Page 80 - What They Did to the Kid

68 Jack Fritscher

The door banged open and he slipped the Presley singles into his
trunk. Porky Puhl confronted us.
“Heil, Hierarch!” I said.
Porky didn’t laugh. Before vacation, in a class meeting, we had
sent money to a missionary he didn’t approve. South America, not
Africa, he had said, was where our first charitable allegiance should
be. The Spanish Church was more deserving than the African
Church. He called us immature and threatened to resign from the
hierarchy of the class. We all stamped our feet and laughed for days.
“Hierarchy!”
“A little contraband, I see,” Porky said.
“Records.” Dempsey closed his trunk. “Gunn approved them.”
“So did I,” Porky said.
“What? Approve them, or bring some contraband back?” I asked.
He looked hurt, as if he had been slapped trying to equalize some-
thing. He shifted his hierarchy across his fat shoulders, intending to
“maintain it on our level” was how he’d say it. He never recovered
from Father Gunn choosing him our class president the fourth day
of our freshman year, and everyone realizing by the fourth month
what a mistake that was.
“I came back with some educational reading materials.” He
opened his suitcase, which hadn’t been unpacked. “Remember the
clipping Rector Karg posted on the bulletin board last month about
the Hungarian Revolt?”
“I read about it over the holidays,” I said. We saw no newspapers
September to June. Television sets were so new and expensive that
no priests at Misery had television, and even if stores had given sets
away, television was too worldly for us to watch. The radio in our
recreation room could only be turned on, by a priest, with permis-
sion, for sports or opera broadcasts.
“Look at these,” Porky said, producing a notebook pasted fat
with clippings like nothing personal I ever had hidden in my little
old shoe box of souvenirs from the world. “The Commies shoved
the rebels through meat grinders and washed them out through the
sewers. Look at this one, Madam Meatball. She shoved glass rods
inside the men prisoners and broke the rod so they felt like they were
dying when they urinated.”

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