by Finn Murphy
Tuesday afternoon Mrs. McMahon called Joyce Van Lines. She was going back to New Mexico at once, she said, and needed to arrange everything that day. Willie himself came out to do the estimate, since everyone else was busy. She told him he needed to get a truck and crew there the next morning for a full pack and load, and the driver needed to be in New Mexico on Sunday. Willie agreed to all of it.
When we arrived, I knocked on the door, heard a faint “Come in,” and walked in with my crew. There she was, on the sofa, half supine, wheezing. The eight of us looked at her. She looked at us for a moment and sat up. Regardless of everything else, Willie was right about Mrs. McMahon being a character. She was a heavy woman in her early seventies with dyed jet-black hair. Perhaps heavy is not quite accurate; gargantuan might be better. Mrs. McMahon had piercing, smart, gray eyes, a permanent sardonic grin, and a plastic hose attached to her nostrils. There was a big tank of oxygen in the corner of the room and about a hundred feet of hose coiled up leading to her nose. When I say a big oxygen tank, I mean the industrial ones about five feet tall. Mrs. McMahon eyed me with a knowing half grin.
“Mr. Murphy, I presume. Your employer, Mr. Joyce, tells me you’re the Great White Mover. What exactly does that mean? Who are the rest of these people? I like to be on a first-name basis with anyone going through my underwear drawers, my basement, and my bathroom. Step up, gentlemen!”
“Well, Mrs. McMahon,” I started out, “this is Nate, Carl, Mike, Carlos, Bobby, Lou, and Waldo.”
“Ha! I don’t believe any of it. Did you ever get on the phone with one of those call centers in India? Some guy you can barely understand says, ‘Good afternoon, thank you for your call, my name is Ralph,’ when you know his name is really Runjeev or Gohar or something. No aliases! What about you, Mr. Good-looking Black Man?”
“I really am Nate. I was christened Nathaniel.”
“What about you?”
“I’m Carlos, ma’am. Mike is Mike, That’s Francisco, Roberto, Luis, and nobody knows Waldo’s real name. We’ve tried for years, ma’am. He won’t tell anybody.”
“You, Waldo, come over here.”
“Si, yes, oui?” Waldo stammered in heavily accented something or other.
“Look at me, Mr. Waldo. I can’t breathe, I can barely see, and I know I’m on short time here on planet Earth. I lost my husband of fifty-five years yesterday. I don’t broach any bullshit. What’s your real name?”
“Frederico.”
“Excellent. You can all call me Mrs. McMahon. Now you, Mr. Great White Mover, there’s a question on the table. Are you Kiowa, Southern Cheyenne, one of those crazy Utes? With a name like that you sound like a chief.”
“I’m a hundred percent Irish, Mrs. McMahon. I’m also the chief of this team today. The term Great White Mover is a kind of joke. I am like an Indian chief, in that I’m doomed to extinction. There are so few white drivers left in this business, Mr. Joyce started calling me the Great White Mover. He thinks I’m going to be the last one. It’s evocative of a bygone time. It’s not a racist thing.”
“I didn’t think it was a racist thing. I imagine you’re pretty ecumenical down in the laboring trenches.”
“Essentially nonsectarian, ma’am.”
“Excellent again. A man with a vocabulary. Evocative. Nonsectarian. We’ll get along, I think, Mr. Great White Mover. Should I call you Mr. Great or Mr. White or Mr. Mover?”
“Finn will do fine.”
“Finn? Like a resident of Suomi or the directional appendage of a piscine?”
“Suomi, ma’am.”
“Good, Mr. Finn. Now, don’t you gentlemen have work to do? I’m out of here today, remember? No excuses. Everything is going in the truck except for the suitcase next to me, the oxygen tanks, and the contents of my medicine cabinet. You mess with any of those and it’ll be a short day, because I’ll be dead. I have lunch ordered for 1 p.m. I’ve ordered a bunch of crap from the deli slathered with cheese and unidentifiable meat along with an array of liquid carbonated sugar poisons. That will suffice?”
