Page 259 - What They Did to the Kid

What They Did to the Kid 247

September 22, 1963

“Alberto, a brave boy, is dead, muerto.”
Movies can change on a dime. Characters die suddenly. The
audience gasps. Rector Karg stood in the pulpit and announced,
“Hank Rimski is dead, drowned.”
For three days, we five hundred boys had prayed for Hank’s
safe return. The weather that autumn, blowing up from the South,
brought a strange flood of rain. Lake Gunn filled to overflowing
across the rim, across the path where we walked, barely wetting
our shoes at first, spilling in an inviting waterfall down to the river
beyond which was the Out of Bounds where we could never go.
The river rose out of its lazy banks, flowing grandly, gently it
seemed, carrying ducks quacking happily downstream. Boys stood
on the hillocks in the woods watching the silky muddy water swirl
around the high necks of trees ten feet from the small river’s usual
banks. Nature was our only entertainment. We waved at a couple of
boats, one wood and one aluminum, that floated past, shouting to
the men, Hey Mister!, who used their oars only to guide their boats
propelled along by the current. A couple of boys splashed into the
water, calling to the men, asking for a ride. Everyone laughed.
Hank grabbed someone’s hat and skipped it like a stone across
the eddies. The river was splendid, flooding its banks after the dry
summer. The hat spun and swirled and caught in tree branches and
freed itself and floated left and right, and once, even floated back
upstream for a moment, riding across the deep pools of water that
made the tiny, silly, negligible river suddenly magical, flowing up,
flowing down, flowing across, as boys, stripping to their underwear,
one after the other jumped from overhanging trees into the water,
floating easily, borne almost sensuously on the slow rolling current.
I waded in up to my knees, and I heard my mother’s father’s Irish
warning, “Stay away from water. Drowning runs in our family,” even
though no relation had ever drowned coming from Ireland or since.
“Come on in,” Hank the Tank called to me, “You’re a duck. You
can float like a duck, a fub duck.”
His crowd laughed. My crowd booed, but only one or two boys
dared to leave the bank or the shallows to join him out as far as he

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