Skunk Hunt (31 page)

Where the hell could it be?
What
could it be? There were dark
lumps on the floor that could be old duffel bags or boxes or even
human remains. This was impossible. If I intended to pursue this, I
would have to go back to the island and get the flashlight from
Barbara.

Someone coughed. Or swore. Or chuckled.

I froze, my eyes drooling out of my gaping
mouth. I imagined some homeless woolly mammoth rising up and
spearing me with its tusk. I was beyond help, beyond hope, and
almost beyond bladder control.

"Hold on, hold on...so many goddamn
buttons."

I didn't recognize the voice, although the
tinniness was familiar. It was emerging from a miniature
loudspeaker. I wondered if I was again the target of a hidden
camera and found myself dropping fear for annoyance. Our unknown
manipulator was taking on godlike airs, demanding that we be good
for goodness sake because you never knew when He might be watching.
God doesn't back down, back off, or back a losing horse. He was a
persistent cuss, with a my-way-or-the-highway tilt of His chin. The
resemblance to our hidden Mr. Wiz was striking. But only a few more
words from the speaker were needed to tell me this man was younger
than the one in the abandoned house.

"Just give me a moment here…I'll lend you a
hand."

"I don't want a hand," I said querulously to
the darkness.

"Maybe not, but you'll appreciate
this..."

Two lights came on. Momentarily blinded, I
covered my eyes. "You work for the guy from the old house?" I
asked.

"He had to step out," said the new voice.

I felt safe—if not from prying eyes, then at
least from an immediate bullet between the eyes. The light came
from a pair of lamps on a tripod that had been braced against the
wall dividing what appeared to have been a workroom from an office.
There was a palpable squish as I took a step forward. Looking down,
I saw confirmed all the worst conjectures I had made in the dark.
It was a regular vomitorium-plus. I hadn't spent much time up here
as a kid, being more interested in sticking my head through the
gaping turbine hubs downstairs. Even then, I was practicing for the
guillotine. The top floor might have been just as bad as this all
those years ago. The Ur-Oregon Hillers had had the habit of
trashing anything that had been abandoned: homes, shops, empty
hydroelectric plants. Hell, they also trashed the very houses they
were living in, with marginally less anarchy. As a 10-year old,
gunk had been a part of life, to be relished and even sought after.
As an adult, I was a bit more finicky. Scraping a used rubber off
my shoe was not so hilarious, anymore.

I located the camera in a high niche
behind the lights and gave it a double blast of skepticism. "Come
on, who are you, really? Where did the other guy go? Step out
where? And who is
he
?"

"Only an old fart playing Mission
Impossible," the voice said. "You know, money is like life, at its
most vulnerable when it's between two points. You go to the store,
you get creamed in an accident. You take bills out of your wallet
and they're at risk. Even a wire transfer is vulnerable to hackers.
We're dealing with pure liquid assets, hidden money, floating loose
like a piñata. So why don't you take advantage of this wonderful
light and begin looking around? I see several interesting prospects
against the wall behind you."

"You should know," I shot back. "Would it
really be so hard to drop this on my doorstep?"

"Why
your
doorstep?" the voice responded with a trace
of irritation. "You have a brother and sister."

"Why should you care?" I said.

"I want to be fair."

"Then why did you leave the clue
in
my
house?" I said. Our
unknown benefactor might want to be fair, but not to the exclusion
of mind games.

"Does it matter?" said the voice. "And does
it matter who I am? Use the light I'm giving you and search."

He had a point. I was getting nowhere fast. I
walked away a few steps, trying to avoid the worst of the
floor-gunk. "Am I getting warm?"

"How should I know?" said the voice.

"Forget it," I said, leaning down and
gingerly tipping over an old knapsack. A book slid out, a thumb-
and weather-beaten paperback. 'The Succulent Secretary' was the
title. It was one of those mid-Fifties productions, written at a
time when words were as titillating as images. I pictured a wrinkly
geezer jacking off at key phrases. The ultimate deconstruction.

