Foreward

Two years ago, I wrote this story, never imagining it would become so relevant in my lifetime. We all must make tough choices and stand up for freedom, even when our upbringing urges us to stay silent, follow the status quo, and do what we’ve been taught is right. No more, my friends. 

 

Conflicted

By Alison Naomi Holt

 

The sun transformed my car’s interior into a furnace, making it hot enough to melt steel. I opened the silver sunshade and carefully stuffed the bottom onto the already too-hot-to-touch dashboard. I wrestled the top under the rearview mirror and pulled down both visors to hold the flimsy mylar in place. The real pros, like me, who practically live out of their cars, know the terrycloth towel trick. I grabbed the yellow one lying on top of my briefcase and draped it over the steering wheel, growling my irritation as I slid out and shut the door.

As soon as I heard the lock click, I realized I’d forgotten to crack the windows. Momentarily allowing my lazy side to override my better judgement, I considered leaving them that way. The problem was I’d already cracked one department windshield by not opening the windows half an inch to let some of the midday heat escape.

As part of my retraining, I’d had to go through a lecture by the guy who maintains the police fleet. He’s a nice enough guy, but he really takes maintenance of the detective cars to an extreme. He went on and on about how the overheated desert sun penetrates the vehicle’s glass and heats the dark objects within—seats, dashboard, and steering wheel—which in turn creates more heat through convection and conduction. Blah, blah, blah.

Maybe the sunshade would keep the heat out long enough for me to check on old Mrs. Winston, who didn’t like women or cops and who would more than likely throw me out on my ass two minutes after grudgingly letting me inside.

My next thought was of my sergeant, Kate Brannigan, who’d threatened to charge me to replace the next cracked windshield because I didn’t roll down my windows. Cursing the fact that I lived in a place where 110 degrees was considered balmy among those of us who’d grown up in the Sonoran Desert, I unlocked the doors, started my engine, opened the windows an eighth of an inch, turned off my engine, got out, and slammed the door shut again.

By the time I’d scraped open the broken and peeling gate, I was hot and cranky and didn’t feel like talking to anyone, let alone old Mrs. Winston. I strode through weeds that left pokey stickers in my socks and marveled at the sheer numbers of cigarette butts, Winstons, of course, that littered the overgrown path leading to the rickety wooden porch.

I wasn’t sure why they’d even bothered to build a porch since it stood no more than six inches above the hard-packed caliche. Well, that’s a bit of an exaggeration since a year ago, the geriatric social worker who checks on Mrs. Winston once a week had seen a hand sticking out from beneath the porch and given us a call.

The homicide dicks had been tied up on a quadruple homicide on the city’s east side, so my partner, Casey Bowman, and I had been assigned to come check it out. I’m Alexandra Wolfe, by the way, assigned to the Special Crimes Unit of the Tucson Police Department. It had turned out that one of the local gangs, the Barrio Vista Bloods, had stuffed a rival gang member’s body beneath Mrs. Winston’s porch to get it out of their territory after the poor sod had had the indecency to die on their turf.

It gives you an idea as to the state of her home when you consider she hadn’t smelled the corpse rotting beneath her front porch for more than a week. That reminded me of the stench that always hits me whenever I walk into her living room. I pushed down the subsequent gag reflex and rapped my knuckles against the hollow-core front door. The resulting sound was more of a thud than a knock—one that wasn’t nearly loud enough for a mostly deaf old lady to hear, let alone to respond.

I didn’t want to put my knuckles through the rotting wood by rapping harder, so I opened my fist and slapped hard with an open palm. The latch gave way, and the door creaked open enough for three cats to slip outside. With each following in the footsteps of the other, they daintily step over and around the butts to disappear beneath the weeds and detritus littering the yard.

A fourth, more sedate…and portly…fellow stepped out and sniffed the food tray sitting to the right of the door.

I’d met him before and knelt to scratch behind his notched ear. “Hi there, Salem. How’s old granny today? Grumpy as ever?”

A gravelly voice called out, “I heard that.”

Salem rubbed against my knee, purring his response before stretching out a paw and batting the cover off the plate of food. Mrs. Winston received food from Meals on Wheels, a charity that provides hot meals for the elderly. Most of the breakfast was gone, a good sign since it meant the old lady still had a good appetite. The cat grabbed a buttered crust and crunched it into submission before finally swallowing the masticated remains. He growled when a calico stuck her head around the door before quickly darting forward and scarfing up the few egg crumbs Mrs. Winston had left behind.

When I pushed to my feet, I stood back and opened the door a bit wider to let out as much of the stench as possible. A wave of cat piss, old milk, and body odor came wafting out, and I turned my head to let the worst of it pass. I’d learned to wait a few moments before entering, giving my senses time to adjust to the cacophony of odors one encounters when entering a filthy home.

“Are you coming in or not? Unless you brought me a jar of dills, you can take your sorry ass out of here and get lost.”

