Sniff Berry's mother refused to let him wear his new six guns to the wake. So with his impatient jiggling boy's body he wandered sulking through the black-creped crowd of adults, sniffing in short rhythmic bursts like someone with a perpetually runny nose.
Butch Arcade's grandfather had given him the nickname, joking that it was perfect for a boy who could sniff out trouble better than any other boy in town.
Now Butch Arcade's grandfather was in a coffin.
Sniff ignored the pulled down faces. Their pallor reflected that of the dead man, as if he had passed out death masks of himself. Straight-jacketed by his new suit, shirt and tie, Sniff shuffled into an alcove off the main room. A ring of keys lay on the mortician's desk. Sniff's little boy alarm jangled as his eyes darted from two of the shinier keys to the lock on the front door. He knew, he just knew; that special magic in him told him that he was right. Palming the key ring, he spun deft fingers like night spiders, noiselessly. When he moved away there was only one key shinier than the others.
A muffled gong sounded. Butch joined Sniff to start their piston-legged trot toward the door, but they were hemmed in behind the mourners who filed out slowly on weary whisper feet.
Sniff was puzzled. "Why were they all looking at your gramps like he did something wrong?"
Butch elbowed him in the ribs, stifling a grin.
"You know what, they're all scared of him," Sniff concluded.
Butch tried to ignore his friend, but he was infected by the curiosity that horsepowered both their lives.
The mortician and his assistant flanked the door. Butch saw that their arms hung uselessly down at their sides. Their funny frozen smiles reminded him of Mr. Yeardy's smile whenever he called Sniff and Butch into his office to punish them for some schoolboy prank.
He eyed the two adults suspiciously as he reached the door, poised to run.
Outside in the weak sunlight Sniff's voice got louder. "Grownups are crazy, look at Mr. Ambrose with your mom, he doesn't know where to put his hands."
Butch agreed. All the mourners were acting strangely. He watched them stand rooted in front of his parents, their legs stuck to the sidewalk while their bodies seemed to lean toward their homes.
"Comon," he said suddenly.
Floating ahead of the crowd, the two boys squirmed inside their clothes. Then Sniff opened his magic hand and showed the key to another world.
Butch held his breath. Sniff jerked his head back at the funeral parlor.
"The front door," he said, grinning. Their faces lit up the sky.
The old man in the coffin had told them.
"Now you two are really Siamese twins but since you don't live in Siam, you were magically separated by a jinni. This jinni conjured up your families to love you and take care of you, and he cast a spell over you both so that you would always be best friends no matter what."
They of course had nodded wide-eyed at this wonderful secret shared by the three of them and the Siamese jinni. Neither boy had ever considered questioning any one of the old man's stories.
Now they monkey scampered down the ivy trellises beneath their windows, and dropped silently onto the inky lawns. With the wind ballooning their shirts they ran, taking turns being in front. Road dust snapped at their heels like invisible puppies. Grass parted as they flew by. Somewhere at the edge of the woods near the small town a treetop rustled and stirred. A black nervous shape soared above their heads, kite like, perhaps attracted by the glint of moon on cowboy belt buckles.
In town they stalked shadows down side streets, unaware of the dark kite following them. At the funeral parlor they listened at the front door. In a blur Sniff jammed the key into the lock, pulled the door open. He shoved Butch hard. And before he could close the door the kite swerved in, fluttered across the room to paste itself onto the somber colored drapes.
Soft breathing. Sniff's hand moved on the wall. A click. Light mushroomed.
"You crazy?," Butch whispered fiercely from a half crouch.
Sniff grinned his devil's grin, flicking fingers, filling the room with clicks. The light was the sickly yellow haze that smells of too many flowers. The drapes shivered once and were still.
They approached the coffin on tiptoe, clutched each other's sleeve, pushed. Then they stared at the old man who had knighted them, who had shared with them secrets long buried in musty Egyptian tombs, who had shown them what magic there was in their fingers.
"Why isn't he smiling?," Butch asked. "He always smiled, remember?"
"Because he's dead and being dead is sad. My mom said so."
Butch recalled how his parents and relatives looked at the wake. He felt certain that the old man would have been amazed at their behavior. He had expected him to get up from the coffin and move among the crowd, slapping backs, shaking hands, grinning slyly, urging them to laugh, telling stories. That was his grandfather.
The boys shifted their feet.
"He was never sad when he talked about it," Butch insisted. "Didn't you believe him...you said you believed him!"
"Sure." Sniff looked down at a hole in his dungarees. "But my mom says..."
"Your mom doesn't know! My mom doesn't know, none of them know, they didn't believe him, they said his stories were lies!"
Wagging fingers, tongues clucking. A barrage aimed at the old man.
"...filling the boys' heads with such nonsense, how will they ever learn to cope with reality, honestly, you're sometimes as much a boy as either of them!"
And the old man would spit back, "From what I've seen over the years, reality stinks!" And storm away to conjure up new tales of ice birds and frogs that spit fire and Mysterious Indians who when captured would teach you every language ever known to man...
The boys slowly began to back away from the waxen lips that didn't smile anymore. The old man was a doll now, not a magician. His hair was yellow plaster, his eyes swallowed by bleak white unmoving bugs that were once lids, his hands and face smooth chalk. Not even the wrinkles that once folded and unfolded his tales were left.
