Skunk Hunt (45 page)

Todd was going to tell a story on himself,
because if he didn't Carl would. Either way, it didn't promise to
be flattering.

"I was at the PFZ January..." he began.

"Taking in the sights," Carl elaborated.

"It was a hot day," Todd continued.

"Half a year ago lands you in the dead of
winter."

"What matters the weather! I happened to be
downtown on business."

"Business?" Carl inquired. His tone inferred
Todd knew as much about business as a seal knew about the Mojave
Desert.

"It's not pertinent to the story," Todd
frowned. "Remember way back when you still had a liquor license?
When a dude could still drop in the PFZ and not end up with
lemonade?"

Carl didn't answer, which I found more
worrying than anything he might have said outside of 'I'm going to
plug the both of you, here and now.' And maybe that was precisely
what he was saying-not-saying. His liquor license had been a badge
of honor, or it could have been dishonor, but either way it made
him a viable business entity. His girls were goddesses in my
uncultured eyes, yet they were probably not top of the line.
Tungsten-halogen lighting, starvation diets, giraffe costumes and
pasties could only perform limited miracles. Carl had counted on
the chemistry of spirits to convince his customers they were
witnessing a parade of bona fide centerfolds. To some folks,
hambones without beer are just hambones.

"I must have had a few drinks too many that
evening," Todd continued, fending off Carl's wrathful expression by
looking into space. "Usually, I'm cooth enough to act my age, but I
went a little overboard and started coming on to one of the pole
girls."

"'Performance artists'," Carl corrected,
massaging his ego with the cachet. "And if you think playing
goochy-goo with a cooch in public is a sign of refinement, you must
take your dumps in the front yard. But you missed the best part.
You want me to continue for you?"

Seeing he was not going to get a break, Todd
went on:

"I may have been a little too forward."

He waited for Carl's laughter to subside.

"The girl began yelling—really out of
all proportion to what I'd done. Which wasn't much. Or it could've
have been. Anyway, I don't remember. So this girl starts acting
crazy, like I was a real pervert instead of a guy looking for a
good time. Then this other girl comes up and begins hammering me.
Man, she hit
hard
."

"That was Dog as Divine in the stage version
of Pink Flamingos," Carl informed us.

Todd and I turned toward the yard, where Joe
Dog was thrashing about the tattered remains of the trampoline,
bits of decayed canvas flying up and landing like massacred
butterflies in the tall grass.

"Wasn't Divine on the big side?" I said.

"Maybe that's why he didn't get the role."
Carl rolled his hand in Todd's direction. "Continue."

"How was I to know she was a bouncer?"
Todd complained, then redressed the pronoun to salve his
self-esteem. "
He
..."

"Heavens to Murgatroyd!" exclaimed Joe Dog,
running in circles around the now-empty trampoline frame. I had
always thought actors had a modicum of intelligence, if for no
other reason than to remember their lines. Maybe Joe Dog
specialized in non-speaking roles.

"So the girl who started all of this jumped
in, but she wasn't after me. She was after the guy beating me up.
And she said, 'Don't hurt him, he's my brother!' And that's when
all this started."

"Barbara was already working there?" I said,
my mind sorting through the various timelines I had pieced
together.

"She was a re-hire," Carl nodded.

Todd looked abashed, and it was no stretch
seeing why. Until seeing me that morning he had been able to logic
his way out of the embarrassing scenario of having put moves on his
biological sister. He had yet to acknowledge his part in the
Skunk-monkey family tree. Everyone had someone who resembled them.
Look how many Elvis lookalikes infest the country. But there were
strong hints from both sides that the unlikely was crossing into
plausibility, and that he had been playing catch the beaver with my
sister, Jeremy's sister...his own sister. Not that such a thing had
been unheard of on Oregon Hill in the old days, where DNA marched
to a markedly different drummer.

"You should thank Dog for saving you from
making a really disgusting mistake," Carl said, flapping a gracious
hand in Joe Dog's direction. The Fifties geek had freed himself
from the trampoline ring and was now twirling an invisible hoola
hoop. The pernicious idiocy of method acting led me to wonder how
Joe Dog would train for a role as a superhero. Would he begin
jumping off skyscrapers?