Nate broke in laughing, “That’s perfect, ma’am. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome, Mr. Nate. If you guys work assiduously, I’ll arrange for some dinner also. I suspect we’ll all be together until the evening. If you don’t work assiduously, you can go hungry. Unfortunately, or maybe not, I learned about food too late in life to do anything about it. I’m living with the consequences, barely. It’s an interesting existential question: If I had learned about food thirty years ago, would I have changed my habits? Probably not. People don’t change their habits, do they, Mr. Nate?”
“Not often, ma’am.”
“Do you see that long hose over there, gentlemen? I can get to any corner of the house to check on you, and checking I will do. No goldbricking or I’ll catch you. I’m smart and I’m nosy. We will be finished today. That’s not negotiable.”
The crew scattered to start their work. We’d all worked together before on full-service moves, and they knew exactly what to do. I sat down with Mrs. McMahon and was going over some details when a bald, slim man of about forty came in.
“Ah, Kevin. Glad you’re here. This is Finn. He’s the driver. Calls himself the Great White Mover. Finn, Kevin is my son. He lives over in Danbury.” We shook hands.
“I’m pleased to meet you, Kevin. I’m very sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you. I’ll be here to help Mom through the move. I’ll also be in New Mexico.”
“That’s great. Your mother and I were just going over some stuff. Here’s the way I understand things so far: First, we need to finish everything today. I’ve got a large, very experienced crew, but there are a lot of items here. We’ll probably be here until nine or ten tonight.”
“We expected that,” said Kevin.
“OK. Second, I understand I need to be in New Mexico on Sunday morning at eight.”
“That’s correct.” Kevin again.
“OK. Now you know what that entails, right? Today is Wednesday. I have no wiggle room. If I get a flat tire, blow a gasket, hit some traffic, that deadline might be threatened. I’m not making excuses. I intend to be there, but it’s a very close call.”
“We know,” said Kevin. “We’re going too.”
“Excuse me?”
“We’re going too. The reason I’m late this morning is I had to go pick up the motor home. The oxygen company is coming over later. We’re going to fill the Winnebago with tanks and head to New Mexico as soon as you guys are finished tonight. Mom can’t fly. We’ll meet you there Sunday morning.”
“Really? You two are quite a pair. Can I ask why it has to be Sunday?”
Kevin looked over at his silent mother. “You can ask. We’ve all asked. She won’t say. When Dad died yesterday, all she said was ‘Let’s go. We can be there by Sunday.’ She’s a force of nature. I don’t recommend trying to thwart her.”
“I’ve no intention of trying to thwart her. My job is to do whatever your mom wants me to do. The job was explained to me last night by Mr. Joyce. I’m on your team on this. We’re partners.”
“That’s very nice to hear.”
“You know it’s probably illegal to transport that much oxygen in a Winnebago?”
“We already researched it, Mr. Finn,” chimed in Mrs. McMahon. “It’s so illegal we’re not telling the oxygen company. They’re going to put the tanks in the garage. I was going to ask you to get your guys to load them into the camper. Will you do that?”
“We’ll do that. I’ve got straps and tie-downs. We’ll figure out a way to keep them from shifting. I’m going to start the packing in the dining room, Mrs. McMahon. I like to pack the high-value items myself. Mr. Joyce said something about Indian artifacts. Can we go in there and look things over?”
“You go in with Kevin. He can explain. I’ll be right along. It takes me a while to get anywhere.”
Kevin and I walked across the house to the dining room. He looked at me and smiled a sad smile. “She’s no
t crazy, you know.”
“No, she’s not. I think she’s wonderful.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“You’ve no idea how much better I feel hearing that from you. She is wonderful. Her body is falling apart, but her mind and her will are spot on. I really don’t know why everything needs to be done in such a hurry. I think it has to do with this stuff.” Kevin indicated the dining room. Every wall was filled with pottery shards. Some were in the shapes of animals, some were jars, some plates, some looked like toys. There were thousands of them. “My father was an archaeologist. He went to New Mexico for his postdoc and hooked up with a native group around the Four Corners. You never met my dad, but he was as remarkable as my mom. The Indians trusted him. He went back to UConn for a couple years, but he found his home and his calling in New Mexico. I grew up there, and Dad worked with the Indians. He set up a system for their artifacts. He got rid of the thieves and the rogue traders. Some of their good stuff goes for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Back in the seventies people were just stealing everything.”
