Page 90 - What They Did to the Kid

78 Jack Fritscher

“Funny as a wicker bedpan, Ryan, that’s what you are,” Hank
said.
“Compared to the professors we have now, anybody’s better.”
Dempsey ticked me off sometimes agreeing with his own enemy. I
liked him better talking about movies or something innocuous like
his family’s peanut farm and how one summer during a drought it
was so hot they planted hay in Lake Dallas.
“Look! It’s alive!” Ski pulled a hunk of meat, gristle organ
attached, dripping with gravy hemorraging from the noodles. “What
is it?” He threw it down on the plastic tablecloth. It wriggled and
shook and I turned away.
Porky muttered something low. Boys nearby laughed.
“What’d he say, Lock?” Dempsey asked.
“I couldn’t care less,” he said, “about the cheap double enten-
dre’s.” Lock was senior class president and an A student, who had
spent the previous Christmas and New Year’s with his pastor, who
was his mentor, at a ritzy hotel in Havana, Cuba, where they had
seen stage shows that were probably a mortal sin, at least for me,
because at the New Year’s eve show at the Tropicana Hotel, a nearly
undressed showgirl had been dropped into Lock’s lap and make-up
smeared on his good suit.
Hank, who had spent Christmas in New Jersey, pushed his plate
away after two helpings. “They call this food?”
“Look,” Lock said flatly, “I went to Gunn officially last week and
complained about the food.”
“So go again.”
“The kitchen nuns need time to reorder.”
“It’s your duty as class president,” Ski said to Lock.
“I’ve got a lot of duties,” Lock said. “Lay off.”
“Those Hun-nuns from Deutschland only give us more of the
same.” Hank was working his way up to one of his stentorian scenes.
He took a plastic serving plate and licked the lead of one of the dozen
pencils he always carried with his slide rule in the plastic pocket at
his chest.
“Tank,” Ski said, “what you doing?”
“Writing a note to the kitchen.” He licked the pencil again.
“Chills, thrills, and vibrations,” I said.

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