Skunk Hunt

by J. Clayton Rogers

  "Hey!" I protested.

  "That'll teach you to keep your comments to yourself."

  Yes, it certainly did, grateful that I had not added that a sprained ankle shouldn't stop her from lap-dancing.

  "You took off work to be here?" I asked, easing back onto the couch, out of arm's reach.

  "I overheard Carl and Dog talking..."

  Oh shit, I thought. Dog had probably given his owner a blow-by-blow account of my flesh-on-fat encounter with Kendle. Good for a laugh, sure, but it might also put into their minds that I was earning uncredited brownie points with the police. I waited for my sister to lower the boom, as in: You criticize me for my lifestyle, and then you sleep with that?

  But my gruesome sex life had apparently not come up, at least not within Barbara's hearing. It turned out Dog was a surprisingly keen observer of the human world outside his kennel.

  "Dog told Carl he got in the house and saw a picture of Skunk at the old power station," Barbara said. She glanced around nervously. "Don't you lock up the house when you leave?"

  "I leave everything wide open," I lied. It was beginning to seem like my house was a sieve. I once had to evict a family of opossums from the sink cabinet. There were doors here that I couldn't imagine. They were like drill holes into my psyche, betraying the vacuous interior. It was sort of like going out into public without your pants, and discovering you aren't dreaming.

  "You don't really leave the door open?" Barbara gasped. I would have gotten the same reaction if I had told her I spent my weekends skydiving or had become a vegetarian. One of those dumb lies that are feasible among feasible people.

  "I was joking," I told her.

  She saw the photograph, which I had carried to the coffee table, and picked it up. "This must be it."

  "Yeah..."

  "I've never seen it before," she continued. "Where did you get it?"

  "Someone left it here."

  "Jesus, Mute, you mean someone else has gotten in here?" She gave me a critical look. Nothing confirms a woman's belief in male stupidity like a brother.

  "Dog didn't leave it behind, obviously," I said. "Why would he give us a leg up on him?" When the joke went uncaught, I continued, "Maybe it was the same guy who left the clue in Flint Dementis' trunk."

  "You mean someone with a skeleton key?" She nodded at this perfectly reasonable suggestion, as if B&E was a common hobby in her crowd.

  "Or a credit card," I shrugged, acknowledging that my locks weren't top of the line. "Why are you here? What's with the flashlight?"

  "We're going to Belle Isle."

  So Barbara understood the clue. I was forced to chalk up a point in her favor, but I didn't like the timing. "We can go tomorrow morning. It's too dark—"

  "We can't wait," my sister stopped me. "Dog and Carl are going out there as soon as the sun comes up."

  "Why does that bother you?" I asked. "You're the one who told them about the farm house."

  "I didn't know about the old house until we got there," she corrected me. "I didn't know how sneaky Carl could be, following us that way. You don't really think I want them to have the money, do you?"

  "It crossed my mind," I said.

  "Well un-cross it," she shot back. "Carl isn't nothing but a warthog. He's fat and he's covered with warts."

  Since there was only one way she could know about the warts, I gave her a meaningful scowl. She flushed the scowl down her mental toilet and continued:

  "Worst of all, he's greedy. He could pay his taxes, he just doesn't believe in them. He says you don't pay for what you don't believe in."

  "He'd pay to stay out of jail," I said.

  "I guess, but someone that cheap will try anything to get out of it. The taxes, I mean. He goes on and on about it, that he's living the American Dream in the American Way. Here, look at this." Barbara pulled her pants down over her right hip, exposing a small red, white and blue tattoo. "He made me get this so his customers know he's a real patriot. All of us girls have one."

  I could imagine the patrons giving a rousing salute on seeing the flag on naked girls wrapped like pita bread around a pole.

  "Carl says America is suffering from creeping socialism," Barbara continued. "He wants people to keep what they earn. Hah! That's a joke. Look how much he earns on our backs."

  There wasn't a whole lot of ambiguity in that last statement. I pretended a thick black curtain had fallen over the scene and repeated my argument against going out to the island at this late hour.

