Skunk Hunt

by J. Clayton Rogers

  "What did you shoot at?" I asked.

  "Kayakers."

  I decided not to pursue the conversation, but I couldn't ignore the gun. Jeremy ejected the clip and gave it a cursory inspection.

  "Bryco M59," he informed me. "The company that made them got sued and went bankrupt, which makes this a gem."

  "A gem?" I asked.

  "You know, an antique. Something they don't make anymore, unless it's a crappy rip-off."

  "Why did they get sued?"

  "I guess because it's a piece of shit," Jeremy said, thumbing out a 9mm round and rolling it in his fingers. "Some dipwad was cleaning his gun and accidentally shot someone's dick off, or something like that. One day every dummy will have a lawyer and the whole world will shut down."

  "You have a lawyer," I pointed out.

  "Court appointed," said Jeremy. "Not a real lawyer."

  I didn't like the way he was fiddling with the gun, like it was a Rubik's cube waiting to explode.

  "Stop looking like a jack-off," Jeremy said, catching my expression. "It's a good basic gun. It gets the job done."

  And Jeremy was a good basic dummy. I said, "What job?"

  "No job at all, if we're lucky," he answered. "You say we've been shot at, right? We're going to some dumpster in the woods where someone might try again, right? We need protection."

  I felt so much safer.

  There was a broken staccato pecking at the front door. Barbara was giving us her Mata Hari rendition, as though we had prearranged a secret knock. I let her in. When she came into the kitchen and saw the gun she pronounced her dismay with a loud gasp.

  "You want I should go ahead and order the daisies?" she said.

  Daisies instead of lilies—she must have been watching The Sopranos. I didn't care what patois she used, so long as the helicopters stayed away.

  When we went outside Barbara walked straight to her Sentra and opened the driver's door. Before she could sit, Jeremy deftly plucked the keys out of her hands and scooted into the driver seat.

  "Hey!" Barbara protested.

  "'Hey' yourself," my brother said as he pushed the key into the ignition.

  "Doubletalk McPherson, yesterday you couldn't do nothing but squat in your pants, and now you think you have the gumption—"

  "So you're psycho, too?" he said, cutting her off. "You want to get in or am I going alone?"

  He had reversed yesterday's scenario, when we threatened to abandon him in the ditch. This struck me as perfectly normal. I have a strong sense of poetic justice, which is why I don't kick up much fuss selling popcorn at the Science Museum. It seems like the fate I deserve. But Barbara took this sudden reversal to heart. She appeared set to do a lot of emoting when Jeremy started the engine and pulled out. She let out a screech and he stopped. We piled in without further ado. Naturally, I took the back seat, as befitted a bottom feeder.

  "You're a complete A-hole, you know that?" my sister complained.

  "I know it, you know it, Mute knows it, the correctional system of the Commonwealth of Virginia knows it," he said, running the Stop sign on Pine and squealing right onto Route 1. "Tell me something none of us knows."

  Barbara worked on this for some time, then smiled grimly. "That gun of yours..."

  "What about it?"

  "You still using that box of cartridges Dalton gave you?" Barbara continued.

  "Got it right here," said Jeremy, patting a leather pouch on the console.

  "Well, Dalton told me he didn't want to get into too much trouble giving away that gun for you-know-what, so he gave you blanks."

  "Bullshit! The box says—"

  "He took the real bullets out of the box and gave you blanks," Barbara explained. "He said you were too much a dummy to tell the difference just looking at them."

  'From rags to rags in three generations'. It's taken to mean the first generation makes money, the second holds onto the money, and the third blows the whole bundle. The inference is that, at some point, at least one member of the bloodline has grit and brains enough to rise out of the swamp. The McPherson line is still waiting on the first rung. We've gone from rags to rags ad infinitum, with hardly enough gumption to throw a light switch. Our progress report was written on Jeremy's face, a goofy slackjaw that would embarrass a halfway-intelligent mother. If our ancestors had cooked up a family escutcheon, it would have been that very look—with raw egg dripping off.

  "I guess those kayakers you were using for targets got off easy," I commented. "Didn't you wonder why you weren't hitting anything?"

