Skunk Hunt (9 page)

"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.

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.

Eight-hundred and fifty thousand
dollars. Okay, divided by a third. Three-hundred thousand. Wait,
that's not right. Damn, why were there three of us? I can do even
numbers on my fingertips. Two-hundred and fifty thousand...? That's
close. Eight-hundred and fifty thousand divided by three...carry
the one...shit. It goes on forever. Let's leave it at a whole lot
of change. I could pay off a few bills, take it easy on the taxes
(that's what money's for), dump this dipwad job, ease back and
watch the sky roll by. In other words, wait out my abundant
remaining years in ease and with an easy conscience. After
all,
I
hadn't stolen the
money.

As the kids popped out of the theater like
overheated sesame seeds, I calmed myself with contemplation of a
blissful future. It didn't seem likely. But it was no more
unrealistic than a flight to Mars.

I was getting ready to close up my cart when
a woman staggered out of the theater, her eyes rolling in her
head.

"Jesus..." she murmured, pausing to steady
herself against the wall.

I pulled out an empty popcorn bucket and held
it up. She gave me a woozy, inquiring look.

"I never watch the Imax movies," I said.
"They always make me puke."

"I won't be repeating," she said, her mouth
hovering like a threatening cloudburst over the paper bucket.

Every few years the local television news
reports on what pigs men are when it comes to stranded motorists.
If a good-looking blonde is standing next to a stalled car, brakes
screech and male Samaritans pour out to give the lady a hand. If
she (or he) is otherwise, the world roars by without a second
glance. And it's true. Roadside Assistance would have passed up
this wreck even if she had been stretched out and bleeding. Her
adiposal ounces were irregularly placed, as though she had ice
packs strapped in odd places. Deep, chubby crevices splayed down
from her nostrils. Her chin hung like an elongated blister. She had
the stern countenance of the rejected, but at least she wasn't so
ugly that I was forced to look away, that being the case with one
of the girls I had dated—which I suppose explains that particular
breakup.

The woman's nausea gave way to some kind of
reverie as she stared at the bottom of the cup. Since there weren't
any dregs to contemplate or tea leaves to interpret, I guessed she
was just pleased she hadn't heaved and was admiring the result.

She handed the cup back to me.

"Thanks," she said. "That was cute of
you."

The 'cute' fuddled me, but I gave her a
gracious nod and tossed the cup into the nearest trash can.

"I didn't use it," she protested.

"Health regulations," I answered with
rigorous uncertainty.

"I don't have the plague."

She could have fooled me. I shrugged, like
the good, helpless automaton of bureaucracy that I was.

"Well, it's wasteful," she continued, going
green on me. The way her jowl flexed, she might have crawled out of
a lagoon, complete with gills. I thought of asking her what
happened to 'cute', then decided I didn't really want to know.

I also began wondering if I recognized her.
Was this the woman who had been sitting outside my house? I'd
caught only a glimpse of her, but I couldn't ask her to take a
gander at the Tyrannosaurus so I could study her profile. She
matched Jeremy's thumbnail description to a lousy T—but the world
is full of dogs.

At this point you're thinking what a creep I
am. You're not supposed to call people ugly, or deformed, or
retarded, or terminally retrograde, descriptions which I often
apply to the wonderful folks I share the planet with. I'm willing
to try conformity. I don't mind calling the kettle white, or
calling a spade a pitchfork, or pretending that taking out the
garbage is entering a brave new frontier. Everyone has to fit in
somewhere, even if it's in a nuthouse. But sometimes a great
asteroid plants itself in your face and you can't call it but what
it is. This woman was a wolf-wolf, a barf-barf, a real tail-wagger.
The streets might not empty in aesthetic panic when she walked down
the sidewalk, but a second glance in her direction would be
masochistic.

She was, in short, someone you wouldn't
forget. The more I scraped my eyes against her, the more certain I
grew she was the woman Jeremy had seen.

I expected her to move on, now that her
nausea had passed. But she looked at me narrowly, annoyed by my
silence.

"You like movies?" she said abruptly. "Not
this brain scrambler..." She nodded at the Imax theater entrance.
"I mean real movies."

I shrugged, frankly puzzled.

"What's your favorite?"

"Tea and Sympathy," I said.

Why it popped out like that I can't imagine.
I hoped it didn't reflect badly on me. I mean, the story of a wuss
having an affair with an older married wuss who served him tea and
sex (the best form of sympathy) left a lot to be desired in the
macho department. But there was no need to worry. She didn't know
the title.

"Deborah Kerr," I said helpfully.

"Oh," the woman said. "An old movie..."

She acted as though she had stumbled on an
adult playing in a sandbox. I guess I should have suggested
something dripping with testosterone: 300 or Terminator XXXX.
Anything that would have placed me in the league of the
lamebrained. Something she would have recognized.

"You like anything they
don't
show at the repartee?" she
asked.

Repertoire, you
ditz
. There's something heartrending about anyone who
exposes their ignorance while trying to show you up as a dummy. But
my momentary sympathy for her was squelched when she toggled her
wattle and said:

"You ought to see something modern."

"You mean, like at the Cineplex?" I asked, my
hair prickling.

"They're showing Avatar." She spoke with that
jocular aloofness teenage girls use when they pretend they're not
so desperate as to ask a guy on a date. Girls at least a decade
younger than herself. "I've been meaning to go see it. 3-D,
completely new technology."

No, it wasn't, at least not the 3-D part.
Hadn't she ever heard of the House of Wax? Or maybe 1953 was too
far before her time. I had grown up on old VHS movies purchased for
50 cents at the local Goodwill. This was in lieu of cable
television, satellite, computers, DVDs, Playstation and all the
other electronic gizmos we couldn't afford. It had given me a
peculiarly dated cultural outlook—witness Tea and Sympathy, for
example. Earth vs. the Flying Saucers was my idea of first-rate FX.
I might not have seen Vincent Price in 3-D, but I knew from the
faded box notes that House of Wax was one of the first big hits
that used the process.

"Wouldn't 3-D make you sick?" I asked.

"I didn't think of that..." she said
dolefully. I could see her thinking of alternatives and moved
quickly to cut her off.

"I don't go out much," I said. To make myself
look less useless, I began closing up the popcorn cart.

The woman sniffed, not at the aromatic wafts
from the popcorn, but at the $5.40 an hour she must have guessed I
was earning. "I'll treat."

I might have been standing in place,
but I was running scared. "I mean, I don't go out much because I
don't
like
going
out."

She gave me another long look. It wasn't what
I expected, an accusatory glare that put the blame of the failed
hookup on me. This was more speculative, as though she was weighing
me on a bug-sized balance scale. Okay, I was an insect. But she
wasn't holding that against me. In fact, she rather liked
insects.

"That's too bad," she said finally, and
reached into her oversized tote. To my utter flabbergestation, she
handed me a business card. "I ran out of embossed cards. These are
cheapies I hand out to the skels and C.I.'s. If you change your
mind, give me a call. I'm serious. Get at me."