Moving Day: A Thriller

by Jonathan Stone

  And taped up like this to this chair, he knows his only chance will be to strike out at those beliefs. Challenge, chip away—it’s the only chance he has to do any useful damage. The only time he has is this short window in which he is being kept alive as collateral, a valuable item himself. Because he is sure—can tell even on awakening, by the tone of the farmhouse around him—that Nick and his crew are gone.

  “Surprise,” says the uniformed man, in a proud, commanding voice. “Are you awake? Or is it a bad dream continuing?” Smiling seedily at his own wit and putting a hand on Peke’s undefended shoulder—the subtle implication of his close, physical domination. What would otherwise be a friendly gesture between men inverted, turned to mockery. Closeness turned to heavy-breathing threat.

  Peke examines his uniform. A colonel’s uniform. Colonel bars. Needle. Wheedle. Cajole. Annoy. Jump in. “Your collar insignias are wrong.” Peke smiles, shakes his head as if with weariness at a world of incompetence. He looks close to suppressing a mild laugh.

  The uniformed man withdraws his hand. Retreats into expressionlessness for a moment. Into the bunker, out of the line of fire.

  The big skinhead stands up, ready to be directed to swing at Peke. To bring order.

  “That’s the wrong number of sleeve stripes for your command level. It’s wrong for the rest of the uniform.” Peke strikes again, using evidence, adding the weight of credibility. A survivor of the Nazis, establishing his authority.

  The man glowers, unsure what to do. He has not met with quite the docile shock he seems to have expected. Peke would bet that the man’s physical encounters so far have been limited, if not nonexistent, and though he can tell a man like this would acquire a taste for physical violence, he may, like most men, be repelled by the intense smell and feel and actuality of it initially, and this window of repulsion and discomfort could work to Peke’s advantage.

  The beefy skinhead steps forward, threatening, eager. Peke pointedly ignores him.

  The Colonel shifts, considering a small act of discipline, Peke can tell—a small, symbolic act of retaliation.

  So Peke strikes quickly once more. “I can fix those stripes for you. We can get you the right insignia. You’ll have the only perfect uniform. It’s up to you.”

  The man looks down at him mutely confused, assessing. Peke knows he is not really considering the offer. But he is, Peke feels sure, nevertheless picturing himself with the correct uniform. The man probably worked carefully from pictures. The artifacts are genuine. They were presumably extremely costly—Nazi memorabilia is. Maybe it took a lot to find them through the Internet. To negotiate for them. All of this Peke imagines the man is quickly, angrily mulling. All of this Peke imagines the man wants to tell him, to defend his appearance. And the man may also be stewing that he’s been had. That it was for naught. He’s probably also thinking how to cut off this line of inquiry.

  The Colonel suddenly slaps Peke. A glove across the cheek. The skinheads grin gleefully, joy unpenned, the gate to the fields of play opening at last. But Peke knows this is his opportunity to go beyond the uniform—to move to something more fundamental.

  “You’re doing it all wrong,” says Peke. “You should be ignoring me. We’re lower than pond scum, remember—we’re not people. You honor and respect me too much by engaging me, by speaking to me, by considering me,” he says. “You’re not a real Nazi. You’re thinking about it all too much.” And now another pinprick, another needle, further up, closer in. “This is not just some game, you know,” Peke says sternly, hoping to steal the man’s thoughts, the man’s words, what the man was about to say reversing on him. “You can’t play this like some game. This is serious. Life and death. You have to be real,” Peke says.

  Peke considers—I know where to get you the right uniform. I know where to get the right artifacts. But it’s too early for these. These would be too obvious a bid for release.

  The big skinhead steps forward and delivers a swiping blow across Peke’s head. Much harder than the Colonel’s slap. Demonstrating to the Colonel quickly and wordlessly and efficiently what works. How to do it.

  Peke goes dizzy. For a long moment he feels close to passing out, but doesn’t. The room rights itself. He is primally, exceedingly aware of the pain. The pain that remains, still sharp, still coursing. But the pain is at the same time somehow inconsequential, he notices. Secondary. Maybe that’s an effect of being an old man. A survivor.

