Skunk Hunt Read online

  Jeremy looked at us, puffing furiously away at our cigarettes, and cocked the pipe like a gun. "I'm just joining in. Do I need permission?"

  I shrugged. Barbara shrugged. Our eyes collided on a tobacco pouch that he drew from his pocket. After testing a kitchen chair and finding it wanting, but the only one available, he lowered himself cautiously, juggled a bit in his seat, then sighed. He packed the bowl of his pipe, then took out a shiny silver pipe lighter and lit up. It didn't look normal, the flame coming out sideways like that. To me it smacked of inversion. I recalled my earlier thought, that Barbara might think I was gay. I wanted to get things back on track, but they kept swerving further and deeper into the jungle.

  Barbara was gazing at Jeremy with horrified rapture, as though he was some kind of man-eating guppy threatening to leap out of its fish bowl. Flint Dementis was the only man we knew who smoked a pipe, and we (meaning the original neighborhood chumps) ascribed it to the fact that half of his brain was missing. Unless it was employed for the honorable purpose of ingesting illegal substances, no one on Oregon Hill considered pipes worthy of respect.

  "If Skunk saw you he'd jump right back in his grave," Barbara said.

  "After knocking your head in," I added.

  "He'd have to come back from the dead, first," Jeremy answered, his head bobbing as he worked the lighter over the pipe, like some kind of sage, or some kind of idiot. All the while his eyes worked back and forth, as though he was scanning the room for evidence of civilization. He drew the lighter away slowly, thoughtfully, tested the embers in the bowl with a few deep draws, then doused the flame. A cloud of thought combined with the tobacco smoke. I half-expected him to summon up demons.

  "Don't give me that look, Mute," he said. "I might throw you to the Matthews boys again."

  This was the Jeremy I knew, ready to foam at the mouth when confronted by adversity. Or logic.

  "They're gone," I said. "Like most everyone else we knew."

  "Mmmm..." Then the Jeremy I knew reverted to the stranger as remorse emerged from the smoke. "I'm sorry I did that, Mute. It was a shitty thing to do, especially when you were just trying to help Sweet Tooth here."

  "Oh God," Barbara moaned, "you found Jesus."

  "That's one of the hazards of prison life," Jeremy admitted. "But I haven't taken holy orders or anything."

  This was too spooky. I decided it was time to get down to business.

  "You brought the letter with you?" I asked.

  "I can't let you read it."

  "I know that," I said testily. "I just wanted to make sure we all had our ducks in a row."

  "What's in the bags?" Barbara asked, nodding at the nylon mountain on the table.

  "This is a laptop bag," Jeremy said.

  "Yeah?" said Barbara.

  "It has a laptop in it."

  "Yeah?"

  "And this is a printer bag."

  "With a printer in it?" Barbara ventured.

  "You got it, Sweet Tooth. Good girl."

  In the past, Jeremy had frequently been cruel. Now he was smug. I didn't see much to distinguish the two attitudes, except he didn't seem inclined to punch Barbara after delivering his verdict. Actually, that was a pretty big improvement.

  "Where did you get them?" Barbara asked.

  I shot her a warning glance. Don't ask, don't tell. She caught on, but not quickly enough. A smirk had hitched itself to Jeremy's lips.

  "You think I stole it?"

  "Does it matter?" I asked.

  "You mean like father like son?" Jeremy said. "What have you stolen lately?"

  "Nothing!" Barbara answered for me. That she was telling the truth was only a matter of luck. "Mute has a good job. That's how he pays for all of this."

  She waved her arm in a circle, directing Jeremy's attention to the broken sink, the ratty curtains, the splotched linoleum floor, the unhinged cabinets, the nicotine-stained walls, the wobbly table...all of this. Now that I knew my brother considered this a pigsty, having it presented as evidence of my scrupulous lifestyle left a bad taste in my mouth. Truly, sort of like eating garlic and then blowing into someone's face to prove how fresh your breath is.

  Fortunately, Jeremy did not join Barbara's visual tour of the kitchen. I think he would have preferred to close his eyes and keep them shut. Having been dismissed as a guide, Barbara scowled at the tote bags.

  "I bought this with my own money, thank you," said Jeremy stiffly, again betraying a trace of prissiness. He took out his laptop and opened it on the table.

