Skunk Hunt (29 page)

"You don't think Doubletalk would try
anything?" she asked in a trembling voice.

"I don't trust him, but I don't think he'd
hurt us." My arm throbbed, a sore reminder of all the times Jeremy
had punched me. "Maybe 'hurt' is the wrong word..."

"Didn't you notice how weird he's acting
since we got back together?" Barbara said, bunching herself against
a non-existent draft. "One day he's the old Doubletalk, the next
he's like some kind of geek."

"Maybe that's why Skunk called him
Doubletalk," I shrugged. "He and Mom spotted him for a schizoid
right off."

I was idly speculating, but my comment struck
Barbara with the force of truth. "You mean we grew up with a
sicko?"

"Well yeah, why do you think we couldn't tell
him from anyone else around here?"

The dull edge didn't comprehend the double
edge. Barbara nodded in aggressive affirmation. "Boy, now I get
it."

No you don't, Sis, I thought. Not by a mile.
It was a pretty conceited thought, especially considering what
happened later. But there I go putting the cart before the ass,
again.

"So you can see we don't want him with us on
the island," she continued. "If nothing else, he'd run off with the
bag."

"There you go with the island again."

"We've got to get there before Carl."

"You know what it's like down there," I
argued. "Boulders...trees...snakes ...ferns— "

"Stop it! There's a nice bridge there
now, you know that." Barbara reached for my shirt collar again. And
she was worried about
Jeremy
getting violent. "Get off your ass! None of this matters to
you, but this is my chance to get out of this shitty life.
Come
on
! You want some coffee?
Do you want me to slap you awake?"

I had never thought about the good
money can do. I know that's a strange comment coming from a
property holder. I have to pay utilities and taxes, like any good
suburban satrap. And there are the good things in life, cigarettes
and tea. Actually, I hate tea. But there's beer and chips and
coated peanuts and all the other elements of an unbalanced
healthstyle. I wasn't paying a severe emotional penalty for the way
I lived. So the moral aspect of money—
proper
money, in bulk—was a subject alien to me.
Skunk had tried to get money in bulk in a socially unacceptable
manner, a potent example to be avoided at all costs. So for Barbara
to tell me that this was her chance to escape a lousy servitude
came as a shock. She carried her career with such panache that it
hadn't donned on me that it could be a burden. I mean, she was a
professional slut, right? You didn't have to be the Pope to
recognize it was not exactly a saintly method of paying your bills.
Barbara was a go-getter, in a demented kind of way, but it was
becoming obvious her life as a pole plumber was losing its charm.
She was calling it hell. I suspected a plain case of job burnout.
But even I could see she had to pad her future. One day, her looks
would fail her. I thought I saw a slight inflation around her
midsection. Fat, or gas?

Even if logic or sibling duty didn't come
into play, the fact that she seemed perfectly willing and capable
of laying a serious hurt on me convinced me to put on my sneakers
and jacket.

"We can drive down to the river parking lot,"
she said, blocking my path to the back door in case I decided to
make a run for it.

"How do you know your car isn't bugged with
one of those GPS thingamabobs?" I said.

"Okay, we take your car."

"How do we know
that
isn't bugged?" I continued.

"You're right," she said. "If Dog's been
hanging around here, he could have planted it while you
were..."

The way she hesitated worried me. Had Dog
told Carl about Kendle? I couldn't credit my sister with anything
remotely resembling tact, especially where I was concerned. I
decided she was letting me finish the ellipses, that she wouldn't
waste good oxygen on a bad excuse. Dog could have been snooping
around my car while I was busy being useless, and that was
that.

"So...we walk...?" Hoofing down Pine Street,
surrounded by whooping barbarian students, held no appeal to me.
They could spot me right away as one of the few remaining yokels,
while I saw them as a plasti-educated horde. What it came down to
was they had parents with money. Well, so did I....

