Page 277 - What They Did to the Kid

What They Did to the Kid 265

wallet. Forces were at work. In silent movies the actors jumped across
the river from one bobbing ice chunk to another. Life lay across the
ice floe on the other bank.
“A penny for your thoughts?” The blonde daughter of my father’s
rich Mason friend smiled. “Do you like Paul better than John?”
“The Popes?”
“The Beatles.”
Her brother, home from college, came over to us with a bottle
of wine. He reminded me of Lock. My brother, on leave from the
Marines, folded himself in. “The more the merrier,” Thom said. He
felt he had won the unspoken competition between us. His military
career was no longer trumped by my vocation. He had married a
girl named Sandy Gully. He had felt sorry for her standing out-
side the Marine Base at Camp Pendleton, choking on the Southern
California smog. She was sixteen, old enough to marry Thom, The
Gully-O’Hara Nuptials, but not old enough, her father said, to travel,
especially her mother said, being pregnant and all.
No one spoke of my past. I was different. They acted normal,
trying to fold me back into their world. I was the alien from another
planet. Karma barana nick toe. They had always talked to the semi-
narian. Suddenly I was real to them. I was back among them: Laza-
rus come back from the dead; a childhood friend hit by a car lying
in a coma for ten years, the Sleeping Beauty of boys; The Creature
from the Black Lagoon.
They covered their puzzlement with laughing, back-slapping,
and contests of singing parodies of carols: “I wouldn’t trade brass
monkeys for a one-horse open sleigh.”
Not one of them believed an “I quit” rubbed out ten years and
four months. Tick, tick, tick. The rich Mason faced me toward the
facts of life: the ten years and four months, the nearly four thousand
days and nights, the ninety-six thousand hours, the six million min-
utes, the three-hundred-and-fifty-million seconds, at five dollars an
hour was $480,000 I could have earned.
Divorce of any kind interested them. They sniffed at my reasons.
They all had heard of “spoiled priests” ruined by alcohol and women,
but the spoiling of the best little altar boy in their world created a
mystery. Where was my cocktail glass? Where was my girlfriend?

©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved
HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS BOOK