Don't Ever Get Old

by Daniel Friedman

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 heal
ing 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.”

  I’d seen them, the sad cases, sinking into the cushy sofas in retirement homes, mulling their missed opportunities, wondering how they ended up there. If we’d seen it coming, we’d have got out of the way. Bleeding in the mud in 1944, I’d had an opportunity never to look into the city’s rotten soul, never to shovel dirt onto my son’s coffin, never to watch myself and my beloved Rose wither. All I had to do was give up, but I was too damn pigheaded, so I went ahead and lived another seventy years. And ended up getting shot in the back on my own lawn by a soft and silly man.

  “Yeah,” Tequila said. “But what about the gold?”

  “It’s funny, you know. You said you never believed it was real, and maybe you were right. There was a box of gold bricks, sure, but whatever it was I thought I needed wasn’t in that bank. We went to St. Louis chasing a lie we told ourselves. All we hauled out of that vault was death.”

  “This can’t be how it ends up, with you in the hospital, and the gold gone and Yael’s killer still on the loose.”

  “Every story has the same ending,” I said. “We just stop telling most of them before we get to it.”

  “And they lived happily ever after,” said Tequila.

  “That’s a nice thought,” I told him. “It would be nice if it was true.”

  47

  I woke up sweating and disoriented in my hospital bed sometime in the night. My side was throbbing despite the painkillers the IV was pumping into me. My palms were sweating and my eyes itched. I felt like I was being watched, but the only other figure in the room was Tequila’s silhouette, in the chair next to the bed.

  I squinted. Tequila’s silhouette was broader and taller than it was supposed to be.

  “Evening, Buck,” said the voice of Randall Jennings. “Sorry to wake you.”

  “I was up anyway,” I told him. “What are you doing here?”

  He moved his chair closer, so I could see his face in the low light coming in through the miniblinds on the window.

  “I heard you got popped, and wanted to see how you were doing.”

  “Looks worse than it is,” I lied, gesturing at the wound. “In and out. Just flesh, mostly.”

  “The word downtown, around the CJC, is that old Buck Schatz is indestructible.”

  “I don’t know about that,” I said. “An inch to the left, and it would have missed me. An inch to the right, and the doc says it would have shredded my guts. Somebody told me once that it’s better to be lucky than good. I figure I’m maybe half and half.”

  He exhaled and his shoulders hunched toward me a little mournfully, or at least it looked that way in the half-light of the darkened hospital room. “I suppose the legends are always bigger than the men who make them,” he said.

  I nodded. “And I ain’t as big as I used to be, either.”

  “Our mutual friend Mr. Pratt was neither lucky nor good. Poor guy didn’t survive. The doctors worked real hard to save him, but they took him off the ventilator a little while ago.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “He succumbed to his severe head injuries. Blunt force trauma.” Jennings pointed demonstratively at his skull.

  I made a series of rapid calculations. “Where is my grandson?” I asked.

  The detective let out a theatrical sigh. “He’s downstairs, in the back of my car. This gives me no pleasure, but I’ve got to charge him on Pratt. There’s nothing else I can do, under the circumstances.”

  “That can’t be right,” I said. “Pratt was hurt when we gave him over to you, but not fatally.”

  Jennings shrugged. “Well, what can I tell you? Head injuries can be kind of funny. Sometimes they don’t seem as bad as they are until the brain starts hemorrhaging, or whatever. I’m no doctor. All I know is the man started having some kind of seizure in my car, and he was unconscious by the time I got him to a hospital.”

  “No,” I said. “It doesn’t make sense. I’ve seen what it looks like when a man is beat to death. We may have roughed the son of a bitch up, but we didn’t smash his head in.”

  “Why are you trying to debate this, Buck?” Jennings asked. “The man is dead. They’re putting him through autopsy. How do you argue with that?”

  He leaned forward and squeezed my shoulder. “Don’t worry about Tequila too much, Buck. I’m sure the D.A. will let him plead to manslaughter, and he’ll be a free man inside three years. Under the circumstances, the prosecutor might even drop the charges, or the judge might suspend his sentence. Even if he spends a couple of years in jail, he’ll get his life back, more or less. Nobody will hold it against him for getting rid of the fellow who butchered all those nice people.”

  “Yeah,” I said, trying to convince myself it would work out okay. “Yeah.”

  It was my fault. I’d pulled Tequila into my Nazi hunt, because I couldn’t run from my real problems without help, and now the poor kid was tangled up with all those corpses and facing prison.

  “I want you to know, even though you and I have had our disagreements, it doesn’t make me happy to be doing this. If you ask me, Tequila is a hero. But doing police work in a town this dirty is like wading balls-deep in a river of shit. The only way to keep yourself clean is to do things by the book.”

  That was something I knew pretty well. I grunted my reluctant assent.

  “We’re not going to trick the kid into making a damaging statement in an interrogation room o
r anything like that. Pratt was an evil bastard, and Tequila comes from a good police family. He will have the best chance we can fairly give him,” Jennings assured me.

  I shrank sadly into my hospital bed as I told the detective how much I appreciated his help arresting my grandson. My side was hurting, and I was wondering how to go about getting some more drugs.

  “Of course, it could go down another way,” said Jennings. And it might have just been the shadows playing off his face in the darkened room, but his expression seemed much less gentle, although his tone was unchanged.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “I might decide I have to charge him with all three of the Memphis killings, and let St. Louis charge him for the girl. Then the two departments can take turns raking him over the coals until he makes an admission unhelpful to his cause.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. I thought I was beginning to see how it fit together, but I wanted to hear him spell it out.

  “Let me make it easy for you.” Jennings grinned magnanimously at me. “Tequila saw Kind brace you for money, and that’s a motive. He was also the last one to see the girl in the hotel alive. And I have witnesses who recall the two of you having an unfriendly altercation with Steinblatt at Kind’s funeral. On top of that, I caught him red-handed in the act of bludgeoning Pratt. Now you told me an interesting story about how Pratt did the first three killings. Maybe I like your grandson for all four of these murders. You see, Buck, depending on how I stick the facts together, William T. Schatz either stopped a serial killer, or he is one.”

  The pain in the bullet wound was white hot. I could feel each individual stitch cutting into my flesh. At least I was fully alert now. I felt coiled, like a spring. But I knew that feeling was a lie my body was telling itself. I had never been more fragile or feeble, and the detective’s cool monotone contained an unmistakable threat.

  “What is it you want here, Jennings?”

  “I’ve already got what I want. Now, I’m trying to make sure I get to hang on to it.”

  “The gold.”