Moving Day: A Thriller (23 page)

Only two hours north of LA’s frenzy, the Western highways are already empty. Interstate 5, through California desert, changes to Nevada in only a single, colorful road sign and the slightly different shade and sound of macadam, but not at all in the vast topography. They avoid the little traffic there is, the rare vehicle alongside them; they watch alertly for state troopers. But shaved heads in a Mercedes do not necessarily arouse suspicions in Southern California, thinks Peke, nor does a packed car on the road to Las Vegas.

He knows where they are going. He knew well before they turned north.

They are headed back to Montana.

In the Nevada desert, Swastika Between the Eyes—still at the wheel—can contain himself no longer.

From the driver’s seat, with no warning, he backhands Peke in the stomach. Peke gasps. Goes to swing in defense. But his arm is grabbed and held from the back, and he is pinned against his seat.

“Let’s kill him,” says the driver, with sudden childlike, unrestrained zeal.

“What’s wrong with you?” a backseat voice counters. “Where’s the fun in that?” They drive for a moment in a chaotic, unbalanced silence. “First, we have some laughs,” proposes the same backseat voice. “Then we can kill him.” The binary logic parsed out carefully, as if it is a complex sequence of events.

It would be mere bravado, but it’s said cold, without affect. Devoid of human connection. Like kids pulling legs off a frog. Said in that flat, unplaceable, vaguely American accent. Southern, Texan, Californian, could be anywhere. Soft, easy, languid, relaxed tones—the accent of combat heroes. But talking about killing a seventy-two-year-old man.

They drive in silence. “He’s old,” another backseat voice ruminates. “He can’t take much fun.”

The thief, seated directly behind him, says nothing in all this, Peke notices. Despite the bits of discussion that jump surly and half-expressed between the others, Peke still senses the man seated behind him is in charge. Peke knows that this man understands that Peke is worth a lot. It seems he is allowing the bravado to vent—it’s big talk, car talk—and at some point he will step in, take over, shut it down. Though it’s possible, Peke supposes, that it’s not mere car talk. What does the thief’s silence signify?

“Idiots,” says the brusque, businesslike voice behind him finally—weary, frustrated, explaining to children. “We tell his wife we’ll return him once we get what we want.” He can hear the thief breathing behind him. Ugly, heavy, animal breath. Breath heavy with experience, somehow. “Then . . . then we’ll see,” he says.

They’re headed for Montana.

Hotbed of freedom. Land of the Free Men. Believers in, defenders of, a Higher Justice. Montana.

He gets a glimpse at the swastika between the eyebrows again.

They didn’t catch him when he was seven.

But they have caught him now.

More than sixty years later.

More than sixty years borrowed; more than sixty years lived as if with something unknown, unseen, pursuing, something at his back. At least—at last—he can see what is pursuing him.

They have finally caught him.

And, oddly, there is some kind of resolution in that. Some sense of completion. A circle finally closing, fully forming. He knows at some level it is insane to feel that. And yet he feels it. There it is.

So much life. A family. The admiration, the respect, of others. A long interval of comfort, civilized life, and at least outward peace.

A dark little piece of him feels that he has stolen these sixty years. Pilfered them from a pile, tucked the years away under his tattered coat, like a seven-year-old boy, abashed, ashamed, living in the woods.

A dark little piece of him feels that somehow he had this coming.

T
he old man is silent.

Nick is, too, but feels there is some connection between the old man and him. That the others, the little neo-Nazi jerks, are interlopers, keeping the two of them from the fullness of that bond. That the Nazi jerks’ fierce, bland provincialism serves only to highlight this connection between the two of them, throw it into dramatic relief.

Nick envisions a conversation between them. An exchange of ideas.

They travel in silence, through the American West, all their polar individual identities, their contrary lives and outlooks, merging temporarily beneath the American sky that harbors them all.

“I’ve gotta piss,” says one of the backseat voices. “I’ll just piss right here on the carpet.” Peke hears the quick, arrogant whine of a zipper.

“Aww, man, you’ll stink it up in here.”

“What the fuck—it’s his car.”

“It’s my car,” says the brusque voice, quiet, low, sure. “And I’d rather you don’t piss in my Mercedes.” The authority clear—the consequences implied.

He is touring America again in his Mercedes, Peke thinks. He watches the changing sky, the great, dark, billowing clouds.