“Shit.” I sighed since I’d left the jar superheating in my car. I left Salem to his crumbs and beeped the trunk open. I had to untuck my shirt and grab the jar with my shirttails because it was way too hot to hold. I figured that since they heat the jars to can the pickles in the first place, it wouldn’t hurt them to get superheated a second time. Of course, I’m the one who eats two-day-old pizza that’s been sitting in the box on the counter, “aging,” as it were.

At the front door, I pulled in a lungful of good, fresh air and prepared myself to beard the lioness in her den. I stepped inside and immediately dodged around a pile of discarded magazines. The covers, at least, were colorful if the contents were not. Mrs. Winston mostly read political stuff, and I had to kick aside several copies of The New Statesman, Washington Monthly, and Harpers to clear a path to where the old woman sat in a dingy room surrounded by, you guessed it, even more cats.

The chair she preferred was hard, “owing to my German constitution,” she’d once told me. That constitution had done well by her. She was a ninety-something spitfire with more wits about her than several of the commanders in my department. Bony forearms rested on the chair’s armrests, and varicose veined legs poked from beneath the faded purple and grey muumuu that I was sure never left her body. Her hands were folded beneath a sharp chin, and perpetually angry eyes stared out from sunken sockets. Nothing new to see here, then.

I glanced up at the corner above her head, wondering what progress the resident spider had made on her web since my last visit. The diameter was still about the same, but now a thin strand ran from the web to the shade of the reading lamp next to her chair.

Following the corner down the wall, I was interested to see that the decapitated, partially desiccated, skeletonized mouse was still lying in a heap next to the hole he’d once called home. “Why don’t you get rid of that thing? It’s gross.”

She lifted a bony shoulder. “It reminds me of my husband.” When I squinted and cocked my head in confusion, she let out a cackle. “He died upstairs in his sleep, and by the time the social shithead came to check on us, the mice had eaten certain parts of him.” She motioned to the pitiful little body in the corner. “I imagine that’s what killed this one. Sid was a mean, poisonous bastard. Too bad nobody warned the mice about that before they decided to dine on his—”

I held up my hand. “Never mind. That’s a vision I’d rather not get planted in my brain.” She cackled again, and when her gaze slid toward the kitchen, I turned to take a look. “Whoa. What happened here?” I walked in and set the pickles on the counter. Someone had cleaned the filth off the countertops. Clean cups sat in a dish tray next to the sink, and years of grease and dirt had been scrubbed off the ancient, green-flecked Marmoleum flooring.

“That fucking do-gooder social shithead wanted to take me out of my house. I had to compromise. She leaves this room alone, and she arranges for a cleaner to come in twice a week to clean the kitchen and bathroom. Shit, even the toilet’s clean. What good is a clean toilet if you’re just gonna crap in it again?”

I shrugged, “I have to admit that makes some kind of twisted, disgusting sense, but still, I’m kinda partial to a clean toilet, myself.”

She waved aside my comment. “Eh. What do you want? Go away and leave an old woman in peace.”

“I just came by to check on you.”

“Why? So you don’t have to come in and find I’ve been dead for a week, and the cats have eaten my eyes out?” I recognized the self-mocking humor behind the words and looked into those blue eyes that had seen so much during her lifetime. Instead of the filmy haze common to most older folks I’ve met, there was an ageless wisdom lurking in their depths that belied her gruff exterior. We’d had many extensive discussions on a variety of topics over the past several months, and it was her views of life, humanity, and morality that kept drawing me back.

I didn’t need to check on her. Not really. The social workers did that.

No, it was her unique perspective I was looking for whenever I walked through her door. I knew she didn’t like small talk, and I dove right into my reason for coming. “You once told me your parents were both Nazis but that you weren’t. That you’d never been.”

Instead of answering, she slowly turned her head and, with a lift of her chin, indicated a lone book lying on top of a dusty, flyleaf table. I walked to it and read the title, “Mein Kampf.” I turned and gave her a disgusted look. “You’re kidding me. Why do you keep filth like this around?”

She gave me a knowing grin. “Ah. The little Jew is horrified at the spawn of two evil Nazi collaborators.”

“No. But…” I indicated Hitler’s filth with an open palm.” “This? What good can it do to keep it around?”

Another shrug. “It belonged to my parents.” Her bright, intelligent eyes caught mine. “I keep it because I never want to forget. I keep it because you should never forget.”

I blinked down at the book.

“You asked about my parents. Does this have anything to do with your question?” Hmmm?” She plucked a newspaper off her lap and held it up, showing me a front-page photo of a line of Tucson Police officers and detectives standing between neo-Nazi protestors and a group of revelers during the recent gay pride event downtown. Protecting the revelers was a third group of bat-wielding, sign-carrying vigilantes who’d come to shut down the Nazis.

