Skunk Hunt (59 page)

The inherent goofiness of the word 'googling'
drew a smirk from Mom. Here was a nice little set-piece in mockery.
There wasn't much difference between scorning someone for being
stupid or for being too smart. I guess they met in the middle.

"Dr. Whacko was Dr. Archibald Penrose, head
of the Twain Monozygotic and Dizygotic Research Institute."

"Wow," I said in the most banal tone I could
summon: my natural voice.

"It's a mouthful," Marvin granted.

"And why would he be visiting our—" I
experienced a mental hiccup and looked at Todd.

"Bingo."

"Nyet," I protested. "If I remember Whacko, I
would remember Todd, don't you think?"

The conversation seemed to be giving Yvonne a
pain in the side. She leaned away from Jeremy and was digging her
fingers into the fold of her blouse, or maybe a body crevice. I
tried to remember if she had a rash when I was with her and
thankfully realized I had banished all trace of her naked body from
my mind.

Something Mom said diverted me from the
overinflated mermaid on the couch.

"He was studying twins, " Mom said to
Marvin.

"Monozygotic, that's what I said," the zit
machine responded dorkily.

"Wai-wai-wait," I held up a hand. "Todd
wasn't living on Oregon Hill when Whacko was around. How could he
know about the two of us?"

Marvin began to answer. I cut him short
with a remarkably effective snarl. "My mother can talk for
herself." Boy, standing up for Mom. A new low. But I wasn't sure
she could explain her past…
our
pasts. She seemed awfully tongue-tied, and in no fit state
for oral history.

"Well, there was the hospital record," she
said slowly, warily—the same way she used to talk to Skunk. And for
the first time I sensed her dread of me. I had known for quite some
time that withholding information imparted its own peculiar form of
empowerment. But in this case the knowledge was more lethal to me
than to anyone else, if you excluded Dog and his owner.

The big drawback to knowing too much is that
you never really know as much as others think you know. I thought I
knew where Skunk had hidden a great deal of loot, but I had no idea
how or when it had gotten there, and that gap left me wide open.
Would Mom—and Marvin, apparently—have the patience to answer my
questions?

"I'm too tired," said Mom, who was still an
expert on reading my facial expressions. I countered this with a
look Marvin's way. Mom acknowledged the threat with a long sigh.
Marvin seemed ready and willing to give me his spin on the
McPherson family skeletons, a prospect she found distasteful and
maybe frightening.

"Well, I am your mother," she said.
"Your
blood
mother—if that's
so important to you."

Actually, it wasn't. In my narrow focus, I
believed I could have popped out of anywomb and been the same me as
me. I mean, I really didn't have the energy or mental wherewithal
to be anyone else. I didn't like the way Mom used 'blood' instead
of 'biological'. The more seemly word was probably beyond her
vocabulary, but she made me sound like a mess she had had to mop
off the kitchen floor.

"I'm choosing to believe you," I relented,
with a caveat: "I believe you the same way I believed you were
dead."

"You think I'm lying?"

"I don't know," I said. "But anyone can
believe any lie, so it doesn't matter, right?"

The channel of weary sorrow that formed in
her brow when the subject of Whacko was raised deepened. But she
had always known I was a bad egg. My disbelief didn't surprise her,
and the sorrow belonged to something else.

"What about Winny Marteen? Or should I say
'Benjamin Neeerson?' Todd showed me a picture of the two of you..."
I scrounged around for a euphemism for marriage, which suddenly
sounded like a dirty word. "You looked like my parents."

"Don't show me a gloomy face," she
spat. "I lost two husbands in one day. In one
minute
."

Marvin, on the verge of jumping in with two
more cents, abruptly withdrew them from the community bank and fell
silent.

Being less than cognizant of moral
standards—I grew up on old Oregon Hill, after all—I let slide this
inferred admission that my mother had been married to two men at
the same time. Questioning the legality of the marriages was moot.
Most of the couples I had known as a kid had never seen the
interior of a church—or of City Hall, for that matter. After
Skunk's death I had flipped through the meager documentation of his
life and did not find so much as a birth certificate in our house.
I was surprised, though, to discover that he had taken some
vocational courses in prison, and was an accredited plumber. Seeing
as our house had a hundred leaks, it would appear his training was
more theoretical than applied.