“What’s all this stuff here?”
“Junk. There’s not an unbroken item in this collection. There are places in the desert where it’s piled in heaps. Dad didn’t care if they were broken. He knew what the designs meant and what the purpose was, and that was what was important to him. He was never what you would call a collector of artifacts. He hated collectors. When he got sick he felt he had to move back to Connecticut. My aunts are here, the hospital is here. Of course Mom didn’t want to go, but she did. They’ve only been here two months. We’ve got boxes from the first move in the basement still untouched. Dad was in chemo, and Mom can barely breathe in this humidity. They never settled in. Mom, as you know, has no intention of settling in.”
“What about you, Kevin? Can you just drop everything and do this?”
“Well, I am dropping everything. I’ve got three young kids at home, and it’s summer vacation. My wife’s been great, but this—this move today, delivering Sunday, driving Mom across the country in a camper loaded with illegal oxygen—has flipped her out. She thinks my mom is being overbearing and selfish.”
Mrs. McMahon lurched into the room, heaving and wheezing on her walker. “What’s my son been telling you about me? That I’m an overbearing, selfish old woman?”
I smirked at her. “It’s not always about you, Mrs. McMahon. Kevin was telling me about the artifacts. My scientific interest is limited, to be honest. I’m a mover. I care about transporting stuff safely. When I pack dishes and art objects, I’m supposed to write an inventory of existing damage. So if there’s a chip in a Waterford glass before I pack it, I make a note so I don’t have to pay a damage claim at the other end. How do I write up this stuff? You could claim I broke it all and sue the van line for fifty million dollars.”
Mrs. McMahon gave me a steely stare. “I don’t want fifty million dollars, Mr. Great White Finn. Fifty million dollars sounds like a whole lot of trouble. What I really want is to be able to breathe. In fact, if I could breathe I’d give you fifty million dollars.”
“Do you have fifty million dollars?”
“No. Unfortunately, I have fifty million pieces of clay from Indian garbage mounds. Want one?”
“No thanks.”
“You’re not into objects either. I can tell. Neither am I. This was my husband’s stuff.”
“Moving other people’s things for twenty years has pretty much cured me of acquisitiveness, Mrs. McMahon. I don’t own much, and I don’t even know where that is half the time.”
“What do you want?”
“I want to get this house empty today and be in New Mexico by Sunday.”
“That’s all?”
“Right now, that’s all.”
“What about later?”
“Later? In my view, Mrs. McMahon, American culture underrates the value of short-term goals. We can talk about other goals in New Mexico. After we’re unloaded you can serve me cold Coronas and we’ll talk about life, the universe, and everything. Right now we’re running your train, and you said the house must be empty today. I think you’re losing focus.”
“Touché, Mr. Mover. They’ve all been waiting for me to lose focus, but my body’s going to give way before my brain.”
“Jeez. You and Willie Joyce must have got on like blood brothers. You’re cut from the same cloth.”
“Mr. Joyce and I share certain surface characteristics. We’re overweight and intelligent. My interests are broader, however. I’d like to put my brain in that gorgeous black man’s body over there. Then you’d see some focus.”
“Oh, Nate’s pretty focused himself. I don’t think he’d do the trade. He’s got a wife and two girlfriends. He carries around three cell phones. I’m going to write ‘All contents broken’ on each of these dishpacks with the artifacts. Are you OK with that? You’re going to have to sign it that way.”
“Fine. The meaning of them all died with my husband. Not even the Indians know what they mean. It’s all from trash piles made three thousand years ago. They were a different people back then. It’s like when Charlton Heston found that doll in Planet of the Apes. Make sure you put the artifact boxes at the very end of the load. They have to come off first, OK?”
“OK.”
“It’s very important they come off first. Don’t mess it up.”
“Yes, Mrs. McMahon. I’ll make sure. I won’t mess it up.”