"I'll tell you a secret boys, every man has his own personal bat somewhere, and when that man dies the bat finds him and it lands and grows big enough to carry the man on its back and fly the world's winds to all kinds of beautiful places. Now if that's not happy, what is? So when I die we'll all dance and laugh right before my trip, and someday the bat will fly me back so I can tell you all about it."
The voice faded as they backed away toward the door. The room was suddenly chilly with the distant sounds of mournful chanting. Sniff bumped into the door, yelped. Butch echoed his cry. The drapes came alive, and a bat skimmed wildly across the room. Mouth open, Butch pointed.
"A bat! It's his bat!"
They ran with windmill arms chasing the bat as it careened from wall to wall, its radar fine-tuned to keep it just out of their reach. Intent on the chase they collided in front of the coffin. Butch fell flat on the thick carpet but Sniff had leapt onto the knee rest to lunge for the bat. His momentum shot him into the coffin.
It rocked backward. Butch grabbed a handle to steady it, tugging with all his strength. Frantically trying to escape, Sniff was pinned by one of the old man's arms. The coffin pitched forward and Butch scrambled to his knees, shoving his shoulder and hand into it, stopping it abruptly. Sniff tumbled out, the old man following, crashing on top of Butch. Above them the bat still dipped and wheeled.
Butch's crewcut stiffened, Sniff's floppy hair flared out as if sucked by a vacuum cleaner. Awkward with bone numbing terror they couldn't escape from the body. Their throats croaked desperately until Sniff at last worked his vocal chords into a high pitched, hysterical half sob, half laugh. Hopelessly tangled, they stared at each other's Halloween fright faces, at the body between them. Their pent up breaths exploded, pure emotional release.
A giggle erupted, snowballing from deep inside Butch's stomach to tickle Sniff's nose. He answered with his own giggle, and they burst into the kind of laughter the three of them had shared so often at the world's expense. It built to their last and best laugh together. They would never laugh this way again.
Helpless, Sniff pointed to the old man. "He...should be...smiling..."
Butch nodded, his body quivering happily. Together they stretched the old man's lips past the frozen grimace to a cocky, lopsided grin. His face seemed curiously warm. And they bubbled more laughter into the room.
"Dance...dance!," Butch squeaked between gulps of air. Slinging one arm around each of their shoulders, they lifted the old man, stumbling over the carpet, inventing dance steps no one had ever seen. The old man's hair bounced silkily on his forehead, glinting dazzling white, showering crystal sparks onto the carpet. His strong hands flailed the air, beating time on their shoulders. Even his legs, lanky, bent, seemed to have a rhythm of their own.
And through the blur of tearful laughter they saw the band he had described to them many times. The largest band in the universe, with instruments whose shapes changed before their eyes. Indians whoop-danced to the strange beat, and the boys understood their chanting. Feathered frogs spit fire while Siamese jinni split themselves into halves, then quarters, then eighths, and smaller and smaller, until they were spinning molecules. The tiny motes grew, shaping birds of paradise with colored plumage so bright it hurt their eyes. The parade marched past them; fierce grinning Chinese swordsmen and bearded sorcerers flashing lightening bolts from their fingers, dwarfs and pin-headed giants and snow white horses with wings and jet black lions with zebra stripes. A parade of beautiful creatures from the old man's imagination.
They watched and they danced. They laughed and laughed and laughed. Above them the bat dipped its wings in a final salute. The boys collapsed, tears streaming down their faces, their bodies heaving. Silence once again slid over the room, until the fluttering of tired bat wings, like the stalling airplane engine, was the only sound.
Their breathing slowed. Wiping wet eyes on sleeves, they blinked at each other, at the old man now very still between them.
Butch's voice faded to a whisper. "Let's sit him up so when they come tomorrow morning they'll know he was right about dying." His eyes pleaded. "They'll see him smiling and they'll know being dead isn't sad."
Sniff thoughtfully chewed his lip, watching the bat flutter to the drapes and cling there, pulsing.
"They won't understand," he said at last. "Grownups never do."
"He understood."
Sniff chewed some more. "He was different, he was like us."
They sat unmoving, Butch with his head lowered, idly toying with his belt buckle.
"Comon," Sniff said, "we did what he wanted, he's happy now."
Butch smiled.
Grunting, they heaved and lifted until the old man was back in the coffin. Gently, lovingly, they smoothed his hair and straightened his clothes. Their magic fingers flicked and his smile was gone.
Sniff moved to the drapes and pounded them; the bat shot into the air again. Butch was still staring at his grandfather. He dug deep into his bulging pocket and pulled out a large, squarefaced, tarnished ring, turning it over to study its strange symbols. The decoder ring with the secret compartment and the flashing light and the whistle.
"Comon!," Sniff urged, standing poised at the light switches. The bat was impatient.
Butch lifted the old man's right hand and placed the ring between it and his thigh. "In case you ever need us," he said. "You know the code." He glanced at Sniff who nodded, grinned.
The room clicked into black. They slid out the door. Key swiftly, silently turned. A quick glance up and down the deserted streets. The bat catapulted up past the street lamp and planed away toward the woods.
The boys ran, following on feet that hardly touched the ground, grinning all the way.