  "Don't you need wires?" I asked. "And you'll probably need a phone jack."

  "We're next door to a university. They've got a cafeteria, library, all Wifi. I can piggyback."

  Since neither Barbara nor I knew what he was talking about, we fell into a glum and leery silence. As Jeremy's fingers danced across the keys and pad, I sensed the skewed picture was now practically upside down. I had expected a minimal performance, the hunt and peck technique of a prison vocational school, accompanied by dark mutters and loud complaints—accusations that the computer was inadequate or that the skills taught to him were out of date. But obviously, my brother had taken his lessons seriously

  As his face settled into bland repose, our father's features became more apparent. I guess this was because Skunk, except when in his cups, was not a demonstrative man. Jeremy had been emoting since he stepped inside, in effect blurring the mad dog face we had known and dreaded. Only this younger version of Skunk had been to canine obedience school, aka Powhatan Correctional Center.

  Jeremy muttered to himself. His eyebrows seemed to pop upwards, not in surprise, but jocular self-commentary. His hand slid over the mousepad like a veteran skater on a tiny rink. We watched him pummel the laptop keys for another minute or so before Barbara grew impatient.

  "Well?" she said.

  "Oh, sorry, I was trending," he answered. He didn't notice our stern expressions of inquiry because he was totally absorbed in the computer screen.

  "Hey, you want to look up and tell us what's going on?" I said, a little timorously. I was programmed at a young age not to push people who beat me regularly. I didn't want the old Jeremy to jump out of this urbane skin and grab me by the throat.

  "Yeah." He raised his head and refocused on us. "The domain name's not there."

  "Meaning?"

  "www.treasure447.com, the site mentioned in my letter. Your letters, too, I guess. I didn't expect it to be. We're dealing with a short-life website. Al-Qaeda uses them all the time."

  "Terrorists?" Barbara said faintly.

  "It makes sense," Jeremy explained casually. "As soon as the site disappears no one can track it because there's nothing to track. The terrorists have the password in advance and are told when the site will be activated. It comes up, they download whatever's on there, and then the site disappears. Pretty basic. Our treasure site won't be activated until April 1, and we'd better damn well be where we can pull it up."

  "Otherwise, it's sort of like burn before reading," I observed.

  "That's pretty good, Mute," said Jeremy. I waited for the punch that inevitably followed any sign of cleverness on my part. I was pleased and puzzled when Jeremy sat back peacefully in his chair.

  But I was now less bothered by his familiarity with the digital world. One of the displays at the Science Museum concerned the growing problem of cyber-crime. It wasn't much of an exhibit, computers not being very photogenic. Cyber criminals ranged from noobs and script kiddies to the black hats and "1337's" (also known as 'the Elite'), and they specialized in unraveling binary DNA and recombining it into unnatural monsters that robbed you, seduced you and amused you, usually all at once. From what I could tell, it seemed like the perfect way for lazy crooks to make an illicit buck. For Jeremy to know about sinister-sounding websites that vanished without a trace was strangely reassuring. Rather than take the Skunk route of charging more or less blindly into a usually-unwinnable situation, it seemed Jeremy had chosen the easy path to riches. Why else wou
ld he bother learning how to use a computer?

  "Of course," my brother continued, "we could make this a lot simpler. You could just give me your codes and I could take care of it all for you."

  Jeremy was back in the McPherson fold. Slicker, more educated and prone to unsightly courtesy, but with larceny in his blood. There was no other explanation for his proposal. Did he really think we were so gullible? Of course not. But there was always hope for the off-chance, that he could catch us in a vulnerable moment. When we glared back at him, he smiled and shrugged. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. He had gained nothing, but there was no harm, either.

  "You don't trust me," he said. "Am I right in thinking none of us trusts the other? Did we all get a personalized postscript, telling us something only Skunk would know? Do any of us want to share our tidbit?"

  "So we have to wait two days before we can find out anything?" Barbara asked in a subdued wail.

  "Looks like we don't have a choice," said Jeremy.

  "You could both stay here, if you want," I said queasily. For the last three years I had lived alone. I wondered if I had acquired the quirky habits of solitude—habits that would not bear close scrutiny by a brother and sister. I sometimes forgot to flush the toilet. I wasn't even sure if I talked to myself. I would ask myself later.

