Moving Day: A Thriller (5 page)

In the end, he doesn’t know whether it has crept up into his consciousness or if it has been there all the time, while some part of him has vainly tried to suppress it. Suppress the parallels, which have loomed up, increasingly insistent. He realizes that this might be what Rose’s silence is actually about. Embarrassment. Discomfort. At recognizing the parallels, too, even from the little she knows of them. Seeing them before he did. Remaining silent, not wanting to make it worse. She fears, perhaps, that it is too much for him to handle, to take in. That it is too much for him to accept.

The uniformed men. The empty house.
It has happened to him before. As bizarre, as unpredictable, as unaccountable as what has just occurred is, it has occurred before. On another continent. In another life. He has tried to cut off the association, tried to bury it in the thick dirt and deep distance of the past. But it rises, powerful and insuppressible. An event poised fragilely between memory and actuality. Between the mind’s eye and the witness’s uncomprehending gaze.

The uniformed men. The empty house.
It has happened to him before.

The adjusters pull up. Get out of their nondescript sedan formally, funereally, though they’re both cherubically young.

“Stanley Peke?” the closer one asks, squinting at the figure seated on the slate front steps.

Peke nods curtly.

The accounting soon begins. Walking through the empty house, room by room, to let each room trigger his remembering. Going through the items again in his mind, individually—just as he had watched the items that day as the movers loaded them into the truck. But this time, the cataloging is only in memory. This time, there is only each object’s ghost form.

L
aFarge doesn’t mind all the lifting. He used to lift equipment in a rock band—keyboards, amplifiers—so it’s second nature. Got him off the streets of the Bronx, after his graffiti stage, that band did. This is like being in a rock band. The four guys. The guys you’re close to, you work with, you argue with, and then make up with. He misses the band and the music, but here the work is steady, the pay is good, and the only rule is you have to shut up about it. The lifting doesn’t bother him. You get to know the secrets of leverage and angles. It’s an art. You can do it even if you aren’t an especially big guy. And you get to see the country. Fancy places you never knew existed. Fancy homes. Rich people. Crisscrossing this great land. It’s an education. He has Nick to thank.

Nick probably wouldn’t have liked seeing him talking to the rich old man, LaFarge knows. Probably wouldn’t like it at all. Nick probably would be nervous. But LaFarge felt bad for the guy, rich or not. LaFarge knows it isn’t really hurting these people. They’re insured and all. They get over it. But he feels bad anyway.

They are at a rest stop, having a quick breakfast. Sitting on and standing around the rear gate of the truck with donut wrappers in their laps, a steady wind blowing off the interstate at them, carrying on it, even this early, that familiar oppressive highway hum.

The aimless discussion backs innocently, inadvertently into it. “I don’t know,” says LaFarge. “Seems awfully harsh. To even take their pictures . . .”

He knows as soon as he says it that it’s a mistake. A big one.

Nick looks at him, instantly annoyed. Instantly transformed. “Oh, that doesn’t work for you?”

LaFarge turns meek, goes silent. He says nothing more, but it’s already too late. He’s gone too far. He’s touched a nerve. Nick is already stewing, going molten. His anger like bile, once risen, unsettlable.

“OK, then, we won’t take the pictures,” Nick says coolly, his sarcasm hardly masking his anger. His anger at being questioned, being challenged.

He tosses the remains of his raisin bagel into the Dumpster alongside them—
you’ve ruined my breakfast
—lifts the back gate of the truck, disappears into it.

Emerges with a carton.

Standing on the gate of the truck, above them, he heaves it into the huge green Dumpster.

“There. We’re not taking the pictures.”

A half hour later, after driving in silence:

“You take the pictures because you need to take everything,” Nick says patiently, with exaggerated calm, as if explaining to a child. “Because you need it to be total annihilation. Total defeat. You don’t want them getting any ideas about mercy from you. You want to create the impression of professionalism”—the implication
clearly
with guys like you, LaFarge, it will be only an impression
—“so they know what they’re dealing with.”

The others stay silent. Listening.

“What’s the point of taking everything if you’re not going to take everything?”

They roll into the compound at night. 150 acres, dirt cheap—
dirt cheap
, in this case, having literal meaning. Paid for with cash, a form of payment that out here didn’t seem to raise an eyebrow. It’s about the ugliest 150 acres imaginable—scrub, dirt, pools of rusty standing water. But it’s his. And it works. And this is only storage anyway. This is business. His life is in Vegas and Miami Beach and twice a year in Rio. Trysts with the comically proportioned, cartoon-chested Viola. Her body offers constant reminders and visual assurance that it can never be a relationship. That this can never be anything more than a consumerist arrangement. Which gives him a sense of control that he needs. She’s a package on a shelf—a high, special shelf, out of the reach of others, he pretends—a package to take down, comport with, and replace back on the high shelf when finished. It is well suited to a loner. A loner with cash.

The crew knows about Viola. They don’t know about Armando, and they don’t have to.

Another difference that made his foster parents nervous, that made him nervous: a difference that wasn’t merely his intelligence.

But fine objects have always aroused him. And Viola and Armando, they’re both fine objects themselves. In both cases, it’s an arrangement. He doesn’t question it too much. That’s the meaning of the term
arrangement
—no questions.

Viola. Armando. It’s a reflection of his living outside the rules. That’s what he tells himself. That’s all he tells himself.

It has always concerned Nick a little that they are out here with the nuts. With the white separatists and the millennial fire-and-brimstone crowd and anti-IRS warriors and Aryan militias and ultra-Christians and Armageddonists. But what can you do? This is where his activities are the least suspicious. This is where his privacy will be respected. (Although he’s started to have the feeling all these personal-privacy hermits and land-rights extremists and off-the-grid kooks might in fact be nosier than anybody else, but they won’t act on whatever they might know or figure out.) This is where you can pull a semi in and out, and though people might talk, locals might mutter, they’ll keep it to themselves, if it ever comes to the involvement of any authority.

The cults—they always have these ramshackle compounds, don’t they? The guys who burn themselves up and go down firing and make suicide pacts and treat their children to poison juices. Is he in a cult, too? A cult of things, of objects? He’s obsessive. He might be just as obsessive as they are. Just as crazy. But his is no cult of death. His is a cult of survival.