Page 304 - What They Did to the Kid

292 Jack Fritscher

gave me her number. “Saul Alinsky, huh? Still waters run deep. We’ll
discuss it.”
“It?”
“All of it.”
“Have you read Alinsky’s manifesto, Rules for Radicals?”
“I proofed the galleys.”
“Liar.”
An hour later, too eager, I called her from the elevated station
near Louisa’s.
“Can I see you?”
“Tuesday at eight.”
“Shall I bring my manuscript?”
“Down, boy,” she said.
“Go get her,” Joe said.
Louisa laughed. “You’re so sophisticated. Certainly, I did not
see the fifth of Southern Comfort stashed under your bed, and your
handwriting is terrible.”
The thought of Louisa trying to decipher my yellow legal pads
was a comedy compared to Rector Karg sniffing through my shoe
box of papers word by word. Something had been stolen from me.
Some secrets had not been revealed. I had escaped from Misery, a
missing boy, gone in the middle of the night, and no one, no priest,
no rector ever even called my parents to report me missing, or to see
if I arrived home in one piece.
“Aaawgh,” Joe said, “we all waste our youth some way.”
“So us three got something in common,” Louisa said.
“Aaawgh, Queenie,” Joe said.
In the Buncheks’ attic, I stood naked, couldn’t keep my clothes
on, transfixed in the mirror by who’s that? Naked, I rose, untouched.
Spring blew in the window. I threw myself into my bed, tossing,
planning my first literary engagement with Jocelyn, whom I thought
of as my editor, Jocelyn.
“I want to introduce you,” she had offered, “to LeRoi Jones. I
want to listen to you reading out loud, ‘An Agony. As Now.’”
In my Journal, I wrote the declarative sentence Jocelyn had
told me was the declarative truth of the declarative Virginia Woolf:
“What secrets men know are revealed through women.”

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