Richard Stevenson - Chain of Fools

"Do you have any reason to believe that Eldon's theory is correct?" I asked

"I'm not sure," Janet said. "I hate to think that any of the Osbornes would murder someone else in the family for money, or for anything else, or would ever murder anybody for any reason. But, I also know that-let's just say for now that what Skeeter is suggesting might be possible " She gave a wan little shrug, as if to apologize for any homicidal tendencies in the Osborne family.

Skeeter said, "They sent the Jetsons to attack her. Betski-wetski. Honk honk, she almost got conked."

Timmy looked blankly at Skeeter, but Janet seemed to know what this meant. "Last week somebody might have tried to run me over with a Jet Ski," she said. "On the lake where I live. That's what Skeeter is referring to in his overly colorful way."

"Might have?" Timmy asked.

"There are a certain number of hotdoggers on the lake, so it could have been carelessness," Janet said, looking grim. "Or it could have been deliberate. We just don't know "

"One's a good chain, and one's a bad chain. It was almost a tall doll with a fractured skull," Skeeter said, and rolled his eyes up inside his head and made his tongue loll idiotically. That's when we all agreed it was time for Skeeter to get some rest.

She was determined to stay calm-I'll bet she's a real rock-but you could see that Janet Osborne is frightened," Timmy said later, as we walked back toward our house on Crow Street.

A big red moon with an enormous blotch shaped like Sri Lanka hung in the eastern sky, and the August night air was as thick as black tea. As we headed down Madison, the Victorian-revival apartment buildings on our side of the street could have been overlooking an Indonesian waterfront instead of Washington Park. It was tropical Albany at its most intoxicating until we got to the donut shop at the corner of Lark, where the light was cold fluorescent and the smell was of powdered sugar and jelly filling and the illusion was lost.

"Families are supposed to be safe havens from the violence and irrationality of the larger world," Timmy said. "To suspect somebody in your own family of killing somebody else in the family must feel like having your soul poisoned."

I said, "Homicide is not one of the family values Pat Robertson would encourage, as a rule, but it does crop up from time to time. And that's not counting, of course, all the subtler intrafamily assassinations that don't involve bloodshed and therefore aren't against the law."

"Operating a family business must be particularly tricky," Timmy said, "since business decisions have to be fairly hardheaded and Freudian undercurrents can only muck things up. And then when the business starts to fail, all kinds of old family furies must be let loose."

"According to the literature-so I've heard-family businesses tend to fall apart, if they're going to, when the third generation takes over," I said. "The first generation founds the business, the second builds and secures it, and then the third-generation fuckups arrive and run the whole thing into the ground. The Osbornes are not unique in this, although there's something especially ugly about a newspaper of the Herald's history and caliber being wrecked as if it were just a thoughtlessly situated Chinese takeout."

"How did the Herald end up near bankruptcy, anyway? Edensburg's economy should be solid-tourism and the canoe factory are both holding up-and there's no other paper up there to compete in any serious way."

We turned off busy Madison Avenue and onto cozy Crow Street, with its brick sidewalks and historically beplaqued town houses. "I'll find out more about the Herald when I meet with Janet tomorrow," I said. "But I know newspapers everywhere in the country are having a tough go of it with newsprint costs way up and ad revenues being drained off by junk mail, shoppers' guides, cable TV, and whatever else is hurtling down the information superhighway toward us."

"The trouble with the information superhighway," Timmy said, "is that it's a brave new highway mostly carrying the same tired information, and worse. And it's destroying institutions like the Herald, where the quality of the information is still considered more important than the extent of the profits that are piled up delivering it." A thoughtful pause. "I guess I'm beginning to sound like a fogy. Don, am I becoming a fogy?"

"You were always a fogy."

"I forgot."

"Gramps Callahan."

"Gramps when not Grumps."

"Except, Timothy, your fogyism is appropriate in this case-as it is, I've noticed as I get older, on any number of occasions. Commercial enterprises with social consciences are getting swallowed up by soulless conglomerates with superior technology, big bucks, and a habit of tossing workers by the thousands out on the street. And the Edens-burg Herald, if it's grabbed, will represent a classic example of the trend. It stinks. If somebody in or outside the Osborne family is using murder to hurry the process along, I'd like to interfere if I can."

"Good."

"You know, it was interesting tonight to be reminded of how unfogylike you were in your last two years of high school, Timothy. Your information superhighway sure was humming back then."

"Well, that's about what it amounted to-neurons and glands working overtime."

"Neurons and glands and hydraulics."

"Those too."

"Poor Skeeter. For him it wasn't just teenage lust, it's now apparent."

"No."

We crossed Hudson Avenue, where the streetlight was aswarm with tiny insects. "Weren't you a little rattled by Skeeter's display tonight?" I asked. "It is not in your nature to intentionally bring emotional pain to another human being. I guess you didn't know-back in '63-just how smitten Skeeter was with you."

Looking straight ahead, Timmy said, "I knew."

We walked on, but I could feel him tense up beside me. A little farther down the block, he said, "The trouble was, see… I couldn't face it."

"No."

"Being a faggot, I mean."

"I knew 'what you meant."

"Skeeter wanted us to keep on being-sexually infatuated was what it was for me. For him it was more. I was only in love with sex, but Skeeter was in love with me. He wanted to write, and phone, and visit me in D.C., and for me to visit him in Plattsburg and for us to spend our vacations together. I broke it off partly because I had mixed feelings about Skeeter as a person-he was always just a little too emotionally erratic for me. But mainly I broke off the relationship-it's as clear to me now as it was back then-because Skeeter was a homosexual, and if I stayed with him that would mean I was a homosexual too."

"Yuck. Arrgh."

"So I broke it off."

"You never saw him again?"

"I didn't accept his phone calls in the dorm, I didn't answer his letters, I didn't go home for Thanksgiving, and at Christmas I faked the flu and never left the house. He phoned twice a day for three weeks, and I told Mom I was too sick to come to the phone. Actually, I was in my room writing a paper on Teilhard de Chardin and reading City of Night, which was camouflaged inside the cover of A Stone for Danny Fisher. Talk about confused."

"Your parents never caught on?"

"I'm sure they were baffled, and worried. They could see that I wasn't all that sick. I'm sure I was consuming an awful lot of baloney sandwiches with mayonnaise for a flu victim."

"And then there was Skeeter baying outside your window. It must have been hellish for him. For both of you."

"It was."

We came to the house and Timmy, his key out of his pocket and aimed like a derringer for the previous half block, led the way in.

"I imagined," Timmy said, "that after Christmas, when Skeeter finally stopped calling and writing, he'd found somebody else. At least that's what I made myself think." We headed for the kitchen, where I got a beer from the fridge, and Timmy said, "I guess I'd better have one too." We pried open the back door, abloat in the wet heat, and sat out on the moonlit deck with the petunias.