By noon I had carried everything from the basement and set it outside the truck. All the truck doors were open, and Willie could see everything, so he worked my chowder into holes in his tiers as he loaded. He was in his loading trance. He had a picture in his mind of every item in the house and was visualizing the location of the next piece in the tier. He and Jeff had been working together for years, and Jeff was prescient about what Willie would want next.
When we stopped for lunch, we all sat down inside the trailer in the shade. (Movers never eat in the shipper’s house.) I had brought a peanut butter sandwich, two Oreos, and a bottle of Gatorade. Jeff brought his cooler into the truck and undid the clasp. The thing popped open like a jack-in-the-box. Jeff pulled out two loaves of Wonder Bread and what appeared to be the entire contents of an Italian deli: ham, salami, roast beef, tuna, egg salad, macaroni salad, four kinds of cheese, French’s mustard, Dijon mustard, horseradish, mayonnaise, potato salad, napkins, cutlery, a couple of 64-ounce bottles of Coke, a couple of bottles of Gatorade, and an entire cherry pie. In a bag next to the cooler were the dry goods: a jumbo bag of Doritos, a jar of peanut butter, a jar of Bonne Maman jelly, two boxes of Fig Newtons, and a banana. While I morosely munched my sandwich and eyed Jeff’s larder, Willie, still in his loading trance, stared remotely into the distance, no doubt building the after-lunch tier in his head. Willie also knew there was no way we were going to get everything into this trailer and we’d have to leave some things behind. It’s called an overflow. Mr. Tabb would not like that, and John Callahan wouldn’t either, so Willie was trying to figure out when to break the bad news. Finally, he was figuring how to maximize the weight of the load, because he’s paid by weight. Whoever was going to take the overflow might as well take the thin metal shelving, the clothing cartons, and all the other light, bulky stuff. Willie would take the file cabinets, book cartons, refrigerators, dressers, gun safe, and dumbbells. On the other hand, Mr. Tabb would go crazy if the overflow took a week or so to get there, leaving him with no clothes. It was a tricky problem, and Willie wandered around during the fifteen minutes he allowed for lunch, idly nibbling a Fig Newton. Jeff, meanwhile, had built himself a four-decker Dagwood using half the first loaf of Wonder Bread. It was disgusting. Jeff was gorging himself like Jabba the Hutt, shoving whatever he could get into his mouth and spilling the Coke down his front. This was the second time in less than eighteen hours I’d seen someone eat like that.
When lunch was over, Willie informed us that since we’d had such an easy morning there would be no breaks the rest of the day. He told Jeff to empty the library, so Jeff brought out his prized humpstrap. (A humpstrap is a hemp mesh strap about three inches wide and ten feet long, which can be used to efficiently move large items. It is particularly useful for negotiating a bureau or dresser down a twisted set of stairs and for carrying multiple cartons.) In the library, Jeff laid his humpstrap on the floor, stacked five book cartons on it, and then laid a second row of five. He picked up the strap, twisted it tight against his chest, leaned over, transferring the weight onto his back, and carried ten book cartons (about 500 pounds) down two flights of stairs into the truck. Jeff is an animal. Willie had the gleam in his eye once he’d seen Jeff bring down over 7,000 pounds of books. If Willie could smile while he was working, he’d have smiled then.
All of us were in that sweet spot now that we’d established the rhythm. Willie built his tiers: dresser, piano, nightstands, end tables, dining room chairs, chowder. Next tier: washer, dryer, overstuffed furniture, chowder. Next tier: tool bench, cartons, chowder. We worked nine hours after lunch nonstop. By 9 p.m. the pile of chowder in the driveway was gone, and there was room for one more tier. Jeff brought out a row of six fireproof file cabinets. At 9:45 Willie closed the trailer doors; we were full. I was fried to a crisp and sat on the grass to light up a smoke. Jeff was on a ladder attaching straps to the slots on the outside of the trailer. Willie looked at me like I’d gone crazy and told me to get the rest of the file cabinets from the office.
“What for?” I asked. “There’s no more room.”
“Get them.”
Willie pulled out the tailgate, a steel platform hidden under the rear bumper, while I went inside and wheeled out the six file cabinets. He set them up on the tailgate and stacked a lawn mower, a picnic table, and the ladder on top. Another 1,500 pounds. Jeff covered the load with a tarp and strapped it all in using the side clips. It was 10:15.
Mr. Tabb was unhappy about the overflow, but he was too exhausted to care very much. Willie had waited until the end to tell him for that very reason. I was exhausted too. I climbed into the cab and tried to arrange a place to sit. The seat area was taken up with Willie’s toolbox, moving pads, and a four-wheel dolly that wouldn’t fit in the trailer. I perched there for the twenty-minute ride back to Callahan’s. I found out later that the shipment weighed 25,750 pounds. Willie netted almost five grand on the Tabb move, bringing his eight-day net to a shade less than $8,000. Callahan Bros. made way more than that. I made $140 on a day when I would have normally made $56. Walking home after Willie dropped me off, I was in an endorphin-induced euphoria. Yes, I was completely exhausted, but I was exultant too. I had been a key member of a professional team with a fixed and difficult objective. Nobody had wasted a word or a motion through sixteen hours of totally focused execution. Give me more of that! I collapsed into bed happier than I’d been for as long as I could remember.
From then on I was Willie’s lumper whenever he came to Connecticut. I even got a road trip out of it when he had to do a quick turn to Virginia Beach. He was traveling at that point with Diana, a preppie chick with a perfect figure, fine features, and a bubbly personality. For an ugly guy, Willie had a way with women. I never did understand it and still don’t. Diana had been trained for voice. She had a playful “come to bed with me” singing voice like Joey Heatherton. I’ll always remember traveling Route 17 south toward Virginia Beach crossing the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel for the first time, at sunset, with Diana sitting cross-legged in the sleeper singing sixteenth-century madrigals. Willie told me that Diana had suggested early on that every time they crossed a new state line they should pull over and screw and see how many states they could cover. Diana rode the road with Willie for almost a year before they called it off. By the time she left they had notched off forty-six states.