Skunk Hunt (62 page)

"You're skipping the important part—like how
I ended up with a bullet in my gut."

I was already peering into the cargo bay and
needed only to shift my eyes a little to look at Marvin. I couldn't
blame him for his priorities. Sure, he had blown away my two
daddies.... On second thought, yeah, I could blame him. He was
still walking, right?

"I've told you endlessly that it was a
mistake," Uncle Vern said with a gratifying trace of whine.

"I think you called it an act of God."

"If it hadn't been snowing—"

"Snow isn't an act of God, Uncle Vern. It's
called 'weather'."

Etymology wasn't up Uncle Vern's alley.
"Well, if Skunk had had sense enough to carry a cell phone,
then."

"He didn't believe in cell phones," I said.
This stirred a few stares out of the soup. To lay the reason at
cost or inconvenience (and the buttons were too small, way too
small, for his thick fingers) would have registered with reason.
But to make it a matter of a belief system strained their
credulity. I explained: "He told me that once he set out to do
something, he didn't want to be called back. 'One Way Skunk'—that
was Dad."

"One way down a dead end," Marvin observed,
absorbing the role of tough guy like a soggy sponge.

"Will someone allow me to begin at the
beginning?" Uncle Vern complained. "Otherwise, what happened that
day makes no sense."

Between shouts from Marvin warning of
non-existent boulders out front and a possible shadowing menace out
back, just beyond Yvonne's van, Uncle Vern rolled out his tale.
Actually, it turned out in part to be
my
tale, which he elaborated upon with all the
relish of a cat toying with a bad pun. I think he hated me for no
reason, but since he hated Marvin too (with good reason), I figured
he hated all twenty-four year old nonentities who occupied valuable
space. Some people behave as though you owe them rent for rooming
in their world scheme—utilities (like oxygen) not included. He must
have hated Todd, too, since he was the spitting image of a
twenty-four year old nonentity.

Skunk was and always would be a bad egg, but
Uncle Vern took the extra step and broke the yolk. My father had
already sampled several of the state's juvenile correctional
facilities by the time he met Uncle Vern.

"Believe it or not, the state has a version
of the ROTC in some of its facilities. When he was a juvenile, your
father enlisted—I think he liked the idea of getting paid to kill
people—and I was surprised to learn he lasted a full day. Then the
commander made the mistake of barking out the wrong side of his
mouth and Skunk decked him. Even at fifteen he was...imposing. When
I met him a few years later I was advised by the warden not to try
and bring him into the Glass Heads, that he was incorrigible to the
nth degree."

But Uncle Vern had seen something in my
father. I suspected what he had seen was evil incarnate, but ol'
Vern insisted it was the intelligence of reason—guffaw. Granted,
Skunk had some street smarts, but not enough to keep him out of the
slammer. He lacked the vital talent successful crooks deemed
necessary to graduate to the big time: the ability to not get
caught.

"Reverend Cawfield would have nothing to do
with your father. He was the Kapellmeister of the Crystal Angels,
after all, and he wanted only the purist virgins in his choir. Not
that he was a complete nincompoop—he knew there was a dire shortage
of saints in the system. But if your prospects for release looked
good at the next parole board, you were a shoe-in with him. Whereas
I took the hard cases. Not the lifers, of course. They wouldn't do
me any good."

"Something to do with jewels..." I said. "I
don't see the connection."

Uncle Vern's voice got smaller as he
continued, as though he was drawing into a shell and I was hearing
his faint echo. He wasn't ashamed of what he had done. It was the
reluctance of a forced confession.

"Mr. McPherson, in case you haven't figured
it out yet, I'm a thief." Alerted by Marvin of movement ahead,
Uncle Vern slowed to allow a possum to cross the road. A thief with
a soft heart? He continued: "The guards usually left my group alone
when we practiced. They didn't like us. They don't particularly
like any of the teachers in their prisons, who are paid a pittance
but still make more than the average guard."

"Salary envy," I observed.

"Very much so. A fertile field for
temptation. My being an unpaid volunteer made for better relations
with the authorities, but they were still cautious. I would be
locked in the music room—really no more than an unadorned
classroom—for hours at a time with hardened criminals."