It was only a short walk to the river. I was
reminded of Oregon Hill's heyday, with drunks roaring through the
street and loud parties end to end, only now the cars were a better
quality and the voices, instead of being harsh, were filled with a
universal, nasal angst. Barbara's eyes bugged out when she began to
cross China Street and was almost run down by a carload of howling
coeds.

"Did you hear what they yelled at me?" she
cried out as she flipped them off.

I told her I had heard, but added by way of
consolation that at least she got paid for it. These future
presidents did it for free.

"I'm going to hurt you," she shouted over the
street noise.

"What?" I exclaimed, gushing with
innocence.

Rather than answering, she forged ahead, her
purple jacket, which was more of a cape, fluttering up and baring
her arms. Her face was grim and determined, not at all like that of
someone about to receive an undeserved fortune. Maybe she was
calculating ways to get rid of me once we found the money. There
were plenty of precarious drop-offs around the abandoned
hydroelectric plant and more than one ready-made organ donor had
been found in the rocks beneath the walls with his neck broken and
a dumb-ass look on his face, as if their last words were, "Hey,
there's nothing to worry abouuuuuuu....' A little friendly nudge of
congratulations from sis could send me over, easy. Money has made
people do stranger things. Just look at what I was doing at this
moment.

With all the traffic and staggering shadows
on the sidewalks it was impossible to say if we were being
followed. We descended a narrow set of wood steps to the trail
running parallel to the CSX railway tracks, then waited a few
minutes to see if anyone came down behind us.

"I think we shook them," I said.

"Shook who?" Barbara asked.

"Whoever."

"Whoever who?"

It sounded like the opening to a
'knock-knock' joke. Believe it or not, though, even as kids I had
never hit my sister, and I wasn't about to begin. All right, she
was now big enough to hit back, but beyond that, I had never felt
the impulse. It was the sissiest side of my wussness. Women were
natural-born targets, and any man who did not belly up to his duty
and (at the very least) give his sweetheart a passing glance of his
fist was unworthy of the 'hood. Nowadays, that's considered correct
behavior—
not
hitting them, I
mean. But I couldn't shake a certain guilt of negligence. I was
betraying yet one more Oregon Hill tradition. I wasn't in debt, I
wasn't on welfare, I hadn't skipped school, I hadn't laughed at
flea-bitten cats who scratched so hard they sheared off their own
ears, I hadn't dissed the blacks who unwisely passed through our
rare white enclave, I wasn't prone to irrational fisticuffs, I
didn't drink Sterno, I didn't own a gun, much less feel inclined to
shoot somebody with one—I couldn't do anything right. On the other
hand, those denizens of the past had loved each other like nobody's
business, even as they beat each other over the head. I missed out
on that, too.

"There's somebody coming down the steps,"
Barbara hissed.

We had waited so long it was bound to happen.
Wait long enough and you'd see the sun burn out, except the light
would be gone. From his shape and smell we determined the guy
coming down was a homeless drunk. He passed us without a murmur and
settled in with some other formless shapes huddled under Lee
Bridge.

"We could get mugged," I cautioned.

"Anyone tries, I'll cut out their throat with
my heel," Barbara snarled loudly enough to be heard by the shadows
under the bridge. There was no movement in response. I figured they
preferred slow suicide to the instant variety.

Barbara wasn't kidding when she said she
could take out any mugger with a swipe of her heel. Her
come-fuck-me pumps could just as easily read 'don't fuck with me'.
On the minus side, they were universally recognized as impractical
for hiking, especially on the rocky slopes and dark woods we were
headed for. She had flung around barefooted in the old days, but
now she looked as if she spent half her free time massaging Oil of
Olay into her pores, down to and including her toes.

"I think we're okay," she said, heading for a
footbridge that crossed the old canal. Her shoes clattered like
cutlery as we went over.

"We can go back for a pair of sneakers," I
suggested when we reached the far end and she snapped on her
flashlight. We were confronted by a sharp slope that looked too
much like a chore. The ground had been scoured by hundreds of
mountain bikes, making it slick for someone in treadworn sneakers,
forget high-heels.

