Don't Ever Get Old (31 page)

She flipped on the light. Randall Jennings was lying on my bed, one unblinking eye staring at the nurse out of half a face. The white bedsheets were soaked black with blood. The wall behind Jennings was looking vaguely abstract expressionist, an explosion of dripping red with bits of pink and black stuck in it. On the wall beside me was a sunburst of brain matter with more blood and white skull fragments to accent the brownish-gray stuff.

The nurse screamed.

“Yeah, I know,” I said, stubbing out my cigarette. “No smoking in the hospital.”

 

49

Davy Crockett had the Alamo. Wyatt Earp had the O.K. Corral. Jack Kennedy had PT-109. John McCain had the Hanoi Hilton. I got the geriatric intensive care unit. And the YouTube.

I'd never even heard of the YouTube before I got famous on it, but apparently it was some kind of Web site where people could watch strange and stupid little videos on computer screens, and it was very popular. This was what young people were spending their days doing instead of working.

Here's what happened: I was lying on my back, ripped open and bleeding, and the doctors were running another transfusion into me. They had hosed off most of the blood that wasn't mine, and somebody lifted me onto a bed with wheels and rushed me down to the operating room.

The anesthesiologist was holding a mask over my face and telling me to try to breathe naturally. The best vascular surgeon in the southeastern United States was getting ready to sew me back up. I told him that I enjoyed moderately strenuous activities, like shooting bad guys, and that he should do his job right this time so I'd hold together. The surgeon told me I wouldn't be doing anything strenuous for a while, because my right leg was broken in two places and I would be in a wheelchair for at least several months. Then I passed out.

In recovery, hours later, I was shaking off the haze of anesthesia, hurting through the painkillers, and trying to figure out whether I'd lost some kind of argument. That's when the lady from the local news and her cameraman came to visit.

“You look like you've had a bit of a rough night, Mr. Schatz,” she said, pointing a microphone at me.

“You should see the other guy,” I told her.

She smiled. “How did it feel when you realized that the man in your hospital room had come to kill you?”

I shrugged, which hurt. “Familiar.”

That seemed to confuse her a little bit, but I was sleepy and didn't have the energy to explain it.

“Look,” I said, “I just got out of surgery.”

She made some kind of gesture to the cameraman. “One more question, Mr. Schatz. How did you manage to stop a rampaging serial killer?”

She could look at the coroner's report and see how I'd stopped him. I watched plenty of news on television and I knew what she was looking for, though. This was the story about the plucky old man who wasn't letting age slow him down, and I was supposed to dispense some kind of vaguely spiritual or inspirational wisdom for the television audience. But I knew I would not be shitting unassisted in the foreseeable future, and I didn't feel very plucky at all.

What I said was: “I shot him in the face with a .357 Magnum revolver. That usually does the trick.”

That went out on television, and I figured I wouldn't hear any more about it. But I was wrong, for reasons Tequila had to explain to me. I'm still not entirely sure I understand what happened.

It seems the local news channel put the video on its Internet site, and somebody took that video and put it on the YouTube. Within forty-eight hours, over a million people had seen it.

Then somebody went and found the old newspaper stories about all the other people I'd killed while I was a cop, going back fifty years. Whoever did it must have gone to the library to find that stuff, into the microfilm. I think it was Tequila, but I could never get him to confess.

The result of this strange, anonymous project was a second video on the YouTube that featured text excerpted from the newspaper articles flashing on the screen, alternating with photographs, creating a three-minute recap of my police career, set to some kind of noisy guitar music. This one, too, hit the top of the “most viewed” list.

Other popular videos on the YouTube include, incidentally: a baby that smiles, some kind of bug-eyed rodent, a sneezing panda bear, and a retarded kid trying to disco dance. So by becoming famous on the Internet, I was joining truly illustrious company.

After the second video came out, the “Buck Schatz joke” became very popular. Tequila said this was like the joke about Chuck Norris kicking somebody in the head or the joke about the walrus with the bucket. I had never heard either of these jokes. He tried to explain them to me, but they didn't make any sense. I don't think people Tequila's age understand what a joke is.

