Skunk Hunt

by J. Clayton Rogers

  "I mean a real cartoon beard, with a point."

  Oddly enough, I did recall that beard, and Todd and I had been talking a little about the man behind it only a couple of hours ago. I realized now that Dr. Whacko stuck in my mind because it was one of the few times—perhaps the only time—that I had seen Skunk try to reason someone out of his house instead of simply chasing him out the door. It was before Jeremy's time, but if Barbara had been here she might have remembered the stranger, too. I summoned an impression of a dormant weasel suddenly waking up and trying (sleepily) to solve the riddle of his surroundings. If my parents' reaction to him was any indication, he was a pest who was chronically indisposed to take 'no' for an answer, or even as an option. He gave us kids the willies, because he was always approaching us with candy canes and a creepy smile. I hate candy canes. Give me chocolate, every time. And blood-sucking needles? Forget 'em!

  But wait...he had also given us ice cream....

  I spent so much time researching my navel that my audience began to grumble, sort of like hard-core Grateful Deaders compressing their bladders during the Captain and Tennille warm-up.

  "You remember," Mom nodded with the kind of marvelous self-confidence that had alienated me from most of mankind. I was looking at a perfect negative of the downtrodden creature I had known as a child. "But do you remember his name?"

  "Dr. Whacko."

  "That's what you and Sweet Tooth called him. He was a professor at UVA or URA or..." Mom's higher education petered out quickly. "One of those big places. You know, with their own basketball teams."

  Marvin was rolling his eyes. The University of Richmond being home to the Cavalier Assholes, I marked him as a recent graduate. "You mind, Mrs. Neerson? I did a little googling on this."

  Neerson, Neerson, Neerson...the name on the will. So Winny had moved out here with Mom and changed his name.

  The inherent goofiness of the word 'googling' drew a smirk from Mom. Here was a nice little set-piece in mockery. There wasn't much difference between scorning someone for being stupid or for being too smart. I guess they met in the middle.

  "Dr. Whacko was Dr. Archibald Penrose, head of the Twain Monozygotic and Dizygotic Research Institute."

  "Wow," I said in the most banal tone I could summon: my natural voice.

  "It's a mouthful," Marvin granted.

  "And why would he be visiting our—" I experienced a mental hiccup and looked at Todd.

  "Bingo."

  "Nyet," I protested. "If I remember Whacko, I would remember Todd, don't you think?"

  The conversation seemed to be giving Yvonne a pain in the side. She leaned away from Jeremy and was digging her fingers into the fold of her blouse, or maybe a body crevice. I tried to remember if she had a rash when I was with her and thankfully realized I had banished all trace of her naked body from my mind.

  Something Mom said diverted me from the overinflated mermaid on the couch.

  "He was studying twins, " Mom said to Marvin.

  "Monozygotic, that's what I said," the zit machine responded dorkily.

  "Wai-wai-wait," I held up a hand. "Todd wasn't living on Oregon Hill when Whacko was around. How could he know about the two of us?"

  Marvin began to answer. I cut him short with a remarkably effective snarl. "My mother can talk for herself." Boy, standing up for Mom. A new low. But I wasn't sure she could explain her past…our pasts. She seemed awfully tongue-tied, and in no fit state for oral history.

  "Well, there was the hospital record," she said slowly, warily—the same way she used to talk to Skunk. And for the first time I sensed her dread of me. I had known for quite some time that withholding information imparted its own peculiar form of empowerment. But in this case the knowledge was more lethal to me than to anyone else, if you excluded Dog and his owner.

  The big drawback to knowing too much is that you never really know as much as others think you know. I thought I knew where Skunk had hidden a great deal of loot, but I had no idea how or when it had gotten there, and that gap left me wide open. Would Mom—and Marvin, apparently—have the patience to answer my questions?

  "I'm too tired," said Mom, who was still an expert on reading my facial expressions. I countered this with a look Marvin's way. Mom acknowledged the threat with a long sigh. Marvin seemed ready and willing to give me his spin on the McPherson family skeletons, a prospect she found distasteful and maybe frightening.

