Don't Ever Get Old (13 page)

“Rose, be a little more careful,” I shouted.

No wisecrack. No insult. No retort.

“Rose?”

Tequila jumped up off the couch and ran into the kitchen.

“Pop,” he yelled to me. “You need to call an ambulance. Right now.”

On the television, the bearded professor said, “It's no mystery why we enjoy our Nazi-fighting fantasies. We get enough mundane tragedy in our everyday lives.”

 

19

I sat in an antiseptic white room, on the same floor where Jim Wallace had died. Same sliding glass door that sealed itself. Same filtered air.

I listened to the rhythmic beeping of the machines and held Rose's hand. It was cold. Poor circulation. The gun, which I had been toting around all the time since my trip to Mississippi, was snug in its holster beneath my jacket, pressed against my right side. It wasn't much of a comfort. My pack of Luckys was sitting on a tray next to the bed, and I wanted one, awfully. But I couldn't leave her.

I pulled the memory notebook out of my left jacket pocket. I didn't read it, and I didn't feel like writing in it. I just clutched it tightly.

Rose was awake when the paramedics arrived, but she had been sedated since then. A doctor had offered me drugs a little while before, to help me sleep. I didn't take them. Somebody had to keep the vigil.

When I woke up in the hospital in November 1944, Rose was waiting for me. That's something I don't want to forget. I was surprised to see her there, in France. I was surprised to be alive at all, really. As it turned out, she'd been sitting there every day for the five weeks I'd been unconscious.

The war was over, so there were no U-boats patrolling the Atlantic anymore and it had been safe for her to make the sea voyage. I figured she must've had nothing better to do.

She handed me a bottle of bourbon. She'd been running a whiskey distributor while I was gone. But she came to France as soon as she heard I was laid up. She said she'd never forgive herself if she missed her only chance to watch me die.

I hadn't eaten anything in over a month, and my mouth was dry and cottony. I looked around to make sure the nurse wasn't watching, and then I took a long gulp of the whiskey. It burned going down.

I remember the way she smiled at me. She wasn't wearing any makeup, and her hair was tangled, but I thought I'd never seen anything more beautiful. I told her so.

She said to me, “Buck, you look like shit.”

In her bed in the geriatric intensive care unit, she looked very small, and I didn't feel too big myself. I felt fat tears welling up in my eyes. It was late, and I was so tired. But I knew I wouldn't be able to sleep.

I touched Rose's hair. I guess it's funny; she had seemed like she was at her most beautiful during those months when I was recovering after the war, even though that was a period in our life when I wasn't able to do much about it. That was the point we'd come back to.

It had been a long time since I could pick her up and carry her to the bedroom. I'd gotten so weak, I could barely carry in the groceries. I had to switch from the big brown paper sacks to those little plastic bags with the handles, and I needed a couple of trips out to the car to haul everything in.

Not that it mattered. The last time I had a proper hard-on, Ronald Reagan was president. They've got pills nowadays to get the old dog barking again, but there's a risk of dangerous interactions with the other stuff I have to take, and I've got the bruising problem, and she has brittle bones.

We were something once, though, back when her hair was like black silk and her skin was soft, and I was straight-backed and hard-jawed. When I was strong enough to lift guns and fists against any threat; when I was strong enough to protect her and strong enough to love her in ways that weren't gentle.

I didn't have that need anymore, but I still needed her. I couldn't handle being alone in the house with nobody but the television. After sixty-four years of her constant presence, the idea of silence and emptiness terrified me. And she counted my pills. She fed me. She remembered everyone's birthdays, and everyone's funerals. Remembered phone numbers and shopping lists, things that floated in my mind like tiny boats in an ocean of fog. She kept all the things I didn't care to remember, and the things I didn't want to forget but forgot anyway. I knew I didn't work alone, without her. Couldn't function. Couldn't survive.

I didn't even know how to work the coffee machine.

