Moving Day: A Thriller

by Jonathan Stone

  It’s a small, careful selection of frightened women on insulting clerk’s salaries who work in the back offices of a handful of moving companies. Annelle. Dora. Sara-Jean. Cultivated carefully over time, with a modest but reliable stream of cash. Nick, like the steady husband none of them has, the silent, sturdy provider, and that seems to serve some classic need, to tap something primal in this subspecies of woman.

  “You miss me, Annelle?”

  No response. As he would expect. Her silence, her resentment, signal that all is well in the relationship. She hates needing the money. She needs the money.

  “I’ll call you after five, Nick.” Easy to decipher: I can’t talk now. I’ll have your names for you by then. Your prospects. Nick knows she’ll call. She needs the money. She knows the consequences.

  It’s simple, what they have to do. Everything is computerized in these places, and the computers are always on. They look at a screen, scroll and troll, tell him what it says. Call him from a pay phone—not from the office, not from home (though in 95 percent of the cases, that would probably be just fine)—and give him names, addresses, and pickup times. Simple. A twelve-year-old can do it, and earn money for dope.

  Moving-company offices are casual, congenial, blue-collar places. Employees tend to gossip about clients anyway—sweet old lady, husband just died. Man, Annelle, you should have seen this place!

  And then the simple counterbalance, the safety check to his system. Virtually every one of the moves is interstate. Moving to Florida, California, Arizona, New Mexico, coastal Georgia or South Carolina, from the Northeast or Midwest. Interstate manifests have to be filled out and filed with certain state offices in advance. A trucking company has to file its plan. And as part of that plan, there has to be an estimation of cargo value. It’s simple: his contacts in the interstate trucking offices call him when they see a high-value estimate. (The trucking companies don’t lowball the numbers, because they pass this cost, like all others, on to the customer and mark it up. They love coming across a genuinely high-value move and have a financial incentive to duly record it for the authorities.)

  These guys are state employees. Like Annelle and Dora and Sara-Jean, they need the cash. Trucking is dirty. Mobbed up far back into its history. His contacts have grown up in that culture. To some degree, they seem to feel they should be calling him with the figures. As if it were part of their job description. His white envelopes of appreciation, they count on as part of their annual income.

  One of them initially thought Nick was an undercover cop, keeping tabs on suspiciously high cargo values, investigating if there might be something illicit, something stolen, being moved. Nick got a good laugh out of that one.

  That’s how he checks the moving-company information. And the moving companies are how he checks his interstate information. And they all know he cross-checks—he’s made that clear. It’s how he keeps everybody honest. If that’s the word.

  He ends up with a short list, and on it is exactly what he wants: a widow in Austin, about to be moved to San Francisco. (Good after the drop-off in Albuquerque, where he’s found a dealer to take the rare china.) A little web research, local newspapers online, tell him more: husband, chief executive of a natural-gas company, dead of a heart attack.

  Moving day currently scheduled for July 23.

  Actually, Mrs. Warren, that’s gonna be July 22.

  Eager Beaver Movers. One Step Ahead Transportation. All kinds of names and slogans suggest themselves.

  A used Ford Fairlane drives north, deeper into Montana. An older couple is inside. Fishing rods. A fishing trip. Americans on vacation.

  They have taken a cabin on the Kootenai River, which rushes sparkling and magnificent alongside them as they follow the turns toward the rural address. The morning sun dapples the river’s surface stunningly, squintingly bright. The river is furiously loud. Powerfully peaceful. A place, he can see already, of serenity and contemplation. Soon they are on the dirt driveway, which runs along the river like a joyous dog.

  As they head up the long driveway—at least a mile—he looks around him. He is far out here. You can’t get any farther out.

  And as he drives, it comes back to him from a distance, from a misty dot on the horizon. He doesn’t say anything to Rose, but the association is like a storm suddenly dark and gathered, like a sudden clap of thunder overhead.

  These woods. These trees. Gnarled, wild, twisted specimens. Dense, prickly underbrush.

