The left wheel was squeaking, a cold mist was falling, and Arthur could swear that someone had grabbed the uphill end of Cemetery Ridge Road and raised it a good ten feet, the combination of the three leaving the old man particularly miserable this morning. To top it all off, he'd lost his pipe. Bad enough he was confined to the wheelchair (with its wheel whining like a ball bearing in heat) and his arthritis left him damn near incapable of so much as tying his own shoes, but to deprive a man of his pipe...

It was just too much.

Still, Arthur Patton wheeled from his lonely apartment on Fifth Street, across to Windsor Avenue, and up the steep ascent of Cemetery Ridge to visit Laurie. Same as he'd done almost every morning for the past twelve years.

Like most mornings, he paused to catch his breath at the halfway point in front of McGruder's Market, to rest his cramped hands and weary arms, to let his atrophied lungs replace depleted oxygen. Lately, what with his arthritis worsening each day and the road magically getting steeper, he'd been considering one of those fancy electric wheelchairs, but harbored little hope that he would live long enough to enjoy one. Besides which, his bank account could hardly support what one would cost.

Arthur locked the chair's wheels against the steep incline while he rested. He laughed morbidly as he thought of the horror that would spring to the faces of the drivers on Windsor if they were to suddenly find a white-haired old man in a wheelchair flying through the busy intersection. Looking down the hill at the cars accelerating through yellow lights, squealing to a halt at red ones, and burning rubber when they saw green, at all the people in such a hurry to get somewhere, not realizing their ultimate destination was the quiet summit of this hill, he knew the cars would be quick -- mercilessly brutal, but mercifully quick. He doubted that he'd feel anything going out beneath those hurtling megaliths of modern technology.

"Morning, Art."

The suicidal reverie dissolved. It was all idle speculation anyway, the daydreams of a dying old man. If he was going to kill himself he'd have done it twelve years ago when Laurie died, or two years ago when the wheelchair became a necessity, or six months ago when he'd suffered his first heart attack.

"Good morning, Mac. How's the store?"

McGruder set down the tray of onions he'd been about to move inside in anticipation of heavier rain. Not that the rain would harm the onions, but it was a pain to drain the water from the tray. He kept reminding himself to fix the problem by simply drilling a few holes in the bottom of the tray, but it was one of those things he only remembered when it was raining.

"Store's fine. I got in that tobacco you were asking about."

Arthur frowned. "Lost my damn pipe."

"Got pipes in the store too, Art."

"Wouldn't be the same." He wrung his aching hands together and looked up towards the cemetery, thinking how he needed to get moving. Black clouds were sweeping in from the west and the mist had become as thick as damp cotton. "Laurie gave me that pipe."

"Oh." No further comment was necessary.

Both men were silent for a moment, then Arthur cleared his throat. "Time I quit smoking anyway." But there was no conviction in his voice.

"You'll find your pipe, Art."

Still looking up at the top of the hill and the myopia of grey markers hazy in the heavy mist, Arthur nodded his head. "Yeah. You're probably right. Lost things usually work their way back to a fellah. Leastwise, the really important ones do." He unlocked the wheels on the chair. "Better get them onions in. Starting to rain harder and you still got the taters and apples to go." He started up the hill, leaving McGruder to his work.

The cemetery was a rolling expanse of green stretched across the ridgeline, cleared of all but a few of the great oaks that had once covered the entire area and still lined Cemetery Ridge Road. It was surrounded by a stone wall, pale grey in color, always cold to the touch. The wall was low enough that it didn't hide the solemn landscape within, high enough that it kept out stray dogs and the dry oak leaves that blew up and down the road. It was broken by several wrought-iron gates, each cleanly painted and well-oiled by the grounds keeper. Something about the silent operation of those black gates always bothered Arthur. He thought they should open reluctantly, shrieking like some rusty gate to Hell in a B-grade horror movie. Instead they opened smoothly, effortlessly, testimony to just how easy it was to join those poor souls bedded within.

Today, the graveyard was quiet and wet, empty of mourners on a day that, on the surface, seemed made for mourning. The drizzle had left the tombstones glistening on their windward sides as if the caretaker had tried to wash them of the permeating aura of death.