  "Why should we want to do that?" Jeremy asked, darting a glance down the hall towards the bedroom we had once shared. If the front of the house was a pigsty, the back might be a cross between a camel pen and an anthrax lab.

  "I don't think..." Barbara shifted uncomfortably in her seat, her glossy shorts almost causing her to slide off.

  It was then I realized her 'nothing has changed' had not been a compliment.

  Now what? Trade stories about the old days? Not much good could come from that, and we knew it. Relate what we had been up to these past few years? Jeremy had spent time doing time, while Barbara had shimmied from pole dancing to a disastrous pre-nuptial divorce. Me? I was an hour away from donning a bright red and yellow clown suit which was the Science Museum's version of an old-time popcorn vendor's uniform—a nod to the geriatrics who found modern science a crashing bore, if not utterly incomprehensible. I wasn't very high on the job skill list, and preferred not to discuss past or current prospects. Nor was my sex life a fit topic—I would have put it on a par with their own, had I been in the game.

  To put it mildly, it was an awkward moment. All we had in common was Skunk's booty, unavoidably out of reach for about thirty-two hours. The only solution to our speechless dilemma was to part ways as quickly as possible.

  "So...we meet back here on—"

  "Are you crazy?" Barbara interrupted. "You're the one who didn't want me to say 'boo' on the phone. We're being watched, you said."

  We both turned to Jeremy for his input. I expected him to dismiss my concern, and experienced a highly tangible chill when he said:

  "I think I saw someone outside, sitting in a car."

  "Watching my house?" I said.

  "Isn't it still sorta our house?" Barbara protested.

  "If it's your house too, clean it up," I groused. The new Jeremy was already having an impact on me. "This is a pigsty."

  My brother did not involve himself in the brief squabble over property rights. He scrubbed his hand on his bristly crewcut, set his jaw in a Skunk-like grimace, and waited. In the back of my mind I registered this as another mark against him. No papers had been signed after our parents' deaths. Legally, this was as much his house as ours. Why wasn't he staking his claim?

  But my fear returned and I stood.

  "I've got to check this guy out," I said, heading for the front door.

  "Gal," Jeremy amended, joining me. "Kind of a dog, too."

  This alarmed me even more. The two girls I had recently dated were fit for euphemisms: 'ill-favored', 'on the plain side', 'glamour-challenged', 'Miss Alternate Universe'. I would add 'sweet personalities', if it applied. So far as I knew, neither of them was dragging a torch for me. But what if I had sparked some kind of emotion? Love? Unlikely. Perhaps, then, a gnawing disgust so potent that they were inclined to rid the neighborhood of such a fumbling rat? I doubted either one of them was packing—but around here, you never knew. Still, if one of them wanted to slather me in ridicule, with my siblings present as witnesses, that would have been as effective as a bullet in the head.

  I had intended to stroll out the door and take a casual glance up the street, as though looking for the ice cream man. But prudence invoked a last-second course adjustment that steered me to the window. Slowly opening a gap in the dismal smoke-saturated curtains, which had not been changed (or washed) since our mother died, I tried to find a clear field of vision through the dusty glass.

  "You've got to be joking," Jeremy fumed, turning away.

  "Wait!" I called out, but my brother was already opening the door.

  When I arrived on the porch, a rust-streaked van was pulling away from the curb. I caught only a chubby fragment of the driver's profile before it sped off.

  "She saw us coming," said Barbara, coming up behind me.

  "Yeah," said Jeremy. "So...the old homestead is out of the question. We'll have to meet somewhere else."

  CHAPTER 7

  The Tyrannosaurus rex roared with nauseating regularity as I handed out feedbags of overpriced popcorn to overfed brats in the care of overindulgent significant-others. It seemed to me a fair portion of the accompanying grownups were divorced fathers trying to put a good face on a bad result. Then there were the nannies forced to suffer through A Day on Mars for minimum wage. Most of the adult couples looked inordinately happy—divorced fathers and nannies hooking up, using the little creeps bouncing against their kneecaps as camouflage.