I tried to imagine gooching Barbara and
encountered the usual brotherly revulsion. A perfectly natural, and
preferable, reaction—although it doesn't always work out that way.
I only went to Sunday school once. After submitting some
impertinent questions about Eve getting it on with Cain and Abel, I
was escorted out the door. There are too many people in church,
anyway.

"I would've left after being picked off the
floor," Todd continued, "but Barbara offered me a drink..."

And he had been unwilling to turn it down. I
marveled at the novelty of that moment. Not just the fact that he
had met by chance his long lost sister, but that a pole dancer had
offered a beer on the house to a patron. Maybe that was when Carl's
hair went white.

Todd and Barbara had gone off to a cozy
table, to the surprise of witnesses who had heard her complain
about the creepy nerd grabbing at her. I felt squeamish on hearing
my second self described in this way. Was I beginning to identify
with him? Was I wounded by disparagement directed at him? How many
times in the past had I experienced an unaccountable emotion that
could be attributable to Todd's constipation? How far away would I
have to move to escape his psychic influence?

I was saddened and unsurprised that Barbara
did not have a picture of me to show Todd. Sisters are not known to
carry snapshots of their brothers in their wallets or G-strings.
Besides, the only recent picture of me was the one taken for my
work ID. Todd had to take her word that he and I were dead ringers.
Naturally cautious, Todd gave out few details of his life, but he
slipped when he told her where he lived. Not the exact address,
just the neighborhood. This triggered a memory in Barbara—something
Jeremy had told her years ago about having lived in a castle before
landing in doo-doo land. He didn't make a fuss, because he quickly
discovered he preferred Oregon Hill to the starchy suburbs. He
could torment his peers to his heart's content, without a single
social worker or concerned parent butting their nose in his
business. You could fire off a .22, pee in the street and (later,
but not all that much later) fall dead drunk in a neighbor's yard.
Yuppification finally triumphed against Doubletalk and his
spiritual brethren, but it wasn't easy, and not really all that
becoming.

As a small boy, though, Jeremy had not harped
much on his dislocation, which was probably why all I remembered
was his venomous behavior towards me. I was a second Todd, a fresh
punching bag. I'm amazed he didn't mention my lookalike to me, not
even as a tool for psychological manipulation. Maybe Skunk
threatened him with a fate worse than torture and death if he told
me. It was also possible that Jeremy was dumb enough to think Todd
and I were one and the same.

Carl, with his magnetic sense for unchained
money, had joined Barbara and Todd, going so far as to offer more
drinks on the house and voluntarily adding white hairs to his
thinning crop. And soon enough, almost boastfully, Barbara brought
up the Brink's job. This is one of those blots on the escutcheon
that most families prefer to keep under wraps. But in what some
might consider the lower depths, armed robbery is a sign of
achievement, sometimes the only achievement, among an otherwise
useless lot.

Todd was puzzled, until he was informed that
the money had never been recovered.

"Oh...whoa...forget it. My father
earned a ton in asbestos abatement. He had the premier state
contract. Those government workers were dropping like flies from
asbestoxicosis or whatever the hell gets in your lungs. That's what
killed my father. He wore a mask on the job sites, but in the end
it wasn't enough. Anyway, he didn't wear a mask
all
the time. He thought it was all a scam, which
didn't matter seeing he was making all that dough. But I guess it's
true, because he began coughing and coughing and next thing we knew
he was in an oxygen tent and then he was croaker. OK, he wore a
mask sometimes, most of the time, but he smoked like a fish, so
maybe it was that."

"How can someone smoke like a fish?" Carl had
asked, making guppy lips as he blew smoke Todd's way.

Todd must have seen Barbara had fallen in
with some hard types, and it didn't take long for him to warm to
them—even the ugly waitress who had mugged him, and who had seated
her skanky self next to him at the table. I had a hard time
picturing Joe Dog as a girl of any stripe.

