Moving Day: A Thriller

by Jonathan Stone

  They drive in silence. “He’s old,” another backseat voice ruminates. “He can’t take much fun.”

  The thief, seated directly behind him, says nothing in all this, Peke notices. Despite the bits of discussion that jump surly and half-expressed between the others, Peke still senses the man seated behind him is in charge. Peke knows that this man understands that Peke is worth a lot. It seems he is allowing the bravado to vent—it’s big talk, car talk—and at some point he will step in, take over, shut it down. Though it’s possible, Peke supposes, that it’s not mere car talk. What does the thief’s silence signify?

  “Idiots,” says the brusque, businesslike voice behind him finally—weary, frustrated, explaining to children. “We tell his wife we’ll return him once we get what we want.” He can hear the thief breathing behind him. Ugly, heavy, animal breath. Breath heavy with experience, somehow. “Then . . . then we’ll see,” he says.

  They’re headed for Montana.

  Hotbed of freedom. Land of the Free Men. Believers in, defenders of, a Higher Justice. Montana.

  He gets a glimpse at the swastika between the eyebrows again.

  They didn’t catch him when he was seven.

  But they have caught him now.

  More than sixty years later.

  More than sixty years borrowed; more than sixty years lived as if with something unknown, unseen, pursuing, something at his back. At least—at last—he can see what is pursuing him.

  They have finally caught him.

  And, oddly, there is some kind of resolution in that. Some sense of completion. A circle finally closing, fully forming. He knows at some level it is insane to feel that. And yet he feels it. There it is.

  So much life. A family. The admiration, the respect, of others. A long interval of comfort, civilized life, and at least outward peace.

  A dark little piece of him feels that he has stolen these sixty years. Pilfered them from a pile, tucked the years away under his tattered coat, like a seven-year-old boy, abashed, ashamed, living in the woods.

  A dark little piece of him feels that somehow he had this coming.

  The old man is silent.

  Nick is, too, but feels there is some connection between the old man and him. That the others, the little neo-Nazi jerks, are interlopers, keeping the two of them from the fullness of that bond. That the Nazi jerks’ fierce, bland provincialism serves only to highlight this connection between the two of them, throw it into dramatic relief.

  Nick envisions a conversation between them. An exchange of ideas.

  They travel in silence, through the American West, all their polar individual identities, their contrary lives and outlooks, merging temporarily beneath the American sky that harbors them all.

  “I’ve gotta piss,” says one of the backseat voices. “I’ll just piss right here on the carpet.” Peke hears the quick, arrogant whine of a zipper.

  “Aww, man, you’ll stink it up in here.”

  “What the fuck—it’s his car.”

  “It’s my car,” says the brusque voice, quiet, low, sure. “And I’d rather you don’t piss in my Mercedes.” The authority clear—the consequences implied.

  He is touring America again in his Mercedes, Peke thinks. He watches the changing sky, the great, dark, billowing clouds.

  Occasionally, one or another of the young Nazis begins to speak about white Christian identity, Aryan superiority, obviously spewing some pamphlet or manifesto, but there is no fluency, no follow-up, no discourse. “We are the true descendants of Adam through Abel, and you are of the Mud Peoples,” explaining it to Peke in a prairie-flat cadence. A tutorial, delivered like immutable fact, as if in a one-room Great Plains schoolhouse. “You’re the issue of Satan’s seed, of his forcing himself on Eve . . .” “We are the true Lost Tribe, the Chosen People, and the Jews are the usurpers of our rightful place. But your conspiracy is now discovered . . .” “You’re Cain’s chaos, the seed line of the sinister . . .” They are mangled half-thoughts without context. Mind burps. Elevating, accreting, over time, over the highway, into brimstone declarations to the wide, empty sky above them. Though one of the declarations sticks with Peke in its diametrical simplicity, its reductive absurdity: You are the people of darkness, and we are the people of the light. As if there must be some measure of truth lurking in its purity.

  To Nick, these declarations from the skinheads are the same as silence, in a way—white noise, he thinks—and he’s sure that if he is able to distance their inanities like that, push them away, the old man probably can, too.

