Skunk Hunt

by J. Clayton Rogers

  Barbara was to blame. On that I had no doubt. She had blabbed to Monique, Monique had tossed the tidbit to Carl, and the result was an ambush. But I couldn't shake the suspicion something else was at work here. Jeremy had thought so, too, especially after I filled him in on my conversation with the mystery voice after he had gone back outside.

  "Why is this guy jerking us off?" he complained as we drove back to Richmond. "There's nothing straight up. All these games. And you don't have any idea who's behind it?"

  "Skunk..." Barbara murmured.

  "Cut it out!" Jeremy snapped, turning hard onto Iron Bridge Road. "Mute saw him laid out on the slab. Right, Mute?"

  "Yeah..." I said.

  "And that didn't sound like Skunk in the old house, did it? Get a grip, Sweet Tooth, before I do it for you."

  "Do what for me?" Barbara inquired, shrinking in the passenger seat.

  "Or I'll do what else, that's what." Jeremy chucked spittle when he talked. He needed a bib, he was so irate. "We had fifty grand in our hands!"

  "We didn't actually touch it," Barbara said.

  "And it was pissed away because of your big mouth." Jeremy took his eyes off the road to emphasize the shaking of his head. "I'll bet that was all that was left. God-damn, I bet there's nothing else. The bag is empty."

  I tended to agree. The voice had gone to a lot of trouble setting up the old house, enough to film an episode from a reality show. Why bother unless the prize was the whole hog? Only a sadist would ask more from us. And yet, I wished for another chance. And by now Barbara would have learned to keep her mouth shut.

  This hi-tech business was getting me down. First the computer messages, then the remote camera, culminating in Carl's wicked GPS.

  "McPherson!"

  I snapped out of my racking reverie to find myself staring at Mr. Toney, my supervisor, whose sole job seemed to be to make sure I showed up and to count kernels in the back room, tasks he performed with insensate indifference because this was, after all, a government position. So far as I could tell, his parents had not bothered giving him a first name, and he worked on the assumption no one else had one, either.

  Being one of those numb souls who only reluctantly admits visitors to his mental space, my mind turnstiled reluctantly. "Uh..." I said.

  "Call for you in the office," said Toney. He appeared more intrigued than put out. Having fingered me as someone who neither received nor made phone calls, his curiosity was roused.

  "Can you take a message?" I said.

  I was asking him to be my secretary. Rather than being offended, Toney was impressed by my reluctance to leave my post. His world scheme was almost as limited as my own, and this was a major event.

  "The next show isn't for half an hour," he said amiably.

  "Who is it?"

  "How should I know?" Toney asked, finally showing a trace of irritation. "Some guy."

  It was obvious this representative of state government did not care if we sold popcorn-tainted butter to the general public. Toney behaved as though I would be doing a service for humanity's arteries by stepping away for a few minutes.

  I scattered some kids away from the Tyrannosaurus as I found the shortest way to Toney's office. He followed me in, giving me an odd look. Maybe I wasn't such a great humanitarian, after all.

  "Line Two," said Toney, dishing his hand towards the phone on his desk.

  I stared at the phone, then at Toney. He didn't get the message.

  "I put him on hold," he said. "Pick up the receiver and punch the line that's blinking."

  How much of a technological nitwit did he think I was? OK, multi-line phones were about the limit of my expertise, but the way Toney talked you'd think I would have a hard time peeling a banana. If there was a moron in the room, it was him, going all blank when I hinted a desire for privacy. Except Toney knew exactly what he was doing. He was the other kind of moron.

  But I would have been reluctant to answer the phone even if I had been alone. All the craziness of the past week had churned my lobes into a mishmash. 'Who-what-where' had become 'duh-duh-duh'. I needed someone to clear my trachea and check my pupils while yelling "What is your name?" in a loud and reasonable voice.

  The phone line light blinked impatiently, a real irritant. I took up the receiver and cautiously pressed the button.

  "Hello?" I said.

  No one answered. This suited me fine, and I was about to hang up when I heard someone shuffling around at the other end.

