Page 216 - What They Did to the Kid
P. 216

204                                               Jack Fritscher

            thought she blamed us for what she could not blame Alfred, whose
            room was filled with paint-by-numbers.
               “Tomorrow night,” I said, “you’ll see Mrs. Doney standing on a
            table, posing for Alfred, with a rose between her teeth.”
               “She’ll have numbers on her body....”
               “So Alfred can paint her!”
               “We could move the numbers around.”
               “That’s what they did to Picasso’s mother!”
               “Move one eye here.”
               “Move the other eye there.”
               “Here an ear.”
               “There a nose.”
               “We’re so uncharitable,” Lock laughed.
               Suddenly, Lock was shoved aside. “That’ll be all, Mr. Roehm.”
            The Full Gunn thrust my door open the rest of the way. He held
            Lock by the nape of his blond neck. “Your foot’s over the threshold,
            Mr. Roehm. A mortal offense. Not even the toe of a shoe enters
            another seminarian’s room. When I come down a corridor and see
            you visiting anyone, I want to see your full body in the hall.” He
            shoved Lock away, and turned full on me. “You should have told
            him, Mr. O’Hara, to stand back.”
               He pulled my door closed with a slam and made a great noise
            bitching Lock out in the hall. All the other boys could hear, but
            everyone knew Lock Roehm was too golden to ever be shipped.  He
            was temporarily stuck at Misery while the Vatican old guard and the
            Vatican new guard fought over him.
               A guy couldn’t win for losing. Screw them all. I picked up one of
            the many novels the Jesuit had bundled over to me from his private
            collection, still stowed in his unpacked trunk. He warned me if
            Father Gunn or Rector Karg caught me with his books, he would
            have to deny he ever had such worldly goods.
               “But this is,” Sean O’Malley, S. J., confided, “best for you.”
               Priests know best, and Jesuits trump ordinary priests. Wasn’t
            that why the Pope himself had ordered the Jesuits to be spiritual
            counselors to make Misery’s seminarians into parish-ready priests
            who belonged to no religious order? My nerves, my underground
            books, my blue pills, my big recovery were all top secret; privileged,


                      ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved
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