MacGregor Tells the World

by Elizabeth Mckenzie

  “Where?”

  “Piano moving. Three or four days a week to start. I saw the ad this morning, called up, owner said, ‘Come down right now,’ hired me on the spot.” “Strong and experienced” said the ad, and he could claim both by fudging a little.

  “We’re having so much fun,” she whined.

  “I know it, but I’m low on cash.”

  “Molly’s only at camp one more week—”

  “I won’t be working all that much. I’ll still be fully available.”

  “No you won’t, you won’t at all.”

  She was mad? He sprayed the car one last time, whipped the hose into the grass. “Carolyn. Did you know that I used to play the piano?”

  No answer. “Carolyn?”

  “I used to play the lute,” she replied.

  “That’s what angels play in paintings. When did you stop?”

  “I was just about to say, ‘When I stopped being an angel in a painting,’ but I don’t know what I mean. When did you stop?”

  “A while back,” Mac said. “I’ve always wondered how my mother paid for my lessons. We were so poor she couldn’t even buy me shoes.”

  “No! A good pair of shoes is number one on every parent’s list.”

  “Not mine. She tried to make shoes! She took apart my old tight ones, used them as a pattern, cut out this weird piece of leather she scrounged somewhere. They were gross, man. Looked like goblin shoes.”

  “Sounds kind of arty.”

  Mac sat on the front steps, his wet feet covered with blades of grass. “When you’re a kid, who wants to be arty? I’d take them off and wear my socks around.”

  “Your mother had a job, didn’t she?”

  “Just shitty ones with minimum wage and tips.”

  “Making shoes sounds more like a choice, if you ask me. She was an artist. Maybe into the Pre-Raphaelites and William Morris?”

  He was impressed. “Actually, yes. You called my bluff.” He didn’t want their poverty to repulse her, so he backed down. “We’ll go out tomorrow evening and negotiate a labor agreement, okay?”

  “You won’t miss the party, will you?”

  The party at Galeotto House. Her parents would be there. He shuddered. “I’ll make it.”

  “I was planning— I really want you—to be there,” she said.

  “You okay?” Her voice sounded strange.

  “Fine!” she said before they hung up.

  It felt bad not to have a job, but bad to have one, too. That night he drank a beer but slept restlessly. In the night he thought more about his encounter with Carolyn’s father, and in the night, when thoughts were thick and woolly, he felt annoyed by the man’s bad memory and chagrined by Carolyn’s perverse fascinations and aroused by her anyway. He wondered why Ware had reacted so mechanically to the envelopes. He wondered how he could go further, looking into it.

  At dawn, a blue jay raiding a nest woke him before the alarm. Mac pushed himself from bed, roughed the bristles on his cheeks, ground his palms into his eye sockets, sniffled, coughed, pulled on his jeans, a T-shirt, a sweatshirt, favored socks, and his old work boots—then stumbled out to his car and drove down Whipple to 101, north to San Mateo, and found the warehouse east of the freeway.

  A small office had been jerry-built into the front of the warehouse. It contained two desks, several steel file cabinets, two cracked orange plastic chairs, and a ratty love seat stained by beverages of various hues. The owner of this business was named Dwight Dixon, and he was already at it, staring into his computer and wearing headphones attached to the telephone.

  “Got your own gloves?”

  “No,” said Mac.

  “Take these today, but get your own.” He yanked open a drawer in his desk, pulled out an oily-looking pair, and tossed them to Mac. “You’re starting with the Africans, and they’re ready to go.”

  “Okay. Thanks again,” said Mac.

  The Tanzanian was named Ahmed and the Kenyan was named Henry and they waved Mac straight into the cab of the shiny red Iveco, which was sending the smell of diesel into the warehouse, deposited the clipboard with the day’s bills of lading onto his lap, drove right from the lot to a café, ordered three lattes to go, then set off in the bobtail for the city. They had one conveyance stop on the way, as well as an upright player piano in the back, coming out of storage to an old man who had relocated and was ready to crank it up in his new place.

  The cab shook like a rock tumbler, and while his bosses enjoyed their hot drinks, Mac knocked a few shots straight up his nostrils, spilling the rest across his knees.

