Chapter 3

1

“Fuck off. The dude that couldn’t even kill himself right?”

            “Yes. No word of a lie.” Pug looked at Adam. He was still mad at him. He figured he would stay mad, but Chels was, little by little, becoming her old self. Ever since they left the woods that spritely spring returned to her step.

            “Didn’ you follow that asshole to Fenway in the first place?”

            It was Croak this time. The questions wouldn’t stop. When Pug spotted Lazarus coming from the field, his whistle brought those boys from the farmhouse with nary a second to spare. And they shot through the woods without looking back. Adam two-stepped over each of those carcasses as if he’d memorized their final resting places, and no matter how tricky that deadfall was to climb down, Pug was able to shimmy up the tangled branches without sparing a second thought to how winded he was.

            And here they were in Fenway now. Their safe place. Pug had let Chelsey off her leash and she was exploring the field, whose swatches of cut grass kept flinging up behind her back legs.

            “You think he was heading to that place back when you followed him?” the Jew asked.

            “I don’t know. I didn’t really care to think about it. His face...it creeps me out.”

            “Putting a shotgun in your mouth will do that,” Adam said absentmindedly.

            “You think he left the place unlocked then? That he swept the floor?”

            “Again, I don’t know, Croak,” Pug answered, watching Chels dig through the dirt pile that had become the rubber and mound for the summer.

            Adam took off his pack and unzipped it, pulling out a VHS tape. The sticker on the edge read: 08/07/88. “What about these?”

            “What are those?”

            “Tapes we found in the house. Cameras were in there, ya know. Wires all cut. Saw them first on the front deck.”

            “You think those are Lazarus’s? Maybe like Pug’s dad’s tapes...ya know, tittie flicks?”

            Pug looked at Croak and then returned his attention to the VHS. Adam had a bag full of them. So they were not leaving empty-handed. And in the end that was always the most important. If this was some sort of adventure, a bag of treasure or mysterious curios was better than nothing. For the moment Pug felt like Indiana Jones. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Poon, he thought, figuring if he said it out loud he’d get a laugh that would quickly turn to curiosity. His father had a bunch of tapes with similar movies, so the thought wasn’t so out there, but the date stuck to the side was intriguing.

            “So the bastard ventures a mile to the middle of nowhere and jerks it with a circle of dead animals just off the porch? Get real,” Danny scoffed. “I’ve seen abandoned buildings. All over New York. My dad says there are rent-controlled apartments there that sit empty cause rich folk hold ‘em as investments and squatters duck in and out to do drugs. I’d guess a dude with a face like that has plenty of reasons to get stoned.”

            Adam laughed, still holding the tape. Wondering the same thing. “Well, his reasons are his reasons. But he’s given us something to do.”

            “Yeah, and what’s that?” the Jew asked, understanding control had shifted once again to Adam’s corner.

            “We watch the tapes.”

            “Chels...what’s wrong, girl?”

            Adam turned to watch Pug chase after his dog. She’d run toward the chute that led back into town. She was barking. Annoying as hell but expected. At least she’d finally turned into her old self and Pug couldn’t pine about her catching some sickness from the graveyard.

            That thought quickly disappeared. The boys all saw the flashing blue and red lights dancing off the trees.

2

It happened when they were in the woods, cloaked from the sounds of the Creek. Even then Adam was surprised they didn’t hear it.

            The tire tracks that veered right seemed burned into the road, turning into a sloughed mess of grass and dirt where the Audi jumped up the curb and wrapped into the electrical pole. There were cop cars and an ambulance. Even one of the Creek’s fire engines, painted a resplendent red, sat parked down the street with its lights blaring. A few people had gathered across the street to watch. Cars pulled over to prove their rubber necking had turned into full on watch mode.

            But they could see inside the car.

Reedy Creek was a big enough town to make people strangers, but the boys had been out and about enough over the summer to see and recognize some faces. That was the way of the world, Adam figured. You had your friends, and then you had your familiars. Even if you never said a word to the familiars, they were still a part of your orbit. They still defined that part of your reality. And sure as shit, they’d see the fat bastard on Main Street, either chugging a Coke or heading to the Mr Sub for a footlong meatball supreme that did nothing but clog the ol’ arteries. The joke had always been a heart attack. If they saw the guy waddle into Mr Sub, the boys would always wonder if he’d walk back out or be rolled on a stretcher. Cause a man that size was always one last bite away from cardiac failure.

            But they were wrong.

