A beautiful, terse, and distilled account of one 12-year old boy's childhood in America during the 1940's. His family (he has a mother and two sisters) is on welfare and they live in a trailer and once in the extra apartment of a funeral home. The book builds through his childhood, recounting his experiences and how they slowly wove together into tragedy when, on February 17, 1948, he accidentally kills his friend while shooting rotten apples in an orchard with him. This event changes him for life and leaves him tortured about his decision to buy bullets for his gun and go shooting apples with David instead of purchasing a hamburger. He becomes obsessed with the choice he made and for a while believes that he can only achieve salvation for David's death by learning everything he possibly can about hamburgers. Finally, his family moves to a new place and he gives up all of his hamburger research, burning files and pages of it in a park grill in the rain outside of a zoo, where a sad coyote watches him from behind bars.