  The thief and his crew are gone, and in their absence, the Colonel and the skinheads are adjusting the rules a little. Peke is not worried about the pain, per se. He’s very worried, though, that they may overdo it. Misapply, overapply, the violence. Kill him inadvertently. They have no experience with this. He is very worried, not to say terrified, of that.

  What are his children doing at this moment, he wonders? His daughter, perhaps feeding and watering a specimen plant in her beautiful garden. Smoothing the loamy dirt around its base, the dirt running through her fingers. His son, playing catch with his grandson, the steady, rhythmic thud of the ball in their gloves, the easy rhythm of wind-up and throw, father and son locking into it like figurines on a Swiss clock. His youngest daughter, out on a new lightweight racing bike with her biking-enthusiast friends on their morning ride, the cool air against their faces and limbs, the green woods rushing by.

  While their father is strapped to a chair in Montana.

  The white truck heads toward Southern California. Nick, Chiv, LaFarge, Al, the regular crew. The skinheads and that old nut are holding Peke, having their fun with him, despite his instructions, Nick is sure. He needed the skinheads to babysit Peke while he and his crew collect the Pekes’ belongings once again. It’s working, he thinks; the arrangement is working. And it’s serving a couple of purposes, even beyond their watching Peke while Nick can’t. First, it ingratiates him a little to their eccentric, fucked-up local community. Backwoods diplomacy. And it advances their cause—or at least they think so. The elimination of the unclean, the unchosen, even if it is one Jew at a time. But best, it puts them in his debt. They’ll feel they owe him one. For including them. For throwing them one. Even for understanding them. Interesting that so much indecency could buy him so much goodwill.

  He’s not really worried they’ll kill the old man. Although they might—it’s obvious they don’t know what they’re doing. But that wouldn’t derail his plan—the missus will assume her husband is alive, particularly since Nick will be there with her. She’ll assume that Nick is keeping the implicit agreement in good faith—you don’t tell anyone, and I’ll return him to you—and there’s no way an inadvertent death could get communicated to the missus before the moving truck has pulled away. Anyway, he’ll be honoring his part of the bargain. He didn’t want Peke to die, he didn’t do it; hey, it was his idiot babysitters, his incompetent partners. His larger concern is that if the death does occur, they won’t know how to handle it. What to do. How to proceed. And some representative of the State of Montana might come snooping around as a result of some foolish misstep they make. He figures he’ll be back in time to take care of any incompetence, but it’s still on his mind. Gross incompetence happens in a flash; its damage can last a lifetime. A lifetime behind bars.

  He’s upped the stakes, he knows. Skipped up a criminal category in the eyes of the law. You’d have to call this kidnapping, or abduction, unfortunately, even though to him it’s just a case of temporary human collateral. Kidnapping, abduction—they have new rules, and you have to be especially careful not to count on the old ones. Nick figures he’s pretty safe, though. This old guy Peke has already shown he’s someone who doesn’t call the police. Maybe has some ingrained distrust of police authority. Or else he’s just a guy who lives by self-reliance. Solving his own problems. Like finding Nick, however the hell he did it. And hiring a truck to get his things back. That’s a guy who’s arrogant enough to think he can handle anything by himself. In finding and following Nick, the old man demonstrated his unshakable belief
in his own abilities. Ironically, thinks Nick, it leaves Nick feeling pretty confident the police won’t be summoned. Peke’s arrogance is Nick’s safety.

  The Nazi nuts are on their own. He knows they’ll feel freer, probably be crazier, more dangerous, off the leash, with him gone. Jesus, don’t burn the place down.

  Peke looks up, and the hazy forms come back into view.

  He’s aware of the throbbing welt on the side of his face. It has a pulse of its own. He can almost see it when he looks sidelong. He can’t reach for it, of course, but he can still sense its contours, its outline, its raised reds and purples.

  His vision is blurry now, but his head, his thoughts, are clear. They want to kill him, but that is so final, they don’t want to just yet. And they don’t know what they want to do with him in the interim. The Jewish problem, Peke thinks vaguely, with no amusement. Here in the Montana woods, they have their own unique Jewish problem.

