You knew Johnny, Mother and Father. He delivered our Tribune. He seldom stopped by Clippers, though. His hair was shoulder-length, but it was probably shaved off before the surgeons treated his head wound.

I had actually predicted an early death for Johnny back in Hoffman Estates. He was a skitcher. Do you know what skitching is? It is an illegal winter activity whereby a person crouches behind an idling car, grabs its bumper, and then skates down the icy street as the car drives away.

Johnny was a speed demon, as the ribbons he had won as a sprinter on the track team proved. But I saw this perilous activity as a death wish. Furthermore, I saw a paradox because he also served as a school crossing guard. As a skitcher, he flouted the safety rules of the road and risked life and limb; as a crossing guard, he helped younger kids navigate busy roads safely.

I was once witness to his daredevilry, during the winter before our passings. As you know, I always rose early because I could easily survive on six hours of sleep a night. Around six in the morning, I went for my constitutional. Johnny was also up at that hour on account of his paper route, and I would see him around the Sandpits Apartments pulling a rusty wagon filled with copies of the Tribune. In winter, a sled replaced the wagon.

One day in January, I came across his sled left in front of a residence on the east end of the complex. I assumed he was inside making a delivery. It was snowing, and little drifts had collected atop the newspapers. I brushed the snow off so the papers would not get soggy.

Sometimes Johnny’s dog went along with him on his route. Rover was a drooling basset hound with red, rheumy eyes. I glanced around for Rover, but he was not there. I did see a station wagon idling in the street, though. The owner had just scraped the ice from his windshield and was climbing back into the driver’s seat. As he did so, a crouching figure shot out from between two parked cars and grabbed hold of the bumper.

The driver must have glimpsed Johnny in his rearview mirror because he pressed the gas pedal to the floor and his car zoomed down the street. It wove back and forth as though to loosen Johnny from its tail. Johnny finally let go. He tumbled headlong till he collided with a parked car.

I ran up the street to where Johnny lay dazed. His knitted pompom hat was askew. Snowflakes stuck to his eyelashes, snot ran from his nose to his lip, and smudges of newsprint darkened his cheeks.

“It’s so gorgeous, Boo,” he said, staring at the dawning day.

I looked at the sky, which was a soggy graphite gray like the newspapers lying in his sled.

“Are you hurt?” I asked. “Do you need medical assistance?”

“Lie down. See for yourself how beautiful it is.”

“We’re on Meadow Lane, Johnny. A car may run us over.”

“You only live once.” (How wrong he was.)

I glanced around. Nobody was in the vicinity. There were no headlights from approaching cars. The station wagon was long gone.

Who knows why I lay down with Johnny Henzel? I try to avoid nonsense, and yet this act was nonsensical, not to mention risky. Still, I did it, probably because Johnny seemed so adamant.

“Do you see it?” he said to me as the snow wet the seat of my pants.

“What are we seeing, Johnny?”

“Oh, Boo, what we’re seeing is peace.”

“Peace?”

He lifted a hand in the air and made the V sign with his index and middle fingers.

I looked through his V and saw the delicate outline of a waning crescent moon.

Then we heard the beeping of an automobile. We scrambled up, and Johnny took off toward his sled of newspapers, waving a mitten at me.

In the years he and I lived at Sandpits and attended the same elementary school and junior high, we had few conversations longer than that one in the middle of Meadow Lane last January.

In that fleeting moment in the street, I did feel a certain kinship. I do not know whether to call it friendship. We did share something, but what that something was I cannot say.