I’d been in that police line. A very conflicted Jew standing up for the rights of Nazis to spew their hatred at a gay pride event attended by dozens of my friends.

When I didn’t respond, she continued, “My parents were butchers. The Nazis were butchers.” She pointed to a stack of newspapers with a Harpers and a Reason magazine sliding off the pile. “See the notebook buried on the floor there? Beneath those magazines?”

I nudged the pile aside with the toe of my shoe until I uncovered a battered, brown, three-ring binder. My nose scrunched involuntarily as I stared at the tattered cover, slightly worried that if I picked it up, a spider, or worse, another headless mouse would erupt from between its pages.

“Well, pick it up, you nitwit. It’s not poisoned. Poisonous, yes, but not poisoned.”

I kicked it gently a few times to give notice to the creatures hiding within and then gently lifted it out of the scattered newspapers. The binding had begun to disintegrate, and I gingerly held it in the palm of my hand. Not wanting to tear the cover completely off, I slipped a finger beneath it and eased it open. On the first page were the words, Records of the United States Nuremberg War Crimes Trials.

She waited, probably to gauge my reaction, before continuing. “I’ve kept the pages that contain the trials of both my parents. I also have the records of my testimony that helped send Christoph and Dorothea Manheim, those same parents, to their deaths.” She shifted in her chair, warming to her topic now. “Why, you ask? Because people must remember what happened. These will be yours when I die, by the way. I’ve put them in my will. They go to you.”

“What?” I nearly dropped the notebook in shock and disgust. “No! I don’t want them.”

She leaned forward and pierced me with an angry glare and then jabbed at the newspaper with a finger painfully twisted by arthritis. “This is why you must.” She rattled the newspaper at me and pointed to the photo of us standing in our riot gear with our batons held at the ready. “You’re here because you were there, yes?”

Uncomfortable that my intent was so easily read, I nodded once.

“Well, I stood up and condemned my parents to death because I was there.” Her raspy, smoker’s voice deepened on the words. “I saw what happened, and now I see my generation is dying. The people who were there are dying. Do you think for a moment I would stand up and protect a Nazi’s right to speak after what I witnessed? What I experienced? That I would allow them to spew their filth into the minds of our children? My parents stood up for Hitler’s right to speak, and then they became him.”

I’d been wrestling with my conscience ever since I’d been assigned to the event, and I repeated what our commanders had told us in the pre-incident briefing. “But in America, they have a right to speak out.”

“No!” She jammed her hand forward, practically clawing at the air between us. “I heard those words repeated over and over as a child. They have a right. And Hitler capitalized on that right. He knew he could destroy an empire by using the moral superiority of those people he meant to destroy. He used our belief in the fundamental right of freedom to destroy us and then meant to rebuild a world where hatred and bigotry reigned supreme.”

Pointing at Mein Kampf, she said, “You must know your enemy to defeat him. If you intend to fight these so-called,” she held her fingers up in quotation marks, “new Nazis, then you read their bible, and you stop them from spewing their hatred into the ears of our youth.” Her voice lowered with contempt. “You don’t stand strong with your riot gear and baton and protect their right to spew their filth.”

Feeling like I’d been punched in the gut, I closed the notebook and set it on top of Hitler’s book. She’d hit the nail on the head, on the reason I hadn’t been able to sleep well for the last several nights.

“You didn’t hear what you expected, did you? You believe in people’s rights, and yet now you learn that it was those rights that nearly destroyed the world and caused the deaths of millions of people, of Jews just like yourself. Of gays, Roma, and intellectuals, too. I learned the hard way that a line must be drawn. I drew that line when I was fifteen and voluntarily testified against my parents. Nazis do not have a right to spew their filth.” She punctuated her next words by jabbing at the newspaper she still grasped in her hand. “They…do…not.”

I stared at her a moment. She’d given me more than enough to think about but, at the same time, had muddied my thinking to an even greater extent. I decided it was time to go so I could process what she was saying. “Do you need anything?”

“Nothing.”

“Thank you.”

“Get out.”

I smiled at her outburst, knowing it was her way of showing affection, and as I headed for the door, I glanced over my shoulder. “You take care, Baba Yaga.”

I expected her usual witty comeback whenever I called her that, but instead, she cocked her head and, with her throaty growl, gave me a benediction I believe I’ll carry with me for the rest of my days. “May the fires of a righteous warrior forever burn hot within your soul.”

When I turned to stare, her lips parted in a nearly toothless grin. “Now get out of my sight. And bring me cold pickles next time.” As I pulled the door closed, I couldn’t help but smile as I heard a muttered, “Idiot. Who brings hot pickles to a party, eh, Salem? You’d never do something like that, would you, boy?”

I drove away from Mrs. Winston’s ramshackle house, still conflicted but determined to return as often as it took to flesh out my feelings about duty and morality and exactly what role the two would play in the coming years of my life.