Skunk Hunt (11 page)

Barbara repeated the request I had made when
I found her and Jeremy leaning over my shoulders. "You guys look
away."

We complied. I found myself watching a kid
slowly unravel a Danish. His significant mother rapped him on the
fingers. He dropped the pastry, scowling. As soon as the nanny
looked away he resumed his research, unwrapping the gooey twirl. I
knew he was headed for disappointment, that the unrolled string of
dough would lead him to an empty center. That much I had learned in
life.

"Oh..." Barbara complained.

"What," Jeremy fumed.

"I think I typed the wrong letter. How can I
tell? There's only dots."

She didn't protest when Jeremy and I turned
around. She was on the verge of biting her index nail, a lengthy
device that seemed grown for the purpose of inserting and
destroying body orifices.

"No wonder," said Jeremy. "You should trim
the daggers."

"But it's
me
!" said Barbara.

"What, you're just a fingernail?" Jeremy's
eyes rolled upwards, but there weren't any answers written on the
ceiling. I know, because I looked, too.

"It's my
statement
," Barbara shot back.

It wasn't the fragment of socio-babble that
bothered me, but my belief that a growing portion of the population
would have understood what she was talking about. I, personally,
have no statements. I'm the null value on the Gallup scale, with
drab clothes, drab values and a distressingly drab conscience.

"How many letters have you typed?" Jeremy
asked.

"Two...maybe three," said Barbara, adding, "I
have to go to the bathroom."

"The way you're going, we might have to join
you." Jeremy pulled a chair over and sat next to our
thank-God-one-and-only sister. "Let me give you a hand."

"I'm not stupid," Barbara said, angered by
Jeremy's tutorial threat. "It's just that I can't think when I have
to poop."

"Shit for brains," I murmured stupidly.
Fortunately, no one noticed. Over half of the customers around us
were college students, for whom swearing is the lingua fucka. Even
here, in All-American Starbucks, the air was hazy with oaths spoken
so casually that they were drained of all
umph
. The same oaths they used when they
were
really
mad. Pretty soon
English will be like Mandarin, with all meaning delivered by
emphasis. Definition in a shout.

Jeremy had been surprisingly calm up to this
point, but Barbara's flakiness was chipping his armor. Maybe he had
been weakened by the long-awaited appearance of the treasure site.
He had thought the whole thing bogus, and now it looked like it
could all be true. The more you strain for the prize, the more you
sweat, and Jeremy was sweating.

When Barbara proved unable to say how many
letters she had typed, or if those letters had been accurate,
Jeremy cleared the login field and nearly pushed her out of her
chair.

"We have to start over," he said. "Mute, come
here and reenter your password."

A little more briskly than before, I typed
'brinks', then jumped away, like a cat escaping a litter box.
Jeremy inserted the underscore, then glared at Barbara.

"What's your password, Sweet Tooth? I'll type
it in for you."

"Like hell you will." Barbara slapped his
hands away from the laptop as she sat back down and focused on the
keyboard. "Turn your backs," she said without looking at us.

We reluctantly complied and for the second
time were subjected to the slow clicks of fake keratin on the
keys.

"Okay," she said finally.

"You sure?" Jeremy said.

"I concentrated."

"That's good," her elder brother answered
with a sneer that brought out not the best but the most familiar in
him. "Did you do the underscore?"

"Just my secret word," Barbara said.

Jeremy took her place, added the underscore,
then craned his head up at us. "Assume the position."

By the time we had turned away he had already
typed in his password.

"Done," he announced, hitting Enter.

I was annoyed that he had made us look away.
There was no way I could have deciphered the blur of his fingers.
But before I could file my vapid complaint the computer screen went
into convulsions that resolved into a tunnel-vision light show.

"Bells and whistles," Jeremy snarled. "Come
on, Dad. Just the facts."

The light condensed into a diamond-shaped
image with what seemed to be words stenciled on each facet. The
diamond exploded and the words shot out in all directions, then
floated down onto the calm pond of the screen and scooted back and
forth like waterbugs looking for an escape until, finally, they
resigned themselves to captivity and settled into sentences.

