He placed it back in the bag with supreme care. “You wanna toast to the ’Graph before this planet goes kerblooey?”
I looked at the bar crowd, the game on TV, then down at my beaten red sneakers. “Why the hell not.”
We ordered bad champagne and clinked plastic champagne glasses. About two sips in, Lazerbeam said, “You know what I’m gonna do, man? I’m gonna put this thing out on 180-gram vinyl. That’s right. Lost classics time. This shit is gonna blow minds, I guarantee—”
But just as he was working himself up, his wife Marie appeared with two bags of veggies.
“There you are! I’ve been looking all over the damn market for you. Are you really talking about The Daily Telegraph again?”
“What the heck, Mare!” His voice pitched high. “You’re embarrassing me in front of our detective friend over here—”
“Guys,” I said, before they could escalate, “It’s okay, I was just leaving.”
She softened. “No, stay, I didn’t mean to scare you off.”
“I wish I could—I’ve got a test to study for, really. I just wanted to thank you for your help, both of you…and…I wanted to put this thing in the right hands.”
Lazerbeam sulked, but he said, “Don’t be a stranger, Zantz,” and I said I wouldn’t as I took one last look at them. They were a heartbreaker, these two keepers of the flame, a conundrum. Teenage senior citizens, cocky on the surface, but trembling in the face of mortality. They were not built for the future and they knew it, and everywhere they looked, the hyper-stim touchscreen Insta-world told them they were useless.
Nevertheless, they kept the flame.
—
The Daily Telegraph’s shining rinky-dink masterpiece Del Cyd came out just two months later on Pioneer Records. I got a weird surge of pride by proxy when I looked on the back cover and read Produced by Lazar Lawrence. The deluxe release had a few awesome bonuses—a lyric sheet and a gatefold collage assembled from the photos I’d taken of Devon Hawley Junior’s wall the night I broke in with Mickey Sandoz.
It just so happened that the very same week, Charles Elkaim called to tell me he received some documents he wanted to show me.
I drove over to the Shalom Terrace with a shrink-wrapped LP and found him eating lunch on his rolling tray. Cinnamon was there, bedside and faithful. She looked happy too, optimistic. It was the first time I’d seen her since the night with Appelfeld, and it was a little awkward between us out here in the light of day—her eyes gave me a gentle warning to not go there. Her almost-father-in-law looked a little weaker than before, but he had outlived the doctor’s predictions and he was happy too—happy to see me, thrilled to show me the letter he got from the county.
“A court processor brought it over,” Cinnamon said. “He thought he was under arrest!”
“For what?” I said.
“I thought maybe I forgot to pay a parking ticket twenty years ago,” he said. “Read it.”
The letter stated that Judge Maxwell R. Edler had vacated Emil Elkaim’s thirty-year-old charges. New DNA tests revealed traces of Benjamin Appelfeld’s blood on the original murder weapon, confirming the inquiry Fry and I had handed the county. Although Emil Elkaim had never been officially convicted, it was noted that he would be listed among the 1,281 recorded in the National Registry of Exonerations. When an innocent person is deprived of liberty because of a wrongful conviction, the form letter stated, the government has a responsibility to do all it can to foster that person’s reentry into society, in order to help restore some sense of justice.
Well, it was a form letter, generated by a computer, and Emil Elkaim wouldn’t be reentering society, but it was better than nothing. I handed the LP to Charles—it glowed majestic in his old hands, with Cinnamon looking over his shoulder, eyes instantly wet.
In a fit of passion, he said, “I want to show the record to Emil.”
It had the ring of dementia—Cinnamon and I exchanged an uncomfortable glance.
“Aba,” she said—but he was already up, grabbing his coat.
“We’ll go to his grave. I don’t believe Cynthia has ever seen her own grave. I’ll hire you. You’re a Lyfter, aren’t you?”
I smiled and shook my head. “This one’s a free ride, Mr. Elkaim.”
A half hour later we pulled into Home of Peace. The afternoon was cool, and fluffy clouds were making their way across the blue. At a tin bucket chained to a faucet, Elkaim washed his hands and Cinnamon and I followed—neither of us knew the rituals quite right. Traffic hummed on in the distance as we got our bearings. Then Cinnamon and I each held one of Mr. Elkaim’s arms and led him across the field to see his son’s grave, and it dawned on me that it would probably be Charles Elkaim’s last visit. Soon enough, he would join him. When we got to the plaques, Cinnamon ignored her own with tender dignity. Charles had her hold the record while he sang a Hebrew prayer in his low and mournful cadence, and then, with great care she laid the LP down between the graves—it made a crazy cacophony, the bright magenta and baby blue collage and the solemn granite with the green grass growing all around—but it was beautiful.
My eyes met Cinnamon’s and some pure, helpless, sweet electricity passed between us—she almost blushed from it. Or maybe I did.
Then Charles said, “Don’t you want to visit your uncle?”
“You know where he is?” I strained, embarrassed.
Elkaim pointed. “Over there, at the far end.”
He pointed to a cluster of graves near the fence—just over the wall, you could see the orange-and-blue sign for Nuñez Building Supplies.
“That’s a long walk, Aba,” Cinnamon said.
“We must,” he said. “Adam must say a blessing for the soul of his uncle.”
I nodded and we made our way down the path, around the tombstones, ambling diagonal to the far end of the cemetery. I was apprehensive, but when I finally gazed upon my uncle’s final resting place, it was all recognition and love and that same force of time I’d heard in those songs.
Herschel Berman
הרשל ברמן
1934–2017
Beloved Husband, Father, Grandfather, Uncle
“He insisted on including uncle—because he was your uncle.” Then Elkaim produced a little Kleenex packet from his pocket and handed it to me. I thought he thought I might cry, but he pointed at the plaque and said, “Needs a cleaning.”
As I got down on my knees and gave it a good once-over, a curious sensation came over me—that there was nothing standing between me and life anymore, that I would have to make my own way, without excuses, and I felt dizzy, weightless, moving dirt off the grave. To get my bearings, I grabbed a few small rocks from the grass and laid them across the plaque in Jewish fashion—one for me and one for Maya.
