Don't Ever Get Old (28 page)

“And he's the killer?”

“I don't know,” I said. Which was sort of true. “We caught the son of a bitch snooping around, trying to break in.”

“That's a lie,” Pratt shouted.

“You got a right to remain silent, asshole,” said Jennings.

That clammed Pratt up. He seemed bright enough not to say anything else without his lawyer present, which was fine with me.

“Anyway,” I said. “We heard this guy scrabbling around outside, and Tequila threw him a beating. But, you know, we were on edge after what happened to Yitzchak Steinblatt, and we didn't know if he was armed until we had him subdued.”

“And what did Steinblatt have to do with this mess?” Jennings asked.

I told him about Avram Silver and about how Steinblatt's arrival coincided with my call to Silver and with Kind's death. I explained how we'd suggested to Pratt that Steinblatt was connected to the treasure. I realized, for the first time, that Steinblatt's death, and Yael's death, too, had been my fault.

“The Israelis had nothing to do with anything,” I said, shaking my head sadly. “They died because the killer associated them with us.”

Jennings seemed to turn this over in his head for a few minutes. “I have to hand it to you,” he said. “I did not expect you to come up with a story that would get your grandson off the hook, but I guess that will do it.”

I figured as much. No prosecutor on earth would have taken the case to trial after I'd stacked up three million dollars' worth of reasonable doubt on the kitchen table.

“He's innocent, like I said.”

“I need him available for questioning, though.”

“He'll be going back to school in New York in a couple of days,” I said.

Jennings rubbed his mustache. He didn't like that but couldn't do much about it. “He better be down here double quick if I want him.”

Tequila helped put the gold bars in the backpacks and loaded them into the trunk of Jennings's car. Then he went back into the house to sulk. He let the door slam behind him.

Jennings had cut the tape off of Pratt and put some real handcuffs on him. He put a hand on the back of the debt collector's head and guided him into the backseat of a brown unmarked police vehicle.

“That rotten little bastard doesn't even appreciate what you did for him,” Jennings told me, jerking his head toward the house to indicate he was talking about my grandson. “You could have kept the treasure and let him take the fall for the killings.”

“He's all the family I've got. Somebody's got to carry on the Schatz name.”

“I hadn't figured you for the sentimental type.”

“Yeah, well, sometimes I'll surprise you like that.”

Jennings patted me on the shoulder and climbed into his car.

I lit a cigarette and stood there on the lawn, watching my fortune ride off down the street.

 

45

It seemed like I'd put myself through too damn much to have the treasure slip through my fingers. I felt like I'd been beaten or outsmarted somehow, and I didn't like it much.

But I figured I'd gotten my money's worth for the gold; it had bought Tequila out of the trouble Pratt or whoever had gotten him into. And it got me out of a full-contact game that I was too old and too weak and too confused to play any longer.

I took a drag on my Lucky Strike, and I turned to go back into the house. That's when I felt something like an angry horsefly hit me low on my left side and whiz through me. It took me a long moment to realize that I must have been shot.

There was nobody around, but somebody with a rifle could have hit me from pretty far away. Norris Feely must have come straight here after Jennings cut him loose and had been waiting all night, somewhere out in the darkness, for a clean look at me.

I felt hot screaming pain as my body realized what had happened, and I knew I was going to fall down. At that moment, my mind could barely even process the terrible significance of the injury I'd already sustained. I was completely preoccupied with what would happen when I hit the ground.

If a guy my age falls and cracks his head, that's a fatal injury. I'm probably not strong enough or quick enough to cushion a fall with my arms, and since my bones are somewhat brittle, my skull would break like an eggshell.

That's what happened to Katharine Graham, the publisher of
The Washington Post
. She was one of the most powerful people in a city full of powerful people; she toppled Richard Nixon. And she died when she tripped on an uneven sidewalk. I didn't want to go out like that.