  It makes sense for the line of latitude, he thinks. For the geography. For the temperature and climate.

  It looks exactly like the woods of Poland.

  He is seventy-two years old.

  He is seven.

  He and Rose pull the old Ford into the little dirt lot in front of the grocery store.

  Inside, they nod to the proprietor. Put milk, juice, eggs into the cart. The proprietor is about Peke’s age and seems to assume communion and permission from that fact.

  “Understand you doin’ some fishin’?” he asks. “Up at the McCane cabin?”

  No secrets here, thinks Peke. Despite the silences as vast as the vistas. Despite the respectful distances.

  Peke nods. Smiles pleasantly. “That’s right.” He’s reluctant to say much more. Reluctant to reveal his mild accent, which brings silent speculation, he suspects, to this kind of American. Discussion after he’s gone.

  “Beautiful up there,” says the proprietor.

  “Oh, it is,” says Rose, stepping in for Peke. We are nice. We are just nice older people fishing.

  “How’d you ever find it?” the proprietor inquires.

  “We were headed west,” she says. “We wanted to stop and fish. A realtor over in Spinesville had the listing,” she tells him, reasonably, unmysterious. The proprietor nods.

  There’s no one else in the grocery store, but in the dirt parking lot, as they’re loading the groceries into the car, Peke sees a number of pickup trucks. A couple of motorcycles.

  He squints at the establishment on the other side of the dirt lot.

  FREEDOM CAFÉ. Hand-lettered. Red and blue letters brushed on a plywood sheet quickly, unevenly. Free of the constraints of conventional lettering, he sees. Free of the cost of a sign. Almost childlike.

  He ambles across the bright, dusty lot to it. Drawn to its authenticity, its Americanness.

  An old man emerges through the rickety wooden front door, taking the trash around to the back. The apron he’s wearing is covered with grease. Peke can’t help notice he’s about Peke’s age and happens to look like him. Same short haircut. Same white hair. Same permanent squint. But there, presumably, the similarity ends. A dishwasher, a hired hand, at a Montana eatery. Bent over with the heavy trash, and with a lifetime of backwoods labor. The kind of American life with which Peke has no intersection.

  Up the two low, mud-crusted wooden steps. Through that rickety wooden door, which, with a loud languorous insolent squeak—a squeak as lazy as the morning—announces his entrance.

  It takes a moment for Peke’s eyes to adjust to the darkness inside.

  Three skinheads are at a table. Open vests on naked torsos. Each one’s skin a mix of careless sunburn and eerily translucent paleness. Sitting with beers. Beers in the morning.

  All of them look up at Peke.

  One of the skinheads has a green swastika tattooed between his eyebrows.

  Another has a larger green swastika on his beefy white bicep.

  Peke stares at the swastikas for a moment. Unable not to.

  Swastikas. Here in Freedom Café.

  It’s too much of a surprise to him. It’s too much unexpected meaning. He has not seen it out in the world, adorning a human being, in a long, long time. He looks a moment too long.

  “Whatcha starin’ at?” says the skinhead with the swastika between his eyebrows. In the local accent—flat, expressionless—his mellifluous, calm local voice at odds with his fierce appearance.

  Peke blinks, as if to blink away a dream. />
  The seventy-two-year-old man turns. As if obediently. As if in submission.

  But in fact to preserve his stealth. His mission. His dignity.

  No longer looking at the skinheads directly—as if not daring to—he nods acknowledgment to them. What kind of acknowledgment, he has no clear idea.

  He silently turns, steps carefully away. In a relieved moment, he finds himself back out in the dusty lot.

  The skinheads smile to one another, sip their beers with renewed satisfaction.

  Sorry-ass old man. Fuckin’ A.

  Peke stands alone at a rusted metal gate.

  He has first driven the Fairlane past it slowly, twice.

  He is miles from town. Miles from the McCane cabin. Miles from anywhere. He has not brought her. She would be good to have with him, useful camouflage, but he can’t do that to her. He cannot make her come out here with him, circling, checking, skulking around. So she is at the cabin.

