Page 179 - What They Did to the Kid

What They Did to the Kid 167

The next morning, Lock entered Rector Karg’s office. From
down the corridor, Mike and I spied Rector Karg rise quickly and
close his ever-open door. Within fifteen min utes, Lock came out for
Mike. “You have to go. You have to tell.”
“Why did we have to tell at all?” Mike said. He started running
down the hall.
“Why does anyone confess?” I asked. Lock and I ran with him.
Our cassocks whooshed around our legs.
“In a school,” Lock said, “where five hundred boys each go to
Confession twice a week, you better confess to cover yourself.”
“Lock’s right,” I said. We ran around a corner. “That’s how
Porky Puhl was caught.”
“Confession is perfect, isn’t it,” Mike said, “for controlling a
bunch of boys.”
“Tattletales,” I said. We picked up speed running for a stairwell.
“Dryden was right about one thing, at least,” Mike said. “Com-
munists and Catholics both rely on informants.”
“But why do we have to tell?” Mike said.
“Because,” Lock said, “we’re good Catholic boys.”
“It’ll be the Inquisition all over again,” I said.
We stampeded up the stairs as if we were somehow going to
escape.
Mike disappeared into Karg’s office. Doors banged shut. Mice
scurried into holes. Sanctuary candles flickered. Priests whisked
down hallways and disappeared.
Lock and I sat through the day’s classes fearful that parts of the
precious world of Misery were about to blow. Around our ears. After
eight years of being good. A month before college graduation.
“I wonder,” Lock said, “how many seminarians took, uh,
interpre tive dance lessons from Dryden?”
By supper Mike had returned. He looked terrible at table, but he
hadn’t been shipped, at least before supper. Maybe he could make it
to our graduation.
Hank the Tank nosed around Mike’s disap pear ance. “Where
were you all day? You missed your classes.”
“None of your beeswax where he was,” I said.
“Mike had an appointment with the doctor in town,” Lock said.

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