Skunk Hunt

by J. Clayton Rogers

  To my utter and complete and perfectly true astonishment, Jeremy stepped forward. "Hey!"

  "Oh, stop the theatrics," Uncle Vern said with a shake of the head. He looked at Monique. "Why didn't you load it?" He pointed the gun in the air and pulled the trigger several times. The click was loud and harmless.

  With the sexiest sheepishness this side of Charlotte Simmons, Monique lifted her bosom and lowered it in camo-covered innocence.

  "You thought the threat would be enough?" Uncle Vern pocketed the gun—no sense throwing away good money—and resumed his stern demeanor. "That doesn't change the terms of my disenchantment."

  "Like hell it doesn't," said Michael, balling his fist.

  Uncle Vern ignored him. "I understand how Sweet Tooth became involved in all of this. It's a family matter, after all. But…" He directed his gaze at Monique. "You're not family."

  "Yes I am," said Monique. "We're married."

  Uncle Vern searched the group for qualified faces: Jeremy, Michael, Todd…and myself. Well, in my dreams….

  "To one of them?" Uncle Vern demanded in a nauseated voice.

  "Or course not. I'm married to Barbara."

  "You've got to be kidding," said Uncle Vern. This was accompanied by a chorus of disbelief from the rest of us, including Yvonne, who pulled her flesh out of range.

  "Why not?" Monique continued saucily, as though explaining away a peppermint kid she had picked up off the street instead of my sister of the female persuasion. "We've known each other for over a year."

  "I don't think that's the point," said Uncle Vern. "Really, I can't believe—"

  Monique stepped over to Barbara and draped an arm around her. "Meet my wife."

  Barbara frowned. "I thought we agreed. You're my wife."

  "It's true?" I squeaked, horrified by the waste of it all. But wait. Didn't this make them virgins? I mean…sort of? That wasn't so bad. Weird, yeah, but….

  Mom shrank away from her daughter and unanticipated daughter-in-law.

  "Oh Mom, boys are so icky!" Barbara fussed. "You should know that, after Skunk."

  "But…what about men?"

  "Never met one," Monique explained.

  I checked out Todd, the closest thing around here to a mirror. I wanted to see my reaction in his face. Which, surprisingly, was perfectly bland.

  Aw crap, I had forgotten. He had slept with Monique, as a reward from Carl for….

  "You," I said.

  Todd's eyebrow went up a notch. "Huh?"

  "Turn out your pockets."

  "Make that a double 'huh'?"

  Uncle Vern caught on quickly. He nodded at Todd. "Marvin…"

  Marvin wasn't sure what was going on, but understood something was up. He looked at Todd. "You heard your identical twin. Show us what's in your pants."

  "Like fun I will." Todd moved back, as if Marvin had asked him to pick up the soap. We all understood that it only sounded perverted because Marvin was an idiot, but Todd took a pose out the Perils of Pauline. Pauline, duly horrified when faced by a mini-gorilla who threatened to transgress her virtue.

  "Oh, stop that," I said, embarrassed for myself.

  It was Monique who threw the game. She was probably a lot less self-possessed than she let on. Acting was part and parcel of the skin trade, I supposed, even if there were some things you just couldn't fake.

  "You don't have to show them anything!" she said.

  Uncle Vern let out a bull moose roar. "Mr. Innocent Victim has a GPS in his pocket! I rest my case."

  "Ha!" said Marvin, inordinately pleased, since Todd having a GPS in his pocket didn't preclude another one on his van.

  Uncle Vern might be able to thwart his curiosity (must be his age), but like hell I was going to let this pass.

  "Sweet Tooth works at the PFZ. That's where she became chummy with Monique." I was unwilling to be more graphic than that. "Todd comes into the bar, looking for a little humdrum excitement, gropes his own sister—"

  "Don't make it sound like I knew what I was doing!" Todd moaned.

  "So Barbara finds my twin, with Carl Ksnip and Dog in attendance. They learn about the Brinks money which turns out not to be Brinks money but that's beside the point. They also find out that someone is twisting me in the wind, and it sure looks like this someone—that's you two, Marvin and Uncle Vern—wants me to find the money, only they're actually trying to trick me into leading them here—so you join in with Dog and Carl to out-trick the tricksters…" I was almost out of breath, but had just enough to add, to Todd: "Who was that girl you called, when we went into the house and found your dead buddies?" I turned dagger eyes on Monique.

