Fear Nothing (6 page)

Bobby and I lamented that the embalming room offered no windows for our use. That sanctum sanctorum—“where they do the wet work,” as Bobby put it—was in the basement, secure against ghoulish spies like us.

Secretly, I was relieved that our snooping would be restricted to Frank Kirk’s dry work. I believe that Bobby was relieved as well, although he pretended to be sorely disappointed.

On the positive side, I suppose, Frank performed most embalmings during the day while restricting cremations to the night hours. This made it possible for me to be in attendance.

Although the hulking cremator—cruder than the Power Pak II that Sandy uses these days—disposed of human remains at a very high temperature and featured emission-control devices, thin smoke escaped the chimney. Frank conducted only nocturnal cremations out of respect for bereaved family members or friends who might, in daylight, glance at the hilltop mortuary from lower in town and see the last of their loved ones slipping skyward in wispy gray curls.

Conveniently for us, Bobby’s father, Anson, was the editor in chief of the
Moonlight Bay Gazette.
Bobby used his connections and his familiarity with the newspaper offices to get us the most current information about deaths by accident and by natural causes.

We always knew when Frank Kirk had a fresh one, but we couldn’t be sure whether he was going to embalm it or cremate it. Immediately after sunset, we would ride our bikes to the vicinity of the mortuary and then creep onto the property, waiting at the crematorium window either until the action began or until we had to admit at last that this one was not going to be a burning.

Mr. Garth, the sixty-year-old president of the First National Bank, died of a heart attack in late October. We watched him go into the fire.

In November, a carpenter named Henry Aimes fell off a roof and broke his neck. Although Aimes was cremated, Bobby and I saw nothing of the process, because Frank Kirk or his assistant remembered to close the slats on the Levolor blind.

The blinds were open the second week in December, however, when we returned for the cremation of Rebecca Acquilain. She was married to Tom Acquilain, a math teacher at the junior high school where Bobby attended classes but I did not. Mrs. Acquilain, the town librarian, was only thirty, the mother of a five-year-old boy named Devlin.

Lying on the gurney, swathed in a sheet from the neck down, Mrs. Acquilain was so beautiful that her face was not merely a vision upon our eyes but a weight upon our chests. We could not breathe.

We had realized, I suppose, that she was a pretty woman, but we had never mooned over her. She was the librarian, after all, and someone’s mother, while we were thirteen and inclined not to notice beauty that was as quiet as starlight dropping from the sky and as clear as rainwater. The kind of woman who appeared nude on playing cards had the flash that drew our eyes. Until now, we had often looked at Mrs. Acquilain but had never
seen
her.

Death had not ravaged her, for she had died quickly. A flaw in a cerebral artery wall, no doubt with her from birth but never suspected, swelled and burst in the course of one afternoon. She was gone in hours.

As she lay on the mortuary gurney, her eyes were closed. Her features were relaxed. She seemed to be sleeping; in fact, her mouth was curved slightly, as though she were having a pleasant dream.

When the two morticians removed the sheet to convey Mrs. Acquilain into the cardboard case and then into the cremator, Bobby and I saw that she was slim, exquisitely proportioned, lovely beyond the power of words to describe. This was a beauty exceeding mere eroticism, and we didn’t look at her with morbid desire but with awe.

She looked so young.

She looked immortal.

The morticians conveyed her to the furnace with what seemed to be unusual gentleness and respect. When the door was closed behind the dead woman, Frank Kirk stripped off his latex gloves and blotted the back of one hand against his left eye and then his right. It was not perspiration that he wiped away.

During other cremations, Frank and his assistant had chatted almost continuously, though we could not quite hear what they said. This night, they spoke hardly at all.

Bobby and I were silent, too.

We returned the bench to the patio. We crept off Frank Kirk’s property.

After retrieving our bicycles, we rode through Moonlight Bay by way of its darkest streets.

We went to the beach.

At this hour, in this season, the broad strand was deserted. Behind us, as gorgeous as phoenix feathers, nesting on the hills and fluttering through a wealth of trees, were the town lights. In front of us lay the inky wash of the vast Pacific.

The surf was gentle. Widely spaced, low breakers slid to shore, lazily spilling their phosphorescent crests, which peeled from right to left like a white rind off the dark meat of the sea.

Sitting in the sand, watching the surf, I kept thinking how near we were to Christmas. Two weeks away. I didn’t want to think about Christmas, but it twinkled and jingled through my mind.

I don’t know what Bobby was thinking. I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to talk. Neither did he.

I brooded about what Christmas would be like for little Devlin Acquilain without his mother. Maybe he was too young to understand what death meant.

Tom Acquilain, her husband, knew what death meant, sure enough. Nevertheless, he would probably put up a Christmas tree for Devlin.

How would he find the strength to hang the tinsel on the boughs?

Speaking for the first time since we had seen the sheet unfolded from the woman’s body, Bobby said simply, “Let’s go swimming.”

Although the day had been mild, this was December, and it wasn’t a year when El Niño—the warm current out of the southern hemisphere—ran close to shore. The water temperature was inhospitable, and the air was slightly chilly.

As Bobby undressed, he folded his clothes and, to keep the sand out of them, neatly piled them on a tangled blanket of kelp that had washed ashore earlier in the day and been dried by the sun. I folded my clothes beside his.

Naked, we waded into the black water and then swam out against the tide. We went too far from shore.

We turned north and swam parallel to the coast. Easy strokes. Minimal kicking. Expertly riding the ebb and flow of the waves. We swam a dangerous distance.

We were both superb swimmers—though reckless now.

