Skunk Hunt

by J. Clayton Rogers

  "Mute..."

  It was a whisper backed by heavy breathing, a voice obscene with dread.

  "Who is this?" I asked.

  "You don't recognize me?"

  "Sweet Tooth? I can barely hear you. We must have a bad connection." I was thinking of my grandmother, who used to shout into the phone because that was what you did to be heard over a long distance. South Carolina was pretty far away, by my lights.

  "I hear you fine." There was a deep breath and her voice became clearer. The interference had been emotional. "I think we should meet."

  "Yes," I said. "How are you doing? How did the wedding go? How's...what's his name?"

  That was a lot of questions from someone who wasn't particularly interested in his sister's life. I'm not particularly interested in anyone's life. Not even my own. But there was a part of me that was irresistibly piqued by Barbara's fate. She had shown more gumption than anyone else in our slouching family. Perhaps this kind of energy, plus luck, could be shared.

  "I'm not doing great," Barbara said. Then her voice picked up, as though the admission had made her stronger. "To tell you the truth..."

  "You're not married to...what's his name?"

  "Don't ask for details."

  "OK."

  "Thanks."

  "So," I continued, "what happened?"

  Then it came, the old laugh. Most people exhale when they laugh. The bursts might be short or long, but are still generally directed outwards. Barbara, on the other hand, sucked wind—shrill, staccato gulps. I've heard laughter that made you cover your ears. This wasn't quite that bad, but I was still inclined to call for an ambulance, or at least take a stab at the Heimlich Maneuver.

  "You haven't changed," Barbara said when her fit had passed. "If you want the long and the short, he dumped me. That's all there is to it. Don't ask why. It's too...don't ask."

  "All right," I said, finally committing her secret to the well-used family closet. "I guess you're calling about a letter you got."

  "Yeah, about the Brinks—"

  "Barb!" I shouted.

  "You got one too, right? About the Brinks—"

  "Barb!" I shouted again.

  "I wish you'd stop that," she said peevishly.

  "Don't say that word." I was probably being overly cautious. Jeremy and I had already spilled enough beans to make a stew. Our earlier conversation would have raised the stench of suspicion in any eavesdropper. But we never spoke the Word. Barbara probably wouldn't get the point unless I spelled it out for her. So I did. "Sweet Tooth, the authorities have software programs that pick out key words."

  "'Authorities'?" Barbara inhaled. "You mean cops?"

  "Yeah, your old buddies."

  "They aren't my 'buddies'," Barbara said angrily. "You and Dad and everyone else, you never understood. There wasn't anyone else to go to for help."

  I heard a low, sharp clink. For an instant I wondered if my paranoia had turned true. Barbara might be on a cell phone, but I had an old-fashioned landline, susceptible to bugs and their accompanying signature clicks. Then the receiver filled with wind and I realized Barbara was blowing smoke. The click belonged to her lighter.

  "What about us?" I asked, a bit indignantly. "What about me?"

  "You mean like when Doubletalk threw you to the wolves?"

  Meaning the Matthews brothers.

  "Well?" I pressed.

  "You can't fight the world with a noodle," was her blithe answer.

  I was hurt, but to show it would have made me a wet noodle.

  "So about this Brinks letter—"

  "Stop it!" I bellowed.

  "Bombs, terrorists, president, holy war, box cutters, Israel, dynamite, rat poison, fertilizer...have I covered all the bases? Come on, FBI spy, show me the handcuffs!"

  Was she drunk? She emphasized each word like a general outlining an air strike, rounding it all off with her sucking laugh. I was speechless. The Brinks money was like a badger in the McPherson collective mind, sometimes barely stirring, sometimes raging, but never asleep. What a difference it could make in our lives! But El Dorado was just over the ridge, too high to see over, too steep to climb. Why bother thinking about it at all? Was it the only dream we had? Had we allowed ourselves to slouch in life because we were all...waiting? Then why was Barbara risking what little hope we had? Maybe she wasn't a true believer.

  "You really think there's money hidden away somewhere?" Barbara asked.

