Skunk Hunt

by J. Clayton Rogers

  Mom emerged slowly, almost wonderingly. It dawned on me that, if you were going to waste a childhood, you could find no better place. I didn't know where Mom had grown up. I was sure that if we had had a scrap album, the opening pages would have been blank. Skunk had never discussed his more distant past, and I was sure Mom was just as reluctant to dredge up memories of coon dogs and moonshine. Of course, these might be the conceits of a citified hick who couldn't imagine life without a local library and a continuous supply of cheese doodles.

  I went over to her.

  "You grew up here, didn't you?"

  "Yes," she said, a little sourly, a little dreamily. But what little magic there was in the moment was dispersed when she added: "When the sun comes up, you'll see what a shithole it is."

  One of the consistencies between the Oregon Hill of the past and the Oregon Hill of today was the fuckabulary, but Mom had never mined the cheap lode of trash talk. I guess she was trying to set an example for me, Doubletalk and Sweet Tooth. And it worked—for me, at least. I rarely ventured beyond tepid 'hell's and 'damn's. I decided that the good life in the West End had loosened her inhibitions. Todd must have benefited from a real home education.

  None of us was inclined to wait for sunrise to confirm Mom's assessment of her childhood home. I started to tell Jeremy we needed to get the lead out, then it dawned on me it wasn't Jeremy I was talking to. He was holding his sore jaw, where Jeremy had punched him.

  "What's your name again?" I asked dourly, reluctant to assign him a marginal human existence, let alone a McPherson identity.

  "Michael Schwinn."

  "Schwinn. That's the name of the family who raised you?"

  "What do you think?"

  "Did they do a good job of it? Raising you?"

  "I'm a private detective, aren't I? They even paid for some of my online courses with the Global School of Investigation."

  "They funded your dick degree?"

  I should have known better. If I had learned anything over the past few days, it was that twins are the barrier reef of existence. Get too close and your hull gets smashed. The tame geek Michael had portrayed when he conned us at Starbucks was identical to Jeremy in everything but name. And yes, Jeremy too would have peed his pants when the sniper winged a close one on Route 6. These two could handle their antagonists face to face, but foes hidden and distant made them dizzy with fear.

  Michael's fist zeroed in on my left shoulder and with uncanny accuracy struck the very spot Jeremy always chose to show his wit. I felt like a scientific experiment used to prove pigeons from generation to generation always knew where to roost. Through my howl I heard Todd sniggering. Boy, would he get his….

  Uncle Vern pulled a shovel from out of the van. Where it had been hidden was anyone's guess, but I was sorry there weren't two. Having spent so much of my life at the bottom of the pecking order, I didn't need to be Bertrand Russell to logic out who would get stuck with it. And wasn't that old prick the author of a famous paper on the meaning of 'the'. 'The old prick', 'the author', 'the famous paper'. How meaningless is that?

  I chose that moment, as the pain in my arm subsided, to dwell on the fact that I had not shown due sorrow over the deaths of Carl Ksnip and Dog….

  "Okay," I said. "Let's get going. Anybody got a flashlight?"

  Bowing to the inevitable, Uncle Vern pulled out two megaton flashlights that produced thermonuclear bursts when he tested them. I wondered if his hidden chest of tricks included an ever-useful Uzi. I would use it in a heartbeat against the pitbull bloodhounds howling at us from somewhere up the road.

  I noticed he did not bring out the gun I had used against the Congreves. No more bullets?

  Uncle Vern killed the van lights and switched off his engine. He spent an uneasy moment deciding who would get the second flashlight. I would have thought Marvin would be his first choice, but in a situation like this light could be a weapon, and he wasn't so sure of his nephew. He finally handed the second flashlight to my mother. It turned out not to be the best choice, and not only because I would have preferred to have it myself.

  Uncle Vern shined a beam across the road. He spoke for us all when he said: "I feel our luck slipping away."

  What had once been a drive-in theater was now a drive-thru derelict cluttered with junked cars and a shack I could only hope no one lived in, although it might be pretty tony for the neighborhood.

