Page 279 - What They Did to the Kid

What They Did to the Kid 267

Lock: “On cold platforms.”
...each never to see the other again...
Ryan: “In clouds of blue exhaust.”
...like the movies...
Ryan: “Be a good priest, Lock.”
The two young men shake hands like comrades parting in the
trenches.
Lock: “A good person. That’s what you’ll be. A good man.”
Close up. Ryan. He wants, for all the warmth of ten years, to hug
Lock shoulder-to-shoulder. But he cannot. There can never be special
friendships, because special friendship never existed. Even at Christmas.
Camera: medium shot. The walls of Misery press too close. The face of
Rector Karg appears. Lock himself begins to fade to black.
Ryan: “Remember the spiritual autobiography Raissa Maritain
wrote about her life with Jacques?”
Lock: “We Have Been Friends Together.”
Ryan: “Good-bye, Lochinvar.”
I dissolved out to my real self, on a walk into the cold December,
taunting the world to receive me newly arrived in the world, but not
yet of it. No longer unlike other men. Other Christmases the bus
out of Misery had roared past filling stations where grease-smudged
young men stood intent around the raised hood of a truck, absorbed
in tangled wires and steaming radiators and universal joints. They
were in the world, unbeaten, unbowed, heroic, anointed in crank-
case oil, unafraid. They were workers, not priests. They knew how
to make motors work. They were serious about their women and
children. They had focus, fraternity, codes, secrets I wanted to learn.
This time I would penetrate the tightest circles. I promised to know
their essence and match it. I would no longer be Saint Analogus,
the Patron of Those Who Always Stand on the Outside Looking In.
Ryanalogus, the Latin word for fool. I would be the real thing if it
took alcohol, tobacco, firearms, and Masonic women. I knew how to
make ready the way of the Lord, to make straight His paths.
I must have looked fierce at our supper table.
My father put his hand on my shoulder, looked at Annie Laurie,
and announced, “He’s a solid man.” He said what Lock had said.
That compliment was the supreme compliment to an Irish boy. “You

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