  The eavesdroppers must be having a field day, I thought.

  "Don't you?" I sighed hopelessly.

  "It's crap," said Barbara. "Skunk was a born liar. About the only good thing you can say about him is that he didn't diddle what he shouldn't diddle."

  "Oh," I said. "You mean...like you?"

  "Exactly."

  "Well...that's good. Right?"

  "Of course it's good, moron." A column of smoke toppled against her mouthpiece and was pulverized at my end in a cloud of sound. "So, I guess you want us all to meet. Has Doubletalk called?"

  "A couple of hours ago."

  "Greedy bastard," Barbara snarled. I suddenly wondered if my brother had diddled my sister. I doubted it. It was none of my business. I was too chickenshit to ask. No...it was none of my business. Anyway, she would have called the police.

  It must have dawned on her that I might think she was just as greedy. "It's not the money," she said. "It's that damn letter. Shit, like he was writing from the grave. You don't really think...?"

  "I don't know what to think," I said. "My letter said some things..."

  "That only Skunk would know?" she asked.

  "Yeah."

  "Me too."

  "And Doubletalk, too," I added.

  "Jesus, my hair's standing up."

  "Can you come?" I said.

  "I'll be there in fifteen minutes."

  "What, you're planning to beam over?"

  "I'm not in Greensville anymore," Barbara said. "I'm in Henrico, just over the city line. I've been back over a year. I'm working again at the…what did you used to call it? The Putrid Palace?"

  A small drop of sorrow fell into my silence.

  CHAPTER 5

  Her hair was still standing on end when she marched through the front door without knocking, as though my house was still her home. At first, her punk spikes punctured my vision. She seemed like a Japanese comic book character, though I gave her credit for not tinting her auburn hair green or magenta.

  We went into the kitchen and sat.

  After the initial shock wore off, I found her less exotic—or rather, exotic in a different way. Having grown up more or less without culture, Barbara's pink shorts and white ruffled blouse seemed the height of fashion to me. I hardly noticed that she was chewing gum as she lit up a Camel.

  Suddenly, she grabbed her mouth. "Shit," she murmured through her fist.

  "What is it?"

  "I keep forgetting..." She removed something that looked like a clear plastic mouthguard from her upper teeth. "Invisalign. They're like braces, only you can't see them. Except you're not to supposed to eat when they're on. You can't even drink anything but water while wearing them."

  "Your teeth are as straight as mine," I observed.

  "Yeah, that's what I'm trying to fix." She laid the gunked object in the center of the kitchen table, which in this house was a perfectly normal thing to do. Streaked by pink gum, it looked like bleeding rubble. The perfect McPherson escutcheon—anything new or unique that fell into our hands was ruined by abuse, ignorance, disuse. That plastic brace must have cost a small fortune. In a careless moment (and careless moments were endemic to us), Barbara had trashed it.

  We were freaks of nature. No matter how hard we worked and saved, or connived and stole, the moment we got what we had striven for the innovative object of desire crumpled and died. Our motto? "We can always get another one, bigger, better and just as flimsy."

  "I'm due to get my new one," Barbara shrugged. "You have to change them every two weeks."

&nb
sp; There was a time I would have asked her who her sugar daddy was. But three years stretched the bonds of recognition out of shape. She was living practically within shouting distance, had set up a new life that included dental work—an inconceivable luxury in the McPherson schematic. Maybe the sugar daddy who had replaced her fiancé was a dentist, a hands-on consumer of adult entertainment. She was certainly moving up in the world.

  I watched Barbara as she surveyed the kitchen shamble. There was an agreeable layer of thickness overlying the scrawny cuteness of the girl I had known. Starting at twelve or thirteen I noted that her usual sleek running style was being hampered by her expanding hips and bustline. Boys had always grappled with her, but suddenly there seemed more to grab hold of. By seventeen she was able to lie her way into the pole-dancing limelight as Enchanté Chanel (she could have done it at sixteen), the wet dream of men old enough to be australopithecine ancestors.

