Skunk Hunt (23 page)

He answered with a barely perceptible
pull of his lips, as though to say, "No, it's
Rabid
Dog to turds like you." Or maybe a flea had
bitten him and he was too stoically houndbound to show he cared.
Either way, I got the message: Stop dicking around. Bring out the
money.
Now
. The mongrel memo
would have carried more weight had he pointed a gun at me. Then I
risked a second look into those weirdly blue eyes and panicked.
This mutt could eat me alive.

I needed to buy time until help arrived,
which meant finding something more convincing than the few loose
boards laying about the first floor. Dog would make matchsticks out
of them before making matchsticks out of me. Some kind of container
to preoccupy Carl and entertain Dog for a few precious minutes. I
held up a hand towards Dog. "Stay."

Dog malevolently interpreted this as an
command to attack and hoiked himself up on the window frame—there
was a back door wide open next to the window, but he was much too
advanced a life form to bother with it.

Like a raccoon pursued by a ratty beagle my
first thought was to gain height. I turned to the stairs and
stretched my leg up to the third step. The handrail wobbled and
groaned, but held, as I pulled myself up. I tested my full weight
on the step. It cackled dryly, as though planning a practical joke.
Without looking back, I went ahead. Each step was a chapter out of
the Fall of the House of Usher, threatening to haul down the roof
on my head, and suck out my immortal soul in the bargain. But I
made it without any more loss than some wind and a weakened
bladder.

Through the window at the top I looked
down on the
misery scene
in
the front yard. Carl was holding a handgun casually in his right
hand, while his gun moll filled his left. It was a Mickey Spillane
moment, and I'm sure Carl could hear the master's typewriter keys
churning out the lurid scenario. Monique's upper and lower body
seemed to segment away from her captive wasp waist, as if Carl had
bad breath and stinky feet and she did not want her analogous parts
to be contaminated. I knew what it was like to live with a man who
stank to high heaven, but I doubted Carl was in the same league as
Skunk, or else he would never have been able to run a strip joint.
Even sordidness has limits, my sister's clientele
notwithstanding.

Empty rooms winged out to either side of me.
I trod more carefully here than on the steps, seeing as a fall
through rotting floorboards would be even more catastrophic. But
this was different wood, seasoned and solid, and after a minute of
exploring I felt reasonably safe.

I'd never been in a house empty not only of
people but also all the stuff people accumulate once they settle
in. The hollowness of my footsteps unsettled me, as though I was
hearing echoes of my own ghost. Dog could hear my aimless wandering
and by now must know I had no idea where the money was. I imagined
him running around front and snarling a few stark truths to his
master. Would the lead start flying? Or would Carl realize we were
just as much dupes as he was and call it a day? I suspected
something in between, a few warning taps on our kneecaps or some
cosmetic rearrangement that would turn our reflections into
strangers.

The idea of having my nose handed to me
like a juicy Tasty Bit spurred me onwards through the rooms. Blank
walls and bare floors greeted every turn. In my desperation I
looked for secret hiding places, but all I found were tiny red bugs
happily burrowing through the crevices. For a moment, the life of
an insect looked pretty good. I'm sure
they
couldn't conceive of an
alternative.

And then, in the last room, I found what I
was looking for: junk. It was a paltry collection, as though the
Confederates who had vacated the place had grouped their
sentimental trinkets for later retrieval. They had never come
back.

It was obvious the room had been visited, if
not exactly ransacked. Over the years, the occasional carpetbagger
had lifted the more valuable items for display on Antique Roadshow,
leaving behind a few dismal odds and ends: cracked vases, assorted
broken crockery, a battered chest, a flaky suitcase, a few broken
tools. I hefted something like a large iron 'S' with a blade inside
the upper curve. I couldn't imagine what it was for, and it was too
heavy (or I was too weak) to use it as a sword. It wouldn't have
been much good against a handgun, anyway, as has been proved on any
number of history's imperial lapses. I dropped it on the floor and
slapped the coating of rust off my hands.

