To hear Wishbone tell it, Gerald was the smoker.  Pack a day at least, must've warned him a hundred times not to smoke around welding lines but he wouldn't listen.  Gerald was an old-timer, set in his awful ways.  I stood against the wall of my uncle's office a week or so after the accident and waited my turn to speak.  My mother was beside me, her hand lightly at my elbow.  To my surprise, I felt no anger at Wishbone's lying.  The skin on his face was still whitish-pink in places, and his sleeves were buttoned to the wrist, covering his scalded arms, and he wore a newborn's light blue knit cap to protect his tender skull.  His hands trembled and his eyes were rheumy, his vision blurred, he said, since the accident.  He looked weak, vulnerable, afraid, squinting across the conference table at my uncle and the men from the insurance company.  I felt sorry for him.  I wanted to know what made him think I wouldn't expose him.  All the shit he gave me.  Maybe he thought I was afraid because he was black or that I was ashamed of being white when he wasn't.  Maybe he thought his cigarette run had saved my life and I ought to be grateful, despite everything.  But what I wanted to know more than anything was how he survived and Gerald didn't, because for an instant, the amount of time it took to burn away the flammable air, that hold was pure, white conflagration, molten gas, like the center of the sun.  Nothing could have lived in there.  But here was Wishbone telling these lies right in front of me, burned but alive, breathing in and out like the rest of us when he should have been dead.  After things had settled down on the deck that day, I walked over to the hatch and looked in.  Two policmen and some emergency personnel were milling around a lumped sheet of blue tarp covering what must've been Gerald's body.  It's funny but the stink of all those rotting fish, that death smell, it was gone.
    When my turn came to speak, I only had to answer one question--Ford, can you corroborate everything this man has just told us?  After but a moment's hesitation, I lied.  It wasn't something I'd planned.  I'd planned on telling the truth, but in the space of that pause, I thought of Gerald wanting that monkey.  He had died believing it would come, hoping for it, and that didn't sound so awful all of a sudden.  And I thought of Wishbone, of what good it would do me to ruin his life, what sort of justice would be served.  And, strangely, I thought of my sister, so far away from all this, troubled only by rare bad dreams.
     "Yes, sir," I said.  "He's telling the truth."
     I looked at Wishbone, but he wouldn't meet my eyes.  He was crying without making a sound  It turned out that he had been standing directly beneath the hatch when he struck the spark that brought the air to life.  He had been lifted out by the force of the explosion, shot free of the hold like a cartoon spaceman.  One minute, he was standing in a perfect square of yellow light with his friend before him, the next, he was riding a grim column of fire.