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Show Acting Alone Page 105 That boy had certainly shown the requisite impertinence as he'd yelled about things like slicing the anthropology building horizontally, and bringing football to campus: "We've gotten along for years without football," he had screamed. "Why now? Fuck you, Grampa!" He really was a lot like young Streckfus Cicerone, the Elder's chief source of misery and agitation in the temporal world, his wayward son, in jail now out in Utah. Elder Cicerone put his arms on his chrome and black glass desk and his silver head in his arms. He now wondered whether it might not have really been "esoteric" business at all, but his son that had made him feel the need to get out of his chalet in "Utah's Swiss Alps" and come east for a while. He had been getting tense and wild inside, for the boy was about due for another binge of craziness. When the sheriff had called and said, "Your son's in jail," Elder Cicerone had felt another burst of real terror like the ones his young son had given him all his life. "What's he done this time?" the Elder had shuddered. "Pickpocketing." And Elder Cicerone had felt his soul fly like a meadowlark, a relief as intense as flight. A mere misdemeanor this time. There is a limit, after all, to the number of capital crimes a man can bail his son out of, no matter how powerful that man's associates be. The media must be taken into consideration, with their perverting effect on public opinion. Localized vigilanteism must be considered a real possibility. So, his son safely in jail for the moment on a mere non-felony charge, |
