The Runt of the Litter

There were four boys in that house: John,
who went to West Point; Joe, who was
Student Council President; Jim, who was
the only halfback in many a year to gain
over a hundred yards a game.
And Dave, the runt of the litter.

All the others had come one right after another,
except for Dave.  He was an afterthought, an
accident.  He was five years younger than the
one before, and shorter than the others.  He
seemed to resent it from the first day he
understood that he didn't measure up.

I used to play with him, though he was younger
than me.  He'd made his way onto my
baseball team, even though he was two grades
behind me.  He'd willed his way into starting
at second base.  He was The Kid—scrappy,
making every play, punching out hits, fearless.

As we grew older, the differences between Dave
and the other kids grew.  They and I got taller,
he did not.  We got bigger, he did not.  Where once
he was everybody's favorite, the sparkplug, now
he was too small.  You wouldn't put him on the
football field—he'd get killed by kids twice his size.

He drifted off to the margins of our lives, and
although you didn't notice it at first, he became
bitter.  Why—he must have been thinking—why
am I the runt of the litter?  Why are all my brothers
well-formed, on the verge of manhood?  What am
I going to do to compare to them?  Lead dogs.

I went away to school, and came back for the summer.
I don't know why, but one day I walked into the hotel
coffee shop, maybe for breakfast while I was goofing
off, killing time with somebody big enough to haul
three hundred pound blocks of ice.  I saw Dave
sitting at the counter, drinking coffee.  Little Dave,

I thought.  He was ten when I was twelve—what's
he doin' drinking coffee?  Then I figured out he must
have been 18 if I was twenty.  He could drink coffee
if he wanted.  He had a blue stocking cap on his head
in the middle of summer—self-absorbed, sullen.  I said
“Hey Dave,” and he just looked at me over his shoulder.

The guy I was with, who knew the town better than
I by then, said “You don't want to talk to him”
and kinda pushed me on to a booth.  “What's up
with him?” I asked, and the guy just shook his
head.  “Nobody knows,” he said.  “Best not to
bother tryin' to figure it out.  He won't say.”

I left in the fall, and didn't think about it again
until a few years later, when I read a squib
in the local paper my mom sent me.  “Local
Man Killed in Bar Fight” said the headline.
Dave had been stabbed and bled to death. 
He hadn't backed down from somebody bigger.