The “Buck Schatz joke” combines two observations: that I am very old and that I have killed a lot of people. So, for example, one basic version might be:

“Do you know why there aren't any more Tyrannosauruses?”

“Why?”

“Buck Schatz.”

This joke had numerous constructions, crediting me for everything from the disappearance of the lost city of Atlantis to the capture of Saddam Hussein.

“When I was your age, we read James Thurber,” I told Tequila.

“Well, we've made a lot of progress since then,” he said.

The “Buck Schatz joke” bled over into real television around the time I departed the hospital and ascended to Valhalla, the undiscovered country from which no travelers return. Or, at least, to Valhalla Estates, a lifestyle community for older adults.

Rose had rented a three-room apartment for us, and our stuff was already there when I left the hospital. I went without complaint; I didn't have much of a choice. With the busted leg, I needed someone stronger than my wife to help maneuver me between the wheelchair and the bed, or between the wheelchair and the toilet.

The house was empty for the first time in sixty years, except for the workmen who were tearing down our wallpaper, which was out of fashion, and tearing up the carpeting, because there was hardwood flooring underneath. The old place would soon be ready to go on the market, which meant it would look like we had never been there. And the grass would go right on turning green in the springtime.

I never went back home.

So, I was sitting in the common room on our floor, in my wheelchair with a blanket over my lap, when I heard them talking about me on Fox News. I remember it was The O'Reilly program.

“I've got two words for all those liberals on Capitol Hill who want to take away our gun rights,” O'Reilly was saying .

I hoped the two words would be “Second Amendment.”

“Buck Schatz.”

Oy gevalt.

*   *   *

Something I don't want to forget:

“It just isn't right,” Tequila said. “This isn't the way it's supposed to end.”

“How do you mean?”

“We went to all that trouble, and all we got was hurt.”

The Memphis City Council had pushed through a special resolution diverting Ziegler's fortune to something called the executive discretionary fund. There was an urgent need to build a new guesthouse behind the mayor's mansion. Tequila was trying to get a lawyer to sue the city on our behalf, but they all told him we had no right to the gold. It was the kind of situation that disappointed me but didn't surprise me.

“I don't see your wheelchair,” I said.

He pulled out his Internet phone and poked his finger at the screen for a couple of seconds, an excuse to avoid looking at me. I could tell he was thinking about the Israeli girl and about Brian. “Fair point,” he said. “But still.”

“The bad guy got what he deserved. The hero saved the day. Things turned out well enough.” Nothing could compensate the loss of my independence, but I took a kind of grim satisfaction in having disposed of Randall Jennings. Putting him down gave me back my sense of myself, a thing I'd been missing since Brian died.

But Tequila hadn't found the catharsis he'd come looking for, and maybe that was my fault. I understood, at least to a degree, what it was that he needed. But I didn't know how to give it to him. He was right: we were hurt. And he'd have to come to terms with it, somehow. But I didn't have my life ahead of me, and it was easier for me to just not talk about it. Whatever he needed to face, he'd have to deal with alone. It shouldn't have been that way. But things are rarely the way they ought to be.

“I kind of thought I was the hero,” he said.

“Yeah, well, that's a common mistake.”

 

50

They buried Randall Jennings a few days after I moved from the MED to Valhalla. I decided to attend; always believed in making my peace after I killed a man. Tequila had already returned to New York, but Felicia Kind gave me a ride.

She would be getting her workmen's compensation settlement, thanks mostly to me solving her husband's murder. So she owed me one. She told me she was getting set to leave town. Under the circumstances, that didn't seem like a bad idea.

She offered me a piece of her payday; I think she felt bad that I lost my treasure. But I turned down Felicia's money. She'd need it to set herself up someplace away from here. Rose and I would be okay. We could last quite a while on the proceeds from the house, and my physical therapist said I'd be walking again after a couple of months of healing. I would need a cane, but I'd be able to get around on my own and I could use a toilet or a shower without help. And I got one of the handicapped parking stickers for the Buick, which was a nice little perk. All things considered, I was glad Jennings was dead and I wasn't.