"About time," Jeremy said, looking at the
clock. "He just wasted two minutes with this crap."

Barbara and I squeezed our brother from
either side. To my surprise he accepted this intrusion on his
personal space, it being the price he had to pay for being the
master of ceremonies.

We read:

Ammo lockers into
ploughshares. The leftovers of the old war include socks and
underwear, not very well cleaned. Hidden away, the gin bottle
scrambles the scrambled brain. A nip here and there from the secret
compartment
.

We waited for more words to appear. Perhaps a
map, an X marks the spot. But I didn't think that was necessary. My
heart was racing.

"Nothing else?" Barbara gnawed on her gum
another moment, then wailed, "I really have to go to the
toilet."

Either her distress had stripped away her
culture, or the years had coarsened her language. When I last saw
her, she employed the much more refined 'little girls tinkle
room'.

"I won't hold you back," Jeremy said
graciously. I merely shrugged.

Barbara raced away.

"Should we tell her if anything else shows
up?" Jeremy said, nodding at the screen.

He was still a mean bastard. Too bad for him
betrayal had already entered my mind.

I didn't answer him. He waited for more
juice from Pseudo-Skunk, but I knew the cyberwell was dry. The
message was complete. The secret compartment was a mild puzzle, but
the rest was clear. The real conundrum was Jeremy's pose of
irritated ignorance. Unless he had suddenly become a retard—a
reasonable if narrow possibility—he had to know as well as I did
the meaning of the text. It was more likely that he saw the same
opportunity as I did:
screw bro and
sis
. I wondered if he was going through a process of
self-justification similar to what was schmoozing through my own
mind. I deserved the money because I was maintaining the old
homestead. It was true that none of us placed any nostalgic value
in Oregon Hill. True, also, that I only stayed because of my own
profound inertia. But did I deserve
all
of the hidden loot? Only to the degree that
my siblings did—and none of us did. The entirety was broken into
thirds, and the thirds dissolved into nothing.

Looking at all viewpoints isn't very
profitable. Truly, I jumped off of that path real quick.

Jeremy was one helluva an actor,
though. His fingers curled on the tabletop in a spasm of suspense.
I glanced at the floor and saw the same jiggling of the legs that
accompanied all his nervous moments when we were kids. He tried
urging the computer along with a couple of bursts of
humming.
Come on, follow the bouncing
cursor! Show us what you've got!
But
www.treasure447.com was not in the mood for music. We stared at the
time in the tray at the bottom of the screen. Fifteen minutes was
almost gone.

Barbara reappeared, looking relieved and
anxious. I glanced back down at the screen, but a moment later my
attention was drawn by several voices raised in protest. Some women
emerged from the back, slapping at the air as though they were
being attacked by rabid bats. Throwing accusatory glances at
Barbara, they raced like the wind out of Starbucks.

"We can go now," she said, fidgeting
nervously.

"We've got a couple of minutes left." Sensing
she needed a visual aid, Jeremy explained the concept of time with
a tap on the system tray clock.

"So there's nothing new?" Barbara asked. When
Jeremy and I shook our heads, she continued: "Then that's it. Let's
go before someone comes in."

The place was packed. Anyone else coming in
would have had to punch someone out of their chair to sit. I
figured she was talking about a SWAT team charging with guns drawn,
bellowing "Everybody down!" as they busted in.

"A few more seconds won't hurt," I
reasoned—and was quickly proved wrong. A stench wafted from the
back of the building. It was powerful enough to grab my
half-digested breakfast and try to pull it out through my throat.
"Jesus," I gasped, invoking my less-than-palpable religious sense
against the elements.

Jeremy's eyes went wide. He found religion,
too. "Christ, Sweet Tooth, you use beach towels for Tampex?"

A hundred-thousand years of brotherly
compassion for sisters was summed up in that comment. Barbara
assumed the dejected stance of the eternally downtrodden.

