Page 82 - What They Did to the Kid

70 Jack Fritscher

up. I recognized Hank and Ski. Ha! Caught! Perfect! I pounded
again to make them uneasy. Someone shifted close to the door, then
moved away.
Dempsey whispered, “Gunn better not find out they locked one
of Rector Karg’s blessed doors. You can get shipped for locked doors.”
We fled on down the stairs. Porky waited for us outside the
locker room.
“Ski and Hank are up in the storage room with the door locked,”
I said to him.
“Not smart,” Porky said. “Nobody gets shipped if nobody tells.”
“What’s going on?” Dempsey asked him. “What are they doing?”
“Lifting, that’s all,” Porky said.
“Lifting what?” I wanted to know.
“Weights Hank made, Jerkwater,” Porky said. “They’ve got these
muscle-building magazines from Charles Atlas.”
“Oh,” I said. “What do you know!” If I ever wanted to get even
with Hank for anything, I had him right where I wanted, behind
what Father Gunn, USMC, disliked most, a locked door. “So what
do you know,” I said. “Hank the Tank has fub duck.”

February 1957

Saturday our classes ran until lunch, and our afternoons were free
until our five-o’clock study hall. Gunn programmed Saturday after-
noons down to fifteen-minute play-and-work periods. His intramu-
ral teams did double-duty for the Father-Treasurer as paint-and-scrub
crews, washing out the jakes, or painting window sashes in periods
between their games. Ski’s team painted while Hank’s played bas-
ketball until two-thirty when they reversed their positions.
During the autumn of my first year, all ninety of us freshman
boys alternated playing football and dismantling an old brick house
on Misery’s property that had been part of the Underground Rail-
road during the Civil War. It was kind of fun and kind of spooky,
especially around Halloween, going down into that cellar and feel-
ing the souls of scared black folks running away, escaping, free.
We chipped all the white mortar off all the red bricks, and loaded
each others’ arms up with six to eight bricks, and carried the bricks

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