  "Why hasn't this place been condemned?" said Yvonne. A pretty dumb question from someone whose own career had been condemned by her complex mind-body issues. "That screen could fall on us."

  It would have been the equivalent of a cliff sliding off and burying a party of daytrippers, a perfectly feasible disaster-comedy. A faint breeze—and I mean very faint—sent the screen rocking in a swirling figure 8, like some near-sighted woman pushing her old husband's wheelchair. Maybe the car heaps had been placed down below to save the cost of crushing. And since no one knew in which direction the screen would fall, the cars had been distributed at all points of the compass.

  "It's a junkyard," Marvin moaned.

  "A museum," Jeremy amended. I had forgotten he had a yen for old cars.

  I was briefly blinded by a slash of light across my face. Mom had switched on her flashlight. Instead of aiming it at the drive-in, she was rounding like a searchlight, showing the beam on her childhood.

  "Lookee down there," she said wonderingly. "That was Madge Woodkins house. Looks like the Starlight took it over…then dropped it."

  A two-story wood frame, more or less white, and more or less still lived in, if the cars in the driveway meant anything.

  "Like you want to draw more attention to us, Mom?"

  Hearing Todd call Mom 'Mom' was like having your worst enemy discover your cache of Playboys. I would have given him the old eye-glare, but I was still half-blind from the X-ray Mom had performed on my retinas.

  From habit, we looked both ways before crossing the road, like a group of school kids being escorted by nuns. There was as much traffic here as in the Sahara. I think we were all in awe of the emptiness of the place, the desolation of what was alleged to be a human habitation. I recalled the time I traversed Hollywood Cemetery with Sweet Tooth. The feeling was the same, sans the Confederate dead looking on from their graves.

  "This is so cool," said Marvin.

  We all stopped and looked at him—except Mom, who was still flashing our presence to all and sundry (especially dogs) in the area.

  "What's so cool about it?" Michael demanded.

  "A treasure hunt in the middle of…this. What's not to love?"

  "Your stupid ass, for one." Michael had the McPherson twitch down pat. He was one of us, God help us.

  "Repeat that to me when we count out the jewels," Marvin smirked.

  We paused by the old concession, a square brick function-palace that had once taken in money and excreted popcorn and greasy hot dogs. I began to drool. Uncle Vern poked his beam at a broken window. Inside were benches and a frame-twisted motorcycle straight out of The Wild One, adorned with cobwebs.

  "You were conceived here." Mom's voice was so freighted with lust it dripped off the wall. She played her light up and down over the screen. In and out, so to speak. "I mean, both of you were."

  "Eeee-www," said Todd.

  "We were watching The Vanishing Point, and we got kind of bored."

  This was the first time I had ever heard my mother make a cultural reference.

  "Eeee-www," I said.

  "So you really had the hots for Dad?" said Jeremy, stunned and stupid as usual.

  "Why wouldn't you think so?" she demanded.

  "Well…it never showed at home."

  "That was home. This was now."

  Todd and I exchanged glances of extreme creepipitude.

  "So the Bartow Drive-in was in business twenty-three years ago," Uncle Vern observed. "That's good to know."

  "Why?" I asked.

  "Because it confirms…"

  "Confirms wha
t?"

  "Shall we proceed?"

  The intensity of Uncle Vern's unhelpfulness was giving me a headache. There was no doubt he was the active principle here. If he suddenly walked away, I'm sure most of us would have joined him. Marvin might have raised a fuss—he was enjoying himself, for some lame-brained reason. The rest of us were so dismal, so lacking in the spirit of adventure, that going home looked like the next best option. No, Uncle Vern wasn't happy about the dark, or the place, and the fact that the dark place was very changed from the way it had been described to him. He was operating on sheer willpower. He had spent a lot of time and effort on this enterprise, as I knew first-hand. He must be totally fed up with this canned comedy and its odd cast of characters. Yet now, at this endgame, it would be plain stupid to let up. Not only that—Marvin would never let him live it down if he abandoned the treasure hunt now.

  Bartow Drive-in might have been defunct for less than a quarter of a century, but it looked as if it had been trashed by William Tecumseh Sherman his very own self. We were close enough now that all the creaking and moaning of the trusses sounded over our heads.