I picked up the suitcase, half-expecting a
snowfall of Confederate bonds or dixies. Leather peeled off at a
mere touch, and inside the only fragments were from the suitcase
itself. Still, it seemed a feasible substitute for a sack of cash,
but when I closed it the handle sloughed off and the two halves
fell apart.

That left the chest, which on quick
inspection also proved empty. I found a piece of wire and wound it
through the latch, twisting it into a knot I hoped would delay its
opening for at least a few minutes. If help didn't arrive soon, I
could gape at the empty chest and gasp something like, "He said the
money was here!" or some such nonsense. A pretty feeble script, on
a par with the fake Maltese Falcon, but it would have to do. If
ever there was a pinch, this was it.

The chest was homemade, something hammered
together in the face of brute necessity. Maybe Ma Barker had yelled
at Pa that she needed something to hide her unmentionables in, and
he had used wood from the barn and horseshow nails to jerryrig this
4X3X2 piece of ugliness. It couldn't have satisfied Ma's dainty
sense of esthetics, but it was certainly not bulky enough to
justify its weight. I hefted it up, then promptly put it back down.
I was tempted to open it again to make double-sure it was empty,
but the wire I had cinched on the latch was brittle and would
probably break if twisted too much. With this in my arms the stairs
would certainly belch their last and send me into a dank and
unforgiving plunge. I went to the front window and studied the
possibility of tossing it from the second story.

Carl was still holding a gun. Monique looked
bored. Jeremy looked frightened and bored. Barbara looked bored and
frightened. Nothing had changed, except that Dog's straw hat hove
into view as he jogged around to the front yard. He looked unusual,
being off the leash like that. I imagined a movie review of Dog's
performance. It would be entitled: "No Redeeming Humor.

Carl spotted me and waved his gun in my
direction. "Y'all stuck up there?"

"No," I shouted down.

"I suggest you get your ass in gear before
bodily harm comes to your brother and sister."

"Sounds good to me," I said.

"Or before I send Dog up to fetch you," Carl
added.

"Right," I said, backing away.

With Dog out front I was free to run out
back. I went into the junk room and leaned over some detached
window shutters to survey the yard. I looked longingly at the woods
beyond. Unfortunately, the woods looked longingly back at me, as if
the trees and thick underbrush wanted to eat me alive.

Carl and his one-dog wolf pack were being
surprisingly patient out front, probably in the belief that the
camera was a hoax and they had all day. I heard sour-sounding
noises I didn't recognize and was startled to realize it was
Dog...speaking. I couldn't catch exact words, but the drift carried
an ominous, skeptical twang.

If I threw the chest out the window and it
broke open, trouble would break out when they saw only busted
lumber. It was carry the damn thing down or nothing at all. So I
took up the chest again, reacquainted myself with its weight, and
forged onto the steps. I took them slowly, like a blind man on a
cliff, feeling the sag beneath my shoes and knowing if I tested the
wood too much it would break from over-cautiousness. I winded
quickly. I was dying for a smoke. I thought of my deceased mother.
Boy, that didn't help.

"May I ask what you're doing?"

I was becoming accustomed to the voice, and
was in fact expecting him to check out what I was up to. I didn't
think he could see up the stairs, but he could no doubt hear all my
panting and moaning. I did not look up, but kept my eyes glued to
the next step. With the chest in my hands, I found it hard to gauge
depth and distance.

"Buying time," I gasped, going down one more
step then stopping to inspect the one I had broken on the way
up.

"By bringing them an empty footlocker?" the
voice scoffed.

He could see me, even though I was only
halfway down the steps. This was a real Hollywood production. I was
feeling like a featured victim in the Blair Witch Project.

"You have a better idea?" I said.

"Yes, sit and wait until help arrives."

"That's a little obvious." I crooked the
chest under one arm, judging I could manage five seconds. Gripping
the rail, I stretched my right leg over the jagged hole and found
the next unbroken step with my toe.

"Careful!" the voice shouted.

