Moving Day: A Thriller (15 page)

These guys are state employees. Like Annelle and Dora and Sara-Jean, they need the cash. Trucking is dirty. Mobbed up far back into its history. His contacts have grown up in that culture. To some degree, they seem to feel they
should
be calling him with the figures. As if it were part of their job description. His white envelopes of appreciation, they count on as part of their annual income.

One of them initially thought Nick was an undercover cop, keeping tabs on suspiciously high cargo values, investigating if there might be something illicit, something stolen, being moved. Nick got a good laugh out of that one.

That’s how he checks the moving-company information. And the moving companies are how he checks his interstate information. And they all know he cross-checks—he’s made that clear. It’s how he keeps everybody honest. If that’s the word.

He ends up with a short list, and on it is exactly what he wants: a widow in Austin, about to be moved to San Francisco. (Good after the drop-off in Albuquerque, where he’s found a dealer to take the rare china.) A little web research, local newspapers online, tell him more: husband, chief executive of a natural-gas company, dead of a heart attack.

Moving day currently scheduled for July 23.

Actually, Mrs. Warren, that’s gonna be July 22.

Eager Beaver Movers. One Step Ahead Transportation. All kinds of names and slogans suggest themselves.

A used Ford Fairlane drives north, deeper into Montana. An older couple is inside. Fishing rods. A fishing trip. Americans on vacation.

They have taken a cabin on the Kootenai River, which rushes sparkling and magnificent alongside them as they follow the turns toward the rural address. The morning sun dapples the river’s surface stunningly, squintingly bright. The river is furiously loud. Powerfully peaceful. A place, he can see already, of serenity and contemplation. Soon they are on the dirt driveway, which runs along the river like a joyous dog.

As they head up the long driveway—at least a mile—he looks around him. He is far out here. You can’t get any farther out.

And as he drives, it comes back to him from a distance, from a misty dot on the horizon. He doesn’t say anything to Rose, but the association is like a storm suddenly dark and gathered, like a sudden clap of thunder overhead.

These woods. These trees. Gnarled, wild, twisted specimens. Dense, prickly underbrush.

It makes sense for the line of latitude, he thinks. For the geography. For the temperature and climate.

It looks exactly like the woods of Poland.

He is seventy-two years old.

He is seven.

H
e and Rose pull the old Ford into the little dirt lot in front of the grocery store.

Inside, they nod to the proprietor. Put milk, juice, eggs into the cart. The proprietor is about Peke’s age and seems to assume communion and permission from that fact.

“Understand you doin’ some fishin’?” he asks. “Up at the McCane cabin?”

No secrets here
, thinks Peke. Despite the silences as vast as the vistas. Despite the respectful distances.

Peke nods. Smiles pleasantly. “That’s right.” He’s reluctant to say much more. Reluctant to reveal his mild accent, which brings silent speculation, he suspects, to this kind of American. Discussion after he’s gone.

“Beautiful up there,” says the proprietor.

“Oh, it is,” says Rose, stepping in for Peke.
We are nice. We are just nice older people fishing.

“How’d you ever find it?” the proprietor inquires.

“We were headed west,” she says. “We wanted to stop and fish. A realtor over in Spinesville had the listing,” she tells him, reasonably, unmysterious. The proprietor nods.

There’s no one else in the grocery store, but in the dirt parking lot, as they’re loading the groceries into the car, Peke sees a number of pickup trucks. A couple of motorcycles.

He squints at the establishment on the other side of the dirt lot.

F
REEDOM CAFÉ.
Hand-lettered. Red and blue letters brushed on a plywood sheet quickly, unevenly. Free of the constraints of conventional lettering, he sees. Free of the cost of a sign. Almost childlike.

He ambles across the bright, dusty lot to it. Drawn to its authenticity, its Americanness.

An old man emerges through the rickety wooden front door, taking the trash around to the back. The apron he’s wearing is covered with grease. Peke can’t help notice he’s about Peke’s age and happens to look like him. Same short haircut. Same white hair. Same permanent squint. But there, presumably, the similarity ends. A dishwasher, a hired hand, at a Montana eatery. Bent over with the heavy trash, and with a lifetime of backwoods labor. The kind of American life with which Peke has no intersection.

Up the two low, mud-crusted wooden steps. Through that rickety wooden door, which, with a loud languorous insolent squeak—a squeak as lazy as the morning—announces his entrance.

It takes a moment for Peke’s eyes to adjust to the darkness inside.

