Chain of Fools (2 page)

I said, "Eldon called Timmy before he got sick last week and told him he had a friend in Edensburg whose life was in danger. Apparently he meant you, Janet."

She gave a quick nod. "I suppose we should talk about that. We could go somewhere—or it could wait until tomorrow."

"They killed Eric, and now they're trying to kill Janet," Skeeter said. "One's a good chain, and one's a bad chain. One's a daisy chain, and one's a chain of fools."

"Eric was my brother," Janet said. "He was a writer. Eldon and Eric were together for eleven years. Eric died in May. He was murdered. We were all devastated, but no one more than Eldon. To lose someone you love that way—it's just the absolute hellish worst." Janet Osborne was a youthful and robust-looking woman, but when she spoke of her brother's murder something in her face altered, and it occurred to me that she was not as young as I had first thought.

"Don and I both read Eric's books," Timmy said. "He was a wonderful writer. His love of the Adirondacks was so infectious that every time either of us read Eric, we'd plan a camping trip the first chance we got to try to see the wilderness the way he saw it. Once, after we read Eric's article in
Harper's
about his winter week on Berry Pond, we decided to spend a February weekend there ourselves. Although I have to admit we spent the second night at the Edensburg Travelodge."

"Couple of nellies," Skeeter said. "Timmy, do tell me: Is it still your habit to take three showers a day?"

"No, Skeeter, I make do with two now that I'm middle-aged
and
am called upon to perspire less often than when I was younger."

"Living with me has turned Timothy into a big slob," I said.

"I was sure your skin would be all dried out from washing your natural body oils down the drain three times a day for forty-some years, but your skin's not hideous at all. I don't know why. You're almost totally bald in the back though."

"Skeeter, I would have expected that as a forest ranger you'd have progressed to concerns less fleeting than those of mere human vanity."

"Oh, so now you're into enemas. I could have predicted this."

"What?"

Janet said, "Eldon, I think we'd better leave you now, and you can get a good night's rest—or a bad night's rest if that's the best anybody can manage around here. I'll come back tomorrow night and see how you're doing, and some of the forest service gang is planning to come by too. The nurse thinks you ought to be okay, especially if they can get you off this prednisone. You're probably clinically insane, which as far as I know is not what the doctor ordered."

"Call me Olivia."

Timmy said, "So long, Olivia."

"I hated you for leaving me," Skeeter suddenly spat out. "I was so mad at you I could have killed you." He started to breathe fast and hard. This was bad, I was sure, for a man recovering from a lung disease.

Looking stricken, Timmy said, "Oh."

Skeeter gasped out, "I went up in the woods past Peterson's Bluff and screamed my head off. I pulled trees out by the roots. I cursed your name, Timmy. I despised you. I crushed your skull with rocks. When I got to forestry school, I cried half the night before I fell asleep. I lied to the other guys and told them my mother had died."

"Oh. Oh, Skeeter. God."

"I loved you and hated your guts for years, Timmy." Timmy looked away. "I never really got completely over you until I met Eric," Skeeter said, glaring at Timmy.

Timmy flushed scarlet and said, "All those years. Jeez, Skeeter. I'm sorry."

"Then and only then were you kaput, Callahan."

"Oh."

"And then it was Eric and I—in for however long it lasted, what with our HIV. Till ridiculous death do us part."

"I'm so sorry."

"I'm the one that got sick first."

"That was awful."

"But at least I still had Eric along for the idiotic ride—until they killed him."

"Who are 'they'?" Timmy said, seizing on this turn in the conversation toward behavior that was even more reprehensible in Skeeter's mind than Timmy's had been.

"That's what your boyfriend has to find out. Who
they
are. I can tell you this: They're in it with the bad chain."

I said, "The chain of fools?"

"Yes, yes, yes, yes."

"The business about the chains is still unclear to us, Skeeter. We might have to come back tomorrow to get that part of the story straight."

Janet said, "I can explain what Eldon is talking about. The
Herald
is on the verge of bankruptcy, and the family is being forced to sell out. One newspaper chain that's interested has made a low bid, but the advantage is that it would maintain the paper's high standards and progressive editorial page, especially on environmental matters. That's the good chain. The high bidder is a big chain run by a reactionary thug who would fire most of the staff, gut the paper editorially, and use it primarily as a vehicle for chain-store advertising. I guess that's the chain of fools. Some members of my family want to sell to the thug and walk away with a bundle. Others want to sell to the good chain, break even, and keep the Osbornes' good name. One vote for the good chain was lost when Eric "was murdered. Someone may be trying to kill me—this is Eldon's theory—and eliminate my vote for selling out to the good chain With my vote lost, the reactionary thug would win." A sheen of perspiration was visible now across Janet's forehead and around her pale eyes.

"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.

2

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
un-
fogylike 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.