Moving Day: A Thriller (29 page)

Because despite the pain they have haphazardly inflicted, despite the aura of threat and lawlessness and implicit finality that hangs over the living room, he finds he’s able to handle it. To remain calm. Perhaps because he is not surprised by any of it. Expected it. Predicted it. It is the dark subcellar of human behavior; a dark, damp, unspecified corner of hell that Dante missed, but he finds he can function within it.

To be taped up like this, unable to move, it is like a paralysis, and the risk is that your mind will follow suit. At first you pull, you bristle, you bridle, with equal physical and mental vigor, but then paralysis and numbness set in and you begin to feel it is the order of things, that it has a certain inevitability; even, you begin to feel, a certain justice. But that is what you must guard against: lying back in the warm sun, floating powerless down the river on a current of suffering.
No. Resist. No.

In that insinuating numbness, he is aware of his own brain beginning its little minuet with reality—its soft, creeping retreat from the horror of the here and now. He is aware of his own mind’s recesses and caverns starting to gently taunt him . . .

Soon the sight of the two shadowed figures in the small, dim-lit kitchen in front of him, from the enforced viewing angle of this nailed-down chair, these taped-down arms and legs, his current fate of mere powerless observation, slants into a vision of two other figures, hulking and indistinct, in another small, dim kitchen, where he is similarly contained in—what is it? a hard-backed, homemade pine high chair?—and he hears the mutter of those voices, too, incomprehensible except as a river of familiarity, a tide of belonging. Olfactory memory assaults him from some preconscious place. He is suddenly bathed in the scents from that high chair—barnyard scents carried through the open curtained window; piquant root smells from deep within the dark kitchen; the thick, cloying smell of that ancient, reddish pine planking beneath him. And now those
immense, dark-draped figures are moving lugubriously in front of him, their muted tones of dress and speech, their obsessive turning to regard and consider him, turning those huge brown eyes on him.
Mammen . . . Foter . . .

He blinks. He shudders. An ancient fury resurfaces sharply to prick the vision, to pull him out . . .

The ending, the finality he faces here, feels suddenly more inevitable and conclusive to him by bringing him back to the beginning, to his earliest sense memories. The vision—still hovering, still reverberating—juxtaposes his current hatred with that long-ago love. Contraposes his will to escape with a tenor of belonging, a primal tug of home. Matches this present with that past—tauntingly, teasingly, meanly, absurdly . . .

Resist . . . Resist . . .

“I have to shit,” he says. “Do you want me to shit myself and stink up your room? You couldn’t stand the stench of this old Jew—believe me, you’ve never smelled anything like it. You couldn’t stand here, torturing me with that stench. You’d miss all your fun.”
Cajole, insinuate, prod. Worm inside their heads, peck at their brains.
The thoughts and words come easily, he finds. The filth, the absurdities, are readily available, as if dormant inside him, waiting for just such a release.

He has to shit. They puzzle over this. Absorbing the unpredicted situation. How to proceed. They’ve been instructed, he imagines, to never let the Jew out of their sight. Not for a moment. The wily, sneaky Jew.

He presses. He pushes. “I’ve got to go,” he tells them. “I’ve got no choice. I’m going to have to shit my pants. And you won’t want to guard me after that, believe me.” An old man who can’t control his bowels. An indignity of age. He adds some moans, some pained writhing, sounds of desperation that are easy to summon by their close relationship to the truth.

“Let’s kill him before he has to shit,” proposes the middle one. It has an appealing neatness to it, a Nazi problem-solving efficiency. But that is too sudden, too soon for the rest of them. It seems too radical a solution to the matter of shitting.

“We could give him a pot or bowl to hold under himself,” suggests the skinny one.

“And which of you is going to carry my shit out?” Peke asks with rhetorical flourish. “Which of you is going to handle that task for me? Perform that service? Carry the shit of a Jew?” He punctuates the urgency once more with a long moan.

Absurdly, he has command. Improbably, he controls the scene. Tied in his chair, he holds center stage. And he highlights this absurdity, rubs it in, with a wildly stentorian, commanding vocal delivery. He gives his accent free rein, elevates it into caricature. To reinforce the absurdity of the situation. To reinforce the impression of his command. To challenge the Colonel with a direct mocking imitation of the Colonel’s command.