  "You're not chicken, are you?" she demanded.

  "I'm prudent," I said.

  "What's that mean?"

  I clucked.

  "Well forget it, mister," she said, grabbing the top of my T-shirt. "You're coming with me."

  "Why not get Jeremy?" I asked, trying to pull away.

  Barbara shrank back, and I thought of the witch when Dorothy doused her. Speaking my brother's name was like dumping a bucket of icy river water over her head.

  "What's wrong?" I asked. "We'll be walking in the woods at night, maybe with a sack of cash that half the world wants and the other half doesn't know about. We'll want some kind of protection, even if it's half-assed."

  "You don't think Doubletalk would try anything?" she asked in a trembling voice.

  "I don't trust him, but I don't think he'd hurt us." My arm throbbed, a sore reminder of all the times Jeremy had punched me. "Maybe 'hurt' is the wrong word..."

  "Didn't you notice how weird he's acting since we got back together?" Barbara said, bunching herself against a non-existent draft. "One day he's the old Doubletalk, the next he's like some kind of geek."

  "Maybe that's why Skunk called him Doubletalk," I shrugged. "He and Mom spotted him for a schizoid right off."

  I was idly speculating, but my comment struck Barbara with the force of truth. "You mean we grew up with a sicko?"

  "Well yeah, why do you think we couldn't tell him from anyone else around here?"

  The dull edge didn't comprehend the double edge. Barbara nodded in aggressive affirmation. "Boy, now I get it."

  No you don't, Sis, I thought. Not by a mile. It was a pretty conceited thought, especially considering what happened later. But there I go putting the cart before the ass, again.

  "So you can see we don't want him with us on the island," she continued. "If nothing else, he'd run off with the bag."

  "There you go with the island again."

  "We've got to get there before Carl."

  "You know what it's like down there," I argued. "Boulders...trees...snakes ...ferns— "

  "Stop it! There's a nice bridge there now, you know that." Barbara reached for my shirt collar again. And she was worried about Jeremy getting violent. "Get off your ass! None of this matters to you, but this is my chance to get out of this shitty life. Come on! You want some coffee? Do you want me to slap you awake?"

  I had never thought about the good money can do. I know that's a strange comment coming from a property holder. I have to pay utilities and taxes, like any good suburban satrap. And there are the good things in life, cigarettes and tea. Actually, I hate tea. But there's beer and chips and coated peanuts and all the other elements of an unbalanced healthstyle. I wasn't paying a severe emotional penalty for the way I lived. So the moral aspect of money—proper money, in bulk—was a subject alien to me. Skunk had tried to get money in bulk in a socially unacceptable manner, a potent example to be avoided at all costs. So for Barbara to tell me that this was her chance to escape a lousy servitude came as a shock. She carried her career with such panache that it hadn't donned on me that it could be a burden. I mean, she was a professional slut, right? You didn't have to be the Pope to recognize it was not exactly a saintly method of paying your bills. Barbara was a go-getter, in a demented kind of way, but it was becoming obvious her life as a pole plumber was losing its charm. She was calling it hell. I suspected a plain case of job burnout. But even I could see she had to pad her future. One day, her looks would fail her. I thought I s
aw a slight inflation around her midsection. Fat, or gas?

  Even if logic or sibling duty didn't come into play, the fact that she seemed perfectly willing and capable of laying a serious hurt on me convinced me to put on my sneakers and jacket.

  "We can drive down to the river parking lot," she said, blocking my path to the back door in case I decided to make a run for it.

  "How do you know your car isn't bugged with one of those GPS thingamabobs?" I said.

  "Okay, we take your car."

  "How do we know that isn't bugged?" I continued.

  "You're right," she said. "If Dog's been hanging around here, he could have planted it while you were..."

  The way she hesitated worried me. Had Dog told Carl about Kendle? I couldn't credit my sister with anything remotely resembling tact, especially where I was concerned. I decided she was letting me finish the ellipses, that she wouldn't waste good oxygen on a bad excuse. Dog could have been snooping around my car while I was busy being useless, and that was that.

