed instructions, according to Itzhak’s somber nods, but Peke can’t be sure, and so it remains a small nodus of anxiety, tapping at him, keeping him moving.

  Outside of Huron, South Dakota, in the light of early evening, they see a neon sign for the Stanley Motel, and Rose is gleefully insistent. The sharply pebbled driveway announces their arrival like the roll of a snare drum.

  The motel’s whitewashed brick facade, its industrial carpeting over cement flooring, are sadly immaculate, as if this stark cleanliness is the only goal and purpose of its managers’ lives. Low, squat, thick, and solid, the building seems explicitly constructed to withstand the climate’s severity, and to have no aesthetic consideration beyond that. In the fading daylight, they see how the land stretches flat and featureless behind the motel—the sky and horizon their focal points by default, by the absence of any other. A squat, clean, spare motel, no frills and no nonsense: the spiritual descendant of the sod houses that once dotted the prairie, standing alone against the elements.

  They eat at the diner across the street, choose meat loaf and three-bean salad delivered by a waitress close to three hundred pounds, whose weariness is as abundant as she is. Yet she speaks with a high-pitched cheerfulness so unlikely from within that weary mass, her voice seems eerie and disembodied. Peke carefully calculates and recalculates the tip to be appropriately generous but not outrageous, to create satisfaction but not insult.

  “At least Mount Rushmore,” Rose says from her side of the lumpy queen-size bed, staring at the cottage-cheese ceiling.

  “It’ll be too far to the south of us,” Peke tells her.

  “We’re crossing South Dakota, and we’re not going to see Rushmore?” she says, hoping to make it sound ludicrous.

  “Graven images. It’s against my religion,” he jokes. “Big stone heads . . . like the self-commemorations of pharaohs.”

  “Valuing the individual,” she counters—challenging both his doubtful point and his jokey spirit. “The primacy of the individual.”

  “Sure. Standing in a line of hundreds at the park entrance for an hour. The primacy of the individual.”

  “Where’s your democratic spirit? Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt.” As if the names alone are argument enough.

  “Making gods of public servants? Hardly the democratic spirit. Their heads carved sixty feet high, set five hundred feet up—you think that’s the legacy they wanted? Perfect for Stalin or Mao. Which should tell you what these fellows would have thought of it.” He feels, beneath his argument, something more significant pawing at him. There is a kind of obscenity to this glorification of the individual juxtaposed against the numberless and nameless, the only ones who would remember them lying alongside them.

  “The Avenue of Flags. Fifty-six states and territories. The Presidential Trail. The Shrine of Democracy.” She is joking now, tossing out terms from her handful of lobby brochures. She knows she has lost. She never expected to win. “Stanley Peke, are you an American, or aren’t you?”

  They both know it is a question larger than her joke. He is. He isn’t. He is a firm believer. He kisses the soil, weeps in gratitude. And yet he doubts it all. Looks on his adopted land with narrow-eyed suspicion. Watches closely for the next human disaster. Inevitable as a storm.

  He hears, beneath their exchange, their annoyance with each other. He knows her frustration with his inflexibility and willfulness. He feels his irritation at her teasing, her disrespectful, mocking challenge. They both hear attributes they know will not change in their lifetimes, and perhaps this gives them special resonance. At their age, the argument is never the argument. There is always a meaning beneath it. A half century into marriage, this much they understand. They just don’t know exactly what the meaning is.

  Yes, Rose thinks, lying there in the motel room’s preternatural quiet and dark. Yes, godlike. Stone, inflexible, immutable. Mutely heroic. Unknowable and inalterable . . . blindly admired and out of reach. And a mountainside of frustration. Frustration that rises into the sky. She doesn’t need the Rushmore visit, she realizes. She has Stanley.

  Her doubts are no greater, no less, her questions no more or less answered, than when she stood at their wedding in a Manhattan hotel lobby almost fifty years ago. It was an assertively nondenominational event: a justice of the peace; a two-minute ceremony. And yet: he had the place swimming in flowers. Towering arrangements. Wrapping the columns. Overflowing from the window boxes. Garlanding the banisters and balustrades. He’d located a swing band in the seediest bowels of downtown, whose black female vocalist was a phenomenon. The night rode a crest of their friends’ high spirits undimmed and undiminished into morning. And the point was clear. Creating their own life. Making their own choices. Her proud, wealthy, fifth-generation Congregationalist parents stood demurely by, masking their disappointment behind brave smiles. It was a spectacular, high-spirited night, but more than that, it was fully, inarguably, inviolately theirs. And who was this man standing next to her in the lobby, smiling warmly and securely on the dais, this man swinging her on the dance floor, laughing helplessly? This handsome man, self-assured, powerful, infinitely patient, unpredictably brusque? Who was he, exactly? But she understood, then and there, even as the justice of the peace spoke: He was who he would be. He was the future—his, hers, theirs. And he was as clearly committed to that future as to her. So she accepted not knowing, experienced her questions as part of an energy: swirling and spinning
like the newly married couple on the dance floor.