Arthur rolled down a path the wheelchair knew. There were tiny ruts permanently writ on the ground, admissible evidence of his daily sojourns to this place of the dead. The rain was falling now in genuine drops. It fell slowly, but the drops were big, hitting his bare and balding head like the droppings of seagulls. His clothes were rapidly soaking through, making him more uncomfortable than usual. He ignored the discomfort same as he ignored the glass slivers wedged deep in his deteriorating spinal column, same as he ignored the doctors' warnings about being out in weather like this.

The rain had found the face of Laurie's stone, leaving it as wet as the day he had first cried over it. The stone was simple. It bore her name, dates of birth and death, and the simple legend `Most Beloved Wife.' The flowers he'd left yesterday were still there (often they weren't), looking fresh in the rain and the dim light.

Arthur kissed the tips of his fingers and laid them tenderly against the cold stone. "Won't be long now, Laurie."

The wind sighed in the nearby trees, a drawn, tired keening, a wailing of the world.

# # #

Late evening. Still raining, though now it was a steady deluge that had beaten down the grass in the cemetery, washed the oak leaves from Cemetery Ridge Road, and left puddles standing like sentinels about the somber stones. The cemetery was a quiet place in the storm, the only sounds being the steady patter of rain, the wind in the trees and, occasionally, the distant rumble of thunder. The cemetery was devoid of living customers, save one.

Crouched beneath a parka cut from black plastic he'd stolen from a construction sight, Toby Simmons spoke to his mother.

"I know it ain't what you'd a wanted, Mama. But it's what I wanted. Justice, that's what it was. Exactly what he deserved." The fifteen-year old pulled a hunting knife from under his parka and laid it beside the simple marker set in the ground above his dead mother's head.

"You give him everythin' you had -- I understand why -- but he give you nothin' but pain and . . ." A sob made the boy's shoulders shake beneath the slick plastic. "I done took care of him, Mama. I done him right."

The boy settled forward, his head resting on the cold marker, and cried softly. There was no one to hear him. No one to care.

# # #

There was a flower shop on Fifth Street, just two blocks out of his way. Laurie deserved fresh flowers as often as he could afford them. Yesterday's mail had included his social security check. McGruder had cashed it for him yesterday afternoon.

At the florist's, Arthur picked out some inexpensive daisies. They were canary-yellow, dazzling in the sunlight. With them across his lap, he wheeled back up Fifth Street. Despite his lack of energy, Arthur was beginning to feel better than he had in several days. He attributed it to the change in weather; sunshine and Indian-summer breezes had replaced the darkness and rain that had followed him to the graveyard for four days running.

McGruder was out front sorting vegetables when Arthur paused to work some of the stiffness out of his hands. There was a newspaper tucked under McGruder's arm.

"Damn kids," the store owner muttered. "Guess I shoulda known to take this stuff in. But hell, I was only going around the corner for a paper."

Arthur tried to look sympathetic.

"What they didn't steal, they mixed all up. I'd like to take a board to the backside of each and every one of them."

Arthur was determined not to let McGruder ruin his morning. "Just boys doing what boys have always been good at, Mac. You think on it a minute or two and I bet you'll remember worse things you done when you were that age."

"Humph."

Arthur leaned back in his chair, letting the warm sun and light breeze waft the smells of the market to him: the sweet tang of apples and oranges, the duller aroma of vegetables, the nasal bite of the onion bin, the tropical pleasure of bananas . . . He and Laurie had taken a cruise in the Bahamas, one of the few summers they'd had the money for a real vacation. It'd been the best summer ever.

Damn. Why'd he have to go and remember that?

"You watch, Art. In a few years those same boys'll be coming in here with thirty-eight specials to empty my cash register."

"It's not as bad as all that."

"Oh yeah? I swear I don't know what the world's coming to." He opened the newspaper and swatted at the front page. "Every day: burglary, rape, murder, one after another. And the goddamn drugs! Every time I turn around they're talking about a new one. The biggie these days is crack -- whatever the hell that is."

McGruder flashed the paper at Arthur. "See right here? Somebody cut this pimp up so bad they never even found all the pieces. Tell me that wasn't some crackhead."