  "Well, I am your mother," she said. "Your blood mother—if that's so important to you."

  Actually, it wasn't. In my narrow focus, I believed I could have popped out of anywomb and been the same me as me. I mean, I really didn't have the energy or mental wherewithal to be anyone else. I didn't like the way Mom used 'blood' instead of 'biological'. The more seemly word was probably beyond her vocabulary, but she made me sound like a mess she had had to mop off the kitchen floor.

  "I'm choosing to believe you," I relented, with a caveat: "I believe you the same way I believed you were dead."

  "You think I'm lying?"

  "I don't know," I said. "But anyone can believe any lie, so it doesn't matter, right?"

  The channel of weary sorrow that formed in her brow when the subject of Whacko was raised deepened. But she had always known I was a bad egg. My disbelief didn't surprise her, and the sorrow belonged to something else.

  "What about Winny Marteen? Or should I say 'Benjamin Neeerson?' Todd showed me a picture of the two of you..." I scrounged around for a euphemism for marriage, which suddenly sounded like a dirty word. "You looked like my parents."

  "Don't show me a gloomy face," she spat. "I lost two husbands in one day. In one minute."

  Marvin, on the verge of jumping in with two more cents, abruptly withdrew them from the community bank and fell silent.

  Being less than cognizant of moral standards—I grew up on old Oregon Hill, after all—I let slide this inferred admission that my mother had been married to two men at the same time. Questioning the legality of the marriages was moot. Most of the couples I had known as a kid had never seen the interior of a church—or of City Hall, for that matter. After Skunk's death I had flipped through the meager documentation of his life and did not find so much as a birth certificate in our house. I was surprised, though, to discover that he had taken some vocational courses in prison, and was an accredited plumber. Seeing as our house had a hundred leaks, it would appear his training was more theoretical than applied.

  I couldn't picture Winny running off with the alleged Mrs. McPherson, Skunk explaining away her disappearance with a phony suicide—which was kind of cruel, come to think on it. No one took anything from Skunk, least of all his wife and the mother of his children, without some serious hurt being involved. Not only that, but Winny had lived just up the street from us, in a ratty old house even more dilapidated than our own.

  It had not dawned on me that Winny had moved off the Hill, because he continued to play the on-again, off-again role of Skunk's shadow. His disappearances coincided with my father's, and I had assumed they were sharing a cell in a state or local prison. But now I knew he was spending much of that time here, in this house, with this woman and my creepy lookalike.

  Mom was all cooked up. Her low-class attitude burned through her respectable makeup, like the bottom of a trash heap catching fire.

  "What I've done for you, all I've done for you, everything, and this is how you behave?"

  It would probably have been rude to point out that, for all her redundancy, she had done nothing for me for over fifteen years, unless abandonment had become a virtue.

  She astutely mitted my unspoken rebuke. "You don't know, you can't know.

  True, I didn't know, couldn't know and wasn't all that sure I wanted to know. But curiosity is a pernicious little cuss. Combined with the fact that what I didn't know could kill me, asking Mom to throw a little light on the situation couldn't hurt. I wasn't going to go so far as to ask if she had breast fed me, but close enough to draw milk. That she had brought
up the memory of Professor Penrose told me he was central to the mystery.

  "So why would Dr. Whacko be so interested in me and Todd? Which reminds me, you haven't explained how he knew about Todd. But there are twins born every day. We're not all that rare, right? What made us so special?"

  Mom wasn't sneering. Actually, she seemed to have a toothache—particularly in one of her incisors. She tapped her front teeth with her tongue, as though desperately trying to attain dental nirvana. Interpreting this torment was beyond my feeble social skills, and I turned to the others for suggestive reactions. Marvin, having been reminded of his role as a serial husband killer, retreated behind his pimples, from where he was probably tracing new fields of fire. Uncle Vern was silently wallowing, though whether in a sea of sympathy or contempt it was impossible to say. Jeremy was still choking down Mom's reappearance in the real world to bother with her behavior. She could have stretched out for a nap or danced on her hands and he would have continued to drip with saline imbecility. I guessed it was pretty hot sitting next to that bulky furnace of flesh. Yvonne was stoking herself with hard labor, pulling out fistfuls of fabric as she groped at her waist. Maybe a rash had developed after our little entre nuts. Maybe I (or my unhealthy environment) had given it to her. Oops.

