Peke trots around the corner of the barn in time to see the movement of the trees and tall grasses across the muddy expanse. In time to see a brown jacket moving against the green. In time to see the thief, hunched over, scurrying awkwardly into the woods.
At the moment, his rescuers are all occupied inside the barn. If he goes into the barn to tell them, to get their help, it will give the thief too much of a lead. Peke will lose sight of him. The thief will get away.
Peke can see the spot where the thief ducked into the woods.
Peke heads after him.
Nick stumbles on, bent over, awkward, but less dizzy, he notices, his various pains settling into a steady pulse now. He stops for a moment, listens, hears nothing.
Through the pain, he feels a moment of relief. A vague satisfaction, stronger at the moment than any regret. He is going to make it. He is going to make it out of here.
His wrists still sear, they are still on fire, but he finds he is somehow adjusting to it. He feels again the cold, rough iron of the crowbar against his wrists. He is like a dog, he thinks, chewing its leg off to escape a trap.
His abdomen still cripples him with deep swaths of pain. He is still doubled over. But he turns and stumbles on.
The old man must be dead in the barn. That must be what the black ski masks discovered. He has little doubt that the skinheads—impatient, frenzied, insane—finished off the old man. The black ski masks must be dealing with the skinheads now, probably more brutally than they dealt with Nick and his crew. Because now—if they’ve discovered the old man dead—their response is propelled by revenge.
Nick keeps moving, heading deeper into the woods. He starts to think about water, and food, and the cold temperature. Good. Beginning to think like a survivor. Thinking about these woods, in order to make it out of them.
The woods are marshy, swampy underfoot. There is a smell that hovers between fetid and sweet. He stumbles on.
Peke feels himself fly over the wet earth and packed leaves, fly past the black and gray tree trunks. He has not been in or moved through woods like this for over sixty years. Of course, he has occasionally hiked a manicured trail with his wife. Played a game of hide-and-seek with his children in a tame local wooded park, walked in a hundred yards to see their elaborate stick forts, to see the handiwork of their imaginations. But those were not woods like this—wild and vast, directionless and dense. He has not run through woods like this since he was seven. Woods where now, once again, life and death are in the air.
He moves lithely. He surprises himself. He slips through unknown woods that nevertheless feel familiar. The woods where he began. The woods where he survived.
He is a child again. He feels Abel beside him. More than that. He can practically see Abel’s spirit next to him. But of course—Abel’s spirit has never left the woods. It has stayed here for more than sixty years, waiting for scrawny, clever little Pecoskowitz to rejoin him. He runs with Abel. He feels Abel next to him. In him.
And what will he do when he finds the thief? Is this some ultimate test of his humanity? Some final test of his being? A chance to rectify, to correct, in some broad way? But what is the rectification? What is the correction? He knows now there are limits to what he’ll do. And the seven-year-old wolf child in him knows—instinctually—that such limits pose an intense disadvantage.
And something else the wolf child knows, something else beneath expression: he’s been permitted to experience survival. To experience it again. But you are not permitted it indefinitely.
All of it charges dimly through his mind as he runs.
In a few minutes, he stops. Listens. Hears nothing. His pounding heart, his invigorated chest and torso, nevertheless feel pressed in by dejection and defeat.
He suppresses his own heavy breathing for a moment, to listen again. He hears it now. Off to the right. Maybe fifty yards away. The awkward scrape of brush. He can tell it’s the scraping, the awkward movement, that results from injury. He can hear it is the scrape, the movement, of desperation. He can hear it. He can feel it. Like being attuned to the weakness of prey. Fifty yards through the woods. He moves lightly, silently.
Nick struggles through the woods, and in a terrain where thick layers of leaves cover tree roots and stumps and fallen branches, he trips on a stump and falls. In his extreme state of pain, the tripping and falling—which would otherwise be nothing—is a major event. He cries out involuntarily. He hears his own crying out echoing around him, and echoing in his head. The fresh pain threatens his consciousness, flirts and plays with it. He finds himself on his knees, clenching his stomach. He is sickly, woozily aware of the soaking, marshy ground less than a foot in front of his eyes. His hands sink into it. It fills his senses.
He waits a moment there, gathering his senses and his strength. He pushes himself, like a rising hero, up off the ground, manages to straighten, and looks ahead.
There is a soldier in a uniform—a formal, old war uniform—standing ten feet in front of him.
Nick sucks in his breath in startlement.
Amid his pain, he blinks to focus.
It is the old man.
Last seen taped to the chair. After that, Nick only imagined him. Only vaguely. Not vividly enough. Not as vividly as now. The uniform is only the most obvious difference about him, Nick senses a moment later. Something in the old Jew has changed. He is livelier. Energized. Is it the uniform, or the woods, or both that have brought this new aliveness into the old Jew? The old man’s eyes stare at Nick from somewhere else.
Nick watches those eyes travel coldly, appraisingly around Nick’s face and body. Taking an inventory of Nick’s injuries, Nick can see. Nick remains hunched over in abdominal pain. His face is creased with his anguish. There is no hiding his injuries from the old man.
