by George Wier
“NO!” I yelled at him. “I’m not going in there.”
He laughed.
I pointed it at his chest and squeezed the trigger.
The gun bucked in my hand, but the sound was little more than a distant popping sound.
The bullet went right through him without leaving so much as a mark.
“You can’t make me go in there,” I shouted.
I pulled the trigger again and again: Pop! Pop! Pop!
Sheriff Noonday thought it uproariously funny.
I threw the gun at him and ran, unmindful of where I was going.
I ran back down the road, off the hill and into the misty air, and there began falling.
And I fell for hours on end.
*****
“Bill. Wake up!” Someone was shaking me.
It was Judge Sinclair.
“What time is it?” I asked.
“It’s nine o’clock at night. We need you to come alive again.”
I rubbed sleep out of my eyes.
I was disheveled and none too presentable.
“Darla went shopping and got you some clothes. Dinner is on the table and there’s a fresh pot of coffee. You can take a shower now.”
“Thanks, Judge. That’s a nice way to put it,” I told him.
“It’s not that. I lost my sense of smell during the Korean War. It’s that I’ve arranged for us to meet with someone, and I think we need to look good.”
“Who is it?”
“The oldest man in North America.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
We measure time in many ways: the positions of the sun, moon and stars; by clocks and calendars; by events of magnitude and by demarcations in our own lives; and ultimately it is measured in the span of years that encompass a lifetime.
So how old is old?
For me, someone isn’t old until they can’t walk due to infirmity or reach an age of around seventy, whichever is sooner.
I knew I would be revising my standard upwards after meeting Ely Green.
He lived near the junction of two minor state roads appropriately called “Crossroads”, a community consisting of a few houses set back on large, cleared spreads of land and one defunct gas station.
We were in the next county to the east of Robertson County beneath a strange, crimson-hued moon. A red moon. I was sure there was some kind of sailor’s superstition about such an occurrence: rough weather ahead, “here thar be monsters” ― some odd belief.
I felt good. Revitalized.
During the trip over the Judge and I had talked out a few things, the most surprising of which was of something that had happened while I was asleep. Lief had slept for five hours, had arisen abruptly and gone out on the front porch to sit and talk with Darla for a good long time. The two of them would be spending more time together. The attraction appeared to be mutual.
The other bit of information that I got was that Tate Lancing had survived and was out of ICU. X-rays showed that the bullet had lodged against two vertebrae in his neck, but that his spinal cord was intact. He would be going into surgery some time tomorrow. He had been truly lucky in that he had lost no motor control to any of his extremities. The judge had promised him the pistol from the safe, but the firing pin would have to be removed from the gun because Tate was a felon and not allowed to possess a firearm that could fire. Also, Tate wouldn’t be able to take it outside of his house once he made it back home, nor show it to anybody. That was fine by him.
Lief had gone back to the construction site and was pushing the highway on through. That part of my mission, at least, had been accomplished.
When we knocked on the screen door of the house in the country, the Judge and I were greeted with a “Come on in.” When we went inside I immediately smelled boiled cabbage.
“Hello, Judge,” Ely Green said.
“Ely. This is the fellow I told you about. Bill Travis, this is Mr. Green.”
I stepped forward and shook the man’s hand. He was standing at a folding card table where he had been working over a large jigsaw puzzle. The puzzle was about halfway done and there were several piles of pieces sorted by color.
Ely Green didn’t look to be a day over eighty-five, but according to Judge Sinclair, he was a hundred and twelve.
He was completely bald and had a light, even sprinkling of freckles from the crown of his head down onto his neck. He wore a light, thin smile and his eyes twinkled, framed by skin creased with age.
“It is good to meet you, Mr. Travis.” We shook hands. I was shaking hands with a man that was born before Teddy Roosevelt was president.
He moved from behind the table and led us into his living room.
“Won’t you both sit down?”
Judge Sinclair and I sat on an old wicker sofa with thick cushions. Mr. Green sat in his well-used bent wood rocking chair. Without further word he held out his hand and I passed the journal to him.
He unwrapped the drawstring, opened it on his lap and bent forward.
“1899,” he said. “I was born the year following.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“I haven’t read German since I gave a book by Heine to my granddaughter. She passed away last year up in Maine. I wonder what happened to it. Probably it’s in some New England antique shop.”
The Judge and I waited.
Ely Green turned one leaf after another, taking several minutes on each.
A cuckoo clock chimed the hour: Eleven o’clock.
I had time on my hands. Time to think.
What was I doing? What business did I have here? I had a wife and kids at home, I had responsibilities that I was sloughing off. I was doing “silly things”.
I looked over at Judge Sinclair. He had nodded off and was snoring softly. Mr. Green appeared not to notice.