  Of course, in lieu of a mirror, the one I studied most was Todd. He should have provided the best template of how I looked and how I should rearrange that look. But he looked to be nodding off. All things considered, that looked to be the best reaction of all. Then I felt my own eyes grow heavy. It had been a long day for all of us, but sleep was out of proportion to the emergency.

  "Your mother is trying to tell you that this is all much more complicated than you can imagine," said Uncle Vern.

  "Than I can imagine?" I said. "I think you're drastically underestimating my imagination. I can imagine Liz Taylor with Mr. Ed, a space station on the head of a pin, reading War and Peace in a single lunch break—"

  Uncle Vern raised a civilized hand. "None of which are imaginable, but I see your point. I think your mother is trying to protect you—"

  "By keeping me in the dark?" I leaned towards Mom with an aching eye. "Is that it? You want to keep your darling son out of the hoosegow?"

  Jeremy gave a cough and studied his cuticles.

  "Well, keep one of us out, at least," I shrugged.

  "Can't you grant me even a little credit?" Mom pleaded, removing her teeth from her lip.

  "I guess not," I said, adding an explanation: "Giving credit where it's due goes against my genetic inheritance."

  Todd roused himself out of his stupor. "Genetic..."

  "What did Skunk tell you?" Marvin demanded. He might be a crackerjack killer, but he was still at heart a cyberkid, demanding lightspeed gratification to outstanding questions, like the copulation count for particular movie stars and which episode of Star Trek guest-starred William Windom. The important stuff.

  Why not? We had to start somewhere beyond the nowhere we were currently inhabiting.

  "Skunk told me..."

  Ooh boy, they all leaned forward. That was pretty cool. Yvonne managed to stop toying with the white folds of her belly to participate in the mass hypnosis.

  "A few months before he died, Skunk told me that if I was ever strapped for money, he knew where I could dig up an easy million."

  "'Dig up'?" Mom asked sharply. "That's the word he used?"

  "He said I would need a shovel," I elaborated.

  "There goes my bus locker theory," Marvin sniffed. I didn't see what he was complaining about. He could legitimately claim he was handicapped and dodge the hard labor.

  "Shit, Mute, you're saying you just sat on a million all that time?" The concept was so far beyond Jeremy his brain slammed through a plate glass window.

  "What would I do with it?" was my saintly reasoning, and we all know the saints were complete idiots.

  Let's face it, psychology evolved with biology, making the hard science soft-headed, especially when the mind is confronted by nonsensical facts. It struck me that there was a certain degree of stupefaction mingled with all this avarice and I wondered if there was a need to pare my story down to numb basics. These days, most people are drugged out as a matter of course—at a minimum, Prozac or its multiple analogs. That would be Todd, nodding off again in the face of a million whoppers. Maybe Mom, too, by virtue of her generation—it used to be genteel ladies and their port toddies. Yvonne must be hyped up on diet pills, which obviously did her no good to the purpose, but gave her enough metabolic wherewithal to move her limbs. Jeremy I figured for oxycontin, hillbilly heroin, while Marvin's bloodstream was probably loaded with a rainbow of narcotics especially designed to block pain and various other thought processes. Only Uncle Vern was clean, although he no doubt was gasping for a cocktail. Personally, I could have done with another beer.

  Naturally, this led me to speculate about the fate of white civilization, but I would have to reserve my conclusions for a later time.

  "One day, while I was clipping Skunk's toenails—"

  "Oh shit," Jeremy moaned, covering his face.

  Graphic detail overload, right.

  "One day, Skunk asked me if I would be willing to wipe his ass when he went old and gaga—"

  "Oh God," Marvin cried.

  Jesus, these people had no talent for particulars.

  "Mu-u-te," said Mom. Her ability to stretch a single syllable word into a triad startled me. It was as if she had reserved her paternal no-nonsense for this very moment. She had certainly never used it before. That had been one of the highlights of my childhood: freedom from mouth-to-mouth moralizing from my mother. She slacked, and we slacked along with her. Our only other immediate role model was Skunk. 'Nuff said.

