Skunk Hunt (4 page)

But I guess the delay was inevitable. After
all, we were being watched.

It was nothing specific. An unfamiliar face
looking at us in a familiar way. A strange car on the street. A
sense of being followed—felt most strongly by Jeremy, whose
backside instinct was so refined it amounted to anal radar. First,
we thought it was the cops. Then Brinks detectives. Then friends or
family of the Congreve brothers. Or simply greedy bastards who
smelled loot in the vicinity. In the end, Jeremy and I concluded it
was a combination of all of them. Barbara said we were
paranoid.

"Dad says there's no money. Why don't you
believe him?"

"You have the life of a natural victim ahead
of you," Jeremy responded. Unlike me, he could spot a loser a mile
away. Must have been all that practice with the mirror.

Incidentally, Mom began using Dad's prison
moniker at home and in public. It was better than Countess or Turd
Blossom, but "Skunk" left a lot to be desired. We don't know if he
came by it because of his personality or a lapse in hygiene.
Probably a lot of both. There wasn't much of the rose about him. On
the other hand, BO in the BOP is probably no novelty. And the first
thing Dad did after greeting (or grunting) us when he arrived home
was empty the 30 gallon hot water tank in the longest
non-pornographic shower I'm aware of. He wanted to get the prison's
PCMS antiseptic off of him as fast as he could.

He was stoic about his experience. "Don't say
sorry—sorry is chickenshit," was a standard Skunk refrain. It was
not a matter of evading fault. You did what you did and paid the
consequences. Bitching and moaning about fate wasn't in his
repertoire. I was always concerned that if he ever shot someone, he
would face the victim and his family in the courtroom and shrug.
But it never came to that. He never had to confront Marvin Hemmings
and his parents because he had died in the botched assault on the
Ice Boutique.

All of this became a little problematic seven
months after the robbery attempt, when Barbara, Jeremy and I were
presented with a real puzzle. In spite of what we saw on the
surveillance videos, in spite of the fact that I had looked down on
Dad's pale mad-dog face in the morgue and spoken the immortal
words, "Yeah, that's him," in spite of what the coroner's report
said ("death by single gunshot wound to the upper left
quadrant")...in spite of everything our senses told us, the media
told us, and the distilled officialese of three millennia of
undertakers told us...we received evidence that Dad wasn't
dead.

CHAPTER 2

We got our letters via snail mail. I was
still living in the old family house in Richmond, on Oregon Hill.
For some reason I had it in mind that Jeremy was shacked up with a
woman in a converted motel bungalow on Route 1—or maybe that was
just where I expected him to be, extrapolating from past behavior.
Meanwhile Barbara, after a brief sordid career, had an epiphany of
common sense. The last I heard, she had married a lineman and moved
to South Carolina.

I had no idea if she had started a family.
All of us had adopted incompatible habits, and as a result we
didn't care much for each others' company. Mom had died while we
were all still living at home, but we still would have scattered
like maddened hornets when we turned 18. I escaped by staying in
place, although most people would consider living with Skunk as
doing exceptionally hard time. He was a walking San Andreas Fault
who clobbered anyone who fractured his drunken reveries. Rarely one
to pin blame unless it profited his Grand Design (something to do
with universal annihilation, I think), he idly speculated that his
violent behavior resulted from crimes committed by the top-billed
villain gracing the FBI's Most-Wanted marquee: Society. Then he
laughed off the excuse as unadulterated bullshit. ("Lawyers eat
five courses of BS before breakfast—helps them to digest.") He
smoked five packs of unfiltered Camels a day, half of the butts
landing in the toilet, which he wouldn't flush to save his life. He
demanded his unworthy children trim his Bessemer-processed
toenails, giving us a gruff kick if we pinked the quick. If Skunk
had been a barber, he would have shaved years off your life.

