Skunk Hunt

by J. Clayton Rogers

  "I don't know where you folks got the idea all those hundreds of thousands might be here," Flint said. "About the only time Skunk visited was when he was broke and wanted hard liquor."

  Meaning every day. Flint continued:

  "Mother didn't like him at all."

  Jeremy was releasing little gasps of disappointment, watching Flint closely for any micro-expressions that would betray a lie.

  "Yeah, well..." My brother turned his analytical eye on me. Either I had misinterpreted the message, or I knew exactly what it meant and had purposefully guided him and Barbara to a dead end. Either way, I was going to get an earful.

  "Can we look in the ammo locker, anyway?" I said with a squeamish insecurity that put me in the league of worms. "The money's not there. You'd know if it was."

  "So it is the money you're after," Flint said, his expression steadily placid.

  Jeremy gave me a 'good going, moron' look, and left it at that. But Barbara thought my gaff so outstandingly dumb that she stood, walked over, and punched me in the arm.

  "Hey!" I protested.

  "What a dummy!" she shouted, giving Flint a good look at how important this was to us. Her bracelets jangled as she gave me a second shot.

  "Who's a dummy?" I winced. "You don't even know what largesse—" I stopped when she balled her fist for another attack. "All right! All right! But he would've guessed sooner or later."

  "That's right, Sweet Tooth," Flint nodded. "Fact is, I knew what you were after soon as I opened the door. Why else would you visit an old fart like me?"

  My heart had gone out, it had been gulped, and now it sank. It was possible, even likely, that Flint was being crazy like a fox. He knew about the robbery. Maybe the money had not been recovered because it was sitting in a box under his floorboards. The same impulse that prompted me as a boy to tease the damaged man had caused me, as an adult, to dismiss him as a threat.

  Flint leaned forward and studied the hallway. "Doesn't look like Mother's up yet. Guess we can go ahead and take a look." Planting his hands on his knees, he pushed himself up. We followed him to a small alcove off the hallway. On the floor was an old olive footlocker. Stenciled on top was:

  CAPT.

  A.F.

  DEMENTIS

  "Thirty-two by sixteen by thirteen," said Flint. "Big enough to hold a quarter million or thereabouts. Guess it depends on the specie."

  Seeing Barbara about to speak, I distracted her with a hard nudge. I figured I was doing her a favor. None of us wanted to hear her ask, "What species?"

  My multi-talented heart was thumping wildly. I was sure I had nailed the message. Yet Flint gave no indication that we were about to become rich.

  As he opened the lid, a small chain connecting the top to the interior rattled like a handful of coins.

  "That's it," the old man said. "Socks and underdrawers."

  That was what we saw lying on top, at least. I was astonished by the neatness of the arrangement. I had never heard of anyone folding underwear and socks. Who cares if boxer shorts are wrinkled? These were things you tossed in a heap and washed at your own risk. We caught a whiff of fabric softener rise from the chest. Slightly effeminate, but undeniably clean.

  "Mother's a stickler for soap and bleach," Flint informed us, as though reading our thoughts.

  Boy, a ghost laundress. Couldn't we all use one?

  "You mind if we...?" Jeremy began reaching down.

  "Mother'll skin me alive if you make a mess," Flint warned.

  "Oh." Jeremy stood up. I sensed his aching desire to dump everything in the locker onto the floor. Jail must have taught him respect for the elderly, or disabled veterans, or both. With the old Jeremy, we would have already known what was at the bottom of the chest.

  "May I...?" Barbara softened the old man with a leach-like moue that sucked out the old man's blood from a foot away. I winced at the way he wilted and made way for her. Of course, she was my sister. I knew what a cretin she was. But he should have known better.

  As she leaned down, I realized she had placed herself perfectly for Flint's chosen perversion. Would serve her right if he whipped it out and jacked off in her ear canal. I could almost hear her squealing for a Q-tip.

  Barbara slid off her bracelets and held them in her left hand as she deftly slid her right into the well-folded cotton. She shifted right, then left, making small smooching noises whenever her fingers encountered the wall of the chest. She suddenly stopped and frowned.

