Skunk Hunt (49 page)

"You're crazy." Todd gave me a guarded look.
"The police would have known these two are one and the same."

"Unless Winny had a twin, too," I grimaced.
"A real possibility, as you can see."

"There aren't that many twins around."

"There's more than I counted on," I said.

We were quickly resolving our sibling
chemistry into mutual suspicion, acrimony and sheer
loathing—exactly as if we had lived together all these years.

"Why don't you give me a lift home?" I added
sourly. "The longer I sit here, the more I think I have an interest
in this property."

"That's a two way street," Todd said sharply.
"Didn't you inherit a house?"

"Skunk was my father, not Winny," I
reasoned.

"If Skunk was my father, too, I might—"

"You might want to see my house before you go
to the trouble of laying claim to it," I cut him off.

"What could be worse than this?" Todd shot
back, openly acknowledging his sloth.

A bit of reverse psychology was called for.
If I made a big deal about my festering pit of a house, he might
think I was putting him on. West Enders rarely ventured into the
old downtown neighborhoods, which to their thinking were either
dangerous haunts (like Jackson Ward) or historic acreage (like
Windsor Farms) whose old money made their new shinola look like
antique camel droppings. But it was general knowledge that Oregon
Hill had come in for some extensive renovations. For all Todd knew,
I spent my afternoons lounging in my backyard Olympic-sized pool
sipping mint juleps as I floated aimlessly on my rubber ducky. I
proceeded to paint a vision of complete squalor. My brother's eyes
narrowed in growing disbelief.

"Nobody lives like that," he said when I
finished.

"Who said anything about living? It's only a
hole where I exist." The exaggeration consolidated a host of truths
while managing to sound like a bloated lie. Todd drew back a
little, as though dodging a sucker-punch. His eyes widened along a
you've-got-to-be-kidding-me axis.

"Why is it I think you're bullshitting me?"
he said.

"Why is it I think the same?" I said.

Our mutual alarm only emphasized our
twin-ness. We had grown up separately and never had the opportunity
to develop a sibling secret code, like the only two people in a
crowded room who speak Armenian. We were strangers to each other.
Sharing thoughts or even moods crowded our personal space. I wanted
to warn Todd against reading my thoughts, but he probably would
have said the same thing at the same instant and we have both
stroked out.

"I'll give you a ride home," he announced
suddenly.

I knew he would.

But when we stepped out the front door and I
noted the immaculate Jaguar in the driveway, I turned to the
immaculate asshole next to me and said, "If you're so broke, that
needs explaining."

"If you need a ride so bad, you'll stop the
questions now."

It was one of those sinister shut-ups that
told you your listener was tired of more than just the noise coming
out of your mouth. I would have stomped away and taken a fat chance
with hitching a ride on River Road if I hadn't been drooling to sit
in the bucket seat of an XJ-L. It's not like I'd never seen a Jag
before. There are even a couple parked on Oregon Hill. Belonging, I
figured, to rich parents who had sent their college kids slumming.
But to actually ride in one of these chariots was beyond the means
of anyone lacking a gold-rimmed sphincter. It seemed like a miracle
when Todd pressed his remote and the car beeped demurely. I
wondered if the Jag's posh personality could distinguish between
the two of us. Make no mistake, cars have personalities. My own
Impala is saturated with the ill will of the previous owner ,
spewing toxins and carburetor malevolence, magnifying its presence
on the road in spite of my attempts to remain inconspicuous.

A Jaguar's whole purpose is to be an object
of ornate consumption. I felt conspicuous just looking at it, and
had to stifle an urge to genuflect before getting inside. But just
because he had a big engine didn't make him better than me. Just
because I didn't figure out relativity doesn't make me worse than
Einstein. Just because I can't pump more than forty pounds doesn't
make me less of a man than Arnold. Just because I sell popcorn
instead of Kissmecanoe Ice Cream doesn't condemn me to the ash
heap. I mean, this is America, after all—nobody is better than
anyone else. In fact, everyone else is a lot worse. That's what
makes us equal.

