Moving Day: A Thriller (13 page)

Sometimes, in a flash here or there, it appears simple: in a life robbed of justice, he intends to see some done.

And where justice leaves off and revenge begins? He knows that is impossible for him to say. He knows that his past has left him no natural experience with justice, and so he has no reliable perspective from which to understand.

After Chicago, the country opens up slowly, steadily, to the elemental. To sky and land, to swaths of color, to immensity. As if the Mercedes is being poured from a bottleneck of urban density out into vastness and shapelessness, out into inexplicable space and plenty.

The bright busyness of western Illinois—gargantuan suburban malls glistening beside the interstate, anchor stores like mother ships in a universe of consumerism—gives way over hours, as if in a gradual shaving away, a more and more scrupulous scraping off of the busyness, to the fields and farms of central Iowa. Farmland, every inch of it eagerly sprouting, it seems, rows of greens and grains of such majesty and magnitude and nearly comical endlessness that Peke is certain America could feed the world—could feed the universe—just given the geopolitical chance.

The populace recedes, grows measurably less present—like a cast of midwestern millions making a gracious, prearranged exit with a bow.

An automobile passing the other way becomes a minor event. The accents of the hosts and callers on local talk radio grow flatter and more measured, as even as the land itself. The voices, and their words, become simpler, devoid of unnecessary expression—auditorily featureless, an aural equivalent of the topography. Eventually, Peke turns the radio off and they ride in silence. He listens to the hollow rubber thrum of the tires on the macadam, a low, industrious, unaltering note. The double yellow lines brighten where a municipality has proudly repainted and in the next county go faded and sorry again. As there is a reduction of sensory input, there is a reduction to one’s thoughts, too, Peke notices. They seem to become elemental as well. The sameness and predictability of the road and view reduce the sense of question in him. Reduce interior discussion to barely a murmur. He is soon following the lines and the road as unthinkingly as he is following the blinking of the black device. He fights sleep, yawns and shakes away the yawn, blinks himself into alertness—like any older American on a long drive. But the other septuagenarian cross-country drivers—the ones he sees occasionally, stretching at a rest stop, picking up a coffee—undoubtedly travel to the warming vision of an old college roommate, or a raucous class reunion, or a favorite grandchild at the other end of the drive. Or perhaps only the image of a quiet guest room over the garage. Or of a magnificent sixteenth hole. Where he has only his unknown destination, his blind rendezvous. Its hundred possible outcomes combine and collapse in his mind into a blurry blankness, though every outcome features the thief. The thief Peke thought was only a uniformed foreman, so his physical image remains blurry, too.

Even after all these years, he finds he still has the extra perspective, the extra appreciation, of a foreigner in America. Yet he also
feels the homeland pride, the sense of custody and connection, of being an American. A European American, an American European: he is having it both ways or inhabits some no-man’s-land in between.

And these sun-soaked, shimmering vistas. These picturesque farmhouses. This epic sky. Does it all shimmer like this because it is in some sense more real, more meaningful to him than to the next elderly traveler—who takes it for granted, who has known only this? Or does it shimmer this way because it is
unreal
—a fantasy, a borrowed view, a vision through glass that can be snatched away? Does his fractured past, a world and lifetime away, render this landscape more real? Or less? It fascinates him that he cannot really know.

West of Chicago, they switch their style: they begin to stay in motels and bed-and-breakfasts. After the Four Seasons, the motels and B and Bs seem not so much a comedown as an adventure. To get the flavor, the whiff, of authentic America. (Though Rose doesn’t ask explicitly, she also senses it is now time to be less recognizable. Now time to blend in, in order to watch.)

He had expected to experience immensity, and yet, with the hours ticking by, there’s an increasing sense of smallness. A manageability. Maybe it’s the big, insulating Mercedes. Maybe it’s the focused insistence of the little, black blinking device. The hours tick by, the landscape remains unchanged. But this now makes it seem small and knowable to him, rather than the reverse. Perhaps it’s his age: the huge clumps of time folding in on themselves, time that moved so slowly as a child, streaming along unrecognizably now. Perhaps it’s his hidden purpose, which holds him focused, unopen. Perhaps it’s the sum of his past experience, which leaves no room for new experience.

The pretense of a tour has fast evaporated. “We should be seeing caves. Looking at statues,” Rose says with forced jolliness. “We should be stopping at sights with postcard stands. We should be holding our guide books up to shield our eyes in the sun. Turning up our noses at cheap souvenirs, then buying them at the last second,” she says, accepting that it will never happen, that this is a different cross-country trip they’re making, but half meaning it, too. Half crying out for normalcy, for the foolish things, the standard activities and memories of older American couples.

He thinks about the device’s chancy battery connection, the extra draw on the watch’s power. The longer the device must deliver its signal, the more time there is for something to go wrong. It should be fine, according to its printed instructions, according to Itzhak’s somber nods, but Peke can’t be sure, and so it remains a small nodus of anxiety, tapping at him, keeping him moving.

