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%u00a9Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights ReservedHOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS BOOKWhat They Did to the Kid 215The next morning, two boys, smoking cigarettes in the attic where Karg stored dead priests%u2019 stuff, found Father Polistina, Misery%u2019s mystic, hanging, dead, naked, from a rafter, swinging above an overturned chair. The rope around his neck was the rope he had worn for years wrapped tight three-times around his waist, knotted every six inches, to rub his skin raw and calloused for penance, to remind him always under his clothes of the suffering of Christ. Karg buried the overworked Polistina, his kind, without ceremony, always, under cover of night, kill themselves, and he was never mentioned again.October 22, 1963At table in the refectory, eight of us sat at supper laughing and talking over a pupgullion of noodles and boiled meat.%u201cCan you guess,%u201d I said, %u201cwhat happened a year ago today?%u201dSki stared straight ahead. Minus Hank.%u201cIt was a year ago today,%u201d I said, %u201cthat Gunn first let us listen to the radio while we ate lunch and supper.%u201d%u201cIt was a month ago today,%u201d Ski said, %u201cthat Tank disappeared.%u201dThe whole table of boys kind of grinned, watching Ski dog-paddle in the debris of his special friendship.%u201cTank was a pain,%u201d Lock said.%u201cWhere a doctor couldn%u2019t reach and a nurse wouldn%u2019t dare,%u201d Ski said, %u201cbut that Tank, he was quite a guy. Makes you wonder.%u201d%u201cWonder what?%u201d I said.%u201cWhy the young die.%u201dLock and I both rolled our eyes.%u201cWhy does anyone die?%u201d Lock asked. Ski slurped up a fork of pupgullion. Gravy splashed, landed on his black cassock, and disappeared into the wool. He was crying. I felt sorry for him in a way. Hank the Tank had never recovered his reputation from the plate caper. Ski was alone now. Like me. But I had chosen my aloneness. Not he his loneliness.%u201cHow can anyone,%u201d I said, %u201cexplain Tank%u2019s lapse in the river%u2013uh, I mean, laps in the river. I thought only the good die young.%u201dSki looked daggers, the kind he scribbled on paper during class, arrows shooting out of the eyes of one stick figure at another.%u201cIf only he were quick,%u201d Lock said, as if Ski were not sitting broken, crying into his pupgullion. Time had bored us with each other and whittled us down from eighty-nine boys to eighteen.