“He goes to the bathroom.” The old Colonel, wresting back control. “Where we all watch him.”
In case you intend to try something, Jew. Something in the walk to the bathroom. Something with the bathroom window.
“We see how the Jew does it,” says the Colonel.
We turn the occasion into an opportunity to demean you.

With their hunting knives—knives Peke knows are as common as keys here in the Montana woods, part of dressing in the morning—the beefy one and the muscled one sever the tape across Peke’s waist and thighs and knees with a purposeful air of carelessness, cutting him out of the chair. They leave his hands taped behind his back.

They lumber together—Peke, the Colonel, the skinheads—a humpbacked beast of hatred and antagonism, a perverse processional—down the narrow hall to the bathroom.

The bathroom—a narrow L, the toilet tucked into the elbow at the far end—can hardly hold five people, no matter how they
arrange themselves in it, no matter what the circumstances, and the immediate uncomfortable looks exchanged between the skinheads and the Colonel seem a recognition of this.

Peke doesn’t miss the opportunity. “And who is going to undo my pants for me?” Peke looks at them, challenging.

They have not thought of this, of course. As they have not thought of anything. But here they are in the bathroom, they’ve already cut the tape that was around his waist, across his thighs and calves, they’ve come this far, they will somehow see it through. Again, there is procrastination, inertia, a hope that the need for decision will disappear.

“Hurry. I feel it coming . . . ,” moans Peke insistently.

Still he has the control. He is about to defecate in front of them, and still he has the control.

The big, beefy one seems to sense that, and can’t stand it, and storms out of the bathroom in disgust, knocking aside the thin bathroom door so it trembles in his angry exit.

The Colonel makes no move but looks to the other skinheads. With what they must take to be a regard of authority, of hierarchy.

Because the middle-size one unhitches Peke’s belt and pants top, then—pressing a black boot to Peke’s stomach—kicks him down onto the seat of the open toilet. That’s how he does it. How he wrestles back dignity from the situation.

Peke, forced suddenly into a sitting position, hands taped behind him, now attempts to wriggle his pants and underwear down his thighs as far as necessary. Shifting, twisting, he manages to pull pants and underwear sufficiently down his white thighs.

He leans back gingerly against the tank of the toilet to adjust himself on the oval seat. Then he hunches forward somewhat. Grunts, as if approvingly, at his arrival in position.

He looks up at them. They stare at him. Peke squatting on the can. His old man’s genitals, gray-haired, hoary, pendulous.

“You like to watch?” Peke inquires. Turning on the accent even more now; it is overflowing, florid. He looks at the skinny, smallest one, positioned behind the others. “It’s fun for you, yes?” He gestures to the Colonel. “But more fun for him, I assure you.” The bluffest, broadest bathroom humor, from the rich Jew. It confuses them, he hopes, usurps them in their vileness, since they are supposed to be the vile ones.

“It’s circumcised,” he informs them, pretending to have seen them staring. “You know who’s circumcised? Only two groups in the world. Real Jews and real Americans. The only ones. That’s why the Jews chose America, you know. So we could hide among the circumcised cocks.” He doesn’t know where this comes from. He listens, amazed by this idea. At least as amazed as his audience. “Let’s see yours,” he says with seriousness, with camaraderie. “C’mon, let’s see yours. Let’s see if you’re real Jews or real Americans. Or are you neither one? Is that why you’re ashamed to show them? Because you’re neither one?”

“I’m gonna tape his fuckin’ mouth,” says the middle one, shifting itchily in the little bathroom, threateningly, explosive. Realizing they have not done this right at all but are now stuck. Fuck—they are
his
prisoners. The skinhead kicks the wall in frustrated punctuation. “When we tape him up again, I’m tapin’ that mouth.”

There is silence as Peke shits. A holy pause, a moment of suspension and fascination. He mutters. He strains, for their benefit. They watch. “You see,” he says, breathing, “just like you. No different. The same.” Alternating continually, confusingly, purposefully, between the declarations they can’t believe, and the assertions they don’t doubt.
Needle, cajole, annoy. Engage, engage . . .

