Michael Langlois - Bad Radio

“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 crossed 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?”