Fear Nothing

a patio bench.
        Sandy Kirk and an assistant were at work near the Power Pak Cremation System. They wore surgeons' masks, latex gloves, and disposable plastic aprons.
        On the gurney near the window was one of the opaque vinyl body bags, unzipped, split like a ripe pod, with a dead man nestled inside. Evidently this was the hitchhiker who would be cremated in my father's name.
        He was about five ten, a hundred sixty pounds. Because of the beating that he had taken, I could not estimate his age. His face was grotesquely battered.
        At first I thought that his eyes were hidden by black crusts of blood. Then I realized that both eyes were gone. I was staring into empty sockets.
        I thought of the old man with the starburst hemorrhage and how fearsome he had seemed to Bobby and me. That was nothing compared to this. That had been only nature's impersonal work, while this was human viciousness.
        

    * * *
        
        During that long-ago October and November, Bobby Halloway and I periodically returned to the crematorium window. Creeping through the darkness, trying not to trip in the ground ivy, we saturated our lungs with air redolent of the surrounding eucalyptuses, a scent that to this day I identify with death.
        During those two months, Frank Kirk conducted fourteen funerals, but only three of those deceased were cremated. The others were embalmed for traditional burials.
        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 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 Levelor 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,