"We've always known the world is not a kind and gentle place, Mac. If it were, I'd be sitting at home with Laurie, and your Martha'd be sorting out them vegetables."

A moment of silence passed between the old men, a moment of mutual understanding for what they'd lost, then McGruder pointed at the daisies. "Damn waste of money, Art. You ought to find one that's still kicking and give her them daisies."

Arthur just frowned at him. McGruder had cremated his Martha -- something to do with not wanting the worms after her in the Earth, but Arthur suspected it left McGruder free of any obligations for visiting a graveyard or otherwise preserving her memory. Since Martha's death, Joseph McGruder had chased every skirt he'd come across, albeit with little or no success.

"Find your pipe yet?"

"Not yet." Arthur didn't tell him that he'd also misplaced his electric razor and a paperback western he was halfway through reading.

"Ah, no matter. You will. I saved back some of that tobacco."

"Thanks. See ya, Mac." Arthur unlocked the wheels and started up the street. McGruder watched his old friend's back for a few minutes, long enough to make sure he was going to be alright, then he went back to sorting his produce.

# # #

McGruder's thieves had taken up target practice in the cemetery. There were three of them, tall and thin, in faded jeans with ragged white holes at knees, crotch, and seat. The rock bands advertised on their t-shirts conjured images of satanic worship and human sacrifice. One of them wore a Japanese hachimaki about his wild black hair. Their high-tops were untied, with rabid hound tongues that flapped as they ran away. They left behind sticky splotches of tomato-red and avocado-green splattered like abstract art over the dignified grey of many headstones, Laurie's included.

Arthur dug out his handkerchief. He winced at the pain in his back as he bent over to wipe tomato blood from his wife's stone. "I'm sorry, Laurie. Hoodlums, that's all they are. No respect for anyone, not even the dead."

He got the last of the juice wiped off and straightened up, head reeling with the effort. For a moment, the grey stones spun about him like a drunkard's Stonehenge, then he got it under control. He was leaning back in the chair with the sun hot on his face, taking long, deep breaths, when he heard them coming back.

"You're such a pussy, Mike. Look, it's just one old fart in a wheelchair."

"Yeah, one old geezer's all I see too. Wait'll I tell everyone at school what a wuss Mike Ford really is."

Two voices, coming up the row of graves behind him. Young voices. Angry. Bored. And then the third voice, the one they'd called Mike: "Didn't see either of you assholes sticking around. Let's see what Gramps is up to, eh?"

Arthur swallowed the first faint taste of fear. He'd always felt safe in the cemetery. It was as if all the violence intended for those within had long since been dealt and, so long as he was within the stone wall, on this side of that dividing line between the living and the dead, he was safe.

Not so today.

One of them caught the handles on his chair and spun him around. "Leave me alone!" Arthur cried. He was surprised to hear his voice come out high-pitched, frightened. Embarrassment and fear spread crimson across his face.

"Leave me alone!" one of them mocked.

"Shut up, Pete," said the boy holding the chair. "Can't you see Gramps is in mourning?"

"Sure, Mike. Give him a tomato and I bet he'll feel a lot better."

Mike had two tomatoes remaining, loaded in the pockets of a Metallica sweat shirt. He pulled one out and tossed it a few times in the air, catching it deftly in his strong, young hand. With his other hand, he took the daisies.

Arthur clawed at the flowers, but his attempt to keep them merely stripped free several bright blooms which fell desolate in his lap, poor substitute for the entire bouquet.

Mike dropped the tomato into Arthur's lap. The boy and the old man stared as if it were about to give some kind of performance where it lay fat and red atop Arthur's withered legs.

"Don't seem to be working," observed the as-yet-unnamed third boy, he with the BANZAI! bandanna.

"That's just cause he don't know what to do with it." Pete theorized. Pete proceeded to demonstrate what the tomato was for by hurling one full force at Laurie's headstone. It exploded across the marble, obliterating her name.

Arthur found his voice. "Please stop. My wife is buried there."

Mike smudged at the running juice with the sole of his shoe. "Laurie. That was your old lady?"

"Didn't she like tomatoes?" he with the bandanna guffawed.

