Michael Langlois - Bad Radio

“Looks like it.”

He sighed and rubbed his knees. “My joints act up at night. Everything but my hands. I guess that shows that there’s a blessing in everything if you look at it the right way.”

“I guess so. Of course, if you close the other eye, you see there’s a curse in everything, too. Is that because there’s good and evil in everything, or because everything is both good and evil depending on how you look at it?”

He shook his head. It was an old fireside conversation. “I like Patty’s granddaughter.”

“Me, too.”

“Seems a shame.”

“She insisted that I bring her along. She lost her grandfather to the bags. They killed him right in front of her, Henry.” I clenched my fists in my lap. “They’re here. All those years and miles, and they’re right back here with us. Can you believe that?”

“Oh, yes. And so can you. We knew it wasn’t over. We’ve been waiting all these years for the other shoe to drop, the both of us. Anne doesn’t care about ancient history, though. She doesn’t really even want revenge, I’d wager. Oh, there might be some of that in her heart, but mostly I imagine that she wants to know that there’s order in the world. Justice. She wants reassurance that things happen for a reason, that her world still makes sense the way it used to.”

“I know. I’d like a little reassurance on that score, too, come to think of it.”

He chuckled, his deep voice smooth in the moonlit room. “I think you and I both know better by now. It’s not that the universe doesn’t want justice, it’s that it doesn’t even know the concept. Like color to a blind man.”

“Maybe that’s what we’re here for, then. Maybe we, of all things in the universe, sow justice in a field that was never meant to have it.”

“Could be. In any case, you know that she wouldn’t be here right now if you didn’t want it, no matter what she said or who her grandfather was.”

“I need her, Henry. I can’t finish this without her.”

“Is it worth it, considering what might happen to her?”

I leaned forward on the couch, suddenly angry. “You tell me, Henry. You’ve been working on what happened that day for decades now. So you tell me. Is it worth sacrificing her for? And you and me besides? Shit, we just sat on those pieces all this time, heads in the sand, hoping it would all go away. Or maybe just hoping to die before anything else was required of us. Isn’t that what we were doing?”

He sighed a long, tired sigh. “Maybe we were. The question is, why aren’t you still? You gave up on us twenty years ago and went to hide down on your farm. You didn’t even come out to Frank’s funeral. And I’m pretty sure I know what you’ve been working yourself up to since Maggie died. Why are you here now?”

I thought about the kind of obligation that can never be denied. Ties that cannot be cut. “Patrick called me for help. I had to go. And when I got there I didn’t save him.” I met Henry’s eyes. “They killed one of us. I will endure for as long as it takes to teach the man responsible what that means.”

He nodded and I could see for a moment the old Henry, full of fire. “And then?”

“And then it will be finished. I’ll be done.”

We sat in silence for a little while, each lost in thoughts of the past and the friends who dwelled there.

“I came out here to show you something.” He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a small dark object and put it into my hand. It was light, maybe as heavy as a spool of thread and as big as an unshelled walnut, and made of wood. I smiled as it uncurled in my open palm and stood up.

“Mr. C!”

“Oh, yes. He’s still around. Will be until we’re both gone, I imagine.”

Mr. C, or Mr. Careful as he was known to the squad, was a small wooden spider about three inches long and two inches wide. His head, thorax, and abdomen were all one piece of wood, carved by Henry with a pocketknife over a month of campfires. It was pretty crude. The shape was right, but there was no real detail carved into it.

The two eyes in the front, on the crown of its head, were the largest, and made from two sewing pins with round black plastic heads on them. The pins had been cut in half, and the steel shafts of the top halves had been pushed into the wood until only the round heads were showing for eyes.

The sharp bottom halves had been bent into gentle curves and pushed into the wood underneath the head for fangs. Those only stuck out about a half-inch or so. There were six more eyes around the top, but they were actually just dents pushed into the wood with the tip of a knife and colored in with a felt tip pen.

The legs were made out of matchsticks with the square edges whittled off until they were pretty round. Each leg was made up of three segments, a long one pushed into a hole in the body like a dowel, a short one in the middle, and a slightly longer one that was whittled down to a point at the end.

The ends where the segments met were wrapped in a tiny piece of cloth cut from one of Henry’s shirts, and then carefully wrapped again entirely in brown thread to make a joint. When Henry had first finished putting it together, the legs had stuck straight out from the sides of the body, like eight spokes.

We didn’t know what to think of the serious black man in our midst at that time, new as we were to both the army and each other, especially since Henry was the only black man some of us had ever met in person.

We’d been together in the field for months at that point, so he was no stranger, and make no mistake, any one of us would have taken a bullet for him without hesitation, but he was still an odd duck as far as we were concerned. So you can imagine our reaction when he came around to each of us in turn and asked for a drop of blood to smear on his little wooden spider.

It was Shad who agreed to do it first, of course, claiming that he wasn’t afraid of any voodoo, being from New Orleans and all. Henry told him it wasn’t voodoo, more than once, but Shad didn’t agree. To Henry, voodoo was a specific practice, to Shad it was anything that smacked of the supernatural. Once Shad pressed his pricked thumb on it, everyone had to do it. Nobody was going to be the guy who chickened out.

Henry drew some stuff on a square of cloth with a charred stick from the fire, wrapped the spider up and tied a string around the whole package, and then buried it. The next morning, there was a round hole about two inches wide with a tiny pile of dirt around it, where something had dug up out of that spot.

And there was Henry, as proud as I’ve ever seen him, beaming and holding that spider, dirty now, but with legs bent in a natural, very spider-like way, on his palm. I took a look at it, and I’m not ashamed to admit that when it spun in his hand to look at me, I jumped back with a high-pitched yell. Like a little girl, Shad couldn’t resist pointing out.

Close up you could see that it was just made of wood and cloth, but it moved with a kind of fluid grace and speed that even a real spider couldn’t match. Its legs bent at the joints without tearing the cloth, and the tips of the pins that made up its fangs flexed easily.

Over the next year of living outdoors and in the mud and the heat and the rain and everything else you could think of, that spider got dirty, but it never seemed to get worn or frayed. It was Shad who gave it the name, Mr. Careful. If you put your hand down to get it, the thing would skitter back until you stopped moving, then it would creep up real slow and get on your hand.

If Henry sent it into a building or over a wall, it would flash up to a corner and then ever so slowly peek over the top or into a window, for all the world looking like a nervous Peeping Tom. Shad found it hilarious, and started talking to it, telling it that it was too careful for its own good, like an old lady.