"Where else can I put them?" she complained.
"Anyway, that's not the...problem. I need to go to the doctor about
it. I've got helicopters."

Jeremy and I were not inclined to hang around
for an explanation. All around us customers were abandoning their
tables, practically gagging on the sulphurous cloud that I'd almost
swear was visible. Yeah...it was a brown cloud.

"A minute left," said Jeremy, gritting his
teeth. He was damned if he was going to surrender a second of
website time, even if it meant paying with his health. As the
stench trailing Barbara from the women's bathroom grew worse
instead of fading, I was forced to conclude Jeremy was truly
ignorant of the meaning of the message—he was waiting for a final
installment that would never come.

But holding the key to the secret wouldn't
help me if I was asphyxiated. Usually, a person is not repelled by
his own body emanations, but even Barbara was beginning to lean
towards the exit, although I guess embarrassment also played a
role. I wondered if Starbucks could hold her legally accountable
for loss of business.

I looked at the laptop just in time to see
the screen change to 'Unable to Display' before running out the
door. Jeremy was not long in following.

"Where's Sweet Tooth?" he demanded.

I shrugged. Surveying the parking lot, we
spotted her wandering between cars at the adjoining mall. When she
spotted us coming towards her, she turned away.

"Hey!" Jeremy yelled, breaking into a trot.
My dread of physical effort is deeply ingrained, and I dropped
behind. When I finally caught up, my brother was holding Barbara by
her arm.

"You know what it means, don't you!" he was
shouting.

"No!" Barbara tried to wriggle out of his
grip. "You're hurting."

"We have a deal," Jeremy insisted.

"What deal?" Barbara said, breaking loose
with an emphatic jerk of her elbow. "Skunk didn't say anything
about a deal. He just—"

"Skunk is
dead
, you twit!" Jeremy lowered his voice,
suddenly realizing a fracas in public would draw attention, even if
one was only stating the perfectly obvious. "We don't know who's
behind this, all right? You must have helicopters in the
brain."

"How smart
you
are." Superior knowledge lifted Barbara's
chin. "Helicopters live in your intestines. And don't tell me the
name doesn't make sense, because that's what they're called. The
doctors have their reasons."

"Helicopters," Jeremy nodded, as though
seeing reason. "I guess that's better than supershit."

I spent this charming moment scanning the
parking lot. No one seemed to be watching us, but I didn't suppose
spies made it a point to be seen. A few vans parked nearby had
ominous potential. One or all of them could be packed with
eavesdropping equipment. At least Yvonne Kendle's heap was nowhere
in sight.

I looked back at my sister and suddenly
understood her secret sorrow. She couldn't keep a man because she
stank of helicopters. I took a step back. Jesus, a mutant! I half
expected her to sprout rotor blades. With me, understanding and
empathy occupy opposite ends of the field.

"I can't find my Sentra," Barbara said,
bangles clanging on the side of her head as she twisted around.

"Aren't we supposed to talk, first?" Jeremy
danced into her line of sight. "Do you understand the message? Is
that why you're trying to get away?"

Barbara jerked as she came on-topic. It was
like seeing a cat respond to a can opener. Then her eyes as quickly
faded, and we could see that she had already forgotten half of the
message.

"Shit," said Jeremy.

"Don't swear at me," Barbara scowled. "Did I
swear at you?"

"'Ammo lockers into ploughshares'," I quoted,
watching both of them closely.

"Hey Mute, you have a memory." Jeremy shot me
a jalapeno grin.

"'The leftovers of the old war include
socks and underwear, not very well cleaned'." My face was a
mediocre Tums. "Do
you
know
what it means?"

But now Barbara was staring at me. How could
she guess what I was thinking? Was it feminine intuition, or did
brain farts clear the mind?

"Doubletalk should know," I said, then
tumbled down a mental hole. Crap. I had not had enough practice
disconnecting my mind from my mouth. Too much time spent alone.

"If you know what I should know, then you
must know." This was not the old Jeremy speaking, who would have
stumbled after two words of reason. Prison had really honed his
thought processes.