Skunk Hunt (19 page)

Dalton Bowen, a post-adolescent pimple of a
creep who had lived over on China Street. He had been among the
poor whites displaced when a developer tore down the houses nearest
the river for new townhouses. He looked like someone who would have
to pay a steep price to get laid.

Yeah, look who's talking. At least I can feed
semi-comfortably at the bottom.

"Did Sweet Tooth get anything out of this?" I
said.

"Of course," said Jeremy. "Sex."

"I mean..." I began, then gave up. "Forget
it."

"I use to target practice with this little
sweetheart up on the canal," Jeremy said with all the weight of a
ride on a merry-go-round. Having a gun was nothing to him, like a
one-night stand. You could smile at the memory, but not go all
mopey about it.

"What did you shoot at?" I asked.

"Kayakers."

I decided not to pursue the conversation, but
I couldn't ignore the gun. Jeremy ejected the clip and gave it a
cursory inspection.

"Bryco M59," he informed me. "The company
that made them got sued and went bankrupt, which makes this a
gem."

"A gem?" I asked.

"You know, an antique. Something they don't
make anymore, unless it's a crappy rip-off."

"Why did they get sued?"

"I guess because it's a piece of shit,"
Jeremy said, thumbing out a 9mm round and rolling it in his
fingers. "Some dipwad was cleaning his gun and accidentally shot
someone's dick off, or something like that. One day every dummy
will have a lawyer and the whole world will shut down."

"You have a lawyer," I pointed out.

"Court appointed," said Jeremy. "Not a real
lawyer."

I didn't like the way he was fiddling with
the gun, like it was a Rubik's cube waiting to explode.

"Stop looking like a jack-off," Jeremy said,
catching my expression. "It's a good basic gun. It gets the job
done."

And Jeremy was a good basic dummy. I said,
"What job?"

"No job at all, if we're lucky," he answered.
"You say we've been shot at, right? We're going to some dumpster in
the woods where someone might try again, right? We need
protection."

I felt so much safer.

There was a broken staccato pecking at the
front door. Barbara was giving us her Mata Hari rendition, as
though we had prearranged a secret knock. I let her in. When she
came into the kitchen and saw the gun she pronounced her dismay
with a loud gasp.

"You want I should go ahead and order the
daisies?" she said.

Daisies instead of lilies—she must have been
watching The Sopranos. I didn't care what patois she used, so long
as the helicopters stayed away.

When we went outside Barbara walked straight
to her Sentra and opened the driver's door. Before she could sit,
Jeremy deftly plucked the keys out of her hands and scooted into
the driver seat.

"Hey!" Barbara protested.

"'Hey' yourself," my brother said as he
pushed the key into the ignition.

"Doubletalk McPherson, yesterday you couldn't
do nothing but squat in your pants, and now you think you have the
gumption—"

"So you're psycho, too?" he said, cutting her
off. "You want to get in or am I going alone?"

He had reversed yesterday's scenario, when we
threatened to abandon him in the ditch. This struck me as perfectly
normal. I have a strong sense of poetic justice, which is why I
don't kick up much fuss selling popcorn at the Science Museum. It
seems like the fate I deserve. But Barbara took this sudden
reversal to heart. She appeared set to do a lot of emoting when
Jeremy started the engine and pulled out. She let out a screech and
he stopped. We piled in without further ado. Naturally, I took the
back seat, as befitted a bottom feeder.

"You're a complete A-hole, you know that?" my
sister complained.

"I know it, you know it, Mute knows it, the
correctional system of the Commonwealth of Virginia knows it," he
said, running the Stop sign on Pine and squealing right onto Route
1. "Tell me something none of us knows."

Barbara worked on this for some time, then
smiled grimly. "That gun of yours..."

"What about it?"

"You still using that box of cartridges
Dalton gave you?" Barbara continued.

"Got it right here," said Jeremy, patting a
leather pouch on the console.

"Well, Dalton told me he didn't want to get
into too much trouble giving away that gun for you-know-what, so he
gave you blanks."

"Bullshit! The box says—"

"He took the real bullets out of the box and
gave you blanks," Barbara explained. "He said you were too much a
dummy to tell the difference just looking at them."

