Skunk Hunt (75 page)

Except, perhaps, Mute Dementis.

"So we went around the world," I said.

"And found ourselves."

Todd was looking away from the street
at that moment and didn't see the rattlely red pickup chugging up
Pine. He wouldn't have recognized it, anyway, since he had forgone
the pleasure of being raised on Oregon Hill. But I knew it was
Buford Skrank, one of Skunk's old hangarounds. Like me, he had
managed to cling to the Hill, pursuing the only vocation he was
capable of: scouring the alleys for discarded junk. He thrived in
the current environment, especially when the school term ended and
students moved out
en masse
.
Like sailors attempting to save a sinking ship, the kids threw out
everything that might prove a drag on their fast track to nowhere.
Working appliances, television sets, furniture, the occasional
computer. Heaps of it, tons of it, making Buford the happiest man
alive, despite the fact that nearly all his old drinking buddies
were gone.

I lifted a hand, as I always did when he
drove by. Sometimes Buford would stop for a chat. More often, he
would be in a rush to get home before the pile in his truck bed
toppled into the street. Judging from the way a washing machine
rattled up and down in its lazily cinched girdle of ropes, I
assumed he would keep driving past my house. His window was open
and he lifted his hand in the usual salute, not bothering to tap
his horrendously skreeky brakes.

He had a passenger. Not so unusual. Buford
sometimes lassoed in a decrepit neighbor to help with heavy
lifting. But as I looked past the driver's alcohol-swollen face, my
heart did a thump-stop. For a half second I saw a man grinning at
me, holding a finger to his lips.

Todd didn't see. I'm not sure he would have
recognized him if he had. That was something else we would have to
sort out later on. Although he denied ever seeing him, I had to
wonder...had he ever met Skunk?

Or his twin?

It was in that instant that our lives
diverged. Because I had seen something that Todd hadn't,
apprehended and comprehended a vital fragment of existence that had
slipped by him, we would never be the same. Whether what I saw was
a clue or a hard fact, a truth or an impossibility, it didn't
matter. Hallucination or not, I fully intended to obey the silent
injunction:

Hey Mute...stay
mute
.

"We found ourselves?" I asked Todd
rhetorically. "Actually, I was going to say we found a Skunk."