Page 128 - What They Did to the Kid

116 Jack Fritscher

Far off, crowds applauded fireworks we could hear but not see.
“Anyway, Doc told me we could talk. So I sat there an hour,
real nervous, drinking Cokes and smoking. At one o’clock exactly,
he hung a Closed sign on the fountain, and we had lunch out of a
paper sack. A few customers came and went about their business
with the pharmacist. Weird. Doc didn’t say one goddam word. So
I put my hand on his and told him, right at the table where there
were a lot of people around and he couldn’t make a scene. All he said
was, ‘Number one made a mistake. Now number two.’ He pulled
his hand from under mine and reached in his jacket and gave me a
dollar. ‘What’s it for?’ I said. ‘It’s all I’ve got.’ He was almost crying.
‘It’s the last thing I’ll ever give you.’”
“Jeez, Louise...”
Brilliant fireworks popped streaming across the town sky.
I held my chair, pained, that for so long Mike had been wrestling
alone, like Jacob with the angel. Wrestling somehow seemed the
classic Roman sport of seminarians: wrestling with angels, devils,
and sexual temptations. I knew that hearing Confessions would be
like this. So I struck a more sincere pose, which felt terrible, really,
and quite so false, that I added to seminarians’ wrestling card: vanity.
How would I ever pull off actually acting like a real priest, actually
being a real priest, when I felt like an imposter distanced from my
own self?
“By the time I got home,” Mike said, “Doc had called, and Julia,
my own mother, was in tears. ‘Your father didn’t let you down,’ she
said. ‘There’s some things you’re old enough to know.’”
From outside and across the pines came the shrill cry of loons
dancing on the lake, calm as a perfect mirror for the man-made
displays of color and light.
“You know my sister Julie I used to tell you about? You didn’t see
her picture anyplace, did you? It went out with the broken plate. She
married when I was in eighth grade. Doc and Julia didn’t like that
choice much and liked it even less when she divorced her husband
for desertion a year later. She was eighteen.”
All the pieces, things Mike had told me at odd times in long
talks, began to fall into place. At Misericordia Seminary, where time

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