My Bad Grandad

by A W Hartoin

  “That’s good?” asked Grandad.

  “It’s good, not great,” I said, then looking up at the surgeon. “You’re happy with leaving him here?”

  He nodded stoically. “I’m comfortable with the decision. I always like to let the family weigh in.”

  “I bet they usually choose to move.”

  “That choice is common. We’ll keep you updated. Mr. Babinski’s hospitalist is Dr. Gail. He’ll want to speak to you soon.” He turned to go, but I stood up. “Wait a minute.”

  “Yes?”

  “I didn’t get a good look at the wound, what with the mud and all. Can you describe it?”

  He frowned. “You already know. It was a puncture to the lower back.”

  “A perfect puncture?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “No slash. Just a straight stab? In and out?” I asked.

  “Now that you mention it, no.” Dr. Yazzie got out his prescription pad and drew me a surprisingly good representation of Robert’s back. There was a small puncture between L1 and L2 of the lumbar spine with a slit to the right. The larger stab wound was between the spine and the kidney, hitting the right renal vein and nicking the intestine. From there a slice extended to Robert’s side, where it became a scratch.

  Dr. Yazzie and I bent over the paper. I almost couldn’t concentrate. He smelled great. Mossy with a side of man.

  “Miss Watts?” he asked.

  “Huh?”

  “Why did you want to see this?”

  Focus, woman.

  “Give me a second. I almost have it,” I said.

  “Have what?”

  I tapped my finger on the spine and then looked at Paula, who was adjusting Grandad’s IV. “Paula, how tall are you?”

  “Me? 5’8”. Why?”

  “Can you stand right here?” I pointed at the foot of the bed and then asked Dr. Yazzie to stand beside her with their backs to us. “Dr. Caruso, take a look at this, will you?”

  She came over and took the drawing from me. “Okay. What am I looking for?”

  “The doc here is about Robert’s height and Paula is my grandad’s.” I peeked around my models. “Grandad, were you on Robert’s right?”

  He steepled his fingers and smiled. “Yes, I was.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Doc, I’m going to touch your back.”

  “If you must.”

  “I must.” I found his L1 and L2. “So the first puncture was here.”

  “You don’t know that,” said Dr. Caruso.

  “I think I do because it’s small, slides over to enter much more deeply, and then slices over to my grandad. He was the end of the attack, not the beginning. The cut on his back was deeper on the left and petered off to the right.” I picked up a butter knife off Grandad’s tray. “So it happened like this.” I demonstrated and she nodded. “I think you’re right. The depths of the wounds in relation to each other make sense.”

  Dr. Yazzie and Paula turned around. “So your grandfather was an accident,” he said.

  “Maybe. Maybe not. There’s a lot of rage in those ten inches. But I think the kidney was an accident,” I said.

  “What?” exclaimed Dr. Caruso. “That’s a leap.”

  “It isn’t. They were running when the rain hit, but Robert’s shirt was probably up. We’ll have to look at it to be certain, but I think his spine was exposed. They were aiming for the spine. If you want the kidney, you come in from the side.” I looked at Dr. Yazzie. “The first puncture was straight in.”

  “I believe so.” He crossed his arms and looked at the drawing with Dr. Caruso. “They weren’t trying to kill him.”

  Dr. Caruso agreed. “They were trying to paralyze him.” She shivered. “I don’t know why that makes me feel worse.”

  Grandad was stiff and radiating anger in his bed. “Because they wanted him to suffer long-term.”

  “That’s sick,” said Paula.

  “So is murder, but this is a special kind of hate,” I said.

  Paula dashed out the door, calling over her shoulder, “I’ll get the clothes for the cops.”

  The doctors left and another nurse brought in a suture kit and lidocaine. I’m not much of a drinker, but I could’ve used a slug of whiskey.

  “I’m ready, but I don’t need that shot,” said Grandad.

  “I need you to have it, so let’s not argue,” I said, lowering the head of the bed and helping Grandad roll over. I numbed him up good. While I was waiting for the lidocaine to take full effect, Trevino and Bennett came in, looking like they’d been run through a gauntlet.

