Skunk Hunt (43 page)

The way Carl rolled his eyes back and forth
between us, I could tell he saw only surface contrasts. To him,
outside of our hair styles (or lack of one, in my case) and
clothes, we were spitting images. For the first time in my life I
was a genuine object of curiosity, which would have been pleasant
if I hadn't been forced to share top billing with a freak of
nature.

"Why are you gawking," I said amiably.
"You've met both of us before."

"Never side-by-side," Carl answered.
Realizing he was sounding a little like a rube, he added: "Hey, I
know twins. I know triplets. We had an act with triplets. They
weren't the best looking girls, but they made a fortune. Guys just
kept slipping bills down their thongs. Only the midget strippers
make more."

"High art," I said.

"Don't knock it," said Todd, who seemed
well-versed in the world of buff strippers, their clientele and the
rancid metaphysical cloud that hid both from the uninitiated. The
way he had sauntered into Carl's office had suggested more than a
passing familiarity with the environment.

There you have it: the first big difference
between us. After the money, I mean, which in an ideal world
shouldn't have made any difference between our fractured zygote,
but this isn't an ideal world. You would think that, growing up as
a bubble boy on River Road, he would be the innocent...and that I,
from the seedy dungeon of Oregon Hill, would be sunk in the stews.
But financial magnets have a way of skewing the moral compass.
Irresponsibility was his birthright. Mine, too, come to think on
it, but I had not taken advantage of it. Having seen it from my
bedroom window, I had decided the street was no home for me. I had
taken active steps to avoid becoming a freeloader.

Todd, it would seem, had had a lot more
leeway in that respect. He could fall pretty far and still come up
cush.

"Let's get down to brass knuckles," said
Carl.

Todd's nose shined, as though a blind
shoeshine boy had given it a good buffing. I couldn't criticize,
seeing as it was my nose, too. He gave Carl a sarcastic glance.
Carl reacted by going logical.

"You've got something I want. He's got
something you want. I have something you both want."

"What's that?" Todd asked, startled.

"Services rendered," said Carl. "You want an
itemized receipt?"

When Todd didn't answer, I went queasy
inside. I was like a fish caught by a hawk and dangled over a nest
of ravenous mouths. By not acknowledging the quip, Todd was tacitly
admitting that I was being prepared for consumption.

Joe Dog was driving at a reasonable speed in
an unreasonable direction—away from home. I hadn't settled in to
the point of being comfortable with the idea.

"Where are we going?" I asked.

"Just around," Carl shrugged. "No place
special."

"You can drop me off at my house, then," I
reasoned.

"Is that where you left your Impala?"

"Uh…no."

"We'll get there, don't worry." He gave Todd
a cagy look. "First you get the grand tour."

Todd caught on instantly. "There's no need
for that."

"Why shouldn't he see what he missed out on?"
said Carl. "Might make both of you more cooperative."

Todd began to disagree, but Carl cut him off.
"You've been jerking us around forever. Now it's time for me to do
a little jerking."

We all sniggered at that one, Joe Dog
included. Carl absorbed the mockery like a man congenitally
indifferent to
faux pas
,
especially his own. He turned in his seat and regarded me with
blithe menace.

"You laugh out of ignorance."

I stopped laughing. "I'm ignorant about a lot
of things."

"Obviously."

Todd had stopped laughing, too. My proximity
was annoying, seeing as I posed the threat of collateral
damage—even worse, collateral ignorance.

"Why don't you help your brother out," said
Carl, tilting in Todd's direction. "Begin at the beginning. Dog is
going the speed limit. We have plenty of time."

"Joe!" Dog corrected from the driver's
seat.

I could almost see Todd's intestines knotting
up. Whatever he told me would have to jibe with whatever he had
told the Panty Free Zone clowns. From his expression, I judged this
involved some heavy, yet discreet, editing.

"To begin the story of my life—"

"David Copperfield!" I shouted.

Todd frowned at me.

"He wants magic," Carl observed.

"Not the magician," I protested. "The
book!"

"A book on magic?"

