Skunk Hunt (5 page)

The letter itself seemed proof of forgery.
Aside from a 'wish you were here' postcard he had sent to Jeremy
from the Jonesville tank, I'd never known Skunk to scrawl so much
as a note. The reference to a website was added evidence that this
was some kind of hoax. About the only difference between his
computer illiteracy and mine had been that at least I knew what a
computer was.

I couldn't ignore Sweet Tooth and Doubletalk,
Skunk's nicknames for Barbara and Jeremy. But 'Mute' was something
Dad had called me on only a handful of private moments. I'll
explain why later. Or I might not.

The clincher was the bit about crosswalk and
yield signs. Not long before the Brinks job, Skunk, feeling
uncharacteristically paternal, had given me my first driving
lessons. I was all of nine. He wanted to go to the 7/11 but it was
Memorial Day weekend and he was concerned about all the extra
police assigned to traffic duty. He must have balanced his
drunkenness against my age and decided I was the lesser risk.
Pulling the seat up as far as it would go, I just managed to reach
the pedal and brake with my right foot. I did pretty well on my way
to the store, but coming back I encountered a three-way merge near
the Belvedere ramp. I slowed down, checked out the yield signs, and
mentally translated 'right of way' as 'right away'. Just as I came
up to the intersection, an old VW van came puttering up and nearly
sideswiped me before cutting me off.

"Did you see that!" I complained.

Dad said nothing.

About fifty yards down the road we came to a
crosswalk near VCU. The northern fringe of Oregon Hill had already
been occupied by students, and I had developed a healthy disrespect
for them. Seeing several ahead of me, I ignored the
yield-to-pedestrian sign and breezed through, delighting in the
loud oaths in my wake.

"If they hadn't jumped out of the way, you'd
have killed them," Dad grunted.

A few nine-pins less in the world was of no
great concern to a 9-year-old. When we pulled up in front of the
house, however, Dad twisted open his bottle of malt liquor (never a
tin can—in some things he was a purist), and said:

"You almost got in a wreck for trusting a
yield sign. Then those kids almost got killed for trusting you at a
crosswalk. Only a dummy trusts traffic signs." He nodded sagely,
then added, "Besides, you could've got me arrested."

At which point he whacked me. I suppose I
deserved it. And it certainly drove the lesson home. I sure as hell
didn't need to hear it again, especially in a letter that arrived
seven months after Dad's alleged death.

When we were younger, the three
McPherson brats had a knack for grabbing every ounce of salt they
could discover to rub in each others' wounds. If Barbara and Jeremy
had known about my little
contretemps
, they would have gleefully stung me
with it even to this day. It had been a few years since I had seen
either of them, but I was sure if we met again, they would remind
me first thing of the time I pooped in the tub—when I was four.
Reason enough to dismiss a family reunion.

CHAPTER 3

"Hey Mute, remember the time Ol' Skunk came
into the bathroom and thought you were playing with a toy boat. He
went ape when he reached in and found a toothpick with a paper sail
stuck a turd!"

I grunted...a very Skunk-like utterance. My
mother once told me this was the one and only time Dad ever
attended me in the bath. I'm sure it left an impression on him.
Maybe he thought I always let go in the tub, and Mom kept it a
secret from him. Since I remembered none of this, it might have
been true. It kind of sounds like something I'd do. But enough
about me.

Knowing neither their addresses nor phone
numbers, I had no way of contacting my brother or sister. If they
received letters about the mystery website, they would have to come
to me, the one who had not budged from the family hearth, whose
address remained unchanged.

I gave a nod of congratulations to the ghost
of our father. He had known where to find them. Jeremy, at least.
On the same day I got the letter, Jeremy rang me up to let me know
he had gotten one, too.

"Weird, huh?" he said.

There ensued a long pause. Jeremy must have
found it awkward, because he broke the silence with the old family
fable—as if bringing up an embarrassing memory was the height of
fraternal interaction. He had not even been living with us when the
alleged turd outrage took place. Which made it all the more
galling. Either Barbara or my parents had told him, which meant the
story was making the rounds. My eternal shame.