The doctor, our doctor, came in through the sliding door, and it clicked shut behind him. His eyes were red with sleeplessness, and I knew he'd come to the hospital just for us. I looked up at the muted television screen, and it said it was 2:43
A.M.

I nodded at him. “Thanks for coming in, Doc.”

“Listen,” he said, “I don't want to upset you too much. I think she's out of immediate danger.”

I let out a lungful of air and wiped at my eyes with my sleeve. No need for him to see tears.

“She's cracked several ribs,” he said. “There's nothing we can do about that. It's going to be painful for a couple of weeks. I can give her some pills to take the edge off. She'll want to avoid moving around too much.”

“Okay,” I said.

“I think she may have bumped her head. Possibly a mild concussion. She could experience some disorientation over the next few days or so. Ordinarily, I'd want to keep her around for observation, but I am pretty concerned that the hospital is not a safe place for the two of you.”

“Yeah,” I said. “If Steinblatt showed up, we'd be cornered here.”

The doctor frowned at me and fidgeted with his clipboard. “Actually, I was concerned that the two of you might be susceptible to infections or communicable diseases you might be exposed to here in the hospital. It's very common among elderly patients, because the immune system weakens with age. So I don't want to keep you here if I can avoid it.”

“Right.”

“When she wakes up in the morning, she'll be in some pain, but she should be lucid, and if everything looks okay, we can send her home. She'll want to stay in bed for a while, though.”

I let go of her hand and laid it gently by her side.

The doctor set down his clipboard. “What I need to talk to you about, Buck, is the significance of a fall event. This is a source of extreme concern when treating a geriatric patient.”

“She slipped in the kitchen,” I said, squaring my shoulders and raising my defenses against him. “It could happen to anyone. You said yourself, you want to send her home tomorrow.”

“Even minor injuries can lead to reduced or painful mobility, and that often sets off a series of cascading health problems. And the first fall dramatically increases the likelihood of a subsequent, more severe fall event within twelve months.”

“She's going to be all right, though?” I asked.

“Like John Maynard Keynes said, in the long run, we are all dead.”

I rubbed at my eyes again. “Our run is a lot longer than regular people's. We ain't even broke a sweat.”

The doctor sighed. “Try to look at this the way I see it. Rose is having difficulties with equilibrium, problems getting around. You're having episodes of confusion. What happened tonight could have been much worse. If Rose had landed hard on her hip, she would have been permanently relegated to a wheelchair. If she had hit her head harder, she could have died.”

I snorted. “Lots of bad stuff could have happened to us over the last nine decades.”

“I haven't suggested disturbing your self-sufficiency before, because you seem to be very good at managing your pills. But neither you nor Rose could safely function alone, and even together, you have to ask yourself, how much longer can the two of you go on living in that house?”

“We outlived our last three doctors there.”

“Jousting with me isn't going to change your situation,” he said, staring at me over his wire-rimmed glasses. “There are a number of excellent assisted living facilities that provide quality care and a perfectly tolerable environment.”

“I'd rather just cut out the bullshit and move straight into a cemetery plot.”

“That is a possible outcome here, a fact we should both be mindful of,” said the doctor.

“Fuck you,” I told him.

His bottom lip quivered a little. “I want to make sure you heard me, and understood,” he said, his voice low and shaky.

“No, I want to make sure you understood me,” I said.

“There are certain realities—”

“Fuck you,” I repeated.

“No. There are certain realities that you can't shout down, that you can't bully, that you can't beat into submission. I've been putting off discussing this with you, because I knew you would get very upset. But cursing at me won't protect you from having to face your limitations, and the next time there is an event like this, you need to be somewhere with emergency care available. I'm only trying to do what's best for you, Buck. And what's best for Rose.”

I stared at him.

“Yeah, I know,” he said. “Fuck me. Fuck me.” He turned his back on me and left. The glass door slid shut behind him and clicked, softly.