  "Hello?" I repeated.

  "Fucking glasses," came a voice, followed by a long pause.

  The chill of suspense, the shock of recognition and the sinking sensation of being caught utterly flatfooted spinned me down and out. I nearly dropped the phone. I held the receiver away from my ear for a moment and saw Toney quizzing me with a glance.

  I brought the receiver back up and listened.

  "You and your fucking glasses," said...Skunk.

  Yeah, impossible. And that very impossibility was a clue, if only I could visualize past the riot of clowns in my head. I listened hard. There was movement, a click and whir more electronic than human—and I don't have to imagine humans clicking and whirring. I see it all the time. It's called 'work'.

  It didn't take much cerebral locomotion to realize I was listening to a tape of my father. But when the silence persisted, I also realized I needed to play along.

  "What glasses are you talking about?" I said.

  Whoever was jockeying the tape was finding it difficult to pinpoint what he wanted to play. I heard a non-recorded grunt, then:

  "It's still there, all of it."

  Click.

  Whir.

  The producer of this little show was searching for the next snippet. He didn't want me to hear the entire recording. If I ever get around to reading War and Peace I don't want the abridged version—even if that means I'll never get around to reading War and Peace. It was the same here. Skunk was being edited, heavily, and I couldn't begin to guess at what was being clipped.

  There had always been an appalling finality about Skunk's declarations. He could say he was going out to buy ice cream and you would think he was getting ready to slit your throat. Even via a recording, at third hand over a phone and peppered with what seemed to be institutional background noise (echoes from prison?), he could still shiver my timbers.

  To fill in the awkward silence, and to goad the tape recorder operator into continuing, I said, "Who is this? I know it's not you, Dad, because I ID'd your body in front of the coroner. And you were never one for practical jokes. Well, there was the time you forced beer down my throat in front of your drinking buddies. That wasn't exactly practical. And I didn't exactly appreciate it. Then there was the time—" I cut myself short, appalled. I had denied the living Skunk, only to segue into chatty reminiscences.

  There was movement next to me—Toney had jumped in alarm. I heard him shuffling around, and the next moment he leaned next to me, paper and pen in hand.

  Skunk returned:

  "Get that thing out of my face."

  "The only thing I've got hanging here is my face," I shot back, peeved. Surely the editor could do a better job of editing. If his intention was to convey meaningful information using an old recording of Skunk, he could have cued up the pertinent segment in advance. This was so arbitrary it verged on torture. What was the message? 'It's all still there' was taken out of context. What was still all there? Not the Brinks money, since a fair portion of it had gone off in Kendle's van.

  "You mind hurrying this up?" I said into the phone. "I'm at work. If you—"

  I was interrupted by a high-pitched ringing, steady and monotonous. I could only think of electronic interference, like the phones melting in Fail Safe. People don't much meditate on nuclear annihilation these days, but anyone hooked on old movies would recognize the end of the world.

  The sounded ended abruptly with a very Skunkesqe, "Aw, shit," followed by a distant tinkling of broken glass.

  I wa
ited a moment before responding with a series of inane "Hello?"s, even though a distinctive click had told me the caller had hung up. The conversation, such as it was, had lasted about two minutes.

  I lowered the receiver and stared at the 16-buttons jutting out of the phone.

  "Crank call?"

  I gave a start. Mr. Toney was standing next to me, but I had completely forgotten his presence.

  "Yeah," I said. "I guess."

  "Isn't your father..."

  My supervisor knew my father was in situ on my fireplace mantelpiece, but I didn't think he knew the particulars of his demise. That may have been more of a hope on my part, but I didn't bother expanding on it.

  "Dead. Yeah."

  "This guy was pretending to be your father?" Mr. Toney shook his head, but was obviously delighted. If he couldn't get a life, he could at least intrude on someone else's death. Dull people are pretty ghoulish at heart. Yeah, I know, the crow accusing the bird-brain.

  "Shouldn't I be getting back to the popcorn stand?" I said, for once eager to work.