"With glasses," I observed.

"Oh, there was no danger any of them would
shatter a glass and use it as a weapon. Reverend Cawfield might
have that problem, but the prisoners had more at stake in my music
class. When it came to keeping my students in line, the Good Lord
was second fiddle."

"You offered them money?" I asked.

"In Cash we trust," Marvin snickered.

"You're awfully quiet back there, Todd," said
Uncle Vern. "You still with us?"

Marvin leaned sideways for a closer look at
my twin. "Out like a light."

"Anyone else want to catch forty winks?"
Uncle Vern inquired. "We have a ways to go."

I envied my brother's oblivion. I sure could
have used a snooze. But Uncle Vern didn't look all that alert
himself. Like Marvin, I wanted to remain available to kibitz the
driver.

"You organized a band of robbers," I said,
forcing both Uncle Vern and myself stay awake.

"Rather than make a long story longer, let me
explain that...years ago..." Uncle Vern paused, searching for a
better light to put on his villainy. Which meant putting it in the
deep shade. I seriously doubted that a fraction of what he was
about to tell me was true, but prejudgment is a guaranteed
soporific, so I guzzled down the caffeine of his lies.

"I wasn't born a lapidarian. I had the
entrepreneurial spirit, and I knew I wanted to start a business
once I got out of college. I started out small: a dry cleaners, a
five-table restaurant, even a book store."

"All floparoonies," inserted Marvin.

"I had the gumption to try, you slug-a-bed. I
must say, selling jewelry wasn't on my radar. I knew many of the
larger jewelers are family-owned, and have been that way for a
hundred years or longer. You have to invest inordinate sums to
build your inventory, and it's a big plus if your daddy hands down
his stock and clientele base to you."

"But you still went into the business," I
said.

"As it so often happens, through chance. I
happened across an estate sale and bought a collection of very nice
paste jewelry. Only it wasn't. For an estate appraiser to make a
mistake that big—it's unheard of. I suspect the appraiser never put
in an appearance and some temporary employee slapped a $50 price
sticker on the jewelry box without thinking twice. Fortunately for
me, there were no living relatives to point out the mistake.

"I didn't know myself how much they were
worth until I had them appraised. The jeweler gave me a look and
said, 'These aren't plastic'. At which point he demanded to see my
receipts, proof of provenance, anything to show him the jewels
weren't stolen. When I finally convinced him of my innocence—"

"Ha!" That was Marvin, but it could have been
me.

"Well...I was young at the time. Your age, in
fact, when face value is all you have to go by. Anyway, I learned I
was the proud owner of $78,000 worth of diamond teardrops, emerald
earrings, carcenets, ruby-studded fascinators, even a bloody tiara.
I was abashed by my ignorance, and by the real possibility that I
might have sold off the jewelry for a couple of hundred and counted
myself lucky."

"You fell in love with the business."

"Not at all. I couldn't get over the look of
greed and disgust—it's a peculiar combination—when that appraiser
realized I didn't know what I had. He wasn't the one who gave me
the true value of the jewels. He tried to buy the collection for
$500."

"Ah...a crook."

"A businessman.
My
kind of businessman. But with no acting
ability. I was in no position to build up a proper inventory, but I
thought it best not to start from scratch. So I checked out some
smaller establishments, places that sold
real
fake jewelry, not the phony genuine
stones."

Needing a moment to grasp this, I held up my
hand. The moment passed and I nodded. Uncle Vern continued:

"I can't say I made a great success of the
venture. I almost went bust several times. And then I found out
what a chump I was."

Marvin did not stifle his cough. When he
recovered, he added: "And I still think we're being followed."

Uncle Vern looked in the rear view and
grunted. "I don't see anyone but Jeremy."

We had just passed through the town of
Jennings Gap, a bucolic burg with real houses, real stores and a
very real sense of early morning desolation. Anyone else on the
road at this time had to be treated seriously. I checked the
passenger mirror and saw only one pair of headlights.

"Where was I...?"

"You're a chump," I said helpfully.