  The little device is flashing, squeaking, and bleating victoriously. As if in celebration of a job well done. Like fireworks celebrating a win—but focused, serious fireworks of only red. The red of severely focused alarm.

  The gate is closed. Its thin metal bar is slung across the narrow dirt-road entrance like a flimsy curtain.

  He looks carefully into the dry dirt below the gate. It doesn’t take a genius. The deep imprint of truck tires. Repetitive, twinning, crushed double-deep.

  Eighteen wheels.

  The tread edges angle back. Indicating, it would seem, movement up the dirt drive. He has become a casual student of truck tire treads, of eighteen-wheelers, at rest stops on his way across America.

  He feels it welling up, irrepressible. A feeling from long ago.

  This standing outside a gate.

  There is something he wants in there. Somewhere up that winding dirt drive, the woods thick to both sides of it.

  There is something he wants in there. Like the food he once craved. The shelter he once prayed for. The rest and sleep he dreamed of.

  He feels it rising, an upward yet inward pressure of feeling that is pneumatic, nearly mechanical. Something primitive. That he has called on before. Become familiar with. More familiar than a person should have to be.

  It comes from deep in him. Prelingual. Deeper in him than a person should have to know.

  The art, the paintings, the cuisine, the hotels, the soirees, the ballets, the wines, all ripped away. All as if nothing. All as if never.

  There’s something inside that gate. Something he needs.

  It is a sensory, primitive welling-up . . .

  It exists alongside his civility and patience, like a dog at his side. Obedient, heeling, silent, but alert—ready to attack, ready to go wild . . .

  He is an animal again.

  Back in the cabin, looking out at the rushing river, he picks up the old, black rotary phone. The dial tone is loud, flat, somehow old-fashioned as well. His cell phone doesn’t work out here. No cell towers—not enough people. But the beeping device works off satellites. Works anywhere. Like a heartbeat. There are no lost, he thinks again.

  He knows the number. Dials it and says his own name and that of the person he’s calling for the first of several times, repeating both names as he makes his way up the hierarchy. He closes the window, shutting out the sound of the rushing water to hear better. He has waited until Rose is out for her walk.

  In a few minutes, he gets him at last. “Daniel,” he says.

  “Dad.” Peke can hear the note of a child’s surprise, even though modulated, smoothed over, in the voice of an adult. And with it, instantly, the accompanying note of caution, of protective reserve. It pains him. But it is at least familiar pain.

  “How are you? Where are you?” his son asks.

  “Fishing in Montana,” says Peke.

  “Fishing in Montana,” his son repeats, not knowing how else to respond, or what to say after it.

  “I bought a cowboy hat and boots,” says Peke.

  “You didn’t.”

  “Oh, I did.”

  “Well, you two enjoy yourselves,” says Daniel. “You deserve it.”

  “I have a favor to ask,” says Peke suddenly.

  He knows the statement will be met with dumbstruck silence. He is famous among his children for never asking for anything. For never in their childhood revealing any need, or ambition, or wish, or dream.

  “Your eighteen-wheelers,” Stanley says to his son.

  “Go ahead,” says Daniel. As if challenging him to come up with it. Come up with anything.

  The eighteen-wheelers are something new—part of the loading-dock upgrade and general expansion of the business that Daniel engineered.

  “You can spare one?” says Peke.

  A pause. Though Peke senses it is only a pause to guess at why—not whether. “Of course,” says Daniel.

  “And a crew?”

  Another pause. “Sure. A crew.”

  He knows what Daniel is thinking. That it is already clear his father wants no questions about this. Is he afraid that if Daniel knows more, he might turn him down? Derail his wild plan? Dad, you’re crazy . . .

  So he is asking of Daniel something new between them. He is asking, from two thousand miles away, for a deep and instant trust, a sudden companionship in a sudden foxhole, that they’ve never known before. Maybe, thinks Peke, simply because they’ve never had a reason to know it before.

  “And I want Grady to head the crew.”