            Because that same man was staring back at them as they gawked from the pathway into Fenway. Unblinking eyes peering above a steering column that had noticeably jammed into his heft. His head looked caved in, freshets of blood coursing his face and staining his jowls.

            “Jesus,” Croak mumbled.

            Pug was holding Chels now and he turned away. That’s you in twenty years, Adam once jibed, but now Pug could only bury his head in Chelsey’s fur.

            The man was dead.

            “You boys...run along...” The cop had come trudging from the edge of the scene. He’d been setting up cones around the site, trying to deter traffic. The Creek’s Sheriff was on the scene as well, gun on the hip, radio at his mouth.

            They didn’t have to be told twice. Adam left first and the other three followed. It was the first time any of them had seen a dead body. The Jew might have contended that he’d seen a homeless man dead in an alley but his memory had turned that into sleep and hope and sanity had kept it that way. He wouldn’t bring it up either. Because memories were apt to changing the moment you gave voice and recognition to them.

            “Christ. I’m never sleeping again,” Croak said once they reached Main Street.

            “He was looking right at us.” Pug’s voice sounded absent. Indifferent.

            “What the hell even happened?” Croak could see Mr Sub up ahead and the realization that they would never see the fat guy in there again landed home. Twelve-year-old boys could speculate, but having never driven a car, Cory knew it was only guesswork. And poor guesswork at that.

            “You think he swerved to miss an animal?” Pug asked. He saw Mr Sub as well but ignored it. When he was finally taught about death, the afterlife that came next seemed pretty nice so he could, most of the time at least, avoid the finer details and assume what he heard on the news was good for the victims because something better awaited them. Though he wouldn’t know the term, it was really just cognitive dissonance to make confronting the sort of misery this world had to offer with good spirits. The sort of shit religion sold by the bunches. But that man in the car did not look like he wanted to die. No. Because his eyes were terrified. In that last split second of his life, as the Audi pin-wheeled toward the curb, jumped the gutter and smashed into the pole, the man could only watch with one final understanding that he’d never taste another meatball again. Those eyes were finality in a nutshell.

            Adam smiled. “A guy like that would have swerved just to hit an animal. Free dinner.”

            Croak punched him in the arm. Humor was a comfort during tragedy, sure, but assholery was being inconsiderate just for the laugh. And Adam was king dipshit in that regard.

            “Come on, Adam,” Pug said, feeling suddenly guilty that the comment would put them all in the Lord’s crosshairs.

            “Geez guys. We didn’t even know him. Shit happens.”

            “He’s right,” the Jew said. “I saw car accidents up the yin yang back home. Shit happens.”

            “I don’t buy it,” Pug said.

            “What’s to buy? Guy had a heavy foot, couldn’t lift it off the gas. Blammo! Audi to the junkyard.”

            “Christ. That’s grim,” Danny laughed. Pug didn’t.

            “Doesn’t change the fact that we found these,” Adam answered, patting his knapsack. “We’re playing gumshoe. Only thing we have to think about now is where we set up shop.”

            “Not my place,” Croak said. “Unless you want my brother crawling up your ass.”

            “Point taken. You?” Adam gestured to Danny, who only shook his head.

            “Shabbat. Dad won’t even mow the lawn. If I come back with you three, I’ll get an ass chewing that’ll make that car accident seem healthy. I’m getting one anyway when he sees me walk in.”

            “Simple no would have worked,” Croak laughed. It was uneasy.

            “My family’s home and they monitor what I watch.”

            “I’d just be watching your sisters,” the Jew laughed.

            Adam sighed. The conversation was really just a distraction. He was just as affected by that dead man’s eyes as the rest of them. He was. Because he thought about the crow’s eyes when he saw them. The crow’s eyes as they looked beading beneath the brim of a fedora. Think about what your dreams will have in store tonight, bud. No. Not dreams. Nightmares. He finally piped up because they were all looking at him.

            “My dad’s not home. As long as my grampa’s aware of what we’re doing...he’ll have our backs if my mom bitches.”

            “God I love your gramps,” Croak said.

            In an hour the true adventure would begin.

3

“You boys been on some sort of hike?”

            The old man was in his Saturday best: pajamas that had most likely witnessed Truman and his belabored speech about dropping the bomb on the Japanese.

            Adam was wearing his knapsack, realizing only now, perhaps in spite of what they’d witnessed outside Fenway, that the lot of them were the worse for wear. They looked like they’d been to hell and back. No matter how true the proverb seemed, Adam only smiled and pulled the bag off, hearing the tapes click inside.