I looked at the last thing I'd written in my notebook. It was something the replacement preacher, Cutter, had said at Kind's memorial service.

“In darkness and solitude, when we are most afraid, we have to face our Enemy.”

 

20

I woke up the next morning on the vinyl couch in Rose's hospital room. She was awake, sipping orange juice and reading the
Commercial Appeal
.

Tequila and his mother, Fran, were waiting as well.

“I'm ready to get out of here, but I didn't want to interrupt your beauty rest,” Rose said to me.

I wiped at my eyes with the bruised backs of my hands.

“If you weren't so damn clumsy, we wouldn't be here in the first place,” I told her.

An hour later, we were out of the hospital. Fran had agreed to put Rose up in her house for the next few days, since I wasn't strong enough to help lift my wife in and out of the bed. Tequila would stay with me so I wouldn't be alone. Rose had already told him how to count out my pills and what foods he should not allow me to eat.

We carefully put Rose in the front seat of Fran's little Japanese car, and we folded up the wheelchair the hospital had given her to move around in while she recuperated. Tequila put it in the trunk. I didn't even want to look at it.

Rose and I had not spent a night apart in a couple of decades, and I found the plan a little upsetting, but if she wasn't going to mention that, neither would I. I fastened the seat belt in the backseat. I trusted Fran's driving, sort of, but I would have preferred to be in control.

“If Rose is going to be with you anyway, I think maybe I'll take Billy on that little road trip we've been discussing,” I announced.

Fran's expression told me she hadn't heard anything about this, and I was surprised that Tequila had the good sense to refrain from telling her everything.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“Just up to St. Louis, for a night or two,” Tequila said.

“Why?”

“Feh,” said Rose. “These two idiots are chasing after leprechauns.”

“We think someone Grandpa knows from the war is in a retirement home up there,” Tequila explained. “We're going to pay him a little visit.”

“Oh, that will be nice,” said Fran. “They can catch up on old times.” She peered at me in the rearview mirror. “I hope you won't be driving, Buck.”

“No, I'll be taking care of that,” said Tequila. “But I thought we had some things to do here first, though. We have to visit Grandpa's friend Norris Feely and pay a condolence call on Reverend Kind's widow.”

“No, we don't,” I said. “Pack a bag. We're going to Missouri after lunch.”

I didn't need to explain myself to him. Buttoning up Lawrence Kind's murder wasn't my job. I'd been retired for thirty-five years, and like Randall Jennings said, they could do police work without me. Tequila had shown me that my methods were antiquated anyway. These newer folks could do anything I knew how to do, faster and easier. They could catch the killer on their own, and I could let them.

If Kind had been killed because of the treasure, if the Enemy was circling around Heinrich Ziegler, I no longer saw the point of caution. Death was close, and it smelled like hospital. Like nursing home. No point in buttressing the walls. No point in barricading the door. It was coming in anyway.

I lit a cigarette.

Might as well ride out to meet it.

*   *   *

Something I don't want to forget:

Five hours is a long time to spend alone in a car with somebody you don't have much in common with. Eventually they try to talk to you, and that never ends well.

“The last time I was in town before he died, Dad wanted me to ride with him up to Nashville for some business thing he was doing.”

I looked out the window at some cows grazing along the side of the highway and avoided Tequila's gaze. He kept talking.

“I asked him if there would be anything for me to do there. He said, not really. He just wanted some company for the trip. I told him to fuck off. I was on spring break.”

I turned to look at him. “Why are you telling me this?”

“I just don't know how to forgive myself for that. It's been a few years, and it hasn't gotten easier. I feel stuck, you know?”

“So what do you want? For me to forgive you?”

“No.” He paused, drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “I mean, maybe. I think this is a big part of why I came down here—to find some kind of catharsis, or something. I don't actually care that much about Heinrich Ziegler.”

“Yeah, you don't care about anything. And that's what you end up regretting.” They always confessed to me, and always thought I'd understand.