Skunk Hunt

by J. Clayton Rogers

  "Stop in the road!" Jeremy shouted.

  "I will not." Barbara planted her hands on her hips. "That would create a dangerous hazard."

  "Just long enough for me to get in."

  "You suck," I complained. "I thought you would be tougher than this."

  I stopped short of suggesting he had been tenderized and feminized in prison, so to speak.

  "Come on, Sweet Tooth," I continued. "Let's leave him in the ditch."

  "Sure," she said tersely, setting out across the road. She gave me a look that said she was only joshing. She wouldn't leave her brother behind. Not because he was her brother. She wouldn't leave a stray poodle behind. When we were kids, she tried to rescue cicadas that had been mauled by our cats.

  Jeremy must have forgotten this bit of family folklore. Mistaking Barbara's bluff for grim determination, he jumped up and dashed past her, beating her to the Sentra and flinging himself prone on the back seat.

  "Hey, you're all muddy!" Barbara reminded him.

  Unlike the dimwits ahead of me, I checked the traffic before crossing.

  Enjoying the front seat, I twisted around and looked down on my brother, who had packed himself in the rear seat as securely as cargo headed for China.

  "I never thought I'd see the day," I said.

  "Never mind," Jeremy shot back. "I plan to see plenty more days. Sweet Tooth, don't go toward the woods. Make a U-turn. We can find a side road to take back to Richmond."

  "Which way is Old Petersburg Road?" Barbara asked me.

  "I don't know, but it's got to be on the other side of the city." I nodded straight ahead.

  "Oh no you don't," said Jeremy.

  "Oh yes I do," said Barbara, starting the car and pulling onto the road.

  Jeremy cowered, whimpered and in general made a spectacle of himself until we had made it safely past the woods we thought the shots had come from. Then he began snarling like a banshee Chihuahua.

  "That's right, ignore me. We could have gotten killed and who do you thank for the warning? No one, because we all would be dead! No thanks to me! Thanks to you!"

  "You're ranting," I said.

  "What do you expect!" Jeremy wiped some mud off the side of his face. "That was a high-powered rifle they used against us. We could be laid out next to Skunk, and who would care? Not you! What have you got to live for?"

  "Is he making sense?" Barbara asked me with a sidelook.

  "I understand him, but it doesn't make sense." I stared firmly at the glove compartment, unwilling to grace my brother with eye contact. "I've got plenty to live for. Well, I've got my own skin, and I wouldn't risk it for being stupid. No one's going to hurt us while we're still broke."

  "That's right," Barbara agreed. "We're the gooses. We don't have the egg yet."

  I found explaining my actions brutally difficult, like learning a new language. Barbara had stomped on my tongue with her ungrammatical footnote. My thoughts veered and crashed. I fell silent.

  "Drop me off at my car," said Jeremy.

  "Have you gone lame in the brain?" Barbara protested. "We got a real address, now. Maybe the money's sitting there waiting for us."

  "Don't you have to go to work around this time?" Jeremy, finally convinced we were in the clear, sat up and looked around, focusing most of his attention on the rear window.

  "What's that supposed to mean?" Barbara asked warily.

  "The sun's going down," said Jeremy.

  "Oh, I only work when the sun goes down?" Barbara fumed. "Is that it? Like I'm some kind of vampire or something? For your information, I happen to have a few days off."

  A few days off without pay, I thought. Just like me, a P-14 without vacation or sick benefits. People like us take monetary risks going out for a coffee break or a breath of fresh air. What we wanted had been left begging by our hardscrabble upbringing and twelve years of indifferent public schooling. Barbara and I were looking for sweet repose away from the working poor, that soft gray bed between grinding honesty and dangerous venality. In short, an extended breathing space. Jeremy seemed to have everything in excess already, but that could be deceptive. Any envy Barbara and I might feel would be modified if it turned out an army of loansharks was on his trail. Maybe my brother had a better idea of what we were dealing with than we did. Maybe I really was a jackass for standing up to the sniper that way.

  Jeremy had begun to mewl and pule, a sound only one notch down on the disgusting scale from puking his guts out. Barbara chanced a glance away from the road to show me her disbelief.

