I asked him what he needed, and in reply he hopped the fence again and opened the side door to the trailer. It looked like tornado wreckage. The moving pads were strewn about the floor in unfolded piles. Plywood sheets leaned against the walls in various poses of disorder. Moving equipment lay about everywhere, and on top of this mayhem, like seracs after an avalanche, were several hundred empty moving cartons of various sizes. Willie explained that he needed to get the trailer ship-shape. We started folding pads. Every driver has his way of folding pads, and Willie instructed me on his method. They had to be perfect. He stopped me a few times and quickly and impatiently showed me exactly how he wanted them done. He wasn’t rude, exactly, just focused. He was direct, channeling his solid middle-class Stamford upbringing into this rough world of labor. He spoke in soft mellow tones with incredibly clear diction, and he sure sounded like a Fairfield county boy. Maybe even one who had gone to a fancy boarding school, maybe spent summers sailing on Martha’s Vineyard. But Willie didn’t have a filthy mouth like the preppies I knew.
While I was folding pads, Willie neatly stacked the plywood and strapped it in. Things were looking better. Then we separated by size the big rubber bands used to wrap pads around furniture and hung them on the trailer wall on hooks. Next came burlap pads, called skins, which are used for wrapping tough and dirty items like fireplace grates and garden tools. We stacked the four-wheel dollies and secured them to the wall along with the refrigerator dolly. Next, we collected the small tools lying around and put them in Willie’s toolbox. Finally we swept the whole trailer from front to back. After two solid hours we’d finished and the trailer looked almost as good as Tim Wagner’s.
I told Willie there was a cooler full of Schaefer’s under the tree, but he said he was hungry, so we headed down the street to the Starboard Port to get some dinner. Willie ordered the chateaubriand for two, along with baked potatoes, a side of fries, a side of fried clams, and a pitcher of Heineken. I thought he was buying me dinner, but he wasn’t. The ensuing rampage of consumption took him about ten minutes to finish. It looked like Willie was racing against time to get as much food and drink inside him as he could. After the last dish was taken away, Willie ordered two slices of apple pie and had his beer pitcher refilled. Then he leaned back and asked me what I was doing tomorrow. I told him I’d be working at Callahan’s. He replied that he was loading a full trailer up on Stanwich Road and needed two more helpers in addition to the crew he’d already arranged. He said he’d pay me $8.50 an hour, which was $1.50 more than I made at Callahan’s. If I was game he’d talk to TC in the morning.
Willie and I walked back to Callahan’s yard. He opened the trailer doors, laid down some pads for a bed, and told me to be at Callahan’s at 7 a.m. This guy had just worked forty-eight hours straight with an eighteen-hour day in front of him tomorrow. He’d eaten a meal no three people could have finished, drunk twelve beers, and, according to him, made over $3,000 in four days. He’d had no shower for who knows how long and was sleeping in his trailer.
I was intrigued. Tim and Willie were young guys making big money. Tim was a nobody from the wrong side of the tracks and had qualified for an $85,000 loan to buy his Peterbilt. Willie had just ordered his own new truck. In addition to that, they both had the respect and trust of a man like John Callahan, not to mention that they were willing and ready to go anywhere anytime to achieve their goals. It wasn’t hard to see why guys like Ralph and Bobby chose to ignore them. The local boys were trapped, while Tim and Willie looked like revolutionaries with their flat bellies, swollen bank accounts, and attitude of complete indifference to anything but work.
The next morning, Willie was waiting for me in the Cornflake. I’d never ridden in a tractor-trailer before. All the Callahan trucks were straight trucks. I was up so high. The engine felt so powerful. This whole rig was going to be loaded today, and three days from now it would be empty in Florida. I was in.
The shipper’s name was Lester Tabb. He had a big house in Backcountry Greenwich, where the big-money lived. We drove up and found the two pillars on the right side of the road standing guard over a long twisting driveway. Willie’s helper Jeff Wilson and Jeff’s sister Punky were already there. Willie tossed Jeff the trailer keys and pulled ahead. Jeff opened the side doors and pulled himself into the trailer. Willie told me to get out and block traffic. As Willie backed blind-side into the Tabb driveway, Jeff lifted the power lines with a long-handled broom. About a hundred yards down the truck stopped, and Jeff tossed out a few sheets of plywood. He jumped down and placed them over a flower bed, and Willie cut the wheel hard guiding the trailer through the twists while Jeff moved the plywood, anticipating the next move, protecting the landscaping, and keeping the drive wheels out of the mud. The two of them were doing a dance they’d clearly done before.
After half an hour of this, the mansion hove into view. It was an ivy-covered faux Tudor pile from the 1920s, three stories with steep gables and a slate roof. I expected to see gargoyles leering over the gutters. Willie backed right to the front door, and we dropped the walkboard into the foyer.
Looking around, I realized we had a twenty-five-room mansion to empty. I figured we’d be here several days. The first item to be loaded was a Persian carpet forty feet wide and sixty feet long. All rolled up it was about four feet high, and the five of us tried to lift it. Not a chance. We could barely pick up one end. Jeff ran back into the truck—he always ran when he worked—and returned with four four-wheel dollies. As we lifted up each section of the rug, Punky slid a dolly underneath. In no time the rug was atop the four dollies, and it looked like a mutated python from a 1950s horror movie. With Punky steering, we rolled the rug through the drawing room and up the walkboard into the trailer. Jeff had set up ropes at intervals, and we pushed the rug to the front of the trailer. We put the ropes around the rug and lifted it in sections, with Punky pulling the rope tight as it went toward the trailer’s roof. It was now well past 9 a.m. Willie told me to go down to the cellar and clean out chowder.