Absently, I extracted one of the shells from my shirt pocket. They had been clinking together during the trip to Ely Green’s house.
I examined it, turning it over and over in my hands. It looked like the first shell we had picked up by the railroad tracks in Hearne.
I removed the other shell and held the thick end of it up to the first shell.
They were two different shells.
A shiver went up my back.
Two different rifles, I thought.
There was another sniper out there, somewhere.
I put the shells back in my pocket. The Judge was still snoring. He hadn’t seen me compare the shells. I was the only person on our side that knew.
Twenty minutes ticked by.
The ancient man in the rocking chair looked at the photographs one by one and put them back in the journal and continued with his reading.
A few minutes later he closed the book. The Judge awoke with a start.
*****
“Mr. Travis,” he said.
“Sir?”
A tear leaked out of the corner of one of his eyes and he wiped it away quickly.
“Do you know who I am?”
“No, sir,” I said. “Judge Sinclair says you’re the oldest man in North America, that you can read five languages, including Yiddish. He says that you’ve been through hell and back and have outlived all of your tormenters.”
“These things are true,” he said. He placed the journal on the coffee table in front of him, covering an old National Geographic from the 1970s.
“Who are you?” I asked.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“My name was Elia Grün. Grün is German for ‘Green’, so like most immigrants to this country, I Americanized it.”
“When did you come here?” I asked him.
“1933. The year that Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany. I left the very day that happened.”
“That’s understandable,” I said. “But most didn’t know how b
ad he was. Wasn’t the whole country enamored with him?”
“That is true. Too true. I was not. I followed his career closely ― from the trenches of The Great War, as it was once called here but is now referred to as World War I ― through his years of writing and stirring up ethnic hatreds. He was a fiery man, a man of zeal. And in his zeal the whole world nearly went up in flames.”
“You knew him,” I said, suddenly certain I was correct.
The old man paused, took a deep breath and let it go slowly.
“He was my... friend,” he said. “It is my burden to carry the guilt.”
“What guilt?” I asked.
The Judge cleared his throat. I looked at him and he shook his head almost imperceptibly, as if to say: “Don’t press him, Bill.”
“It’s alright,” Ely Green said. “It is my guilt, my utter anguish... that I saved his life.”
*****
Our world is probably not large, as worlds go. At the turn of the year 2000 there were over seven billion souls living on its six habitable continents, which, if my geography lessons were correct, account for some thirty percent of its surface. Before World War I there were less than two billion men, women and children. Going further back in history, say, to the end of the first millennium, there were likely less than a hundred million, all told. The actions of any one person, unless he or she was at a crossroads of events, were not likely to greatly influence the outcome of the species, or so I recall from the opinion of one of my college professors on the subject. But one man, a French monk newly arrived on the British Isles had stirred a firestorm that had launched the Crusades. Our history books were full of the names of those who had most influenced culture, for better or for worse. And still there were thousands of others who lay in unmarked graves, long forgotten, like their actions.
But for the actions of one man, millions of lives could have been saved. That he couldn’t have known it at the time, however, appeared to do little to assuage his guilt.
What do you do when a comrade has fallen? You pick him up. You bind his wounds. You save his life, if possible. I liked to believe that is what any person would do, if they were able.
I let Ely Green shed his tears.
When he was done he returned the journal to me.
“Who wrote this?” I asked.
“His name is Helmut Pfeffer. He was a doctor. I’ve heard his name before.”
“When?” I asked.
“As a young man. His journal tells of his experiments. He was a pupil of Wundt, who was a professor at Leipzig, I believe. Wundt experimented with criminals in the 1870s.”
“Experimented?” the Judge asked.
“Electricity. How much a man could take before he died. How to make men controllable, so that they would not commit crimes. How to control their thoughts.”
“Pfeffer’s journal,” I said. “What about his experiments?”
“He experimented on the insane, on the malformed. In the end he had progressed to children.”
“Progressed?” Judge Sinclair asked.
“Yes. He was brought here by the Americans to continue his experiments.”
“In 1899,” I said.
“Or thereabouts,” Ely Green said. He coughed once and covered his mouth.
“If you gentlemen will excuse me,” he said. “I am tired. It is well past my bed time.”
“Thank you, Ely,” Judge Sinclair said. “Let’s go, Bill.”
Ely Green walked us to his front door. We shook hands, cursorily, before leaving.
Once we were back inside my Mercedes, which Darla had been good enough to retrieve from her grandfather’s house for us, I turned to the Judge.
“That is a fine old man,” I said. “I believe him. I wouldn’t want to be him, but I believe him.”
“Of course you do,” he said.
