Bad Radio (6 page)

“All of a sudden, Patty points at the wall and keeps pointing. He moves his finger slowly towards a window, and Shad tosses that grenade out of it right before the finger gets there.

“After the smoke clears, we run outside and we see the guy. That grenade must have practically landed at his feet, because he’s really tore up. I’ve seen guys blown to bits by every piece of bloody-minded ordinance you can think of, but this was worse. One of his legs was off and he was split all up the belly and chest. That part I expected. But the crazy part was that what spilled out of him wasn’t just his workings, it was something else, too.

“There were long black wormy things in there, and they were thrashing around like crazy in the open air. Jumping and flipping around like fish out of water, only faster and harder. Like a movie reel sped up. You could hear this kind of snapping sound when they whiplashed around in the mud.

“Shadroe said the guy must have been a lousy fisherman, because he ended up having to eat his bait, and we all broke up. I know it sounds crazy, standing in the rain and laughing at a dead guy, with those worms all over the place, but we laughed until we cried. After that, when Patty would point out that it was one of them, we’d call ‘em baitbags, cause they were just sacks of fishing bait on two legs.”

“Oh my God, that’s disgusting. What were they?”

“Dunno,” I lied. That conversation goes places that I haven’t talked about for sixty years. After tonight, only one other man besides me knows anything about them, and that’s plenty.

“But why don’t they stop when you shoot them? Is it because of the worms or whatever inside them?”

“I don’t know. But it’s not true that you can’t stop them by shooting them. The worms seem to need the brain to drive the body, so headshots work pretty well, and of course you can always slow them down by hitting them in the knees and hips. Pain won’t stop them, but they need joints to move, same as we do.” I didn’t tell her about my preferred way of dealing with bags. She was upset enough already.

She didn’t ask any more questions for the rest of the trip. The both of us just went quiet and listened to the wind and the engine, trying to keep the fragile feeling of calm intact. We were both hit pretty hard by Patty’s death, and everything else on top of that just seemed to make things spin around out of control. We sat there trying to keep it together and hoping the other wouldn’t bring the whole house of cards down with the wrong words.

It worked pretty well until we got within a mile of my farm. By then we could see the ruddy orange glow reflecting off of the low clouds overhead. It was a fire, and it looked like a big one. I could feel my heart clench up in my chest.

7

W
e slewed and bounced up the dirt driveway, the glare from the roaring house blinding us. When the car finally crunched to a stop, I threw the door open, letting in the continuous low thunder of the fire. As I got out, I could feel the heat pressing in on me, like it was trying to push me back into the car. My eyes and throat started to sting, even though there didn’t appear to be much smoke at ground level, just a kind of foggy haze, but huge ashy clouds of it were rolling out of the top of the house, made up of everything Maggie or I ever owned.

I couldn’t look away. Every letter and picture, every scrap of cloth or furniture that ever adorned our lives, was rising up in a billowing black column full of cherry sparks.

As they spiraled up and became cold and invisible, they took the weight of the incinerated bits and pieces of my life with them, leaving only the imprint behind on my soul, finally becoming the past in the way that I always imagined memories existed for everyone else.

Weightless.

I hadn’t been sitting in that chair with my gun because I was depressed, or not just that, but because that was the only thing left to do. My life was a single track, bounded and fenced by my past.

I wasn’t just some guy named Abe. I was Abe, Maggie’s husband. Abe the old man. Abe who came back from the war. After losing Maggie there was nothing left in front of me, only a past and no future. That Abe’s track had only one stop left.

But watching the things that defined me drift away into the forgiving sky, I felt myself getting lighter. In that moment of complete loss, I was free. For the first time in nearly a century, I felt like I did when I was a boy leaving the farm for the first time, seeing the future expanding out in front of me. A quiet bittersweet exultation, but exultation all the same, filled me and lightened my body from the inside out.

I drew in a deep breath, full of scorching air and wood smoke, and when I exhaled, all my tired hopelessness seemed to flow out with my breath. It felt good. The east wall of the house crumpled just then, and a fierce bloom of heat tightened the skin on my face, pulling me back to the present.

“Back up the car,” I shouted over the roar. “You need to get further back!” I heard the engine rev and the tires bite as I slammed the car door shut. When I judged that Anne was no longer in danger of having things melt off of her car, I ran towards the house, cutting a wide circle around to the side.

My farm was built by my father in 1908, before electricity and refrigeration came to the countryside. That meant a big root cellar for storing preserves under the house. I hoped that the fire hadn’t eaten the foundation supports and let the house collapse into it just yet. I had things other than fruit preserved down there.

I saw immediately that that the cellar doors set into the ground were thrown open, and the padlock was laying on the ground, reflecting red and copper against the scorched grass. The shackle had been neatly severed with bolt cutters. I sucked in as much relatively smoke-free air as I could and hustled down the steps with my hand and forearm shielding my face from the heat.

The cellar was a surreal, hellish environment. Yellow and orange flame clung to the wooden ceiling in a rippling sheet. It looked like an upside-down lake of fire, rolling and boiling. Smoke filled the top half of the room, forcing me to shuffle crablike along the earthen floor, which was littered with shattered glass from broken jars of preserves. The air was a reeking stew of burning wood, plastic, insulation, and fruit.

