Read Online King of the Mild Frontier by Chris Crutcher - Free Book Online Page A

Cascade High School and the world a safer and better place. So whilewe didn’t have to do anything more than sell raffle tickets to our parents and siblings and extended families to be in the C Club, what we had to do to get into the C Club would earn a whole bunch of people—starting with the principal and the C Club faculty adviser—thirty years to life if it happened today.
    The initiation was shrouded in secrecy, but stories about it leaked like stories out of the Clinton White House, which wasn’t invented yet. They couldn’t be true, they just couldn’t be true.
    They were true.
    Each initiate was required to make a hardwood paddle, three-feet long with ten holes and beveled edges, an exact replica of the paddle hanging in the principal’s office. That is equivalent to requiring the condemned man to supply rifles for the firing squad and polish the stocks. The best of the paddles, as judged by the school principal, would hang in the office, ready for use by the likes of Tarter and the myriad others who shared his mindset, for the remainder of the year.
    As an initiate you spent initiation day wearing your clothes inside out and backward, underpants on the outside. Tight fit. You ran errands for lettermen and the girls they wanted to impress, carrying their books, addressing them asroyalty. At the end of the day the student body was called into the gymnasium so the lettermen could run you through more humiliating exercises, singing dumb songs, proposing to unsuspecting girls, playing Cuckoo—in which one initiate would kneel on top of a table with a wet, knotted towel and another would kneel underneath. Both were blindfolded. The one on the bottom was to stick his head out and yell, “Cuckoo! Cuckoo!” and the guy on top would swing the towel at the sound. If the guy on top missed, meet Mr. Hardwood Paddle. If the guy on the bottom got hit, meet Mr. Hardwood Paddle. Us Ramblers knew how to have fun.
    In truth we actually welcomed this part of the festivities, because we had at least an inkling of what was to come when the sun went down. At the end of the school day, Ron Hall, the C Club president, gathered us together to instruct us to be at the gym at seven o’clock sharp, and be sure to take a good shower.
    If your local library advertises my presence at Live at the Library and I don’t show, it’s because I’ve disappeared into the Witness Protection program, since as we entered the gymnasium that evening, we each signed an oath never to reveal the specifics of the upcoming event. They didn’t threaten death and dismemberment (not necessarily in that order) for anyone breaking this oath; they promised it.
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    The gym doors slam shut. I have been dreading this since sixth grade, when I first heard the high-school kids at my dad’s service station talking about it. I have particularly dreaded it since the beginning of this year, because I finally won a starting position on the football team, which meant there was no way around it. Some of my classmates lettered as sophomores; they get to deliver the torment, adding to my humiliation.
    We leave our clothes in our lockers, stand naked in a line while President Hall reminds us of the sanctity of the event; when we walk out of here, we’ll be men. Several mason jars filled with gray, oversized, slimy oysters sit on a table by the stage. The lettermen remove them from the jars, handing us one each. They’re slick, they tell us, they’ll go down easy. The paddles are cocked behind our bare butts. Just swallow those babies right down. But wait! These are awfully expensive oysters, they might want them back. They tie strings around one end of each oyster, wait till we swallow, then pull them back.
    As anyone who has ever undergone any procedure whose name ends in -oscopy knows, the Master of the Universe did a marvelous job engineering the human body. There are bones and muscles by the score we