The fantasy ended abruptly. My whacko brother
had trashed the interior. Cups and wrappers littered the
semi-aniline leather seats and the mat carpet, rude brown blotches
were splattered across the dashboard. There were even crumbs on the
console display. When he switched on the engine the analog clock
glowed a phosphor blue, like a radioactive bird feeder.

"Some things you're supposed to take care
of," I complained.

"Listen to that V8," Todd gloated. "Does that
sound deprived?"

My car had a V8, too, but the Impala's loose
belts and misfires made everyone else's car sound destined for
Daytona, so I couldn't say if the Jag's engine was properly
maintained or was a complete shambles.

"This calls for some explaining," I said as
Todd shifted into reverse.

"You can't drive standard?"

"I mean this car," I said. "I'm surprised
Carl didn't bring it up. For someone who's supposed to be broke,
it's a helluva asset."

"Worth more than the house, so far as I'm
concerned," Todd nodded, patting the wheel.

"You treat your car like your house, and
they're both losing book value."

"I inherited it from Dad," Todd said,
nonchalantly sliding past my comment.

Both of us had-hand-me-down modes of
transportation, like Amish buggies handed on from bearded to
beardless. Todd's carriage had a lot more cachet than my heap, but
we had identical emptied Big Gulp cups rolling under our feet. I
wondered if some of the trash was left over from Winny, who had
been no neatnik. I began scanning the interior, looking for
clues.

"What are you looking for?" Todd demanded in
an annoyed tone, as though I should be busy admiring his driving
skills.

"When's the last time you cleaned out your
car?"

"I think you already made your point," Todd
snarled without twisting his lip, causing his mouth to flatten
painfully.

"Is some of this junk Winny's?" I asked,
reaching for the glove compartment.

"You want to stop—hey!"

I pulled out a glop of papers and planted
them on my lap. A couple of maps slipped off, along with a small
plastic folder. I leaned over and picked it up. Inside was the
registration.

"What the fuck?" I said, staring.

"Cut it out!" Todd griped, struggling to look
in two directions and not doing either very well. "You can't look
at that. It's illegal!"

"The registration?"

"No, dipwit, looking at someone's private
documents."

"I don't see a stamp on it," I reasoned. "If
it's not in the U.S. Mail—"

With more frustration than timeliness, he
slapped at the pile on my lap and sent the folder flying, even
though he knew it was too late.

"This is a business car," I said.

He grunted.

"'The Ice Boutique dba New River
Environmental Group." I eyed him narrowly. "That's pretty...what's
the word I'm looking for? Fishy? Fucked up?"

"Let it go."

"No can do. Firstly, what do jewelers know
about asbestos removal? Secondly, Skunk and Winny were killed at
the Ice Boutique on Staples Mill Road—which begs a thousand and one
questions. What the fuck is going on here?"

"You say 'fuck' an awful lot," Todd
complained.

"That's the most dimwitted thing you've said
so far. If you and I are anything alike—"

"And we aren't," Todd interrupted.

"Right. Anyway, rich people say 'fuck' a lot
more than poor slobs like me. They can afford to."

"Whatever that means," said Todd, now
focusing on the road. "And I told you, I'm not rich."

"So you don't own this car?" I demanded.

"It was my father's car," Todd said grimly,
shifting the gears needlessly. The ensuing rattle and roar could
only be cured by braking suddenly and shifting again, which nearly
resulted in a spontaneous daisy chain in the thick traffic.

"Hmmm," I observed.

"What?"

"No one honked at you."

"They're very polite and understanding out
here." Todd allowed himself a moment's smugness, until a BMW pulled
out a shade too close and he leaned on the horn. "Fuck him," he
growled as the startled driver ahead of him swerved fearfully.

"It makes more sense, Winny driving a company
car," I continued. "I mean, he never had two dimes to rub together.
I never knew he even had a driver's license..." I looked down at
the J-shaped notch of the selection lever. "...forget handling a
shift."

I couldn't get over the idea of Winny
Marteen behind the wheel of this prince of cars. It was like
something out of a fairy tale, a regular frog kiss—and come to
think of it, he
had
looked a
lot like a toad. Someone had bussed his lips, and he had come up
with this.

