Skunk Hunt (7 page)

"A couple of hours ago."

"Greedy bastard," Barbara snarled. I suddenly
wondered if my brother had diddled my sister. I doubted it. It was
none of my business. I was too chickenshit to ask. No...it was none
of my business. Anyway, she would have called the police.

It must have dawned on her that I might think
she was just as greedy. "It's not the money," she said. "It's that
damn letter. Shit, like he was writing from the grave. You don't
really think...?"

"I don't know what to think," I said. "My
letter said some things..."

"That only Skunk would know?" she asked.

"Yeah."

"Me too."

"And Doubletalk, too," I added.

"Jesus, my hair's standing up."

"Can you come?" I said.

"I'll be there in fifteen minutes."

"What, you're planning to beam over?"

"I'm not in Greensville anymore," Barbara
said. "I'm in Henrico, just over the city line. I've been back over
a year. I'm working again at the…what did you used to call it? The
Putrid Palace?"

A small drop of sorrow fell into my
silence.

CHAPTER 5

Her hair was still standing on end when she
marched through the front door without knocking, as though my house
was still her home. At first, her punk spikes punctured my vision.
She seemed like a Japanese comic book character, though I gave her
credit for not tinting her auburn hair green or magenta.

We went into the kitchen and sat.

After the initial shock wore off, I found her
less exotic—or rather, exotic in a different way. Having grown up
more or less without culture, Barbara's pink shorts and white
ruffled blouse seemed the height of fashion to me. I hardly noticed
that she was chewing gum as she lit up a Camel.

Suddenly, she grabbed her mouth. "Shit," she
murmured through her fist.

"What is it?"

"I keep forgetting..." She removed something
that looked like a clear plastic mouthguard from her upper teeth.
"Invisalign. They're like braces, only you can't see them. Except
you're not to supposed to eat when they're on. You can't even drink
anything but water while wearing them."

"Your teeth are as straight as mine," I
observed.

"Yeah, that's what I'm trying to fix." She
laid the gunked object in the center of the kitchen table, which in
this house was a perfectly normal thing to do. Streaked by pink
gum, it looked like bleeding rubble. The perfect McPherson
escutcheon—anything new or unique that fell into our hands was
ruined by abuse, ignorance, disuse. That plastic brace must have
cost a small fortune. In a careless moment (and careless moments
were endemic to us), Barbara had trashed it.

We were freaks of nature. No matter how hard
we worked and saved, or connived and stole, the moment we got what
we had striven for the innovative object of desire crumpled and
died. Our motto? "We can always get another one, bigger, better and
just as flimsy."

"I'm due to get my new one," Barbara
shrugged. "You have to change them every two weeks."

There was a time I would have asked her who
her sugar daddy was. But three years stretched the bonds of
recognition out of shape. She was living practically within
shouting distance, had set up a new life that included dental
work—an inconceivable luxury in the McPherson schematic. Maybe the
sugar daddy who had replaced her fiancé was a dentist, a hands-on
consumer of adult entertainment. She was certainly moving up in the
world.

I watched Barbara as she surveyed the kitchen
shamble. There was an agreeable layer of thickness overlying the
scrawny cuteness of the girl I had known. Starting at twelve or
thirteen I noted that her usual sleek running style was being
hampered by her expanding hips and bustline. Boys had always
grappled with her, but suddenly there seemed more to grab hold of.
By seventeen she was able to lie her way into the pole-dancing
limelight as Enchanté Chanel (she could have done it at sixteen),
the wet dream of men old enough to be australopithecine
ancestors.

So when I say she appeared a little heavier,
it was with the rich abundance of womanhood, with only a little
excess. She was one year younger than me, and she looked like an
adult. While, at 24, I was achingly aware of the zitty goofball
that gawked back at me the rare times I bothered staring in a
mirror. You would have thought my self-esteem had improved since
Skunk's death. I had a job, I was able to pay taxes and utilities,
even the minimal insurance on the fat-assed Impala I had retrieved
from the impound lot after the robbery.