  Now she was not so blithe. Not so sure. A half century had inevitably provided, if not answers, exactly, then a sense of answers, circuitous and indirect. Which made the remaining questions feel starker and the questioner more exposed.

  Driving west through South Dakota, amid the startling sparseness, the Mercedes is becoming more and more conspicuous, claiming too much attention. For significant stretches, it is the only car to be seen, which makes it more noticeable than Peke would like. Peke sees a farmer point to it from his dusty pickup.

  Selling it, though, will be conspicuous, too. Out here, its own provenance might follow it—that old man with the accent in the expensive Mercedes. He is tempted to simply leave it in the lot of a bed-and-breakfast one morning—check out at the front desk, come out into the sunshine, call a cab to take them to a car dealership, simply pretend the Mercedes isn’t there. But that would attract undue attention, too: a man just left his Mercedes one morning.

  West of Pierre, they drive along the strip of car dealerships, flags and banners waving in the Western breeze in a proud and antic display of local spirit, standing firm against the windswept barren plains.

  Peke pulls into a Ford dealership, parks the Mercedes right at the door. He and Rose enter politely, respectfully, as if into the hushed foyer of a funeral home.

  “It’s starting to give me trouble,” he explains to the salesman. “I’m seventy-two. I’m too old for car trouble. I want to drive out of here in a Ford.” There’s an American sentiment for you, Rose, he thinks with some amusement. Is that American enough for you?

  “You want to go from that Mercedes to a Ford?” A prairie frankness. The salesman doesn’t bother to hide his confusion. His bland startlement and obvious disapproval.

  “A used Ford,” adds Peke, even less comprehensibly. The salesman nods, not knowing what else to do. “A used but reliable Taurus, for example,” Peke explains. “Except we don’t like the new body style.” Pretending some forethought to this seeming impulsiveness.

  They check the Blue Book for a price on the Mercedes. While the salesman and the manager test-drive the Mercedes down the dealership strip and back, Peke and Rose stand out front, watching them, wordless, hands shielding eyes from the bright sun in a Western pose, as if counting cattle. The manager returns, jots a credit for the Blue Book amount on a slip of paper from his shirt pocket, hands it to Peke. It all happens quickly—with the wordless, unspoken efficiency of what Peke imagines as an American frontier transaction. A settler’s quick trade with the Indians. They are clearly afraid of Peke changing his mind.

  With the salesman’s help, Peke picks out a gray gunboat of a Ford Fairlane.

  The salesman moves their luggage into the Ford for them, and they thank him. The manager scribbles out a check for the difference. Mercedes minus Fairlane. There is more tight-lipped, nearly wordless outpost trading, until there is a handshake. Peke will deposit the check quickly, hoping they will speculate only briefly, conclude Peke’s reversal of fortune, and think nothing more about it after that.

  “We have millions of dollars in the market, don’t we?” she queries him calmly, staring out the window, the scenery of the American West rushing at them, running down the side panels of the strange car like liquid. Millions in CDs in the bank, she thinks, holding her gaze steady, almost haughtily. Our homeowners’ policies have never had a claim before this. We could replace almost everything in a blink, without batting an eye, without missing a beat. Get anything we need or want.

  She knows he knows it. Saying it aloud won’t make the point any more obvious or compelling to him. So she shifts her thoughts away, addresses something higher.

  “You’re not putting us at risk, I hope.”

  Because it’s not worth risk. We still have time ahead of us, years to be happy, to enjoy our children, the tribe of our grandchildren that grows as steadily as those enumerated Bible tribes.

  But I can’t tell if you care about any of that at all.

  I’m your last possession. Your last chattel. Even if I am just chattel to you, don’t risk losing me.

  This unsaid, too.

  “I won’t put us at risk,” he says. As if he has calmly and accurately read every thought in her staunchly expressionless face. “I promise. If it comes down to that, I’ll back away. We’ll just go on to Santa Barbara.”