"I
was
a chump. I forgot that like any other business, whoever gets
the niche first has all the advantages…unless you're IBM handing
out free operating systems to Microsoft. Mom and Pop had their
gizzards stripped by Wal-Mart, and there's no going back. And
there's nothing quite so cutthroat as the jewelry store
business.

"I learned how to use the Diamond Price
Guru and bought my diamonds at Rapaport-price, sorted out the best
B2B wholesalers, made some contacts in India—now
they
appreciate gold. Okay, so I
pushed blue-white on the unsuspecting, made sure any flaws were
hidden under the prong—but nothing worse than they do in New York.
And through all this, I kept before me the memory of that first
cretin, the man who had appraised the jewels from the estate sale.
His expression had said everything: I was a mark and didn't know
it, someone to take advantage of because of my ignorance. I was
determined to amend that situation, but the more I learned about
the business, it seemed, the more I was taken advantage of. I was
being laughed at. In short, I was the perfect candidate for the
vice-presidency of the Dominion Jewelers Association."

This abrupt turn caused me to raise my hand
again, summing up my confusion with a cogent, "Huh?"

"I picked out the lobbyist who helped shoot
down some ridiculous ethics regulations before the General
Assembly. I was a keynote speaker at the annual conferences. Gave
speeches on evils of the FTC, how to shoot down lawsuits, how to
avoid taxes. Most important, though, I visited jewelry stores
throughout the state."

"You were casing them!" I exclaimed.

"It's amazing how far hobnobbing with the
owners got me. I was even able to get a close look at their
security systems."

"It almost sounds to me like you were
planning to get even before you had a reason to get even," I
observed.

"How so?" he asked.

"Didn't you found the Glass Heads before you
started staking out the jewelry stores?"

"No, that came later, when I became
respectable."

"Ah," I said. "So you set up the whole
musical glass thing just to—"

"Don't confuse my great love for music for
something sordid!" Uncle Vern said with some heat. "I mean...we
adapted Mozart's Adagio for Glass Harmonica in C, and we did very
well!"

His pride was genuine enough, misplaced or
otherwise. But let's face it, you can float on a lake of crap just
as well as on the clearest chlorinated pool.

"All right," said Uncle Vern, detecting the
vibes of disbelief all around and within. "I got the glasses at an
estate sale—a different one—and I thought I would put them to good
use. Our church makes a big deal out of visiting inmates. Have you
heard of the Eagle Outreach? Our minister was already involved with
a number of programs—he had mentioned the inmate glass musicians in
one of his sermons—and I told him about my little purchase. He went
bonkers. He had been using cheap stemware from Discount Mugs, and
wanted me to loan him my set for concerts. He invited me to come
along. Insisted, really. He was that proud of his group."

"And you did this with the idea of forming
your robber band?"

"Worse than that. I piggybacked on God's
reputation. My pastor, Reverend Smith, began to mention me in his
after-sermon announcements. I fit in nicely between local deaths
and the time for the next Presbyterian Kaffeeklatch. Somewhat to my
astonishment, business at the Ice Boutique began to pick up. This
encouraged me to invest more time in the Glass Heads. I got to know
more about my musicians—Reverend Smith's musicians, I mean. And
then came the day I ran into Skunk McPherson." Uncle Vern cast a
look in my direction. "I'll bet you didn't know your old man could
be something of a schmoozer when he wanted to be."

"He wasn't a con artist," I protested,
defending my father's reputation. "He was a stiff-arm man."

"'Strong'," Marvin snickered.

"Well, he conned you then, didn't he? All
those years spent in virtual poverty. Two brothers you never
guessed existed. A supposedly dead mother who was in fact alive and
well in the West End. Shall I go on?"

"Can you?"

"Not to put too fine a point on it: the
existence of me. You never heard of me, yet I was central to your
life."

"You're my real father?" I asked with
humiliating credulity. Well, why not? Neither Todd nor I looked
anything like Skunk. We didn't favor Mom--not really...I think. It
was just conceivable that Uncle Vern had dumped unwanted twins in
the most convenient skunk den.