  So when I say she appeared a little heavier, it was with the rich abundance of womanhood, with only a little excess. She was one year younger than me, and she looked like an adult. While, at 24, I was achingly aware of the zitty goofball that gawked back at me the rare times I bothered staring in a mirror. You would have thought my self-esteem had improved since Skunk's death. I had a job, I was able to pay taxes and utilities, even the minimal insurance on the fat-assed Impala I had retrieved from the impound lot after the robbery.

  "Nothing's changed," said Barbara in a neutral tone, the kindest tone she could have used.

  "You must mean the house." I said. "Most everyone we knew when we were kids are gone."

  "I noticed a lot of people on the sidewalks." Barbara scowled. "It was like when we were kids, when everyone stayed outside. But the faces were all wrong. They're all students?"

  "There's still Flint Dementis and a few others, but that's it."

  "But...where is everyone. I only left a few years ago."

  "Forced out," I said. "All the property assessments skyrocketed. No one could afford to pay their taxes."

  "But you do?"

  "Barely." I glanced over at the sink, as though an oracle was hidden in the cluttered dishes. "Don't know for how long. I work the popcorn concession at the Science Museum. It's a nothing job for a nobody."

  Barbara's eyes widened. Her mascara exaggerated her emotions, like a face on a balloon.

  "Don't say that, Mute!"

  "It's true."

  "That's like saying we're all nothing."

  "How can me being nothing make everyone nothing?"

  "Because it's what we all believe, that everyone is something."

  "Not everyone believes that."

  "But it's like saying you don't believe in God," she continued to protest. "You don't say it, not out loud. You don't even try to think it."

  "Do you believe?"

  "You won't get me to admit to anything. Do I want to get hit by lightning?"

  While our theological discussion stalled, I puzzled out her meaning. There was some truth to what she said. Everyone has to agree that everyone has inherent human worth. It's not a hard sell, and most people buy into it. I only have to open my front door to run into a world of blind self-confidence and conceit. Maybe it's a little more potent in my neighborhood. Young people think all their wonderful todays will make for wonderful tomorrows. A fully mature adult understands there are setbacks in life, maybe a few tears on the horizon to brace for. Over all, though, as a nation, we're pretty cocky.

  If it takes only one cogent doubt to bring down the whole cathedral, it's a pretty fragile religion. I stooped under the weight of responsibility. Would I have to become an optimist to keep the edifice from falling?

  "Aren't you seeing anyone?" Barbara asked.

  "You mean a shrink?"

  "I mean a girl, dummy."

  She had acquired a touch of PC in the outer world. In the past, she would have posed the question more crudely. Such as, "Fucking any of the neighbors? She'd better be of age." Her cherry had been popped at the age of 12, and perhaps she was thinking it would have been better to wait—although she never expressed any such doubt. Her new, cosmopolitan self had been taught to tread carefully. For all she knew, I was seeing another guy. Maybe even another thing.

  In this respect, she became perverse in my eyes.

  "I dated some," I answered. "But it takes a little more money than I've got to..."

  "No one around here ever needed money to breed before," was Barbara's acid response.

  I didn't answer. Without money, you had to have something else going for you to attract the opposite sex. None of which I had.

  After suffering through a minute of non-elaboration on my part, Barbara continued: "I brought my letter." Barbara lifted a small pink purse and the wadded 8.5 x 11 timebomb ticking away in its nest of makeup and emergency tampons.

  "I don't think I should show it to you," said Barbara.

  "You're not supposed to," I said. "It's got a secret password."

  "Oh, yeah. But the letter says something about me...you know, that only Skunk would know."

  "Embarrassing?"

  "You wouldn't believe," she said emphatically.

  "That's all right. I'm not going to show you mine, either. And I'm sure Doubletalk will keep his to himself. By the way, he says he might be able to get hold of a computer. It looks like we need one to do any of this. I would hate to do it at the library."

  "Yeah, it's hard being quiet," Barbara said doubtfully. "What did Skunk know about computers?"

  "What did he know about light sockets?" I added. "That's why I think this is a sick joke."