  At any moment, of course, any moment he chooses, he could decide to ignore the insistent little beep and flash. The tiny blinking red dot. At any moment, he could shut off the device. At any mile in the two thousand miles so far, he could have turned the wheel, changed course, headed the car toward the gorgeous simplicities of Southern California, continued their lives.

  But he cannot. And if it were even slightly possible at the outset to abandon his plan, it is unthinkable now. The insistent little red dot is like a heartbeat. Hypnotic. Not just an electronic pulse—it is somehow his pulse. He cannot abandon it, because he would be abandoning himself.

  He could stop this chase anytime. Except that he can’t.

  A seventy-two-year-old man who has lived several lives already, who has balanced on the ledge of life, who has been curled into the heart of the planet’s fiercest mid-twentieth-century insanities, doesn’t have that much to give up, it seems to him. A few dinners. A few conventional family celebrations and milestones. An endless stream of the morning paper, one day’s edition largely indistinguishable from the next. A few cycles of seasons, which come at him now with such demoralizing speed, it might be easier giving those up anyway. But he has to keep in mind that she doesn’t understand this. He has to make allowances. His perspective may be skewed. On the other hand, she has to understand that the willingness to risk was how he has gotten anywhere. How they have any of this. That in a way, risk is all he knows. He will try to rein it in. Out of deference to her. He will not let her lie awake unnecessarily. What would that accomplish? But he can make no guarantees.

  Seventy-two. How much more is there?

  He has lived his life. No one is more thankful for that than he. But now, after all, he has had that life. And here is a last opportunity. When he thought he was done with opportunity, in the land of opportunity, here’s another. How can he pass it by?

  Great Falls, Montana. A sea of sky. An ocean of land. Elemental and raw and open. A stunning inverse of the way he arrived here—amid endless water that still haunts him in only distant, fractured memories of his passage. The close gray sky that hung above the crowded, creaking, groaning steel vessel. The vast blue sky now above the steel craft that floats over the waves of the road in soft, plush American-car style. The slap of water against the hull, the whistle of Western wind against the car windows. There is in him a sense of coming full circle. But still, making a crossing.

  He pushes the buttons of the GPS display once more. They’re within a few hundred miles of where the signal settled a day or so ago. Stopped its movement.

  Great Falls. He pulls the Ford off at a scenic overlook. They get out and stretch. The snowcapped mountains are so distant, so out of scale, they seem to exist in another dimension, to be lit by a different light. One feels, staring at them, a sense of personal glory and yet of inconsequence. He listens. There is a kind of sacred silence here. He has noticed this silence, growing in tone, enlarging somehow, as they travel west. A silence that is sacred, but common and natural, too. A grand quiet that is repeated on a human level in the acutely limited exchange of words that is the local style—in diners, at rest stops, in convenience stores, at motel registration desks. He was always more comfortable not speaking. Silence is far preferable. Maybe this is where he always belonged. Maybe he was meant to be a Westerner. He feels an affinity for it. He smiles.

  Great Falls, Montana. This is a land he could have been happy in, he senses. Here is his chance to look in on other lives, lives not lived.

  He checks them into a bed-and-breakfast. It is much less quaint than their previous B and Bs, sparer and plaine
r. Thin white towels, simple bureau, simple bed, no embroidered curtains, just a single pull shade. He tries on a cowboy hat in the shop next door, likes it, buys it. Finds boots a few doors farther down. Pays cash for both. More the norm out here. Comes back upstairs, all smiles, to his wife. Looks in the mirror at an American of a certain type, of a certain age. A rancher. A Westerner. Grain prices and hog futures. His accent so mild it’s heard now only in a slight stilting of speech, his Europeanness revealed (and only to a sophisticated observer) by his dark-eyed, watchful gaze, his habit of separateness. His middle-European features, his slightly prominent ears and proud nose, his outsider identity, all disappearing under the brim of that hat. Disappearing, it occurs to him, at long last.

  After sixty years of trying to fit in, he thinks with amusement, all it took was one of these hats.

  He puts it on the hat rack behind the door. A hat rack! My, my.

  And really, what is this seventy-two-year-old Jew doing in the land of outlaws? In the land of last stands?

  Making one.

  “National Moving and Storage.”

  “Annelle,” the voice says.

  “Nick,” she responds, automatic, curt. Nick can feel her anxiety from here. Her hostility. Her dread on hearing his voice.