I couldn't picture Winny running off with the
alleged Mrs. McPherson, Skunk explaining away her disappearance
with a phony suicide—which was kind of cruel, come to think on it.
No one took anything from Skunk, least of all his wife and the
mother of his children, without some serious hurt being involved.
Not only that, but Winny had lived just up the street from us, in a
ratty old house even more dilapidated than our own.

It had not dawned on me that Winny had moved
off the Hill, because he continued to play the on-again, off-again
role of Skunk's shadow. His disappearances coincided with my
father's, and I had assumed they were sharing a cell in a state or
local prison. But now I knew he was spending much of that time
here, in this house, with this woman and my creepy lookalike.

Mom was all cooked up. Her low-class attitude
burned through her respectable makeup, like the bottom of a trash
heap catching fire.

"What I've done for you, all I've done for
you, everything, and this is how you behave?"

It would probably have been rude to point out
that, for all her redundancy, she had done nothing for me for over
fifteen years, unless abandonment had become a virtue.

She astutely mitted my unspoken rebuke. "You
don't know, you can't know.

True, I didn't know, couldn't know and wasn't
all that sure I wanted to know. But curiosity is a pernicious
little cuss. Combined with the fact that what I didn't know could
kill me, asking Mom to throw a little light on the situation
couldn't hurt. I wasn't going to go so far as to ask if she had
breast fed me, but close enough to draw milk. That she had brought
up the memory of Professor Penrose told me he was central to the
mystery.

"So why would Dr. Whacko be so interested in
me and Todd? Which reminds me, you haven't explained how he knew
about Todd. But there are twins born every day. We're not all that
rare, right? What made us so special?"

Mom wasn't sneering. Actually, she
seemed to have a toothache—particularly in one of her incisors. She
tapped her front teeth with her tongue, as though desperately
trying to attain dental nirvana. Interpreting this torment was
beyond my feeble social skills, and I turned to the others for
suggestive reactions. Marvin, having been reminded of his role as a
serial husband killer, retreated behind his pimples, from where he
was probably tracing new fields of fire. Uncle Vern was silently
wallowing, though whether in a sea of sympathy or contempt it was
impossible to say. Jeremy was still choking down Mom's reappearance
in the real world to bother with her behavior. She could have
stretched out for a nap or danced on her hands and he would have
continued to drip with saline imbecility. I guessed it was pretty
hot sitting next to that bulky furnace of flesh. Yvonne was stoking
herself with hard labor, pulling out fistfuls of fabric as she
groped at her waist. Maybe a rash had developed
after
our little
entre
nuts
. Maybe I (or my unhealthy environment) had given
it to her. Oops.

Of course, in lieu of a mirror, the one I
studied most was Todd. He should have provided the best template of
how I looked and how I should rearrange that look. But he looked to
be nodding off. All things considered, that looked to be the best
reaction of all. Then I felt my own eyes grow heavy. It had been a
long day for all of us, but sleep was out of proportion to the
emergency.

"Your mother is trying to tell you that this
is all much more complicated than you can imagine," said Uncle
Vern.

"Than I can
imagine
?" I said. "I think you're drastically
underestimating my imagination. I can imagine Liz Taylor with Mr.
Ed, a space station on the head of a pin, reading War and Peace in
a single lunch break—"

Uncle Vern raised a civilized hand. "None of
which are imaginable, but I see your point. I think your mother is
trying to protect you—"

"By keeping me in the dark?" I leaned towards
Mom with an aching eye. "Is that it? You want to keep your darling
son out of the hoosegow?"

Jeremy gave a cough and studied his
cuticles.

"Well, keep one of us out, at least," I
shrugged.

"Can't you grant me even a little credit?"
Mom pleaded, removing her teeth from her lip.

"I guess not," I said, adding an explanation:
"Giving credit where it's due goes against my genetic
inheritance."

Todd roused himself out of his stupor.
"Genetic..."

"What did Skunk tell you?" Marvin demanded.
He might be a crackerjack killer, but he was still at heart a
cyberkid, demanding lightspeed gratification to outstanding
questions, like the copulation count for particular movie stars and
which episode of Star Trek guest-starred William Windom. The
important stuff.

