Misplaced, maybe a little vague, but with this raw stinking guilt. Which you're going to shoulder until the day you die. The stories are set in Calgary from the 1950s to the present, an era that is effectively reproduced and, of course, familiar to many readers. The characters come from the blue-collar class of Canadian society, a group whose lives are not often explored in literature. The children are 12 to 13 years old and absorbed in their play.
Later stories reveal that the gang's experiences vary widely when they reach adulthood.
The stories also view the characters from the perspective of time, distance and even other characters. Tom shattered by the death in prison of Kenny Dawe. He and Adrian take Kenny's ashes to a northern lake where they scatter them on the surface of the water. There, Adrian tells Tom that Kenny died of AIDS, which explains why his corpse looked like that of an old man, though he was only 36. Tom realizes that Kenny's lifestyle shouldn't matter, but somehow it does.