  "So...we walk...?" Hoofing down Pine Street, surrounded by whooping barbarian students, held no appeal to me. They could spot me right away as one of the few remaining yokels, while I saw them as a plasti-educated horde. What it came down to was they had parents with money. Well, so did I....

  It was only a short walk to the river. I was reminded of Oregon Hill's heyday, with drunks roaring through the street and loud parties end to end, only now the cars were a better quality and the voices, instead of being harsh, were filled with a universal, nasal angst. Barbara's eyes bugged out when she began to cross China Street and was almost run down by a carload of howling coeds.

  "Did you hear what they yelled at me?" she cried out as she flipped them off.

  I told her I had heard, but added by way of consolation that at least she got paid for it. These future presidents did it for free.

  "I'm going to hurt you," she shouted over the street noise.

  "What?" I exclaimed, gushing with innocence.

  Rather than answering, she forged ahead, her purple jacket, which was more of a cape, fluttering up and baring her arms. Her face was grim and determined, not at all like that of someone about to receive an undeserved fortune. Maybe she was calculating ways to get rid of me once we found the money. There were plenty of precarious drop-offs around the abandoned hydroelectric plant and more than one ready-made organ donor had been found in the rocks beneath the walls with his neck broken and a dumb-ass look on his face, as if their last words were, "Hey, there's nothing to worry abouuuuuuu....' A little friendly nudge of congratulations from sis could send me over, easy. Money has made people do stranger things. Just look at what I was doing at this moment.

  With all the traffic and staggering shadows on the sidewalks it was impossible to say if we were being followed. We descended a narrow set of wood steps to the trail running parallel to the CSX railway tracks, then waited a few minutes to see if anyone came down behind us.

  "I think we shook them," I said.

  "Shook who?" Barbara asked.

  "Whoever."

  "Whoever who?"

  It sounded like the opening to a 'knock-knock' joke. Believe it or not, though, even as kids I had never hit my sister, and I wasn't about to begin. All right, she was now big enough to hit back, but beyond that, I had never felt the impulse. It was the sissiest side of my wussness. Women were natural-born targets, and any man who did not belly up to his duty and (at the very least) give his sweetheart a passing glance of his fist was unworthy of the 'hood. Nowadays, that's considered correct behavior—not hitting them, I mean. But I couldn't shake a certain guilt of negligence. I was betraying yet one more Oregon Hill tradition. I wasn't in debt, I wasn't on welfare, I hadn't skipped school, I hadn't laughed at flea-bitten cats who scratched so hard they sheared off their own ears, I hadn't dissed the blacks who unwisely passed through our rare white enclave, I wasn't prone to irrational fisticuffs, I didn't drink Sterno, I didn't own a gun, much less feel inclined to shoot somebody with one—I couldn't do anything right. On the other hand, those denizens of the past had loved each other like nobody's business, even as they beat each other over the head. I missed out on that, too.

  "There's somebody coming down the steps," Barbara hissed.

  We had waited so long it was bound to happen. Wait long enough and you'd see the sun burn out, except the light would be gone. From his shape and smell we determined the guy coming down was a homeless drunk. He passed us without a murmur and settled in with some other formless shapes huddled under Lee Bridge.

  "We could get mugged," I cautioned.

  "Anyone tries, I'll cut out their throat with my heel," Barbara snarled loudly enough to be heard by the shadows under the bridge. There was no movement in response. I figured they preferred slow suicide to the instant variety.

  Barbara wasn't kidding when she said she could take out any mugger with a swipe of her heel. Her come-fuck-me pumps could just as easily read 'don't fuck with me'. On the minus side, they were universally recognized as impractical for hiking, especially on the rocky slopes and dark woods we were headed for. She had flung around barefooted in the old days, but now she looked as if she spent half her free time massaging Oil of Olay into her pores, down to and including her toes.

  "I think we're okay," she said, heading for a footbridge that crossed the old canal. Her shoes clattered like cutlery as we went over.

  "We can go back for a pair of sneakers," I suggested when we reached the far end and she snapped on her flashlight. We were confronted by a sharp slope that looked too much like a chore. The ground had been scoured by hundreds of mountain bikes, making it slick for someone in treadworn sneakers, forget high-heels.