  Nick must know they might kill him. Nick is a professional. Nick must have observed their amateurism and known they might kill him, so it obviously doesn’t matter much to Nick. This much is clear now to Peke, too.

  Conscious again, he will not relent.

  “You shave your heads,” says Peke through the dizziness, the slight nausea. “Just like the Jewish prisoners. Why do you try to look like Jewish prisoners? I don’t understand.” Keep up the connection. Keep needling. It might seem like the wrong thing, to annoy them, opposite what one should do. But engage, engage. It makes him human and alive. The squeaky wheel. And if his strategy is wrong, if they are going to kill him anyway, at least he’ll make his points, be himself, try to the very end.

  There is a palpable degeneration as the hours click by. A human regression that both prisoner and guards sense equally. A steady descent into a rawness that Peke is aware of in all his senses. In the close scent of the farmhouse living room. In the raw rubbing of the tape against his wrists. In the increasingly guttural communications between the skinheads. An animal descent, a primitive vision, that he detects in them. That he detects in himself.

  Because despite the pain they have haphazardly inflicted, despite the aura of threat and lawlessness and implicit finality that hangs over the living room, he finds he’s able to handle it. To remain calm. Perhaps because he is not surprised by any of it. Expected it. Predicted it. It is the dark subcellar of human behavior; a dark, damp, unspecified corner of hell that Dante missed, but he finds he can function within it.

  To be taped up like this, unable to move, it is like a paralysis, and the risk is that your mind will follow suit. At first you pull, you bristle, you bridle, with equal physical and mental vigor, but then paralysis and numbness set in and you begin to feel it is the order of things, that it has a certain inevitability; even, you begin to feel, a certain justice. But that is what you must guard against: lying back in the warm sun, floating powerless down the river on a current of suffering. No. Resist. No.

  In that insinuating numbness, he is aware of his own brain beginning its little minuet with reality—its soft, creeping retreat from the horror of the here and now. He is aware of his own mind’s recesses and caverns starting to gently taunt him . . .

  Soon the sight of the two shadowed figures in the small, dim-lit kitchen in front of him, from the enforced viewing angle of this nailed-down chair, these taped-down arms and legs, his current fate of mere powerless observation, slants into a vision of two other figures, hulking and indistinct, in another small, dim kitchen, where he is similarly contained in—what is it? a hard-backed, homemade pine high chair?—and he hears the mutter of those voices, too, incomprehensible except as a river of familiarity, a tide of belonging. Olfactory memory assaults him from some preconscious place. He is suddenly bathed in the scents from that high chair—barnyard scents carried through the open curtained window; piquant root smells from deep within the dark kitchen; the thick, cloying smell of that ancient, reddish pine planking beneath him. And now those immense, dark-draped figures are moving lugubriously in front of him, their muted tones of dress and speech, their obsessive turning to regard and consider him, turning those huge brown eyes on him. Mammen . . . Foter . . .

  He blinks. He shudders. An ancient fury resurfaces sharply to prick the vision, to pull him out . . .

  The ending, the finality he faces here, feels suddenly more inevitable and conclusive to him by bringing him back to the beginning, to his earliest sense memories. The vision—still hovering, still reverberating—juxtaposes his current hatred with that long-ago love. Contraposes his will to escape with a tenor of belonging, a primal tug of home. Matches this present with that past—tauntingly, teasingly, meanly, absurdly . . .

  Resist . . . Resist . . .

  “I have to shit,” he says. “Do you want me to shit myself and stink up your room? You couldn’t stand the stench of this old Jew—believe me, you’ve never smelled anything like it. You couldn’t stand here, torturing me with that stench. You’d miss all your fun.” Cajole, insinuate, prod. Worm inside their heads, peck at their brains. The thoughts and words come easily, he finds. The filth, the absurdities, are readily available, as if dormant inside him, waiting for just such a release.

  He has to shit. They puzzle over this. Absorbing the unpredicted situation. How to proceed. They’ve been instructed, he imagines, to never let the Jew out of their sight. Not for a moment. The wily, sneaky Jew.