  "What's..."

  "Oh, nothing, my dear," Flint said with cautionary benevolence. "A Smith & Wesson 39. Bought it off a Navy Seal. I stick the barrel in my mouth every April 1."

  Barbara craned her head up in at him. He wore a smooth stare, a dreamy reconciliation.

  "That's the anniversary of my wounding," he continued. "I like to remind myself how close I came to our Savior."

  "What if it goes off?" Jeremy asked.

  "Most people have more than one anniversary." Flint raised a finger. "Don't pull at it, Sweet Tooth. I'd hate there to be an accident."

  "Uh..." I began, but was slapped down by a harsh look from Jeremy. Today was April 1.

  Withdrawing her hand gingerly from the underwear, Barbara began to pull back.

  "Can we look in there?" Jeremy was pointing at the partitioned compartment on one side of the chest. The top tray was segmented to hold toothbrushes, combs and whatever other items Flint needed for personal hygiene—only now they held sewing needles and military patches. It was as though he was storing up for the day he went back into action, complete with rank and sidearm.

  Flint looked doubtful. The compartment looked big enough to hold any number of articles a God-fearing mother would frown upon—a hefty bundle of back issues from Penthouse, a litany of sex toys, a lifetime's supply of blow. But when Barbara turned an unwary ear in his direction, he succumbed with a nod. For a war hero, he was pretty spineless.

  Barbara lifted the tray, exposing a bottle of amber liquid. I reached past her and removed the bottle of JB Black. There was nothing underneath it.

  "Okay, you've seen it," an agitated Flint said breathlessly. "Put it back, quick! Before Mother sees!"

  I didn't want to upset him and was lowering the bottle into the chest when something caught my eye. I gaped at the label, then held it up to Jeremy.

  "So?" he said in an anguished voice. "I agree, we'll need a drink after this."

  "Check out the 'For Questions and Comments'," I said.

  Fuming, Jeremy snatched the bottle out of my hand and read the bottom of the back label. His lip twitched, his eyebrow twitched, and his hand joined the chorus of contractions.

  "Hey!" Flint protested. "That's 7 years old!"

  Flint took the bottle and gently lowered it into the niche, then secured the tray on the chest rim.

  "Flint?" Jeremy said.

  "Mmmm?" said Flint, patting the tray, like a baker planting a cherry on a cupcake.

  "You have any visitors lately?"

  "Naw," said Flint, cranking his old bones into standing position. "Not even the boys come around anymore."

  I understood he meant the throngs of graffiti artists who had plagued his property for over thirty years. Generation after generation of young punks with spray cans, all lumped under the same label. Flint almost sounded like he missed them. Us. We don't always dislike our devils, especially when they had been displaced by mindless weevils.

  "No one came knocking?" Jeremy persisted. "No one at all?"

  "There was a real estate agent came by yesterday, but he was a no count." Flint seemed vaguely distressed by the memory. Or maybe he only now recalled what the day's date was. His Savior must be tapping his Size 37AAs with impatience.

  "Did he come inside?"

  "Just for a minute," Flint said, not looking at us, not even at Barbara. He must be jonesin' for that gun barrel, I thought. I was tempted to remove the gun from the chest. One year, one day, there was bound to be an accident with that unsteady trigger finger of his
. Flint's mother was definitely at risk, sitting up there in the cerebral cockpit. I'd read somewhere that the only thing left of Hemingway after he ate the big one was his lower jaw. The old men in the sea of Papa's jellybean had been spattered over the room, the messiest kind of Diaspora.

  "And?" Jeremy said.

  "Nothing. He said he'd been looking over title chains for the area and he was offering me a free appraisal. Complete malarkey. I kicked the bum out."

  "He wasn't alone for a few minutes?" Jeremy continued. "Did you get called away for anything?"

  "Mother got all wound up," Flint shrugged. "I had to drag her out of the room before she clobbered him."

  "What's all this about?" Barbara interrupted. "I don't have one iota clue what's going on here."

  Jeremy gave her a patented Skunk 'shut yer yap' look, and then turned to me. "That's it."

