Bad Radio

by Michael Langlois

  9

  We stopped at a store on the way to the airport so that I could get two duffel bags and fill one of them with toiletries and clothes. The store was too big and sterile, and the shirts seemed like they were made of less fabric than they used to be. In fact, everything seemed to be TV props of the real thing, brighter and slicker, but also flimsy and insubstantial. Disposable. Anne geared up as well, just with more clothes and double the toiletries. I paid for everything.

  Standing out in the parking lot, I transferred the remaining contents of the battered metal toolbox to the empty duffel. An early fall rain was coming, and streamers of cool air whipped past me, carrying fine droplets and the scent of electricity.

  I borrowed Anne’s cell phone as we drove towards the airport and dialed Henry’s number from memory. Anne kept glancing at me as she drove, then looking away as if she weren’t curious.

  “Henry, it’s Abe. I’m coming to see you tonight. Yep. That’s right. You’re still as sharp as you ever were. See you tonight.” I handed the phone back.

  “What did he say?”

  “He said he’d be ready for us.”

  “You didn’t warn him about the bags, that they were going to his house.”

  “I didn’t have to, he knew as soon as he heard my voice. We haven’t spoken in thirty years, and all of a sudden I call him out of the blue and say I’m on my way to his house?” I looked out of the rain-flecked window and watched the thunderheads flicker with internal lights overhead. “No matter what else he might be, Henry’s still the smartest man I ever met.”

  As with most daytime showers, the sun was still shining between the thin clouds, painting the gray cotton with summits of liquid gold. A faint rainbow shone in the distance, seeming to pace the car as I watched out of the speckled window.

  “Abe, what’s going on?”

  I shrugged. “Let’s hope Henry can tell us both. And that we get there in time to hear it.”

  “I hope the bags do show up. I owe them for my grandfather.”

  “Yeah, that’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you about. That shot with my gun was pretty impressive.”

  She shrugged and looked away.

  “I’m serious. Tell me about it.”

  “Not much to tell. My grandfather taught me to shoot, and then had me enrolled in classes and signed up for competitions pretty much the whole time I was growing up. I was at the range every weekend when my friends were all at the mall, which did wonders for my social status. He even insisted I learn some hand to hand stuff from his Army training, which seemed pretty pointless. I asked what it was all for, and he said that in his day, men were better behaved, but now he figured I needed to be able to explain to a date that no means no. Preferably while I was driving him to the emergency room.”

  I had to laugh at that. Getting grabby with Patty’s granddaughter would have led to quite the exciting evening for her dates, just not in the way they imagined.

  “That’s a great idea, but I don’t think that’s really why he did it. I think that the old bastard knew all along that you had his gift. He was preparing you to do what he used to do, if it came down to that. Patty was pretty good in a scrape himself, but of course he got his training from the Brits at Achnacarry with the rest of us. Maybe he didn’t go through the whole course, but he did enough.”

  “Achnacarry?”

  “Scotland. It’s where all of us were trained, back in the ‘40s. The British had real commandos and we didn’t, so Uncle Sam pulled a bunch of us from the 34th Infantry and gave us to the Brits to train. Your grandfather and the Professor showed up at the end. They were more honorary Rangers than anything else. We had four head-kickers plus those two, whom we were assigned to protect.”

  “My grandfather was in for his nose, right? Why Henry?”

  “Doesn’t do much good to find the bad stuff if you don’t know what it is or what to do about it when you get there. Didn’t Patrick ever tell you any of this?”

  “He didn’t like to talk about it.”

  “Me neither to tell the truth.”

  “Oh. Sorry.” And just like that, she turned on the radio and dropped it. I was both surprised and grateful for the gesture.

  Austin Straubel International Airport was originally named for the first aviator from Brown County to die in the war, back in 1942. I didn’t know if the stream of people that swirled around us like we were a rock in a current knew that, but it was kind of a big deal back then. No matter what branch you served in, or where you lived or fought, he was one of us. It was satisfying to see him remembered, as if that remembrance were for us as well.