I could feel myself beginning to go into shock. My shirt was drenched in blood, and I could feel the stuff soaking my underpants. The blood thinners protected me from strokes, but when I bled, I bled a lot and didn't stop.

I bent my knees as far as I could and sort of sat down, catching as much weight on my arms as they would bear. Then I carefully laid myself on the lawn. Having succeeded in getting to the ground without causing additional damage, I was now free to safely bleed to death from the gunshot wound.

I thought about shouting to Tequila for help, but I remembered how Nazi snipers would wound a man and then leave him lying in the open, screaming for assistance, so they could kill anyone who tried to rescue him. Feely could still be skulking around out there, waiting. I couldn't risk getting my grandson killed; couldn't endure that kind of loss again, even for the few minutes I had left to live. I kept my mouth shut.

My hands were going numb, so I reached into my pocket for my memory notebook, but it wasn't there. I must have left it in the house. I had my cell phone, though; I'd forgotten about it. I pressed my emergency speed-dial button.

“Nine one one,” said a voice on the line.

I gave my address and told her I'd been shot. Then I dropped the phone on the lawn without bothering to hang it up. Where I was going, I wouldn't need my anytime minutes.

The grass underneath my body was soft and fresh, like it always was in the springtime, like it had been when I was young, like it had been when I'd tasked myself with taking care of it, and like it would remain, even though I wouldn't be around any longer. There was some kind of metaphor there that Tequila might appreciate: the gold riding off down the road, the old man bleeding out onto the indifferent sod, the world going on as if none of it had happened. A lesson for him to learn, like that professor had been talking about on the television. It wasn't much consolation; mostly I was just angry. But I was too weak to holler about it, so I closed my eyes.

I think I might have heard the sirens, but I don't remember much after that.

 

46

When I woke up, I was someplace dark and I felt hot. So I assumed I was in hell. As things turned out, though, I was still in Memphis.

More specifically, I was in the geriatric intensive care unit in the MED. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness and my initial panic dissipated, I could see the blinking monitors next to my bed and hear them beeping. I could see the television mounted high on the wall. I could see a window with venetian blinds over it and a little bit of light streaming through them. And I could smell hospital, piss and death. That meant I wasn't much deafer or blinder than I had been, and my brain seemed to still be mostly functioning.

I took a careful inventory of myself to assess the damage. There was an oxygen line in my nose, but no feeding tube in my throat, so I had probably not been out for longer than a day or two. I had both of my arms and all of my fingers. An intravenous line was plugged into me, taped to the back of my right hand. It itched a little. I had a catheter in me, which also itched. I really, really hated hospitals.

I could still feel my feet and wiggle my toes. I tried to raise and lower each leg, to see if I'd shattered a hip, which was a big concern. Because of my age, I couldn't survive an invasive surgery like a hip replacement, so that kind of fracture meant permanent confinement to a wheelchair. Both my legs lifted, which was a relief, but when I raised the right one, my side hurt so bad that I screamed in pain, which was embarrassing.

The noise woke Rose, who had been asleep in an armchair next to the bed.

“What's wrong, Buck?” she asked, concern etching lines in her face that were even deeper than the usual.

“I must have forgotten I got shot,” I told her.

I hiked up my hospital gown and inspected the wound. There were about twenty sutures in the front, to the right of my navel, and the wound in the back felt like it was about the same size. Somebody once told me how a fully jacketed rifle bullet can shear right through a human body, and at that moment, the fact seemed pertinent.

I could vaguely remember having half woken sometime recently. I recalled staring through a drug haze at a man wearing a white coat over surgical scrubs standing at the end of the bed. Not our regular doctor.

“You're very lucky. Massive trauma injuries like this are extremely dangerous and routinely fatal in patients who are on anticoagulants,” the surgeon had told me. “And elderly patients can decompensate quickly when they experience a severe injury. You would have died if they hadn't brought you to the hospital with the finest goddamn vascular surgeon in the southeastern United States.”

