Skunk Hunt (18 page)

Jeremy had begun to mewl and pule, a sound
only one notch down on the disgusting scale from puking his guts
out. Barbara chanced a glance away from the road to show me her
disbelief.

"Can we do this by ourselves?" she asked
me.

Before I could give her my doubtful answer,
Jeremy spoke up.

"Tomorrow. Give me until tomorrow. I just
need to straighten things out in my head."

"You'll come back tomorrow?" I asked
skeptically.

"Yeah. Tomorrow morning, early," said Jeremy.
"I'll look up that address, make sure it's legitimate, and we'll
all go together. You can wait one night, can't you? You don't want
to go out in the middle of nowhere in the dark."

He was right. I didn't know what was coming,
and wanted to see it when it came.

"All right," Barbara said slowly. "Wherever
nowhere is..."

CHAPTER 12

I knew from when I was a little
nematode that I would never be part of the grand sweep of history.
I didn't even make it into the high school yearbook. People who
cringe at life don't make much headway. Was this the result of
nature of nurture? I shied away from nature in all its forms
(vegetable, mineral, animal—human above all), so this no doubt
implicates both: nature
and
nurture. I can probably summarize my upbringing with the name
Jeremy often substituted for Mute: Fucktardo.

The old family homestead consisted of a
kitchen, one and a half bathrooms, dining and living rooms, a
semi-enclosed back porch (I'm being kind to the rent-ridden metal
screen easily penetrated by mosquitoes and other bloodsucking
fauna)—and three bedrooms. Three bedrooms for one man. In many
places this would be considered overbearing luxury, but the
three-quarters-empty mansions on River Road sop up any excess guilt
I might impose on myself. The rich have their uses.

To be the only one left in the house I
grew up in opened all sorts of doors to the psyche. When I'm
feeling like myself—which, oddly enough, isn't often—I sleep in my
old bedroom. The self-isolation that I'm most comfortable with was
grievously interrupted by child-Jeremy's unexpected arrival. None
of my ranting and sulking availed. He was plopped alongside me and
for seven years I was forced to share my bed and closet with him.
As the tenant with permanent tenure I should have dominated the
situation. In the end, though, I was the one pummeled and kicked
throughout the night, I was the one rolling out to the precarious
edge from which I dropped more than once, waking up on the floor.
My mother was too busy with her own inner demons to show much
sympathy, Barbara was naturally indifferent, and Skunk (if he
wasn't away in jail) showed a marked tendency to side with Jeremy
in any of our disputes. I never did quite get it into my head that
my father loathed whiners. Jeremy could kick me in the head or the
nuts, and so long as
he
didn't
whine about it Skunk couldn't care less. Well, why should
Jeremy
have minded, seeing as I was
the one getting kicked? In my dreams Jeremy was converted into a
sharp-toothed demon, reason enough to avoid my old
bedroom.

A more specific memory discouraged me from
using my parents' twin bed. It was in the bedroom where Mom had
found Skunk's .38 (confiscated soon afterwards) and decided the
means and justification for ending her life were amply fulfilled.
We were told she had shot herself in the house, but Skunk and the
EMTs had spared us the trauma of encountering her blasted corpse.
We were secretly grateful to be spared what must have been a bloody
mess. But I could picture her sitting on the bed, gun in hand,
contemplating her death—a bit of nostalgia I preferred to keep at
arm's length.

Then there was Barbara's room, facing the
rear alley, where boys had lined up for a glimpse through pink
curtains injudiciously left open several inches while my sister
rehearsed her future as a professional exhibitionist.

But abandoning the bedrooms would have been
not much different from abandoning the house entirely. In the end,
none of the unpleasant or even appalling memories prevented me from
playing my own solitary version of musical beds. If a loud party
across the street interrupted my sleep, I could move to Barbara's
room. If people were raising a fuss in the alley, I carried my
nodding head to the front. And if both the front and the back were
noisy, I reclaimed my old room in the middle. My dreams absorbed
unfavorable omens from every bedstead, each offering its own inner
landscape and peculiar cast of characters.

