Page 262 - What They Did to the Kid

250 Jack Fritscher

The whole table of boys kind of grinned, watching Ski dog-
paddle in the debris of his special friendship.
“Tank was a pain,” Lock said.
“Where a doctor couldn’t reach and a nurse wouldn’t dare,” Ski
said, “but that Tank, he was quite a guy. Makes you wonder.”
“Wonder what?” I said.
“Why the young die.”
Lock and I both rolled our eyes.
“Why does anyone die?” 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.
“How can anyone,” I said, “explain Tank’s lapse in the river–uh,
I mean, laps in the river. I thought only the good die young.”
Ski looked daggers, the kind he scribbled on paper during class,
arrows shooting out of the eyes of one stick figure at another.
“If only he were quick,” Lock said, as if Ski were not sitting bro-
ken, crying into his pupgullion. Time had bored us with each other
and whittled us down from eighty-nine boys to eighteen.
“Hey, numbnuts,” Ski said. “I’m sitting right here.”
“But do you remember Gunn’s radio a year ago?” I said.
“I remember the first day I saw you eleven years ago, you stupid
mick, you and Lochinvar there, and you haven’t changed.”
“The Cuban crisis, stupid. When JFK made us finally take a
stand against Khrushchev and Castro,” Lock said. “Gunn brought
in the radio and put it on the corner of his table. Were you out to
lunch?”
“If Kennedy had sent in the Marines, I would have gone,” I said.
Ski spit pupgullion all over the table. “Oh, Mary! And Joseph!”
Lock put his hand to his mouth.
“My brother Thom is in the Marines,” I said. “Gunn was trying
to inspire us to be patriotic priests, maybe turn out to be military
chaplains like he had been.”
“War is immoral,” Lock said.
Ski blew raspberries.

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