I did my best to ignore Carl's
lumpenproletariatism
and focused on
Todd. "You like to read? You were quoting classic
Dickens."

"Was I?" asked Todd, looking vaguely
nauseated. "Must be something left over from school. I
did
go to school, y'know."

"So did I," I protested. Of course, I knew he
was talking about private school. Otherwise, why bring it up? But
his alleged McPherson blood rebelled against intellectual snobism.
He was saying that a lot of money had been spent on his education,
not that his education had been particularly meaningful. Still, it
was a wonder that a Victorian snippet had spouted out of his mouth.
You don't get that in today's public schools. I only spotted the
quote because I'm a freak. As if to prove this, I said: "'It was
the best of times, it was the worst of times...'"

"It's one or the other," Carl scowled,
punching his fist into his hand.

"I'm having a great time," I said. I turned
back to Todd. "You went to a private school? Uh...your
parents...your foster parents...sent you?"

"I didn't know any other," said Todd. "Ben
and Liz Neerson. All this crap about a 'biological father'...I
didn't know anything about Skunk until Jeremy showed up and tried
to claim my inheritance. What bullshit! My father was an abatement
contractor. He made a mint when they started removing asbestos from
all the state government buildings."

"You had a father?" I asked.

"No, the fucking aliens took a dump and here
I am." Todd swept a hand across his forehead. He was having just as
much trouble with all of this as I was, and apparently had had
several months to digest it. "I sort of remember a kid beating up
on me at home all the time, and then one day he was gone."

"It was you or Jeremy," I said. "And if they
had sent you away to live on Oregon Hill people would have seen we
were twins. It was a close-knit place back then, and we would have
drawn attention, the last thing Skunk wanted. But that didn't have
anything to do with Brinks. I was almost ten when that happened. Or
maybe nine."

My modest speculating left us both dangling
in air.

"And your father, the abatement guy..." I
prodded. "What can you tell us about him? Where was he from?"

"Hell if I know," Todd said uneasily. "For
years I thought he was from Emporia, but once I caught him talking
about growing up in Wheeling."

"West Virginia?"

"Somewhere south of it," said Todd. "'Hick
& Tick Town.' When I told him it had to be one or the other,
Emporia or Wheeling, he had one of his coughing fits and almost
croaked on the spot. I dropped the subject."

"How about your mother?"

"West Virginia." He paused a moment. "It
doesn't matter. They're both gone."

"Gone? You mean dead?"

"One way or another."

"Is that in West Virginia, too?" I said,
growing irate.

West Virginia had been the seedy seedbed of
at least half of the original Oregon Hillers, whose ancestors had
emigrated from the hills to work at the Tredegar Iron Works, back
in the days when there was no such thing as 'West' Virginia and
southerners had the chronic habit of shooting Yanks on sight.

"Maybe..." I began, then stopped.

Our frowns must have looked ludicrously
identical as we sought to make the connection. But all of the key
witnesses—both sets of parents—were gone. If Skunk had gone to the
trouble of setting up two families, who was the man who had briefly
shared Todd's early life? And if Jeremy had been so easily shifted
from one milieu to another (and it must have been easy—Jeremy fit
like a glove on Oregon Hill), who was to say the other set of
parents were the true ones? My pop, the asbestos abatement
contractor. Had a nice lawyeresque ring to it.

Carl was shaking his head. "I can't
think of anyone I know who doesn't know where they come from.
Plenty who
lie
about where
they come from. But to not have a clue?"

"You don't know any orphans?" I said.

"Not that I know of, and anyway, orphans at
least know they come from an orphanage."

Todd and I exchanged startled mirror glances,
then simultaneously dismissed the possibility. I couldn't vouch for
Todd's alleged family, but no agency in its right mind would have
allowed Skunk to adopt.

"How long ago did your father die?" I
asked.

"It was kind of sudden. Back around
Christmas."

I had a creepy feeling. Ben Neerson died
around the same time as Skunk. "And your mother?"

"She's been gone awhile." Todd shrugged, as
though he had spilled a dish of Lying Asshole Supreme on his
shirt.