"Nothing's changed," said Barbara in a
neutral tone, the kindest tone she could have used.

"You must mean the house." I said. "Most
everyone we knew when we were kids are gone."

"I noticed a lot of people on the
sidewalks." Barbara scowled. "It was like when we were kids, when
everyone stayed outside. But the faces were all wrong.
They're
all
students?"

"There's still Flint Dementis and a few
others, but that's it."

"But...where
is
everyone. I only left a few years
ago."

"Forced out," I said. "All the property
assessments skyrocketed. No one could afford to pay their
taxes."

"But you do?"

"Barely." I glanced over at the sink, as
though an oracle was hidden in the cluttered dishes. "Don't know
for how long. I work the popcorn concession at the Science Museum.
It's a nothing job for a nobody."

Barbara's eyes widened. Her mascara
exaggerated her emotions, like a face on a balloon.

"Don't say that, Mute!"

"It's true."

"That's like saying we're
all
nothing."

"How can me being nothing make
everyone
nothing?"

"Because it's what we all believe, that
everyone is something."

"Not everyone believes that."

"But it's like saying you don't believe in
God," she continued to protest. "You don't say it, not out loud.
You don't even try to think it."

"Do you believe?"

"You won't get me to admit to anything. Do I
want to get hit by lightning?"

While our theological discussion stalled, I
puzzled out her meaning. There was some truth to what she said.
Everyone has to agree that everyone has inherent human worth. It's
not a hard sell, and most people buy into it. I only have to open
my front door to run into a world of blind self-confidence and
conceit. Maybe it's a little more potent in my neighborhood. Young
people think all their wonderful todays will make for wonderful
tomorrows. A fully mature adult understands there are setbacks in
life, maybe a few tears on the horizon to brace for. Over all,
though, as a nation, we're pretty cocky.

If it takes only one cogent doubt to bring
down the whole cathedral, it's a pretty fragile religion. I stooped
under the weight of responsibility. Would I have to become an
optimist to keep the edifice from falling?

"Aren't you seeing anyone?" Barbara
asked.

"You mean a shrink?"

"I mean a
girl
, dummy."

She had acquired a touch of PC in the
outer world. In the past, she would have posed the question more
crudely. Such as, "Fucking any of the neighbors? She'd better be of
age." Her cherry had been popped at the age of 12, and perhaps she
was thinking it would have been better to wait—although she never
expressed any such doubt. Her new, cosmopolitan self had been
taught to tread carefully. For all she knew, I was seeing another
guy. Maybe even another
thing
.

In this respect, she became perverse in my
eyes.

"I dated some," I answered. "But it takes a
little more money than I've got to..."

"No one around here ever needed money to
breed before," was Barbara's acid response.

I didn't answer. Without money, you had to
have something else going for you to attract the opposite sex. None
of which I had.

After suffering through a minute of
non-elaboration on my part, Barbara continued: "I brought my
letter." Barbara lifted a small pink purse and the wadded 8.5 x 11
timebomb ticking away in its nest of makeup and emergency
tampons.

"I don't think I should show it to you," said
Barbara.

"You're not supposed to," I said. "It's got a
secret password."

"Oh, yeah. But the letter says something
about me...you know, that only Skunk would know."

"Embarrassing?"

"You wouldn't believe," she said
emphatically.

"That's all right. I'm not going to show you
mine, either. And I'm sure Doubletalk will keep his to himself. By
the way, he says he might be able to get hold of a computer. It
looks like we need one to do any of this. I would hate to do it at
the library."

"Yeah, it's hard being quiet," Barbara said
doubtfully. "What did Skunk know about computers?"

"What did he know about light sockets?" I
added. "That's why I think this is a sick joke."

There was a knock at the front door, polite,
almost too discrete to hear.

"Thanks," I said grimly, glaring at my
sister.

"What?" she asked, surprised.