  Of course, the noble history of the airport didn’t make up for the reality of modern air travel. We spent the next five hours in a cramped flying bus full of people studiously ignoring the undignified accommodations and each other.

  I received fifteen cents worth of soda in a tiny plastic cup while trying to keep my knees from rubbing the seat in front of me. It was like being in a dog kennel one size too small, but without the ability to lie down.

  I remembered taking trips with Maggie back in the ‘60s to visit friends, and it seems like with so many other things, in my memory those trips were more elegant and comfortable. Of course, fewer people could afford to do it back then, so I guess I shouldn’t complain.

  Coming out of the airport into the soft, fragrant night air of North Carolina was worth the ordeal. I took a deep swig of the heavy air and felt my shoulders and face relax right away. It was warmer here, as if even the seasons were more relaxed.

  We had to take a shuttle bus to get to the rental car center, which was a quick way to get to a slow moving line, where I rented the cheapest SUV they had.

  I’m not a fan of SUVs for most things, since I expect a truck to work hauling manure and hay on the farm and I’m not interested in sharing cabin space with a hundred pounds of cow shit, but I figured the extra room and ground clearance couldn’t hurt for what lay ahead.

  It took over an hour to reach Henry’s place from the airport, much of it down dark and deserted blacktop roads, past the outskirts of the small town of Linwood. The lonely plot of land that Henry had purchased after the war was situated on the edge of a large stand of pine trees far back from the highway.

  The only indication that someone lived here was a break in the endless line of trees along the highway and a massive brick mailbox with an iron plate on top with the word “Monroe” stenciled on it in white paint.

  He ended up living on the backside of nowhere for the same reason that I had moved back to the farm after the war. Walking through the destruction of Europe, literally climbing over chunks of masonry from buildings five hundred years old, or around the smoking remains of a newly built café, had changed the way we viewed civilization.

  Buildings looked like pre-ruins when we got back, and the teeming masses that inhabited them seemed fragile and temporary. Only the mud and trees and hills seemed permanent and reliable.

  I turned into Henry’s carefully raked, quarter-mile-long gravel driveway and stopped after about twenty yards, leaving the lights and engine running.

  “Why are we stopping?” asked Anne.

  “Because we don’t want to get shot.” After a few seconds of sitting in the dark, a powerfully built black man in dark sweatpants and a black T-shirt materialized out of the shadowy tree line to my left. He moved in that classic easy trot that spoke more of military service than the M9A1 pistol that he was holstering. I rolled the window down.

  “You must be Abe.” He was fairly young, but he had a deep, wide voice. Beads of sweat stood out in his scalp-close hair. “Expecting anyone else?”

  “Nope. And you are?”

  “Leon Moss.” He reached into the car and shook my hand. His grip was hard and quick. “Henry is my great-uncle.”

  “Nice to meet you, Leon. Want a ride up to the house?”

  “No, thanks. I’m gonna check the perimeter a few more times and see what might come in behind you
.”

  “Okay, thanks.” We started rolling slowly up the drive, the gravel cracking and popping under the tires. When I looked into my rearview mirror, Leon was gone.

  The old place looked much like the last time I saw it, decades ago. A huge oak tree dominated the front of the house, now just a black fractal silhouette against the floodlight over the porch.

  The gravel drive went straight up to the tree where it became a wide circle around its trunk. I drove around until I was pointed back down the drive and then shut off the engine. Yellow light from two of the front windows painted long rectangles across the wooden porch, spilling out into the yard.

  I walked around to the SUV’s rear hatch, listening to the crunch of my footsteps and the wind slithering through the oak’s high branches. Those small sounds underscored the thick silence. I put both of my duffels over one shoulder, and Anne’s over the other and then locked the car.

  “Thanks, but I can carry my own bag,” said Anne as we walked to the porch.

  “I got it.” I knocked on the door.

  “I said I can carry it.” She yanked her duffel off of my shoulder and slung it over her own.