I knew that if I didn't answer he would begin
spouting more nonsense. He had earned his family nickname honestly.
Oddly enough, he only took offense at it when steeped in the wisdom
of his cups.

"Listen, Doubletalk, I doubt there's anything
to it. It's just a sick joke."

"I don't think so, Mute. No one would
play that kind of trick with Skunk. When I was in the can, no one
played drop the soap with
me
.
They knew who our father was."

"
Our
?" I said, my hackles rising. "You talked to
your jailbird buddies about me?"

"No, no," Jeremy said quickly. "I meant
to say they knew who
my
father
was. No one would mess around with his name, even after he's been
shot full of holes."

"One hole," I amended absently. Whenever I
felt semi-suicidal, I would correct my brother's exaggerations.

Truth be told, I had been as surprised
as Jeremy when he landed in a state prison for a crime that should
have been worth no more than a night in the city jail. He had been
out drinking with his friend Jerry Lewis—a comedian, but not
the
comedian. When Jerry was rousted
by a pair of cops for creating a public nuisance (he pissed on the
tire of a parked car which turned out to be a police cruiser—I told
he was a comedian), Jeremy came to his aid by nudging one of the
officers on the shoulder. Jeremy swore it was no more than that,
but the cop went sprawling. The cop chose to put on his high hat,
like God taking umbrage, and crucified him royally before the
judge. Jeremy's mouth did the rest.

Of all of us, Jeremy was most like Dad. He
could turn sinister and (I suspected) deadly when he was crossed.
But there the similarity ended, because our father had never been
much for speech. Jeremy had a nervous streak that ran from his
forebrain to his tongue, where he rattled off words as detrimental
to himself as they were meaningless to everyone else.

I was six years old when Jeremy was suddenly
thrust in our midst. I arrived home from elementary school to find
the living room couch cleared of junk to make room for three
people. In the middle was Mom. To one side of her was five-year-old
Barbara, wide-eyed and non-comprehending. On the other was a
stranger.

"Mute-baby," Mom announced, "this is your new
brother."

Living where we did, with whom we did, and in
our rough, pre-student-infested neighborhood, Barbara and I already
had a good grasp on the procreative process. Although there were
the usual gaps and caveats for kids our age, we both knew there was
a major league problem with this picture. What had happened to the
nine months of Mom growing from bean pod to melon? What about the
diaper phase and the crying-jag phase and the (not to put too fine
a point on it) poop in the tub phase? Two or three years older than
me, Jeremy was some kind of weird, alien mommy-snatcher who had
burrowed a permanent hole in the couch.

My childhood took a drastic downturn at that
point. If I was Mute before, I became practically catatonic with
this new arrival. Mom, too, seemed dragged down by Jeremy's
presence, even though she wasn't poked and teased by him, the way I
was. I never thought there was an abundance of motherly affection
in her nature until I saw the contrast between the way she treated
us and the newcomer. Compared to Jeremy, Barbara and I were beloved
darlings. We got smacked around, true enough, but she never laid a
finger on Jeremy. I sensed that had more to do with her fear of
Skunk—who, on that first day, after dropping off Jeremy, had
escaped to Triggs, the nearest bar.

I can give you the flavor of our relationship
with a succinct example:

Before the influx of students, Oregon Hill
was the last white neighborhood in downtown Richmond. I wouldn't
say it was a Caucasian oasis—more like a swamp. These weren't your
premiere bluebloods who sneered at their inferiors and supported
the opera. Well, they sneered, but it was more of a generalized
attitude towards the world. There were few black faces to be seen
in our little world, one of them belonging to the newspaper boy. He
was a big kid who looked like he could handle himself.

About a week after Jeremy's arrival, I was
sitting with him on the front porch when the delivery boy sauntered
past, his newspaper pouch draped over his shoulder. Jeremy nodded
in his direction and said, "Go over and call that guy a
nigger."