Mike retrieved his tomato from Arthur's lap. "You like tomatoes, don't ya Gramps?" He crushed it in his hand so that the thick red meat and juice gushed out between his fingers to spill into Arthur's lap. Then he wiped his hand off on Arthur's shirt.

"Please," Arthur tried again.

Mike leaned close, breath reeking of burgers, fries, and shakes, chin coated with thin, scraggly whiskers, nose bent as if it'd been broken at least once, eyes awash in unwarranted hatred. "What are you gonna do about it, old man?" He pulled the other tomato from his pocket, made to crush it over Arthur's head.

Arthur swatted the tomato from the boy's hand. It bounced across the ground and rolled away like a child's ball.

"You shouldn't have done that!" Mike hissed. His hand went back, and before Arthur realized it was coming, Mike backhanded him across the face.

"Whoa!"

"Oh shit," Pete sputtered. "Chill out, Mike. It's just a stupid old man --"

"Maybe you want some of what I'm gonna give the old faggot, eh?"

"No, Mike. I just --"

"Just shut the fuck up!"

Arthur tasted blood on his lips. His nose and cheek stung and there were tears welling up in his eyes. He cursed silently. This was humiliating enough without crying.

"You ready for another one, pops?"

"Tough guy." Arthur spit. Blood caught on his chin and hung there, angry and red. "Beating up an old man who can't even get out of his wheelchair. What'll you do for fun next, rape somebody's grandmother?" Arthur reached cautiously to the small pouch that rode behind his chair, keeping his eyes locked with Mike's the whole time, willing him not to notice.

"When I'm done beating the piss outta you," Mike sneered, "I'm gonna shit on your old lady's grave. How's that grab you?"

"About as well as this'll grab you." Arthur brought out the mace and let Mike have it full in the face.

Mike leaped back, screaming and rubbing fiercely at his eyes, daisies scattering like yellow shrapnel. "He's blinded me!"

Pete stepped in and batted the mace from Arthur's hand. It spun away, bounced off the top of a cross-shaped headstone, and disappeared somewhere in the grass. "That was a real dumb thing to do, old man."

"Mike, you okay?"

"Just make sure that bastard doesn't go anywhere while I get this shit outta my eyes!"

"Let go of my chair," Arthur demanded, his voice weak and small. He had no real hope that Pete would listen.

Mike shoved Pete aside, grabbed the chair by its armrests, and put his tear-streaked face an inch from Arthur's. "You done fucked up good, old man! I'm gonna drill you a new asshole. Right here." He drew back his fist and punched Arthur square in the chest.

For a moment, Arthur checked out, just blanked, slipping off to some dark netherworld where he hung transfixed through the heart by a chrome lance. The pain in his chest was all he knew, the sum total of everything he was and had ever been. The boy might have hit him again, might have beaten him to a bloody pulp, but for Arthur there was only this singular, blinding pain, an impaling lance of purest white fire, like the thorn through a shrike's prey.

His return to the cemetery was fragmented. First there were voices. He became aware of green prison bars, then the smell of rich soil and grass, and finally the hard ground against his face. They'd knocked over his wheelchair. Even now, they might be about to kick him senseless, but --

But there was an intruder. A new voice. A young voice, like theirs -- yet not like theirs.

"Back away from him," this new voice commanded.

"Who do you think you are?"

"Just leave the old man alone."

Arthur struggled to raise his head above intervening blades of grass. His vision was wavering, but he could see there were four boys now. One squared off against three.

"I'll take care of this." Pete drew something from his rear pocket. Arthur heard a metallic click. Sunlight glinted off bare steel. Switchblade?

Vision swimming red and grey, Arthur struggled to rise, but there was a loop of barbed wire drawn about his heart, tightening with every breath he took. His lungs seemed to have lost their ability to process oxygen. He was gasping like a drowning victim rising to the surface for the last time.

To Arthur's bleary eyes, Pete was a fuzzy shadow as he crossed the short span of green separating the three from the one. The newcomer stood his ground.

There ensued a brief scuffle.

A second later Pete was screaming. "He's got a knife! Oh God! Mike, help me! I'm bleeding, man. I'm bleeding bad."