  He presses. He pushes. “I’ve got to go,” he tells them. “I’ve got no choice. I’m going to have to shit my pants. And you won’t want to guard me after that, believe me.” An old man who can’t control his bowels. An indignity of age. He adds some moans, some pained writhing, sounds of desperation that are easy to summon by their close relationship to the truth.

  “Let’s kill him before he has to shit,” proposes the middle one. It has an appealing neatness to it, a Nazi problem-solving efficiency. But that is too sudden, too soon for the rest of them. It seems too radical a solution to the matter of shitting.

  “We could give him a pot or bowl to hold under himself,” suggests the skinny one.

  “And which of you is going to carry my shit out?” Peke asks with rhetorical flourish. “Which of you is going to handle that task for me? Perform that service? Carry the shit of a Jew?” He punctuates the urgency once more with a long moan.

  Absurdly, he has command. Improbably, he controls the scene. Tied in his chair, he holds center stage. And he highlights this absurdity, rubs it in, with a wildly stentorian, commanding vocal delivery. He gives his accent free rein, elevates it into caricature. To reinforce the absurdity of the situation. To reinforce the impression of his command. To challenge the Colonel with a direct mocking imitation of the Colonel’s command.

  “He goes to the bathroom.” The old Colonel, wresting back control. “Where we all watch him.” In case you intend to try something, Jew. Something in the walk to the bathroom. Something with the bathroom window. “We see how the Jew does it,” says the Colonel. We turn the occasion into an opportunity to demean you.

  With their hunting knives—knives Peke knows are as common as keys here in the Montana woods, part of dressing in the morning—the beefy one and the muscled one sever the tape across Peke’s waist and thighs and knees with a purposeful air of carelessness, cutting him out of the chair. They leave his hands taped behind his back.

  They lumber together—Peke, the Colonel, the skinheads—a humpbacked beast of hatred and antagonism, a perverse processional—down the narrow hall to the bathroom.

  The bathroom—a narrow L, the toilet tucked into the elbow at the far end—can hardly hold five people, no matter how they arrange themselves in it, no matter what the circumstances, and the immediate uncomfortable looks exchanged between the skinheads and the Colonel seem a recognition of this.

  Peke doesn’t miss the opportunity. “And who is going to undo my pants for me?” Peke looks at them, challenging.

  They have not thought of this, of course. As they have not thought of anything.
But here they are in the bathroom, they’ve already cut the tape that was around his waist, across his thighs and calves, they’ve come this far, they will somehow see it through. Again, there is procrastination, inertia, a hope that the need for decision will disappear.

  “Hurry. I feel it coming . . . ,” moans Peke insistently.

  Still he has the control. He is about to defecate in front of them, and still he has the control.

  The big, beefy one seems to sense that, and can’t stand it, and storms out of the bathroom in disgust, knocking aside the thin bathroom door so it trembles in his angry exit.

  The Colonel makes no move but looks to the other skinheads. With what they must take to be a regard of authority, of hierarchy.

  Because the middle-size one unhitches Peke’s belt and pants top, then—pressing a black boot to Peke’s stomach—kicks him down onto the seat of the open toilet. That’s how he does it. How he wrestles back dignity from the situation.

  Peke, forced suddenly into a sitting position, hands taped behind him, now attempts to wriggle his pants and underwear down his thighs as far as necessary. Shifting, twisting, he manages to pull pants and underwear sufficiently down his white thighs.

  He leans back gingerly against the tank of the toilet to adjust himself on the oval seat. Then he hunches forward somewhat. Grunts, as if approvingly, at his arrival in position.

  He looks up at them. They stare at him. Peke squatting on the can. His old man’s genitals, gray-haired, hoary, pendulous.

  “You like to watch?” Peke inquires. Turning on the accent even more now; it is overflowing, florid. He looks at the skinny, smallest one, positioned behind the others. “It’s fun for you, yes?” He gestures to the Colonel. “But more fun for him, I assure you.” The bluffest, broadest bathroom humor, from the rich Jew. It confuses them, he hopes, usurps them in their vileness, since they are supposed to be the vile ones.