Page 108 - What They Did to the Kid

96 Jack Fritscher

I whipped the car into a U-turn that threw Rip against the rear
seat. They both started laughing. I started laughing.
“First you try to kill us, then you try to kill us,” Kenny said.
“Me and Rip were gonna hike the beer trip. Da da dee. You’re like
a lifesaver, Bug man.”
“What kind of a name is Rip?” I said. “Is that–like–a Hollywood
name like Tab and Rock and Troy?”
“His name is like Ripley,” Kenny said. “Believe it or not. Ha ha
ha. Da da dee.” He turned the radio up louder.
At Misericordia, I had longing fantasies about disappearing into
the real world like a real person instead of like a seminarian, so I
could see what real life was like. “Lullaby of Birdland” filled the car.
Doo wat da doo doo doo wah da. It was summer. The Fourth of
July. I was free. Doo wah. Real.
Ahead, I saw a store called “Fred & Alice’s” with a single red gas
pump. I drove in kicking up our own cloud of dust. Rip and Kenny
walked into the store as a really old Fred sitting on the porch looked
toward me.
“Fill up?” he shouted.
I waved at him to keep sitting. I had learned how to pump gas
filling up all those tanks at the Mason’s filling station where hardly
anyone who knew me even recognized me. A gas jockey is such an
opposite of a seminarian. People don’t notice the one and fall all over
the other. Except for one time, a girl, when I was leaning over the
hood washing her windshield, she spread her knees way apart and
held her two dollars in her fingers between her thighs and neither
one of us pretended to notice what she was doing.
“Hey, kid, like you want any?” Kenny yelled from the porch of
the store.
All over the rustic wood front of the station, Fred had nailed
metal signs for Coca-Cola and Lucky Strike. Kenny stood next to
a three-foot thermometer shaped like a Drewry’s beer bottle. The
temperature was 94 degrees.
“Any what?” I yelled.
“Like beer, man.”
“I’m driving.” I walked closer to the porch.
“Don’t be a dick,” Kenny said. “I figured because you were

©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved
HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS BOOK