Page 296 - What They Did to the Kid

284 Jack Fritscher

Liar. That’s why I got the job. I feared nothing, because nothing was
more claustrophobic than Misery.
As the last syrup trickled into the tanks, I climbed a twenty-foot
ladder, like Tony Curtis in Trapeze, leading straight above to the
hop-jack where most of the waste had settled. A man stood beside
it waiting for me, the first time. His cap was pulled down to his
eyes and he seemed to have no face. He had an immense potbelly. A
worker could drink as much as he could hold. He wore a see-through
white nylon sport shirt that buttoned tight across his chest. My chest
had strengthened at the YMCA. He motioned me to watch. He
turned on the cold water to flush the heat from the hop-jack waste.
He said nothing and I felt awkward, the two of us standing like
acrobats on a platform, waiting, high above the rest of the plant.
Finally he motioned for me to climb higher up the next ladder. I had
to do it. Below me was all the world. I had to prove I could function
where Rector Karg’s Holy Mother Church was no net to catch me.
I peered down at him.
He smiled beneath his cap. He placed his hand sideways in his
crotch, drove his fingers in flat, index finger up, and pulled his hand
out loosely and snapped it from the wrist as if flinging sweat from
his fingers. He shook his head side to side, laughing, boy-o-boy. He
was making like my buddy signaling me we were both hot and tired.
He was telling me I was doing okay. Then he motioned me on, to
enter the jack.
I peered in through the small porthole door, down at the ladder,
into the steel submarine of the copper tank. From theological study
to graduate school to this noisy, dangerous factory, and maybe to
the war far off in Southeast Asia, I had to meet the world on its
terms. That was always my point. Lots of workers become priests. I
never heard of a priest becoming a worker. I looked inside the tank,
pulled my work gloves on my hands, over the once-broken finger,
and vowed I would make it back to Louisa’s, because the stranger,
my new buddy, had given me more encouragement in one gesture
than any priest.
I climbed feet first through the porthole and ten feet down the
rungs of the ladder into the isolation tank of the vat. Six inches of
hops waste mattressed under my new work shoes. My buddy threw

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