            “Something like that.”

            “Hey grampa,” Croak said. The others followed. The boys all called the man by his title. Adam knew the man loved it. There was no truer name for him, even if there was no bloodline to tie him to Adam’s friends. If they each had their nicknames, then why the hell couldn’t he?

            “Mom home?”

            Grampa shook his head. “Took Patty out. Not sure where. Don’t care.”

            Pug laughed. The man had spoken as if reciting a nursery rhyme.

            “And dad?” That was the kicker. The boys all knew it.

            “He’s out saving the world. One less life at a time.”
            It was an old joke. Adam wasn’t certain he totally understood it but he could guess. His dad’s books were everywhere in the house. The Population Problem. He had several hard cover copies sitting on shelves. Adam always hated the photo of his father on the back. It was from his professor days when he was even more no-nonsense than he was now, stern and contemptible, seemingly aware of everything but indifferent enough to leave his face and mind buried in the books. Adam hated that time. And he hated those goddamn glasses, perched on the end of his nose in that black and white photo. Baiting a debate. Wanting to change the way you saw the world.

            “Your father’s a doctor,” his mother used to say.

            “So he saves people?”

            “He’s not that kind of doctor, Adam. But yes. He’s going to save everyone.”

            Adam used to pick up that book and flip it open to random pages. He wanted to peer inside his dad’s mind. He wanted to see what his father saw. Your dad’s sort of a big shot in the academic world, Adam. He’s been on TV. The president even sourced him in the 70s before those damned Republicans took the House with Hollywooden Reagan. It was always his mother who spoke highly of the man. Always. And he suspected she was protecting him. Because what he read in that book, what he read and understood, terrified him. His book would make you a part of the problem in this world that needs to be solved. You’re the reason why nature is broken.
            “We’re just gonna play some video games for a bit.”

            “It’s almost the end of summer. Wouldn’t you rather hit up Fenway?”

            “Not today.”

            Pug offered a smile and followed behind as grampa went to the fridge for a cold beer.

            “You think he suspects something?” Pug asked when they got into Adam’s room. It was dim. He’d kept the curtains closed but Pug could still make out the movie and Sox posters on the wall and the bookshelf that held more tapes than novels. Adam did have a small TV on his desk. His Nintendo was pushed to the side. The monitor had rabbit ears. It was a pass-me-down, something requiring tinfoil to get any sort of reception, but Adam just used it for Zelda and the VHS. The VHS was something his grampa bought him. Something he’d rather his parents didn’t acknowledge.

            “Nah...who gives a shit either way. We’re not Mormon, Pug. He doesn’t approve what I put in the deck.”

            “Oh, ha ha,” Pug retorted, but there was a tinge of envy. To him freedom was unsupervised television privilege. Maybe a glimpse of tits on HBO. “At least I’m not living in a pig sty. Chels wouldn’t even come in here.”

            She was leashed out front. Adam’s parents kept a strict No Pet policy and Pug didn’t want to test their theory even if they were gone. Because they all knew about Trevor Kramer. “Anybody who writes the stuff he does is apt to be a little batty,” Pug’s father once muttered at dinner, skeptical at first of his friendship with Adam, the product of such zealotry.

            “Yeah man. Even without an allowance I’d rather be able to walk in my room without gum boots on,” Danny said when he opened the backpack. The bed was unmade and the floor was a hamper.

            “Shut up. Give me a tape.”

            Danny handed Adam the tape that read: 07/26/88. Adam plucked it into the tape deck. There was snow on the screen for a moment, followed by the interminable static sound that was like a radio between stations.

            And then it was a bedroom. Empty at first. One lone lamp on the night table. It was the only source of light, leaving the picture a grainy black and white.

            There was palpable tension only because the boys partly wanted the find to be dirty movies. They could joke about it all they wanted, but the truth was in the anticipation of the act of sex itself. But it wasn’t like the tapes Pug’s dad hid in the closet. It wasn’t, because there was something realer about this...something authentic. Adam thought it felt like spying. That the insignificance of an empty bedroom meant they were watching something they shouldn’t be.

            And then a man walked into the room. He was carrying a bag.

            “Holy shit.”

            It was Croak. His voice did not break. Not this time.

            They knew the guy. Hell, they’d just seen him. And for the last time. Dead inside his Audi.