"Not here," I said, after lifting the edge of
the knapsack to see if anything else was inside.

"I see," said the voice. "If you find
it..."

"Yeah?"

"Try not to get any smears on it."

"Smears?" I said, then added, "Oh, yeah. What
exactly is 'it', again?"

The voice chose not to answer. I pushed ahead
across the mushy floor, praying I didn't become pregnant from sheer
funk. Impossible, sure, but there must be a saturation point where
everyone and everything becomes a potential womb. Empty space
produces humans, given enough time. We're proof of it.

I ranged through 57 different varieties of
disgusting rubble, from flaky bags to empty crates. There were even
soggy envelopes, some so old they were addressed without Zip codes
but with a kind of cerebral flair, as though the Post Office had
been able deliver letters bearing no more than a smudge. Mailmen
had once been telepathic, identifying locations with arcane logos.
I wasn't nearly that talented, being unable to spot the prize under
my eyes.

"If I can't find it, are you going to tell me
where it is?" I said at one point, calling out from the opposite
side of the room.

"I'm counting on
you
to find it," said the voice. "I don't have a
clue."

"Well, here's a clue," I answered. "Assuming
the lights are here for a purpose, I'd say what I'm looking for is
in this room, and not downstairs or any other room."

"That makes sense," the voice agreed.

I stopped for the tenth time and surveyed the
room. It was large, and I had by no means covered every inch of it.
But I was growing more and more concerned that I was about to
contract some form of airborne venereal virus, as of yet
undiscovered by science but which was native to this oversized test
tube.

"Why don't I just leave?" I suggested. "It's
only money. Stolen money."

"All property is theft, all money is blood
money," intoned the voice.

I was standing in a stinky hydroelectric
plant listening to stranger quote Marx, or Engels, or Proudhon, or
Dick Cheney—hell, they all steal from each other.

"Are you saying that there's no such thing as
an honest living?" I said.

"What a sub-moronic notion," the voice said.
"You yourself are taking a job away from an unemployed car salesman
with five hungry children, and he's stealing it from a foreigner
with twelve hungry children—"

"They shouldn't breed so much," I complained,
with the usual non-breeder's indifference to the fate of
humanity.

"Your wages are tainted, stolen by taxpayers
from business, who steals its money from honest citizens, who
earned their money on land stolen from native—"

"I sort of get the point," I cut him off.
"You're saying I might as well get the money, even if I don't
deserve it, because no one else does, either."

"The Dalai Lama couldn't have said it
better," said the voice.

With that justification in my pocket, I
returned to the search. I soon came across a small cash box
half-hidden under a soggy shirt.

"What's that?" the voice asked.

"Right idea, wrong dimensions," I said. "This
isn't big enough to hold what we want it to hold."

"So open it."

That didn't exactly follow from what I said.
Maybe the voice wasn't paying attention. But I was a little
curious, too. The metallic-olive box didn't share the room's
weather-weary patina. On the other hand, I felt a little like
Pandora about the spring misery and remorse on the world. I
delicately lifted the shirt out of the way and stared at the shiny
chrome latch-button.

"It's not rusty," I carped.

"All the better," the voice reasoned.

"But..." I began.

"Yes?"

"It's too pat," I said.

"Like the picture of your father, like this
audio visual set-up? Pat clues result in a pat answers."

I wished to hell I knew who was speaking, the
better to arrange his demise. I lifted the box and held it up.
"Look! Lunch!"

"Get on with it."

There being no clean spot where I could sit
down and put the box on my knees, I rested it on a window
ledge.

"Don't drop it in the river," the voice
nitpicked.

I found the notion curiously appealing. It
would be like God stumbling halfway through Creation and dropping
the ball. My situation wasn't quite so elevated, but it was easy to
imagine a choir of angels belting out a blasphemous chorus if I
nudged the box too close to the edge.

"What if it's locked?" I said.

