"If I can't find it, are you going to tell me where it is?" I said at one point, calling out from the opposite side of the room.
"I'm counting on you to find it," said the voice. "I don't have a clue."
"Well, here's a clue," I answered. "Assuming the lights are here for a purpose, I'd say what I'm looking for is in this room, and not downstairs or any other room."
"That makes sense," the voice agreed.
I stopped for the tenth time and surveyed the room. It was large, and I had by no means covered every inch of it. But I was growing more and more concerned that I was about to contract some form of airborne venereal virus, as of yet undiscovered by science but which was native to this oversized test tube.
"Why don't I just leave?" I suggested. "It's only money. Stolen money."
"All property is theft, all money is blood money," intoned the voice.
I was standing in a stinky hydroelectric plant listening to stranger quote Marx, or Engels, or Proudhon, or Dick Cheney—hell, they all steal from each other.
"Are you saying that there's no such thing as an honest living?" I said.
"What a sub-moronic notion," the voice said. "You yourself are taking a job away from an unemployed car salesman with five hungry children, and he's stealing it from a foreigner with twelve hungry children—"
"They shouldn't breed so much," I complained, with the usual non-breeder's indifference to the fate of humanity.
"Your wages are tainted, stolen by taxpayers from business, who steals its money from honest citizens, who earned their money on land stolen from native—"
"I sort of get the point," I cut him off. "You're saying I might as well get the money, even if I don't deserve it, because no one else does, either."
"The Dalai Lama couldn't have said it better," said the voice.
With that justification in my pocket, I returned to the search. I soon came across a small cash box half-hidden under a soggy shirt.
"What's that?" the voice asked.
"Right idea, wrong dimensions," I said. "This isn't big enough to hold what we want it to hold."
"So open it."
That didn't exactly follow from what I said. Maybe the voice wasn't paying attention. But I was a little curious, too. The metallic-olive box didn't share the room's weather-weary patina. On the other hand, I felt a little like Pandora about the spring misery and remorse on the world. I delicately lifted the shirt out of the way and stared at the shiny chrome latch-button.
"It's not rusty," I carped.
"All the better," the voice reasoned.
"But..." I began.
"Yes?"
"It's too pat," I said.
"Like the picture of your father, like this audio visual set-up? Pat clues result in a pat answers."
I wished to hell I knew who was speaking, the better to arrange his demise. I lifted the box and held it up. "Look! Lunch!"
"Get on with it."
There being no clean spot where I could sit down and put the box on my knees, I rested it on a window ledge.
"Don't drop it in the river," the voice nitpicked.
I found the notion curiously appealing. It would be like God stumbling halfway through Creation and dropping the ball. My situation wasn't quite so elevated, but it was easy to imagine a choir of angels belting out a blasphemous chorus if I nudged the box too close to the edge.
"What if it's locked?" I said.
"Why don't you find out if it's locked before you raise such a question?" The voice was irate. "Do you make it a habit of creating problems where none exist?"
"Well, yeah..." I shrugged. "You could also call it 'contingency planning'."
I pressed on the button. It didn't budge. "It's locked."
"Try sliding it sideways," instructed the voice.
I tried.
"It's locked," I repeated.
"Find the key."
"A key for this would be the size of a nickel," I protested, viewing with repugnance the seminal sludge I would have to sift through.
"Look for anything bright and shiny," the voice insisted. "You have enough light."
Bright and shiny...was he kidding? In the sharp down-angle of the arc lights the floor spangled with chewing gum foil, Trojan wrappers and reflective bubbles of goo. I returned to the box and pressed the button harder, in every which direction.
"I thought you said it was locked," said the voice.
"It still is," I said with that hopeless slacker defeatism inherent in my station in life.
"Stop slumping," the voice ordered.
"What are you, Miss Manners?"