“Elderly than who?” I had asked, pointing an accusatory finger at him. Then I'd passed out again.

“Am I going to die?” I asked Rose.

“Yes,” she said. “Just not right now. You should try to stop getting in the way of bullets, though.”

Her advice was sound, but it annoyed me nonetheless.

“Buck, I've spoken with the doctors, and they say you are going to have a harder time getting around, even after you recover. I think it's time we talk about our living arrangements.”

“I'm going to get out of this place, and I am going to go home, and things are going to be the same as they have always been,” I said.

She crossed her arms. “No, they're not. Not this time.”

I rubbed at the IV line where it went into my hand. “What have you done?” I growled.

“I've met with some people, and I've put down a deposit on an assisted living condo at a place called Valhalla Estates. There's room for your sofa and there's full premium cable with all your channels, right in the apartment. They've got parking for residents, so you can keep your Buick, and they will sell our house for us and credit it against our expenses.”

“We can't go to Valhalla,” I said. “That's heaven for Nazis.”

I didn't want to give up the ungrateful lawn and the paper at the end of the driveway. I didn't want to give up my coffee and oatmeal at the kitchen table with the sun streaming in through the windows. I didn't want to give up Brian's old room and its shelves lined with the books I'd read to him when he was a boy.

“I don't want to go any more than you do, but what am I supposed to do?” Rose asked me. She wasn't just giving me the piss now, there was real anger and sadness in her voice. “They say it's going to be hard for you to get upright from a lying-down position. For months, at least, and maybe forever. I can't lift you out of bed.”

“I can manage.”

“I sure don't see how. And that little wound goes all the way through you, through every layer of you, and that surgeon had to stitch every one of those layers up. So as long as you're healing, you could tear all that stuff back open, and healing is going to take a while, because of the blood thinners. You need to be supervised by a nurse.”

“Baby, there's another way.” But I didn't really believe it.

“There's no magic treasure we can use to bargain our way out of this, Buck,” she said. “And even if there was, I'm not sure there's a bargain we could make. We can't take care of ourselves anymore, and there's no getting around that.”

I tried to think of something else to say, but there wasn't anything, so I kept my mouth shut. Rose took my hand and squeezed it. We stayed like that for a while.

*   *   *

Something I don't want to forget:

Tequila came to visit a while after that. He had an overnight bag full of my things he'd brought up from the house. I looked inside, but I wasn't very interested in pawing at relics from a life that was over.

“What am I going to do with these in here?” I asked, pulling out a pack of Lucky Strikes.

“I don't know, but you always have them. I didn't think you would want to be without them.”

I put the cigarettes on the tray next to my bed and found my memory notebook in the bag.

“Thanks for bringing this.”

“I really fucked things up, didn't I, Grandpa?”

“No,” I told him. “Everything had already come apart when you took Pratt. Jennings was going to charge you with killing Kind and Steinblatt. I'd have had to give up the gold to get you off the hook anyway.” All my anger had been drained out of me, along with most of my blood.

“I still didn't handle myself the way I might have hoped.”

“You learn from that.”

He was silent for a moment, and I let it hang there. Then I said: “You know how you thought the treasure hunt was a search for meaning or a way to define my legacy?”

“Yeah,” he said. “But maybe it was a mistake to try to graft symbolism onto straightforward things.”

“No, I think you were right. There's a reason I went out there after Heinrich Ziegler. But it wasn't for the reason you thought. You see, Ziegler is Death. In 1944, I faced him down in the rain and the mud, and I knew he was Death when I stared him in those cold, savage eyes of his. And I went looking for him again, because I had to go hunting for it. I had to face it on my feet; I couldn't stand just waiting for it to find me. I had to hold it accountable for what is happening to me and your grandmother, for what happened to your father. Heinrich Ziegler was the closest thing I ever saw to a rider on a pale horse, and when I found him, he was just used up and emptied out like the rest of us.”