Usually a swimmer finds cold water less discomfiting after being in it awhile; as the body temperature drops, the difference between skin and water temperatures becomes much less perceptible. Furthermore, exertion creates the impression of heat. A reassuring but false sense of warmth can arise, which is perilous.

This water, however, grew colder as fast as our body temperatures dropped. We reached no comfort point, false or otherwise.

Having swum too far north, we should have made for shore. If we’d had any common sense, we would have walked back to the mound of dry kelp where we’d left our clothes.

Instead, we merely paused, treading water, sucking in deep shuddery breaths cold enough to sluice the precious heat out of our throats. Then as one, without a word, we turned south to swim back the way we had come, still too far from shore.

My limbs grew heavy. Faint but frightening cramps twisted through my stomach. The pounding of my riptide heart seemed hard enough to push me deep under the surface.

Although the incoming swells were as gentle as they had been when we first entered the water, they felt meaner. They bit with teeth of cold white foam.

We swam side by side, careful not to lose sight of each other. The winter sky offered no comfort, the lights of town were as distant as stars, and the sea was hostile. All we had was our friendship, but we knew that in a crisis, either of us would die trying to save the other.

When we returned to our starting point, we barely had the strength to walk out of the surf. Exhausted, nauseated, paler than the sand, shivering violently, we spat out the astringent taste of the sea.

We were so bitterly cold that we could no longer imagine the heat of the crematorium furnace. Even after we had dressed, we were still freezing, and that was good.

We walked our bicycles off the sand, across the grassy park that bordered the beach, to the nearest street.

As he climbed on his bike, Bobby said, “Shit.”

“Yeah,” I said.

We cycled to our separate homes.

We went straight to bed as though ill. We slept. We dreamed. Life went on.

We never returned to the crematorium window.

We never spoke again of Mrs. Acquilain.

All these years later, either Bobby or I would still give his life to save the other—and without hesitation.

How strange this world is: Those things that we can so readily touch, those things so real to the senses—the sweet architecture of a woman’s body, one’s own flesh and bone, the cold sea and the gleam of stars—are far less real than things we cannot touch or taste or smell or see. Bicycles and the boys who ride them are less real than what we feel in our minds and hearts, less substantial than friendship and love and loneliness, all of which long outlast the world.

On this March night far down the time stream from boyhood, the crematorium window and the scene beyond it were more real than I would have wished. Someone had brutally beaten the hitchhiker to death—and then had cut out his eyes.

Even if the murder and the substitution of this corpse for the body of my father made sense when all the facts were known, why take the eyes? Could there possibly be a logical reason for sending this pitiable man eyeless into the all-consuming fire of the cremator?

Or had someone disfigured the hitchhiker sheerly for the deep, dirty thrill of it?

I thought of the hulking man with the shaved head and the single pearl earring. His broad blunt face. His huntsman’s eyes, black and steady. His cold-iron voice with its rusty rasp.

It was possible to imagine such a man taking pleasure from the pain of another, carving flesh in the carefree manner of any country gentleman lazily whittling a twig.

Indeed, in the strange new world that had come into existence during my experience in the hospital basement, it was easy to imagine that Sandy Kirk himself had disfigured the body: Sandy, as good-looking and slick as any
GQ
model; Sandy, whose dear father had wept at the burning of Rebecca Acquilain. Perhaps the eyes had been offered up at the base of the shrine in the far and thorny corner of the rose garden that Bobby and I had never been able to find.

In the crematorium, as Sandy and his assistant rolled the gurney toward the furnace, the telephone rang.

Guiltily, I flinched from the window as though I had triggered an alarm.

When I leaned close to the glass again, I saw Sandy pull down his surgical mask and lift the handset from the wall phone. The tone of his voice indicated confusion, then alarm, then anger, but through the dual-pane window, I was not able to hear what he was saying.

Sandy slammed down the telephone handset almost hard enough to knock the box off the wall. Whoever had been on the other end of the line had gotten a good ear cleaning.

As he stripped out of his latex gloves, Sandy spoke urgently to his assistant. I thought I heard him speak my name—and not with either admiration or affection.

The assistant, Jesse Pinn, was a lean-faced whippet of a man with red hair and russet eyes and a thin mouth that seemed pinched in anticipation of the taste of a chased-down rabbit. Pinn started to zip the body bag shut over the corpse of the hitchhiker.

Sandy’s suit jacket was hung on one of a series of wall pegs to the right of the door. When he lifted it off the peg, I was astonished to see that under the coat hung a shoulder holster sagging with the weight of a handgun.

Seeing Pinn fumbling with the body bag, Sandy spoke sharply to him—and gestured at the window.

As Pinn hurried directly toward me, I jerked back from the pane. He closed the half-open slats on the blind.

I doubted that I had been seen.

On the other hand, keeping in mind that I am an optimist on such a deep level that it’s a subatomic condition with me, I decided that on this one occasion, I would be wise to listen to a more pessimistic instinct and not linger. I hurried between the garage wall and the eucalyptus grove, through the death-scented air, toward the backyard.

The drifted leaves crunched as hard as snail shells underfoot. Fortunately, I was given cover by the soughing of the breeze through the branches overhead.

The wind was full of the hollow susurrant sound of the sea over which it had so long traveled, and it masked my movements.

It would also cloak the footsteps of anyone stalking me.

I was certain that the telephone call had been from one of the orderlies at the hospital. They had examined the contents of the suitcase, found my father’s wallet, and deduced that I must have been in the garage to witness the body swap.

With this information, Sandy had realized that my appearance at his front door had not been as innocent as it had seemed. He and Jesse Pinn would come outside to see if I was still lurking on the property.