Why not? We had to start somewhere beyond the
nowhere we were currently inhabiting.

"Skunk told me..."

Ooh boy, they all leaned forward. That was
pretty cool. Yvonne managed to stop toying with the white folds of
her belly to participate in the mass hypnosis.

"A few months before he died, Skunk told me
that if I was ever strapped for money, he knew where I could dig up
an easy million."

"'Dig up'?" Mom asked sharply. "That's the
word he used?"

"He said I would need a shovel," I
elaborated.

"There goes my bus locker theory," Marvin
sniffed. I didn't see what he was complaining about. He could
legitimately claim he was handicapped and dodge the hard labor.

"Shit, Mute, you're saying you just sat on a
million all that time?" The concept was so far beyond Jeremy his
brain slammed through a plate glass window.

"What would I do with it?" was my saintly
reasoning, and we all know the saints were complete idiots.

Let's face it, psychology evolved with
biology, making the hard science soft-headed, especially when the
mind is confronted by nonsensical facts. It struck me that there
was a certain degree of stupefaction mingled with all this avarice
and I wondered if there was a need to pare my story down to numb
basics. These days, most people are drugged out as a matter of
course—at a minimum, Prozac or its multiple analogs. That would be
Todd, nodding off again in the face of a million whoppers. Maybe
Mom, too, by virtue of her generation—it used to be genteel ladies
and their port toddies. Yvonne must be hyped up on diet pills,
which obviously did her no good to the purpose, but gave her enough
metabolic wherewithal to move her limbs. Jeremy I figured for
oxycontin, hillbilly heroin, while Marvin's bloodstream was
probably loaded with a rainbow of narcotics especially designed to
block pain and various other thought processes. Only Uncle Vern was
clean, although he no doubt was gasping for a cocktail. Personally,
I could have done with another beer.

Naturally, this led me to speculate about the
fate of white civilization, but I would have to reserve my
conclusions for a later time.

"One day, while I was clipping Skunk's
toenails—"

"Oh shit," Jeremy moaned, covering his
face.

Graphic detail overload, right.

"One day, Skunk asked me if I would be
willing to wipe his ass when he went old and gaga—"

"Oh God," Marvin cried.

Jesus, these people had no talent for
particulars.

"Mu-u-te," said Mom. Her ability to stretch a
single syllable word into a triad startled me. It was as if she had
reserved her paternal no-nonsense for this very moment. She had
certainly never used it before. That had been one of the highlights
of my childhood: freedom from mouth-to-mouth moralizing from my
mother. She slacked, and we slacked along with her. Our only other
immediate role model was Skunk. 'Nuff said.

"Cm'on, cm'on, cm'on."

Todd's sleepy nonchalance supplied a nice
contrast to Marvin's antsy impatience. His guilt over killing our
fathers lasted as long as one of his farts.

"So we have to dig," he persisted.
"
Where
?"

"Is the 'where' the real reason why you
haven't gone after it?" Uncle Vern said cagily. There was something
militant about his expression, as though he regularly brought down
entire flocks of angels. For my money—such as it was—he was the
most civilized man in the room. Almost a gentleman, even.

Jeremy let out a gasp of relief. My apparent
indifference to Skunk's cache had given him mental cramps. "So
that's it. Where is it buried? In a baseball park? Like Jimmy
Hoffa?"

"We're not talking about digging up corpses,"
said Todd queasily.

"So this would be easier," said Jeremy with
idiotic authority, as if burying great sums of money was old hat
for him.

"That's an urban legend," said Uncle Vern.
"Nobody knows where Hoffa ended up."

Todd drifted off into mental self-amusement,
which is one step short of jerking off. He had never been broke—Mom
had seen to that, I supposed. All his needs had been granted. But
the person who had granted those needs knew the value of a buck and
was ready to pull out her rack and thumbscrews. The blowsy mother
of my youth had become an iron maiden. I was tempted to point this
out to her—hell, to everyone. See what money does to you? But my
audience would want statistical evidence. To prove my theorem, I
would have to put the money in their hands.