But when Barbara raised the possibility of a
family reunion, with me, Jeremy and herself in a rousing memorial
to the departed Skunk, Todd backed off. It was obvious we were a
bunch of moochers. Besides, he only had Barbara's word that they
were related. He had yet to see me.

His reluctance goaded them into conspiracy.
After he left the bar, Carl began working on Barbara. Was she sure
about the resemblance? How accurate was her memory of Jeremy's
comments? Above all...what's all this about Brinks?

Up to the day Todd walked through his door,
Carl had never heard of Skunk, which surprised me. I had always
thought the crook grapevine to be all-encompassing. We prefer our
criminals to be smart, since that's the least painful method of
explaining their way of outsmarting us. But the reality was that
the vaunted criminal underground reflected the limitations of its
users. Skunk's name was well known, but only in specific circles,
like some renowned surgeon known as Dr. Death among his peers. Ask
any former state roomy about Skunk and you were bound to receive a
knowing roll of the eyes.

But it seemed Carl's experience with
justice was mostly local, within the city jail, where his meals
were outsourced to illegal immigrants instead of being served up by
fellow desperados. He had been in temporary residence for various
violations, such as: tax evasion, serving drinks to minors,
pimping, loan sharking, failure to report a traffic accident,
allowing tobacco smoking on the premises, bribery (successful and
otherwise) of city inspectors, contributing to the delinquency of
minors, disturbing the peace, distribution of pornography, holding
illegal lotteries, creating a moral panic, various "inchoate"
offenses (including conspiracy), criminal recklessness and
negligence, masturbating in front of the elderly, the underaged,
and the general public (which might come under "deviancy", but you
never know these days), providing a haven for pollution,
bootlegging, defecating on city property (without benefit of the
city facilities), defacement of a city vehicle (lining up his
boogers while sitting in the back of a parole car), common assault
and using profanity against public officials. He was what you might
call an enormous personality, so enormous that he just couldn't
keep his
mens rea
under wrap.
Obviously there was fire under all that smoke, but the smoke itself
was so thick that the man was obscured. The local news media
thrived on his bad name without doing much more than the stir the
murk. To the prurient-minded city councilmen, it all came down to
the fact that Carl had unreasonable access to a lot of fine
flesh.

Of course I was jealous.

Seeing as Todd had temporarily dropped out of
the story, Carl took the baton.

"I told Barb she should keep the meeting with
Todd to herself, so of course she goes straight to Jeremy and blabs
her guts. I have a feeling he had been out to the River Road house
before, maybe to drive by and gander the place, because he didn't
have no problem finding it again. Only this time, now that he knew
Todd was an orphan, he knocked at the door."

"To give his condolences?" I sniggered at
Todd.

"Actually, he did," Todd said wryly.

"For about a minute," Carl said. "Then he
started twisting the screws. 'Share the wealth or I'll tell the
cops where it came from,' or something like that. Am I right?"

Todd gave him a surly look. "I tried to
explain that my father paid for the house—"

"No mortgage," Carl interjected, his
tubbiness quivering with deep meaning.

"Is that a crime?" Todd snotted.

"My house was paid for long ago," I pointed
out. "It's been in the family for a hundred years."

"And looks it," said Carl.

I had fallen in with the vacuous sniping and
deserved the comeback. I'm proud of my house, but while I might
take steps against an arsonist, defending it against slander is
just too much trouble. I subsided.

"So you were how old when your father died?"
Carl inquired.

"You're talking about Ben Neerson, the man
who stuck it to Mom and made me," Todd answered crudely, sucking
every ounce of romance out of the moment. Not all twins think
alike. In fact, there are some pairs where one is perfectly sane
while the other is totally schizoid. My eyes narrowed. This sick
bastard's been spying on me, I thought. Then I relaxed. The whole
world was out to get me, so what was the difference?

"I suppose that’s the man," Carl nodded.

"Same age as I am now," Todd said lowly,
catching me in a glance. I was the same age now as when Skunk died,
but we were too wary to compare birthdays.