Pete stumbled back to his buddies, clutching his stomach and whimpering like a kicked dog.

"Get the son of a bitch, Daryl!" Mike ordered, finally giving a name to the third boy.

"You want him, you get him," Daryl responded. "Look at the size of that knife. I'm not going near him!"

"I can't see with this shit in my eyes!"

Pete was on the ground, rocking back and forth. "God, it hurts. Oh man, it hurts bad."

Daryl hauled Pete off the ground. "We're getting outta here, Mike." A second later, Daryl was dragging Pete through the tombstones.

Mike stayed, wiping furiously at his eyes. "Soon's I can see, I'm gonna shove that knife --"

Arthur's eyes were still playing tricks, because the newcomer had suddenly become Bruce Lee. The distance between the newcomer and Mike had to be at least twelve feet, but the Bruce Lee clone sailed across it. At the terminal point of the leap, his right foot whipped around and caught Mike alongside the head.

Like a rag doll, Mike did a little somersault, ending up in a heap against the tombstone of one Horace T. MacAvie. Arthur's vision was beginning to clear and he saw that MacAvie's tombstone was smeared with sticky white apple. As Mike huddled against the stone, holding his head and moaning softly, Arthur envisioned MacAvie applauding from his box beneath the ground.

The newcomer knelt beside Arthur and pulled him to a sitting position. Arthur focused on a face no kinder than those who'd just tormented him. But when the newcomer spoke, his voice was weighted with concern.

"Where're you hurt?"

Arthur tried to answer, but all that came out of his mouth was an agonized wheeze.

"Lemme get you in your chair," the boy said. "Then we'll see 'bout gettin' some help. You need a doctor?"

"No," Arthur managed to get out.

"They take anythin' from you? Money? Medicine? Anythin' like that?"

"Flowers."

"Uh, yeah. We'll get those later, man."

"For Laurie."

"Right. Here's your chair." It shifted when he tried to lower Arthur's weight into it. "Shit. Lemme lock the wheels. There. Better?"

"Hurts," Arthur wheezed.

"Jus' take deep breaths."

"Who are you?" Arthur managed to ask.

"Name's Toby."

"I'm Arthur." The pain was lessening, but it was still hard to breath. Someone had clamped a vise about Arthur's lungs. "I don't know how to thank you, Toby."

Toby shrugged. "Mama's buried a couple rows over. If they hadna run on you, they'd a been over there in a minute or two. Either way, they was bound to piss me off."

"The one they called Pete, did you cut him bad?"

"Bad 'nuff."

Arthur didn't know what to say to that so he said nothing. He was surprised at how little concern he felt for the injured boy, even though he knew he was somewhere bleeding, perhaps even dying.

Mike surged drunkenly to his feet.

"You want I should hang on to him?" Toby asked.

"Let him go."

Mike stumbled off through the graveyard, holding his head in his hands.

Arthur took out his soiled handkerchief and handed it to Toby. "Would you mind?" he asked, nodding towards the tomato juice running down Laurie's stone.

Toby wiped the marble clean. "Where you live, old man? I'll take you home."

"Just let me rest here for a while longer." Arthur closed his eyes and concentrated on his breathing. When he opened them a minute later, Toby had gathered what daisies had escaped trampling. He handed the bouquet to Arthur.

"Thanks." Talking hurt like a dagger in his chest.

Toby gathered up the remaining daisies, all of them crushed and mangled. "You mind? Mom doesn't get flowers often."

For the first time, Arthur noted the filth on the boy, the unwashed hair and yellowed teeth, the ragged clothes and shoes, the haunted, hungry eyes. Odds are, he thought, the boy's mom never gets flowers.

"Those are ruined. Your mom deserves better." Arthur separated the daisies he was holding and gave half to Toby. "For Laurie," he said, nodding towards his wife's resting spot. "No finer woman ever lived. Given a choice, she'd have never left me. Of that, I'm certain. All I ask is that I not be much longer in joining her."

Toby swept aside a few scraps of tomato and laid the daisies at the base of Laurie's headstone.

Arthur handed him the remaining flowers. "Let's go meet your mother, son."