  “Piano moving,” explained Ahmed, “is a complex task which demands a great deal of strength and dedication to the art of transporting the value, beauty, and essence of the instrument. Each is crafted differently, therefore is one of a kind and cannot truly be replaced if damaged. We must always attempt to understand the customer’s attachment to their piano and treat the precious cargo as if it were our own.”

  Mac was impressed by the man’s delicacy of expression. “I’ll do my best.”

  “And yet it’s nearly every time a melodrama, no matter how well it goes,” Ahmed added.

  “So how’d you guys get into this?” Mac asked.

  Ahmed said, “In a previous life, I was an engineer. I wanted more control.”

  Henry said, “Now he has more control. I was a high-ranking party official. I wanted less.” The men laughed.

  “What about yourself?” asked Ahmed. “How did you come to the trade?”

  Mac said, “I think I just want to see some pianos again.”

  The men nodded with appreciation.

  They chugged into the city and stopped for their first job, at a music school on 19th Avenue. A straightforward task. Here they harnessed a baby grand to a rolling thing in one building and moved it to the next, through wide doors and ascending only three steps. Over and done in less than an hour. For this they were treated to pastries and orange slices, and the man who had contracted them gave them each a tip of ten dollars. “The day begins well,” said Ahmed.

  Back in the cab, taking off again, they lurched through the lights and traffic of the city, and Mac soon realized they were approaching Carolyn’s neighborhood. In fact, they came to a stop just a few blocks from her house, on Presidio, and parked beside a pollarded row of sycamores. Kind of French-looking, which always made him flinch.

  Ahmed said, “The chock blocks are located behind the seat.”

  Mac found the wood chunks—a couple of short four-by-eights—and wedged them under the front tires. The San Francisco hill rose steep and fast, and Mac gazed up at the building before them, a sheer white face of windows like a jury of judging eyes. Henry rolled down the ramp and called him into the back while Ahmed buzzed the door. Mac helped loosen the various straps restraining the player piano on the side wall. It was wrapped like a pupa in quilted blue blankets.

  “I cannot stress enough,” Henry said, indicating the shiny, well-maintained equipment on the floor of the truck, “that this is a very dangerous procedure, and not to be undertaken lightly. An inexperienced young man was crushed last year.”

  “You now have my full attention,” said Mac, thinking of the release form he’d signed when taking the job. Yes, he might be maimed or even killed. Fifteen dollars an hour.

  “At heart, I am still a government official,” said Henry.

  Ahmed emerged from the building, his face a picture of stress. “We have a problem. Dixon has made another bad telephone estimate. We need to consider a hoist.”

  “I would rather stick a bull for his blood,” said Henry.

  “Come see for yourself,” said Ahmed.

  The piano sat at the base of the ramp; Mac was assigned the job of guarding it. Guard it he did.

  A chilling wind blew from the damp foliage of the Presidio. Mac shivered, lit a cigarette.

  He had never seen a player piano, so he peeled back the moving blanket, loosened a strap, bunched up the cloth, and manag
ed to lift the lid off the keyboard. The keys were real ivory, with the swirling grain of wood. He rolled up his sleeves and dared to touch them. Then tried a few scales, considering the noise. Not too offensive. The soundboard was muffled in the blanket but still audible, so he wiggled his hands, cracked his knuckles, and continued. Shortly another idea occurred that he couldn’t resist, and he wrested his phone from his pocket.

  To his delight, Carolyn Ware answered right away, her voice friendly again.

  “Hey,” he said. “You free?”

  “Pretty free. Why?”

  “Can you walk over to the corner of Presidio and Washington? Like, right this second?”

  “Right this second? Okay.”

  “Terrific.” He liked how she didn’t ask why.

