Moving Day: A Thriller

by Jonathan Stone

  He stands in front of the big barn. Looks up at the ancient, wide planks of its vast skin. “Hello? Anybody here? Anybody?” His voice vibrates oddly against the flank of the enormous building.

  He steps up to the barn’s side door, pulls at it. Solid. Locked.

  He looks at the keyhole of the heavy door’s handle.

  Again looks up the side of the giant barn. There’s a ridge of slatted opening at the crease of the tin roof and sides. To let the hot air inside escape. Nothing more.

  He looks again at the keyhole in the door handle.

  Peke heads now to the back of the farmhouse. Walks through the dust and dry dirt, up the steps of the exposed landing, presses his face against one of the glass panes of the farmhouse’s back door.

  He sees no wires crossing the glass inside. No wires running along the door frame, at least not visible from here.

  Peke steps off the landing, stoops, and picks up a rock about the size of a fist.

  He steps back up onto the landing, looks once more, then covers his fist with the sleeve of his barn coat, and taps the rock firmly through the door’s lowest pane of glass. Three quick punches clear the pane out.

  He waits. Waits to hear something. Anything. An alarm. Another dog. A shout from someone roused from a nap.

  Nothing.

  He reaches his wrist in carefully to the inside door handle, turns it. The back door opens into the kitchen.

  Peke glides through the ancient room, its black-and-white tile floor heavily cracked, its cabinets deeply scarred, thin and slapdash to begin with, hanging crooked, having suffered fists and blows and recklessness. He passes through the living room with the big television and stereo speakers. He can feel it is a world of men—transitory, haphazard, rough—a barracks, stale and ramshackle. A house in such contrast with his own, where everything was considered, thought out, to add to the warmth, to the sense of peace and charm. Peke moves lightly, invisible, ghostly. He steps into the office, hardly pausing, settles down at the oddly ornate desk as if it were his own.

  Picture books, price guides, auction catalogs, fill two walls. Catalog consumerism gone beyond itself in this farmhouse hideout, a dark inversion of the cheerful missives of American plenty that flooded his mailbox.

  The computer sits on a metal stand to the left. He stares at its mute green screen. He is tempted to start it. But no. Not now.

  He opens the desk’s top drawer. Black ledgers, spiral-ringed notebooks. He leafs idly through the top ones randomly, discovers immediately that they are neatly kept lists, itemizations of objects.

  He sits there. A thief at a thief’s desk.

  He opens a second drawer. He sees Rose’s necklace immediately. Finds the two ruby earrings next to it, hers also. He puts them into the velvet sack still in there with them, stuffs the sack into his front pants pocket.

  He finds next to the sack—not so surprisingly—his own safe-deposit box key.

  He stuffs that into his pants pocket, too.

  It occurs to him: it is a precisely parallel action. A swift, perfect justice. Finding the safe-deposit box key in the thief’s desk, after the thief found it in Peke’s. He’s rifling through the thief’s desk as the thief rifled through his.

  He pulls a couple more drawers, soon finds the old bonds, the old wills, and, in a quick inventory in his head, realizes he has everything. Everything, that is, except what he came inside hoping to find.

  He rises from the desk, heads to the back door. But he stops first at another doorway—almost involuntarily—when he sees it is a bedroom. Better furnished, more serene, more finished, than the brusque, dilapidated, untended other rooms he has hurried through. It has the feel of a sanctuary in the chaotic, ramshackle ranch house.

  He looks inside and is momentarily disoriented by seeing it at the bedside. Gaudy, gold, sparkling in the low light.

  The watch. Peke knows that the thief, though he might cherish it, can’t wear it on a job. It’s too distinctive. Not what the foreman of a moving crew would be wearing. It’s why the red light has continued to blink, unchanging, these last few days, frustrating Peke, testing his patience.

  The watch that guided Peke here.

