tombs, weigher of the hearts of the dead, could not have stared more
piercingly. This dog of mine was no Lassie, no carefree Disney pooch
with strictly cute moves and an unlimited capacity for mischievous
fun.
“Sometimes,” I told him, “You spook me.”
He blinked, shook his head, leaped away from me, and padded in circles
among the tombstones, busily sniffing the grass and the fallen oak
leaves, pretending to be just a dog again.
Maybe it wasn’t Orson who had spooked me. Maybe I had spooked
myself.
Maybe his lustrous eyes had been mirrors in which I’d seen my own eyes;
and in the reflections of my eyes, perhaps I had seen truths in my own
heart that I was unwilling to look upon directly.
“That would be the Halloway interpretation,” I said.
With sudden excitement, Orson pawed through a drift of fragrant leaves
still damp from an afternoon watering by the sprinkler system, burrowed
his snout among them as though engaged in a truffle hunt, chuffed, and
beat the ground with his tail.
Squirrels. Squirrels had sex. Squirrels had sex, had sex right
here.
Squirrels. Right here. Squirrel-heat-musk smell here, right here,
Master Snow, here, come smell here, come smell, quick quick quick
quick, come smell squirrel sex.
“You confound me,” I told him.
MY mouth still tasted like the bottom of an ashtray, but I was no
longer hacking up the phlegm of Satan. I should be able to steer to
Bobby’s place now.
Before fetching my bike, I rose onto my knees and turned to face the
headstone against which I had been leaning. “How’re things with You,
Noah? Still resting in peace?”
I didn’t have to use the penlight to read the engraving on the stone.
I’d read it a thousand times before, and I’d spent hours pondering the
name and the dates under it.
NOAH JOSEPH JAMES
June 5, 1888-july 2, 1984 Noah Joseph James, the man with three first
names. It’s not your name that amazes me; it’s your singular
longevity.
Ninety-six years of life.
Ninety-six springs, summers, autumns, winters.
Against daunting odds, I have thus far lived twenty-eight years.
If Lady Fortune comes to me with both hands full, I might make
thirty-eight. If the physicians prove to be bad prognosticators, if
the laws of probability are suspended, if fate takes a holiday, perhaps
I’ll live to be forty-eight. Then I would have enjoyed one half the
span of life granted to Noah Joseph James.
I don’t know who he was, what he did with the better part of a century
here on earth, whether he had one wife with whom to share his days or
outlived three, whether the children whom he fathered became priests or
serial killers, and I don’t want to know.
I’ve fantasized a rich and wondrous life for this man. I believe him
to have been well traveled, to have been to Borneo and Brazil, to
Mobile Bay duringJubilee and to New Orleans during Mardi Gras, to the
sun-washed isles of Greece and to the secret land of Shangrila high in
the fastness of Tibet. I believe that he loved truly and was deeply
loved in return, that he was a warrior and a poet, an adventurer and a
scholar, a musician and an artist and a sailor who sailed all the seven
seas, who boldly cast off what limitations-if any-were placed upon
him.
As long as he remains only a name to me and is otherwise a mystery, he
can be whatever I want him to be, and I can vicariously experience his
long, long life in the sun.
Softly I said, “Hey, Noah, I’ll bet when You died back there in 1984,
undertakers didn’t carry guns.”
I rose to my feet and stepped to the adjacent tombstone, where my
bicycle was propped under the guardian gaze of the granite angel.
Orson let out a low growl. Abruptly he was tense, alert. His head was
raised high, ears pricked. Although the light was poor, his tail
seemed to be tucked between his legs.
I followed the direction of his coaly gaze and saw a tall, stoop
shouldered man stalking among the tombstones. Even in the softening
shadows, he was a collection of angles and sharp edges, like a skeleton