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
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.
I reached the backyard. The manicured lawn looked broader and more open than I remembered it.
The full moon was no brighter than it had been minutes earlier, but every hard surface that had previously absorbed this languid light now reflected and amplified it. An eerie silver radiance suffused the night, denying me concealment.
I dared not attempt to cross the broad brick patio. In fact I decided to stay well clear of the house and the driveway. Leaving via the same route by which I had arrived would be too risky.
I raced across the lawn to the acre of rose gardens at the back of the property. Before me lay descending terraces with extensive rows of trellises standing at angles to one another, numerous tunnel-like arbors, and a maze of meandering pathways.
Spring along our mellow coast doesn’t delay its debut to match the date celebrating it on the calendar, and already the roses were blooming. The red and other darkly colored flowers appeared to be black in the moonlight, roses for a sinister altar, but there were enormous white blooms, too, as big as babies’ heads, nodding to the lullaby of the breeze.
Men’s voices arose behind me. They were worn thin and tattered by the worrying wind.
Crouching behind a tall trellis, I looked back through the open squares between the white lattice crossings. Gingerly I pushed aside looping trailers with wicked thorns.
Near the garage, two flashlight beams chased shadows out of shrubbery, sent phantoms leaping up through tree limbs, dazzled across windows.
Sandy Kirk was behind one of the flashlights and was no doubt toting the handgun that I had glimpsed. Jesse Pinn might also have a weapon.
There was once a time when morticians and their assistants didn’t pack heat. Until this evening I had assumed I was still living in that era.