  "And those two?" Uncle Vern touched Jeremy and Michael with his beam of light.

  "Michael probably really works for a detective agency. The mystery is when did he find out he was a McPherson."

  "I've known all my life," Michael admitted with smooth Jeremy-esque indifference. "My adoptive parents didn't think it was any big deal for me to know. They didn't think anything was much of a big deal, except beer and dip chips."

  Sounded like he had been raised in a white ghetto, which would account for his ability to mimic an Oregon Hill bumpkin like his twin. The fact that the impersonation was imperfect only added to his air of McPherson incompetence.

  "So you knew about the Brinks job," Uncle Vern said.

  "Which didn't mean beans to me at the time," Michael told us. "But it got my parents' attention. They kept telling me what a rotten man Skunk was and how much they admired him. And they knew about some of the other robberies, too. They must have kept in touch..." He looked at Mom.

  "They would call me every so often to tell me how you were doing," Mom said in a small voice.

  "And you would fill them in on the family business," Michael smiled crookedly. "But not about the house on Ferncrest. I started out at the Radcliffe Agency as a clerk, and if that's the beginning of a laugh I'll break your jaw. At least I started somewhere."

  As opposed to starting nowhere and stopping off years later at the same stop. No, I was not about to laugh.

  "Radcliffe was one of the several agencies hired after the police flubbed the Brinks investigation. My stepparents had told me about Skunk's involvement in the Greeter Robbery, so I snooped through the files. And guess what I found? A cross-reference between Skunk and Vernon Baldwin. One of the earlier investigators thought there might be a link between the Brinks job and the jewelry store robberies—which we were also investigating. Lucky for me, he didn't go beyond that point. I looked into Vern's financial transactions—"

  "Perfectly illegally," Uncle Vern fumed.

  "And found out he had co-signed on a house in the West End for someone named Neerson. I drove by Ferncrest and got a gander at Todd—snapped a picture and gave it to my associate..."

  We gave Yvonne a look of disgust.

  "She checked out Skunk's old place and saw the same guy. We staked out both places, and when we both saw the same guy at the same time, I knew I was dealing with twins. My stepparents had told me about Jeremy, but not about you two. I guess they wanted to prepare me in case I met myself on the street one day. But you and Todd didn't matter."

  I started to say 'the story of my life', but Todd beat me to it.

  "They also hadn't told me about Mom's second life. I guess they didn't want to think that she..."

  "Was a slut," said Mom flatly.

  "That was when the plot thickened," said Michael.

  I waited for him to finish. When he didn't I said, "What do you mean? Why would it thicken when you found out about the second set of twins? I would've thought Brinks and the jewelry heists were thick enough."

  "Background, background, background!" Marvin complained. "Can't we move this along and fill in the gaps later? We have Mr. Sun coming up in an hour."

  I felt the heat of their collective gaze on me. The apparent absence of loaded guns in our little orbit boosted my confidence.

  "Who has the shovel?" I asked rhetorically.
>
  Marvin thrust it into my hands.

  I held it out to Todd.

  "No way!" he glowered.

  "Why not? You're standing on X marks the spot."

  It was signing my life away, that sentence. I had seen the fatal speaker post several minutes earlier. P25, at the rear left edge of the lot, there not being any room for another row. The junkers had stopped around Row M, so we would not have to deal with moving a car. Throughout the turmoil of revelations I had been holding a sub-textual conversation with myself. Should I barf or should I bail? Now that I had tried proper bailing etiquette—as in rudely trying to escape without getting hurt—there didn't seem to be any more options. That hadn't stopped me from wracking my mind. All sorts of ideas occurred to me. My favorite was to use their greed to turn them against each other. Set the clockwork in motion, and sit back in amused contentment as they slaughtered one another. I, of course, would slaughter the lone survivor—Jeremy or Monique, it was a tough call. But there were too many intangibles to contend with. In other words, there was too much thinking involved. Naturally, this went against my genetic predisposition.

  So I signed off on my life.