  “How’d you find me?” Nick finally asks casually, after a silence, with no acknowledgment of the preceding fanaticisms. As if he and Peke were old acquaintances.

  “So you can avoid being found next time?” Peke counters sarcastically. His first words of the journey. The skinheads seem half startled, and fascinated, by the sound of his voice.

  But Peke says nothing further. And doesn’t answer Nick’s question.

  The man’s calm, the man’s serenity, is not helping his cause, thinks Nick. Show some fear. Show some concern.

  They stop at a railroad crossing, one of the few stops they are forced to make in more than a thousand miles. They have to wait ten minutes for a freight train to go by. The skinheads get out of the car and urinate next to its open doors, allowing Peke to do the same, watching him. Only cattle observe them. Much of the freight train is cattle cars, the cattle packed tight together, braying, whinnying, but patient, too, their heads pressed against the bars by other cattle, their clear, limpid, brown saucer eyes looking out. It’s a dose of Americana, thinks Nick, getting back in the car: a new-style cattle drive, on the ancient railway that opened up the American West.

  But the scene sends Peke a different message, one whose echoes and reverberations overwhelm any redolence of Americana, of outdoor tradition, of big sky and freedom, which he, too, might otherwise have observed and absorbed. The cattle packed like that. He thinks about other trains, trains of people packed like these cattle, crossing open terrain beneath low, changeless sky, condensing hundreds, a thousand miles, into nothing, into meaninglessness, or else into a single meaning—making the mind turn those thousand boundless miles into a small, airless cell, into a hard nub of confinement.

  He, of course, is in a Mercedes, his own Mercedes, packed with people—if you chose to call them that—headed into the woods.

  And more than sixty years later than the terrified, confused passengers on those trains, he—in contrast—has history to help him imagine what fate might hold for him. He is terrified but not confused. He has history as his grim guide.

  The police are with Rose, doing their soft-spoken Santa Barbara best to calm and console her while explaining again: for twenty-four hours, it can be only a Missing Persons. It can be only a report. They’ll ask officers on the street to keep an eye out, of course, but no more formal action can be taken yet. She is frantic, but they are firm.

  He’s how old?

  Seventy-two.

  And in his own car?

  Their doubts about this being anything serious are loud and unsubtle in their pointed questions.

  It’s a Missing Persons, they tell her again, as if the repetition will make it more acceptable to her. There’s nothing we can do for twenty-four hours. Missing Persons. Nothing more. We just don’t have the manpower.

  She can tell what they think: that he is simply lost in his own car. Has forgotten where he is or what he’s doing. Has neglected to call in. Or is simply unaware that she’s already back from Los Angeles.

  He’s seventy-two, you say?

  And how can she tell them the story about Montana and what happened there? It’s not believable to begin with; plus, she has no corroborating details—he kept her away. She knows the address of the fishing shack, but nothing else. His chivalry, his habit of silence, his personality, all leave her in the dark.

  Twenty-four hours might be too late.

  “We’ll look for the Mercedes,�
� says the cop. “But, ma’am”—a reassuring Santa Barbara smile—“he’s probably fine.”

  She looks at him hard. “He’s probably not.”

  And she is sure—to her dismay—that she will be proved right.

  It is exactly as he predicted.

  As if being held and treated exactly as he predicted is part of the punishment, increases it, becomes part of its effect.

  As if they know that perfectly executing what he has imagined will make it more painful, more fearful, for him.

  He imagined himself, saw himself, in the beaten-up living room of shredded sofas, taped to a chair.

  He is in that living room, taped to a chair. The shredded sofas have been pulled away, creating a spare stage. An old man taped to a chair, the only thing on it.

  It is as if they have read and utilized his imagination, having none of their own.

  From the smallest one, Peke senses, if not exactly intelligence, then an evenness, a pausing and considering, that in the circumstances can dimly qualify as intelligence. Despite his smaller physical size, he is the one who is slow, brooding, deliberate.