  I nodded. Someone had switched bottles on Flint. They even knew his brand, Jim Beam Black Label. But how would he know how far down in the bottle the whiskey had gone? He couldn't of course. What we saw had been unopened, the seal intact. Maybe the visitor was counting on Flint's absent-mindedness to smooth over the discrepancy.

  "There's someone at the door."

  We all four nearly fell into the chest at the sound of the voice behind us.

  "Savior take me!" Flint protested, slamming the top down. "Don't sneak up like that, Mother!"

  We found ourselves gaping down at a woman the size and consistency of an unharvested pumpkin. She wore a faded blue shift that hung down to her ankles, sort of like a child's hospital gown. Threadbare slippers left over from the Long March poked out, sparing us, I guess, the sight of her gnarly feet.

  "Yes, Mother," Flint said, pulling himself together. "There were people at the door. They came in. You can still see, can't you?"

  In those brief sentences Flint's attitude swung between abject dread and unsuppressed antagonism. All these years, his mother had been sneaking around unobserved. It was a state of affairs perfectly understandable in the current ephemeral environment, with college kids hooking up and unhooking at the speed of light. They wouldn't know a neighbor from a hole in the wall. But this had once been a community so tightly knit that you couldn't shit in your pants without the whole neighborhood bursting out in raucous laughter. Maybe I was staring at the real reason Flint's marriage fell apart, why those other women fled. They were running away not from him, but from the gnome under his roof. The ear-sex rumor was just one of those charming urban myths. Maybe.

  And a mean little gnome she was. She was snarling. Even without teeth, she looked capable of biting off our kneecaps. Her arms were draped to either side. I fully expected her to raise her hands and pronounce a hex.

  "Twenty years ago I got a neighbor to videotape her," said Flint. "I got her quoted as saying when she was really old, she wouldn't behave like those snappers you see in the nursing home. So what happens when I show her the tape now? She asks who's that old bitch on the television."

  "I'm not talking about them," Mrs. Dementis snapped from inside her hundred-year-old carcass. "There's someone at the door now. I saw her come up the sidewalk."

  Her? Oh shit....

  There was a loud knock from the front of the house.

  "I bet it's her," I said lowly.

  "Her who?" Flint whispered.

  "What's-her-fat-ass who's been following me," I said. The tension brought out my rude streak. "A cop."

  Nothing so roused the sluggish Oregon Hill genes like the proximity of the law. Leaving behind the awful miracle of Mrs. Dementis, we crept into the living room, like a quartet of mice alerted to the menacing shuffle of the family cat.

  "Open up in there!" the visitor yelled, confirming that it was indeed Sergeant Yvonne Kendle of the Richmond Police. "Cm'on, I don't have all day!"

  Flint began to draw back.

  "Where are you going?" Jeremy said in a whisper.

  "I'm gonna a get my gun."

  "Shoot a cop?" my brother asked frantically.

  "No, it's April 1—" Flint began.

  "Get your skinny ass back here!" Jeremy commanded.

  Flint scowled at him. It was his home, after all. If he wanted to poke a gun barrel into his own mouth (in celebration of life, of all things) that was his business.

  "I have to go to the bathroom," Barbara moaned lowly.

  "No!" Jeremy and I hissed in unison. "Don't let her do it!"

  "I hear you in there!" Sergeant Kendle shouted from the porch. "This is the police. You open up, or I'll..."

  This was a set-up that in the past Jeremy would have been quick to exploit. That in this case the sucker was a cop shouldn't have made any difference. 'Or what?' was an attitude built into his bones and sinews—I won't say 'brain', since I didn't think that a particularly vital piece of Jeremy's anatomy. But when I glanced over at him, hunched near the door, his lips locked against any comeback, I realized jailtime had been harder on him than he admitted. He had learned not to tease cops, especially when there was so much money at risk.

  But it was a situation that cried out for a retort. From what I had seen of Kendle at the Science Museum, she didn't have much potential as a battering ram. Her tub of lard would have spattered against even Flint's thin door.