  “What happened to you?” I asked, prepping the tray.

  “Your grandfather’s friends,” said Trevino, wiping his brow.

  “I assume they were a huge help.”

  “You assume wrong,” said Bennett. “They gave us nothing.”

  Trevino pulled the curtain, cutting off the gaze of the curious asthmatic. “Less than nothing.”

  “They don’t know anybody or anything,” said Bennett. “You called it.”

  Grandad looked over his shoulder. “They’d help if they could.”

  Trevino raised an eyebrow at me.

  “We think it has to do with the war,” I said.

  Grandad snorted. “You’re a romantic, just like your dad. The war is long over.”

  “Apparently not.”

  “This scratch was an accident. You said so yourself.”

  “Robert wasn’t. They wanted to paralyze him. Who would want to paralyze Robert?”

  “Nobody,” said Grandad. “It’s ridiculous. He’s a retired realtor.”

  “It’s not about realty. It’s about the war.”

  He glanced back at me. “You can’t prove it.”

  And there it is. I’m right.

  “Don’t be so sure,” I said. “Now, lie down.”

  “Can you think of anything else?” asked Bennett.

  “Did you get anything from the guestbook?”

  The cops shook their heads.

  “No fingerprints could be raised, but the names and times were intact. George Nappo did finally admit that he took a call from Hal, saying that he and Mike switched rooms. He wrote it down on a sticky note next to the phone.”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “The note is gone.”

  “Yes, it is,” said Trevino.

  “So whoever read the book knew where Hal was, for sure.”

  “They definitely did.” Trevino and Bennett left and I got down to business. Pain-free for Grandad and anxiety-ridden for me. Stitching up a grandparent was now on my list of things never to do again.

  Two hours later, I left the ICU. Robert pretended to go to sleep in the middle of my questioning. Painkillers were known to loosen tongues, but not our Robert. He was on a boatload, but clear enough to deny knowing a thing. Then he went to sleep. Right.

  I wandered the halls until I found Grandad in his new room. They’d admitted him because his kidney function was in the basement. Mom called me every ten minutes for updates, but I wasn’t worried. Grandad had a UTI that he chose to ignore because ‘It didn’t burn that bad.’

  Grandad was kicking back with a phlebotomist, discussing the correct way to turn a chair leg with a lathe or something. I checked his chart for my nervous mother and called her with another unexciting update before I headed for the waiting room where Grandad’s cronies were holed up. They were swathed in blankets and talking about the good times, which I noticed were all during the war. Christmas in the trenches. That kind of thing. If I hadn’t seen the fight in the bar and Hal’s body, I’d have thought the war was a great time, instead of the nightmare that Grandad avoided remembering. Maybe Grandad and his buddies came out of that hellhole with no hard feelings, but others didn’t. Not even close.

  “You don’t have to stay here,” I said, coming in and dropping down on a sofa next to Janet. Her eyes were red and swollen, but she was the only one. “How is he?”

  “Robert? Pretending to sleep so
I won’t ask him any more questions.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  I could tell from her wide eyes that she really didn’t get it. “Ask them.” I gestured to the rest of the room.

  “Mercy, if we knew who killed Hal and stabbed Robert and Ace, don’t you think we’d tell you?” asked Big Mike.

  “You won’t tell the cops Steve and Jeanette’s last name. The guys in the Steelers jerseys remain a mystery, so I’m going with no.”

  “Mercy, if we knew—”

  “Spare me. Has it occurred to you that you’re next?” I asked Big Mike.

  Janet jumped to her feet. “Mercy, how can you say a thing like that?”

  “Easily. We started with Big Mike, my grandad, Hal, and Robert. One’s dead. Two are in this luxury vacation spot. That leaves Big Mike.”

  Janet gathered the blanket tighter around her shoulders. “And me and Barney.”

  “You and Barney weren’t in Vietnam. Big Mike was.”

  They went silent, their favorite thing, and Aaron trotted in with a plastic tray and a coffee carafe.