"Your phone call. You and your mouth."

She assumed the deerstruck pose, folded and
mutilated, eyes wide with blindness. "You mean it's the
police?"

"Or worse. Shit, Sweet Tooth, you know we're
being watched."

"But that was years ago," she said
plaintively.

"Who's going to forget $850,000?"

Another knock, scarcely any louder.

"Maybe it's Doubletalk," Barbara suggested,
burning a quarter inch of tobacco in a single gulping intake.

I snickered and Barbara sucked a laugh. Yeah,
right. Imagine Jeremy knocking ever so courteously.

"We don't have to answer," said Barbara,
lowering her voice.

"We just sit here while they bust down the
door?" I said skeptically.

"We don't have anything to hide."

"The letters," I observed.

"Oh shit." Barbara clutched her bag
tightly.

"But it doesn't sound like they mean to break
in," I said when there was another light tap.

"So we sit tight?" Barbara gave me a
questioning glance, as though I had some sort of control over the
situation.

"Guess so," I shrugged.

We sat still for a couple of minutes,
listening to the intermittent tapping. I was beginning to wonder if
it was one of the Jehovah's Witnesses that plagued the area, trying
to convince students and the remaining locals to kiss up to God
before it was too late. Not too many people gave them (or the
Almighty, for that matter) the time of day.

Barbara had gone pale.

"What is it?" I asked.

"What if it's...
him
."

"Who?" I said.

"
Dad
."

"Skunk is dead."

"That's what I mean."

"You mean a
ghost
? Knocking on his own door? In the middle of
the day?"

"Stranger things have happened," Barbara said
breathlessly.

"Name one."

She frowned at me. I knew she was stumped, or
hoped she was. But rather than prolong the tension and risk further
supernatural qualms, I got up and went to the door. I didn't have a
peephole, a bit of frugality I now regretted. Whoever or whatever
was on the other side would be an unavoidable surprise.

I opened the door.

I was surprised.

"Doubletalk," I said.

Jeremy looked at me a long moment, then said,
"I guess I didn't knock hard enough. I didn't want to disturb you
in case...well, in case..."

In case I was jerking off?

But I don't think that was on his mind. I got
the impression he had been hoping no one would answer.

CHAPTER 6

"What a pigsty," Jeremy winced as he
unshouldered two black nylon bags and laid them on the kitchen
table.

Barbara and I exchanged glances. Her comment
about the house, that 'nothing had changed', was not exactly a
compliment, but at least withheld judgment. Jeremy's outburst was
spontaneous and honest. He shriveled like a prissy old maid dumped
in a dorm filled with orangutans.

He was Skunk's boy, all right, right down to
the thick neck and heavy tread and a face winched up into the
narrow cavern of his eyes. Otherwise, in his madras shorts and polo
shirt, he could have just finished a quick jog across the Harvard
quad. The crew cut...that was pure Skunk. But it was tight and trim
as our father's had never been. No beer sweat here.

I had the qualified pleasure of seeing
Barbara as dumbfounded as I had been when I saw the new her. If
there had not been the barrier of incest, Jeremy would have looked
like the guy who owned the yacht I imagined Barbara boarded for a
weekend of skinnydipping.

"Oh my God," said Barbara, all but gaping at
her big brother. "What did they do to you in prison?"

What anybody else would have seen as a vast
improvement she considered grotesque evidence of brainwashing, with
extra starch. I knew how she felt. When the gap between what you
expect and what you get was this wide, it could only mean something
had gone horribly wrong. I imagined a long line of jailbird
hairdressers ramming culture up my brother's—

"What's wrong?" Jeremy asked, craning his
head downward. "Did I spill some of my latte?"

There was a hint of posturing in his voice,
as if he knew perfectly well he was presenting us with a skewed
picture. The picture grew skewier when he took out a pipe.

"What's that?" Barbara demanded.

"A pipe. You must've seen one before."

"What are you doing with it?" my sister
persisted.