  “Take mine, too, if you like carrying bags so much. I’m not that big a fan.”

  The door swung open with a long creak from the steel spring bolted to the top of it, revealing Henry ‘The Professor’ Monroe. He looked pretty good to me for a man in his eighties. The deep wrinkles and sagging, parchment-thin skin did little to distract from his clear and steady gaze.

  “Abraham. Come on in.” His smile was bright in his dark face, and warm.

  We followed him into a small but neat kitchen. He wore gray work pants, heavy black shoes, and a sleeveless wife beater undershirt.

  “It’s been a long time, Henry,” I said. Then I dropped my bags and hugged the guy.

  “It’s great to see you, Abe.” He slapped me on the back a few times, and I’ll be damned if my eyes weren’t a little moist when we were done. We grinned at each other for a few moments in silence. “And who is this?” His voice was deep and measured, each word enunciated precisely in his round-edged mellow tones. It was this mannerism, more than his role as our portable scholar, that earned him his nickname.

  “I’m Anne, sir. Pleased to meet you.”

  “She’s Patrick’s granddaughter.”

  “Is that right? Well, I’m glad to make your acquaintance, Anne.” Henry smiled and shook her hand with both of his. “Can I get you two some coffee?”

  “Did you make it?”

  “Leon put it on for me.”

  “Then, yes.” We both chuckled at the old joke, which I was surprised still had the power to tickle me. Henry had burned enough coffee in the field to be the only man in the squad exempted from the task. Being the smart guy of the group, we all assumed he did it on purpose. He poured three big mugs of coffee from a battered old percolator and handed us each one. If Anne preferred cream or sugar, she didn’t say so. “Come on back into the den.”

  We followed him down a short hallway, passing framed pictures of family on the walls, mostly kids in their Sunday clothes laughing into cameras. Our feet made comfortable and quiet thumping noises as we moved across the wooden floor. The house was an old pier and beam affair, without a foundation, so there were a couple of feet between us and the ground below, lending our steps a hollow sound.

  Henry sat down with a grunt in his big easy chair and waved us to the overstuffed, Depression-era sofa to his right. There was a colorful hand knitted blanket draped across the back. Two big lamps and the wide windows looking out onto the front porch kept the room from being gloomy, as it might otherwise have been with the dark paneled walls and low ceiling. We sat down.

  Henry waited patiently with an amused glint in his eye as Anne stared openly at his hands and forearms. At first glance they appeared to be terribly scarred. Long teardrop-shaped welts and rivulets ran down both forearms, getting denser towards his wrists and then merging to completely cover his hands. It looked like he had plunged them into a vat of hot cooking oil, which had splattered up both arms. Then, as you noticed that his hands were smooth and supple, the pattern seemed to reverse like an optical illusion, as if everything except that skin was burned, and that the youthful texture of his hands was what ran up his arms, splashing over the rest of his wrinkled, thin skin.

  Anne looked up to see Henry watching her, and blushed in embarrassment. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to stare.”

  “That’s all right. They’re marks worth staring at. When I first got them, I didn’t even know it. Even twenty years ago, I could just make out faint outlines. That’s when I had my first suspicions. But now that I’m an old man, they’re as plain as the nose on my face.”

  “What happened?”

  “Well, that’s a long story.”

  “Don’t worry, I already know about Abe’s age. He told me.”

  His eyes locked onto mine, and I could see a sadness there, and maybe some reproach. “Did he now? I guess he felt like there wasn’t much reason to keep it a secret any longer.” Like I said, he was a smart son of a bitch. He settled back in his chair. “Well, it’s still too long a story for tonight, but I’ll tell you a little. You ever take chemistry in school?”

  “Some in high school, not much though.”

  “You ever put sodium in water? To see the reaction?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “You’d remember it if you had. It’s a popular demonstration of the volatility of alkali metals among high school and college educators. What you do is take a small piece of metallic sodium, just a tiny one, and drop it into some water. It’ll start burning, that little piece of metal, so hot and so fierce that it’ll come right to the surface and start skating and sizzling around, throwing fire and sparks. It’s so bright you can hardly look at it. Of course, if you use too much, it can blow up in your face.”

