Skunk Hunt (12 page)

"Come on," Jeremy needled. "What's the
rest?"

I tried to dodge. "Why didn't we bring a
notepad?"

"What happened to your whoop-de-do printer?"
Barbara said.

"You saw how small the tables are there,"
said Jeremy. "I couldn't fit it alongside the laptop. Damn!"

"We should have written it down," Barbara
moaned.

"But we don't need to take notes, do we?"
said Jeremy, leering at me. "We've got you. Come on..."

I took a deep breath. "'Hidden away, the gin
bottle scrambles the scrambled brain. A nip here and there from the
secret compartment.'"

"Yeah, that's it," Jeremy nodded.

"Then you remember it word for word, too," I
said.

"Redundancy can't hurt."

Okay, they had a dictionary at the
Powhatan School for Scoundrels. One that included definitions. I
didn't look at my brother with more respect. Actually, it was more
fear. A punk with a jailbird education was an awkward joe to deal
with. Before prison, they knocked you over the head with tire
irons. After prison, they knock you down with
words—
then
bring out the tire
iron.

I was like a crumpled piece of paper and
Jeremy and Barbara were busily unfolding me. No matter which way I
turned, it was my two hands against their four. They bracketed me,
Jeremy's hard chest heaving up against one shoulder while Barbara's
venomous jugs weighed down on the other.

"Okay, okay," I said.

"Yeah," said Jeremy. "Okay."

CHAPTER 9

The so-called door to Flint Dementis' house
was a piece of plyboard that sagged beneath Jeremy's knuckles with
each hairy knock. This was old-style Oregon Hill architecture,
where keeping up with the Jonses meant clearing a path through a
museum of cans and bottles and other assorted garbage (not to
mention the occasional drunken derelict) to reach the front
porch—and even that was considered the height of hoity-toity.
Thirty years ago the entrance to Flint's house would have been
indistinguishable from most other doors facing the street. My own
house, a couple of blocks down, had the same flaked paint and
sagging exterior, but some nutcake inspector had threatened to
invoke a dozen city ordinances against me. I caved in and swept the
catshit off my steps.

There was a soft murmur from inside which
sounded like "Get the door!" I found this ominous, since Flint
lived alone. He had been married once. His wife had not passed on,
but passed through, a rolling stone who had divorced the moss.

"I have a bad feeling about this," said
Barbara, holding up her tiny purse as a shield.

"I don't see why," I said. "We used to come
here all the time when we were kids."

"Now I know better," she said. "When was the
last time you saw him?"

It had been nearly a month since I had last
seen Flint, and I had only spoken to him because he spotted me
skulking in the alley behind his house (recycling aluminum cans is
an honest avocation, even for the non-homeless). The most pitiless
thing about growing up, aside from learning about death and false
hope, is the universal tendency to convert the oddballs you knew as
a child into social demons. Except in this case, we had always
known there was something screwy about Old Man Flint.

When I was eight or so Flint rounded up a
group of neighborhood kids to explain the odd shape of his
forehead. It was a procedure he repeated every generation in a
mostly vain attempt to ward off some of the human cruelty (let's
not limit it to children) that misshapen people encounter. In this
case, Jeremy had led an impromptu art class in drawing grotesque
portraits of Flint on the old man's backyard shed. My own
contribution had included a rhomboid head in pink chalk, complete
with antennae.

"I don't know which one of you came up with
the alien," Flint critiqued, "but it's an interesting concept. In
the twinkle of an eye, I was transformed from a fairly average
human being into something from another world. It's not all that
unusual. Go to any VA hospital and you'll see hundreds like me. Go
to any hospital at all. People are always being transformed by car
wrecks, strokes, disease...even things you can't see. Mental
disease or plain old stress. One day you're one thing, the next
you're something else. The lucky ones say 'Hallelujah!' Most just
shit their pants in misery. But there are a few who for the rest of
their lives see a different existence. One that can't be imagined.
You have to be twisted, physically twisted."