Toby wheeled Arthur to a simple plot with an inset marker that read `Yolanda Simmons.' The only other writing on the stone was the dates of her coming and going. Toby knelt and laid the flowers over the marker. When he bent down, Arthur saw the handle of a large hunting knife protruding from his waistband.

"For Mama," Toby said, trying to sound as serious as Arthur. "She done her best and she always loved me."

"A body couldn't ask for more than that."

Toby turned from his mother's grave, his face gnarled with concentration. "You know, Arthur, don't too many folks realize what you just said."

Arthur smiled at the boy. "I like you, Toby. You speak in truths."

A frown. "Not sure I understand you."

"No matter." Arthur reached out and laid a hand on the boy's shoulder. "Let's go home, son."

"Home?"

"You don't have a place to live, Toby. Do you?"

"Why you think that?"

"Because, like you, I see truths, Toby. You haven't been eating right. From the date on that marker, I'd say you haven't been eating right for about six days. Secondly, those bags under your eyes. Wherever you've been spending your nights, you haven't been getting much sleep. Third: Well --" Arthur wrinkled his nose. "-- you stink to high heaven, my friend."

The boy frowned and Arthur wondered for a moment if he'd gone too far. He didn't want the boy to leave. For one thing, the way his chest was hurting, he didn't think he could make it as far as McGruder's, even if it was all down hill. But more importantly, the boy had probably saved his life. Not that life these days was all that important to Arthur, but it was a debt requiring payment of some kind, even if payment amounted to nothing more than bed and board for the night.

"Come back to the house with me, Toby," Arthur coaxed.

"I've nothin' to pay you with."

"I wasn't expecting anything."

Toby looked up, his frown making furrows in his dirty face. "Don't want no handouts."

"I wasn't offering any. I need someone to help me get home. That should be worth something."

"I woulda done that for nothin'."

"Exactly. You offered because you wanted to. I want to help you as well."

The boy nodded once as if the dickering had been completed and some bargain struck. "Best be gettin' you home then." And with that, he turned the chair and started for the nearest gate.

Halfway there something caught on the wheel and snapped, a brittle, dry crack, like breaking a pencil. Arthur caught a flash of color out of the corner of his eye as something flipped away from the wheelchair.

"What was that?"

"Dunno," Toby answered. "Stick or somethin'" He dug in the grass and came up with about six inches of dowel. It was the fletched-end of an arrow. One strip of orange fletching remained.

The boy tossed it aside. "Jus' an old arrow the wheel got caught on."

"Rather odd," Arthur said, "finding an arrow in a cemetery. Do you see the rest of it?"

"Huh?"

"Can you find the rest of the arrow?"

"Wha' for?"

"Please. Just see if you can find it."

The boy knelt and dug through the grass. Finally, he pulled free a long shaft, carefully slipping it out lengthwise to avoid snapping the old wood. It looked to have once been green, with red and white lettering on the shaft. The white lettering was small and precise. The red script looked to have been painted on by hand, neat but not nearly so precise as the factory lettering. It was in some foreign language. The arrow's head was a knob of rust.

Toby handed the broken shaft to Arthur. The old man took it carefully, almost reverently, in trembling hands. "What is it?" the boy asked, sensing that something was wrong.

Arthur swallowed. "Nothing. Let's go home."

But he didn't toss the arrow away. He laid it across his lap.

Toby got behind the wheelchair and maneuvered Arthur towards the nearest exit. Neither of them spoke, the boy pondering the mystery of the broken arrow, the old man still concentrating on his breathing. They'd reached one of the wrought-iron gates when Toby noticed Arthur clutching his left arm.

"You okay?" Toby asked.

"Just take . . . take me --" Arthur grimaced. "-- down the street to the market."

Toby pushed the gate open and pulled the chair through. As the gate swung shut behind them it let out an aberrant shriek, like the lid of a casket.

Arthur caught Toby's arm. "Stop."

"Gotta get you to a doctor, man."

Arthur doubled over and would have fallen out of the chair, but Toby caught him. The old man's face was pasty, glistening with sweat. His right hand was clenched about his left elbow, holding his arm tight against his chest.

"Pills," Arthur gasped.

