Skunk Hunt (61 page)

Yvonne shoveled Michael's head onto her lap,
not so much a femme fatale as a femme avalanche, squeezing great
tears out of her bulbous eyes as she checked him for signs of life.
I didn't realize crotch-groping was part of the CPR package.

She, too, had misrepresented herself as a
policewoman. Impersonating an officer must be a new fad among the
low and unmighty.

"Hey," said ever-grammatically incorrect
Jeremy. "He got gum on his shoe."

I would have thought this
uncharacteristically clever of him, except when I leaned over to
look, I saw dirty pink wads on his sole.

Jeremy gave Yvonne an unkind nudge. "What,
you can't tell us apart?"

"Michael Schwinn," I announced, turning
around and holding up the I'D in Mom's direction. "Ring any
bells?"

She shook her head stiffly.

"Hey, didn't anyone hear what I said?" Marvin
complained loudly.

"I didn't hear you say anything," Todd said
and glanced at me, as if I was the other half of a speaker system.
"You?"

I shrugged. Marvin might have said something,
but either none of us had heard, or the words had sloughed off into
our collective short-term memory bin.

"We should haul ass!" Marvin shouted.
"We don't know who's going to show up next. Maybe the cops.
Maybe
triplets
!"

Good point. Our secret staging area was
becoming a community ensemble.

"But go where?" I said. "I don't think my
house would be any safer." I turned to Uncle Vern. "How about
yours?"

He easily stared me down. That avuncular
elder statesman look gets me every time.

"What about West Virginia?" he said.

Driving on narrow mountain roads in the
middle of the night for fun and profit was not my idea of
profitable fun. Ever see the 'Wages of Fear'? "If you're thinking
of digging it up..." I hesitated. What exactly was
it
?

"Yes?" Uncle Vern prodded, inferring that he
had a ready answer, no matter what my objection was. I could have
told him my brain was at the cleaners, but I had to remain in the
realm of the semi-probable.

"You won't be able to find the place in the
dark," I said. "We're talking about West Virginia here. They've
probably never heard of streetlights. Maybe not even
electricity."

"What are you talking about?" Marvin whined.
"They have an eighty-mile-an-hour speed limit."

The high-tide mark of civilization, to be
sure. But disparaging my hillbilly ancestors was second nature to
me and I couldn't stop the flow of negatives. "Do you know what
those things are like up there?"

"What 'things'?" Todd asked.

"You know...the people. You start wandering
around in the dark in one of their fields...that's when they hunt,
you know. After the sun goes down. And they'll tear you limb from
limb and eat—"

"Eat it raw!" Todd snickered red-neckedly.
Well, he shared the genes. Neanderthal humor was in his blood.

"We can discuss our options on the road,"
said Uncle Vern, lifting himself off his chair. "But Marvin is
right. We need to move along."

"What about them?" said Jeremy, frowning down
at the gelatinous pile at his feet. Michael's eyes fluttered open,
which seemed evidence enough that all his brain damage had been
incurred before Jeremy socked him. Yvonne's prognosis was summed up
in the sudden stoppage of tears, which were sponged up in a sour
expression in which I could see no sign of relief. Maybe she had
been robbed of the performance she had planned in case Michael
croaked. Then she saw Jeremy holding her own gun on her and her
face curdled.

"What do you think you're doing?"

"I was thinking of blowing your brains out,
Chumpcakes."

"Where would that get you?" she demanded,
meeting his eye.

"Nowhere much," Jeremy admitted. "So just
come along with us and I'll save myself the jail time."

"Go where?"

Michael groaned as he pushed himself into a
seating position. I fully expected Yvonne to cradle his bruised
head in her arms, but instead of a tender embrace, he received a
sharp, "Get up, will you?"

I suppose that was part of her charm,
or the only part of her charm. She was unpredictable. Men like
that. Most men. Michael put a hand up in her face and pushed her
out of her crouch. She fell back on the floor with a soft crunch.
Now,
that
was
charming.

"We're going on our honeymoon," said Jeremy
with a sly grin. "West Virginia. Home to the stars."

