The Fisher Boy Read Online Free PDF Page B

and water” slipped a paperweight into the front pocket of his jeans. When she told him to put it back, he said the bulge was “an all-natural compliment.” So she called down the street, pretending to see Sergeant Almeida, and the boy tossed the paperweight onto the floor, then ran out.
    “Was he ‘Swedish’?” Miriam asked sarcastically.
    “He was just an idiot,” the cashier said.
    The paperweight, full of tender-looking orange tentacles that looked like they might sting small fish, had chipped, the cashier confessed, but Miriam said not to worry about it. Then, to Roberto and me, she said, “I wonder if the Christian Soldiers steal?”

Chapter Four
    Up, up, up we climbed on the following Friday. Roberto and I were climbing endless redwood steps up the sandy hillside to what Ian Drummond was calling the First Annual St. Harold’s Memoriam. Ian’s party list was culled from a far smaller circle than Arthur’s; it was crankier, more conservative, and exclusively gay male. His guests were graduates of select New England prep schools like St. Paul’s, St. Mark’s, and Exeter, among which St. Harold’s would be considered what Ian called “weak tea” even before it began hemorrhaging red ink.
    But the fate of St. Harold’s failed to tarnish Ian’s social stature in gay circles. Among angry entrepreneurs who called talk radio on their cell phones, among MBAs who quoted Ayn Rand, among South End couples with hot tubs on their roof decks, Ian was recognized, and, to a large degree, respected. People might challenge his opinions or find him scrappy and smug, but few denied him the compliment of being one of Boston’s “movers and shakers.”
    “Take everything he says with a grain of salt,” I advised Roberto, as a survival strategy for this party.
    Our host, obviously sloshed, greeted us with, “Welcome, Mark, what would you like to drink? I’m serving grilled swordfish, which doesn’t go well with dead dog, so I want no discussion whatsoever about Arthur’s little canine dilemma. Agreed?” This remark sabotaged my plan. I’d left a message on Arthur’s answering machine warning that if I didn’t receive some sort of reply—from him—that I’d assume he was in danger. And I’d planned on asking Ian to phone him too.
    Belatedly, Ian acknowledged Roberto, or rather acknowledged his thighs and biceps with a once-over, then, to me: “And you brought your fellow thespian. How bohemian, I hope we won’t bore you.”
    Roberto simmered, but didn’t speak. Ian’s house was like a flying saucer from some especially shabby planet. Built on several levels, it seemed decorated with suggestions from old
Playboy
“Advisor” columns or plagiarized from sets of an early James Bond film. It was filled with Sixties-era sculptures—a neon eye, female nudes in runny epoxy—and with kidney-shaped tables and Martian-looking lamps and acres of nubbly carpeting the beige of dirty cocker spaniels. But you had to forgive Ian for most of these lapses of taste because, strictly speaking, they were not his. He had inherited the furniture and art from his oldest brother, Fulton. Married but childless like Ian’s other brother, George, Fulton had given Ian the entire contents of his Sutton Place townhouse when he’d left bachelorhood and Manhattan for marriage and Westport. When I whispered this information to Roberto, he countered, “He’s still under indictment for the carpeting.”
    The men present, busy laughing, talking about taxes and property values, were the sort that sent us scurrying to that sanctuary of the shy, the hors d’oeuvres table. Ian’s offerings were not terribly imaginative, celery and carrot sticks and broccoli florets, with onion dip conjured from some mix. And even the celery was bad, thick and spongy and riddled with those strings that wedge between your teeth for days at a time. “He can’t even do vegetables,” Roberto said.
    “So we’ve got to socialize,” I muttered. “We