  “Um, okay.”

  “Well, back in the war, in Warsaw, Abe here fell into a big pool of … liquid. He fell about thirty feet straight down into this big dug-out pit, must have been twenty feet across and who knows how deep. He just dropped in like a stone.

  “The next thing I know, there’s a light down there where he hit, dim at first but getting brighter. Then Abe breaks the surface just like that piece of sodium I told you about. That light? It was coming from him. It was so bright you could hardly look at it, and he was throwing sparks and sizzling like crazy, just burning on the surface.

  “We thought it was phosphorus at first. So, he’s skating on the surface, burning like the sun, and he comes in a big circle right to the edge where I’m standing. So I reach in and grab him. I can’t look right at him because the fire is too bright, but my hands found him easy, due to the heat.

  “I noticed two things right away when I touched him. My hands burned like hell, and that he was stark naked, the clothes burned right off him. So I slid my hands around until I found his wrists, and I hauled him out of the pool.

  “As soon as I got him clear, the fire went out. Just like that. Also, he’s bone dry, and so are my hands and arms. It’s like the liquid was the fuel, and as soon as he came out, it burned up in an instant. But only what touched Abe burned. He was the catalyst. So there we were, him naked and unconscious, and me with my uniform sleeves burned off, and neither one of us with a mark on us to show for it. “

  “Oh my God.” She looked at the both of us in amazement. “But, if he was on fire, like you say, he was burning so hot and bright you couldn’t even look, why did you grab him?”

  Henry looked at her like she was from another planet, which I guess she was, as far as this was concerned. “Because one of us was in trouble. That’s what you do. The war made us family. Any one of us would have done it without hesitation. It just happened to be me because I was the closest. If I had been two more steps away, it would have been your grandfather, or any one of us. We watched out for each other, no matter what. Reaching into a fire is nothing, it never even cr
ossed my mind not to.” That brought thoughts of Shadroe to my mind, but I pushed them away.

  “What was it? What was in the pool?”

  Henry hesitated, and then glanced at me. I just shrugged, so he answered. “It was blood. A giant pool, who knows how many feet deep, of human blood.”

  She turned to me, her mouth twisted in disgust. “Why would there be so much blood? How could there be that much blood?”

  I told another lie. “We never found out. About then the demo charges we’d planted went off, and we got out as fast as we could.”

  “You must have seen something. What were you doing when you fell?”

  “I was trying to kill a man named Piotr Rafal Ostrowski. We were at an old train yard, long since bombed out of service by the Germans, and I had chased him up to the control room overlooking the tracks. We fought, he won. Then he threw me right out the window from three stories up.”

  “Peter who?”

  We heard the screen door creak open, then slap shut.

  “Piotr. We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”

  Leon tromped into the room, bringing the scent of the night air and pine trees with him. “It’s all clear, Uncle Henry.”

  Henry stood up creakily and clapped his nephew on the shoulder. “Thank you, Leon. I think we’ll be alright tonight.”

  “Me and Carlos will be back tomorrow morning, early.”

  “You don’t have to do that, we can handle it from here on out.”

  Leon looked at Anne and myself, then back at his uncle. “No offense to your friends, but I don’t think so. If somebody is coming here to mess with you, they’re gonna be damn sorry. I’ll see you tomorrow. Nice to meet you folks.”

  I could see the pride in Henry’s eyes as we waved good-bye. I knew what sort of trouble was coming to visit tomorrow and wished there was some way to keep Leon out of it.

  Leon left and Henry got everyone settled for the night. Anne got the guest room, and I got the couch in the den. I listened to Anne moving around and making the zippers on her duffel bags sing. A little while later I heard the sharp snap of the light going off and then the creak of the bed as she settled down. Henry must have heard it, too, because a few minutes later he padded into the den and sat down in his easy chair. “Still up?”