  "You want me to put on your stinky sneakers?" Barbara huffed, as though I was suggesting an act far beneath her station. She had discovered refinement in her new life.

  Without another word, she started down, picking her way with the delicacy of a mountain goat. I followed, and managed to arrive at the bottom on both feet. I stood there for a moment, congratulating myself.

  "Get a move on, Mute," Barbara said, all action.

  We passed under the tracks and followed the road that led to the footbridge over the river. This was a long slab of cement that seemed far too heavy for the wires suspending it from the Lee Bridge overhead. But I'm no engineer. The rusty old Erector Set I played with as a child had proved I have no aptitude for cantilevers and steel beams.

  A heavy gate had been installed at the north end of the footbridge. Up to a few years ago it was regularly locked at dusk, but after several boys splattered themselves on the road below while trying to slip past the gate the city caved in to teen audacity and left it open all night. Barbara's relentless heels echoed across the James River as we set out, alerting the whole world that we were trespassing after dark. I'm not particularly fond of heights, and was comforted by the virtual invisibility of the water below. Streaked here and there by lights from the city, visibility stopped short of revealing the long drop to the rapids. But the steady tattoo of traffic overhead sent a quiver through my gut, as though I was entering the Great Unknown instead of a favorite boyhood haunt.

  Crossing the pedestrian bridge was a bit like traversing cement dunes, the up and down suspension swaying in nausea-inducing mimicry of the waves below. Barbara clicked-clicked-clicked downhill then clopped-clopped-clopped uphill in a one-woman mambo that put my nerves on edge. She had switched off her flashlight to conserve battery power, but in a faint shaft of light I spotted some dog poop on the pavement and suggested she take off her shoes to keep the noise down. One bare foot in that mess would have turned her around in an instant. But she ignored me.

  Getting off the bridge didn't improve my mood much. The ghostly drumming overhead was a reminder that I was headed for one of the premier Yankee graveyards of the War for Southern Uppitiness. Belle Isle had been so notorious that the Yanks fought a battle just outside Richmond in an attempt to free the 30,000 prisoners being held there
. They had lost, naturally, but after they had won the stupid war they disinterred a thousand or so graves and sent the corpses back to the frigid north where they had come from. Those being days of low tech and high moronity, I was sure more than a few Union bones were still littering this good Confederate soil. The ghosts emanating from those bones were meek enough during the day, but at night who knew what they might be up to? Tormenting the living descendants of their sworn enemies must be one of the few enjoyable pastimes of Eternity. Maybe there was a good, supernatural reason the city forbade access to the island after dark.

  "Stop holding back," Barbara reprimanded me. "You know as good as I do where the power station is."

  "I was checking to see if we're being followed," I said. Like hell. I was checking to see if any of the shadows flitting across the island sported muskets with bayonets. I don't believe in ghosts, but I also believe anything is possible. It's tough getting through life when your leading precepts are mutually exclusive. Sort of like walking forwards and backwards at the same time. The problem was, in the current situation, I might bump into an Enfield-toting Yank drooling with the pus of the dead by walking forwards or backwards, or in any other conceivable direction.

  Barbara finally switched the flashlight back on as we began moving away from the switchback end of the footbridge. We were now officially stagelit, but that was preferable to stumbling in the dark. Like any good Southern gentleman (Southron to y'all down here), I followed the ladies-first principle and let my sister lead me across the field that had held the main prison camp. It was now a dismal stretch of scrub grass crisscrossed by bare patches of earth, as if all that collective misery had salted the ground. A couple of gruesomely harmless possums darted in front of us, their eyes shooting beams of terror as they looked our way. For an instant I felt like a tough guy, sending Mother Nature flying in wild retreat. Needless to say, that bit of macho euphoria didn't last long.

  "Ick," said Barbara as the possums scurried into the grass.

  "Yeah," I agreed. "Want to turn back?"

  "You want me to attach this battery to your brain and fry your cereal cortex?" she said.