  "Why didn't you tell me before?" Jeremy asked after taking a full minute to recover his voice.

  "You threatened to break my arm if I didn't sleep with that creep, remember?" Barbara said.

  "So?"

  "You don't think that's a little extreme?" she persisted.

  "Extreme what?" asked Jeremy, his voice bruised and bewildered.

  He didn't see where he had done anything wrong. In fact, he was feeling hurt that anyone would play such a trick on him. Poor innocent victim. I was tempted to slip out a shoe string and garrote him.

  "What are you, some kind of animal?" Barbara said.

  "You're the one sending us into a shooting gallery with blanks," Jeremy said, speeding up, as though he couldn't wait to put us at risk. "That's not very civilized."

  The only thing worse than Jeremy with a loaded gun was Jeremy with a useless gun. After yesterday, there was no telling what we would encounter. I would prefer that our adversaries ate lead, not sound bites.

  At least my brother seemed to know where he was going. Near Happy Hill we branched off onto a side road, and soon intersected Old Petersburg Turnpike. Not long after he turned south, slowing down, searching for landmarks.

  "We're looking for a house, right?" Barbara said.

  "A driveway," Jeremy said. "The house is set off from the main road."

  "How far from the main road?" I asked, concerned.

  "Whoever gave me the map wrote a note on the back." His words resounded with deep effort, as though the note had been an estuary of foreign phrases.

  "What map?" Barbara asked. "What note?"

  "The note said maybe a hundred yards."

  Barbara went bug-eyed. "A hundred yards in the woods?"

  "Maybe in the woods, or it could be—"

  Clamping a hand to her forehead, Barbara said, "Turn around."

  "We can handle it," Jeremy grinned without slowing down.

  "Up to now we've been pretty much in the open," Barbara reasoned tensely. "We've been in coffee shops, and there was Flint's house. Even on the road there were cars going by, at least. You want us to go in the woods, where there's no help. What are we going to do if we get in trouble? It's a crummy deal. Turn around!"

  I was inclined to agree, but I was surprised by her lack of moxie. She had taken yesterday in stride, shrugging off the sniper once it became apparent we were not the primary targets. A weasel of doubt about my sister began nibbling at my vitals.

  "Sweet Tooth," I said, "you haven't been talking to someone about all of this, have you?"

  "Course not!" Barbara said, her chest throbbing in protest.

  Jeremy caught the uneasy crimp in her answer and eased off the gas as he glanced at her. "Who?"

  "I just said—"

  "You just lied." Jeremy slammed his fist on the steering wheel. "Couldn't you keep your mouth shut for once in your life?"

  "Who says I didn't?" said Barbara, who immediately proceeded to chew on her knuckle. Jeremy gave me a knowing look in the rearview mirror. When we were kids, we had always been able to tell when our sister was lying. Any reference to bad behavior on her part, such as a betrayed secret, sent her into gnawing mode. Body language is the first thing you learn and the hardest thing to kick. My personal betrayer is a tendency to bite my lip in a vain attempt to cut short words already spoken. Lying doesn't come naturally to me, which makes me somewhat subhuman.

  Barbara was staring straight ahead and missed t
he impish light that flashed across Jeremy's face. But I saw it, just as he was looking away from the mirror. Another familiar giveaway. He too had leaked our secret to a party or parties unknown. It made me weary of being Mute. I wondered if I should bring up the fact that his expression had betrayed the fact that he had betrayed the fact that...then I lost the thread, or rather dropped it.

  Jeremy didn't bother speeding up again. We had driven past a decrepit business park and then a loose row of houses that grew progressively weedier before hitting a stretch of woods that showed no sign of ending soon. Here and there we saw mail boxes that followed the same pattern of decay as the houses, with neatly numbered boxes giving out on dented receptacles and broken posts. The house numbers stenciled on the posts became so faded we were forced to slow down to read them. The houses themselves were invisible, tucked away in the woods at the end of dirt lanes, inhospitably secret and grave. Yeah, grave. These folks had buried themselves away from humanity. It was an attitude I fully appreciated, but in practice sent shivers down my spine. Every so often I find it salutary to see a human face. And not only that, to speak to that face. And sometimes I even want that other face to speak back to me in a benign manner. I conformed to the habits of a 'city solitaire', meaning I occasionally conversed with members of my species. A solitary man in the city just happens to be alone. In the country, they're trolls. These were the marksmen who drew a bead on you when you violated their territory. Who ate roadkill and were semi-if-not-entirely illiterate and played banjo music on their Victrolas. I knew my assumptions were littered with clichés, but mass media was more firmly anchored in my psyche than reality. Jed Clampett and Deliverance leapt to mind. I feared our destination long before I laid eyes on it.