  If the thief had kept it on, of course, Peke would still know his whereabouts. It would take some of the tenseness, some of the risk, away right now. He presumes they’re away on another job. But he has no idea how far away or for how long, nor even exactly when they left. It creates a low-grade, continual anxiety to Peke’s presence here. A thief doesn’t belong in your house, but you certainly don’t belong in a thief’s. If the thief would at some point put the watch back on, Peke thinks, it might still have its uses.

  Wouldn’t it now be too suspicious to leave the watch here and take back everything else that was his?

  He could pry open its back, leave it open-backed on the desk—show the thief how it was done. Show him how he was followed and found.

  Or he could leave it here by the bed, and the thief might presume Peke simply did not see it, if everything else was gone.

  Peke picks up the watch, looks at it one last time, sets it down on the bedside table exactly as it was before. His gift to the thief.

  He is nervous, jumpy, being in here. He’s suddenly aware of needing to relieve himself. He steps carefully into the bathroom. It’s a narrow L, he sees. As he urinates, he inspects the toiletries on the low plastic shelf to the side of the toilet. It is neat, well organized, like the bedroom. He thinks, for the first time, with surprise, about the possibilities of the thief’s sexual orientation. His wife is fascinated by the family cabin they are staying in. By the family’s life. Peke is as fascinated by this den of thieves. By the thief’s life.

  He still has not found what he is looking for. He exits the bathroom and scans the beat-up, worn-down farmhouse interior once more, futilely, and turns to leave.

  Then smiles. Because it’s in the act of leaving that he sees it. Right where he should have looked first. A small key ring hanging on a nail by the door. It might as well have been labeled BARN or SHED. Peke obviously doesn’t see as well as he once did, but he sees well enough.

  First, though, to a small moving job that, unfortunately, can’t wait for Daniel’s crew. That has to be done before they get here.

  There is a wheelbarrow upside down, ten yards away from the back door. He rights it, wheels it briskly across the muddy field to the comatose dogs. He turns the wheelbarrow on its side against one dog’s torso, pushes the animal against the wheelbarrow’s edge, and rights the wheelbarrow with the dog in it. The sleek, fierce animal is surprisingly light in the wheelbarrow. There is a dog pen around the side of the house. He wheels it up to the dog pen, opens the gate, wheels it in.

  He dumps the sleeping dog gently onto the dirt inside.

  He had expected the effort to wear him out, but he feels invigorated. Feels reserves of energy.

  He repeats the process for the second dog.

  For all their snarling, outsize fury, he’s surprised again by the lightness. As if docility makes them lighter.

  When both are in the pen, their forms still splayed out, oblivious, he pulls their rusty water trough inside the pen with them, careful not to spill any liquid. They’ll have water. They’ll be OK. He shuts the sturdy pen door. Checks it to assure that it will stay shut.

  Peke stands at the door of the barn, the key ring glistening in the sun, and tries the few keys systematically, until one turns in the lock.

  He pulls down the handle, pushes open the heavy door, ducks into the darkness.

  It takes a few moments for his seventy-two-year-old eyes to adjust from the bright, brutal Montana daylight to the low light inside—light coming mainly in a sharp path from the door he’s just opened.

  When he can see, he looks around him.

  Paintings stacked out from the walls. Some still in their expensive gilt frames, others simply pinned against unpainted wooden ones. Beautiful, ornate pieces of furniture piled high: desks, highboys, dressers, ch
ests of drawers, Chinese vases, rolled Oriental and Turkish rugs, Mediterranean amphorae. A warehouse agglomeration of art and civilization, heaped high, here in a barn on an overgrown lot in the Montana woods. European craftsmen, salon painters, artisans from across centuries, in their final home in the off-the-grid American backwoods. In a benighted gallery. In an unknown museum.

  He sees the outline of the inside of the locked overhead doors toward the far end of the barn. He moves toward them. As he gets closer to them, they loom up surprisingly large. Twin, mammoth entrances.

  And there, piled just inside the doors, are the Pekes’ belongings.

  Even the Mercedes convertible is there, tucked to the side.

  He steps over, looks more closely at it. Runs his eyes sternly, appraisingly, down its flanks. Unbruised. None the worse for wear.

