Skunk Hunt (69 page)

We gave Yvonne a look of disgust.

"She checked out Skunk's old place and saw
the same guy. We staked out both places, and when we both saw the
same guy at the same time, I knew I was dealing with twins. My
stepparents had told me about Jeremy, but not about you two. I
guess they wanted to prepare me in case I met myself on the street
one day. But you and Todd didn't matter."

I started to say 'the story of my life', but
Todd beat me to it.

"They also hadn't told me about Mom's second
life. I guess they didn't want to think that she..."

"Was a slut," said Mom flatly.

"That was when the plot thickened," said
Michael.

I waited for him to finish. When he didn't I
said, "What do you mean? Why would it thicken when you found out
about the second set of twins? I would've thought Brinks and the
jewelry heists were thick enough."

"Background, background, background!" Marvin
complained. "Can't we move this along and fill in the gaps later?
We have Mr. Sun coming up in an hour."

I felt the heat of their collective gaze on
me. The apparent absence of loaded guns in our little orbit boosted
my confidence.

"Who has the shovel?" I asked
rhetorically.

Marvin thrust it into my hands.

I held it out to Todd.

"No way!" he glowered.

"Why not? You're standing on X marks the
spot."

It was signing my life away, that sentence. I
had seen the fatal speaker post several minutes earlier. P25, at
the rear left edge of the lot, there not being any room for another
row. The junkers had stopped around Row M, so we would not have to
deal with moving a car. Throughout the turmoil of revelations I had
been holding a sub-textual conversation with myself. Should I barf
or should I bail? Now that I had tried proper bailing etiquette—as
in rudely trying to escape without getting hurt—there didn't seem
to be any more options. That hadn't stopped me from wracking my
mind. All sorts of ideas occurred to me. My favorite was to use
their greed to turn them against each other. Set the clockwork in
motion, and sit back in amused contentment as they slaughtered one
another. I, of course, would slaughter the lone survivor—Jeremy or
Monique, it was a tough call. But there were too many intangibles
to contend with. In other words, there was too much thinking
involved. Naturally, this went against my genetic
predisposition.

So I signed off on my life.

Being so much like me, if not identical, it
was remarkable to see the alacrity with which Todd attacked the
ground. It was like I had been told to pop five gallons of popcorn
at work and had come up with a hundred. Going the extra mile was
anti-pragmatic, anti-social and anti-McPherson. Todd loosened the
soil with drool. The kind of dedication that induces cardiac
arrest.

"Doesn't look like anything's buried here to
me," Marvin said, eyeing me skeptically.

He was right. There was no telltale mound, no
sign at all that this plot of dirt was any different from the soil
around it. Skunk had been playing a joke, I was sure. But this was
the spot, all right. Skunk's words still rang in my ears, along
with the clipped toenail as it whizzed by my head:

"
P25. Dead
center
."

Todd was a little off-center, but I thought
he was close enough to hit anything buried down there. He redeemed
himself in my eyes when he stopped after creating a 4x4 hole.
Inches.

"Whew!"

"Let a man do the job," said Monique, yanking
the shovel out of his hands.

Barbara disputed the takeover, but receded
with feminine grace when Monique snarled her out of the way. She
was the wife, for sure. Disgusting.

I have to admit, Monique thwonked that shovel
with so much phallic emphasis I found it easy to believe she was
butch. Then again, she might have been metaphorically spaying every
man she had ever thwonked. Which included the repulsive Todd, who
must have wondered why I grinned at him.

"So," I continued, turning to Michael, every
bit as repugnant as Jeremy, "you hooked up with Yvonne, who you
knew from somewhere and somewhen. All these years later, and the
Brinks money had still not been found. And you found out the police
were considering Skunk as a suspect in the jewelry store robberies,
too. Yvonne could have told you that. You figured Jeremy must know
something…another jailbird, right? Like father. And the father must
have told the son. Only you sent Yvonne after the wrong son."

"We were starting to wonder," said Yvonne
smoothly, as if she had my hand on my cock—and yes, that's what I
mean. All right, so they had been more efficient than I gave them
credit for.