  "Can we do this by ourselves?" she asked me.

  Before I could give her my doubtful answer, Jeremy spoke up.

  "Tomorrow. Give me until tomorrow. I just need to straighten things out in my head."

  "You'll come back tomorrow?" I asked skeptically.

  "Yeah. Tomorrow morning, early," said Jeremy. "I'll look up that address, make sure it's legitimate, and we'll all go together. You can wait one night, can't you? You don't want to go out in the middle of nowhere in the dark."

  He was right. I didn't know what was coming, and wanted to see it when it came.

  "All right," Barbara said slowly. "Wherever nowhere is..."

  CHAPTER 12

  I knew from when I was a little nematode that I would never be part of the grand sweep of history. I didn't even make it into the high school yearbook. People who cringe at life don't make much headway. Was this the result of nature of nurture? I shied away from nature in all its forms (vegetable, mineral, animal—human above all), so this no doubt implicates both: nature and nurture. I can probably summarize my upbringing with the name Jeremy often substituted for Mute: Fucktardo.

  The old family homestead consisted of a kitchen, one and a half bathrooms, dining and living rooms, a semi-enclosed back porch (I'm being kind to the rent-ridden metal screen easily penetrated by mosquitoes and other bloodsucking fauna)—and three bedrooms. Three bedrooms for one man. In many places this would be considered overbearing luxury, but the three-quarters-empty mansions on River Road sop up any excess guilt I might impose on myself. The rich have their uses.

  To be the only one left in the house I grew up in opened all sorts of doors to the psyche. When I'm feeling like myself—which, oddly enough, isn't often—I sleep in my old bedroom. The self-isolation that I'm most comfortable with was grievously interrupted by child-Jeremy's unexpected arrival. None of my ranting and sulking availed. He was plopped alongside me and for seven years I was forced to share my bed and closet with him. As the tenant with permanent tenure I should have dominated the situation. In the end, though, I was the one pummeled and kicked throughout the night, I was the one rolling out to the precarious edge from which I dropped more than once, waking up on the floor. My mother was too busy with her own inner demons to show much sympathy, Barbara was naturally indifferent, and Skunk (if he wasn't away in jail) showed a marked tendency to side with Jeremy in any of our disputes. I never did quite get it into my head that my father loathed whiners. Jeremy could kick me in the head or the nuts, and so long as he didn't whine about it Skunk couldn't care less. Well, why should Jeremy have minded, seeing as I was the one getting kicked? In my dreams Jeremy was converted into a sharp-toothed demon, reason enough to avoid my old bedroom.

  A more specific memory discouraged me from using my parents' twin bed. It was in the bedroom where Mom had found Skunk's .38 (confiscated soon afterwards) and decided the means and justification for ending her life were amply fulfilled. We were told she had shot herself in the house, but Skunk and the EMTs had spared us the trauma of encountering her blasted corpse. We were secretly grateful to be spared what must have been a bloody mess. But I could picture her sitting on the bed, gun in hand, contemplating her death—a bit of nostalgia I preferred to keep at arm's length.

  Then there was Barbara's room, facing the rear alley, where boys had lined up for a glimpse through pink curtains injudiciously left open several inches while my sister rehearsed her future as a professional exhibitionist
.

  But abandoning the bedrooms would have been not much different from abandoning the house entirely. In the end, none of the unpleasant or even appalling memories prevented me from playing my own solitary version of musical beds. If a loud party across the street interrupted my sleep, I could move to Barbara's room. If people were raising a fuss in the alley, I carried my nodding head to the front. And if both the front and the back were noisy, I reclaimed my old room in the middle. My dreams absorbed unfavorable omens from every bedstead, each offering its own inner landscape and peculiar cast of characters.

  If none of the bedrooms suited my current tumult, I had a fourth choice: the living room couch. This room too was freighted with bad memories, but these were of shared misery, spiced with a handful of good moments, so I considered it more or less neutral territory.

  It was on the couch that I spent the night after our encounter with the unknown sniper. With the prospect of seeing Barbara and Jeremy next morning, I saw no need to reinforce their presence by sharing their lingering auras. And the paternal bed was out of the question. Whether from life or the afterlife, Skunk was observing my actions. Mussing up his mattress might incur his wrath.