"I mean you give up too easily." The voice became less strident in an attempt to lure me with sweet reason. "You don't want to be a loser all your life, do you?" Then, for a moment, it slipped into a confiding mode: "I know what that mindset is like. It gets you nowhere, and nowhere is no fun."
"I've done okay by it so far," I said.
An apoplectic series of gasps came over the speaker. Like all sweets, reason was ephemeral and lacked nutrition. A beefy haunch of wild optimism was what was called for, I supposed.
"You don't like it, you can lump it," I declaimed, raising the box and aiming it at the river. I knew I wasn't going to throw it, but the man at the microphone didn't.
"Don't!" the voice cried out.
"Why not?" I asked.
"Bring the box to me," the voice said. "We can open it together."
Suddenly the box, which had seemed inadequate to the dreams foisted upon it, seemed precious and irreplaceable. I drew back from the window and cradled it protectively in my arms. As it tilted against my chest, I spotted the key taped to the bottom.
"Damn, why didn't you tell me about this?" I swore, angered by the pointless gamesmanship. I tore off the key and held it up in the direction of the camera.
"Why am I supposed to tell you everything?" said the voice, filled with relief that I hadn't dumped the box out the window, but growing tense again when I placed it back on the ledge. "Careful..."
"You be careful," I spat as I inserted the key in the lock.
Whoever you are.
My wit dissolved when I saw the bundle inside the box. It wasn't as much cash as I had been hoping for, but was plenty enough to pique my interest. Below it were some legal-looking papers, some of them powder blue. What lay beneath those papers was something just as interesting as money. Actually, far more interesting.
A photograph strategically placed to be the first thing seen lay on top. I lifted it out and stared.
"Well?" said the voice.
I held it up.
"You're too far away."
Tiptoeing across the sludge, I advanced several yards towards the camera and stopped.
"Closer."
I obeyed.
"What is that?" the voice asked uncertainly.
"A snapshot," I said.
"I can see that. But what..."
I took a few more steps.
"That's..." said the voice.
"Yeah," I said. "That's—"
The lights went out and the voice vanished.
CHAPTER 17
"Sure's amazing what they can do with those head boxes these days," Flint Dementis shrugged at the pictures we placed before him. I found his analogy to computers unsettlingly apt.
"But...that's Doubletalk," said Barbara, pointing at a childhood picture of Jeremy.
"And...that's Doubletalk," I said, pointing at the boy standing next to Jeremy.
Flint ran his stalk-dry hand over his week-old beard. It sounded like two pieces of sandpaper rasped together. "You ever see that movie where they show Nixon buggering Kissinger?"
"There's no such movie," I protested.
"It amounted to the same thing, something too ugly to imagine." Flint cocked his head at the picture. "Like that."
"Doubletalk isn't ugly," Barbara said. There was something definitely screwy about her. So far as I knew, all sisters considered their brothers dogs, and vice versa.
"Two of them are," the old fart answered, backing away from the table. "It's not real."
"But these were taken over twenty years ago." Barbara fanned out the half-dozen photos from the cash box. There was no question about the identity. Even as a child, Jeremy had worn a permanent smirk that invited a punch in the mouth for anyone daring enough to attempt it. We were confronted with dual smirks, unpleasantly crumpled half-moons cratered by dimples at either end. You just knew these kids had something up their sleeves, even if they were too dumb to know it. Barbara continued: "I don't think they had anything but real pictures back then."
"You don't know much about the truth, do you, Sweet Tooth?" Flint pumped his arm, as though drawing down a viewing screen. "They've been faking pictures since Instamatic. All those UFO's and Big Foot. That Vietnam photo of that girl running naked down the street? She was laughing, and they made it tears."
"Uhmmm," Barbara said doubtfully.
"All those pictures of Neil Armstrong on the Moon?" I said, pushing a joke without expecting a response.
"Fake," Flint asserted.