Occasionally, one or another of the young Nazis begins to speak about white Christian identity, Aryan superiority, obviously spewing some pamphlet or manifesto, but there is no fluency, no follow-up, no discourse. “We are the true descendants of Adam through Abel, and you are of the Mud Peoples,” explaining it to Peke in a prairie-flat cadence. A tutorial, delivered like immutable fact, as if in a one-room Great Plains schoolhouse. “You’re the issue of Satan’s seed, of his forcing himself on Eve . . .” “We are the true Lost Tribe, the Chosen People, and the Jews are the usurpers of our rightful place. But your conspiracy is now discovered . . .” “You’re Cain’s chaos, the seed line of the sinister . . .” They are mangled half-thoughts without context. Mind burps. Elevating, accreting, over time, over the highway, into brimstone declarations to the wide, empty sky above them. Though one of the declarations sticks with Peke in its diametrical simplicity, its reductive absurdity:
You are the people of darkness, and we are the people of the light
. As if there must be some measure of truth lurking in its purity.

To Nick, these declarations from the skinheads are the same as silence, in a way—white noise, he thinks—and he’s sure that if he is able to distance their inanities like that, push them away, the old man probably can, too.

“How’d you find me?” Nick finally asks casually, after a silence, with no acknowledgment of the preceding fanaticisms. As if he and Peke were old acquaintances.

“So you can avoid being found next time?” Peke counters sarcastically. His first words of the journey. The skinheads seem half startled, and fascinated, by the sound of his voice.

But Peke says nothing further. And doesn’t answer Nick’s question.

The man’s calm, the man’s serenity, is not helping his cause, thinks Nick.
Show some fear. Show some concern.

They stop at a railroad crossing, one of the few stops they are forced to make in more than a thousand miles. They have to wait ten minutes for a freight train to go by. The skinheads get out of the car and urinate next to its open doors, allowing Peke to do the same, watching him. Only cattle observe them. Much of the freight train is cattle cars, the cattle packed tight together, braying, whinnying, but patient, too, their heads pressed against the bars by other cattle, their clear, limpid, brown saucer eyes looking out. It’s a dose of Americana, thinks Nick, getting back in the car: a new-style cattle drive, on the ancient railway that opened up the American West.

But the scene sends Peke a different message, one whose echoes and reverberations overwhelm any redolence of Americana, of outdoor tradition, of big sky and freedom, which he, too, might otherwise have observed and absorbed. The cattle packed like that. He thinks about other trains, trains of people packed like these cattle, crossing open terrain beneath low, changeless sky, condensing hundreds, a thousand miles, into nothing, into meaninglessness, or else into a single meaning—making the mind turn those thousand boundless miles into a small, airless cell, into a hard nub of confinement.

He, of course, is in a Mercedes, his own Mercedes, packed with people—if you chose to call them that—headed into the woods.

And more than sixty years later than the terrified, confused passengers on those trains, he—in contrast—has history to help him imagine what fate might hold for him. He is terrified but not confused. He has history as his grim guide.

T
he police are with Rose, doing their soft-spoken Santa Barbara best to calm and console her while explaining again: for twenty-four hours, it can be only a Missing Persons. It can be only a report. They’ll ask officers on the street to keep an eye out, of course, but no more formal action can be taken yet. She is frantic, but they are firm.

He’s how old?

Seventy-two.

And in his own car?

Their doubts about this being anything serious are loud and unsubtle in their pointed questions.

It’s a Missing Persons, they tell her again, as if the repetition will make it more acceptable to her. There’s nothing we can do for twenty-four hours. Missing Persons. Nothing more. We just don’t have the manpower.

She can tell what they think: that he is simply lost in his own car. Has forgotten where he is or what he’s doing. Has neglected to call in. Or is simply unaware that she’s already back from Los Angeles.

He’s seventy-two, you say?

And how can she tell them the story about Montana and what happened there? It’s not believable to begin with; plus, she has no
corroborating details—he kept her away. She knows the address of the fishing shack, but nothing else. His chivalry, his habit of silence, his personality, all leave her in the dark.

Twenty-four hours might be too late.

“We’ll look for the Mercedes,” says the cop. “But, ma’am”—a reassuring Santa Barbara smile—“he’s probably fine.”

She looks at him hard. “He’s probably not.”

And she is sure—to her dismay—that she will be proved right.