He was plain and good, and as visible everywhere as Wonder Bread was then. “Builds Young Bodies Twelve Ways.” (I felt built by every vitamin Dan’s company and little gifts provided me.)

From my tree house, through fieldglasses, I stared down on a Dan foreshortened. His beer-loving pals had already begun the tragic waist-high unraveling that gets most guys. From my perch, they looked like stacks of pebbles, largest on the bottom and the smallest, pinkest, right on top. Dan’s build still reversed this.

From overhead, his brown locks and foursquare shoulders eclipsed narrow hips. Just shoe tips showed. I’d memorized the hair cocooning his ridged forearms. Back when I put my fishhook in poor Dan, I touched arm fuzz growing haywire, all directions. Hair sprouted every color, blond, brunette, and Lucy-red—mixed, like the pelt of our brindled boxer dog.

I’d never seen Dan shower at the club; I didn’t dare, but liked knowing I could’ve. I feared he would be burred across with many-colored patches. The taut chest and high butt—speckled, furred thanks to helpless handicapping manliness. Strange, that his perfection almost made you pity him.

From my closet perch, through binoculars, I now bird-watched a friendly compartmented bulge in the front of young Dan’s ironed chinos. From direct overhead, you could see its smiling sickle curve. He always “dressed” his due right, like some driver signal’s courteous extended arm.

“What you seein’ from up there, John Jay Audubon?” Hands on his hips like a goalie, daring you to score, Dan stared right up into my suction-attention.

“You … look”—I felt caught—“close.”

“Excellent glasses, hunh, buddy? German, I bet. One thing’s sure, those Krauts flat-out know their optics.”

No other friend of my father’s took any time with me. Passing, guys might rub my blondish hair but always the wrong darn way. Puppylike, I growled. They never noticed.

Dan did, laughing. “You’re too much, little buddy.”

III. Wanted Dead or Alive

Then Dan was not. Not in Papa’s golfing party. Nowhere near our home, the couples swarming for Friday-night bridge, arriving as solemnly intent as if planning new Normandy beach landings. Something’d happened.

I, a watchful boychild, with the man-sized interest in him, retreated to my tree house, soon overheard tag ends of stifled driveway conversations. “Never in a million years’d guess … him … one … those.”

My favorite had descended from such visibility. That same year he’d headed our Community Chest charity drive. Dan was often shown in the paper, grinning beside a giant plywood thermometer. The hand of his arm—muffed as in downy Shredded Wheat—touched painted mercury. Mercury shot up as cash poured in. He smiled a hopeful grin one-sided; he rolled his eyes to urge our town toward generosity—a salesman’s readiness to look however foolish for a sale.

I myself gave forty-seven cents.