Barbara shot me a look. Our antique neighbor believed nothing unless he saw it first-hand, with his own eyes. By this criteria, 99% of the evidence for our shared history and continued existence was bogus. Like most philosophical platforms, it was perfectly useless. But in this case it was possible. Even I knew scanning and doctoring old pictures was commonplace. The question was why someone would go to all the trouble to make twins out of Jeremy?
Flint did not know that, besides the pictures, the cash box had been spiced with $20,000. Our benefactor was whetting our appetites, giving us plenty of incentive to continue the hunt. At the moment the money was resting in Barbara's handbag. We told Flint we had found the pictures in my house. Did the McPherson clan have a secret history?
"Every family has secrets," the old vet continued. "But not secrets like this. Back when you were kids, everyone knew everyone on Oregon Hill. We would've known if there were two Jeremys."
He had a hard time matching his words to his wrinkles. He said he was doubtful, but the crosshatch of his face twisted not just with surprise, but awareness.
"That's not true," I said. "No one around here knew about your mother, right?"
"What are you thinking?" Barbara chimed in, catching the same division between what he said and what he knew.
"Nothing," said the Vietnam vet.
I had no doubt that Flint Dementis was the original blank slate, but right now it was obvious something had been scribbled across his mind.
It had been an unnerving night, the final nerve unstrung when the voice in the hydroelectric station went inexplicably silent and darkness blocked my path. I spent a few moments listening to my echo as I pleaded with the man to turn the spots back on.
I had entered the plant in the dark, and I would leave in the dark, once my eyes grew accustomed to it again. Splashing my way through the slime, I worked my way to the back of the upper story, facing the island and Barbara's frantically waving light. I spent several minutes scraping my shoe against the doorframe before venturing out onto the narrow culvert. It was a dangerous enough prospect without skating on a thick layer of genomic ooze. The whole way Barbara filled the air with hushed warnings and threatening hisses. She had caught a glimpse of the arc halo at the back of the plant and couldn't hold her water to find out what had happened. The box drew me off balance. Between that and Barbara's frantic hoopla I nearly fell into the canal.
Once across, I had to deal with my sister clawing at me and the box for a look inside. She gaped at the pictures of duplicate Jeremys, beamed at the wad of cash, and frowned with concern at the papers, neatly bound in a stiff powder-blue cover.
"It's a deed," I said, lifting the edge and glancing at the first page.
"Yeah?" said Barbara, stuffing the money in her purse.
There were several ways off the island, but at night there were only two neck-safe options: the way we had come, and the short maintenance bridge leading to Southside. The problem being, once we were off Belle Isle, where could we go? We had to assume my house was being watched, so we couldn't go to Barbara's car, which was parked out front. There was only one other place within reasonable walking distance where we could go to study our find.
Barbara wasn't too keen on my plan, which was to return to the north shore, follow the mountain bike trail to Hollywood Cemetery, and come up on Pine Street and Flint's house—all in the dark. But when I suggested Carl and Dog might be waiting for us at my house, she gulped down the bullet. She knew it was a real possibility because she was the one who had stupidly brought them into the game.
We crossed the footbridge and found our way to the bike trail, following it until we came to a huge gap that had been torn through the chain link fence separating the trail from the cemetery. Since discreet entrances are de rigour with trespassers, I assumed it was the graveyard groundskeepers, and not kids, who had rammed a bulldozer through the fence near the river. It's SOP for hands-on folks to tear down inconvenient theoretical constructs, and the fence had proved an impractical barrier to removing excess earth. After leaving the trail, Barbara and I clambered over a few large mounds and found ourselves in the midst of a host of defunct Confederate notables, among others. We had no sooner passed our first grave when my sister got the shakes.
"This isn't a place for people with weight on their brains," she said.
I had strong doubts about any accumulation of weighty matter in her head, and she probably wasn't referring to cerebral wrecking balls caroming off her brain stem. She had twisted her guilt into a knotty conundrum. It used to be that if you screwed around beyond reason you were by definition 'bad'. No question about it. We're probably just dodging the issue by raising a troubled conscience to the platform of valid options. Really, we all suck, and we know it. And for some people the moment of truth comes when they confront the dead.