4

It was a paper bag, something that might have come from the Liquor Depot, something those winos clutched with the exposed bottleneck whose namesake was safely tucked inside. But this wasn’t a bottle. The big guy brought the bag to the table and sat on the edge of the bed. The mattress sank beneath his weight, and though Danny or Adam would have usually made a comment about Pug sitting to slow his heart rate and denting a steel framed chair, there were no words. Not now. Because this was like a diary. Personal. A glimpse at something they weren’t supposed to see.

            The big man, whose eyes were glaring opals in the slant of light offered from the lamp, unbuttoned his shirt and took it off, throwing it behind him. Patches of hair defined his protuberant tits, whose sag flopped his nipples atop the mount of his belly where the light trailed up the globules of sweat that had beaded his belly hair. He sat like this for a moment. To Adam it looked as if he was flexing. As if he was contracting whatever tensile muscle he might have had under that vat of flesh. Perhaps there was a mirror across from him, a mirror the boys could not see, and he was gauging himself. Imagining a better him. What his boy self thought he might become. It was depressing. Even more so now because the boys knew he was dead.

            He didn’t know he’d be dead in a few weeks. So even then, if he is looking at himself, if he is pretending he sees something better, there never will be. Not for this version of him. This is the version that’ll be buried. It was a somber thought. Adam wasn’t quite sure where it had come from, but he knew the Jew was probably thinking the same thing. They all were. Because boys didn’t totally change when they became men. He thought men were just illusionists, throwing facades over their youth because the world asked it of them.

            The big man finally turned back to the night table and opened the bag. It’s probably just food. Something from Mr. Sub. But he knew it wouldn’t be. Adam knew that if such a tape existed, was dated...catalogued, it wasn’t to categorize a man’s eating habits. He’d seen enough movies to know why somebody would spy on another.

            Secrets.

            There was a clear bag inside. Something the guy pulled out delicately, inspecting it as he held it in front of his face, twisting and turning in his grip.

            “It’s like...flour,” Pug said, not meaning to.

            The guy wasn’t a baker. It was always a guessing game as to what brought certain people to the Creek, but as far as any of them were concerned, they’d never seen the man with the Audi wearing an apron at the grocery store waiting to hand out a slice of pie to grubby hands with a buck to spare. In Reedy Creek you were either here for the corn or you were here as a result of it. That was something Danny had heard his father say, and perhaps the idiom had mutated in one form or another among the adult pool whose own world subsisted on a more mature form of gossip. But there was the ethanol and then the subsidiaries that grew organically as a result. It was the way any town grew.

            But it was a white powder. Something the man thought it was prudent to hide inside another bag. Something the man brought to his bedroom while he was alone. And something the man poured out onto the night table beneath the lamplight, where it clumped in a fine pile.

            He’ll use a credit card to separate it, Adam thought. He’d seen the movies. And they were all getting a broader understanding of what was happening. Even Pug.

            He did just that. Probably with his Diners Club card. He cut the pile into rows. And then he took a bill out of his wallet and wrapped it into a tight straw, straightening the edges against his palm.

            “Turn it off,” Pug said.

            The man snorted the first line.

            Pug leaped forward and pressed stop.

            “What the fuck, Pug?” Croak yelled.

            “It’s wrong, guys. It’s just...it’s wrong.” He was worked up. “I mean, what is this? Whose tapes are these?”

            “Are they all of him?” Danny asked, still staring at the blank monitor. “I mean, if the guy’s doin’ coke, somebody was watching him, and I didn’t think the Creek PD would, well, use these sort of tactics. Surveillance. This isn’t the USSR.”

            “Unless he was filming himself,” Adam said.

            “No way. My dad’s got a camcorder. Bought it in Brooklyn. When you’re on camera, you know you’re on camera. Even when you’re pretending you don’t. You ham it up. I know I did. I think it’s natural. At least for, well, for us. Cause it’s new and fun. But he...he was doing the shit you do when you know you’re alone. Or think you’re alone.”

            Croak looked at the Jew and nodded. “Yeah. I’ve seen my mom’s super 8s. When I was young. When my brother was young. It isn’t candid.”

            “Then somebody else is watching him. Somebody set a camera up in his room cause they knew what he was doing—” Adam was cut off.

            “And we found the tapes in a house crammed to the T with circuit cameras,” Danny said. “A box full of ‘em.”

            “We need to watch another,” Adam said, understanding where the Jew was going. “You can leave if you want, Pug.”

            “Feels like we’re spitting on his grave,” Pug said sourly.