I went to work. Kevin went to work. My crew was at work. Mrs. McMahon staggered back to her sofa and grabbed a full-face oxygen mask connected to a smaller tank.
Mrs. McMahon slept on and off most of the day and evening on her sofa. She didn’t roam the house with her extra-long hose to check on my crew, but she did have a sardonic comment whenever any of the men passed through the living room. I think it took everything she had just to breathe. We finished loading at nine thirty that night. The house was empty and the truck was full. So full we had to strap the patio table to the back door of the trailer. The crew filed inside to say good-bye. Nate, who’d been yammering with Mrs. McMahon most of the day, tapped her gently on the shoulder. Mrs. McMahon woke up.
“Ma’am, we’re done. Did it all today, just like you wanted. Good luck to you.”
“Nice job, gentlemen. I thank you.” She reached into her bag and pulled out an envelope. “This is three hundred and fifty dollars. That’s fifty for each man. Split it up in front of me, Nate, and hand it out. Mr. Finn will get his tip if he beats me to New Mexico. You sure you don’t want to trade your body for my brain there, Nate?”
“If there was a way to share both, ma’am, I’d do it. I could use some brains, and your body sure as shit is wearin’ out.”
“Nate!” I cut in.
“You leave Nate alone, Mr. Finn. We’re family.”
“OK, Mrs. M. You’re the boss.”
“I’m always the boss. You gentlemen take care of yourselves. You Spaniards or whatever you are—learn some English! You’re going to be an embarrassment to your kids. You don’t want that.”
“You sure don’t,” Kevin said. He was exhausted too, but smiling.
I did the three hundred miles that night. I-80 through Pennsylvania is a horrible 311 miles of construction zones. It’s just like I-40 east out of California. The roadwork never ends; it’s orange cones and steep hills the whole way and a nightmare at night. In a way it’s worse than the Rocky Mountains: sure, the Rockies have hills, but the Rockies aren’t that wide. They’re maybe seventy miles, so they eventually end. In Pennsylvania the hills never quit. One late night a few years ago, on I-80 outside of Clarion, I saw a big truck off to the side of the road, catty-corned. It didn’t look right. I pulled over, stopped, and walked up to the truck. The windshield was smashed and I saw the leg of a deer hanging over the hood. Where the driver was supposed to be I saw the deer’s head. Everything was perfectly still and quiet. I didn’t look any further. I saw police lights coming around the bend so I knew someone
had already called it in, so I left. I knew what had happened. I hoped it was quick for both of them.
I crawled into my sleeper around 5 a.m. somewhere near Lock Haven, Pennsylvania. This wasn’t a logbook nightmare, yet, because I logged my loading time as off duty. I got to Vandalia, Illinois, by midnight Thursday. I’ve done the cross-country thing so many times now the bloom is pretty much off the rose, though I do still get a twinge crossing the Big Ditch at St. Louis, which I did Friday morning. The first time I did that was with Willie back in 1979. Jeez. I pulled into the truckstop at Limon, Colorado, on Saturday around 6 p.m. and was putting another thousand dollars’ worth of fuel into the tanks when my phone rang.
“Driver Murphy here. On schedule.”
“Finn, it’s Kevin McMahon.”
“Hello, Kevin. Where are you guys?”
“She didn’t make it, Finn. I’m at a funeral home in Salina, Kansas. Mom went aft to take a nap. When I pulled into Salina she was gone.”
“Christ, Kevin. I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah. Me too. We talked about it on the way out here. I’m supposed to meet you at the house tomorrow morning. You’re still on schedule?”
“I am.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow morning at eight, then.”
“Kevin, if you leave now, you’ll barely make it.”
“I’ll make it. I’ve got to stop at a friend’s house in Farmington first. He picked up my dad’s ashes from the FedEx office. My mom had them shipped there from Watertown.”
“What are you going to do about your mom?”
“She’ll stay in Salina. In the refrigerator.”
“You’re sure about all this, right?”
“I’m sure.”
“OK, Kevin. You’re the boss now. I’ll be there, but I have to stop too, to pick up labor.”
“You won’t need any labor.”