  "Check that out," I said.

  "I've checked," said Jeremy tightly.

  We passed a van parked on a gravel turn-off, the quaint satellite dish on top raising the distinctive stink of cops who had neglected their protective deodorant. But we saw no one in the driver's seat and the van stayed put as we progressed up the road.

  "Here, I think..." Jeremy slowed at a long curve in the road. Someone behind us grew impatient and gunned around us, heedless of the double line.

  Barbara saw the narrow rutted drive and headless mailbox post and murmured, "Turn around..."

  Yesterday, the word I would have used for Jeremy was Quixotic. Not in any magnanimous sense, but even greed can possess a sheen of nobility. Until the sniper took a shine to us, my brother played a leading role in the great Skunk Hunt, gallantly forging through the challenges with aplomb and enthusiasm. But now he was a reckless gambler redeeming a lotto ticket from Hell. He had crossed the line between prudent acceptance of the terms of the hunt and sheer stupidity.

  There was something terminal about the driveway's steep slope, and I'm not talking about buses. It was as if this was a place where what went up did not necessarily come down. The hill had our well-being at heart, and fought the fishtailing Sentra every yard of the way, telegraphing us in no uncertain terms that if we wanted to stay healthy, we'd better turn around and leave. Only there was no place to turn around. We skidded, bounced, jounced and swiveled. I moaned, Barbara squealed, Jeremy swore. I began to wonder if we would find a Tibetan monk at the top—armed with a mantra and scimitar.

  The road leveled and we found ourselves in a small clearing that boasted tree stumps and a dilapidated hovel straight out of Dogpatch. Jeremy stopped and we all jumped out like bats on fire. I'm not sure what we thought we were escaping. Sooner or later we would have to get back in.

  There were no other cars in sight. That was good. Nor was there any indication that the house had been lived in for a couple of decades. That was also good. But the good news came to an end when we began milling in circles, wearing the vacuous expressions of the clueless.

  "Now what?" Barbara said, a less-than-clear call to action. Jeremy and I stopped in our tracks.

  "Well..." I began.

  Jeremy gave me a dark look and I continued:

  "The clue was the house number. We need to go inside the house." When the dark look continued, I added, "It's better than digging."

  If this had ever been an active farm, its heyday was buried under the pepper weeds, snarled creepers and surface roots. A shovel would have been useless. We needed a pick and ax. Or, considering our work ethic, hired help with a backhoe. While there were a few bare patches dirt, they were so stony and brittle we winced just looking at them. They say Mother Earth is resilient, but this was a pretty hopeless case, practically a radioactive waste dump, with only a few twigs sprouting out of the stumps to stake a claim to reclamation.

  But at least the miserable acreage wasn't dangerous—if you excluded snakes and poisonous insect hordes lurking in the grass. The two-story house had all the earmarks of a man-trap: the porch boards were rotted and its roof slanted like some old geezer tipping his stovepipe. We could see holes in the clapboard siding—in fact, here and there, you could see right through to the feathery caps of broomsedge in the back yard. Risking the first couple of porch steps, I studied the front rooms and saw no sign of itinerant hygiene. Even the homeless had done a thumbs-down on this dump. In the transition between home-boys and college clowns, Oregon Hill had been substantially depopulated. I had grown familiar with the sight of abandoned houses and the waste products of trespassing derelicts, who did not shun using old living rooms as crappers.

  "Why'd you stop?" Jeremy asked me.

  "Why don't you follow?" I said.

  "You're lighter," my brother answered with an indifferent shrug, as though the topic held no interest for him.