'From rags to rags in three
generations'. It's taken to mean the first generation makes money,
the second holds onto the money, and the third blows the whole
bundle. The inference is that, at some point, at least one member
of the bloodline has grit and brains enough to rise out of the
swamp. The McPherson line is still waiting on the first rung. We've
gone from rags to rags
ad
infinitum
, with hardly enough gumption to throw a
light switch. Our progress report was written on Jeremy's face, a
goofy slackjaw that would embarrass a halfway-intelligent mother.
If our ancestors had cooked up a family escutcheon, it would have
been that very look—with raw egg dripping off.

"I guess those kayakers you were using for
targets got off easy," I commented. "Didn't you wonder why you
weren't hitting anything?"

"Why didn't you tell me before?" Jeremy asked
after taking a full minute to recover his voice.

"You threatened to break my arm if I didn't
sleep with that creep, remember?" Barbara said.

"So?"

"You don't think that's a little extreme?"
she persisted.

"Extreme what?" asked Jeremy, his voice
bruised and bewildered.

He didn't see where he had done anything
wrong. In fact, he was feeling hurt that anyone would play such a
trick on him. Poor innocent victim. I was tempted to slip out a
shoe string and garrote him.

"What are you, some kind of animal?" Barbara
said.

"You're the one sending us into a shooting
gallery with blanks," Jeremy said, speeding up, as though he
couldn't wait to put us at risk. "That's not very civilized."

The only thing worse than Jeremy with a
loaded gun was Jeremy with a useless gun. After yesterday, there
was no telling what we would encounter. I would prefer that our
adversaries ate lead, not sound bites.

At least my brother seemed to know where he
was going. Near Happy Hill we branched off onto a side road, and
soon intersected Old Petersburg Turnpike. Not long after he turned
south, slowing down, searching for landmarks.

"We're looking for a house, right?" Barbara
said.

"A driveway," Jeremy said. "The house is set
off from the main road."

"How far from the main road?" I asked,
concerned.

"Whoever gave me the map wrote a note on the
back." His words resounded with deep effort, as though the note had
been an estuary of foreign phrases.

"What map?" Barbara asked. "What note?"

"The note said maybe a hundred yards."

Barbara went bug-eyed. "A hundred yards in
the woods?"

"Maybe in the woods, or it could be—"

Clamping a hand to her forehead, Barbara
said, "Turn around."

"We can handle it," Jeremy grinned without
slowing down.

"Up to now we've been pretty much in the
open," Barbara reasoned tensely. "We've been in coffee shops, and
there was Flint's house. Even on the road there were cars going by,
at least. You want us to go in the woods, where there's no help.
What are we going to do if we get in trouble? It's a crummy deal.
Turn around!"

I was inclined to agree, but I was surprised
by her lack of moxie. She had taken yesterday in stride, shrugging
off the sniper once it became apparent we were not the primary
targets. A weasel of doubt about my sister began nibbling at my
vitals.

"Sweet Tooth," I said, "you haven't been
talking to someone about all of this, have you?"

"Course not!" Barbara said, her chest
throbbing in protest.

Jeremy caught the uneasy crimp in her answer
and eased off the gas as he glanced at her. "Who?"

"I just said—"

"You just lied." Jeremy slammed his fist on
the steering wheel. "Couldn't you keep your mouth shut for once in
your life?"

"Who says I didn't?" said Barbara, who
immediately proceeded to chew on her knuckle. Jeremy gave me a
knowing look in the rearview mirror. When we were kids, we had
always been able to tell when our sister was lying. Any reference
to bad behavior on her part, such as a betrayed secret, sent her
into gnawing mode. Body language is the first thing you learn and
the hardest thing to kick. My personal betrayer is a tendency to
bite my lip in a vain attempt to cut short words already spoken.
Lying doesn't come naturally to me, which makes me somewhat
subhuman.

Barbara was staring straight ahead and missed
the impish light that flashed across Jeremy's face. But I saw it,
just as he was looking away from the mirror. Another familiar
giveaway. He too had leaked our secret to a party or parties
unknown. It made me weary of being Mute. I wondered if I should
bring up the fact that his expression had betrayed the fact that he
had betrayed the fact that...then I lost the thread, or rather
dropped it.