I lifted the neck of my shirt over my mouth and moved as quickly as I could towards my workbench. The heat was suffocating and insistent. Hot glass crunched under my boots, and more than once I had to catch myself with an outstretched hand to keep my balance, earning me deep cuts and burns in my palms and fingers from the scorching glass and bubbling, tar-like preserves which stuck to my skin like peach and strawberry napalm. I wanted to laugh at the idea of weaponized fruit, but the pain kind of sucked the funny out of it.

Under the workbench was the large metal toolbox that I was looking for, also sitting open with the lid thrown back. I was already seeing spots from the smoke and my throat was burning, so I flipped the lid closed and fumbled with the hot latch until it closed. Then I burned my hand again grabbing the handle and dragged it painstakingly across the floor and up the stairs.

I managed to stagger a few yards away from the cellar doors before dropping the box and myself on the cool grass. We were both steaming and smoking in the night air. In between coughing fits that produced bitter black phlegm, I could hear sirens approaching in the distance. Since the nearest fire station was in town proper, I figured my neighbors must have called them at least fifteen minutes ago.

The steel toolbox that had started life a glossy gray was now a brownish sandpapery gray, thanks to the patina of rust covering it. It was over two feet long and probably weighed twenty pounds empty. I had long since taken out the metal tray of tools inside of it, so now it contained only a few old cigar boxes and a long bundle wrapped in cloth.

“What the hell is wrong with you, running into the fire like that? Are you crazy? You ran
under
a house that was on
fire
.” I hadn’t heard Anne approach. “You could have died over that stupid box, you fucking idiot!” She knelt down next to me and punched me in the shoulder, hard.

“If that was supposed to be first aid, you’re doing it wrong.” I took out a wooden cigar box with a picture of a matronly Cuban woman smoking a fat cheroot on the top. As soon as I picked it up, I could tell it was empty. I handed it to Anne. She opened the lid and then tossed it back to me. “You risked your life for an empty cigar box. Great. Good job.”

“Yesterday it had a piece of metal in it, just like Patrick’s.”

“You think those men came here to get it, exactly like at the nursing home, don’t you?”

“Except for the arson, yeah.” I took the box back and ran my fingers across the gently bumpy surface of the bottom and sides, as if to check the validity of what my eyes were telling me. The box stayed empty. The things that did this know who I am, and they wanted to hurt me. And they did. But I’ll bet you my last dollar that none of them stuck around after setting that fire. Like I said, they know who I am.

We sat on the lawn as gleaming county vehicles began to surround the house, reflecting the blaze in their chrome and glass. The inevitable flashing lights added hints of blue and actinic white to the mix. It didn’t take long to be surrounded by a swarm of determined and polite people going about their tasks in a controlled frenzy for the second time in one night.

After a quick checkout from the EMTs, we ended up sitting on a rough wool blanket well back from the house, supplied with bottles of water and instructions not to go anywhere.

After sixty years of silence, things were once again in motion. Everything in my sight was transformed. Flames from the inferno reflected off of the black glass surface of the lake behind the house, making it look like a hole full of fire.

The trees and grass had a macabre aspect in the blood red light. Even the hazy night sky bled and pulsed. Who could have guessed that the end of the world would start with a nursing home murder and a house fire?

I pulled myself to my feet and picked up the box. “Come on, I want to get this into your trunk before we become the center of attention.”

She wrinkled her nose. “Why are we keeping that? It smells awful, and they already got the thing out of it.”

“I guess because as of now this box is everything I own in the world, so I’m keeping it.”

“I’m sorry, Abe. Of course.”

The box went into the trunk. By dawn the fire was out, leaving the house a soggy, charred skeleton. Statements had been given, and paperwork had been filled out. Anne was sitting on the ground, leaning against her car and dozing while the swarm of vehicles drifted away in the pale morning light like bees returning to the hive. The dew in the grass shone like tiny diamonds, uncaring. I shook Anne gently and her eyes blinked open.

“Hey, we can go now.”

She yawned and stretched. “‘kay.”

“I’m pretty beat. Would you mind driving me up to the motel in town? I might be homeless, but I still have my wallet.”

“Sure, Abe. Not a problem.” She took a deep breath and rubbed her eyes. There were circles under them, and it wasn’t all because of a sleepless night. Neither one of us had been granted the time to feel the full weight of Patrick’s death, but it bore down on us nonetheless.

She followed my directions in a tired but companionable silence all the way to the shabby splendor of the Sweet Pastures Inn. Built in the fifties, it had served America’s glory days of highway travel, when the summer months were filled with family sedans packed with kids and luggage on their way to see the Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls and stopping at motels and roadside attractions along the way. It was far past its prime, but still managed to be clean and to mostly avoid the “hourly rental” crowd that seemed to claim so many older motels.

We pulled up into one of the many vacant spaces in front of the lobby. White painted wooden railings ran along the front of the single-story building in an attempt to give the narrow walkway in front of the battered doors a homey, porch-like feel. It might have worked if not for the crude epithets scratched into the dingy white paint along the rough-cut two-by-fours.