"You married?" I asked abruptly.

"Hell no," he answered quickly, as though
jabbed. "What would I be doing at the PFZ if I was married?"

"You're kidding, right?" Carl scoffed.
"Ninety-nine ninnies out of a hundred who come to my place are
chained."

Todd protested, "Why ninnies?"

"Anyone who pays ten dollars for a glass of
cheap beer is a ninny."

"I guess that's why you lost your liquor
license," Todd shot back.

"Hey, the ABC Board doesn't care if I'm
cheating," shrugged Carl. "They just don't like my attitude."

"DNA," I said, trying to be serious.

"You mean we should get paternity tests?"
said Todd.

"You want to do an OJ?" said Joe Dog from the
driver's seat as he turned onto Parham. I couldn't get used to his
new voice. It reminded me of the way Jim Nabors would morph into an
operatic baritone. I felt I had been cheated. Not that his new
persona wasn't an improvement, but to think you know one thing,
only to find out it's a cheap imitation of something else, leaves
you wanting your money back. I wondered what I would find when my
own mask slipped off.

"What good would it do to find out Skunk was
our father?" Todd groused. "Or Ben Neerson could be our father. Or
someone we don't know."

"We weren't orphans," I insisted,
although of course I didn't know that for sure. I felt a bit like
someone present at the scene of a crime who couldn't describe what
he had just witnessed beyond the fact that all the chaos had
resulted in a corpse. Star Wars V.
Luke,
I
am your
father
...

"At least DNA—" I began.

"What we've got was what we got," Todd cut me
off. I couldn't blame him, really. To think you were a rose and
discover a skunk instead was a prospect I would have avoided,
myself. On the other hand, it would be nice if everything came up
roses, and I had a yen to improve my genetic lot.

"And what have you got?" said Carl, giving
Todd the slits of his eyes.

"Isn't that what you're taking us to see?"
Todd huffed.

"We're going to your house for a little chat
and to pick up your brother's car, that's all." Carl shifted his
eyes between us, as though suspicious that we might try to switch
places on him. "Which one of you was the love child?"

'Love' was a word never used in the Skunk
household, which didn't bother me then and doesn't bother me now.
In my experience, most anyone who uses the 'L' word is a liar or a
salesman. Had Todd's home been gooey with sweet nothings? He seemed
like the type whose mother had slathered his face with kisses and
her car with bumper stickers: "My son is an honor student at
Ludicrous High." Maybe his current wounded self-esteem, as
demonstrated by his dour expression, was a sign he was confronting
reality. He really didn't have much going for him, for all his
mother's boasting.

Okay, I'm reading too much into this. The
chump was a stranger to me, after all. Chances were that he was
playing the same presupposition games as I was—except he had a head
start. He probably considered himself an expert on me. Did he know
about me and Kendle? I posted an embarrassed glance towards the
driver.

"I think we're both the love child, if we're
really monozygotic twins," I observed.

Todd took issue. "It's what happens after
you're born that counts."

None of us are
compos mentis
at the most important event in our
life, our conception—even if you make the claim that the cluster of
cells that take center stage is a human and not a tadpole.
Baby-making is the supreme act of tyranny. We're not consulted,
we're not pre-ordained, and in too many cases the result of all
that huffing and puffing doesn't satisfy. It didn't matter if we
had time-shared the same womb, an accident of history that made us
both slightly nauseous. Todd was laying claim to privilege because
he had skedaddled to the 'burbs while I languished in
White-Trashland.

"I don't see half a cent difference between
the two of you," Carl declaimed with all the authority of a junk
scientist. "For my money, either one of you would have shafted me.
And that's what I'm talking about: my money. One of you has to
cough it up--or both of you. Otherwise, I'll have to sic The 'Toon
on you."

Joe Dog signaled his disapproval of the
moniker with a cartoonish whoop.

"You start behaving like an adult, I'll call
you something decent," Carl said without taking his eyes off Todd
and me. I didn't think he knew Skunk had called me 'Mute', but I
was indirectly wounded by the criticism.