And to say it so suddenly like that . . . It is instantly obvious to Daniel that some act that impels a personal accounting—something final—is taking place.
So is now the time to intervene? To disobey his father? To see what, exactly, is going on? To finally reverse the roles and protect his father from himself? But one thing Daniel has come to understand, working beside him: his father’s self-reliance is his very being. His self-reliance is his self. Alone, in some sense, is the only way Stanley Peke can be.
The arms that carried Peke, the big hands that passed him, the rough palms that pushed him into a trunk with holes punched underneath to breathe, from the woods of Cracow, to attic, to attic, finally to a boat. The powerful arms, the big hands, of nameless, faceless adults who saved him. Those who despised him, he knew their faces, their smells, their nicknames, their habits, he dreamed of them even as he dodged them. But those who loved him so selflessly, he never knew, he cannot picture.
From subsisting on scraps in Cracow trash cans to surviving with a child’s wolf wiles in the woods outside the city to the thick, close sounds and smells of that trunk.
Peke is startled, remembering the trunk. The smooth wood inside, some lone craftsman with old-world values finishing the interior with pride, knowing all the while that a trunk was for storage and it was unlikely that anyone would ever know of the craftsman’s extra efforts. Except, as it turned out, the little boy shoved into it, hidden in it. How he ran his fingers, repeatedly, incessantly, down the smooth wood, its darkly burled pattern barely visible by the light from the narrow breathing holes placed low, nearly invisibly, along the back side of the trunk. Is this where a dangerous obsession with possessions, with things, came from? Because a physical object had saved him? Or is this just more searching, his casting about for explanation?
And now his own son responds like those nameless, faceless saviors.
In a moment, Peke finds the ancient phone’s black receiver in its cradle and finds his own eyes wet with a gush of gratitude.
The cabin is comfortable. Beautiful. There are pictures throughout of the Western family who owns it. Photos on the mantel. Local items, local artisans’ crafts, chosen with care. Soft, deep couches and settees where grandparents can jostle and tease with grandchildren. Upstairs bedrooms with scuffed walls where grandchildren can tussle and jump. The snowy old television that bespeaks life without it. Life lived outside. Life with fresh air and no rules.
Someone else’s things. Someone else’s life. How strange to inhabit someone else’s life, thinks Rose. To wander through someone else’s rooms. They take on a new interest, a new fascination and meaning and tone, she finds, when you no longer have rooms of your own.
She moves through these rooms, and waits, while her husband sees through this silent task of his. As he heads out on his silent, unacknowledged missions, as he makes his furtive phone calls out of her earshot, as he wordlessly and continuously asks her forbearance.
In the years of the manufacturing plant, he never discussed his work much at home. Rarely revealed even the shape or tenor of his day. But that silence became a comfortable one. A certainty in itself, a silence to nestle into securely and predictably each evening. While this, she knows, is a silence born of danger. Fraught with it, she is sure.
She can stop him. She can demand that he stop. Demand, threaten, insist, stamp her feet, issue an ultimatum. And perhaps he would respect that demand, and perhaps he wouldn’t. But she is unwilling to do that. Threats and ultimatums are not what Rose and Stanley have been about. Interrupting what is truly important to one or the other, what truly matters to one or the other—for whatever private or unfathomable reason—is not what their marriage is about. Their marriage is not built on interruption.
So she is consigned, for the moment, to the role of the waiting wife. Her husband is in the middle of a project. Not repairing a toilet, or a window shade, or a garage-door opener, but trying to repair their life. It’s a dangerous project—dangerous in direct proportion to the degree he tries to pretend otherwise. After fifty years of marriage, she knows his techniques, and she knows at least that.
So she cooks. Reads. Patiently and brilliantly resurrects the owners’ garden.
It is easier for him, she thinks. He at least has some control on this transcontinental errand. He at least has reins to hold. While standing in another family’s cabin in another part of her country, she has nothing.