  He steps to the overhead door of the left bay garage, throws the lock, struggles a little at first, then succeeds, in lifting the huge door.

  The furniture, the cartons of books and china, the bright flanks and chrome of the Mercedes convertible—all their belongings—are pierced and bathed by the light of day.

  The truck pulls grandly onto the compound grounds. Big, white, new, gleaming brightly. Twenty tons of warrior-savior, at the beck and call of the mottled septuagenarian standing small in front of the barn.

  As it happens, painted white. As it happens, roughly matching the truck that took his belongings. Once again—like finding his safe-deposit key in the thief’s desk—an elegant symmetry of fate. Justice as if mathematically balanced and precise.

  He has Grady’s cell phone number, called early this morning from the cabin one more time before they went out of cell range. They had just passed the Idaho border. They had explicit directions from him. He even drove the final hour of it himself several days before, gathering landmarks, just to be sure. Coming straight into the compound, he figures, is how they’ll arouse the least suspicion. A truck pulling in, a truck pulling out, like always, he is sure. Certainly no one will think anything as the truck pulls past the crossroads. Pulls by Freedom Café.

  Through the truck’s cab window—broad and flat, like a movie screen—Grady, the driver, big and muscled, sees an old man in a Western hat, standing out in the Western barrenness and scrub, gesturing the immense vehicle toward him.

  In a symphony of hisses and squeaks, of sharp turns and air brakes—the grand concluding notes of its cross-country song—the truck backs into position outside the barn.

  Grady hops down from the cab, looks around at the oddness of the scene. A kind of bright desolation. He wears a closely contained but still evident air of amusement at where he suddenly finds himself after two days in the saddle, blasting westward.

  “Why, hello, Stanley Peke,” he says, the slightest bit of Irish brogue still in the uttering of his old boss’s name, his blue eyes smiling brightly. Peke sees the familiar scar down Grady’s right cheek—a barroom scar, he’s always been sure. He knows this isn’t just any crew. It’s a crew that’s ready, just in case. Grady. There are such various immigrant experiences, thinks Peke.

  If the crew with Grady doesn’t always have such a paramilitary quality to them, they have effectively assumed it here. They ask no questions, proudly make it clear they will not ask questions, will respond only to whatever the need is. They’re alert, Peke notices, not immense men, but beneath their T-shirts, not men to tangle with. The crew remains silent, as if to further abet the powerful, seamless impression of a dream. Of a calm, sure, smooth unreality in the truck’s arrival.

  They are the men in the white hats, Peke thinks, riding into a Western town to save him. The opposite, the mirror image, of the thief and his crew. He notices the symmetry. Another symmetry. Like his being in the thief’s office.

  Peke shows them. “Everything in this pile. Everything here. It’s mine.”

  Grady nods. “And where’s it going?”

  Peke hands him the address on a scrap of paper: 3901 Pacific View, Santa Barbara, California.

  Grady nods again.

  But before beginning the task at hand, before marshaling his men to it, he regards Peke with a sudden expression of loyalty and reverence and curiosity that Peke can’t quite decipher. Grady’s half smile is on the verge of words but is containing them. A look that half warns: I will ask one question, one relevant question, and that is all.

  “And where are they?”

  “Taking someone else’s,” says Peke—with a vehemence, a disgust, he did not expect to feel. It surprises him, there inside the barn. It satisfies him, too.

  If Peke went to the local Montana police, he can imagine what would happen.

  They would raid it, yes. They would have the glory of breaking the burglary ring, of recovering the merchandise.

  But after that, he would become a witness, needing to fly back here continually, or even east, to where the original theft took place, to be deposed, to testify—it would consume his privacy, his time, his life.

  And his belongings—they would become state’s evidence, exhibit A. It could be months of argument and appeals before he and Rose got them back. The valuables more damaged by months as state’s evidence, probably, than in the careful thieves’ hands.

  Returned to him finally, perhaps years later.

  That’s how these things work, he knows. He is seventy-two. He doesn’t have that kind of time.

