Page 278 - What They Did to the Kid

266 Jack Fritscher

Eyes watched from church pews. Faces glanced over plates at holiday
supper tables. They stared on the sledding hill in the park where
I took my six-year-old sister, Margaret Mary, rocketing down the
toboggan run.
I was no great mystery.
I had no scandal.
I had no vocation.
My father explained to my mother, “He’s a cover without a book.”
“What?”
“His life is beginning.”
I could never write or phone or visit Misery again. Ninety-six
thousand hours. I could never change my mind. At five bucks an
hour. I could not go back. $480,000. I forced myself forward into
the future. No longer was a bed and a supper waiting somewhere
in some rectory. Life had no net. I sensed danger and adventure. I
had a draft card. In six weeks, I could be in Vietnam, with no Jack
Kennedy to lead me. In seventeen months, my classmates would be
ordained to the priesthood. I panicked. I missed Lock. I fantasized
saying good-bye to him at Misery. No real good-bye. So no experi-
ence of a personal good-bye. An imagined good-bye no more real
than a grade-B late show starring Lock and me.
Lock: “Did Karg give you his farewell sermon?”
Ryan: “I stopped him. I said the Jebbie Jesuit took care of any-
thing that needed to be said.” Close-up. Ryan. His face shows he
remembers how he had lied to his father when his father had tried to
explain the facts of life.
Lock: “Good. I heard it’s terrible.”
They look at each other as the swirling decked holiday halls of Misery
empty around them. Carolers, far-off, sing, “Fa la la la.”
Lock: “Priests are like gypsies. We’re always saying good-bye.”
Ryan: “Life is an endless succession of good-byes.”
They begin to make dialog...
Lock: “Everything goes too fast, I guess.”
...to cover the end...
Ryan: “It seems all my life I’ve been standing in bus stations
saying good-bye, leaving people.”
...of their friendship...

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