  "That's Meg Tawthorne's place," Mom growled lowly. She was shining her light at a shabby line of trees beyond which I presumed was the house in question. There was an adversarial quality in her tone. Meg and Mom had been competitors. I thought I smelled a skunk. But it was irrelevant to the task at hand. At any point in her 45-ish years she could have taken a day trip out here to verify old memories. But she was choosing now, of all times, in the impractical darkness, to stir up her youth. I hadn't known her maiden name until this evening (shame on me!), but she was definitely betraying some McPherson impracticality.

  "Where is it, Mute?" Uncle Vern was sensible enough not to turn his light on my face as I turned to him. Standing behind the spot like that, he became an accusatory shadow-man. He could have been my conscience. Where is it, Mute? Where is…everything? Why didn't you come to Bartow years ago, as soon as Skunk told you where the (what I had assumed) the Brinks money was? And yes, I was still clipping his toenails at twenty-four. A son's duty doesn't end with maturity, and trimming your father's nails ranks right up there with pushing wheelchairs and pulling the plugs off iron lungs.

  "There are too many things in my head," I complained. "I can't deal with all of this. Truly, I only have two hands and one dick."

  "Got half that right," snapped Jeremy.

  Skunk knew that I was too spineless to dart off to the West Virginia wilds by myself unless ordered by him to do so. But that command had never come. My father seemed content to live on the ill-gotten interest that accrues from criminal investments. Which begged the question: why hadn't he come back to this godforsaken place himself? Why had he arranged the deal that had cost him his life, instead of returning here and digging up his retirement nest egg? I could think of only one reason: that nest egg was somehow contaminated. Had Uncle Vern lost his trust? Did Skunk think he would hock the jewels and skedaddle with the proceeds? That was possible, sure. But the roundabout methods Uncle Vern and Marvin had used to try and scare me into betraying the hiding place hinted at something more complex. It was too bad I hadn't gotten myself into this mess. At least then I would have someone to blame besides a dead man.

  "Are there any poles left?" I said.

  "Poles?" Marvin asked.

  "Yeah, 'poles'." Jeremy snotted himself as he came up next to me. "You don't understand English?" Then he visually took aim at my shoulder, which was still throbbing . "What kind of poles?"

  "He means where they put the speakers," Mom answered. "The ones you hooked on your car door. You could turn the sound way up, or…" Her voice went dreamy. "Turn the sound off. You know, for those little private moments."

  Todd made a gagging sound that I fully concurred with. Skunk out here, busting open the egg that would produce the two of us…all steamy and hot and gooey and Barry Newman pouting moodily on the giant screen, surrounded by hot and steamy woods, the windows fogging up….

  I made a gagging sound.

  "There's some poles," Yvonne said, heaving herself through the narrow lanes of rusting metal. "See? Between the cars."

  "I hope we don't have to push one of these crates out of the way," Marvin said, gearing up his slacker credentials. I might get stuck with the shovel, but it would take several people to move a derelict car, some of which looked pretty immovable. A number of them, in fact, were propped on cinderblocks.

  "A7," said Uncle Vern, reading off the faded lettering on one of the poles. "Legible enough."

  A7 was off-center in the front row. Craning my head up, I felt I was practically pressing my nose against the ravaged screen. Someone watching a movie from this angle would have been confronted by cinematic giants. One of the stains looked like a silhouette of John Wayne in Fort Apache. I could almost imagine the screen soaking up all the movies ever flashed onto its panels, emitting them for history in a halflight.

  "Well?" Uncle Vern persisted. By reading off the pole ID, he must have thought he was priming my pump. But I felt my pump shut down. I know the whole point of bringing me out here had been to let me disclose the last fragment of vital information on-site, with everyone present. If one or a select party of them tried to coerce the location out of me (it wouldn't take much), the others (it was understood by all) would be left out. So they were keeping me alive and healthy for as long as it was necessary to guarantee everyone's so-called rights—excluding Sweet Tooth. But why include Michael Schwinn and Yvonne Kendle? It would have been to Uncle Vern's benefit to leave them roasting in a premeditated car wreck. Weren't they in as much danger as me?