He had been piloting a UH-1 Huey MedEvac into
Khe San when a chance bullet (the Viet Cong were aiming at America,
not Flint in particular) from a Russian RPD pierced his skull. The
7.62mm round performed the usual ballistical gymnastics, and then
some. It cavitated, yawed, tumbled—and then, amazingly, it left.
Flint referred to it as a "GSW-TTH, gunshot wound through and
through". "It entered here..." The old man planted an index finger
on one temple. "And came out here." Whereupon he planted an index
finger on the other side—and that's how he stayed for the next five
minutes, like one of those toy arrows you fit over your head. It
was though he was miming the permanence of a few seconds in his
life.

"Todd Randall was co-piloting, and I think
the whole thing bothered him a lot more than me. I said, 'Todd, I
think some of my brain has spilled out on your lap' and he forgot
all about flying. Or maybe not. I don't recall it clearly, but one
minute we were in the air and the next we had landed safely, and
Todd was howling and trying to wipe me off his uniform. It was sort
of like coming prematurely and the girl wiping you off in a fit."
(I was eight, remember, and this bit left a puzzle in my head that
wasn't solved for nine more years.) "I can't imagine me handling a
joystick and control pedals in that condition, and Todd was fit to
be tied. Maybe the Fearsome Lord took pity on me or Todd or the
wounded we were going to dustoff and planted us nice and soft on
the pad." He paused. "What was I saying?"

"Premature ejaculation," said Jeremy, not
much older than me but already wise in science.

"The frontal lobe helps you process long-term
emotional memory," Flint continued, "and I wondered at the time
what had been erased. Who was in those little white and red chunks
Todd was sweeping away left and right? There were parts of me
scattered all the way from the pedestal panel to the overhead
console. There were human beings tucked away in those pieces.
People I'd known and loved or hated. Were they still in me? Did I
care?

"That bullet set me up for life. I get my
government checks. I don't want much in the way of worldly goods. I
never had to work an honest or dishonest job if I didn't want to.
Just sit back and think about...what was I saying?"

He was set up for life, all right.
Aside from looking like a Star Wars humanoid analog (slightly more
'oid' than 'human') and an overindulgence in non sequitors, he fit
right in with the chronic slackers of old Oregon Hill. He didn't
even have to
pretend
he was
looking for employment. His occasional eccentric behavior blended
with the environment. He had an overwhelming desire to ejaculate in
the female ear (hence his wife's departure, to avoid permanent
hearing impairment), but that was an improvement on all the cretins
who beat their girlfriends into bruised lumps. In some respects,
old Flint was a breath of fresh air. Skunk must have thought so. He
had spent an inordinate amount of time with the old man.

Flint's salutary lecture (given eighteen
years ago, can you believe it) was delivered calmly, as though he
was talking to children—which even Jeremy was, although it's hard
to think of anyone so consistently evil as ever being a child.
There was no trace of apathy in the old mutant, just a relentless
acceptance of fate that bordered on Buddhism. The recitation made
little impact on the young hooligans who listened with avid but
fragmented comprehension. If his intention was to get us to ease
off our vandalism of his property, his plan was a masterstroke of
incompetence. He had given us more subjects for our palette.
Portraits appeared on Flint's fence and shed of exploding heads and
rotting limbs. A particularly fine piece of artwork showed a man
hanging out of a helicopter, his skull open and his brain falling
earthwards while he stretched out in vain to catch it.

Oddly enough, the old soldier did not seem to
take any of this to heart. He continued to greet us as he strolled
by (sometimes with wet 2-inch roller brushes still dripping paint
in our hands) with an unflappable, benign smile. We assumed this
had something to do with his wound, but it begged the question of
why he had bothered telling us his war story. Maybe there had been
no ulterior motive. Maybe he wanted to prove he was just as stunted
as the rest of us, that he fit right in.

