Page 126 - What They Did to the Kid

114 Jack Fritscher

“The season’s all wrong and it’s too hot to wrestle,” I said.
“You want to go out to the park or the lake?”
“What’s the use? Tag-teaming Kenny and Rip? Seminarians on
parade. We don’t fit.”
He led me upstairs to the screened porch outside his bedroom.
For a long while we sat in silence, with the one little ship’s lamp
burning, listening to the evening sounds of the town beginning to
ignite the sky. I rocked in a glider. Rockets whistled and flares went
up and fathers lit fountains on the sidewalk across the street. At the
Point, he had said he wanted to talk. I wanted to listen to him, but
I sensed a danger, a chance of reaching out to him and getting hurt
in the process.
He reached the lamp from his chair and turned it out.
I tried drawing a line between safety and charity.
Aerial displays exploded all across the night sky.
I was still looking for myself.
From way down at the park, some band played sweet patriotic
music.
In all charity, I wanted to help him, but without losing the little
self I had found. Confessions, especially late night ones, made me
nervous. Boys always wanted to confess to me. That made me feel
priestly, but I never really knew what to say.
In the sudden dark of the extinguished lamp came a moment
more of silence while the bugs that had been fighting the screens so
fiercely stood back stunned that their bright goal had been snuffed.
The moon made blue-white tracings on the floor.
“This is the time,” he said, “for telling you.”
Out in the night of the Fourth, bombs were bursting in air.
I immediately sensed the huge substance of his Confession and
prayed nothing Mike said would drag me from my vocation.
“I think I better not be a priest, Ryan. I think I been...I didn’t
know how much till this summer...pressured all my life. It’s time I
stopped.”
I pulled at my trunks that had long ago dried on me.
“Doc’s always saying he thought I’d be the salvation of this fam-
ily. And Julia! She keeps reminding me she was pronounced barren
forever after my older sister Julie was born. She prayed for a son,

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