Naturally, I was in Storrs the next morning at 8 a.m.
The McMahon shipment wasn’t a corporate job. She was a cash-paying customer, what we call a COD. The McMahons had lived in New Mexico for thirty years. Mr. McMahon was a professor of some kind and a consultant to the Native American community near the Four Corners. When he was diagnosed with cancer, he told his wife he wanted to move back to Connecticut for treatment. Mrs. McMahon, in ill health herself, was not in favor, but she dutifully called the movers and arranged for the move back to Storrs. The McMahons loaded their 22,000 pounds of household goods, including several thousand Native American artifacts, and went east. They weren’t looking for the Next Big Thing; they were looking for good health care and a closer family circle. They settled into an old white colonial house with black shutters. A few months after their arrival, Professor McMahon went to the hospital complaining of a sore throat. They diagnosed a mild infection, and since he was in chemo, they admitted him for the night. This was on a Sunday. On the Monday he contracted a staph infection, probably from the hospital, but who knows. Tuesday morning he was dead.
Tuesday afternoon Mrs. McMahon called Joyce Van Lines. She was going back to New Mexico at once, she said, and needed to arrange everything that day. Willie himself came out to do the estimate, since everyone else was busy. She told him he needed to get a truck and crew there the next morning for a full pack and load, and the driver needed to be in New Mexico on Sunday. Willie agreed to all of it.
When we arrived, I knocked on the door, heard a faint “Come in,” and walked in with my crew. There she was, on the sofa, half supine, wheezing. The eight of us looked at her. She looked at us for a moment and sat up. Regardless of everything else, Willie was right about Mrs. McMahon being a character. She was a heavy woman in her early seventies with dyed jet-black hair. Perhaps heavy is not quite accurate; gargantuan might be better. Mrs. McMahon had piercing, smart, gray eyes, a permanent sardonic grin, and a plastic hose attached to her nostrils. There was a big tank of oxygen in the corner of the room and about a hundred feet of hose coiled up leading to her nose. When I say a big oxygen tank, I mean the industrial ones about five feet tall. Mrs. McMahon eyed me with a knowing half grin.
“Mr. Murphy, I presume. Your employer, Mr. Joyce, tells me you’re the Great White Mover. What exactly does that mean? Who are the rest of these people? I like to be on a first-name basis with anyone going through my underwear drawers, my basement, and my bathroom. Step up, gentlemen!”
“Well, Mrs. McMahon,” I started out, “this is Nate, Carl, Mike, Carlos, Bobby, Lou, and Waldo.”
“Ha! I don’t believe any of it. Did you ever get on the phone with one of those call centers in India? Some guy you can barely understand says, ‘Good afternoon, thank you for your call, my name is Ralph,’ when you know his name is really Runjeev or Gohar or something. No aliases! What about you, Mr. Good-looking Black Man?”
“I really am Nate. I was christened Nathaniel.”
“What about you?”
“I’m Carlos, ma’am. Mike is Mike, That’s Francisco, Roberto, Luis, and nobody knows Waldo’s real name. We’ve tried for years, ma’am. He won’t tell anybody.”
“You, Waldo, come over here.”
“Si, yes, oui?” Waldo stammered in heavily accented something or other.
“Look at me, Mr. Waldo. I can’t breathe, I can barely see, and I know I’m on short time here on planet Earth. I lost my husband of fifty-five years yesterday. I don’t broach any bullshit. What’s your real name?”
“Frederico.”
“Excellent. You can all call me Mrs. McMahon. Now you, Mr. Great White Mover, there’s a question on the table. Are you Kiowa, Southern Cheyenne, one of those crazy Utes? With a name like that you sound like a chief.”
“I’m a hundred percent Irish, Mrs. McMahon. I’m also the chief of this team today. The term Great White Mover is a kind of joke. I am like an Indian chief, in that I’m doomed to extinction. There are so few white drivers left in this business, Mr. Joyce started calling me the Great White Mover. He thinks I’m going to be the last one. It’s evocative of a bygone time. It’s not a racist thing.”
“I didn’t think it was a racist thing. I imagine you’re pretty ecumenical down in the laboring trenches.”
“Essentially nonsectarian, ma’am.”
“Excellent again. A man with a vocabulary. Evocative. Nonsectarian. We’ll get along, I think, Mr. Great White Mover. Should I call you Mr. Great or Mr. White or Mr. Mover?”
“Finn will do fine.”
“Finn? Like a resident of Suomi or the directional appendage of a piscine?”
“Suomi, ma’am.”
“Good, Mr. Finn. Now, don’t you gentlemen have work to do? I’m out of here today, remember? No excuses. Everything is going in the truck except for the suitcase next to me, the oxygen tanks, and the contents of my medicine cabinet. You mess with any of those and it’ll be a short day, because I’ll be dead. I have lunch ordered for 1 p.m. I’ve ordered a bunch of crap from the deli slathered with cheese and unidentifiable meat along with an array of liquid carbonated sugar poisons. That will suffice?”
Nate broke in laughing, “That’s perfect, ma’am. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome, Mr. Nate. If you guys work assiduously, I’ll arrange for some dinner also. I suspect we’ll all be together until the evening. If you don’t work assiduously, you can go hungry. Unfortunately, or maybe not, I learned about food too late in life to do anything about it. I’m living with the consequences, barely. It’s an interesting existential question: If I had learned about food thirty years ago, would I have changed my habits? Probably not. People don’t change their habits, do they, Mr. Nate?”
“Not often, ma’am.”
“Do you see that long hose over there, gentlemen? I can get to any corner of the house to check on you, and checking I will do. No goldbricking or I’ll catch you. I’m smart and I’m nosy. We will be finished today. That’s not negotiable.”
The crew scattered to start their work. We’d all worked together before on full-service moves, and they knew exactly what to do. I sat down with Mrs. McMahon and was going over some details when a bald, slim man of about forty came in.
“Ah, Kevin. Glad you’re here. This is Finn. He’s the driver. Calls himself the Great White Mover. Finn, Kevin is my son. He lives over in Danbury.” We shook hands.
“I’m pleased to meet you, Kevin. I’m very sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you. I’ll be here to help Mom through the move. I’ll also be in New Mexico.”
“That’s great. Your mother and I were just going over some stuff. Here’s the way I understand things so far: First, we need to finish everything today. I’ve got a large, very experienced crew, but there are a lot of items here. We’ll probably be here until nine or ten tonight.”
“We expected that,” said Kevin.