"So my repulsive brother, Jeremy, thinking he
had the inside track on the Brinks money—"

"I'll destroy you," said Jeremy to
Michael.

"I double-double-double dare you," said
Michael.

"That's a triple," said Yvonne
double-smugly.

The height of statistical maturity.

"Like my idiot nephew said, 'one big happy'."
Uncle Vern held himself like a preacher, the pushy shit. It made me
wonder about the prison's vocational concept of improving inmates
by teaching them to play glasses. 'America in decline' was all I
could come up with.

Monique spent fifteen minutes energetically
expanding the hole Todd had started. Mr. Sunshine was closing in
and she seemed to feel his heat on her back. She sweated with all
the sensuality associated with carnal acts—at least in the movies
I've seen—and there was really no doubt she was in better shape
than anyone else present. But she got tired of us watching her
hardened nipples through her sweat-soaked camouflage and threw the
shovel aside after achieving a sizable hole.

"Next!"

Jeremy and Michael tussled over the shovel.
It was as if they thought that those who did the digging would earn
the reward. What a pair of idiots. The enormity of their idiocy
became apparent when, after Jeremy won and began slashing away at
the dirt, Michael edged in sideways and used his hands.

"Way to go!" Marvin chuckled.

"You'll get all dirty!" Yvonne protested. To
whom it was hard to say. Obviously, she was doing someone's
laundry.

Laughter from the distant party occasionally
filtered through the woods. It looked like the people of Bartow
partied hardy, partied all night, partied all the next day. Which
sort of took them into a permanent celebration. When you don't have
anything else but Bartow, you might as well enjoy it.

Michael's extraordinary effort lasted all of
ten seconds. When Jeremy nearly sliced off his fingers with an
overachieving swing of the shovel, Michael fell back, swearing.
Jeremy pretended not to hear him, though his stupid smirk said
otherwise. Then the smirk melted as the magnitude of the job at
hand dawned on him. Lucky for us, not only were there no cars this
far back, but there was also no blacktop to chop up and remove.
Gravel was the limit of Bartow's technological progress. But
gravel, especially packed gravel, can be a supreme pain if all you
have is a shovel, as Todd and Monique had discovered, and which
Jeremy was now learning first hand.

"Shoulda brought a pick," he complained and
dirt as gravel rattled off the shovel.

"I don't think Skunk would have gone to all
this trouble," Mom said. She exchanged glances with Uncle Vern, who
seemed increasingly nervous as he watched the sweating sequence of
laborers.

"Yeah," Jeremy panted. "The only thing he
lifted without moaning was a beer can."

"I think the gravel was laid down…later,"
Uncle Vern ventured.

"Later than when?" Todd frowned. "The Stone
Age?"

"Don't they scrape the ground before
laying gravel?" I asked. "Wouldn't they have uncovered anything
buried here?" When everyone shot me a venomous look, I became
defensive. "Hey, this
is
the
spot he told me about. Don't shoot the messenger. And I speak from
the heart."

Todd was looking even more disturbed.
"Mom?"

"Yes, Todd?"

Hmmmm…no nickname. Was that a plus or a
minus?

"Where were you and Skunk when you…um…"

"
Made
you two?"

She made us sound like a couple of clay
pigeons they had pieced together on a lark.

"That's right," I said. "You would have
wanted some privacy, and this is the most private part of the
lot."

"The private parts salvage yard," Marvin
sniggered.

Mom trolled the area with her eyes, dredging
up memories by the net-full. Even in the poor light we could see
her blushing.

"I think we have our answer," Uncle Vern
coughed, embarrassed for her.

"Great!" Jeremy threw down the shovel. "Dad
remembered where he got his jollies and picked that for his
joke."

There it was. I agreed completely.
Maybe the sick prank had been directed at me alone, or maybe Skunk
had known the family would avalanche down on me and we would be
tricked
en masse
. Mom's fond
memories notwithstanding, it didn't look as if he had thought much
of us. But someone had to assert faith, no matter how bogus,
because what else was there? Well, nothing. Which was exactly what
we would get if we didn't at least try.