  I looked at Barbara. "You're even lighter."

  "Hey, you're a guy," she said, taking a step back.

  Women's Lib came to a clunkering halt in the McPherson household way back, before we were born. Awareness has to begin before it begins, if you know what I mean. You don't know what I mean? Try this, then: to fill a glass you have start with a few drops. To siphon gas out of a car's reservoir you have to start sucking. To begin anything you have to begin. Still not making sense? You have to meet me halfway. Well, three quarters of the way....

  About the only fads that stuck with my family were low-sodium ham and lite (sic) beer, because there was nothing else available at the Fine Food Mart down the street. Our collective sense of social relativity wouldn't fill a thimble. Maybe it's a holdover from the Civil War. The only way to raise consciousness in the South was to hold a gun to its head. And pull the trigger.

  Barbara gave me her best 'unmanning' look, the surgical expression designed to lop off the male penis and display it in a dainty floral arrangement, pretty, useless and pretty useless. Any guy reluctant to suck in his gut for The Cause—any cause that required the useless splurge of testosterone—was a nonentity in her book. Awfully intolerant for someone suffering from helicopters. My only consolation was that this attitude probably caused her untold grief. I wondered if she sported contusions inflicted by testosterone-laden boyfriends under all that makeup.

  Jeremy's macho image was not under threat. Excluding his reaction to the sniper, he was royally endowed with pointless manliness. He was just showing me up—a very manly pastime.

  "Go on, Mute," he said

  Judging from a pair of uneven rents, one of my predecessors had fallen through the rotting floorboards. It was impossible to say if they were recent. Avoiding the jagged fissures, I timidly tiptoed ahead. Every step I took wrenched an arthritic protest from the joists, and I could actually see the ledger board wobble like a level held by a drunk. The entire edifice might come crashing down on my stupid head at any moment. Not only would that have served me right, but it might have been an improvement.

  But the porch held. Astonishment and gratitude escorted me through the gaping door.

  There was an antiseptic air about the place, as though it had not only been bleached by age, but the heavy hand of industry. I disturbed no roosting birds. No lurking possums jumped out of the corners.
Even vermin had no desire to live here. It should have been the perfect spot to hide stolen loot, but the total emptiness bothered me.

  "Someone's been here," I shouted to the chickenshits outside.

  "I hope so!" Jeremy shouted back.

  "I mean someone's cleaned this place up. The floor's been swept!"

  "So the owner's planning to sell." Jeremy's voice sounded louder. I turned and saw that he had advanced to the top of the porch. His brand of moral support put the remote in control.

  "I didn't see a For Sale sign," I groused. I didn't realize until that moment that I preferred my abandoned houses to be unowned as well as unoccupied. We were adding breaking and entering—well, entering—to our list of crimes. And we had been committing crimes. Every time we followed up on a clue without advising the authorities we were crossing the line. We were accessories after the fact, and our only defense (if we were caught) was that we fully intended to return the Brinks money to its rightful owners. Which, needless to say, was not part of our plan.

  Treading carefully, I mapped out a mental schematic. There were four rooms downstairs: living room, kitchen, parlor and bedroom. At least that was what I imagined the rooms to be, although the only thing certain was the kitchen, because of the sink.

  If the owner planned to sell, he should have focused on the sagging woodwork. The walls were wormy, lathing was exposed everywhere, and shaggy tufts of insulation hung from the ceiling. That in itself was a curiosity. There should have been debris on the floor.

  Hollow tippy-toe footsteps sounded from the front. Jeremy had entered the house and was following my footsteps. So much for discovering the money and skipping out the back door.

  "Boogy-boogy-boogy," my moronic brother intoned, making the most of the ghostly echo. "Find anything yet? Anything green?"

  "You mean like your rotting brain?" I said.

  Jeremy came around to the foot of the stairwell, where I was standing doubtfully.

  "Well?" he said.

  "I haven't seen anything," I confessed. "But that doesn't mean we can't start pulling up floorboards." I glanced down. "It shouldn't be too hard. I think Lee slept here after Appomattox." I looked again. "Or maybe Light-Horse Harry Lee after—"