  “Grady,” says Daniel warily, his discomfort rising, his anxiety awakened.

  “Grady, Daniel. Tell Grady I need him.”

  Because his is the only brand of fatherhood they’ve ever known, Peke’s children have experienced it not as sadness, or distance, or frustration, but rather as a kind of benign absence. Absence despite presence, because their father has always been there for them. They’ve always detected a fierce protectiveness of them that conveyed love but wasn’t love. Love itself—simple, unconditional—was not in the equation.

  Neither Daniel nor his two sisters have ever felt a full connection with their father. But for Daniel, the one who took over the business, and the only son, it has been a more mystifying and painful relationship. Daniel had eagerly anticipated—given the atmosphere of mute circumspection he grew up with at home—that he would finally discover more about his father down at the plant. That there, among other men, his father would be looser, freer, reveal more of himself. That working alongside him, Daniel would get to know at least some piece of him.

  But his father was, if anything, even more distant at work. And though his connection to any of his family was meager, Daniel remained the one whom—paradoxically—he seemed to connect with least. (With his sister Anne, his adorable, brilliant, secure, walk-on-water doctor sister, it was different. There was always a gleam in their father’s eye. Stanley glowed in her presence, as she glowed in his. Though Daniel knew it was something his sister didn’t understand any better than the rest of them.)

  Nevertheless, they worked together, desk touching desk, in the years when Daniel learned the business. And in the years since his father’s retirement, Daniel had succeeded in growing the business—smoothly and surely taking it to the next level beyond his father’s management of it. It had been Daniel who’d opened the distribution center, who’d built up a genuine Western presence, expanded the loading dock, and established a delivery fleet. He had thought all this success would win his father over in some way and might finally bring connection. His father, looking in from time to time, curious, merely nodded noncommittally as Daniel caught him up on the latest developments. He left it entirely to Daniel. To a fault.

  Daniel had his own children now, and had learned that he was one of those fathers for whom his children were everything. He loved them vastly and unreasonably and would always wonder if this was in reaction to being his father’s son—or was it simply who he was, anthropologically or chemically? Having his own children had softened the pain, but increa
sed the mystery, of his relationship with Stanley. He wasn’t singled out for harsh treatment, after all. His father treated everyone equally. Was unfailingly fair. Which was painful for a son who wanted more than equal or fair.

  Grady had been with them from the beginning. Even when Grady began, Daniel had somehow known to be careful around him. Even as a boy visiting with his father, he had picked up something, sensed something, about Grady.

  And now, very specifically, very sternly, this request. These stipulations.

  “You just say when and where,” says Daniel. His offer a declaration, an affirmation.

  “I’ll call,” says Peke. “But when I call, they can come right away?”

  “Day or night,” says Daniel. “What, to Montana?”

  “Yes, to Montana. I don’t know when, exactly. Soon.”

  “A truck is ready, Dad. My best crew.”

  He deserves to know, Peke feels. He deserves an explanation. “I’m getting my things back, Daniel.”

  “I assumed.”

  “You can’t say anything to anyone.”

  “I assumed that, too.”

  “And you can’t come.”

  There is a pause. Frustration, annoyance, pain. “All right.”

  Daniel doesn’t say be careful. Doesn’t say don’t do anything foolish. Doesn’t say any of the things a son or daughter would otherwise say. They are useless sentiments with a man like Stanley Peke.

  “You call, and it’s there,” says Daniel summarily.

  “I know I’m difficult,” says Peke. “That I’m distant. I know the burden I can be.”

  Two thousand miles away, Daniel Peke is astonished to hear it so suddenly like that. From his father, it practically qualifies as a speech. He can only respond smoothly, conciliatorily, from his adult outer shell. “Well . . . it’s all right, Dad . . .” Brushing the moment away. Prisoner to their strained and disconnected history. He’s been ambushed by the truth, sideswiped by the moment. Nonetheless, there it is. Recognition, confirmation, that it is not merely his own failure, dark and silent and invisible in his father’s long shadow.