  "But this is harassment," said Mr. Toney in a tone that sounded a lot like harassment. "He called to a government phone to harass a government employee working on government property."

  "There's no reason to make a federal case out of it," I said squeamishly, wishing he would drop the subject.

  "Commonwealth," Mr. Toney corrected officiously. He was put out by my unwillingness to go into conniptions. To be elevated from a common popcorn hustler to a legally-defined harassed citizen should be cause for celebration. Instead, I was denying the limelight, which he obviously wanted to share with me. If we called in the authorities now, he would undoubtedly hog the proceedings. He wanted to bask in the enormity of the crime. He would fill in the note-taking detective on the details of my emotional stress, my tears, my inability to fulfill the function assigned to me, the foam dripping from my mouth and staining the government carpets. This would lead to the sort of questions that cement your sphincter, like why were you harassed in the first place? Was the caller acting on behalf of a jilted girlfriend? But wait, skip the conspiracy: was the caller a jilted boyfriend? Was this the result of misbehavior on my part? Or was I being victimized by my own charm and good looks. Answers would get more and more unbelievable as I attempted to screen off the truth. And then, finally, the subject of stolen money would come up: Ah-hah! goes the detective. Oh my! says Mr. Toney. Boo-hoo! says yours truly. No, I had to put as much space between this crank call and my personal reality as possible.

  "They got the wrong number," I said blandly.

  "Really?" said Mr. Toney, nonplussed.

  "If they got the wrong guy, they got the wrong number," I reasoned. I think I sounded like someone who had poured sour milk on his Lucky Charms.

  Mr. Toney worked this over in his mind, really hammered and sawed, then held out a sheet from his notepad. "If you decide to follow up on this, which I highly recommend, this is who the caller was."

  I stared numbly at the phone number he had written down. Judging my silence to be part and parcel of my technological illiteracy, he pointed at the phone's LED display. "Caller ID," he said. "Heavy breathers can't get away with their games the way they used to."

  I was annoyed that he had reduced my complicated call to the realm of sexual assault, especially as the caller had not been a woman. Technically speaking, it might be said I had been talking to myself: the phone number he had written down was mine. Someone had called me from my house on Oregon Hill.

  "You mind if I take off the rest of the evening?" I said.

  "So the call did rattle you," said Mr. Toney, inordinately pleased. "Do you recognize the number?"

  "It looks a bit familiar..."

  "Let's call the police."

  Let's not.

  "I think it's something I can take care of," I said.

  "You think so?" Mr. Tony asked, lifting a scruffy eyebrow.

  "I'd prefer to take care of it on my own," I elaborated.

  Mr. Toney deflated. Doubt requires an act of will, and his will squiggled out and plopped on the floor. Could he have less of a life than I did? That would go hand-in-hand with the profile of a bottom tier government employee. It was a depressing sight. And enlightening. The hunt for Skunk's treasure had put meaning and purpose in my life. It might not be a very elevated kind of purpose, but it had a background and story thread. And while nothing would probably come of my search, at that moment something else flashed on my imperceptible mind. I could choose how to see life.

  We've all met people whose lives have been trashed one way or another, yet managed to smile on their way to the poorhouse. Usually we shrug them off as mental cases, delusional nitwits who can't or won't own up to reality. But I grew up in a neighborhood populated entirely by losers. Perhaps the one thing I missed most about the old Oregon Hill was its pervasive atmosphere of cheerful despair. There was too much drunkenness, too much wife-beating, too many meaningless fistfights in the streets, the alleys, the bars and any other corner where you could swing your arms. And yet you never saw so many people smiling, grinning, haling each other with open cheer. Intruders were eyed with menace or cynicism. Social instincts showed their negative side whenever a black strayed into the area—a common bumper sticker of the day was "Oregon Hill—That Better be a Tan." Tourists visiting the Confederate graves at historic Hollywood Cemetery were greeted with knowing smirks. It was as if the locals were saying: "You might think we're perfect examples of decrepit Southern manhood but our great grandfathers were the ones who fought that dumb-ass war for that slavery you love to go on about." They relished their white-trashness and chose to see it as a virtue. That was my spark out of the blue. What you choose to see yourself as might not be very accurate, but it's what you are, or what you become. A Jehovah's Witness, a Nazi, an upstanding citizen, a Moon pilot—take your pick. The folks of Oregon Hill were the scum of the earth, and they rolled in the dirt every day of their unredeemed and statistically brief lives. If you haven't lucked out in either the nature or nurture departments, you can still make the most of the little you're given.