  Like trace elements of lead poisoning, the music was still inside him, wasn’t it? A few easy pieces sprang to mind, such as Chopin’s Ballad No. 2 and Mozart’s Fantasy in D Minor, but he was warming up for something even better. A friendly girl on a passing white Vespa paused to listen to his serenade. This emboldened him. Shortly a car pulled up alongside, a mother and a boy; she lowered her window and smiled. He must have sounded decent after all. It wasn’t hard to think back to his mother’s pleasure in his keyboard artistry, to the sight of her face during recitals. She used to say, “This is all that matters to me, all that ties me to the ground.” So he’d hammered away. She’d had a passion for old, crackling recordings of Scriabin and Rachmaninoff, and even an original 1955 vinyl of Glenn Gould, and they’d listen to them on a flimsy stereo.

  Now, as soon as he saw Carolyn’s forehead rounding the building on the corner, he attacked his all-time personal favorite, Beethoven’s “Waldstein.”

  How puffed up with pride he’d been, learning this difficult piece back when Beethoven was his hero. The curse of Ludwigs hearing problem, his grumpy persona, his mean, thrashing old dad, all aroused in him the greatest sympathy. The heartfelt Heiligenstadt Testament—“Oh you men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn, or misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me. You do not know the secret cause which makes me seem that way to you. …”

  Carolyn paused by the side of the truck. He stumbled and made some mistakes, but his hands were good little servants. He was standing on the street, but he was back in the recital room, his mother following his every move, clinging to every note as if it would save her, as if he, young MacGregor, was her only chance, her life raft—

  Then, as used to happen in the old days when he felt too responsible for his mother’s happiness, he saw that hands were little more than contracting tendons and bones operated by some chain reaction issuing forth from a bunch of spongy matter in his skull, and he seized up.

  Carolyn’s mouth was in a strange and perfect o, with zipperlike creases on the sides.

  “Show’s over.” He closed the lid and quickly pulled the moving blanket over it, tightened the strap.

  She was wearing a pink sweater set with a striped skirt that reminded him of the upholstery on lawn chairs, her bare calves scattered with goose bumps. “Who are you?” she said.

  “It’s good to have a few tricks up the old sleeve.”

  “Did your mother play?”

  “Ha! Not a musical bone in her body.”

  “Your father must have been musical.”

  “No, Carolyn, I worked really hard at it. Not everything’s inherited.”

  Her arms were folded over her chest. “We had a beautiful piano until Dad gave it to Bill, who destroyed it. Would you like to come for lunch?”

  “God, Carolyn, I’m working, remember?”

  She said, “Couldn’t you hire someone else? It might clear up— we could have a picnic in the park.”

  He started to laugh. “Hire someone else?” He hoped she was kidding.

  Just then Henry and Ahmed came hustling from the building. “All right. We’re taking it up the stairs. Dwight has called an extra, and let us pray he shows. We will double-pad the end and stand it on the refrigerator dolly,” said Ahmed. “We will take the stairs one at a time.”

  “By the way, Ahmed and Henry, this is my friend Carolyn.”

  They gave her a nod.

  “I’ll call you when we’re done,” said Mac.

  He leaned in to kiss her, but she pulled away from his reach, and he watched her stroll away. Then he focused on the sidewalk and the front steps of the building instead. Inside the lobby, the carpet was spongy and bunched up under the weight around the wheels of the dolly. They shoved and wheedled the thing inch by inch until they reached the bottom of the flight.

  “Five floors,” said Ahmed. “Ten flights. Very narrow up top. Are we ready, boys?”

  And then there came a grueling, protracted struggle the likes of which he’d never known. A player piano generally did not want to go up stairs.

  “These are the heaviest of all pianos,” said Henry. He and Mac had the bottom; Ahmed was trapped in the stairwell above, pulling and guiding with the strap.

  After forty-five minutes, they had ascended five steps. Each heave-ho depleted Mac’s entire body of any stored force. He was gasping for breath.

  “One, two, three, heave” called Ahmed, and with his shoulders and body Mac pushed, so that the piano could climb yet another step. Then he collapsed, coughing and sweating.

  “Call Dwight,” said Henry. “Find out when the hippie will arrive. He is a hippie but also a super mover.”

  “Good,” gasped Mac.

  “This is an outrage,” said Ahmed.

  “You’re getting paid by the hour, right?” said Mac.

  “No. We are subcontractors. We must go by the estimate. Dwight’s estimate for this job was two hundred and fifty dollars. We will end up paying you and the hippie almost all of that.”