  I'm not all that superstitious, but my brain has an unlimited ability to absorb noxious ideas. Ghosts don't exist, but that doesn't stop the thought of ghosts from disturbing my soppy mental processor. You may have never eaten Brussel sprouts, but I bet you still hate them.

  And then, wouldn't you know it, I was awakened by a ghost pounding at my front door.

  "You got a problem answering your door?" Jeremy demanded, giving me a painful poke in the chest as he swept past me and scoured the living room with dark intensity. "Shit for brains, Mute. As always."

  A burst of terror took several moments to subside. In the brusque light of morning, with my nightmares still hovering just below the horizon, I thought that Skunk had returned home. Jeremy was pumped up and irate, his hair and clothes tangled as though he had just fought his way out from under a bridge. He stepped over to the couch and gave it a vicious kick, sending a cushion flying across the room. Then he flopped into a reclining chair—Skunk's old chair—and arched like a landed shark. I had no doubt he was born to kill the last surviving member of a species, any species.

  "What happened at the restaurant, huh?" he shouted. My bleary eyes landed somewhere on the menace-laced landscape between his eyes.

  "Huh?" I said slowly, realizing too late that it sounded as if I was mimicking him. I got the arm-punch I deserved.

  "Well, it didn't work, asshole," Jeremy hissed. "Our friend, whatever he is, must've found out you screwed up my car. He left this in my mailbox."

  He held out a color map. I made out Old Petersburg Road.

  "Great," I said. "So now we know where we're going." I drew back from the schizonoid, hoping I hadn't inadvertently triggered another punch. I received, instead, a stiff poke in the chest.

  "Where's Sweet Tooth?" he said in a raspy voice.

  "She should be here soon," I answered, though I thought it unlikely she would show up before nine. I doubted Barbara had ever seen the sun rise, an astronomical commonplace that she would have probably shrugged off as science fiction. Jeremy knew this as well as I did. The query had been rhetorical, like asking me the time while a clock stared him in the face.

  He fidgeted, flung himself upwards, then backwards, then began pounding the chair arms with his fingers. He looked ready to strangle someone. I rubbed my chest, which seemed to have a permanent indentation from all the times he had poked me as a kid. This was the behavior I had expected yesterday, and found perplexing by its absence. Now I was equally perplexed by its resurgence. This couldn't be the guy who had nearly pissed in his pants when a sniper zipped a warning shot in his vicinity. I wondered if he had dosed his fear with steroids.

  "Where's your laptop?" I asked.

  "Lap dance?" he snarled, raising his fist.

  "Hey, I was just asking!" I protested. He gave me a goofy look and I was confirmed in the belief that computers make people soft-headed.

  "The place we're going is near Iron Bridge," Jeremy said. "We head south about fifteen miles. We can't miss it."

  "But what is it?" I said. "A house? An office? A bank?"

  He gave me a sharp look. "Bank?"

  "It could be in a safety deposit box," I reasoned.

  "Right, store stolen money in a bank," Jeremy snorted.

  "It wouldn't be the first time," I reasoned. "It might not even be unusual. But I guess you're right. It's probably an empty lot. We'll have to dig it up."

  Jeremy didn't catch my blush. Why couldn't I live up to my nickname?

  He made a face. The idea of manual labor conflicted with his purpose in life. He settled into a position between lolling and tense expectation, like a cat watching a fish bowl. His demeanor contrasted so sharply with yesterday's that I found myself searching his nose for any sign of redness. Was he snorting?

  "What are you gawping at?"

  "I'm wondering if you're hyped up on something," I said, pretty boldly, I thought.

  "What's it to you if I am?" he said, pinning me down with a sharp glance.

  "What we're doing could end up being dangerous." Nothing wrong with stating the obvious, especially to the oblivious. "Don't you think we need clear heads?"

  "Okay, Rinso-brain, you think we should spend a month in rehab before we set out on this mission?" Jeremy grinned. He thought he was being clever.

  "There's no sense in making things worse," I said.

  "You used to know how to keep your mouth shut," he said.

