Skunk Hunt (47 page)

"I guess you could give me a ride home," I
said when Todd opened up.

"I guess you could catch the bus," he
rejoined.

"I guess you'd loan me the fare," I said.

"I guess you're walking."

An amiable start to our first session
of fraternal bonding. I wondered why he was making my departure
difficult. True, he was making it difficult for
me
, not for himself. But if the situation had
been reversed I would have done anything to hurry him on his way:
driven him home, paid his cab fare, shot him out of a
cannon.

The level of antagonism had not been extreme
while we were preoccupied with Carl and Joe Dog. Now we were bare
face to bare face, with no intervening threat. We checked each
other out only because we were checking ourselves out. Did I really
look like that, sound like that, perform such amateurish body
language? Was I really hokey enough to throttle my eyeballs in
exaggerated horror, twist my lips up like a hooked fish, and fiddle
with my pimples as I went deep in thought? He was thinking the same
thing (I thought), and the only way to end this unpleasant meeting
was to part ways. But I didn't leave, and he didn't offer to
help.

Naturally, our thoughts diverged when it came
to the factualities of our lives. He had answers and no questions,
I had loads of questions and was getting no answers.

"Looks like you're in the clear," I said,
casting a hand in the direction of the weedy lawn. We were still on
the porch. It was getting hot outside, but I had no great desire to
go indoors. Todd's mess was no worse than mine, and from what I had
seen the trash was of a much higher quality. He might have offered
Carl Milwaukee's Best, but I spotted empty Heinekens poking out
from under the garbage can lid. There was real porcelain stacked in
the filthy sink, as opposed a bin overflowing with sodden paper
plates. Yet my trash was permeated with my identity, the occasional
whiff of decomposition identifiable and removable, if ever the
spirit moved me. Todd's contained all the mysteries of a broken
garbage disposal, with lots of maggot potential, and he looked even
less inclined than me to deal with it. I continued: "Looks like
they don't want your house, your land, or you."

"What was Skunk like?" he asked abruptly.

"He was a saint," I said.

"No. Really. Skip the details. Basic. Like,
what did he look like?"

"Like someone you wouldn't want to meet in a
well-lit alley," I said truthfully. "If he walked into a church
during a Sunday service they'd trample the preacher to death to
escape."

Todd gave me a flat look. "Really that
ugly?"

"He was more mean-looking than ugly," I
admitted. "You would have thought he wanted to murder everyone in
sight, but..." I shrugged. "
I'm
still alive. And Sweet Tooth and Doubletalk."

"Who?"

"Barbara and Jeremy. Your other alleged
siblings."

"Barbara's convinced," Todd said sourly.

"She's been out here?" I asked.

It was the wrong question. He would have
driven her out here from Shockhoe one night a half year ago. But
for the timely intercession of Carl, an old Oregon Hill tradition
would have been renewed in the West End. Still, Barbara must have
pestered him to see the property.

"You sure you don't have a family photo
stashed inside?" I said. "I mean, Ben and Liz Neerson are sort of
my stepparents, don't you think?"

This should have been his cue to drive me
home. You don't just ask for a gun from a possible enemy and expect
him to hand it over. We both knew the weapon-potential of a family
snapshot.

For the second time in as many minutes Todd
remained mute before one of my questions. I should have told him my
family nickname, triggering a response from him to prove we weren't
all that much alike. If I couldn't get any responses I could at
least rest my feet. I studied the plastic chairs on the porch and
their thick prophetic scrolls of bird poop.

"Let's go inside," I said.

"What do you want in there?" Todd asked
warily.

"To sit. You mind?"

"Kind of," he said. "What's wrong with out
here?"

"Are you blind? If I get crap on my pants, I
want it to be my own."

Todd gave an ugly snort that sounded
disgustingly familiar. I silently agreed. Carl's verbal missteps
had left unsightly tracks all over the immaculate desert of my
mind.

"You're just like the others, you want to see
what you can get." Afflicted by sourness, Todd hawked
profoundly.

