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.

Though the same picture appeared week after week, I still scanned it for small message differences.

•  •  •

Now, no photographs, no word. Missing in Action, one electric-blue Plymouth (its pale interior startling as a white sock around the calf of some dark, older boy). My parents having purged our house of any telltale Herald Traveler, I grew so jumpy/bold from missing Dan, I blurted during dinner, “Wwwwwhat ever happened to … ?” (I didn’t even need to finish—they’d been waiting.)

Mother stiffened from Casual to Regal. Using her linen napkin, she blotted her mouth, then—napkin stretched between her fists—studied it as if my question had made the cloth go beautifully bloodstained.

Dad cleared his throat, public speaking, “Someday, I’ll explain, son. Once I figure it out more myself. There are certain men, often not the ones you’d expect … Dan went and tried something that … Dan’s left us, basically. Nobody understands it. Pass the turnips, son, and take more or you’ll never make the Six Footers Club. Mighty good turnips tonight, Helen, crispier. Son, I know how much you, all of us, feel so attached to, but … Fact is—son?—around our town?—what Dan tried?—it’s the one thing a man cannot come back from….”