  "Have you forgotten someone took a shot at us yesterday? I may have only been a warning, but it got my attention. Yours too, if I recall."

  "You're so full of shit." Jeremy's lip twisted upwards, like a hooked fish. "Anyway, any bad guys show up, I got it covered."

  "How so?" I persisted.

  Jeremy hopped out of the chair and walked for the stairs.

  "Where are you going?"

  "To see if you're as dumb as you look," Jeremy said.

  I followed him upstairs and into our old bedroom. I grew queasy when he stood at the door. This was my personal space, now, the heart of my comforting solitude, even if I did not always choose to spend my nights here. I looked quickly for anything one brother might want to hide from another. Smutty magazines, dirt (real dirt, I mean), and little treasures that might reflect poorly on my character—like the plastic T-Rex I had swiped from work, sitting prominently on my cluttered bedstand next to a half-empty glass of cheap sweet port. It was the room in its entirety, including contents, that burst the bubble of my paltry existence. Jeremy had no right to see this, he no longer shared in the spirit of the house. I wanted him out of there, fast.

  But he did not seem to notice anything out of place. Unlike Barbara, he had not wormed his way out of the muck. To him, my bedroom was right and normal. The neat-as-a-pin prig of yesterday was gone. What a slob.

  He went to the closet but did not look inside. Instead, he kicked a threadbare rug out of the way and sat on the floor.

  "What are you doing?" I demanded.

  He didn't answer. He began worrying at one of the floorboards, bleached practically white by age and scuffing. Managing to get his fingers under the tiny rim, he lifted the board.

  "A hiding place?" I said weakly.

  Jeremy's snicker was easily translated: 'Yes, dumb ass, it's been here all these years and you never knew.'

  He pulled out what looked like a rectangular cookie tin from the niche. Tucking it under his arm, he rose and began to leave the room.

  "You want to put the board back?" I fumed, getting what I expected when he didn't answer. I peeked down the hollow and caught a whiff familiar from the days of Skunk. My stomach dropped. I'd never seen my father clean a handgun—come to think of it, I rarely saw him clean anything, including himself. But on a couple of occasions I had found him hunched in a corner of the house looking over a gun in preparation for yet
another social outrage. Even shady dealers can have a sense of armamentary decorum, and these guns had usually been field-stripped and cleaned. I knew the smell of Rem-Oil. That was what I was smelling now. Every time I went to my closet I had trod on this nasty secret. I didn't berate myself too much. The cops had searched the premises several times while Skunk was alive, and they had missed it, too. Just as they had missed the other hiding place, which Jeremy had obliviously stomped across as he went to the closet.

  I found Jeremy in the kitchen, opening the tin. I didn't recognize the gun he pulled out, but I assumed it had belonged to our father. With a wicked grin, he displayed it under my nose.

  "The Euthanizer," he announced. It sounded like the name of a WWF hunk-o-beef.

  I had lived alone with Skunk for the last three years of his life. It gave me a real family thrill to think he had stashed it away in my bedroom. Would he have fingered me if the police had found it?

  "How did you know it was there?" I asked Jeremy.

  "I put it there before I left home," he said blandly.

  "But you were seventeen—"

  "Sixteen," Jeremy corrected. "I traded for it."

  "Traded what?" I asked.

  "What else?" he smirked. "Sweet Tooth."

  "You traded sex with our sister for a handgun?" I said in disbelief.

  "Yeah, it was a great deal." Jeremy shook his head. "I almost felt sorry for Dalton, ripping him off like that."

  Dalton Bowen, a post-adolescent pimple of a creep who had lived over on China Street. He had been among the poor whites displaced when a developer tore down the houses nearest the river for new townhouses. He looked like someone who would have to pay a steep price to get laid.

  Yeah, look who's talking. At least I can feed semi-comfortably at the bottom.

  "Did Sweet Tooth get anything out of this?" I said.

  "Of course," said Jeremy. "Sex."

  "I mean..." I began, then gave up. "Forget it."

  "I use to target practice with this little sweetheart up on the canal," Jeremy said with all the weight of a ride on a merry-go-round. Having a gun was nothing to him, like a one-night stand. You could smile at the memory, but not go all mopey about it.