Maybe even less than that. Because a new question has been pushing at her, one that she has in turn been forcing away from herself—it is too powerful, too much to bring close. With the longer stretches of their silences, the new degree of their isolation, with what seems in him a deeper sense of brooding as they have traveled farther west, closer and closer to some unknown eventuality, she has wondered: Does she even have Stanley?
Marriage to Stanley Pecoskowitz has always incurred a cost in aloneness, in distance. But fate is lately laying on extra penalties.
The loss of their things. Yes, she is shocked. She will always be shocked by it, in some sense. But her relative silence about the event is not from that. It is from an inherent paradox that she finds difficult to digest. On the face of it, it’s not a paradox; it’s reasonable: while she knows and genuinely believes that it all means nothing—all this stuff—she nevertheless wants it all back. Of course. That’s fine. But then it immediately deepens for her, into a paradox both of existence and of feeling, that hangs over her, ceaselessly, at every moment:
You have your life, but you don’t anymore.
It is this realm between, this inhabiting of uncertainty—having your life, but not having it—that she knows her husband is expert in. Armed with few specifics, few details, she nevertheless senses that Stanley Peke knows his way here. That no one is as experienced in these shadows as Stanley Peke. So she lets him lead. And she follows.
To live in someone else’s life for a few days—it is a reminder of what your own life once meant. Could mean again. And that, in the end, is the dangling leaf of hope—shimmering in the immense Western light, turning in the cool breeze, clinging firmly and miraculously to its branch—that holds her here.
Peke sits fishing. The light dances fiercely, dazzling, on the river. A postcard scene. A princely realm. Warm bright sun but cool dry breeze. A horizon to infinity in an unbroken blue. The day goes through him with its beauty. Fills him with its peace. Fishing is a fancy word for waiting—functionalized waiting. Which is perfect, because he is waiting on more than fish.
He casts his line, remains motionless, until he feels the sure, unmistakable tug, and reels it in. He watches the silver fish wiggle with an energy, a life force, that must be respected, before throwing it back.
He casts his line identically again into the loud peace of the rushing river.
A black bug crawls along the ground by his leg. It burrows in the dirt busily.
A Western bug—he doesn’t know what it is. Fat, though. Purposeful. Some kind of beetle, maybe. He watches it work.
Seven years old, living in the woods. The memory loosening in him, made to loosen by a conspiracy of circumstances, by layers of imagery revivified and close by—these brushy woods, the chill breeze, the empty land and sky. And, not least, by standing at a closed gate, wondering what is up that dirt road.
He watches the bug.
Suddenly he scoops it up in one hand, blocks its escape with the other.
He looks at it. Watches it scoot frantically around on his broad, ancient, creviced palm, looking for a path, an exit.
Then, impulsively, he slaps the black bug into his mouth, bites down a few times, hears and feels the unmistakable crunch in his jaw, then swallows.
Stanley Peke, epicure and connoisseur. Stanley Peke of four-star restaurants, of genteel chefs bowing at the table, of sommeliers standing obediently at the ready, a respectful two steps behind his chair. Stanley Peke of precious wines from special reserves, brought up from the corners of deep cellars.
As he
suspected. As he remembered. Not bad at all.
The woods, the thicket, the dirt fields outside Cracow. All come rushing back in the taste of the bug. That is connoisseurship, after all. Sense memory bound to taste, rushing back with each bite. In Cracow, Abel taught him how to test the trash can food first—how to hold it in his mouth, what to taste for, to know it was OK to eat, before swallowing.
He is unchanged. It is still him. He is still the boy. The wily survivor.
He feels it welling up. A ball of rage, packed tight, pulsing. A dense fury, dense enough to have its own gravitational pull, like a geological body in space, the gravity assigning it direction and purpose. The rage harbored, intact, since seven, Peke is suddenly aware. Since seven. Contain it. Contain it. Don’t descend to them.
His creeping forgetfulness has been only situational, he realizes. Nothing organic. Here in the fresh Montana air, he is focused. Alert.