  "Hey!" Yvonne shouted at me. "You want to stop rotating on your stick?"

  "Yeah," said Michael. "Quit jerking off. Tell us the goddamn pole number."

  These weren't comments from people who thought they were on death's doorstep. Just the reverse: that I was on death's doorstep. Why was that so?

  Knock knock. Who's there? Dummy. Dummy who? Dummy Mute, who doesn't see that Michael and Yvonne probably have a certifiable safety net against mortal harm. Something akin to a letter in a safe place, with the envelope reading: "Do not open unless I disappear down a high-powered wood chipper." I had not taken out such an insurance policy. Nor could I fake having one now, not with any credibility. You can take this as evidence of the truthfulness of my story. Only a completely honest idiot would confess such a fault.

  "Hold the light this way," I said to Uncle Vern, pointing to the edge of the lot.

  "Toward the trees?" he said eagerly. "That would make sense. Less chance of being spotted."

  In fact, ever since Mom had pointed her light in the direction of Meg Tawthorne's old house, I had hoped to see signs of life through the trees. A porch light, the sound of a car up a driveway. If Meg still lived there, she would be Mom's age, a hardbitten country girl, prematurely aged and haunted by the twin demons of ignorance and superstition—or so my own ignorance and superstition told me would be the natural result of permanent residence in the hollers. Such a woman would be prey to fears of all the things the scientists up the road had explained away long ago. But there were more parochial dangers that were very real: gnarly moonshiners and clandestine meth lab gauchos moving product by night, greasing palms and slitting throats with equal aplomb. If you didn't mess with them, they would (usually) leave you alone. But if my theoretical observer spotted strange lights in the old drive-in, would she call the sheriff, or leave well enough alone? It was more likely that she wasn't there, awake or asleep. These backwoods hovels are not only primitive, but ephemeral. The hardscrabble life leaves few scars.

  Assuming they were penned or leashed, even the baying hounds would have presented a hopeful sign, except the sound came from the wrong direction.

  I reached the treeline. Everyone but my mother was tagging along, each making sure all revelations were properly shared. Their greedy little eyes swiveled with the light. Every so often a junk car would emit a peep or growl. It was like a la
ndlocked reef, sharks and their prey lurking just out of sight. Feeling very much like a guppy, I gave an authoritative grunt. Guppies don't grunt, you might say. Well, not until now.

  "What?" Jeremy thrusted forward carnivorously. Somehow the shovel had ended up in his hands. He held it out to me.

  "Not here," I said, waving him off.

  "Then why—"

  "I'm just getting my bearings," I said, with a couple grains of truth.

  "What nonsense," said Uncle Vern. "It's a simple A-B-C with a very basic numeric value."

  "There's nothing simple about this." Trapped in Uncle Vern's improvised klieg light, I mimed a theatrical wand over the broad lot. "In case you haven't noticed, some of the poles are missing."

  "Not enough to miss a beat," snickered Marvin, not missing a beat.

  "Shadows…junks…and look, a raccoon!"

  "Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!" laughed Yvonne.

  "I won't answer for your health if you force us to dig up every slot in this drive-in," Uncle Vern said.

  "There's no need to threaten me," I said.

  "Would you rather not be warned?"

  After a moment's reflection, I gave a prudent shake of my head. The inference that my health was a given if I played along offered some comfort. Which brought up a new worry. What if Skunk had been kidding? What if the treasure had already been spent, and I was on a wild skunk hunt?

  I was the kind of chump for whom cautionary labels were invented. I didn't need to be told that it was against Federal regulations to insert air freshener up my rectum, but only because I read the warnings, first.

  Still, every warning detracts from your freedom, and I was as resentful as any freewheeling poodle yanked short by a chain. Maybe my captors were feeling the same way. I'm pretty sure they didn't like dragging after me, dependent on my every whim and dubious memory. Meanwhile, Mom was scrolling her light slowly across the silver screen, lost in its rusty blankness. Was she focusing on fact or fiction? Clark Gable or Skunk McPherson?

  "Mom's lost it," Jeremy said.