  Being so much like me, if not identical, it was remarkable to see the alacrity with which Todd attacked the ground. It was like I had been told to pop five gallons of popcorn at work and had come up with a hundred. Going the extra mile was anti-pragmatic, anti-social and anti-McPherson. Todd loosened the soil with drool. The kind of dedication that induces cardiac arrest.

  "Doesn't look like anything's buried here to me," Marvin said, eyeing me skeptically.

  He was right. There was no telltale mound, no sign at all that this plot of dirt was any different from the soil around it. Skunk had been playing a joke, I was sure. But this was the spot, all right. Skunk's words still rang in my ears, along with the clipped toenail as it whizzed by my head:

  "P25. Dead center."

  Todd was a little off-center, but I thought he was close enough to hit anything buried down there. He redeemed himself in my eyes when he stopped after creating a 4x4 hole. Inches.

  "Whew!"

  "Let a man do the job," said Monique, yanking the shovel out of his hands.

  Barbara disputed the takeover, but receded with feminine grace when Monique snarled her out of the way. She was the wife, for sure. Disgusting.

  I have to admit, Monique thwonked that shovel with so much phallic emphasis I found it easy to believe she was butch. Then again, she might have been metaphorically spaying every man she had ever thwonked. Which included the repulsive Todd, who must have wondered why I grinned at him.

  "So," I continued, turning to Michael, every bit as repugnant as Jeremy, "you hooked up with Yvonne, who you knew from somewhere and somewhen. All these years later, and the Brinks money had still not been found. And you found out the police were considering Skunk as a suspect in the jewelry store robberies, too. Yvonne could have told you that. You figured Jeremy must know something…another jailbird, right? Like father. And the father must have told the son. Only you sent Yvonne after the wrong son."

  "We were starting to wonder," said Yvonne smoothly, as if she had my hand on my cock—and yes, that's what I mean. All right, so they had been more efficient than I gave them credit for.

  "So my repulsive brother, Jeremy, thinking he had the inside track on the Brinks money—"

  "I'll destroy you," said Jeremy to Michael.

  "I double-double-double dare you," said Michael.

  "That's a triple," said Yvonne double-smugly.

  The height of statistical maturity.

  "Like my idiot nephew said, 'one big happy'." Uncle Vern held himself like a preacher, the pushy shit. It made me wonder about the prison's vocational concept of improving inmates by teaching them to play glasses. 'America in decline' was all I could come up with.

  Monique spent fifteen minutes energetically expanding the hole Todd had started. Mr. Sunshine was closing in and she seemed to feel his heat on her back. She sweated with all the sensuality associated with carnal acts—at least in the movies I've seen—and there was really no doubt she was in better shape than anyone else present. But she got tired of us watching her hardened nipples through her sweat-soaked camouflage and threw the shovel aside after achieving a sizable hole.

  "Next!"

  Jeremy and Michael tussled over the shovel. It was as if they thought that those who did the digging would earn the reward. What a pair of idiots. The enormity of their idiocy became apparent when, after Jeremy won and began slashing away at the dirt, Michael edged in sideways and used his hands.

  "Way to go!" Marvin chuckled.

  "You'll get all dirty!" Yvonne protested. To whom it was hard to say. Obviously, she was doing someone's laundry.

  Laughter from the distant party occasionally filtered through the woods. It looked like the people of Bartow partied hardy, partied all night, partied all the next day. Which sort of took them into a permanent celebration. When you don't have anything else but Bartow, you might as well enjoy it.

  Michael's extraordinary effort lasted all of ten seconds. When Jeremy nearly sliced off his fingers with an overachieving swing of the shovel, Michael fell back, swearing. Jeremy pretended not to hear him, though his stupid smirk said otherwise. Then the smirk melted as the magnitude of the job at hand dawned on him. Lucky for us, not only were there no cars this far back, but there was also no blacktop to chop up and remove. Gravel was the limit of Bartow's technological progress. But gravel, especially packed gravel, can be a supreme pain if all you have is a shovel, as Todd and Monique had discovered, and which Jeremy was now learning first hand.

  "Shoulda brought a pick," he complained and dirt as gravel rattled off the shovel.