"Why don't you find out if it's locked before
you raise such a question?" The voice was irate. "Do you make it a
habit of creating problems where none exist?"

"Well, yeah..." I shrugged. "You could also
call it 'contingency planning'."

I pressed on the button. It didn't budge.
"It's locked."

"Try sliding it sideways," instructed the
voice.

I tried.

"It's locked," I repeated.

"Find the key."

"A key for this would be the size of a
nickel," I protested, viewing with repugnance the seminal sludge I
would have to sift through.

"Look for anything bright and shiny," the
voice insisted. "You have enough light."

Bright and shiny...was he kidding? In the
sharp down-angle of the arc lights the floor spangled with chewing
gum foil, Trojan wrappers and reflective bubbles of goo. I returned
to the box and pressed the button harder, in every which
direction.

"I thought you said it was locked," said the
voice.

"It still is," I said with that hopeless
slacker defeatism inherent in my station in life.

"Stop slumping," the voice ordered.

"What are you, Miss Manners?"

"I mean you give up too easily." The voice
became less strident in an attempt to lure me with sweet reason.
"You don't want to be a loser all your life, do you?" Then, for a
moment, it slipped into a confiding mode: "I know what that mindset
is like. It gets you nowhere, and nowhere is no fun."

"I've done okay by it so far," I said.

An apoplectic series of gasps came over the
speaker. Like all sweets, reason was ephemeral and lacked
nutrition. A beefy haunch of wild optimism was what was called for,
I supposed.

"You don't like it, you can lump it," I
declaimed, raising the box and aiming it at the river. I knew I
wasn't going to throw it, but the man at the microphone didn't.

"Don't!" the voice cried out.

"Why not?" I asked.

"Bring the box to me," the voice said. "We
can open it together."

Suddenly the box, which had seemed inadequate
to the dreams foisted upon it, seemed precious and irreplaceable. I
drew back from the window and cradled it protectively in my arms.
As it tilted against my chest, I spotted the key taped to the
bottom.

"Damn, why didn't you tell me about this?" I
swore, angered by the pointless gamesmanship. I tore off the key
and held it up in the direction of the camera.

"Why am I supposed to tell you everything?"
said the voice, filled with relief that I hadn't dumped the box out
the window, but growing tense again when I placed it back on the
ledge. "Careful..."

"
You
be careful," I spat as I inserted the key in the
lock.

Whoever
you
are.

My wit dissolved when I saw the bundle inside
the box. It wasn't as much cash as I had been hoping for, but was
plenty enough to pique my interest. Below it were some
legal-looking papers, some of them powder blue. What lay beneath
those papers was something just as interesting as money. Actually,
far more interesting.

A photograph strategically placed to be the
first thing seen lay on top. I lifted it out and stared.

"Well?" said the voice.

I held it up.

"You're too far away."

Tiptoeing across the sludge, I advanced
several yards towards the camera and stopped.

"Closer."

I obeyed.

"What
is
that?" the voice asked uncertainly.

"A snapshot," I said.

"I can see that. But what..."

I took a few more steps.

"That's..." said the voice.

"Yeah," I said. "That's—"

The lights went out and the voice
vanished.

CHAPTER 17

"Sure's amazing what they can do with those
head boxes these days," Flint Dementis shrugged at the pictures we
placed before him. I found his analogy to computers unsettlingly
apt.

"But...that's Doubletalk," said Barbara,
pointing at a childhood picture of Jeremy.

"And...
that's
Doubletalk," I said, pointing at the boy
standing next to Jeremy.

Flint ran his stalk-dry hand over his
week-old beard. It sounded like two pieces of sandpaper rasped
together. "You ever see that movie where they show Nixon buggering
Kissinger?"

"There's no such movie," I protested.

"It amounted to the same thing, something too
ugly to imagine." Flint cocked his head at the picture. "Like
that."

"Doubletalk isn't ugly," Barbara said. There
was something definitely screwy about her. So far as I knew, all
sisters considered their brothers dogs, and vice versa.