nonetheless a boy and, therefore, in love with adventure and camaraderie, so I might knowingly have risked blindness to share that moment with Bobby Halloway.
On a stainless-steel gurney near the window was the body of an elderly man. It was cloaked in a sheet, with only the ravaged face exposed. His yellow-white hair, matted and tangled, made him look as though he had died in a high wind. Judging by his waxy gray skin, sunken cheeks, and severely cracked lips, however, he had succumbed not to a storm but to a prolonged illness.
If Bobby and I had been acquainted with the man in life, we didn’t recognize him in this ashen and emaciated condition. If he’d been someone we knew even casually, he would have been no less grisly but perhaps less an object of boyish fascination and dark delight.
To us, because we were just thirteen and proud of it, the most compelling and remarkable and wonderful thing about the cadaver was also, of course, the grossest thing about it. One eye was closed, but the other was wide open and staring, occluded by a bright red starburst hemorrhage.
How that eye mesmerized us.
As death-blind as the painted eye of a doll, it nevertheless saw through us to the core.
Sometimes in a silent rapture of dread and sometimes whispering urgently to each other like a pair of deranged sportscasters doing color commentary, we watched as Frank and his assistant readied the cremator in one corner of the chamber. The room must have been warm, for the men slipped off their ties and rolled up their shirtsleeves, and tiny drops of perspiration wove beaded veils on their faces.
Outside, the October night was mild. Yet Bobby and I shivered and compared gooseflesh and wondered that our breath didn’t plume from us in white wintry clouds.
The morticians folded the sheet back from the cadaver, and we boys gasped at the horrors of advanced age and murderous disease. But we gasped with the same sweet thrill of terror that we had felt while gleefully watching videos like Night of the Living Dead.
As the corpse was moved into a cardboard case and eased into the blue flames of the cremator, I clutched Bobby’s arm, and he clamped one damp hand to the back of my neck, and we held fast to each other, as though a supernatural magnetic power might pull us inexorably forward, shattering the window, and sweep us into the room, into the fire with the dead man.
Frank Kirk shut the cremator.
Even through the closed window, the clank of the furnace door was loud enough, final enough, to echo in the hollows of our bones.
Later, after we had returned the teak bench to the patio and had fled the undertaker’s property, we repaired to the bleachers at the football field behind the high school. With no game in progress, that place was unlighted and safe for me. We guzzled Cokes and munched potato chips that Bobby had gotten en route at a 7-Eleven.
“That was cool, that was so cool,” Bobby declared excitedly.
“It was the coolest thing ever,” I agreed.
“Cooler than Ned’s cards.”
Ned was a friend who had moved to San Francisco with his parents just that previous August. He had obtained a deck of playing cards—how, he would never reveal—that featured color photographs of really hot-looking nude women, fifty-two different beauties.
“Definitely cooler than the cards,” I agreed. “Cooler than when that humongous tanker truck overturned and blew up out on the highway.”
“Jeez, yeah, megadegrees cooler than that. Cooler than when Zach Blenheim got chewed up by that pit bull and had to have twenty-eight stitches in his arm.”
“Unquestionably quantum arctics cooler than that,” I confirmed.
“His eye!” Bobby said, remembering the starburst hemorrhage.
“Oh, God, his eye!”
“Gag-o-rama!”
We swilled down Cokes and talked and laughed more than we had ever laughed before in one night.
What amazing creatures we are when we’re thirteen.
There on the athletic-field bleachers, I knew that this macabre adventure had tied a knot in our friendship that nothing and no one would ever loosen. By then we had been friends for two years; but during this night, our friendship became stronger, more complex than it had been at the start of the evening. We had shared a powerfully formative experience—and we sensed that this event was more profound than it seemed to be on the surface, more profound than boys our age could grasp. In my eyes, Bobby had acquired a new mystique, as I had acquired in his eyes, because we had done