"Did Winny ever talk to you about his work?"
I asked.

"You asked that before, I think," said
Todd.

"Maybe I did. Did you answer?"

"He complained about all the hours on the
job," Todd said after reflecting a moment. "I never learned
anything about abatement from him, that's for sure. Which way?"

We were approaching Cary Street, and any
Richmond numbskull would know Oregon Hill was right.

"You've been downtown plenty of times."

"Shockhoe Bottom, sure," Todd said with a
shrug, as though to say his low life had a touch of class—meaning,
as well, that he was only slumming, while I was a real chip off the
old white trash block.

"You're lying," I said.

"You're talking about that dead end where
they keep all the dead rebels?"

"Hollywood Cemetery, yeah."

He turned right.

We were soon passing the grand estates of
Windsor Farms, mansions and grounds ripped straight out of the
pages of the Versailles edition of Better Homes and Gardens. Both
Todd and I turned a little green from envy and nausea, aware that
places like this belonged in the 'careful-what-you-wish-for'
category.

"That's a lot of grass to cut," Todd
said.

"They've got groundskeepers," I
commented.

"The kid down the block wants $80 to cut my
lawn." Todd bloated his cheeks, as though demonstrating the rate of
inflation.

"Just think, you could've done it yourself
for free."

"Don't miss my point. Eighty bucks for a
quarter acre lot. Multiply that by—"

"They've got money, too," I sighed.

That was what we wanted. Not the mansions,
but the wherewithal to fork out maintenance fees. There didn't seem
much point in having property if you had to sweat over it. That's
not what I had told Todd back at his house, I know, but neither of
us had energy to spare for contradictions, reserving it instead for
disclaimers and ripostes. We lacquered the air with 'kiss my ass's'
and 'rotate and screw yourself's' all the way through Carytown. By
the time we reached the VCU district we had settled down to a raw
simmer that smelled like burning clams, or maybe our combined wrath
was frying the bucket seats' softgrain leather.

"Why don't you just run them down?" Todd
griped after we had swerved around our fifth or sixth student
strolling insouciantly down the middle of the street.

This was not proof of shared mental
processes. It was a thought that would have crossed the mind of any
sane citizen.

"This whole area used to be part of Oregon
Hill," I said, falling into tour guide mode. "Then the poor
ignorant folk were turned out and the area dedicated to higher
education."

"I just saw two guys holding hands," Todd
said in disgusted amazement.

"Don't worry, it wasn't us." Adding, with a
sniff, "You're not very tolerant, are you? Are you homophobic?"

"I've got a phobia against anything that
deserves a phobia," he answered. I found this remarkably astute,
but of course didn't say so.

"Tell me when to turn."

"Here."

I had forgotten to alert him to make a right
on Laurel. He was so much like me I had instinctively assumed his
inner radar would direct him straight to my front door. Swerving
sharply, he almost collided with a bicyclist coming the other way.
After a traditional exchange of horn blowing and curses, without a
whisper as to how lucky we all were, we continued towards the
river.

"I shouldn't have braked," Todd fumed.

"You would have killed him," I said. "His
head would have cracked your windshield."

"He was wearing blue underwear."

"That was Lycra. Don't you see any of this in
your area? Gays? Cyclists? I thought the Westies were pretty
liberal."

"All the real couples on River Road produce
real kids," he logicized.

"And those kids end up on Oregon Hill." Only
after I said it did I realized I had made my neighborhood sound
like a leaking nuclear power plant where kids came to get
mutated.

I directed Todd to circle around to Pine
Street. To my astonishment, we pulled up behind my Impala.

"My car!"

"Yeah?"

"It's here! I thought it was towed from your
back alley. Who...?" I reached into my pocket. My keys were still
there.

Todd snickered at the fat-assed car trunk
that filled his front view, rusty streaks running down the back,
looking like Flint Dementis' chin when he went on a drooling jag.
He backed away some, as though fearful of contamination, but was
reassured when he bumped into the Mercedes behind him.