Page 70 - What They Did to the Kid

58 Jack Fritscher

laundry, walking around and around wooden racks hung with five
hundred laundry bags, rarely bothered to look at the red period dot
sewed in after 66. Once a week, I had to meet with 99 to exchange
clothes. There seemed to be a curse on 99, because 99 always seemed
to quit or get shipped, and my underwear would disappear with the
disappeared boy, and I’d be left with his jockstrap and stray socks.
My dad sat down. “I brought an ashtray,” he said.
“Would you hand me those four books?”
He handed over the Modern Library editions of Hemingway,
Wolfe, Dos Passos, and Fitzgerald. “You read too much, but I bet
you’ll be glad to get back to the good old routine,” he said. “There’s
a lot you can say for regular hours and plenty of sleep.”
I didn’t say it. I loved my father, but he had grown up on a farm
before he married my mother, who insisted they live in a town. One
set of my grandparents lived in an apartment. The other owned a
barn.
He made business with his cigarette, casting silently about for
conversation. “Really think I should go back with you. Yessir, that
would be the life. Quiet. Regular. Like the farm.”
This joke he always made I always played along with, because
I loved him so much. What we had in common was growing less
each year I was gone from the world. Sundays I wrote long letters.
Wednesday mornings Annie Laurie ran down the stairs to the green
mail box on the big porch, read my typed pages once, then immedi-
ately again to my father over the telephone at his work. They bragged
to their friends and to my aunts and uncles that my letters were talky
and full, but they could not begin to fathom what it was to be away,
as they always said, studying to be a priest.
“Here’s the last of your underwear and socks.” Annie Laurie
put them on the bed. “I soaked them in practically straight bleach
to get them white. What’s the matter with those nuns who do your
laundry?”
“It’s top secret,” I said. “We don’t tell anyone what goes on there.”
Through the back of my mind raced the laundress-nun with her
note in German that poor literal Father Gunn had read aloud in the
refectory, asking if the boys would please stop blowing their noses
in the sheets.

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