Outside of Huron, South Dakota, in the light of early evening, they see a neon sign for the Stanley Motel, and Rose is gleefully insistent. The sharply pebbled driveway announces their arrival like the roll of a snare drum.

The motel’s whitewashed brick facade, its industrial carpeting over cement flooring, are sadly immaculate, as if this stark cleanliness is the only goal and purpose of its managers’ lives. Low, squat, thick, and solid, the building seems explicitly constructed to withstand the climate’s severity, and to have no aesthetic consideration beyond that. In the fading daylight, they see how the land stretches flat and featureless behind the motel—the sky and horizon their focal points by default, by the absence of any other. A squat, clean, spare motel, no frills and no nonsense: the spiritual descendant of the sod houses that once dotted the prairie, standing alone against the elements.

They eat at the diner across the street, choose meat loaf and three-bean salad delivered by a waitress close to three hundred
pounds, whose weariness is as abundant as she is. Yet she speaks with a high-pitched cheerfulness so unlikely from within that weary mass, her voice seems eerie and disembodied. Peke carefully calculates and recalculates the tip to be appropriately generous but not outrageous, to create satisfaction but not insult.

“At least Mount Rushmore,” Rose says from her side of the lumpy queen-size bed, staring at the cottage-cheese ceiling.

“It’ll be too far to the south of us,” Peke tells her.

“We’re crossing South Dakota, and we’re not going to see Rushmore?” she says, hoping to make it sound ludicrous.

“Graven images. It’s against my religion,” he jokes. “Big stone heads . . . like the self-commemorations of pharaohs.”

“Valuing the individual,” she counters—challenging both his doubtful point and his jokey spirit. “The primacy of the individual.”

“Sure. Standing in a line of hundreds at the park entrance for an hour. The primacy of the individual.”

“Where’s your democratic spirit? Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt.” As if the names alone are argument enough.

“Making gods of public servants? Hardly the democratic spirit. Their heads carved sixty feet high, set five hundred feet up—you think that’s the legacy they wanted? Perfect for Stalin or Mao. Which should tell you what these fellows would have thought of it.” He feels, beneath his argument, something more significant pawing at him. There is a kind of obscenity to this glorification of the individual juxtaposed against the numberless and nameless, the only ones who would remember them lying alongside them.

“The Avenue of Flags. Fifty-six states and territories. The Presidential Trail. The Shrine of Democracy.” She is joking now, tossing out terms from her handful of lobby brochures. She knows she has lost. She never expected to win. “Stanley Peke, are you an American, or aren’t you?”

They both know it is a question larger than her joke. He is. He isn’t. He is a firm believer. He kisses the soil, weeps in gratitude. And yet he doubts it all. Looks on his adopted land with narrow-eyed suspicion. Watches closely for the next human disaster. Inevitable as a storm.

He hears, beneath their exchange, their annoyance with each other. He knows her frustration with his inflexibility and willfulness. He feels his irritation at her teasing, her disrespectful, mocking challenge. They both hear attributes they know will not change in their lifetimes, and perhaps this gives them special resonance. At their age, the argument is never the argument. There is always a meaning beneath it. A half century into marriage, this much they understand. They just don’t know exactly what the meaning is.

Yes
, Rose thinks, lying there in the motel room’s preternatural quiet and dark.
Yes, godlike.
Stone, inflexible, immutable. Mutely heroic. Unknowable and inalterable . . . blindly admired and out of reach. And a mountainside of frustration. Frustration that rises into the sky. She doesn’t need the Rushmore visit, she realizes. She has Stanley.

Her doubts are no greater, no less, her questions no more or less answered, than when she stood at their wedding in a Manhattan hotel lobby almost fifty years ago. It was an assertively nondenominational event: a justice of the peace; a two-minute ceremony. And yet: he had the place swimming in flowers. Towering arrangements. Wrapping the columns. Overflowing from the window boxes. Garlanding the banisters and balustrades. He’d located a swing band in the seediest bowels of downtown, whose black female vocalist was a phenomenon. The night rode a crest of their friends’ high spirits undimmed and undiminished into morning. And the point was clear. Creating their own life. Making their own choices. Her proud, wealthy, fifth-generation Congregationalist parents stood
demurely by, masking their disappointment behind brave smiles. It was a spectacular, high-spirited night, but more than that, it was fully, inarguably, inviolately theirs. And who was this man standing next to her in the lobby, smiling warmly and securely on the dais, this man swinging her on the dance floor, laughing helplessly? This handsome man, self-assured, powerful, infinitely patient, unpredictably brusque? Who was he, exactly? But she understood, then and there, even as the justice of the peace spoke: He was who he would be. He was the future—his, hers, theirs. And he was as clearly committed to that future as to her. So she accepted not knowing, experienced her questions as part of an energy: swirling and spinning like the newly married couple on the dance floor.

Now she was not so blithe. Not so sure. A half century had inevitably provided, if not answers, exactly, then a
sense
of answers, circuitous and indirect. Which made the remaining questions feel starker and the questioner more exposed.