Moving Day: A Thriller (38 page)

Peke trots around the corner of the barn in time to see the movement of the trees and tall grasses across the muddy expanse. In time to see a brown jacket moving against the green. In time to see the thief, hunched over, scurrying awkwardly into the woods.

At the moment, his rescuers are all occupied inside the barn. If he goes into the barn to tell them, to get their help, it will give the thief too much of a lead. Peke will lose sight of him. The thief will get away.

Peke can see the spot where the thief ducked into the woods.

Peke heads after him.

Nick stumbles on, bent over, awkward, but less dizzy, he notices, his various pains settling into a steady pulse now. He stops for a moment, listens, hears nothing.

Through the pain, he feels a moment of relief. A vague satisfaction, stronger at the moment than any regret. He is going to make it. He is going to make it out of here.

His wrists still sear, they are still on fire, but he finds he is somehow adjusting to it. He feels again the cold, rough iron of the crowbar against his wrists. He is like a dog, he thinks, chewing its leg off to escape a trap.

His abdomen still cripples him with deep swaths of pain. He is still doubled over. But he turns and stumbles on.

The old man must be dead in the barn. That must be what the black ski masks discovered. He has little doubt that the skinheads—impatient, frenzied, insane—finished off the old man. The black ski masks must be dealing with the skinheads now, probably more brutally than they dealt with Nick and his crew. Because now—if they’ve discovered the old man dead—their response is propelled by revenge.

Nick keeps moving, heading deeper into the woods. He starts to think about water, and food, and the cold temperature.
Good. Beginning to think like a survivor.
Thinking about these woods, in order to make it out of them.

The woods are marshy, swampy underfoot. There is a smell that hovers between fetid and sweet. He stumbles on.

Peke feels himself fly over the wet earth and packed leaves, fly past the black and gray tree trunks. He has not been in or moved
through woods like this for over sixty years. Of course, he has occasionally hiked a manicured trail with his wife. Played a game of hide-and-seek with his children in a tame local wooded park, walked in a hundred yards to see their elaborate stick forts, to see the handiwork of their imaginations. But those were not woods like this—wild and vast, directionless and dense. He has not run through woods like this since he was seven. Woods where now, once again, life and death are in the air.

He moves lithely. He surprises himself. He slips through unknown woods that nevertheless feel familiar. The woods where he began. The woods where he survived.

He is a child again. He feels Abel beside him. More than that. He can practically see Abel’s spirit next to him. But of course—Abel’s spirit has never left the woods. It has stayed here for more than sixty years, waiting for scrawny, clever little Pecoskowitz to rejoin him. He runs with Abel. He feels Abel next to him. In him.

And what will he do when he finds the thief? Is this some ultimate test of his humanity? Some final test of his being? A chance to rectify, to correct, in some broad way? But what is the rectification? What is the correction? He knows now there are limits to what he’ll do. And the seven-year-old wolf child in him knows—instinctually—that such limits pose an intense disadvantage.

And something else the wolf child knows, something else beneath expression: he’s been permitted to experience survival. To experience it again. But you are not permitted it indefinitely.

All of it charges dimly through his mind as he runs.

In a few minutes, he stops. Listens. Hears nothing. His pounding heart, his invigorated chest and torso, nevertheless feel pressed in by dejection and defeat.

He suppresses his own heavy breathing for a moment, to listen again. He hears it now. Off to the right. Maybe fifty yards away. The awkward scrape of brush. He can tell it’s the scraping, the
awkward movement, that results from injury. He can hear it is the scrape, the movement, of desperation. He can hear it. He can feel it. Like being attuned to the weakness of prey. Fifty yards through the woods. He moves lightly, silently.

Nick struggles through the woods, and in a terrain where thick layers of leaves cover tree roots and stumps and fallen branches, he trips on a stump and falls. In his extreme state of pain, the tripping and falling—which would otherwise be nothing—is a major event. He cries out involuntarily. He hears his own crying out echoing around him, and echoing in his head. The fresh pain threatens his consciousness, flirts and plays with it. He finds himself on his knees, clenching his stomach. He is sickly, woozily aware of the soaking, marshy ground less than a foot in front of his eyes. His hands sink into it. It fills his senses.

He waits a moment there, gathering his senses and his strength. He pushes himself, like a rising hero, up off the ground, manages to straighten, and looks ahead.

There is a soldier in a uniform—a formal, old war uniform—standing ten feet in front of him.

Nick sucks in his breath in startlement.

Amid his pain, he blinks to focus.

It is the old man.

Last seen taped to the chair. After that, Nick only imagined him. Only vaguely. Not vividly enough. Not as vividly as now. The uniform is only the most obvious difference about him, Nick senses a moment later. Something in the old Jew has changed. He is livelier.
Energized. Is it the uniform, or the woods, or both that have brought this new aliveness into the old Jew? The old man’s eyes stare at Nick from somewhere else.

Nick watches those eyes travel coldly, appraisingly around Nick’s face and body. Taking an inventory of Nick’s injuries, Nick can see. Nick remains hunched over in abdominal pain. His face is creased with his anguish. There is no hiding his injuries from the old man.

The old Jew holds a long stick at his side. A staff that seems as natural, at home, in the old man’s fist as the old man somehow seems in these woods. In that strange, old military uniform—like a ghost or creature that has inhabited these woods forever.

Both are aware of the shift. Peke, the hunted, is now the hunter. Nick, the hunter, is now the hunted. Both can see awareness of the shift, of the reversal, in the other’s eyes. This reversal creates a kind of balance to events, presaging some sort of conclusion. Both know the end of the story is near.

Something primal will take place here. Something above words, or beneath them. So nothing is said. Whatever happens now, though neither knows what that will be, both know that words are superfluous.

He feels as if he has ceased to exist. As if he has died, and returned as a mythological creature. A dybbuk from Jewish myth, roaming the woods. But he is a unique creature of modern mythology. Half-Nazi, half-Jew.

He stands in front of Nick. Physically and symbolically blocking Nick’s motion in any direction.

He begins to move around him as if around prey. Aware of that sense of it. He imagines that Nick senses it that way, too.

Nick is panting. Still gasping deeply from the fall, from the wounds, from the pain; from the searing wrists, the left one probably broken, judging by the angle of it; from the blows to the abdomen.

Peke, in contrast with the heavy panting and gasping, is preternaturally silent.

They both listen to Nick’s gasping, his labored breathing.

A thief
, he thinks, looking at Nick. A particularly cunning and adept one, but nothing more than a thief. Through some obsession, some compulsion, this thief took Peke’s things, and Peke was clever and determined enough to get them back.

A thief is low in the order of things. A thief is hungry. It is a hunger of some sort. Peke has known hungers, too.

But then the thief took Peke. Tied him to a chair, rendered him chattel, a slave, to negotiate his precise value with Peke’s wife, to terrify her with the tactic. Was it still mere thievery to the thief? Or was it then about vengeance? Was it then about teaching the Jew a lesson? Understanding it or not, the thief put himself into a deeper alliance with evil.

Peke feels all his civility, all his rationality, still pushing at him from some neat, organized place within him, despite this charged moment, despite the forces now unleashed, like ghosts and spirits suddenly alight in the woods.

He feels all his rationality, his understanding about the thief seeking vengeance, the clear logic of the argument. But all that rationality and understanding seems irrelevant amid the ghosts.

He begins to sense it is not the thief who is caught out here in the woods. It is him.