  "Cm'on, cm'on, cm'on."

  Todd's sleepy nonchalance supplied a nice contrast to Marvin's antsy impatience. His guilt over killing our fathers lasted as long as one of his farts.

  "So we have to dig," he persisted. "Where?"

  "Is the 'where' the real reason why you haven't gone after it?" Uncle Vern said cagily. There was something militant about his expression, as though he regularly brought down entire flocks of angels. For my money—such as it was—he was the most civilized man in the room. Almost a gentleman, even.

  Jeremy let out a gasp of relief. My apparent indifference to Skunk's cache had given him mental cramps. "So that's it. Where is it buried? In a baseball park? Like Jimmy Hoffa?"

  "We're not talking about digging up corpses," said Todd queasily.

  "So this would be easier," said Jeremy with idiotic authority, as if burying great sums of money was old hat for him.

  "That's an urban legend," said Uncle Vern. "Nobody knows where Hoffa ended up."

  Todd drifted off into mental self-amusement, which is one step short of jerking off. He had never been broke—Mom had seen to that, I supposed. All his needs had been granted. But the person who had granted those needs knew the value of a buck and was ready to pull out her rack and thumbscrews. The blowsy mother of my youth had become an iron maiden. I was tempted to point this out to her—hell, to everyone. See what money does to you? But my audience would want statistical evidence. To prove my theorem, I would have to put the money in their hands.

  "It might as well be in a baseball field," I said. "Skunk buried it at a drive-in."

  "An outdoor movie theater?" said Uncle Vern. "I thought those were extinct."

  "I guess not," I shrugged. "We can't go at night, because it'll be open for business."

  "Not all night," said Marvin.

  "Anyway, we can't go during the day because it's out in the open," I continued. "And it's far away, too."

  "How far?" demanded Jeremy.

  "West Virginia, in a no-place called Bartow."

  "That's not so horribly far away," Uncle Vern said.

  But my mother and Jeremy were taken aback. Oregon Hill had been home to hundreds of West Virginians who had come down from the high ridges in search of work at the Tred
egar Iron Works. Most people don't know the factory held on after the Civil War, and was a working foundry through the end of World War II. When the place finally folded, or rusted, the Hill and its transplanted hillbillies remained. So far as I knew, not one returned to their ancestral shack in the mountains. They had lost the ability to uproot themselves, and West Virginia became a mythical outpost on the dark side of the Moon. Not a homeland to return to but a cold harsh planetoid no one in their right mind would even visit. The very mention sent shudders down our spines. West Virginia was good for a joke—a lot of jokes, actually—but that was all. I was pretty amazed when Skunk told me he had buried his loot out there. He must have figured it was the one place no one would find it, because no one wanted to go there. Mom and Jeremy reacted as though they had ordered scrambled eggs, only to be served rotten yolks.

  Marvin had taken out his phone.

  "Who are you calling?" my mother asked warily.

  "No one. I'm checking Bartow on my GPS."

  "What's that?" she asked.

  "The same tech stuff everyone's been using to track everyone up to now," Jeremy said sourly, forgetting to look in the mirror.

  Marvin punched some buttons and studied his small screen. "Hell, it's not even 200 miles straight up Route 250. We can get there in four hours…less, if we use the interstate.

  "Past Charlottesville," my mother said weakly. I think her mental map of Virginia cut off at that point. Unless, of course, she knew the lat and longe of Bartow to within an inch—which would make sense....

  "Past Staunton," Jeremy affirmed with knowledge no doubt garnered from a visit to a state prison in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

  "Past Puketown," said Marvin, snapping his phone shut. "But for the money we're talking about, I'd walk through—"

  "You're all under arrest!"

  Yvonne's announcement was premature. She was only halfway to her feet, and had only halfway drawn a gun out of a body crevice deep enough to hide a holster. She huffed and puffed and almost succeeded in unraveling herself from the couch when Jeremy snagged hold of her and dragged her back down.