  And maybe it wouldn’t result in a conviction anyway. Maybe it could be argued away, or there would be a backroom compromise struck, a deal made, as there often is, where justice is the last matter, the last item on the agenda. Maybe it would be lost in legal argument, in point and counterpoint. Maybe it’s harder to get a conviction on interstate transportation, for instance. Multiple jurisdictions. Maybe the thief even knows all this, relies on it. Maybe it’s part of his plan.

  The loss of Peke’s privacy. The loss of his time.

  To be a hero. To be of service. In bringing a chancy justice.

  He watches them carrying the items from the barn. No. This is much better.

  To help with the loading would be foolish vanity on his part, counterproductive. Yes, he is a strong and healthy seventy-two, possessed of a rude, raw physical health that is a genetic accident and gift. It is the envy of his wife and friends, he can see, this basic robustness, that always shines through his aches and pains. But he senses Grady and the crew don’t want him lifting alongside them. It mildly reduces and insults their heroics. Isn’t really useful, anyway. But it feels foolish to just stand here, watching. So what will he do while they work?

  Peke finds himself wandering the property.

  It is scraggly, brushy, dusty, and undistinguished. Untended woods and field, undifferentiated weeds and undergrowth. Without the haphazard fencing, there would be no sense of borders at all.

  In a few minutes along a narrow path, where the woods open unexpectedly into a field, he comes upon it: an immense mountain of trash. They must simply pile it up out here, not bothering with any formal disposal. The property is large enough to accommodate its own trash site. But as Peke ambles closer, looks up at it—maybe twenty feet high—he can analyze its contents better, more specifically. It is filled with cast-off household dishes and furniture and toys and games and televisions and electronics, all clearly from other lives like his own.

  Some scraps of food—melon rinds, eggshells—lie scattered a few yards away from the mountain’s perimeter, probably dragged around gleefully by local feasting wildlife. But that’s the minor part of it. It’s mostly hard goods, in various states of destruction and unrecognition.

  A particularly American pile of detritus, Peke thinks. Brightly colored packaging, retaining its resolutely cheerful color after season upon season in the rain and snow. A pile of absurd variety, of ridiculous plenty.

  It occurs to him that this is where much of it ends up anyway, in a pile like this. That despite his arguably brave and high-principled rescue operation, despite any subsequent return to normalcy, wh
en he and Rose pass on, their children will take a few items to which they assign personal meaning, and the rest of it will make its eventual way, either over weeks or over years, to a place like this—a legal one, but one that looks much the same.

  He feels that simple realization like a weight on him. Amid the exhilaration and excitement of retrieving his belongings, a sudden weight of brooding. It’s almost enough to make him go back, tell them to unload the truck again, back out empty, call it off. This is where it will end up for the thief, too. Their odd communion. Meaninglessness piled high.

  Only now does he notice the books in among the items. Hardcovers, paperbacks, which, like so much of the rest of it, must have no value to the thieves. Books, cartons of books, among the broken chairs, the drawerless upturned desks, the half beds.

  How could he not think of it? Maybe because it is so distant in time and place. Maybe because he was resisting the memory. It is as if the pile has been accumulated, assembled out here in a field like those other fields, by the woods like those other woods, exclusively to pierce him.

  How could he not think of it? They would come at night, in the wee hours, he and the other boys, to the smoldering piles at Cracow’s eastern edge. To scavenge what they could. Using the immense pile itself as camouflage, remaining unseen by the guards by keeping the pile between the guards and themselves, like a game, while they picked over the items, took what they could carry at a run, what they could trade, what they could fit inside their torn coats. The guards were old and unalert, when there were any there at all.

  It continues to pierce him. Because at first there were the other boys, a wild pack of them, swift and dancing night creatures with the power and confidence of their numerousness and anonymity, but in the end, it was only Abel and he.

  The items piled high. The stuff of life. Life, history, existence, piled up and burned. The piles were both practical and symbolic. Your lives are done. Piled up here in front of you. And the small, technical, leftover detail of your aliveness—we’ll attend to that soon. An efficiency, the pile, but an efficiency meant to humiliate.