The old Jew holds a long stick at his side. A staff that seems as natural, at home, in the old man’s fist as the old man somehow seems in these woods. In that strange, old military uniform—like a ghost or creature that has inhabited these woods forever.
Both are aware of the shift. Peke, the hunted, is now the hunter. Nick, the hunter, is now the hunted. Both can see awareness of the shift, of the reversal, in the other’s eyes. This reversal creates a kind of balance to events, presaging some sort of conclusion. Both know the end of the story is near.
Something primal will take place here. Something above words, or beneath them. So nothing is said. Whatever happens now, though neither knows what that will be, both know that words are superfluous.
He feels as if he has ceased to exist. As if he has died, and returned as a mythological creature. A dybbuk from Jewish myth, roaming the woods. But he is a unique creature of modern mythology. Half-Nazi, half-Jew.
He stands in front of Nick. Physically and symbolically blocking Nick’s motion in any direction.
He begins to move around him as if around prey. Aware of that sense of it. He imagines that Nick senses it that way, too.
Nick is panting. Still gasping deeply from the fall, from the wounds, from the pain; from the searing wrists, the left one probably broken, judging by the angle of it; from the blows to the abdomen.
Peke, in contrast with the heavy panting and gasping, is preternaturally silent.
They both listen to Nick’s gasping, his labored breathing.
A thief, he thinks, looking at Nick. A particularly cunning and adept one, but nothing more than a thief. Through some obsession, some compulsion, this thief took Peke’s things, and Peke was clever and determined enough to get them back.
A thief is low in the order of things. A thief is hungry. It is a hunger of some sort. Peke has known hungers, too.
But then the thief took Peke. Tied him to a chair, rendered him chattel, a slave, to negotiate his precise value with Peke’s wife, to terrify her with the tactic. Was it still mere thievery to the thief? Or was it then about vengeance? Was it then about teaching the Jew a lesson? Understanding it or not, the thief put himself into a deeper alliance with evi
l.
Peke feels all his civility, all his rationality, still pushing at him from some neat, organized place within him, despite this charged moment, despite the forces now unleashed, like ghosts and spirits suddenly alight in the woods.
He feels all his rationality, his understanding about the thief seeking vengeance, the clear logic of the argument. But all that rationality and understanding seems irrelevant amid the ghosts.
He begins to sense it is not the thief who is caught out here in the woods. It is him.
It’s lying there in the leaves, Nick knows, just a few feet away. It’s long enough, thick enough. It’s closer to him than the old man is. Nick knows it’s there—right there—because he is meant to survive. The sticks, the downed branches that cover the floor of the woods—one tripped him; this one will free him.
He senses, from the old man’s moving around him from several yards away, a hesitancy, the old man’s lack of a plan, and Nick’s street-kid instincts tell him to capitalize on that indecision.
Nick lunges for the stick and straightens against his abdominal pain, and now stands armed. Nick—racked with pain, but much younger and much stronger than the old man. Cornered, but with clearer purpose.
It is now some mechanism deeper than consciousness. Nick feels no hesitancy, no confusion. For Nick, it is survival. That’s the difference between them here. That’s what the old man hasn’t calculated, hasn’t understood. Maybe the old man has confused this with some other time, some other event—certainly the uniform indicates that. But this is now. It’s this event. And here, now, it’s a matter of Nick’s survival—not the old man’s.
Brandishing the stick, swinging it warningly, Nick begins to move around the old man, edging steadily toward the deeper woods that the old man had blocked. The old man backs up a couple of steps. Nick sees, feels, an invisible corridor opening to him. A path to freedom. But the street kid in him senses that the path still leads over the old man.
It has all caught up with him as suddenly as he’s caught up with the thief. The weariness, the exhaustion, seem as sudden as an ambush. Running through the woods, everything felt the same, but everything felt different, too. The night in the barn has worn him down. The effort of survival. The peeling, raw layers of memory. And what exactly is he doing here? What course of action does he have? Trying to block the thief’s escape indefinitely? Trying to lead the thief back? He won’t, can’t, do more than that. The quotient of violence is already so high.
Running through the woods, Peke has felt himself shuttling oddly, uncontrollably, between his seventy-two-year-old and his seven-year-old selves. He knows it’s some sort of collapse, some sort of melding that has waited for so long, the pressures of his stoicism, the pressures of his memory, folding in on themselves, but recognizing such a collapse doesn’t mean he can control it. It is some kind of integration—or disintegration. Some kind of final tumbling-out . . .
He is weary. He is done. He wants rest. He is no longer seven. That sensation of seven was momentary, fleeting. He is seventy-two. Maybe he’s survived enough. Maybe it’s someone else’s turn to survive.
He holds the stick up, but purposelessly.
Weary, exhausted, foggy, unsure, he wants to lower it, drop it at his side. Let him go.
It’s at that moment—when Nick might limp on and Peke might watch him go—that they both hear the dogs.
Those stupid fucking dogs, thinks Nick.
Someone opened the pen. Someone was smart enough to let them out of the pen, smart enough to put them onto the trail. The dogs will lead the black masks right to Nick. Nick can tell, by the frantic barking, that they have picked up the scent already, maybe Nick’s, maybe the old man’s, either way giving Nick away. They’re closing—maybe a quarter mile off, he’d guess by the sound.