            “He ain’t buried yet.” Danny pulled out another tape. This one labelled for the last week of July as well. There were so many of them. And if each were the deposit of some secret, the result of one watching another, then this knapsack could be a goldmine, the sort of find people lorded over others. Something those who knew better might call blackmail. But how did you blackmail a dead man? His estate, maybe? Because a man’s reputation did not die with his body.

            “Well that’s nice,” Pug interjected.

            “I’m not being an asshole. I’m being realistic. Where’s your sense of adventure?” He put the new tape in.

            “Well, somebody made these, so somebody’ll be looking for them.”

            “Shouldn’t have left them in an opened box.” Danny pressed play.

            It wasn’t the room anymore. No lamp, no night table. At the edge of the screen they could see the slight flutter of something coming in and out of frame. The picture was outside now. A downturned angle of a driveway and garage door, the walkway toward the front steps of a home.

            “Leaves,” Croak said. “The camera’s in a tree. That’s what keeps popping up at the bottom.”

            He was right. They were leaves, briskly and quickly shooting into frame, swept up by wind, and then disappearing to reveal more concrete, transferring focus for just a moment and muddling the clarity.

            “Can you tell whose house it is?”

            Adam looked at Croak and shook his head. How would he know? Any of them, at that. If patterns should persist then his best guess was the fat Mr. Sub guy with a coke problem, but he didn’t want to drag him back into this prematurely, especially when he looked at Pug, whose lips and nose were contorted up into the sort of grimace that meant he was either angry or holding in a fart. Because this was partly wrong. And not just the invasion of privacy, but the fact that they took these tapes in the first place. And he never once considered the fact that whoever did make these tapes might be missing them, and probably looking for them right now.

            A car pulled into the driveway. It was a familiar car.

            “Jesus. It’s him again,” the Jew said. It was the Audi. The driver side door didn’t even have to open to cement that guess. The man exited. The car’s shocks depressed, its front fender dipping as its weight shifted, and the man slammed the door, walking to the front when the angle of the picture changed. It was a quick transition from the tree to a lower perch. What Adam might have guessed was a spot above a decorative ladder on the stoop. Something high enough not to be noticed. But he saw an address plate. 964. The guy went inside and the image changed again to the foyer, lights switching on to reveal a ghastly lavender paint job. The camera was high and out of the way. But the focus changed based on the man’s position, as if somebody were at the control, watching his every move and switching feeds to keep him in sight at all times.

            “Does anybody know where that is? Nine sixty-four?”

            “Could be anywhere,” Adam said, looking at Croak skeptically.

            “It might be in his obit tomorrow,” Pug said. “His address, I mean. Why?”

            “I want to see if the cameras are like the ones at the farmhouse,” Adam answered. He was thinking of connective tissue. Or rather, the precocious thought was one of powers beyond coincidence, but he hadn’t the words to truly articulate what he meant beyond the: “guys, we were meant to find these just like we were meant to stumble on the animal graveyard.” Things happened for a reason. But it was sometimes hard to believe that claptrap, even as a kid, because connective tissue could so easily be torn. You once believed in Santa, but now that sort of bullshittery is so self-evident you can’t believe you ever once fell for it. Maybe this was like that and there was no connection. No connection but the fat guy. “Check another one.”

            Danny grabbed a new tape. Two out of a couple dozen centered on the fat guy. That didn’t prove anything. Two lucky draws, maybe. A fluke.

            But the new tape was the same. Same shot from the tree. Audi in the driveway as the man strode to the car, a certain discomfort in his face as if it hurt to put so much stress on his knees. The car pulled out and then it was gone. The images switched. Flickering from room to room in the house, showing the utter loneliness in this man’s life. A home bereft of the sort of comfort one expects from those confines. This was no respite from the outside world. There was a couch and television. No dinner table. A sparse room with no paintings or pictures on the wall. There was an intermittent time stamp on the video. The feeds were spaced by minutes. When the image changed again they saw something far more familiar.

            Main Street.

Mr Sub.

The Audi had parked at the curb outside the front facade with its red glistening sign and the image of that cartoonish rotund face smiling, presumably having tasted one of the footers. The shot was quick before it flickered to show the inside of Mr Sub. The time was nearly twenty minutes after the first stamp when the car left the driveway. Adam had been inside the place a dozen times and never once thought to look for cameras, or if he had seen one or two, buried the sight having never given it or them a second thought. And there he was. Sitting at a window booth, crumpled napkin on the table and a half-eaten meatball platter stuffed into foil and spilling out of greasy wrapping paper whose stock had become diaphanous bearing the bulk of those ground beef puffs that for some time had the boys convinced the man would either choke on or clutch his chest after one last bite.