His joke was more accurate than he knew. I
realized with a fearful sigh that the trip to the mountains was
unavoidable—and the place we were headed to was a stone's throw
from Green Bank Observatory, where scientists search the cosmos for
intelligent lifeforms.

They wouldn't find any tonight.

CHAPTER 29

"Your father was a skunk in more ways than
one," Uncle Vern said over his shoulder as he took the ramp off
I-64 onto Route 250. We had passed Charlottesville and Staunton and
were entering (I assumed—I'd never been here myself) the cavernous
narrows of a hazardous landscape. I wasn't the only one to think
the straightforward hundred miles of interstate had been wasted.
Marvin had urged his uncle to tell me the whole story, or at least
enough to make sense. Every time he threatened to give his own
version of events, Uncle Vern would cut him off.

"Everything you know you heard from me, and
you'll scramble it mercilessly."

So now, Uncle Mentally Challenged was
choosing this dark, twisting road to twist around in the driver's
seat and spit out the tangled truth. There wasn't a brain in the
lot.

But it wasn't as if the trip thus far was
totally unenlightening. Before leaving Richmond's FM range, Uncle
Vern had switched on the local news. It was preceded by A Moment in
Science, which discussed a new computer program that created works
of art free of human imperfections, real masterpieces.

"Finally!" Marvin exclaimed with relief.

The murders in my bedroom were reported
breathlessly by some twit of a girl who was probably as cute as a
button, although with radio you never knew. This was followed by
the story of a wild high speed chase south of Richmond along Jeff
Davis Highway. Two men had been arrested for reckless cornholing or
some such thing. But no connection was made between them and the
murders. This was worth a few puzzled murmurs from the van's cargo
bay, including my own technocratic: "They don't tell you
everything, not at first."

"At least the Congreve assholes are in the
lockup," Marvin said. "That's one less pair of guns."

This didn't stop him from keeping his
eye glued to the headlights of Yvonne's van in the rearview mirror.
Michael's dramatic entry at the unsafe house had upset him as much
as the rest of us, which I thought out of proportion to his vital
interests. It wasn't as though
he
had had a douche twin show up on the doorstep. A couple of
sharp exchanges with his uncle suggested ol' Vern had kept him
ignorant of some important factualities. He was hoping to learn as
much during this ride as I did.

Mom and Jeremy were in the back seat of
Yvonne's van, Michael and Yvonne were in the front. I didn't think
Doubletalk was holding the gun on his beloved. She had balked as a
matter of form. I could tell both she and Michael were as eager to
hot foot it to the boonies as everyone else, excluding your
narrator. I was stuck in Uncle Vern's surveillance van. Marvin
remained in the cargo bay so he could watch the rear screen. Rather
than let the front passenger seat go to waste, Todd and I squabbled
over which one of us should ride up front with Uncle Vern. And
yeah, it was a little like arguing with myself. That should have
made it easier, but try holding a reasonable discussion with your
echo. I finally won when Uncle Vern let out a truly aching fart and
Todd conceded the position.

I was sorry Mom wasn't in the van with us.
She was the one I really wanted to grill. But when Jeremy
discovered his inner gentleman and held Yvonne’s van door open, he
had to place a hand on her head to prevent her from banging it on
the roof, like a cop guiding a suspect into a cruiser. Michael's
arrival had knocked her way off course, and she probably would not
be able to tell which end was up for some time to come.

"I'm not sure where to begin," Uncle Vern
said as he forged into the darkness beyond the interstate
lights.

"You might begin by keeping your eyes on the
road," Marvin carped. He must have had eyes in the side of his
head, because he remained glued to the rear screen, concerned that
Yvonne would miss the turnoff.

"Skunk McPherson was one of my first
students, a long time ago," said Uncle Vern musingly.

"You're a teacher?" I asked.

"Chortle yuck guffaw," snortled Marvin.

"Until recently, I held
cappella oenological
classes at
several of the prisons."

"Which is?" I asked, though I knew I risked
another turn of the head away from the road when he answered.

"The art of playing wine glasses and
goblets."

