Page 142 - What They Did to the Kid

130 Jack Fritscher

“Lambs right, goat knees left.” Lock turned to me. “Are you
washed in the Blood of the Lamb?”
I showed him my bare knees in my blue Bermuda shorts. “Goat
knees,” I said.
Ahead, first in line in front of Gunn, Hank the Tank stood with
his cassock gathered up around his thick waist. Lock could see his
chunky immodest calves. “Goat knees,” he said.
Mike shuffled past Gunn. “Hager,” he mumbled and let his cas-
sock fall down his Bermudas around his bare calves.
“O’Hara,” I said.
Lock came next, perfectly dressed as always, home free.
“Two-out-of-three boys: naked goat-knees,” Mike tallied.
“Safety in numbers,” I said. “Bermuda shorts: the new vestments
in the coming attractions for Vatican II: The Sequel.”
“The most swift punishment I can mete out,” Gunn said, “is
to deny tonight’s movie to this entire college department. No one
will be allowed to watch The Song of Bernadette. The names I have
collected certainly deserve no enter tain ment and you others deserve
the same punish ment, being collaborators in silence.”
“What’s the good of being good, Lock?” Mike asked. “You miss
the first movie of the year same as anyone else.”
In the refectory, we ate lunch in double-enforced silence, because
Gunn was so furious he forbade us to talk at a meal during which
talking was never permitted in the first place. In my sweltering
room, I regretted I had been caught wearing Bermuda shorts. How
could something that began as such a lark turn so serious that voca-
tions ended up on the line with boys being shipped? I hadn’t long
to ponder before Mike and Lock coaxed me out of my room. “More
absurdity?” I asked.
“Come on,” Mike said. “Hank’s got a bench down by Ski’s
garden.”
The spring before, Ski had asked his mother to send him veg-
etable seeds so he could plant a garden in the woods near the pond
we called Lake Gunn. He thought the spot secluded enough that no
one would find it. But everyone knew and raided Ski’s patch for what
food it was worth, which wasn’t much. Misery fed us, but we were
five hundred growing boys who were always hungry. The German

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