Was he right? Deep down...well, not that
deep...I was vigorously rubbing my hands together at the prospect
of unspeakable wealth. I was surprised by Carl's dismissal of this
property as virtually worthless. Location, location, location,
right? This piece of dirt was a hawk and a spit away from River
Road, the lodestone of upper class wannabes. All you needed was a
bulldozer to make it worth a bundle of rubles, even in the current
market. Something had told Carl to write off the quarter acre. But
reserving his energy for bigger game had to be a tactical error.
This was all there was, and it was Todd's to share. Or not.

"What about your brother and sister, the two
McPherson Whatitz? They'll be back, for sure." He wrapped his blue
funk around himself like a cape. "Barbara at least has known about
me for months, and she didn't say boo to you. She and Jeremy were
going to cut you out, bro, if there'd been anything here to
cut."

He had been sharing an abundance of misery
with me. I thought it time to dole out some of my own.

"What about Walter Neerson?" I countered.
When he greeted this with puzzled muteness, I said, "I've seen the
will."

"How--"

"Long story. But there's two names on it: Ben
and Elizabeth Neerson. Plus...unnumbered and unnamed children."

"Doesn't sound very legal to me," Todd
groused. "Who witnessed it? Who notarized it? Who's the lawyer and
where is it on file?"

My little thrust had been parried and
inserted in my behind. I remembered reading about Vlad the Impaler
and squirmed.

Did Todd know Flint Dementis? If he had a
copy of the will, he knew the answer to that question, as well as
the names of every beneficiary and witness on Ben Neerson's last
will and testament. But he didn't know how much I knew, and that
irked him every bit as much as his reticence irked me. By just
existing I had the ability to get on people's nerves, a character
trait we apparently shared, because I wanted to slug him. He looked
like he wanted to slug me.

"Okay," he relented. "A beer."

Surprised by this abrupt beneficence, I
followed him doubtfully into the kitchen. I was reassured when he
gave me a Bud Lite while giving himself a Heineken. I didn't want
him to be nicer than me, or anything else that might require me to
catch up.

"You like Bud, right?" he said with a vague
sneer.

"Sure," I answered boldly, flicking my tongue
into the can like a hummingbird at a feeder. "And you like imported
Nazi suds?"

"It's Dutch," Todd frowned "Anway, Hitler was
a teetotaler."

I guess that explains his behavior. Anyone
who doesn't drink anything at all has a screw loose.

"You know that for a fact?" I ventured. "Do
you read history?"

"Is that a crime?"

"In Skunk's family it was," I said. "I got
slugged whenever he caught me with a book."

"Nice guy," Todd sighed, slipping onto a
kitchen chair. I joined him at the table, placing my can on a ridge
of dried ketchup. Something in his tone snagged my attention.

"Same in your family?" I asked.

"Let's just say my father wasn't too keen on
book learning," he said. "But Mom wasn't like that. Whenever she
wanted to get Dad's goat, she just pointed at me with a book and
asked why he didn't do anything to improve his mind."

This sounded alarmingly familiar. My mother
wouldn't dare confront Skunk with his ignorance, not directly, but
she made disapproving noises whenever he slugged me for cracking a
spine.

"What kind of stuff to you like to read?" I
asked gingerly. Asking someone a question like that is nosy in the
extreme, like asking what brand of toilet paper they use.

Put off by this stab at intimacy, Todd tossed
a hand in the air. "All sorts of stuff."

It sounded a lot like my own agenda, and I
backed off, comforted by the thought that I forget most of what I
read, anyway.

"You sure you don't have any way of getting
home?" he added, crunching the love into my bones.

"What's your favorite candy?" I asked.

"What?"

"Your favorite color? Do you prefer the
original Star Trek, or the Next Generation? Who do you think is the
sexiest woman alive?"

Todd would have tossed his beer in my face if
it hadn't been so precious.

"Go to hell," he said.

"We're a living experiment," I pressed. "They
pay guys like us for research."

"Research for what?" said Todd, subdued by
the idea of being paid just to exist. "We don't have to actually do
anything, do we?"

The path of least resistance. I had to admit,
we thought alike when it came to work.

"Not much," I said. "Answer a lot of
questions, get our tongues swabbed for..."