He has been drifting, somnolent, with no need to think. The slow slide of complacency. Preparing to die. Now he is thrown back to an earlier time. When he was—at every moment—relentlessly preparing to live.
He picks up the fishing line again, methodically casts it again, feels the pleasure of its gentle tug, of its modest weight and momentum in air, the plink and settle into the sun-dappled river.
He waits.
Contain it.
He waits.
Another widow—this one via Annelle. A Florida job. Gold Coast matron, moving in with her family in the DC suburbs. Easy. Why not? They’ll make the Albuquerque delivery, do the Austin gig, then turn the white truck east.
To time it correctly means a couple of days and nights in Miami. Like shore leave for LaFarge, Chiv, and Al while Nick scouts it. And then, if it checks out, if the information is good, if the routes are safe, do the job on Thursday.
And after returning from it, a little break. Drive to Billings, fly to Seattle, on to Rio and Armando. To the hot breeze and the hot breath, to bury himself in hedonism, hide from himself in Armando’s simple self-absorption. Armando. The love of a beautiful thing. His torso. His tan. It is nothing more or less than that. No need to understand it further. Armando. The love of a beautiful thing.
Soon, the huge white truck rolls out the gate.
On the move. The white, gleaming monster—an eight-hundred-horsepower, twenty-ton Grendel—heading off to gorge again on the infinite promise of America.
Peke stands again in the dusty silence, outside the rickety metal gate. The harsh red blinking hasn’t altered in days.
He looks down into the dirt by his feet. He smiles.
New deep tire treads. Fresh. The tire treads are running the opposite way now. Going out.
His heart beats harder beneath the big, featureless Montana sky. His body fills with a kind of glory. A vindication. An aliveness.
An old Ford Fairlane moves crisply on the road into town. Out here, its speed, the urgency to its movement, translates into nothing unusual to observe. There are no respected speed limits. Speed is your inalienable right.
At an intersection in town, Peke drives in over the gravel and pulls up to the pay phone on the outside wall of the filling station. One street up from Freedom Café. He dials. He says his name several times into the receiver, as his call makes its way again up the hierarchy. Moments of suspension. A series of clicks. Until Daniel’s voice is once again at the other end.
Peke utters the three words he has patiently waited days to say.
“Send the truck,” he says.
There is an old man standing alone on a dirt road in Montana, squinting at a closed rusted metal gate in front of him.
Is he wandering? Is he lost? Those in a passing car might think so and stop. But it is unlikely that a car will pass by. It’s too remote. There’s no reason to be out here.
A white plastic supermarket bag is clutched in each of the old man’s hands. Perhaps he’s collecting cans by the side of the road.
Minutes before, he pulled his Ford off the road into the high brush several hundred yards past the gate and shut off the engine. As he walked away from the car, he looked back to be sure it wasn’t visible from the road, submerged in high brush and high weeds and grasses like a sunken ship.
Now Peke looks at the gate, as if he has come upon it unexpectedly. He stares at it a moment.
Then he pulls the gate aside, his face muscles clenching slightly against its loud, rusty, swinging squeak, and begins to walk up the path of dirt road. He walks up the middle of the road, an old man alone, slightly swinging the white plastic supermarket bags.
He can’t ask the truck to enter the property without his looking first. Without his being sure. He’s asking something far out of the ordinary, after all. He must take responsibility.
The woods and brush open onto a clearing.
An old farmhouse. A couple of trailers—vintage-looking—on cement blocks. A couple of late-model pickup trucks. And behind them a hundred yards, a huge storage barn—an unpretty, efficient farm building—utilitarian and immense.
He does not have much chance to take it all in.
Two sleek, snapping black dogs are racing furiously, flat out, toward him, across the weed-and-dirt field. Big mutts, but with plenty of Doberman in them. Waiting for this moment all their dog lives.