*****
I dropped the Judge back at his home in Hearne forty-five minutes later with a promise that I would see him the next day and found myself wanting to wend my way back to Darla’s place. Really, I had no reason to go there, but I liked that couch. I didn’t know anywhere else to go except there, or to Lief’s construction shack, or home to Austin. I wouldn’t be going home, though, until I knew what to do with the journal, if anything. Also, there were two steel-jacketed rifle shells in my shirt pocket that came from two different guns.
I thought about Jennifer in her jammies with little Sailormoons on them. I thought about Michelle, already cutting her teeth and her thin-lipped smile and twinkling eyes. And Jessica with her exasperated expressions, shoulder shrugs and rolling eyes. Last I thought about Julie and warmth in the night.
I was wide awake with nowhere to go.
So I did what I usually do instead. I went back to the beginning.
The Family Diner Café.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
No one seemed to remember me from before. That was well and good.
I had a chicken-fried steak dinner, complete with Cajun-style french fries, a dinner salad and a tall glass of iced tea. This time I was able to finish it.
I was through with dinner and on my second glass of tea when the booth directly in front of me became occupied with three men: Sheriff Noonday, his deputy, and a big, beefy-looking fellow that couldn’t be anyone else but a lawyer with the unlikely last name of Jockovitch.
The journal lay beside me on the booth cushion, drawstring pulled tight.
I suddenly wasn’t very thirsty.
“How long you gonna hold that old squatter?” the deputy asked.
“Long as I want to,” Noonday said. He still wore his hat, even though he was inside. My respect for him fell another notch. I was raised with the etiquette that a real man took off his hat when indoors.
Then I remembered the dream I’d had, and shivered.
“I wonder,” the deputy went on, “who put a burr up the District Attorney’s ass.”
“Shut up, Sam,” Noonday said.
“Alright. Alright. I was just sayin’.”
“I know what you were saying. You’re more worried about your job that you are about me. Get your priorities straight.”
“Okay, boss.”
“And stop calling me that.”
“Okay, boss.”
Noonday sat with his back to me, and Sam, his deputy, sat next to him. I looked up from my empty plate and met Jockovitch’s glowering stare.
At that moment a large diesel rig pulled up next to the building outside the window on my right.
“They’re here,” Jockovitch said. “And this is where we part company.”
“Wait,” Noonday said. “You can’t leave yet. You’re the one that started all this mess.”
“What I came for is loaded on that truck. If you will excuse me.”
Jockovitch made motions to stand.
I heard it then: the unmistakable sound of a pistol being cocked.
I looked around the restaurant. There were two other sets of customers on the other side of the restaurant, oblivious to what was happening.
“I wouldn’t advise that,” Jockovitch said. “You boys are in over your heads. You’ll both be dead before the sun comes up if you pull that trigger.”
“Then that’ll be three of us,” Noonday said. “Sit down!”
Jockovitch sat.
The deputy turned around in his seat to look at me. I looked down at my plate quickly and yawned. I could tell he was going to say something, but the Sheriff’s right arm grabbed him and made him face forward.
“I don’t think anybody’s listening, Sam. Right Mister?” The question was directed at me. I looked at the back of Sheriff Noonday’s head.
I yawned again widely and made a loud sighing sound, as if I hadn’t a care in the world.
Jockovitch looked at me. I met his stare.
/> “That’s what I thought.” The Sheriff lowered his voiced and said: “See, Jocky? Nobody’s interested in what happens to you.”
“What is it you want?” the big man asked.
“Just a phone call or two. I want everything put right again. Everything was fine until you came along. You and your goddamned envelopes and your goddamned safe and your goddamned unanswered questions.”
“I see,” Jockovitch said. “Anything else?”
“Yeah. But this time no envelope. I want a suitcase. And if I don’t get it, there will be hell to pay.”
There was motion to my left. I turned to see the waitress approaching. I shook my head slowly in the negative. She must have understood from the expression on my face, if not the nod. She stopped, turned around and went the other direction.
“Okay,” Jockovitch said. “I’ll make sure you get everything you have coming to you.”
There was a tap on the window beside the booth in front of me. A clean cut young man wearing a baseball cap and a starched and clean white shirt was making motions with his hand and his head, as if to say ‘time to go.’
Jockovitch shook his head ‘no.’
The man shrugged and was gone.
“See,” Noonday said. “You do know how to be cooperative.”
I had that feeling again. Again, as in the barn with Tate Lancing taking a lifetime to turn the combination on the safe, I knew that the world was about to fly apart. This time, though, I didn’t need to blink away any apparitions.
I slowly fished my wallet out of my pocket and laid a twenty dollar bill on the table. I absently picked up the journal next to me, moved it from my right to my left hand and eased out of the booth.
“Take it easy, Mister,” the Sheriff said. His back was still to me and he hadn’t turned so much as a tick.
I nodded as if he could see me. I tried to cover the journal with my body, but in the last instant as I stood fully, I was aware that Jockovitch’s eyes were on it.