Jeremy didn't bother speeding up again. We
had driven past a decrepit business park and then a loose row of
houses that grew progressively weedier before hitting a stretch of
woods that showed no sign of ending soon. Here and there we saw
mail boxes that followed the same pattern of decay as the houses,
with neatly numbered boxes giving out on dented receptacles and
broken posts. The house numbers stenciled on the posts became so
faded we were forced to slow down to read them. The houses
themselves were invisible, tucked away in the woods at the end of
dirt lanes, inhospitably secret and grave. Yeah, grave. These folks
had buried themselves away from humanity. It was an attitude I
fully appreciated, but in practice sent shivers down my spine.
Every so often I find it salutary to see a human face. And not only
that, to speak to that face. And sometimes I even want that other
face to speak back to me in a benign manner. I conformed to the
habits of a 'city solitaire', meaning I occasionally conversed with
members of my species. A solitary man in the city just happens to
be alone. In the country, they're trolls. These were the marksmen
who drew a bead on you when you violated their territory. Who ate
roadkill and were semi-if-not-entirely illiterate and played banjo
music on their Victrolas. I knew my assumptions were littered with
clichés, but mass media was more firmly anchored in my psyche than
reality. Jed Clampett and Deliverance leapt to mind. I feared our
destination long before I laid eyes on it.

"Check that out," I said.

"I've checked," said Jeremy tightly.

We passed a van parked on a gravel turn-off,
the quaint satellite dish on top raising the distinctive stink of
cops who had neglected their protective deodorant. But we saw no
one in the driver's seat and the van stayed put as we progressed up
the road.

"Here, I think..." Jeremy slowed at a long
curve in the road. Someone behind us grew impatient and gunned
around us, heedless of the double line.

Barbara saw the narrow rutted drive and
headless mailbox post and murmured, "Turn around..."

Yesterday, the word I would have used for
Jeremy was Quixotic. Not in any magnanimous sense, but even greed
can possess a sheen of nobility. Until the sniper took a shine to
us, my brother played a leading role in the great Skunk Hunt,
gallantly forging through the challenges with aplomb and
enthusiasm. But now he was a reckless gambler redeeming a lotto
ticket from Hell. He had crossed the line between prudent
acceptance of the terms of the hunt and sheer stupidity.

There was something terminal about the
driveway's steep slope, and I'm not talking about buses. It was as
if this was a place where what went up did not necessarily come
down. The hill had our well-being at heart, and fought the
fishtailing Sentra every yard of the way, telegraphing us in no
uncertain terms that if we wanted to stay healthy, we'd better turn
around and leave. Only there was no place to turn around. We
skidded, bounced, jounced and swiveled. I moaned, Barbara squealed,
Jeremy swore. I began to wonder if we would find a Tibetan monk at
the top—armed with a mantra and scimitar.

The road leveled and we found ourselves in a
small clearing that boasted tree stumps and a dilapidated hovel
straight out of Dogpatch. Jeremy stopped and we all jumped out like
bats on fire. I'm not sure what we thought we were escaping. Sooner
or later we would have to get back in.

There were no other cars in sight. That was
good. Nor was there any indication that the house had been lived in
for a couple of decades. That was also good. But the good news came
to an end when we began milling in circles, wearing the vacuous
expressions of the clueless.

"Now what?" Barbara said, a less-than-clear
call to action. Jeremy and I stopped in our tracks.

"Well..." I began.

Jeremy gave me a dark look and I
continued:

"The clue was the house number. We need to go
inside the house." When the dark look continued, I added, "It's
better than digging."

If this had ever been an active farm, its
heyday was buried under the pepper weeds, snarled creepers and
surface roots. A shovel would have been useless. We needed a pick
and ax. Or, considering our work ethic, hired help with a backhoe.
While there were a few bare patches dirt, they were so stony and
brittle we winced just looking at them. They say Mother Earth is
resilient, but this was a pretty hopeless case, practically a
radioactive waste dump, with only a few twigs sprouting out of the
stumps to stake a claim to reclamation.