Page 167 - What They Did to the Kid

What They Did to the Kid 155

“Where there’s talk, there’s action,” Mike said.
“Don’t be scandalous.” I turned away from them. “Let it alone.
Prudence dictates we keep our distance from sin.”
“Ryan,” Lock grabbed my arm, “this has to be hand led right.”
“Don’t start a witch hunt,” I said. I’d seen what witch hunts had
done to Hollywood. My forbidden reading under plain brown wrap-
per had evolved from novels by Charles Dickens and poetry by Walt
Whitman to dramas by Arthur Miller like The Crucible. “We’ve got
trouble enough with our own voca tions. Let Dryden alone. Pursue
this line and we’re lost.”
The bell ending the brief evening recreation period rang. The
door of the lounge room opened to the hallway.
“Up, everybody,” Hank the Tank yelled, “the wee-bitching hour.”
He walked past us shaking his cassock down around his legs. His
brother, PeterPeterPeter, was only eighteen months from Ordina-
tion, and their father, Mister Gustav Rimski the Huge, had come to
visit several times to sit on the Board of Directors. Tank’s family was
everywhere at Misericordia, and he was full of himself. He walked
up the stairs past us, leaned over the rail, and looked down on us.
“My, my,” he aimed at me, “you’re so young to be going bald on
top. Your Ordination photo will look like Yul Brynner.”
“Yours will look like Liberace.”
I hated him. He was the first person ever to mention my deepest
secret: my hair, like everything else about me, was exactly like my
Uncle Les.
Tank shook his head. “’S Wonderful!” he hissed at the three of
us.
“’S fub duck,” Mike said.
“Jeez!” Lock said. He asked me again. “Will you help us get
Hank, Ryan, and guys like him?”
Were we starting to decide who had a vocation?
“Yeah,” I said. “So much for philosophies of ‘I and Thou.’ I guess
I need to learn to listen.” Sooner or later, a seminarian must start
training for the rigors of the Confessional, where people who do
everything can say anything.
The lounge crowd milled past us, out the doors, talk dying,
stubbing cigarettes, still exhaling on the stairs, smoke rising up the

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