Don't Ever Get Old (2 page)

“Anything?” he asked.

“No.”

The machine was still wailing.

“Gonna hit him again,” said the doctor, turning the voltage knob on the defibrillator.

“Clear.” The body seized up again, but the line on the monitor had gone flat.

The other doctor kept working the oxygen bag. I rubbed at my wrist; purple bruises were blossoming out from where Jim had squeezed. A couple of years back, my doctor put me on Plavix, a blood thinner, to keep me from having a stroke. The stuff made me bruise like an overripe peach.

I pulled out my pack of Luckys and flicked at the silver Dunhill cigarette lighter I carry around, but my hands were shaking so much, I couldn't get the damn thing to spark.

“You can't smoke in here,” the nurse told me.

“He don't look like he minds much,” I said, gesturing at Jim.

“Yeah, well, his oxygen tank probably minds, mister,” she said, and she swept me into the hallway. The sliding glass door clicked shut behind me.

Norris was leaning against the wall, his face a slackened, puffy mask; Emily was pacing the floor, crying.

I touched her arm.

“There's nothing more you can do for him,” I said. “But I need a ride home.”

 

2

Emily Wallace-Feely looked like she needed somebody to hug her when she dropped me off at the house. I was sorry her father had just passed, but I certainly wasn't going to touch that woman. Her eyes were red-rimmed and her nose was still running. Catching a cold would be unpleasant and dangerous; any kind of illness might send me right back to the place I had just left.

I wished her the most sincere condolence I could manage while staying as far away from her as I could. I was very glad to get out of her car; happy to be away from the hospital's artificial atmosphere.

Memphis in early March was still cool and breezy in the mornings. High temperatures would hover in the seventies for a few more weeks before the Tennessee summer kicked in and things got hot and damp. By July, I'd sweat through a T-shirt walking to the curb to fetch the newspaper.

As I shuffled up the front walkway, I noticed, with considerable annoyance, that the lawn was greening nicely and the perennial bulbs in the flower beds were pushing tentative young shoots above the loamy southern soil. Seemed like last time I'd looked, it had been February and the yard had been brown, which suited me better.

Back when I could push a mower, I used to take care of the grass. It was something that Rose and I could do outside, together; she maintained the flower beds. Our yard was the best on the block, and we took a lot of pride in it. But since I had heart bypass surgery in '98, we'd been paying some kind of Guatemalan refugee to handle that stuff. He was a hardworking, fastidious man, and his crew did a good job. I hated his goddamn guts, and I carried a deep resentment against the lawn. The Guatemalans had replaced me, and the indifferent grass had gone right on turning green in the springtime.

I used to talk to the lawn, cooing and whispering as I mowed and edged, fertilized and aerated. Working my key in the lock as Emily backed her car out of the driveway, I whispered something that might have been “Ungrateful.”

I went into the kitchen, scrubbed my hands with hot water, and washed down a multivitamin with a glass of orange juice and a cigarette. Rose was cleaning up the breakfast dishes.

“How's Jim?” she asked.

“Dead.” I handed her the juice glass, and she topped it off. “I'm going to see what's on television.”

As I was settling into my comfortable groove in the sofa cushions, the phone rang. Rose was running the sink, so I answered it.

“Hey, Pop.”

It was my grandson, Billy.

“Well, if it ain't Moonshine,” I said. Billy lived up in New York, where he was a student at NYU School of Law. It was very prestigious and unconscionably expensive.

“It's Tequila. People call me Tequila.”

Billy's full name was William Tecumseh Schatz, after the great Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman. Our family held the general in high esteem. My great-granddad Herschel Schatz came to America from Lithuania in 1863, after his family was killed and his village was burned in a pogrom. Union recruiters handed Herschel his conscription papers as soon as he got off the boat, and he rode south with General Sherman to raze Georgia. Every Schatz man since learned at an early age about how fine a thing it is to be born in a country where Jews get to swing the torch.

My late son, Brian, saw fit to give Billy the great man's name, but the kid went away to college and joined a fraternity, where “Tecumseh” became “Tequila.” So he was known, forever after, as Tequila Schatz. Everybody was just so proud of him.