  "I don't think Skunk would have gone to all this trouble," Mom said. She exchanged glances with Uncle Vern, who seemed increasingly nervous as he watched the sweating sequence of laborers.

  "Yeah," Jeremy panted. "The only thing he lifted without moaning was a beer can."

  "I think the gravel was laid down…later," Uncle Vern ventured.

  "Later than when?" Todd frowned. "The Stone Age?"

  "Don't they scrape the ground before laying gravel?" I asked. "Wouldn't they have uncovered anything buried here?" When everyone shot me a venomous look, I became defensive. "Hey, this is the spot he told me about. Don't shoot the messenger. And I speak from the heart."

  Todd was looking even more disturbed. "Mom?"

  "Yes, Todd?"

  Hmmmm…no nickname. Was that a plus or a minus?

  "Where were you and Skunk when you…um…"

  "Made you two?"

  She made us sound like a couple of clay pigeons they had pieced together on a lark.

  "That's right," I said. "You would have wanted some privacy, and this is the most private part of the lot."

  "The private parts salvage yard," Marvin sniggered.

  Mom trolled the area with her eyes, dredging up memories by the net-full. Even in the poor light we could see her blushing.

  "I think we have our answer," Uncle Vern coughed, embarrassed for her.

  "Great!" Jeremy threw down the shovel. "Dad remembered where he got his jollies and picked that for his joke."

  There it was. I agreed completely. Maybe the sick prank had been directed at me alone, or maybe Skunk had known the family would avalanche down on me and we would be tricked en masse. Mom's fond memories notwithstanding, it didn't look as if he had thought much of us. But someone had to assert faith, no matter how bogus, because what else was there? Well, nothing. Which was exactly what we would get if we didn't at least try.

  I took up the shovel. It was my turn, anyway. I mean, Sweet Tooth was too dainty, Marvin was still recovering from his wound, Yvonne was exhausted just standing, Uncle Vern was too long in the tooth and Mom…excluded by definition.

  "I hope Skunk's happy."

  "He's laughing in his grave."

  A cloud fell over the group as I jumped into the rather smal
l hole and began clobbering away for all I was worth. Which wasn't much—and they knew it. But like me, they grabbed hold of the tail end of luck, which is only faith by another name. When the world doesn't end (or begin) when you expect it to end (or begin), all the life force is sucked out of you. But we had not dotted any T's or crossed any I's—which is what it amounted to. You have to exhaust all possibilities before you give up the Holy Ghost.

  Jeremy had managed his way through the gravel and had been in the dirt when he gave up. But the underlying layer was almost as hard, packed down as it had been by generations of gas-guzzlers and back-seat humpers.

  "What exactly did Skunk tell you was here?" Michael asked under the misconception that I had enough wind to dig and talk at the same time.

  "A million," I gasped, and left it at that. In fact, with all the work and uncertainty involved, a million didn't sound like nearly enough. With the arrival of Sweet Tooth and Monique, the loot would be split…how many ways? This was assuming the split would be even—or dramatically reduced, case in point being Carl Ksnip and Dog, whose share was laughably posthumous.

  "If we had normal jobs, we could earn as much in a year," I huffed.

  This went over with a palpable thud. Even Uncle Vern, the most likely candidate among us to win Employee of the Month (he would award it to himself), made a big chunk of his income via grand larceny.

  "So when was that big jewelry heist?" Marvin asked his uncle.

  "Last year."

  "Then this can't be the spot. He's going to be digging up fossils any minute now."

  If ever a cue was felicitous—and spookily accurate—it was Marvin's not-so-idle quip. I had hit a root undermining the lot from the nearby woods and was gnawing at it with the tip of the shovel blade. On the verge of giving up, the root snapped abruptly. I sorted it from the dirt so the others could see it when I tossed it onto the rim of the hole. I wanted them to know how sincerely I was working, and how hopeless this all was.

  "Ah!" Barbara gasped. "What's that?"

  I took a second look at the root. "Ah!" I shouted, letting go of the shovel and leaping out of the hole.

  "A foot!" Marvin shrieked.

  The skeleton of one, at least. My hard labor had separated it from the rest of the leg. I had half-expected I was digging my own grave, only to find an earlier tenant still holding the lease.