  "I said open up!" she commanded, then coughed. Hell, she couldn't shout without almost collapsing. I swallowed my rejoinder. An unconscious cop on the porch could be as damaging as a splintered doorframe. Anyway, I couldn't think of a rejoinder. I'm Mute, after all.

  "She can't hear us," Barbara said.

  "I heard that!" Kendle huffed from outside.

  "I hate letting one of them in without a fight," Flint said. "A man's home is his berm."

  "What did you have in mind?" Jeremy asked. "You want to call in an air strike?"

  "That's not a half bad notion," Flint nodded.

  "I think," I muttered, "we'd better just get it over with." As I reached for the doorknob, I expected one of them to try and stop me. But no one did. For the moment, we were possessed by an uncommon amount of common sense.

  CHAPTER 10

  "Took you long enough," Yvonne Kendle complained as she labored through the door like a camel dragging a pyramid—but her burden was her own unhealthy carcass. "For a moment I thought I might have to kick the door in."

  We would have laughed, but she was too inherently dangerous. We stared at her like an unwanted stray. Oversized comfort sweats gave her the appearance of a semi-deflated dirigible with only just enough helium left to drag the ground without crashing. She wore colossal sneakers and pounded into the room like someone in snowshoes. She seemed to have been to a hairdresser, but the bottom layer of her do was matted by sweat that lay across her head in wet strands, leaving the hair up top to waggle in isolation. Her face was almost red to bursting.

  "Who's the tub of lard?" came a crackly voice from the back of the room. Mother Dementis shuffled into the living room. From what I could see through the wrinkles, her eyes were sharp and unclouded.

  "Police," said Kendle. She fumbled at her waist and found the pouch attached to her jogging belt. It took her a moment to unzip the pouch and produce identification. We leaned forward like schoolkids cribbing answers from a careless teacher. Yep, a badge.

  "That what they call a 'potsy'?" Flint asked.

  "Only in New York City and other third world countries," said Kendle.

  "Well," said Flint with grim but irrepressible courtesy, "What can I do you for?"

  "Mind if I sit?" Kendle asked.

  "You can march your overstuffed butt out the door," Mother Dementis said with the kind of staccato asperity only the old, the really old, are capable of. With one foot in the grave—two feet, if you went strictly by appearances—she did not give a damn for social forms.

  Kendle was unimpressed. The lady of the house saw her eying the couch and tried to block her path, but as the heavy cloud approached she wisely reversed direction. As the couch moaned, we drifted to various perches in a semi-ci
rcle around her, Jeremy taking the easy chair, Barbara planting herself genteelly on the arm. Flint wasn't inclined to sit. When I politely stood aside for his mother to take the chair I had sat in earlier, she showed me her gums. I took this for a negative and sat. No one was prone to join Kendle on the couch. There wasn't any room left, anyway.

  Kendle seemed neither dissatisfied nor pleased to be the center of attention. She tucked a few handfuls of excess adipose into the rare vacant folds of her outfit, ignoring the groaning couch frame beneath her. Then she slapped her thighs and looked up at us.

  "So?"

  Our expressions varied, but added up to a collective 'so what?' I shot a glance at Barbara to see if her acting was as good, or bad, as mine. Under all that mascara, she looked like a clown whose monkey had died. Mrs. Dementis appeared ready to repeat her demand to give Kendle the bum's rush, but her Archimedean sense informed her that would require one hell of a lever and she backed off. I couldn't get over Mother Dementis' being here. It wasn't her existence I questioned—Flint had to have come from somewhere. But all my life she had been right under my nose, practically, and I hadn't known it. The most annoying mysteries are the ones that slip past unnoticed. When I turned again to Kendle, I found her staring straight at me. She had a chubby brow (I'd never seen one before) and there was a trench running from her crown downwards through her septum. She was annoyed that my attention was so quickly sidetracked onto irrelevant paths. I wanted to explain that I have Attention Deficit Disorder. Not officially. People without health insurance can only afford self-diagnoses.

  "You want to tell me where the money is?" Kendle said. She lifted her hand when Jeremy began to answer. "And don't say, 'What money'."

  "What money?" said Mrs. Dementis. Her wrinkles folded into a scowl directed at her son. "You been holding out on me?"