There didn't seem any point in doing this,
but there was no apparent danger that I could see. So I went over
and did it.

Afterwards, Mom and Dad had a brief debate as
to whether I should be taken to the hospital. They concluded I
would survive, and left me to nurse my own wounds.

"Why are you calling?" I asked Jeremy, trying
and failing to wipe away bad memories as my ear sweated against the
phone receiver. I was tense. I hate questions because I hate
answers.

"Oh, yeah," Jeremy said. "You must think I'm
calling out of the blue."

That's not what I thought, but I didn't say
so.

"Hello, you still there?"

"Yes," I said.

"Okay, well...I got this letter
yesterday..."

"Yes."

"You got one too?"

In the past, Jeremy had been in the habit of
using the most mundane personal information against me, whether to
his profit or (which I suppose was emotionally profitable) simply
to torment me. After getting me to tell him which toy I liked most,
he held it ransom until I forked over my lunch money. When I was
stupid enough to admit to a crush in my freshman year, he went and
told the girl I abused my pillow at night while moaning her name.
My brother should have worn the Mark of Cain the way cats have
bells on their collars, to warn unwary prey. But this was one
tidbit that could not be avoided.

"Yes," I answered, after a pause.

"You got a secret code?"

"You mean part of a password? Yes."

"What is it?" Then, realizing this was a bit
too unsubtle even for him, added: "I'm your brother."

Meaning: 'Trust me.'

I couldn't help laughing.

"Have you heard from Sweet Tooth?" he
continued, not sounding too put out by my reaction.

"No," I said. "And I don't have Barb's
number. Do you?"

"I haven't heard from her since her last
abortion," Jeremy said blandly.

He had often delivered his bombshells
off-handedly—as though he was handing you a glass of homogenized
milk, then waiting for you to swallow the jalapeno hidden inside.
But he was never one to worry about adverse reactions. If you
warned him about it, he would answer, "Or what?"

In fact, that 'or what' pretty much defined
Jeremy. He challenged society in various stupid ways, then cocked
his snoot. Every so often society struck back.

Oh yeah, he was Skunk's boy, however odd his
arrival. And as we grew older, I noticed the physical similarity.
The sandy hair, square jaw, big fists, mean glint.

There was no telling if what he said about
Barbara was true or not. But I couldn't imagine her confiding
secrets to my brother. She knew him as well as I did, how he could
make the simplest words into knives.

I didn't respond, not wanting to reveal my
ignorance if it was true, or my gullibility if it wasn't.

"She married some dude from the power
company, right?" said Jeremy.

If he didn't know she was married, chances
were the abortion business was made up. But confronting him with
this logic would only prolong the conversation.

"You still there?"

"Yes," I said. Then, to move things along,
added, "Whoever sent my letter made it sound like it was from
Dad."

"Mine too." Jeremy made a sound that could
have been a sniff of emotion, or a snort of disgust. "He said some
things...I would've busted him in the face."

"Something only you could know?" I
prodded.

"Yeah. Tell you the truth, Mute, it sent an
ice pick up my spine."

A curious analogy. I wondered how many ice
picks he had wielded, and against whom.

"But it's not possible. I saw his body
myself. I saw the clip of him being shot on YouTube."

"You have a computer?" Jeremy asked
quickly.

"I went to the library," I explained.

"I've never stepped inside a library in all
my life."

A point of pride, to be sure.

"They have computers you can use," I told
him. "That's where I saw Dad—"

"You know how to use a computer?"

"Not really. The librarian helped me. How
about you?"

From the way he guffawed, I thought he was
about to make another proud subtraction from his resume. I was
surprised by his next words.

"I took a vocational class at Powhatan.
Business Ed. I had to use a computer."

"And?"

"We weren't allowed to go on the internet.
Assholes wouldn't even let us burn CDs." To further emphasize what
a deprivation this was, he repeated, "Assholes."

"So you don't—"

"Maybe I can get my hands on a computer," he
interrupted. "How hard can it be? Click a few buttons..."