  There was a knock at the front door, polite, almost too discrete to hear.

  "Thanks," I said grimly, glaring at my sister.

  "What?" she asked, surprised.

  "Your phone call. You and your mouth."

  She assumed the deerstruck pose, folded and mutilated, eyes wide with blindness. "You mean it's the police?"

  "Or worse. Shit, Sweet Tooth, you know we're being watched."

  "But that was years ago," she said plaintively.

  "Who's going to forget $850,000?"

  Another knock, scarcely any louder.

  "Maybe it's Doubletalk," Barbara suggested, burning a quarter inch of tobacco in a single gulping intake.

  I snickered and Barbara sucked a laugh. Yeah, right. Imagine Jeremy knocking ever so courteously.

  "We don't have to answer," said Barbara, lowering her voice.

  "We just sit here while they bust down the door?" I said skeptically.

  "We don't have anything to hide."

  "The letters," I observed.

  "Oh shit." Barbara clutched her bag tightly.

  "But it doesn't sound like they mean to break in," I said when there was another light tap.

  "So we sit tight?" Barbara gave me a questioning glance, as though I had some sort of control over the situation.

  "Guess so," I shrugged.

  We sat still for a couple of minutes, listening to the intermittent tapping. I was beginning to wonder if it was one of the Jehovah's Witnesses that plagued the area, trying to convince students and the remaining locals to kiss up to God before it was too late. Not too many people gave them (or the Almighty, for that matter) the time of day.

  Barbara had gone pale.

  "What is it?" I asked.

  "What if it's...him."

  "Who?" I said.

  "Dad."

  "Skunk is dead."

  "That's what I mean."

  "You mean a ghost? Knocking on his own door? In the middle of the day?"

  "Stranger things have happened," Barbara said breathlessly.

  "Name one."

  She frowned at me. I knew she was stumped, or hoped she was. But rather than prolong the tension and risk further supernatural qualms, I got up and went to the door. I didn't have a peephole, a bit of frugality I now regretted. Whoever or whatever was on the other side would be an unavoidable surprise.

  I opened the door.
/>   I was surprised.

  "Doubletalk," I said.

  Jeremy looked at me a long moment, then said, "I guess I didn't knock hard enough. I didn't want to disturb you in case...well, in case..."

  In case I was jerking off?

  But I don't think that was on his mind. I got the impression he had been hoping no one would answer.

  CHAPTER 6

  "What a pigsty," Jeremy winced as he unshouldered two black nylon bags and laid them on the kitchen table.

  Barbara and I exchanged glances. Her comment about the house, that 'nothing had changed', was not exactly a compliment, but at least withheld judgment. Jeremy's outburst was spontaneous and honest. He shriveled like a prissy old maid dumped in a dorm filled with orangutans.

  He was Skunk's boy, all right, right down to the thick neck and heavy tread and a face winched up into the narrow cavern of his eyes. Otherwise, in his madras shorts and polo shirt, he could have just finished a quick jog across the Harvard quad. The crew cut...that was pure Skunk. But it was tight and trim as our father's had never been. No beer sweat here.

  I had the qualified pleasure of seeing Barbara as dumbfounded as I had been when I saw the new her. If there had not been the barrier of incest, Jeremy would have looked like the guy who owned the yacht I imagined Barbara boarded for a weekend of skinnydipping.

  "Oh my God," said Barbara, all but gaping at her big brother. "What did they do to you in prison?"

  What anybody else would have seen as a vast improvement she considered grotesque evidence of brainwashing, with extra starch. I knew how she felt. When the gap between what you expect and what you get was this wide, it could only mean something had gone horribly wrong. I imagined a long line of jailbird hairdressers ramming culture up my brother's—

  "What's wrong?" Jeremy asked, craning his head downward. "Did I spill some of my latte?"

  There was a hint of posturing in his voice, as if he knew perfectly well he was presenting us with a skewed picture. The picture grew skewier when he took out a pipe.

  "What's that?" Barbara demanded.

  "A pipe. You must've seen one before."

  "What are you doing with it?" my sister persisted.