  Was that my problem? That I was interpreting reality for what it was instead of what it could be? You don't have to go through life without rose-tinted glasses. It's an American right, practically mandatory in fact, to delude yourself. And why not? Believing the Earth is flat doesn't mean you'll fall off at the end.

  So I fell in with Mr. Toney, metaphysically speaking. I suddenly took delight in being part of a grand if meaningless conspiracy. I was in the midst of an adventure. It would be sort of pointless if I didn't get all excited about it.

  I had Mr. Toney's permission to skip the rest of my shift. He overawed me with the suggestion that he join me to confront the caller, if such was my intention. I wasn't certain if he knew the call came from my house. If he did know, I would have more emphatically turned down his offer. Besides, he might be AC or DC or some other unholy combination. There was no sense in complicating matters.

  I had helium in my feet as I walked out of the museum. I was light and focused. I doubted the caller was still in my house, but I was full of anticipation. Was there a satchel of money on my couch? Or had he left me another clue? Maybe something less arcane, a little more direct. And there was the possibility that the intruder would, for some unfathomable reason, reverse the flow of information. Had my house been bugged? Was there a hidden camera? I might be the center of attention even as I enjoyed the search. Colder...hotter....

  My spirits dipped but were not dashed when I saw Kendle leaning her big ass against my big assed car in the employee section of the parking lot. I even managed a jocular smile. Her expression told me she received it as a sneer. Maybe it was. My face has had zero practice in the mirror. There's no telling what was written on it, or how it might be misinterpreted.

  "Yes, I suppose you found it very funny, Mr. McPherson," she said as I strolled up.

  I stopped dead. Was she behind the phone call? It was only a shor
t drive from the Science Museum to my house. She could have driven here in the short time I spent fending off Mr. Toney's inquiries and spirit of volunteerism.

  "I," I said. I waited a moment, then said it again. "I..."

  "Don't act dumb," said the detective. "I mean the money from the old house."

  Anything learned well is learned young, and I was past the age when I could incorporate new ideas with fluid ease. The thought that I could choose how to see life had gone down the hatch readily enough, but now I felt the sickening urge to barf it all back up.

  Kendle looked about as amused as day-old roadkill, with the sour look of death still visible. She could have been the Road & Track model for my banged up, unwashed Impala.

  "We know that's not all of it," I said.

  "We know that's not any of it," she responded, flagging me with a grimace. "The money from the house had traces of cocaine, but that's no big news."

  "Uh...no?" I stuttered.

  "Ninety-per cent of all bills in the U.S. has cocaine on it. It binds to the green dye. That's how ninety-per cent of drug dealers beat the rap."

  That was news to me, so I let go a wow. "You guys work fast," I added truthfully. "Are we prioritized or something? Do you use tricorders?"

  "We were able to trace some of the bills. Before they ended up here they were deposited in the Bank Mandiri of Timor-Leste."

  "I don't think I've ever heard of it," I confessed.

  "A branch of the Indonesian state bank in East Timor." Her eyes weren't so bleary that she couldn't see my confusion was genuine, although it was actually ignorance.

  "East Timor," I said. "Wow."

  "It's not in Indiana," she said.

  "California?" I ventured.

  "Take a sharp right at Australia and a left at New Guinea. The dollar—our dollar—is the legal currency there. I guess they don't have enough room for their own printing plant."

  I made a brief, farewell glance to my optimism. My thoughts forged ahead briefly before stumbling on a few crumbs of logic. "You're saying someone took the Brinks money overseas and traded it in?"