He can’t outrun his own dogs. So he can’t outrun the black masks following them. He’s seen enough of the black masks’ violence to predict what will happen when they arrive here. He knows what happens when bloodlust is unleashed like that.
He knows what he would do if he were the black masks.
Only then does he realize: his dogs will arrive ahead of the black masks. Far enough ahead for Nick to have an option: to turn the dogs on the old man. Only Nick knows the command drilled into the dogs by that crazy off-the-grid skinhead who trained them behind his broken-down trailer. When the old man broke into the farmhouse, Nick wasn’t there to deliver the command. But he’s here now. Nick, from amid his pain, feels himself smile.
Peke hears the dogs’ barking grow closer.
The wolf child in him knows how the dogs rely on scent. How they recognize and respond to it. When the skinheads first let the dogs inside to circle and snap at his chair, maybe they remembered his scent, and the sweet special meat he’d brought them, and maybe were waiting for more. But since then, they’ve been unleashed to chase him through the night. Since then, he has swung at them with the spade, caught one in the flank, sent both whimpering and scurrying. They barked frantically, leaped furiously at him against their pen as he waited for Grady to finish in the barn. What will they do now? Which Peke will they remember? Though he realizes, darkly, that his own scent is now probably unrecognizable, erased, because he is wearing the uniform of the Colonel. He is clothed now in the Colonel’s scent.
The barking grows louder. The two black bullets are closing in.
Is there a chance to bargain? Can Nick grab the old man, hold him, and with the threat of commanding the dogs to attack the old man, can Nick bargain for his own life when the black masks arrive?
No. Because if the black masks are armed (and certainly they will be), they can simply dispense with the dogs, leaving him no threat, no leverage.
So he has no choice, really: he’ll have to turn the dogs on the old man when they arrive, ahead of the black masks. With no chance to bargain or negotiate, that will be Nick’s final act. The black masks may ultimately take him, but he will take the old man with him. They will enter eternity together. An odd notion. A strange couple.
And again he knows what he would do if he were the black masks. He wouldn’t pause to negotiate. He knows what happens when bloodlust is released.
And if that will be his final act, then he will initiate it now, before the black masks arrive, to assure its completion, to pave its way.
An inextinguishable fury has propelled Nick into the streets and through this life—a fury that he has made his partner and ally. His fury serves him now, as he seizes upon this moment of pause, of indecision, of the dogs’ relentless approach—and he roars through his pain and lunges at the old Jew, swinging his stick furiously, an animal unleashed.
Whether by mere suddenness or fury or skill, it drives the old man back farther. And Nick, student of the streets, won’t miss his chance. All animal fury and adrenaline—the pain channeled into rage—he keeps coming and leaps at Peke, preparing the prey for his dogs, taking control of his own mortality.
Peke falls backward into the hard mud and rolls, instinctively protective, to the side.
The thought is brief but crisp, dizzy but sharp:
The Nazi soldier has finally fallen. What the seven-year-old has always wished for, beneath it all—for the Nazi soldier to fall, the soldier whose bullet pierced Abel. But isn’t it actually the seven-year-old who has fallen? The seven-year-old pretending to adult power, donning it, but found out at last. The seven-year-old, back on the familiar, cold mud floor of the woods. Looking up from the mud floor into the years of fear. Because you cannot defeat them.
And that is when the dogs finally appear. Charging at him, snapping snarling raging muscle and bone. They bark furiously at him, pawing and pedaling around his head. Black-pupiled empty-eyed soulless ferocious machines of teeth and jaw and snout and eagerly dripping saliva—savagery sharpened to a polished point. He suddenly knows: this is the end always meant for him. Like a final scene carried patiently in his own genes, and in theirs. A scene handed down genetically for eventual enactment, fro
m his persecuted ancestors to him, from the dogs’ ancestors to them.
Snapping. Snarling. They are fury itself. But they haven’t touched him. Because they are waiting. Waiting as they have been trained to. Waiting as they have been waiting all along. Waiting for the command.
Nick stands over the old man. He looks at him for a moment. “I was an orphan, too,” he says.
The old man looks up at him.
“That’s how I guessed that you lost your parents. Because I recognized it in you,” he says flatly, over the fierce racket of rage, standing above the pawing, rippling, eager black forms.
The old man stares up at Nick. As if uncomprehending. As if momentarily lost.
Another orphan. Alone in the woods.
It must be Abel. Abel, out here with him, in pain. Out here for years, and runty little Stanislaw doesn’t recognize him.
He understands now. Understands at last. A German soldier is on the ground, and an orphan stands over him. It’s what he’s always wanted—unspoken, unrecognized. It’s what the seven-year-old has unconsciously waited for, for sixty years. Completion and revenge, all in one. The Fates, the cosmos, have clearly weighed in, just as he suspected all along. He feels the elation rise in him. Relief. Resolution. Yes, Abel. The German soldier is on the ground. Go ahead, Abel. Take your revenge.
Moving Day: A Thriller Page 23