I was tempted to turn on the overhead light.
The moonglow from the sphinct-ometer did not tell me if Uncle Vern
was silently laughing. Really. Skunk playing music on delicate wine
glasses? It was enough to make me turn in my grave, which I half
suspected was where I was headed. But now that I thought about it,
I remembered the times he sat with his beer bottle ("Never drink
suds from a can," was his credo), circling the rim with his huge
index finger. He never drew a tune out of the narrow mouth, but he
could still be practicing his technique.

"Surprised?" Uncle Vern smirked, looking
directly at me. It was almost ungentlemanly. "And he could raise
the loveliest high C out of a 120 milliliter Mikasa. It made my
heart sing."

Yeah. Wild thing.

"So...he got brownie points for doing that?"
I inquired. "One minute knocked off his sentence for every note he
hit?"

"Performance in my group was noted in his
parole evaluation, certainly." He craned his head and noted the
full moon overhead. "Should be a plenty of light for the
disinterment."

"Jewels, right?"

"I was just getting to that. What I'm about
to tell you is no secret to anyone else here."

"It was until last winter," Marvin
interrupted his uncle with a fervent snarl. "And for the record, I
think we're being followed."

"Of course, by—

"Someone else took the off ramp behind
Jeremy."

"People do reside in these hills," Uncle Vern
grumped. "We'll be passing through McDowell, site of one of
Stonewall Jackson's victories. And there have to be other
hamlets."

A Hamlet in every hamlet. Deadly sword
thrusts in every direction. I hadn't poured poison in my father's
ear—but wait, here was an uncle. Not mine, but
someone's
uncle. And uncles are famously
disreputable. Had he slept with....

I forced literary nonsense from my head and
sat on the brass facts.

"My father was a musician?"

"He had a good ear," Uncle Vern shrugged,
dismissing any notion of a Bach in the family. "Reverend Cawfield
thought well enough of him to consider bringing him into his group,
the Crystal Angels. But, of course, he was desperate for a token
white. And he only had to spend five minutes with Skunk to know he
wanted nothing to do with him."

"There's more than one...uh, orchestra?"

"It's very therapeutic for the inmates,"
Uncle Vern said with what I thought was a trace of sarcasm. If it
was a waste of time, why had he bothered? But that was what I was
about to learn: it had not been a waste of time. Not by a long
shot.

"The prison system is riddled with preachers.
Why do you think so many inmates get born again? It's a national
disgrace."

"I take it you aren't a church-goer?" I
said.

"Of course I am. You can't run a business
without copious hallelujahs." Give him credit, his hypocrisy left a
bad taste in his mouth. But that was just the church side. I didn't
know it at that moment, but Uncle Vern was one of the biggest
hypocrites this side of John Edwards. And he relished it.

"Uncle Vern, if we're going to reach where
we're going maybe you'd better hold off on your story until we
reach where we're going." Marvin had swiveled a second screen and
was trying to watch front and back. He had apparently seen
something flit across the road, something I had missed because I
was looking at Uncle Vern.

"There's no license for backseat drivers,"
Uncle Vern groused.

"I've got this set on low light," Marvin shot
back. "I can see the road better than you."

"Wait, you missed that!"

"What?" Marvin frantically demanded, shooting
his eyes back to the forward screen.

"The horse's ass," answered Uncle Vern. "Now
to answer your question, Todd—"

"I'm not Todd," I said quickly. "But now that
you bring it up, how long have you known him? And my mother?"

"Too long," Marvin said, smarting over his
uncle's remark.

"I've known your mother almost as long as I
knew your father," said Uncle Vern. "A very sweet and intelligent
lady."

You could have floored me with a feather. Two
highly improbably adjectives attached to an unlikely noun and
emphasized by a flattering adverb to round off the impossible. He
had to be confusing her with Marilyn vos Savant.

"The last time I saw you, you must have been
three or four," Uncle Vern added. "It wasn't until this business
with the lost money that I saw you as an adult."

"But you knew what I looked like," I said,
glancing over my shoulder. "Every step of the way."