  The middle one is the jumpiest—has a sinewy, ceaseless energy, muscles in continual flex, seeking an outlet, looking for trouble. He is a natural mesomorph, blessed with a sculpted physical definition that would be beautiful if he were not so ugly.

  From the biggest one, the beefy one, Peke senses evil. He smells it dripping off him, a high concentration of it, nearly chemical, emanating continually. He recognizes it. His civilized friends, his children, his neighbors, have trouble recognizing evil, identifying it, because they’ve never seen it in pure action in their modern, lawful, civilized lives. It is disguised, filtered, unclear. But he has had the unfortunate privilege of seeing it exercised openly, unmediated, uncalibrated. He knows it when he sees it. And in the big one, he sees it. Naturally, unfortunately, it is the big one. It probably explains his leadership, the pecking order based purely on brute strength and brute hatred, the prevailing social organization of their group. The only order of their tribe.

  Perhaps he should be more careful not to show his disdain. His open disdain may only get him killed more quickly than even they might want. His disdain is one of the few weapons in his limited arsenal, in his thin quiver, and he will have to deploy it with the utmost care.

  Their first moment of sport was the dogs. The dogs were yelping, howling at the back door, and the skinheads let them in, and the dogs rushed up to the chair, barking fiercely.

  “See, they know,” the beefy one joked with satisfaction. “They know he’s a Jew. They want that Jew meat.”

  But the dogs rushed the chair, then sat and stopped barking. Stood panting, almost expectant.

  Waiting dumbly, only Peke knew, for more of the sweet special meat he’d brought them before.

  “Go on, get out,” the beefy one burst out, annoyed with their sudden docility. He hustled them to the door. “Go on, get out. We got work to do in here.”

  Peke assesses the thick silver windings of duct tape over his thighs, wrapping beneath the chair. The duct tape wound around his shins and around the chair’s front legs. Across his stomach and around the chair’s sturdy back. His wrists are bound tightly behind him. It is a union with, a marriage to, the simple wooden chair, a parasexual closeness. As if giving oneself to the position, to the needs, of the chair.

  It was only a short time ago that he was in the driver’s seat of his Mercedes. A prisoner of that seat, too, but a prisoner of a different kind. A prisoner to the blinking light of the tracking device—but a prisoner of his own choosing, in a seat of command.

  Now it is this seat. Wooden, primitive, unforgiving. As primitive as the Mercedes’s seat is advanced. As freely chosen as this seat is not. And here America does not rush gloriously across the windshield. Here is just a grim room, the same view, a reduction of elements. Nothing moving or shifting or changing.

  He knows he must immediately begin the business of keeping himself alert. Keeping himself sane. He imagines that this is the Mercedes seat. That he is still driving his beautiful silver Mercedes convertible, his beautiful wife, Rose, beside him, crossing through the West, top down, hair blowing. It is an advantage to his imagination that he has logged so many recent hours, so many recent days, traveling like that. Such vivid, celebratory days, once the Mercedes convertible was retrieved. He pictures those days. He draws on that drive from Montana to Santa Barbara—an opposite drive, literally, figuratively—and in his mind he tries to recalibrate, reexperience, every remembered stretch of it. To erase, mile by mile, the imprisoning drive north with the liberating drive south.

  To make this chair like the seat of his silver Mercedes. To make this, too, a seat of command. That is the goal.

  He will beat this thief. He will survive them. That is what he does. Survive.

  The middle one flexes his bulky white biceps absently, incessantly. Not knowing what to do with all his stoked energy. Waiting to be told. Waiting to deploy it.

  Peke has seen him looking at Peke’s wrists—not glancing nervously, uncomfortably, like so many glances in the past fifty years, prepared to see something forbidden, pornographic, totemically powerful—but looking openly, expectantly, and somewhat disappointed.

  “How do we know he’s a Jew?” he says to the beefy one.