“How come you got to call yourself that?” I asked him.

“For the same reason you call yourself ‘Buck,'” shouted Rose, from the next room.

“Oh, hush up. Nobody asked you,” I yelled back at her.

“So, are you doing okay?” Billy asked. He was always asking about our health. It was annoying, but then again, so was most of the stuff he did.

“I'm still here,” I assured him. “Had an eventful morning. Your grandmother made me go over to the hospital to visit my old war buddy Jim Wallace, and he died while I was there.”

“I'm so sorry,” Tequila said.

“Don't be. I was pretty sick of that guy. I've known Jim over sixty years, and he ran out of interesting things to say while Truman was still in office. And, as it turns out, he was a skunk. At least I don't have to feel bad that he's gone.”

“What did he do that you're so upset about?” Tequila asked.

I took a long drag on the cigarette. “Why do you care?”

“You're my grandfather. You know, I love you.”

“Oy.”

He was always telling me that, I guess, because he never said it to his father. Every time he said good-bye to me at the end of a visit, he would kiss me on my face, even though he was, by most definitions, a fully grown adult man. And the discomfort was in no way ameliorated by the fact that every time he kissed me, I knew he was thinking that I might not last until his next trip home. For my part, I thought the same thing about him; young men are as fragile as the rest of us, but they aren't smart enough to know it.

“I don't see what's wrong with loving my grandparents.”

I sighed and lowered my voice. “Wallace told me that the Nazi guard who beat me up when I was a prisoner escaped Germany alive, with the trunk of his car packed full of gold bars. Wallace took a payoff to let the guy go.”

“That's got to mess with your head.”

“Don't tell your grandmother about this. It will just upset her.”

“I'll keep quiet,” he assured me. I could have done without his patronizing tone. “So after all this time, why did Wallace tell you about this Nazi?”

“He wanted absolution, or something. Also, I think he expected me to track the guy down; set things right.”

“Why would he think you'd do that?”

“Probably because I was a homicide detective for thirty years. You knew that, didn't you?”

He waited a couple of beats too long before: “Yeah, of course, Pop.”

Most people who knew me going back, people like Wallace, still thought of me as police. But I was retired before my grandson was even born. I suspected he just thought of me as old.

“So what are you going to do?” he asked.

I thought about that for a second. “I'm going to watch Fox News for a while, and later, I am going to work a crossword puzzle while I sit on the toilet.”

“Right, but what are you going to do about the Nazi?”

“I'm not going to do anything. When you have the option to do nothing, you should always take it.”

“Don't you regret not taking back the dignity he stole from you?”

I coughed in a way I thought might sound derisive. Regrets were for suckers. The world was full of used-up men, sitting glassy-eyed on park benches staring at nothing or sinking into upholstered chairs in retirement home lobbies, and every one of them was mulling his irrevocable missteps. Wasted chances. Bungled opportunities. Busted romances with fickle women and pear-shaped business deals with crooked partners.

I took pride in not being one of those sad cases. I was grumpy more for sport than out of necessity. I married the greatest lady I ever met, and I had a distinguished career with the department and retired to a detective's pension. Ideally, I wouldn't have had to see my son die, but getting old meant outlasting things that ought to have been permanent.

The revelation of Heinrich Ziegler's possible survival did not incite me to vengeful fervor. The war was a long time ago, and fervor required a lot of effort.

“Whatever he took, I don't miss anymore,” I said. “Dignity is something we all have to learn to live without, and revenge don't take much away from men like me and Ziegler. Every other kind of way we are apt to shuffle off this mortal coil is at least as ugly and coming almost as soon.”

I paused for a second; I had that dry mouth again. I stubbed out the cigarette and took a long gulp from the juice glass. Never easy to confront the reality of the geriatric ICU and the place that comes after. Never easy to recognize what I might share with the doped-up, piss-soaked Wallaces of the world.

“If Ziegler is still alive, there ain't much pain I can add to the sorrows he's facing.”