  I tried to remain oblivious, without much luck. I also tried to remain invisible—with a little more success. Maybe it was my Sad Sack posture, my limp demeanor, or the empty cave of my personality. The robotic dinosaurs in the next exhibit hall had more charm, although I had formed a sympathetic attachment with the demure ankylosaurus, with its head-to-tail armor. Go ahead, he seemed to say. Bite me.

  But I didn't want to be bitten. I didn't want to be seen. Among my forefathers, labor was a dirty word, and looking stupid while performing labor was enough to evict me from the family tree. I wasn't a captain of industry, but a busy-work clown. About the only thing positive was that I was legal, a rare attainment at this level of employment. I was free of razor wire cuts, lungs half-choked with border sewage, scrapes and bumps from dark, narrow tunnels. Don't knock it. Being born an American is my only accomplishment.

  The old-style red and yellow popcorn stand (which my uniform matched) was just outside the Imax theater, planted there as a consolation to the busloads of nursing home residents wheeled in every week and who stared uncomprehendingly at the exhibits: Space Gallery, Bodies in Motion, Electriworks, the Foucault Pendulum, the Science Sleuth Theater, the Human Genome Project, the giant granite kugel. But the popcorn stand triggered memories of carnivals, old cinema houses, the crunch-munch of toothy days long-gone. The elderly faces melted into fondness as they peered past their cataracts at the sixteen ounces of popcorn beckoning to them from beyond the glass. The machine was hot, and I had an unfortunate tendency to salt the contents with my sweat. Occasionally someone would notice this bit of unintentional bio-terrorism and stomp away in disgust. Otherwise, customers happily ingested the ureic spice of life.

  Not the oldsters, though. They smacked their bare gums and fell into dreamy swoons, but all they could savor was the aroma. To tell you the truth, they looked like mutants. It didn't help my attitude to know I was headed in the same direction—if I was lucky.

  I heard the roar of a futuristic spaceship from the theater. The five-o'clock show was coming to an end as the Interplanetary Explorer Regurgitation fired its landing rockets and lowered itself in the great vomitorium of Earth. Needless to say, its passengers looked longingly up at the stars, wishing they were back on Mars.

&n
bsp; There weren't many customers for my sweat-stained popcorn after a show. Like most theatergoers, they weren't there to watch the credits, but were racing for the exits. Funny how we'll sit through a film, even a good one, then treat it like the plague. Think of the name of a single gaffer. See? You don't like to see things through to the end, either. I guess we're all like that. We all like fresh starts, as opposed to stale endings, and we keep racing to new beginnings before finishing what we've begun.

  The possibility of a new beginning had been blazing a hot eager trail through my mind ever since the arrival of the pseudo-Skunk letter. Of course it couldn't have been from Dad. He was most definitely gone, commiserating with his ancestors in the great white-trash heap in the sky. I mean, I saw him at the morgue, right? Becoming one of the undead was implausible, but it would have fit Dad's style. Returning from an all-nighter, returning from jail, returning from the grave. But philanthropy was even more improbable—statistically speaking, in fact, a McPherson impossibility.

  Wherever the letters came from (all the envelopes had been postmarked Richmond), the promise of unspeakable riches...OK, I'll speak about them...sent shivers of hope through me. Invisible shivers, fortunately. Rampant greed is never sightly.

  From a very early age—I'd say from the cradle, but then you wouldn't believe me—I knew that life wouldn't happen for me. Obviously, I'm alive, but I mean life—the glamour, the swelling pride of accomplishment, the virtues of consistency, the sweet smell of...well, the sweet smell. It's a genetic fault, this tendency to just wait for things to happen. At least I hope so. I'd hate to think it was my fault. But good things do happen to good people, and bad people, and the indifferent. It could be good luck. It could be bad luck. It could be the simple luck of lucklessness.

  I wasn't really hoping that good things come to those who wait. I was waiting naturally, like a ground hog, just sitting around. Sooner or later a shadow was bound to appear. Of course there was the possibility that it wouldn't be my shadow.

  Am I a victim of my environment? Am I a victim at all? In my neighborhood, I've heard of some lowlifes becoming mid-lifes, some mid-lifes going on to become successful something-or-others. Inadequacy begins in the home, and that's where I live. More precisely, though, it begins inside your own skin, the ultimate prison.