His solicitude was cancelled out by his fear,
adding up to nil in the moral support department. Trembling from
cramped foot to cramped hand, I eased slowly over the gap, got both
feet on the step, and let go of the rail.

There was a loud snap and I went down.

"Oh!" the voice cried out. "I shouldn't
have...are you all right?"

I guess he was amazed that I was still
standing. I, for one, was impressed—not to mention thankful. It was
only the second step and I had not dropped far, but keeping my
balance represented something of a miracle.

But even miracles have limits. The chest had
slipped my grasp and fallen on the rubble of the first step, the
sound muffled by what amounted to a small heap of mulch.

"Is it broken?" the voice inquired.

I reached down to my knees, mired neatly in
the breach while my feet were planted on the floor under the
stairs. "Not even a scratch," I said admiringly, as though the
handiwork was my doing.

"That's wonderful," said the voice. "And the
footlocker?"

"It's a chest," I corrected. I don't know why
I was being finicky about it. Maybe I hated the way the unseen
voice (aka Invisible Asshole) was still behaving like a
know-it-all, when it was obvious from Carl's sudden appearance that
he was almost as clueless as the rest of us.

"A chest, then, though to my knowledge very
few chests that age had padlocks like that."

"There's just a latch," I said, drawing one
leg out of the hole and planting it forward below the first step,
on the floor. "It's homemade. They made whatever they wanted out of
it."

Abruptly, the weirdest noise rose from the
camera speaker, like the sound effect of a flying saucer
approaching and landing on a lonely country road.

"What the hell's that?" I said, alarmed.

The noise stopped. "Sorry," said the voice.
"I was...doodling."

"Take your doodling somewhere else," I said,
though I had no idea what he was talking about. "And maybe you
should shut down. Those folks out there aren't deaf, you know."

"I want to see what's going on," said the
voice.

"You can't see much...unless you've got more
cameras planted around here."

The red light again went out.

I finished extricating myself from the hole
and gave the chest or footlocker or steamer truck or whatever the
hell it was a once-over. It seemed undamaged, but when I lifted it
I thought I detected some new wobbles in the frame. This was
bothersome. If the wire in the latch annoyed Carl, he had only to
snap his fingers for Dog to kick it into fragments and expose the
deception. But I wasn't about to go back upstairs to find a
suitable replacement. For non-saints, miracles are probably
restricted to one per lifetime.

I walked out the front door and negotiated my
way around the gaps in the porch. Not really wanting to see Carl's
reaction—as though he had X-ray eyes and could see right through to
the emptiness inside the chest—I did not look up until I felt grass
under my feet.

Everyone was pretty much where I had left
them, but they were turned away from the house. And Carl had let go
of Monique, who had mixed success staying upright on her
impractical spiked heels.

I appreciated their oblivion, and held off
asking why they were all gaping towards the sorry excuse of a
driveway, which disappeared into the trees. Anyone coming up
couldn't be seen until they entered the clearing. And from the
sound of it, someone was coming up.

Not very quickly, though. The engine noise
was nearly drowned out by the swish and gush of dirt and gravel.
There was only one gear appropriate for ascending this hill, but
the driver was spinning roulette to find it. Whoever it was must be
a novice on all-terrain, or they were driving an oversized go-cart,
because the noise stopped suddenly with no vehicle in sight.

Carl glanced at Dog, as though trying to
decide who to sic him on. Then he saw me. Well, he saw the chest.
Jeremy and Barbara turned and gave me a good gawp.

"That's it?" Barbara asked breathlessly.

Carl answered for me, using words not exactly
appropriate for the occasion.

"Oh man baby." He staggered towards me like a
man knocked on the head. "Oh man baby."

This sounded a bit too much as though he was
having gender identity issues, with pederasty thrown in for good
measure, and I took a step away. Dog whirled, his eyes narrowing,
ready to tackle me if I tried to escape.

I could feel the pressure building up. The
pressure of anticipation—of greed, so long shortchanged, about to
be gratified. Oh man baby, indeed. They had completely forgotten
about the intruder stuck on the hillside.