He wasn’t alone. There was another guy at the booth. The camera was above the front door and could just catch a mere glimpse of that far booth; it was enough to make out the fat guy and piece together the rest based on habit. The place wasn’t busy. There weren’t any distractions from what might have been going on here. The guy sitting across from the newly deceased only had a soda, and he took quick sips, never lifting the cup. Always dipping his head, topped by disheveled hair whose ropy ends curled into the wrinkled folds of his hoodie, to the straw like a bird to a feed dish.

“You recognize that bag?”

It was Croak. At first Adam hadn’t really noticed anything beyond the sandwich and the dude with the hoodie, the stranger whose face was obscured as if by the very notions inherent to such a mystery. But it was right there on the table, next to the soda. They weren’t hiding it, and maybe that was why the two met at Mr Sub in the first place. Because it was public and there were expectations of normal behavior as a result of one’s routine. So putting the bag on the table was really only one diner keeping things casual while talking to another. They were witnessing the transaction. What the Jew might have called the deal. The guy in the hoodie slid the bag over. The fat guy did not grab it. He left it on the surface and proceeded to take another bite. Then the stranger got up and left. And the boys finally saw his face.

“Holy shit. It’s Lazarus.” Pug swore. He was a prude, so when he did let his tongue slip, he meant it. There he was. The son of a bitch that had come traipsing through the field on his way to the farmhouse. Where the boys found the tapes in the first place. A fucking circle.

There he was, scars and all.

5

“I don’t want to follow him,” Pug said. “Not again, at least. The guy’s nuts. And now we know he’s a druggie.”

            “Look at what he did to his face,” Adam retorted. “We already knew that. But these are his tapes. Maybe his leverage.”

            “They might be worth something to him,” Danny said.        

            “And that’s something you seriously want to test?” Pug asked. “I mean, what if he saw us at the farmhouse. He may already be following us…”

            That was something Adam hadn’t thought of. But there were far more curiosities now. Far more. Like the cameras in the house, for one. And the bag of tapes still left, all presumably of the fat cokehead. Adam had already stowed the knapsack under his bed. He wasn’t sure he wanted to ever see them again. Another part of him was convinced this was the last ditch effort of a waning summer, and what boys didn’t like an adventure? So he was giving them one.

            “If that were true, Chels would have already barked,” Croak said, absentmindedly. “But Adam’s right. I want to know what’s going on.”

            “You won’t be alone, Pug. You and the Jew can go. You both have God on your side.”

            “I’ve heard what his people do to gods,” Pug said and Danny barked. It was a good one.

            “And so what, we go to Mr Sub? That’s your plan?”

            “I don’t want to wait to see an obit, Croak, and I’m guessing they knew him well enough to have his meatball supreme prepared in advance….so maybe the right directions to his place wouldn’t be too far off.”

            “They wouldn’t say shit to a couple of kids. And if they haven’t already heard the guy died, I think the last people they want to hear the news from is us.”

            Adam thought about that as well. He thought about the cameras at the farmhouse. Thought about the clipped wires and the box of tapes. Thought about Lazarus sidling through the field and wondered if he’d taken squatter’s rights of the abandoned place with the strange basement door and cut the cameras himself after testing them, and setting similar ones up in the fat guy’s house to blackmail him using the very product he sold at the Mr Sub. It was a line of reasoning out of a novel, something his grampa might read on the shitter, leaving the paperback next to the sink for the next fortuitous round when nature gave him the urge to take a dump (no, leave a dump, that’s his joke. Why would you take a dump? Shit stinks. Leave it where it is!)

            “I’ll have my grampa take us for lunch,” he finally piped. He knew the boys wouldn’t have a problem with it. The guy’s stories and jokes were top notch, and hell, getting a bite to eat wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. He could bring up the conversation casually in the car. Maybe not as in depth as it had truly gone down, because once an adult heard you’d seen a body, looked into the eyes of a dead man, talks of therapy wouldn’t be too far down the road, because that level of reality, of witnessing mortality, was a testament to impermanence, and the last thing a twelve-year-old kid on summer holidays should have to think about is death.

            “Well then, we’re regular Hardy Boys, aren’t we?” Pug said.