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As I sat nose-to-nose with Orson, staring into his eyes, a sense of the uncanny came over me--or perhaps it was a transient ined that I could read his true thoughts, which were ue that I invented for hi hands from his head, but he chose not to turn away froaze

I was unable to lower mine

To express a word of this to Bobby Halloould have been to elicit a reco feared forso hard not to admit the true depth of e how profoundly the prospect of being alone scared h he saw an oncoreat white blazing wheel, as big as a rindin its wake

"What, when, where?" I wondered

Orson’s stare was intense Anubis, the dog-headed Egyptian god of toher of the hearts of the dead, could not have staredof 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 fro the torass 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 into look upon directly

"That would be the Halloway interpretation," I said

With sudden exciterant leaves still da by the sprinkler systeed 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-ht 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 Satan I should be able to steer to Bobby’s place now

Before fetching my bike, I rose onto ainst 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 ti the name and the dates under it

NOAH JOSEPH JAMES

June 5, 1888-July 2, 1984

Noah Joseph James, the man with three first naular longevity

Ninety-six years of life

Ninety-six springs, su odds, I have thus far lived twenty-eight years If Lady Fortune coht 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 knoho he hat he did with the better part of a century here on earth, whether he had one hom 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 li as he remains only a name to me and is otherwise a mystery, he can be whatever I want hi 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 toaze of the granite angel

Orson let out a lol Abruptly he was tense, alert His head was raised high, ears pricked Although the light was poor, his tail sees

I followed the direction of his coaly gaze and saw a tall, stoop-shoulderedshadows, he was a collection of angles and sharp edges, like a skeleton in a black suit, as if one of Noah’s neighbors had cli

The raves in which Orson and I stood, and he consulted a curious object in his left hand It appeared to be the size of a cellular telephone, with an illuminated display screen

He tapped on the instrument’s keypad The eerie h the cemetery, but these were different from telephone tones

Just as a scarf of cloud blew off the reen screen closer to his face for a better look at whatever data it provided, and those two soft lights revealed enough for me to make an identification I couldn’t see the red of his hair or his russet eyes, but even in profile the whippet-lean face and thin lips were chillingly familiar: Jesse Pinn, assistant h we stood only thirty or forty feet to his left

We played at being granite Orson wasn’t growling anyh the oaks would easily have rulanced to his right, at St Bernadette’s, and then consulted the screen again Finally he headed toward the church

He reh ere little more than thirty feet from hiotten, we followed Pinn