I took up the shovel. It was my turn, anyway.
I mean, Sweet Tooth was too dainty, Marvin was still recovering
from his wound, Yvonne was exhausted just standing, Uncle Vern was
too long in the tooth and Mom…excluded by definition.

"I hope Skunk's happy."

"He's laughing in his grave."

A cloud fell over the group as I jumped into
the rather small hole and began clobbering away for all I was
worth. Which wasn't much—and they knew it. But like me, they
grabbed hold of the tail end of luck, which is only faith by
another name. When the world doesn't end (or begin) when you expect
it to end (or begin), all the life force is sucked out of you. But
we had not dotted any T's or crossed any I's—which is what it
amounted to. You have to exhaust all possibilities before you give
up the Holy Ghost.

Jeremy had managed his way through the gravel
and had been in the dirt when he gave up. But the underlying layer
was almost as hard, packed down as it had been by generations of
gas-guzzlers and back-seat humpers.

"What exactly did Skunk tell you was here?"
Michael asked under the misconception that I had enough wind to dig
and talk at the same time.

"A million," I gasped, and left it at that.
In fact, with all the work and uncertainty involved, a million
didn't sound like nearly enough. With the arrival of Sweet Tooth
and Monique, the loot would be split…how many ways? This was
assuming the split would be even—or dramatically reduced, case in
point being Carl Ksnip and Dog, whose share was laughably
posthumous.

"If we had normal jobs, we could earn as much
in a year," I huffed.

This went over with a palpable thud. Even
Uncle Vern, the most likely candidate among us to win Employee of
the Month (he would award it to himself), made a big chunk of his
income via grand larceny.

"So when was that big jewelry heist?" Marvin
asked his uncle.

"Last year."

"Then this
can't
be the spot. He's going to be digging up
fossils any minute now."

If ever a cue was felicitous—and spookily
accurate—it was Marvin's not-so-idle quip. I had hit a root
undermining the lot from the nearby woods and was gnawing at it
with the tip of the shovel blade. On the verge of giving up, the
root snapped abruptly. I sorted it from the dirt so the others
could see it when I tossed it onto the rim of the hole. I wanted
them to know how sincerely I was working, and how hopeless this all
was.

"Ah!" Barbara gasped. "What's that?"

I took a second look at the root. "Ah!" I
shouted, letting go of the shovel and leaping out of the hole.

"A foot!" Marvin shrieked.

The skeleton of one, at least. My hard labor
had separated it from the rest of the leg. I had half-expected I
was digging my own grave, only to find an earlier tenant still
holding the lease.

The reaction from the others was not what I
would have expected—and revealed where everyone stood in the
information pyramid. Yes, Monique, Barbara and Jeremy (and myself)
scrambled a dozen yards away from the grave, perfectly horrified.
And I would have sworn Marvin's hair stood on end.

"Son of a bitch!" he cried out, staggering
backwards. "It's a frame-up!"

But no cops came pouring out of the junk
cars. No SWAT team bellowed a catastrophic 'freeze!' through a
philharmonic gathering of bullhorns. No, there was a different
sound: a chuckle, followed by another chuckle. Uncle Vern and Mom
were grinning stupidly, almost ecstatically. While Michael wore an
expression of deep satisfaction.

"
What
?" I demanded of them. "Do you know who this
is?"

"You bastard!" Marvin was beside himself, his
venom directed at Uncle Vern. This was no way to talk to one's
uncle, but there was no peep of protest. Instinctively, we agreed
with the nephew.

Uncle Vern and Mom exchanged another one of
those cryptic meaningful glances. Mom went over to the skeleton
foot and stared at it in the beam-light.

"Do you think we need to…" she began.

"Exhume him?" Uncle Vern laughed. "No need to
go to that much trouble. In fact…" He turned to me. "Mute, would
you please re-fill this hole? Toss that foot back in, first."

"Wha…" I sort of whined.

"Do as he asks, Mute," said Mom, coming
around the hole and putting a hand on my shoulder. "Mute? Look at
me. All of you, look at me."

Everyone looked at her.