  “Where’d you come from?” I asked.

  “Cheyenne Crossing.”

  “Ask a stupid question. How’d you know what happened?”

  “News.”

  That was new. I’d never known Aaron to watch the news or TV or anything, except a stove.

  “Please say there’s hot chocolate in that carafé.”

  “You need it.” It wasn’t a question and he was right. Aaron was always right about chocolate. It was a gift like his ability to make feather-light gougeres.

  “I do in a huge way,” I said.

  Instead of pouring, he gave me his phone. “Mom.”

  “I’m good. Already called her on the nurse’s phone.”

  Aaron avoided my attempts to give it back and turned to Barney to say, “Cups.”

  Barney jumped, looked around, and then got up. “I guess I’m getting cups. Anybody need anything else?”

  Motive. Cooperative witnesses. A real vacation.

  “I think we’re good,” I said.

  Barney took off and Aaron switched his stare to me.

  “He’s getting the cups,” I said.

  “Napkins.”

  “For crying out loud, Aaron. Barney could’ve—oh, right—I’ll get them.” I shoved the phone in my pocket and booked it out of the waiting room, pausing briefly to see if I could possibly lock them in, but no such luck. Big Mike would figure out that I was talking to Barney and come running in a minute so I had to nail him down quick.

  I found Barney in what a nurse called the Necessities Room. It had everything you could possibly need for hanging out in a hospital for days at a time, coffee, tea, blankets, disposable toothbrushes and toothpaste, plus a myriad of snacks. Barney was loading up on cheese and crackers. He saw me and blushed. “It’s been a long time since the tacos.”

  “I agree.” I helped him load his loot into a brown paper bag. “I need to talk to you.”

  “Mercy, I really don’t know anything. Dad didn’t talk about negative things to do with the war. Isn’t Ace like that?”

  “He doesn’t talk about the war, period.”

  “Really?”

  “I didn’t know Big Mike and Hal existed until this trip. Your dad and Robert were just his friends, as far as I knew.”

  Barney looked to the side of me and then closed the door.

  “So…” I got myself a cup of coffee to have something to do while Barney pondered his choices.

  He took the coffee out of my hand and nervously drank it. “My dad said they were good guys. Better than the world would ever know.”

  “Who?”

  “All of them, Ace, Big Mike, all of them.”

  “That’s not exactly breaking news,” I said.

  “No, but it’s the way he said it like…I don’t know…they’d done something extraordinary.”

  “They won medals, didn’t they?”

  “Sure, but it wasn’t about the medals. Real soldiers don’t care about medals. They care about the job.”

  I filled the cup for him and handed it over. “Was this the whole group?”

  “Everybody who survived, yeah. They’re pretty tight. I can’t believe Ace doesn’t talk about them. You know he got the Silver Star, right?”

  “Wrong. He didn’t mention it. What was it for?” I asked.

  “There was some ambush. Ace went in to pull out the ground troops. He kept going back, even after his huey was shot up. He was hit twice and then he crashed.”

  “I saw the burns on his back for the first time today.”

  “Ace is a tough mother. That crash is how he met Big Mike. He pulled Ace out of the wreckage.”

  “That’s where he got his scars then.”

  “Some of them.”

  “And the rest?”

  Someone knocked on the door. “Hey, Barney,” said Big Mike. “You in there?”

  “Don’t say anything,” mouthed Barney.

  I turned on the sink and splashed my face, arranging it into tragic lines. “Come in.”

  Big Mike opened the door, a frown creasing his worn face. “What are you two up to?”

  “Nothing,” I said with a sniffle. “I’m okay.”

  “Did something happen?” he asked.

  “You mean other than death and stabbings? No.”

  Big Mike pulled me into his arms and nearly suffocated me against his meaty chest. “They’ll be fine. They’re tough old buzzards.”

  I made a big fuss about wiping my eyes. “So stupid.”

  “It’s not stupid. Ace is your grandad.”

  And apparently a lot more.

  “Yeah, I just freaked myself out,” I said. “And I forgot the napkins.”