  “Can’t the estimate be adjusted?”

  “By only ten percent. We don’t wish to gouge people, anyway.”

  “They’re gouging you!”

  “This is an old man who wants to see his player piano again,” said Ahmed.

  “He didn’t have to move to the fifth floor,” griped Henry.

  Mac’s muscles were stiffening. He started to blame the whole day on Margaret Sullivan, his childhood piano teacher. They heaved and pushed and struggled for another hour before “the hippie” arrived. He had a shaved head and a lightning bolt tattooed on his neck. Perhaps Ahmed and Henry didn’t know what a hippie was.

  “Jesse,” he said, shaking Mac’s hand.

  With the help of his brawn, they were able to raise the piano up a few steps without stopping. But after Jesse’s initial burst of energy, he too fell to the floor, winded. Mac’s trapezius muscles and biceps were bunched into fists.

  “This next flight is narrow, and the steps are not as deep,” instructed Ahmed from above. “This will be far worse than what we have endured already. And be careful of the walls. I will guide you. Don’t push until I say.”

  Mac looked at his watch. Four o’clock!

  “I’m going to miss my date, too,” said Jesse. “With destiny! As long as I get over the bridge, I’m all right. I’ve been saving a little money and sleeping in this graveyard over in San Rafael, where it’s pretty friendly and no one busts you, or at least they don’t notice.”

  “Boys, heave!”

  They hefted, fell spent.

  “On your feet! One, two, three, heave!”

  They hefted again. The stairwell smelled like sweat.

  “Damn it!” yelled Ahmed. “The wall! Go down!”

  They brought it back down.

  “Damn this, the wall is freshly painted. Move to your right as you lift.”

  They tried.

  “Don’t break the wall!” Ahmed cried. “Do not go so fast!”

  “Fast?” said Mac, gasping. Pain shot through his shoulders and around his ribs. His knees were shaking. “I gotta make a call.”

  He took his phone a flight down and tried Carolyn, and when she didn’t answer, he left a dignified apology. He’d never
failed her before and wondered what the consequences would be.

  Back in the stairwell, Jesse was saying, “Locals always dig me. I was visiting this town in Nebraska, this farmer brings me home for a meal, and next thing you know I’m living with them, got a room upstairs, the Frau is cooking for me, I’m working on the farm for my keep. Well, the Frau is a beautiful woman, and the farmer’s never home, and when he is he’s burned out and muddy, and the Frau and I start fooling around. I know it sounds unethical, but she was lonely. This boring you yet?”

  “Not me,” said Mac.

  “Anyway, one night I wake up in my cot, all in a sweat. And there’s these icons on the wall, and they’re all staring at me, and I’m shaking, and this voice in my head yells at me, ‘She’s going to have a baby—you have a son! A son!’ And then suddenly there’s this knock on the door, and the farmer comes into my room, and his hands are covered with blood! I jump out of my cot. I’m screaming, man. And he says, ‘Hurry, hurry, the cow is having her calf. I need you to help.’ I rush down into the yard, and we go into the barn, and I help him pull the calf. Stillborn. I left the next morning.”

  “One, two, three, heave!”

  “Unnn,” said Mac. The piano had become like a horrible problem that loomed and obscured all the pleasures of life. Kind of like looking for his mother.

  “Turn more to the left now,” said Henry. “The railing is going to break.”

  “One, two, three, heave!”

  “I’m going to heave if he keeps saying ‘heave,’ ” Jesse said.

  Time blurred as they continued their ascent. Each discharge of energy drained Mac to the core. Surely, this was the hardest work he had ever been enlisted for. Oh, for man, the tether was never far! He thought of the sweating slaves dragging stones to the pyramids. He thought of the endless legions erecting the great walls. All for the next meal. The next roll in the hay. His brain settled into a dull pattern of oblivion, heave-ho; in his delirium, Mac began to register the timbre of a new voice.

  “Damned old thing’s a bugaboo, isn’t it!”

  “All’s well that ends well,” Ahmed said.

  “Well, I’ve waited a long time for this beauty,” the old man said.