After his wife left him a few other women
were suckered by sympathy or desperation into Flint's domain. None
of them stayed long. Flint would wear a downcast look for a few
days, then return to his 2% amiable self. Over the last few years,
as Oregon Hill upscaled or downscaled (according to your lights),
he became more isolated. Like me, he didn't know what to make of
the influx of students, and they didn't know what to make of him.
These young perfections of upper-middle-class physiology, streaming
along on their bicycles, girls in skimpy halter-tops, guys in cargo
shorts, pulled up short at the sight of his imperfect head. The
skewed brow became increasingly pronounced as he approached 80,
like a doll losing its stitches, one by one. Outside of Skunk,
social workers seemed to be his only acquaintances. They came and
went, the women more quickly than the men. Maybe they knew what was
on his mind when he began fondling their ears.

"Get the door!" Flint repeated to someone
inside as we waited on the porch, which began to sag under our
combined weight. Barbara inched towards the steps, as though
expecting a trap door to be sprung any instant.

"Who is he talking to?" she asked.

"Dead Army buddies," said Jeremy,
following this with a spook-saturated "
Whoooooooooaaaa
..."

I said nothing, but I was worried that my
brother might be right. Someone living alone for so long invoked
all sorts of invisible companions. I didn't have any dead buddies
to talk to, but it was only a matter of time before Skunk put in an
appearance. Maybe he already had.

"Aw crap," said Flint beyond the door. This
sounded far more cantankerous than the Flint of old. But when the
plywood finally swung in, he greeted us with the usual empty smile.
"Well, all the kittens, right on my doorstep."

"Kittens?" said Jeremy.

"That's what they call baby skunks," Flint
explained, standing aside. "Come on in. Don't fall over
anything."

We entered warily, expecting to be attacked
by an oozing wall of antique stench: liniment, unflushed toilets,
layer after layer of dead skin, rotting food. Usually I met Flint
outdoors. It had been so many years since I crossed his doorsill
that I couldn't remember a stick or smudge. But as I led the way, I
was relieved to encounter nothing more than a faint mustiness no
worse than a vacated warehouse. It was unnatural.

The gruff voice that had bellowed behind the
door had vanished. Flint's warning not to trip was mere courtesy.
The sitting room, at least, was (by my standards) immaculate. The
sofa and easy chair were threadbare, but clean enough to sit on.
When Flint invited us to make ourselves at home, there was no
clutter to shift out of the way.

I wasn't used to formality. I was startled
when the old man asked us if we wanted anything to drink. I've
heard that people who travel overseas learn all kinds of manners.
But Vietnam was a long time ago, and I would imagine civilian
etiquette is the first thing to go in a war zone. Maybe Flint was
just behaving normally. It had been a year since I invited anyone
into my house, and I had been so busy grimly groping at the girl
that courtesy had slipped my mind. I didn't know the routines of
propriety.

There were magazines on the scruffy coffee
table: VietNow, DAV, The American Legion, Soldier of Fortune.
Across each cover Flint had written SHIT, but the letters were so
neat, lacking any hint of scribbled wrath, that they could have
been printed by a demure librarian after a pleasant night's
sleep.

"What can I do you folks for?" Flint asked,
dropping his seventy plus years slowly onto the couch next to
Barbara. My sister leaned away, trying to discretely cover the ear
nearest our host. She had heard the stories, too.

Our approach was ill-planned, meaning we had
no plan at all. How could we tell him we wanted to look into his
old ammo chest for stolen money?

"We were just wondering about Skunk," said
Jeremy. This sounded like a promising start, such as it was, and I
let him keep the lead—like I had a choice. Anyway, Jeremy seemed to
know what he was doing. If we could somehow get the Brink's cache
without cutting Flint in, all the better. But how could the old man
not know there was over three-quarters of a million dollars under
his roof?

"Your father was an interesting man," Flint
said, then scowled faintly. "He certainly was fond of my whiskey.
Always coming over here to bum a drink." He licked his lips. The
memory made him thirsty.

Jeremy leaned forward in his chair. "Go
ahead, pour yourself a stiff one. We don't mind."

Flint lowered his ancient hands between his
knees. His skin was a wasteland of seborrheic keratoses and cherry
angiomas. Maybe the vestiges of Nam skin, saturated with jungle
fungi and Agent Orange, a permanent reminder of the Far East and
the wretched tortures of foreign service. He picked at his skin, as
though trying to scrape off his past. He looked oddly thoughtful
and absent.