Page 188 - What They Did to the Kid

176 Jack Fritscher

“Maybe,” I said, “Father Dryden really did nothing wrong. No
more wrong than me translating Häring. Maybe he’s only a symbolic
target.”
“But Mike said...”
“Mike has a great imagination. Nobody has actually proven
Father Dryden committed any sins. In my vocation, I want to be
sensible about hysteria.”
“Ryan,” Lock said, “If you write stuff like that in our moral
psychology exam tomorrow morning, I’ll graduate top of the class.”
“You want to fight for number one?” I said. “You can have ‘Vale-
dictorian, Misery, college class of 1961.’ Help find me an extra pack-
ing box. Tomor row I’m taking home anything they can object to.
I’m purifying my life.”
“Ryan, you’re afraid too, aren’t you?”
“It’s ironic. The minute I started to understand the requirements
of a vocation to the priesthood in the Catholic Church...”
“Deep down,” Lock said, “you feel maybe Gunn and Karg and
all the old fogies in this sterile hothouse are right to hold off change.”
“A vocation happened to me this year,” I said.
“Ha! You...don’t...want...to...change!”
“I don’t know whether I’m protecting my vocation running with
them or from them.”
“There’s many kinds of priestly vocations,” Lock said.
“So which kind’s mine?”
“You’ll be the first beatnik priest. That’s the beauty of the new
Church.”
“As God is my witness,” I said, “I will be a priest, and if you want
valedic to ri an, you’ll have to kill me.”
Lock jumped me with a full nelson. We wrestled and laughed
and ran down to the swimming pool and raced each other in furious
laps through the slapping bright chlorine water.
Hank the Tank stuck his head out of the lifeguard’s booth and
flicked the overhead lights on and off. He was stealing a pair of
flippers to go swimming himself down at the river, where he and his
kind had started to hang out to separate themselves from our crowd,
who had taken over the pathway circling around little Lake Gunn.
“I dare you to come race me down at the river!”

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