In that angry, whirling moment of their approach—barking, snarling, choking on their own enthusiasm, he knows now what he suspected. Why there is no fencing. Why the gate can be swung open. Why there is no other protection system. Because it’s this. Protection, Montana-style.
And he has a quick, vivid, instant, blackened vision of the other dogs. The officers’ dogs. The dogs he learned from.
The dogs are closing in . . . almost to him . . . preparing to leap. Their Doberman sleekness makes them bullets of black. Preparing to leap . . . but not yet committed to the attack. He sees them looking, judging, examining, processing angles and smells and sounds and sights and sensations in their dog brains.
Dogs trained haphazardly, no doubt. Dogs taught with a casual love of violence. Trained to attack, trained into aggression out here, but almost certainly not having, in this wilderness, anyone to actually attack.
At this moment, Peke, letting out a furious, piercing scream, runs straight at the dogs, just as they run at him.
It is not a human sound, nor a human behavior at all. Not something they have seen in a human.
One dog falters for a moment.
Peke focuses on that one. Roars at it. Then abruptly stops his roaring to stare at it. Staring at them both now.
Both dogs have stopped.
I have seen much worse than you. You’re nothing. Nothing. You know that, don’t you, in your little dog hearts? It is etched in his face, obvious in his stance, full in his own heart.
In theirs, too, apparently.
Because now they circle warily. Snarl. Growl.
Peke circles, too. Snarls. Growls.
Then Peke begins laughing. Howling hysterically. Raucous human laughter. A sound, a happy sound, they undoubtedly know.
They bow their necks, paw the dirt in confusion.
He looks in their eyes. Looks all the way into their black eyes like they are equals. Stares into their souls. And they seem to know it. As if they have met one of their own. A kindred being.
One dog whimpers for a moment in puzzlement.
Then, in a sort of culmination of his staring, Peke empties the two supermarket bags. From each bag, an immense slab of Idaho beef falls to the ground.
They look stunned for a moment at the meat. Then leap to it, each dog settling down onto its haunches and going to work, shredding and feasting.
He watches both intently.
A minute or so into the meal, one of the dogs looks up at Peke dumbly. Sated. Satisfied. And something more than that.
The dog blinks repeatedly.
Now the other dog is blinking, too.
Before either can finish its feast, they have rolled to their sides, slumbering.
/> In the woods of Poland, they made the compound from mushrooms and bark. Here in America, it was simpler. He knows what medications to buy at the pharmacy to grind up together. Ingredients he has disguised with a much broader pharmacy shopping list.
These are descendants, spiritual cousins, of the officer dogs—those shadow-colored hell-beasts.
Descendants that were bred mean. But not mean enough.
“Hello?” he calls out, as flatly American as he can.
He walks up to the farmhouse. “Hello?” His voice made minuscule, swallowed up in the landscape. “Hello?”
Is someone feeding the dogs? Or are they living off the wildlife that is bound to be plentiful within the borders of the big property? It’s an important point, because it leads to the next question: How long until the thieves return?
“Hello?”
No response.
Surely the commotion of the dogs would have brought someone out. Or barricaded them in. Let them prepare. “Hello?”
He crosses the dusty front yard, climbs the gray steps to the front porch, stands on the small farmhouse porch a moment, the floor planks painted gray. He tries the front door, already knowing. Locked. He looks in the front-door window. A living room with large stereo speakers, a big-screen television, a beaten-up couch and shredded rug, and not much else. Temporary. Transitory. A room of men passing time. He can’t see the cases of beer, both full and empty, but imagines they’re there.
He steps down off the gray-planked porch.
The wind. The sun. An old man in a wide-brimmed Western hat, wandering alone. He has entered an American landscape. He is in a painting.
He walks around the side of the farmhouse, then the hundred yards or so back to the barn. He sees that truck tire tracks—lots of tire tracks—crisscross everywhere.
But the truck is not here. He feels himself relax a little. Hears his own breathing become steadier with relief.
Moving Day: A Thriller Page 10