“I guess that makes sense,” Tequila said. But I could tell from his tone it didn't make much sense to him at all. There was strain in his voice, and I imagined him wrapping the phone cord around his white knuckles on the other end of the line. Then I remembered phones didn't have cords anymore.

“Don't get me wrong; punishing him might feel good. But sitting on the couch feels pretty good as well. And the couch is in my living room, while Ziegler, if he's even still alive, could be on any one of several continents. I'm not sure they sell my Lucky Strikes overseas.”

I couldn't bring myself to say it out loud, but even if I had been predisposed to doing things, I was facing mounting limitations. My quarry would be just as feeble, but, regardless, I wasn't sure I was up to the task of going on any kind of manhunt.

In the last few years, my stride had grown shorter and more labored. I could see a progressing decrease in my pace on the treadmill at the Jewish Community Center gym. I was down to a sluggish mile and a half per hour, and folks marveled about how I was still so mobile.

My skin had become dry and thin, almost papery in texture. If I jostled my arm too hard against a doorknob or bumped a knee into the bedside table, I could tear open and leak thin, watery blood all over the carpet. A couple of times, I hadn't been able to stop bleeding, and Rose had to take me to the emergency room. And it was easy to bump into stuff, because my eyes were failing. I needed a pair of glasses to see distance and a different pair to read. The fuzzy vision was, I guess, a minor blessing; it spared me from having to take a clear look at the mess of bruises and liver spots on my arms and cushioned the blow of seeing my collapsed and sunken features in the bathroom mirror.

“That treasure in gold bars sounds pretty appealing,” Tequila said.

“Come on,” I said. “You seriously think you're going to find lost Nazi gold? Even if he had gold in 1946, why wouldn't he have spent it all by now?”

“He's a fugitive. If he went looking to convert millions of dollars in gold to cash, or if he threw around a lot of money, he'd draw unwanted attention to himself. I think he'd try to avoid attracting notice, so he couldn't have run through all that treasure. And maybe he's dead, and the gold is just stashed away someplace, waiting for us to find it.”

“Terrific. I can buy myself a Maserati and drive it to the grocery store at thirty miles an hour. I can go to a fine restaurant where I'll pay more and wait longer for food I can barely taste anyway.”

“You were angry with Wallace because he let Ziegler go. If you don't at least try to find him, you're looking the other way, just like your friend did.”

That stopped me for a second. The little prick had a point.

“There's no way I know of to find a man who was last seen in Germany in 1946. What do I do? Go to the police station and ask if anyone's seen a Nazi?”

“Sure. Why not?” Tequila said. “There's a whole lot of computerized record sharing these days between local police and federal authorities and even international agencies. If Ziegler's ever had a run-in with any kind of five-oh, he could turn up in one of those law enforcement databases.”

There were no computers in the police station when I retired, and I had never learned how to use that set of tools.

“You really think so?”

“No,” he said. “But even nothing can get boring when you do it long enough. It can't hurt to go ask, and then, at least, you can say you didn't just let Ziegler walk.”

“Yeah, all right. I've got some time to kill before Fox News Sunday comes on, anyway.”

 

Something I don't want to forget:

Historians consider the Chelmno death camp in Poland a minor extermination facility, because only a hundred and fifty thousand Jews died there. I visited in 1946, and there wasn't much left of it; when the Nazis closed the camp, they burned the manor house where they processed the victims and they blew up the furnaces they used to incinerate the bodies. Maybe they were ashamed.

It would make a better story if I said the acrid stench of burning human flesh still hung in the air at the Chelmno site. But it had been two years since the Nazis shut the place down, and it didn't look or smell like anything special. It was just a muddy field with some patchy grass.

There is a village called Chelm, which is famous in Yiddish folklore for the wacky misadventures of its population of idiot Jews. It would make a better story if the Chelmno camp were the same place, but it isn't. I checked. Chelmno is in the middle of Poland, near Lodz, and Chelm is somewhere to the east. The Jews of Chelmno couldn't have been all that smart, though. They let the SS load them into trucks and gas them with exhaust fumes, with carbon monoxide.