My vanquished foe drew an even smaller crowd than Jim Wallace; I guess that comes with dying disgraced. No church would host the memorial service, and since Jennings had murdered a clergyman, none of God's folks would read a psalm over him. So the half-dozen mourners stood graveside, and I was stuck looking over the coffin at the wife and teenage daughter of the man I'd shot, and at a guy about my age I figured was his father. They stared back at me with eyes full of hatred I knew I'd earned. Jennings had twenty-five years on the force, but dying dirty meant he forfeited his pension. They were facing hard times.

Only one cop showed up to mourn the dead man: Andre Price, the young colored officer I'd spoken to at the CJC the day I met Jennings. He was wearing neatly pressed dress blues, and his cheeks were drawn and tense as he looked at me, as if his whole body were straining to contain some outburst of emotion.

Andre read a eulogy, and I focused on writing it in my notebook to avoid meeting the dirty stares getting thrown my way by pretty much everyone in attendance.

“They say Randall Jennings turned dirty at the end, but he worked clean for all the years I knew him,” Andre said. His voice wavered a little as he spoke.

“When I was fourteen years old, some of the neighborhood scumbags found me, told me I should do some slinging for them, on the corner. They turned out kids to deal for them on the street and in the schools. Once they got pulled into the life, the only way most of them kids ever got out was in the back of a meat wagon. But I was only there maybe twenty minutes before Randall, who was riding the beat at that time, grabbed me around my neck and threw me in the back of his squad car. And I know he could have taken me into booking, and I would have gone away to juvie, and Lord knows where I'd be today if he had.”

He paused for a moment and dabbed at his eyes with a handkerchief.

“Instead, he took me to my grandma's house, and he told her what I'd done. And boy, she gave me a whuppin'. But I never went back out on that corner. Randall Jennings showed me mercy. Randall Jennings saved my life. And whatever else he did, I know he was doing Jesus's work the day he rescued me. All the folks who didn't come out here to see him buried, the folks who won't come out to pray with his family, they don't remember the things he did for this city, and for so many of us. But me, I'm not going to forget.”

I had no reason to disbelieve a word he said, Jennings had been clean, as far as anyone knew, until he found out about Nazi gold, so in a way, the whole mess was my fault. I mean, really, I guess, Feely was the one who told him most of the details, but Feely rode in my wake. At the very least, I was the harbinger of Feely.

I remembered, when Brian died, I went to speak to the rabbi at our synagogue. He told me that God tests us and that loss was one of those tests. He told me to remember the story of the Garden of Eden and how the snake had tempted Eve to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. The Christians, he explained, believed the snake was the Devil, something older than the world and evil; intent on undoing God's plan. But Jews had no Devil; the snake was just a snake. And he was there in the Garden because God made him; God put him there.

“Randall always said doing police work in this town was like wading waist-deep into a river of filth,” Andre said. I remembered Jennings phrasing it differently. “I guess, after twenty-five years watching the scumbags take whatever they wanted, watching the businessmen and real estate developers take whatever they wanted, watching the politicians take whatever they wanted, Randall finally succumbed. It ain't an easy thing, walking away from what you desire.”

Maybe Jennings was the Devil, or maybe I was the snake. Maybe I'd tempted him off the path of righteousness. But likely as not, he was just a mean son of a bitch who never met anyone meaner than he was, until he met me. But Yitzchak Steinblatt had said something that seemed true, about the folks who turned sick, who got to like killing too much, and Jennings would have been one of those whether there was Nazi gold or not.

Either way, I supposed, it had ended up how it ended up. Like Tequila had told me, dead was dead. So, to Valhalla with Buck Schatz, and to hell with Randall Jennings. The old man I figured was Jennings's father was sobbing loudly. The detective's widow looked at me, and her lower lip was quivering. Felicia Kind's hand squeezed my shoulder, reminding me not to feel sorry for these people.