The skinny boy and the fat boy both love the sound that shattering beer bottles make against the sides of cars; that sweet sound of compressed air escaping through broken shards of green, brown, and clear glass. They delight in the destruction.
They are drunk again; third time this week. Everyone at school agreed; they were drunks. Ever since the fat boy’s older brother had bought them their first six packs, they lost all fear of asking complete strangers in the parking lot of the Main Street Grocery Store to buy them booze. They are drunks. They care less.
Each day the two of them appeared at school for less than two hours. Just barely long enough to get noticed. Girls talked about how fat the fat boy was and how the skinny boy was cute in a weird way. They were gone before lunch. Their last two classes, whatever they were, were long forgotten. Long overdue with math, English, and history assignments. They barely went to school. They didn’t want to. They didn’t need to. They didn’t. This is obvious.
The junkyard is quiet. The silence is only penetrated by the shutter of metal creaks when the wind picks up a bit and the sharp smash of a bottle hits metal. Most people are in bed at this time.
They aren’t.
This was the fat and skinny boy’s clear act of defiance. Defying their parents, their principal, their teachers, their minister at their parent’s church. It was the straight forward and basic way of making sure that everyone knew they live by their own rules. They drink and they skip classes and stay up late.
The skinny boy is known for destroying things; for property damage; for vandalism; for squirting ketchup from highway overpasses onto cars, shooting bottle rockets near crowds on Main Street, hitting mailboxes with golf clubs, shooting at house windows with bb guns. He uses his sixteen- year-old boredom to deconstruct the small town that he lives in.
The fat boy is known for being a follower.
They meander between the long, disorganized rows of rusted out scraps of Ford, Chevy, and the like. A new pile of beer bottles is discovered. Their pace quickens a bit. Each boy grabs a discarded glass container, aims at a car, cocks back his arm and applies as much force as possible.
The fat boy releases three bottles into the night. The skinny boy throws four. With the last thunderous crash of glass on metal comes a loud, organic shriek. Something stirs from the back of the dark blue Cadillac that the skinny boy had chucked his last bottle at. A scraggily looking mutt begins slowly moving towards them.
The skinny boy pulls out his large, cheap, folding knife from his pocket and begins to walk toward the old dog. He slowly opens the knife blade, pretending to stalk it; just like he had seen the Indians do on television. Each step closer is a bit more unbalanced. He lunges and wrestles it to the ground. It flips him over backwards and tries to run through the air.
The knife enters through the dog’s windpipe and gently pokes through the opposite side of the warm and hollow pink tissue.
The skinny boy gets up. The dog struggles and flops on the ground. It kicks up dirt. It tries to escape. It goes nowhere. It is the first time that either of them has seen something die.
Blood covers the skinny boy’s lightly covered plaid shirt.
“We have to go” says the fat boy quickly and unsure of himself; his eyes fixed on the skinny boys blue jeans which were now red.
“Yeah…Yeah, we had better… better go.”
He is stunned. He is drunk. He is now a killer.
The fat boy grabs the skinny boy’s arm, the knife is still loosely held in his hand.
“C’mon man, let’s just fuckin’ go”
“Just,” the skinny boy paused “… just, a second.”
He doesn’t even bother to look at the fat boy. The skinny boy is fixed at the same spot which he had been in from when he got up. The skinny boy’s Converse foot prints had made a dense semi circle around his back half. He watches as the dog slowly tries to take in another breath. It is choking on the blood that has pooled into its mouth and throat. It has stopped flailing about. It is no longer trying to escape its killers. Each agonizing pull inward is only met with futility.
The skinny boy watches to the last moment; to the last, bloody and pathetic breath. The fat boy bounces around behind him, somewhere, suddenly worrying about the repercussions of what he had just witnessed. Paranoia sweeps over the fat boy and he now fears the cops coming to arrest them or possibly the junkyards owner chasing them away with his side by side.
The fat boy begins to run in his awkward fat boy run, toward the exit. The skinny boy finally turns around and begins to walk at a quickened step behind him.
“Which way is out?” the fat boy asked. He was gaining a large lead on the skinny boy because the skinny boy is barely stumbling his way out.
The skinny boy doesn’t know. He is focusing on the silence; he doesn’t even hear the scrape his stumbling feet make against the dried, reddish earth.
The boys take a big right turn, followed by a left and then another right. The fat boy keeps on asking questions and yelling things. All the skinny boy hears is muffled vowel sounds; he just follows with his head down bobbing just a bit.
They finally reach the gate; the fat boy runs right up to it and begins to climb up. The skinny boy catches up a few moments later and falls to his knees three body lengths short of the dirty, chain link fence.
Even he doesn’t believe it. He is the boy who was the source of so much rumor and gossip; almost anyone at his school can regurgitate an hours worth of what he had supposedly done. Everyone thinks that he… he, is the destroyer. And there he is, crying at the foot of a junk yard gate, over the death of dog no one cares about.