Three skinheads are at a table. Open vests on naked torsos. Each one’s skin a mix of careless sunburn and eerily translucent paleness. Sitting with beers. Beers in the morning.

All of them look up at Peke.

One of the skinheads has a green swastika tattooed between his eyebrows.

Another has a larger green swastika on his beefy white bicep.

Peke stares at the swastikas for a moment. Unable not to.

Swastikas. Here in Freedom Café.

It’s too much of a surprise to him. It’s too much unexpected meaning. He has not seen it out in the world, adorning a human being, in a long, long time. He looks a moment too long.

“Whatcha starin’ at?” says the skinhead with the swastika between his eyebrows. In the local accent—flat, expressionless—his mellifluous, calm local voice at odds with his fierce appearance.

Peke blinks, as if to blink away a dream.

The seventy-two-year-old man turns. As if obediently. As if in submission.

But in fact to preserve his stealth. His mission. His dignity.

No longer looking at the skinheads directly—as if not daring to—he nods acknowledgment to them. What kind of acknowledgment, he has no clear idea.

He silently turns, steps carefully away. In a relieved moment, he finds himself back out in the dusty lot.

The skinheads smile to one another, sip their beers with renewed satisfaction.

Sorry-ass old man. Fuckin’ A.

P
eke stands alone at a rusted metal gate.

He has first driven the Fairlane past it slowly, twice.

He is miles from town. Miles from the McCane cabin. Miles from anywhere. He has not brought her. She would be good to have with him, useful camouflage, but he can’t do that to her. He cannot make her come out here with him, circling, checking, skulking around. So she is at the cabin.

The little device is flashing, squeaking, and bleating victoriously. As if in celebration of a job well done. Like fireworks celebrating a win—but focused, serious fireworks of only red. The red of severely focused alarm.

The gate is closed. Its thin metal bar is slung across the narrow dirt-road entrance like a flimsy curtain.

He looks carefully into the dry dirt below the gate. It doesn’t take a genius. The deep imprint of truck tires. Repetitive, twinning, crushed double-deep.

Eighteen wheels.

The tread edges angle back. Indicating, it would seem, movement up the dirt drive. He has become a casual student of truck tire treads, of eighteen-wheelers, at rest stops on his way across America.

He feels it welling up, irrepressible. A feeling from long ago.

This standing outside a gate.

There is something he wants in there. Somewhere up that winding dirt drive, the woods thick to both sides of it.

There is something he wants in there. Like the food he once craved. The shelter he once prayed for. The rest and sleep he dreamed of.

He feels it rising, an upward yet inward pressure of feeling that is pneumatic, nearly mechanical. Something primitive. That he has called on before. Become familiar with. More familiar than a person should have to be.

It comes from deep in him. Prelingual. Deeper in him than a person should have to know.

The art, the paintings, the cuisine, the hotels, the soirees, the ballets, the wines, all ripped away. All as if nothing. All as if never.

There’s something inside that gate. Something he needs.

It is a sensory, primitive welling-up . . .

It exists alongside his civility and patience, like a dog at his side. Obedient, heeling, silent, but alert—ready to attack, ready to go wild . . .

He is an animal again.

Back in the cabin, looking out at the rushing river, he picks up the old, black rotary phone. The dial tone is loud, flat, somehow old-fashioned as well. His cell phone doesn’t work out here. No cell towers—not enough people. But the beeping device works off satellites. Works anywhere. Like a heartbeat.
There are no lost
, he thinks again.

He knows the number. Dials it and says his own name and that of the person he’s calling for the first of several times, repeating both
names as he makes his way up the hierarchy. He closes the window, shutting out the sound of the rushing water to hear better. He has waited until Rose is out for her walk.

In a few minutes, he gets him at last. “Daniel,” he says.

“Dad.” Peke can hear the note of a child’s surprise, even though modulated, smoothed over, in the voice of an adult. And with it, instantly, the accompanying note of caution, of protective reserve. It pains him. But it is at least familiar pain.

“How are you?
Where
are you?” his son asks.

“Fishing in Montana,” says Peke.

“Fishing in Montana,” his son repeats, not knowing how else to respond, or what to say after it.

“I bought a cowboy hat and boots,” says Peke.

“You didn’t.”

“Oh, I did.”

“Well, you two enjoy yourselves,” says Daniel. “You deserve it.”

“I have a favor to ask,” says Peke suddenly.

He knows the statement will be met with dumbstruck silence. He is famous among his children for never asking for anything. For never in their childhood revealing any need, or ambition, or wish, or dream.