"You want me to put on your stinky sneakers?"
Barbara huffed, as though I was suggesting an act far beneath her
station. She had discovered refinement in her new life.

Without another word, she started down,
picking her way with the delicacy of a mountain goat. I followed,
and managed to arrive at the bottom on both feet. I stood there for
a moment, congratulating myself.

"Get a move on, Mute," Barbara said, all
action.

We passed under the tracks and followed the
road that led to the footbridge over the river. This was a long
slab of cement that seemed far too heavy for the wires suspending
it from the Lee Bridge overhead. But I'm no engineer. The rusty old
Erector Set I played with as a child had proved I have no aptitude
for cantilevers and steel beams.

A heavy gate had been installed at the north
end of the footbridge. Up to a few years ago it was regularly
locked at dusk, but after several boys splattered themselves on the
road below while trying to slip past the gate the city caved in to
teen audacity and left it open all night. Barbara's relentless
heels echoed across the James River as we set out, alerting the
whole world that we were trespassing after dark. I'm not
particularly fond of heights, and was comforted by the virtual
invisibility of the water below. Streaked here and there by lights
from the city, visibility stopped short of revealing the long drop
to the rapids. But the steady tattoo of traffic overhead sent a
quiver through my gut, as though I was entering the Great Unknown
instead of a favorite boyhood haunt.

Crossing the pedestrian bridge was a bit like
traversing cement dunes, the up and down suspension swaying in
nausea-inducing mimicry of the waves below. Barbara
clicked-clicked-clicked downhill then clopped-clopped-clopped
uphill in a one-woman mambo that put my nerves on edge. She had
switched off her flashlight to conserve battery power, but in a
faint shaft of light I spotted some dog poop on the pavement and
suggested she take off her shoes to keep the noise down. One bare
foot in that mess would have turned her around in an instant. But
she ignored me.

Getting off the bridge didn't improve my mood
much. The ghostly drumming overhead was a reminder that I was
headed for one of the premier Yankee graveyards of the War for
Southern Uppitiness. Belle Isle had been so notorious that the
Yanks fought a battle just outside Richmond in an attempt to free
the 30,000 prisoners being held there. They had lost, naturally,
but after they had won the stupid war they disinterred a thousand
or so graves and sent the corpses back to the frigid north where
they had come from. Those being days of low tech and high moronity,
I was sure more than a few Union bones were still littering this
good Confederate soil. The ghosts emanating from those bones were
meek enough during the day, but at night who knew what they might
be up to? Tormenting the living descendants of their sworn enemies
must be one of the few enjoyable pastimes of Eternity. Maybe there
was a good, supernatural reason the city forbade access to the
island after dark.

"Stop holding back," Barbara reprimanded me.
"You know as good as I do where the power station is."

"I was checking to see if we're being
followed," I said. Like hell. I was checking to see if any of the
shadows flitting across the island sported muskets with bayonets. I
don't believe in ghosts, but I also believe anything is possible.
It's tough getting through life when your leading precepts are
mutually exclusive. Sort of like walking forwards and backwards at
the same time. The problem was, in the current situation, I might
bump into an Enfield-toting Yank drooling with the pus of the dead
by walking forwards
or
backwards, or in any other conceivable direction.

Barbara finally switched the flashlight
back on as we began moving away from the switchback end of the
footbridge. We were now officially stagelit, but that was
preferable to stumbling in the dark. Like any good Southern
gentleman (
Southron
to y'all
down here), I followed the ladies-first principle and let my sister
lead me across the field that had held the main prison camp. It was
now a dismal stretch of scrub grass crisscrossed by bare patches of
earth, as if all that collective misery had salted the ground. A
couple of gruesomely harmless possums darted in front of us, their
eyes shooting beams of terror as they looked our way. For an
instant I felt like a tough guy, sending Mother Nature flying in
wild retreat. Needless to say, that bit of macho euphoria didn't
last long.