"DNA samples." Todd clasped his fingers in
what was supposed to be a double helix.

"I wonder," I said, suddenly startled by a
remote memory. "Maybe it won't be the first time. When I was a kid,
this guy kept showing up to swab my cheek and take blood samples. I
guess it sticks in my mind because he was doing it in our den
instead of at the doctor's office. It was like Skunk had invited a
vampire into the house."

"Were you sick?" Todd seemed woozy at the
prospect of a shared disease.

"Not that I remember." Vexed by what seemed
like silent awareness, I said: "What is it?"

"I think the same thing must have happened to
me. But I'm not sure. It was only a few times."

"The guy I'm talking about hung around for a
year, or it seemed like it. Always popping in with his cotton swabs
and needles. I called him Dr. Whacko. Did he ask you weird
questions?"

Todd gave a helpless shrug. "I don't know. I
don't even know if it really happened. Maybe you just talking about
him planted a false memory."

I gave him a long look, longer than necessary
since I could tell at a glance he was a retard. "Anyway, I'm
wondering now if he was getting DNA samples for some reason."

"You think it was one of those government
experiments? You know, where they plant alien genes in a human to
see what comes out?"

Apparently, he watched the same dumb movies I
did. Mars Needs Women. Or, in this case, Mars Needs Morons. Or
maybe Mars needed to scrub morons out of its gene pool and was
using humans as some sort of Rinso.

"It's more likely Whacko was trying to
determine if the McPherson's bred idiots."

"Isn't that a relief," said Todd.

I shrugged. "Anyway, it's kind of hard to
deny the obvious."

"We don't look anything alike," Todd
affirmed.

"Monique couldn't tell us apart. Not at
first." I gave him a grim smile, as if holding him to a standard of
which I had not partaken. My sexual reputation was dependent on his
performance, if his moves and equipment were identical to my own.
Sheesh.

"I was seduced," Todd said blandly. "And
don't look at me like that. You know the routine. If I hadn't
walked in..."

"It would have been a far pleasanter
afternoon."

"Yeah, ignorance was bliss," he shot back
quickly.

He had dodged the salacious for the abstract,
which wasn't like me at all. Monique's nipple had left a permanent
dent in my forehead, adjacent to my memory bank, and I would always
regret the lost opportunity. I knew much more now than I had when I
woke up on my couch that morning. For sure, my ignorance had
involved potential bliss.

"I guess she was pretty good..." I said
longingly.

"You'll never know."

"Why not? All I have to do is change my name
to 'Todd'." I hoped my grin was more wicked than lame.

"You think she won't be able to tell
the difference?" Todd said hotly. "You really think we're
that
identical? You want to see how
different we are? You want pictures? I'll give you
pictures."

He swooped out of the room and I took a
couple of swigs from his Heineken bottle. Okay, germs and all, but
I needed proper reinforcement for what I was about to see, whatever
it was. Not Todd and Monique in the buff, I prayed. I was thinking
more in the line of Skunk in a tux, posing as the respectable
Benjamin Neerson, asbestos abatement contractor. How old would the
picture be? Sepia or Costco glossy, Polaroid or digital? Who else
would be present? Todd for sure, since this was to be the
pudding-proof that on such-and-such date and in such-and-such place
Todd Neerson (no relation to Mute McPherson and his scummy clan)
had been born and raised in a properly segregated environment.

For a second I thought I heard hushed voices.
Something toppled over upstairs. The curse that followed seemed to
be filtered through a mountain range of junk. This was no
short-term accumulation, but evidence of powerful tectonic forces.
He might be able to prove we weren't kin, but there was no denying
we were spiritually connected to the Big Slob in the Sky.

Todd returned looking doubtful and sheepish,
holding a picture to his chest. The brown plein air frame seemed a
little wormy until I realized that was the style.

"Dad wasn't Prince Charming, but there's no
way he's the Skunk you're talking about." He tilted the picture
like a drawbridge, using his abdomen as a fulcrum. I would have to
lean forward if I wanted to see more than the bottom of the frame.
Sensing a powerplay, I leaned back, instead. Todd frowned. "Hey,
you don't want to see, you can kiss my ass."