"Where?"

"Carry bag."

Toby tore open the bag on the back of the chair and began tossing things out in the grass: another handkerchief, a small penknife, a tattered date book, matches, reading glasses, and a pipe.

"No pills!" the boy screamed.

Arthur said nothing. His gaze was fixated on the items Toby had spilled out on the ground.

"Doctor," Toby muttered, grabbing the chair handles.

Arthur slapped on the wheel locks and the boy nearly pushed him over.

"What the hell --"

"Too late."

"Bullshit!"

The old man smiled; the pain on his face seemed less.

"Doctor," Toby repeated as if he could conjure one.

"Give me the pipe."

"What?"

"The pipe. Give it to me."

"Listen, old man --"

"Lost," Arthur said, reaching as if he could grasp the pipe.

Toby grabbed up the pipe and put it in Arthur's hand. If that's what it took to get him moving...

"The really important things come back."

"What the hell are you talkin' about?"

"I should have known when I saw the arrow."

Toby noticed that Arthur seemed to have relaxed, the pain on his face was gone. I'll go along with him for a minute, thought the boy. See where all this is leadin', then I'll get him to a doctor. "What about the arrow?"

"First time I ever met Laurie." Tears rolled down Arthur's cheeks. "In a field." His sentences were short, spaced around ragged gasps for air. "Fifteen years old. Practicing with my bow. She asked to try it. God, I would have . . . given her the bow. Just to be near her."

Arthur's eyes glowed. "She missed the damn target by a mile. I never did find the arrow."

"Arthur, that's not --"

"It is." Arthur took the shaft from his lap and ran his thumb over the red letters. "There were several archers using that field. We marked our arrows so we could identify the owner of lost ones when we found them days or weeks later." He showed the boy the printing. "It's my name in sanskrit."

Toby hadn't the faintest idea was sanskrit was, but this had gone on long enough. "So you found an old arrow, what's that got to do with gettin' you to a doctor?"

"That field is eighty miles east of here."

Toby frowned and was about to argue that this was all a very perplexing mystery, but hardly one worth sitting here and dying of a heart attack, when Arthur sank his fingers deep into the boy's shoulder.

"Laurie gave me this pipe. I lost it several days ago." His eyes glazed like a rabid dog's. "Lost things have a way of coming back to a man in the end, Toby."

"I'm not gonna let you die, old man."

"Take me back to Laurie."

"I'm takin' you to a doctor!"

"You don't understand, do you?"

"I understand that you're havin' a goddamn heart attack!"

Arthur's hand clenched tighter and Toby felt genuine pain in the muscles of his shoulder, but the old man's eyes were pleading. "I've wanted this for so many years..."

In the end, Toby turned the wheelchair around and pushed it back through the gate -- which closed this time without a sound. As he approached Laurie Patton's grave, he thought he saw bright lights, an Aurora Borealis among the gravestones, but it was probably just the tears in his eyes. Or maybe not, for Arthur gasped and struggled up from his chair.

"Arthur!" he cried, for he had thought the old man totally confined to the wheelchair. But then he wondered if it was Arthur at all, for this old man walked straight and strong through the taciturn tombstones.

In the glow stood a woman, all sunlight and gold. Her flaxen hair was tossed by a wind Toby neither felt nor heard. She smiled once at Toby, this startling vision of beauty and light, then opened her arms to the old man.

Arthur went to her, his hair shining in her light, his head high and his back straight. They embraced. She buried her face against his neck and wept. Arthur stroked her long hair and ran his hand over her shaking back.

At the penultimate moment, the old man looked back. He smiled at Toby, his face young, smooth, and at peace.

"Goodbye, my friend," the boy whispered.

Then the light was gone and Toby found himself on his knees beside a wheelchair and a dead old man. He touched Arthur's weathered face once in farewell, then left the cemetery behind.

As he went out the gate, he looked back, thinking of all the things he had lost and all the things he would lose in the coming years. Would he know the important things?

He knew one.

In all her light would his mother know him? He imagined the blood she would see on his hands. He took the hunting knife and threw it as hard and as far as he could.

Would he have the time to tell her all the things he had yet to say?

He thought so.