  Big Mike grabbed a handful and gestured for me to go ahead.

  “No offense, but I’ll never squeeze by. This room wasn’t designed for the likes of you.”

  He laughed and went through the door sideways to be dramatic. When he wasn’t looking, I glanced at Barney, who mouthed, “POW.”

  Of course!

  I followed Big Mike out and Aaron’s phone rang in my pocket. It startled me even though I’d been hearing it repeatedly. Aaron gave my mom Professor McGonagall’s theme song from the first Harry Potter movie. I didn’t see the connection unless he thought Mom was a witch. Aaron was odd, but not quite that odd.

  “Hi, Mom,” I said. “Nothing’s happened.”

  “Don’t get short with me. I’m going to come up. I think I should come up.”

  That was the very last thing I wanted. My mother, Sturgis, murder. No thanks.

  “Grandad’s fine. He’s teaching people how to make furniture.”

  “But what about his kidneys?”

  Big Mike and Barney raised their eyebrows at me and I waved for them to go ahead. Big Mike put his arm around Barney’s shoulders and said something about getting food brought in. Fat chance. Aaron would feed them. Against their will, if necessary.

  “Mom, I told you this is just a precaution because of his age,” I said. “He’ll respond to the Levaquin and it’ll be fine.”

  “You’re sure?” Mom asked and I felt a thrill. Mom was asking me like I knew something. It was a rare moment meant to be savored.

  “I’m absolutely sure.”

  “What’s the hospitalist’s name? I’ll call her.”

  And the moment’s over.

  “He’ll tell you the same thing,” I said.

  “I’m sure. What’s the name?”

  I groaned.

  “Now don’t get upset. I trust you completely,” said my mother, who had never trusted me in her life.

  “And yet you’re calling the hospitalist.”

  “It’s not personal, sweetheart.”

  “How is it not personal?”

  “Mercy!”

  I gave her Dr. Gail’s number because I was an incompetent boob with no hope of convincing my mother otherwise. “Before you go, Mom.”
/>   “Yes? I knew you weren’t telling me everything,” she said in a rush. “A mother knows.”

  “In this case, a mother doesn’t know. I want to ask you about Grandad.”

  “You’re there. I’m not. I think I should come. Should I come?”

  “For crying out loud, no. Focus, Mom. What do you know about what happened to Grandad during the war?”

  That shut her down and unfortunately, she didn’t know much more than me. She knew about the crash and Big Mike. She’d met all the guys but didn’t know them well.

  “Have you ever heard of the Gold Star Brigade?” I asked.

  “Well, the gold star is a symbol used when someone is lost in battle. Mrs. Hanover has one hanging in their conservatory for Jacob.”

  “I know. But it’s this brigade I’m interested in. They have a website, but it’s password protected. Did Grandad ever mention them?”

  “Not that I recall, but none of his friends are widows, are they?”

  Ding. Ding. Ding.

  “But his friends didn’t all survive, did they?” I asked. “They’d have widows.”

  “You shouldn’t sound so happy. The war was a terrible thing. It left a lot of scars.”

  I thought about Grandad’s back and winced. “Yeah, I saw some today.”

  “He shouldn’t have insisted.”

  “It’s what he wanted and I did get him to eat,” I said. “What about some names? Can you remember anyone who didn’t come back?”

  “Sorry, darling,” said Mom. “I don’t. Ace doesn’t like to talk about it. He sometimes mentioned good things like letters from Janine or seeing your dad for the first time when he came home on leave, but that’s it. Call Morty.”

  “Grandad talked to him?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. He can break that password.”

  “Of course,” I said. “Thanks, Mom.”

  “I think maybe I should come up.”

  I groaned again. “I’m hanging up now.”

  “Mercy.”

  Click.

  Mothers. What are you gonna do?

  I called Uncle Morty and to my everlasting surprise, he answered. Since he’d hooked up with Nikki, he had no time for anyone, even Aaron. “What’d you want?”

  I could barely hear him and Uncle Morty wasn’t a quiet guy. There was music and shouting in the background. “This is Mercy.”