A group of strangers watching you shit. Is that the opposite of aloneness? The opposite of lost? Or another variant of lost, of alone . . .

In a moment, waving his taped hands modestly behind him like a wagging duck tail—something mocking in its very motion—he
asks in a manner so cheerful, so succinctly crafted, that it is obvious he has been gleefully waiting for this moment to ask:

“So, who will wipe me? Who volunteers?”

They haven’t anticipated this either. Once again, they don’t know what to do. It is as if each succeeding moment has been calibrated to add another layer of incompetence and embarrassment. Should they cut his hands loose? But Nick must have said not to untie him no matter what, and they are already partly in violation of that, not knowing how else to accommodate the predicament. And anyway, which of them would even get near Peke’s hands right now to cut the tape?

“Or should I come back to you unwiped, and we’ll enjoy the scent together?”

Crasser than they. Less civil than even they can imagine.

It is too much for them.

“Wipe with your hands tied,” the Colonel commands curtly, reddening, trying to maintain control and authority—a ridiculous aim, given the circumstance.

“Ah, so you’ve imagined me wiping and you think it can be done? You’ve had fun imagining me doing it . . .”

“Wipe!” the Colonel shrieks, nearly frantic, explosive. “Wipe!”

Peke looks at him and shrugs.

Hands behind his back, he bends down awkwardly, shuffles sideways, to reach the toilet paper roll perched on the freestanding plastic shelf next to the toilet.

He succeeds in unrolling a portion of it, pulling it off the roll.

He also feels for the nail scissors that he knows are next to the toilet roll. He finds them with his fingers, tucks them quickly beneath the palm of one hand, keeps them tucked in that hand as he manages to wipe.

The scissors that he saw among the toiletries on the plastic shelf when he used this toilet a week ago.

When he saw how narrow and uncomfortable the bathroom is. Thinking—while tied to the chair—how its narrowness and L-shape would necessarily limit the number of observers and the effectiveness of their observations.

The purpose of his trip to the bathroom was not primarily to shit, of course, but he waited until he could, to make that seem the purpose.

The little plastic shelf next to the toilet: on it the roll of toilet paper. Deodorant. Shampoo. Nail scissors. A spray disinfectant. More of the thief’s organizational zealotry, he had thought, seeing it that first time, wondering for a brief moment about the thief’s sexual preference, given this neat, prim arrangement of items next to the toilet, and the tasteful bedroom where he saw the jeweled watch. Such surprising touches amid the farmhouse’s general male chaos.

There is, he realizes with gratitude now, nothing wrong with his memory whatsoever.

His body provides a natural shield from their seeing what he is doing. Amid his sputter of scatological jokes and speculations and barbs, they are not inclined to look too closely either.

If he smudges some of his own feces on the nail scissors, so be it. If he accidentally cuts himself in the unfamiliar simultaneous actions of holding the scissors and wiping his anus, so be it. They won’t see any blood. It would only run into his pants. And he can work somewhat slowly. They will assume it is simply his wiping. They will assume it takes an old man some time to wipe. Especially an old man with his hands taped together behind him.

He stands up, leans partly forward, squats awkwardly, to accomplish the wiping.

Perhaps they think this is how any old man wipes.

Perhaps they think this is how you have to wipe with your hands taped behind your back.

Perhaps they think this is how a Jew wipes. Standing like this. Different from them.

As he finishes, he is able to drop the used panels of toilet paper directly into the toilet, grapple for and press the flush lever, even to pull his pants partway up, to his knees, before looking up at them, exasperated, that he can’t pull his pants up all the way.

As the muscled one steps forward, Peke presses the scissors deeper into his own hand. The muscled one hitches Peke’s belt loosely, and then—given the events and frustrations of the last few minutes, and the sense of belittlement where there should have been domination, and such proximity and opportunity—he kicks Stanley Peke in the gray, dangling, too-tempting balls.

Peke gasps. Falls back awkwardly onto the open toilet. The pain goes hot, searing, instantaneous through his body like an electric jolt.

In a moment, he realizes he has opened his hands. He’s no longer gripping the nail scissors.

A new pain sears him inside his forehead, deep inside his chest. The interior pain of a crucial mistake—equally unbearable in its own way.