  Ah, he wants to see the tattoo. He knows about the tattoo. Skinheads—they love tattoos. Even concentration camp tattoos. Maybe especially those. The authenticity of them. They aren’t mere decoration; they mean something, a status the skinheads secretly wish for their own. A standard their own tattoos can’t meet. Could there even be sardonic camaraderie? Hey, look, I’ve got one, too—the beefy one pointing to the swastika between his eyes. But Peke has no tattoo to offer them. No such authentication or perverse camaraderie. He is no mere survivor. He is an escape artist. Unmarked. Perhaps not even there.

  He recognizes the moment, the stage they’re at. It is that moment when they’ve caught the snake, cornered the critter, when they are observing it, examining its features closely, before they decide what to do with it, what tests to put it through, what entertaining end to plan for it.

  He is seven. He is seven again. Except that at seven, he slipped through them, snuck by them, and at seventy-two, they have caught him.

  In a different country. In a different place. But the same—the same insane hatreds, the same celebration of the perverse, the same motivating mélange of ignorance and greed and darkness.

  He can tell that these shaven-domed, square-headed brutes have no idea what Nazism actually is or was. They have raided history’s dusty shelves, grabbed a trinket, swiped it in the dark. They have perverted and distorted the ideology, one that was perverted and distorted to begin with. Another twist in it will hardly alter its appearance or effects. He regards them. In the human species, they are but dimmest reflections of one another, ancient Stanley Peke and these skinheads, Manichaean occupants of the globe of human experience. Surely God could concoct no greater variety in a single species. Surely that is the miracle and irony and puzzlement of mankind. But a piece of Stanley knows this is something he is telling himself—building this difference, this gulf between them—to prepare himself, in mind and soul, for the confrontation that he knows must come.

  “Do you think I’m Jewish?” he asks, very quietly, dangling the question with an air of puzzlement. “Why? My accent? My money? The art on my walls? What makes you think I’m Jewish?” He lets his puzzlement grow into a look of outsize incredulity, exaggerated confoundment. “I’m a Congregationalist,” he declares suddenly. It has conclusiveness. As if unchallengeable.

  They regard him, unmoved. Their level of communication and comprehension will be, he sees, an extra, unintended torture, added to their intentional ones. An extra circle of hell.

  He looks from one to the other expectantly.

  “Nick said,” says the middle one finally, distantly, after a short silence—as if compelled to respond.

>   Peke feels the click of the moment. It is the first time—however absently, however inadvertently—that they have addressed him with any directness. He seizes this strand of connection.

  And the thief’s name—Nick.

  “What makes Nick say I am? Does he know me? Are we friends? Do we socialize?”

  He looks at them. “And I don’t have the tattoo, do I?” He shrugs. As if case closed.

  It is only a shallow edge of doubt. They seem generally untroubled by this lack of evidence. But it is a beginning. He must begin. Jump in somewhere.

  “I’m Dutch,” he adds, to explain the accent. “And I’m Christian. Peke’s a Dutch name. Don’t you know anything? I’m Dutch.” Congregationalist. Dutch. Christian. The versions of his life begin to fly.

  A Jew.

  Nick said.

  The irony being, Peke knows almost nothing about Judaism. He has never had any formal religious training. He has never practiced it. He has no familiarity with the faith. On the rare occasions when he’s been at a synagogue service—the social commitment of a bar mitzvah or a wedding, or taken by friends on the High Holidays—he has had no comprehension of what he is witnessing. It is as foreign to him as if he were a Catholic or Protestant observing the strange ancient ceremonies for the first time. Before his life as a feral child, he was present, as required, at a few ceremonies, and watched them with the natural remove of a child. Candles, leather books, obscure mutterings. And then, one night, he was shooed into the woods. Go play. Go play back in there as you always do, but this time, don’t come out. You understand? Your game must go on forever. With only a look from his mother. A look of pain, of torture, of hope, of pride. Of all hope dashed and all hope still intact. The full expectation of defeat and the full expectation of triumph. Her eyes so wide and awash in emotion, he stared for a moment into her soul. Stared into a naked soul, and expected never in his mortal life to see one so naked again. A last look from his mother that he still carries with him, a psychological amulet.