The house on Pine had belonged to my
grandfather, himself a descendant of an ironworker who had helped
roll iron for Confederate artillery at the Tredegar foundry, the
ruins of which were just down the hill. It pleased Skunk that his
ancestors had contributed to the rolls of dead and dismembered
Yankees. The only reason the McPhersons had been able to hold onto
the Oregon Hill house was because it was as seedy and dilapidated
as everyone else's, and real estate developers were busy elsewhere.
But when the university up the road began to expand, property
values exploded. White trash was gradually supplanted by student
trash.

As a species, the McPherson's were not world
travelers. In fact, almost entire generations had slumped and
dissolved on their front porches in alcoholic hazes that wavered
between wrath and conviviality. Skunk was equally disinclined to
move on. Despite the rising property tax, and the fact that the
people we saw from our porch were increasingly alien, we doggedly
held onto the Pine Street residence. Whenever Dad went to prison,
the IRS and city tax collector would begin hounding Mom. We faced
eviction from a house that had been paid for in full almost a
hundred years ago.

"We're like the Indians," Mom once moaned.
"They're going to stick us on a reservation."

I thought it was a valid analogy. We've
become more discreet about how we displace unwanted tribes. We
might not indulge in a happy hour of genocide anymore, or weep
crocodile tears of remorse as we take over the vacant land, but the
practice is still pretty much in place.

Mom was gonging us to the need to find paying
jobs. After a lot of lazy harrumphing, I began swimming through the
dismal swamp of help-wanteds. Which turned out, in my case, to be
not much more than a leaky birdbath. I had graduated from high
school, meaning I possessed no special skills beyond being a pest.
I started at the 7/11 and worked my way down. After spending a
couple of years scraping out toilets at the bus terminal and
improving my social and reading skills by perusing the anti-drug
messages on urinal screens, I leapt up the scale to popcorn
concessionaire at the Science Museum. I was thoughtful enough to
wash my hands before taking the job.

Jeremy's contribution to the household kitty
consisted of a variety of burgled homes and small businesses. He
didn't do badly, but it has to be admitted that he didn't accrue
any benefits, unless you included free education at Powhatan's
prison school.

Barbara did infinitely better than the rest
of us combined, finding remuneration at the Shockhoe Slip
Gentleman's Club PFZ (Panty Free Zone), where she was a danseuse
whose specialty was pole dancing and being underage. The 451st man
to stuff bills down her g-string included a marriage proposal, and
she found him hunk enough to accept. I met him once or twice and he
seemed as serious about matrimony as other men a notch above my
social stratum (he actually enjoyed working at a steady,
good-paying job). They went down to Greensville, where his parents
lived, to tie the knot. After that, all communication stopped.

Mom's death a few years later was quick and
merciful. She shot herself in the bedroom. That might seem a pretty
conclusive commentary on the miseries of life, but I didn't find
out until later there was more to her death than met the eye. We
kids were either at school or busy skipping it when this took
place. We never saw the body. Actually, we saw nothing at all, not
even a trace of blood. We came home to a Skunk who was completely
dry-eyed. I thought later she might have hung on longer had she
known that, ten years down the road, Skunk too would meet death by
gunshot.

The mental stability of anyone who chose to
live alone in the same house with Skunk McPherson could be
legitimately challenged. But unlike everyone else in my family, I
had never been plagued by demons. I had a practical side, though,
and pure essence of practicality is always ugly. One of Dad's
cronies was Winny Marteen, another of the few remaining Oregon
Hillers whose bloodline included some double-entry genetics. I
suspect there was some inbreeding in the McPherson past, too, which
is reason enough to pass over the family tree. At the time I
thought none of this affected me.

Winny found it difficult to maintain a poker
face. He puttered behind Skunk with a kind of aching glee, as
though he couldn't get enough of my father's abuse. Whenever I
complained, in my pre-concessionaire days, about long hours pushing
broomsticks, washing dishes and sharing the sweat of foreign labor,
Winny would give me a shrewd look and say, "It won't last."

I thrive on thin hopes, and that was enough
for me. Winny was hinting that the Brinks loot was real, that Dad
knew where it was, and that one day he could recover it and all
would be fine. So you see, it made logical, sane sense to work like
a dog to keep the mad dog in clover, relatively speaking. At least
I made the rent and utilities and put enough food on the table to
keep the beriberi at bay.

