Fat Boy

We were boys then, more beautiful than we ever would be again, pure and perfect and not yet touched by age or anger or failure. Then we were innocent and baptized by the spirit of youth, swimming like cavorting puppies in the childhood soup from which someday we would emerge as men. We loved each other like brothers, Zack and Duncan and Fat Boy and I, and childhood stretched before us in endless possibility. Death had come now and then, of course, to our tiny Pennsylvania borough. It had stolen into town at night, taking the old and infirm. It had gone screaming into the steel mills to take men in the prime of their lives, but never had it visited itself upon a child that I knew, and so I viewed death as impotent in the face of youth, but that was before Fat Boy. After Fat Boy, life's little horrors never surprised me again. The first hint that we had of Fat Boy's death came in the middle of the night as we slept in the fort that we had built at the edge of the borough's graveyard. "Look," Zach urged me from sleep, his voice a whisper at my ear. Through the door of the fort we saw Fat Boy's father walking through the graveyard, the smell of stale beer heavy in the air, his shoes caked with mud and debris. Most of what we told the police after Fat Boy's body was found in his basement was the truth, but we told other things too, things that were not true. We did not tell those lies in the way that children do, manipulating the truth on the spur of the moment to get out of trouble or to get their own way. No, we planned those lies, and they were deliberate and calculated and full of intent and malevolence, and we told them as if they had the power to bring Fat Boy back to us, even though we knew that they did not.