Fear Nothing

profoundly the prospect of being alone scared me. More than anything, however, he feared for me, as though he saw an oncoming juggernaut of which I was oblivious: a great white blazing wheel, as big as a mountain, that would grind me to dust and leave the dust burning in its wake.
        “What, when, where?” I wondered.
        Orson's stare was intense. Anubis, the dog-headed Egyptian god of 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 during Jubilee and to New Orleans during Mardi Gras, to the sun-washed isles of Greece and to the secret land of Shangri-la 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