After Dad and Winny drove out to the Ice
Boutique to meet their idiotic fate, I was left alone in the house,
with a little more money than I was used to. I no longer had to
feed the old man (Winny too, on occasion), and the utilities bill
was automatically cut in half. I could afford to go out on a few
dates. But there weren't many citified country girls left in my
neighborhood, and the college girls wanted nothing to do with me.
Try as I might, I couldn't imitate the rapid-fire collegiate patois
of blurs and empty air.

The letter arrived midway through March. With
its 12-point Arial font, it did not look personalized. I was about
to toss it when I took note of the return address on South Pine
Street. My street. My house number. And the name: A.C.
McPherson.

Jokes come in varying degrees of sickness,
and this scored at the top of the scale. I studied the postmark:
Saunders Station. That was the USPS branch for Oregon Hill.
Jesus.

Going strictly by the envelope, whatever was
inside was from my father, from inside this house. I was tempted to
start searching for him in the cupboards. I stared at the urn on
the fireplace mantelpiece. At the coroner's, an assistant had
studied my ratty appearance and informed me I could forgo all costs
of a burial by donating Dad's shabby remains to science. He gave me
the name of a company that acted as middleman. I couldn't imagine
what Science would want with this corrupt version of humanity, but
I thought it worth a shot. I found out that for a nominal fee of
$150 (for paperwork processing, ha-ha), I could wash my hands of
Dad's remains. It sounded like a good deal. Besides, I was curious
to learn if the medical students came across a heart as rotten in
death as it had been in life. I forked over the fee.

A few months later I got a call from
the middleman. Science had finished with Skunk and they were
wondering where to deliver the ashes. I asked if they could tell me
what they had found in the old demon's hulk besides a well-aimed
9mm slug. They said they couldn't tell me, the answer I pretty much
expected. If I refused to take the ashes, I would have been stuck
with a disposal fee, so I told them to bring them on. The sugary
blonde on the other end of the line (okay, maybe she was a
60-year-old divorced housewife struggling to make ends meet, but
she had the
sound
) offered to
sell me a cremation urn. She said I could review the different
styles on-line, but I didn't own a computer and barely knew how to
boot up the one at the city library. She began mentioning discount
items, and I stopped her at the Eternal Cremation Urn.

I suppose I chose that for Dad's ashes
because of the name. I wanted to make damn sure he didn't come back
to life, at least in my lifetime. For extra security I left the
ashes in the sealed plastic bag they had arrived in. It reminded me
of a tobacco pouch, except it was clear. Dad would remain fresh and
pure, untainted by human hands. And in that $27.95 urn, he would
stay that way for eternity, especially after I removed the yellow
Temporary Container sticker from the bag.

Or so I had thought.

I opened the envelope and encountered an
all-too familiar scrawl on an 8 and a half by 11 sheet of plain
paper.

Mute, Greetings.

You probably never expected
to hear from me again. Remember when I told you only a dummy trusts
people to obey crosswalk and yield signs? The same goes for
morticians. They might say I'm dead as a doornail—but you should
stick a nail in a dead man to make sure. At noon on April 1 I want
you to go to www.treasure447.com. You need three words to log in,
no space between. Your word is first, and it's 'brinks'. Sweet
Tooth and Doubletalk have the other passwords. You three being so
trustworthy, you might want to keep them secret from each other. If
one of you got all three words, he could log in without telling
anyone else. And then everything would be his. Or hers. Don't try
this before the 1st of next month—the site won't be there. And at
12:15 that same day the site will go down. You'll have fifteen
minutes. Don't miss your chance. Skunk
.

I went to the fireplace mantelpiece, took
down the Eternal Cremation Urn, and checked its contents. The skunk
was still in his burrow, complete with metal ID disk.

If it wasn't from my father, then who? Or
what? You could have picked up nine pounds of ashes like this at
any barbecue pit at a state park. I peered at the clear bag,
looking for small pieces of burnt wood or briquettes.