"They're not watching," I said, nodding at a cluster of headstones showing dimly in the moonlight. Stumpy ghosts, more like kids getting ready to yell 'trick or treat!' than the slated dead.
"You don't know," Barbara hissed lowly.
I shifted the box to my left hand and held out my right to help guide her past Joe Blown. She didn't see my hand or the tombstone and banged her knee painfully.
"Ouch! See? They're getting back at me."
"What crap," I answered. "They don't punish you for your sins."
"They punish you for having too much fun," Barbara said, rubbing her shin vigorously. "Oh, there'll be a bruise."
"Not the first," I said, figuring the remark would fly over her head. My misjudgment was rewarded with a stiff jab. "Anyway," I continued, trying to rub my arm in spite of the box, "to this crowd just being alive is fun. I mean, if there were any active brains around, of which I see only one."
"Don't you think anyone or anything sees what we're really like?" Barbara was going little-girl on me, complete with a trepidation-filled squeaky voice.
"What, that we're the walking dead?"
"I mean our souls, Mute. If nothing sees into our souls, it's like we never existed. Something has to write down what we were while we were here."
"In a graveyard?" I said.
"On earth."
"Well..." I speculated as I shifted past an angel wielding a sword, granite with a vengeance. "You can't count God out, I guess."
"You can if you don't believe in him."
"Okay," I admitted with easy secularity. "But then you're left with an all-seeing body scan that X-rays your soul. Do you prefer that?"
"I don't know what you're talking about," Barbara shivered. I didn't offer any mental demerits. I didn't know what I was talking about, either. She continued: "These people know about life and death. They learned what counts for and against you in the..."
"Hereafter?"
"Yeah."
'These people.' She was acting as if we were in a coliseum chock-full of rabid preachers. 'These people' in the not-so-
sweet hereafter had not gotten the one thing they most wanted in life, which was not to die, and that had somehow made them masters of theological speculation. And judges. I wanted to shrug off the idea and focus on getting through Hollywood Cemetery without adding my bones to the skeleton crew. This place was haunted, all right. A million chuckholes threatened our ankles, headstones ranging in size from notepads to small airplanes leaned threateningly in our direction, tree branches and bushes snagged and unthreaded our clothes and skin, and a fair number of feral something-or-others darted across our path, bearing fear and malice in equal portions and armed to the teeth with teeth. Nice chewy humans, yum.
Barbara seemed intent on adding angst to our impediments. She made little mewing sounds, inarticulate pleas for forgiveness. Then she began to mumble. After a minute of this I began to make out a word here and there and realized she was reciting her crimes and misdemeanors. I listened with growing disbelief, until she said something that hauled me down in my tracks.
"You did what?"
"I enjoyed my misery too much," she responded.
"I mean, what was it you just said about...did you say something about stuffed rubbers?"
I sensed a wave of sheepishness flowing out of the dark from her direction. Maybe she was mistaking me for one of the all-seeing dearly departed.
"I'm not a hooker," she said.
"Sure."
"But sometimes...you know...when I'm in a bind..."
"You conduct a mutually satisfying financial transaction," I prompted.
"I guess you could say that."
"I am saying it."
"Well, there's this one guy who wraps his yinyang in hundred dollar bills and stuffs it all in a rubber before—"
"I'm getting the picture," I said through a wave of nausea. "And you get a kick out of that?"
"It's fantastic!" she shouted, belching with laughter which she quickly throttled when she remembered where we were. "Sorry," she whispered to the dead, like a comic who had dropped his punchline in front of a tough crowd.
I tried not to picture Barbara unrolling gooey C-notes from a used rubber. "Are you finished with your confession?" I asked warily.
Skunk Hunt Page 23