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. “