If none of the bedrooms suited my current
tumult, I had a fourth choice: the living room couch. This room too
was freighted with bad memories, but these were of shared misery,
spiced with a handful of good moments, so I considered it more or
less neutral territory.

It was on the couch that I spent the night
after our encounter with the unknown sniper. With the prospect of
seeing Barbara and Jeremy next morning, I saw no need to reinforce
their presence by sharing their lingering auras. And the paternal
bed was out of the question. Whether from life or the afterlife,
Skunk was observing my actions. Mussing up his mattress might incur
his wrath.

I'm not all that superstitious, but my brain
has an unlimited ability to absorb noxious ideas. Ghosts don't
exist, but that doesn't stop the thought of ghosts from disturbing
my soppy mental processor. You may have never eaten Brussel
sprouts, but I bet you still hate them.

And then, wouldn't you know it, I was
awakened by a ghost pounding at my front door.

"You got a problem answering your door?"
Jeremy demanded, giving me a painful poke in the chest as he swept
past me and scoured the living room with dark intensity. "Shit for
brains, Mute. As always."

A burst of terror took several moments to
subside. In the brusque light of morning, with my nightmares still
hovering just below the horizon, I thought that Skunk had returned
home. Jeremy was pumped up and irate, his hair and clothes tangled
as though he had just fought his way out from under a bridge. He
stepped over to the couch and gave it a vicious kick, sending a
cushion flying across the room. Then he flopped into a reclining
chair—Skunk's old chair—and arched like a landed shark. I had no
doubt he was born to kill the last surviving member of a species,
any species.

"What happened at the restaurant, huh?" he
shouted. My bleary eyes landed somewhere on the menace-laced
landscape between his eyes.

"Huh?" I said slowly, realizing too late that
it sounded as if I was mimicking him. I got the arm-punch I
deserved.

"Well, it didn't work, asshole," Jeremy
hissed. "Our friend, whatever he is, must've found out you screwed
up my car. He left this in my mailbox."

He held out a color map. I made out Old
Petersburg Road.

"Great," I said. "So now we know where we're
going." I drew back from the schizonoid, hoping I hadn't
inadvertently triggered another punch. I received, instead, a stiff
poke in the chest.

"Where's Sweet Tooth?" he said in a raspy
voice.

"She should be here soon," I answered, though
I thought it unlikely she would show up before nine. I doubted
Barbara had ever seen the sun rise, an astronomical commonplace
that she would have probably shrugged off as science fiction.
Jeremy knew this as well as I did. The query had been rhetorical,
like asking me the time while a clock stared him in the face.

He fidgeted, flung himself upwards, then
backwards, then began pounding the chair arms with his fingers. He
looked ready to strangle someone. I rubbed my chest, which seemed
to have a permanent indentation from all the times he had poked me
as a kid. This was the behavior I had expected yesterday, and found
perplexing by its absence. Now I was equally perplexed by its
resurgence. This couldn't be the guy who had nearly pissed in his
pants when a sniper zipped a warning shot in his vicinity. I
wondered if he had dosed his fear with steroids.

"Where's your laptop?" I asked.

"Lap dance?" he snarled, raising his
fist.

"Hey, I was just asking!" I protested. He
gave me a goofy look and I was confirmed in the belief that
computers make people soft-headed.

"The place we're going is near Iron Bridge,"
Jeremy said. "We head south about fifteen miles. We can't miss
it."

"But what is it?" I said. "A house? An
office? A bank?"

He gave me a sharp look. "Bank?"

"It could be in a safety deposit box," I
reasoned.

"Right, store stolen money in a bank," Jeremy
snorted.

"It wouldn't be the first time," I reasoned.
"It might not even be unusual. But I guess you're right. It's
probably an empty lot. We'll have to dig it up."

Jeremy didn't catch my blush. Why couldn't I
live up to my nickname?

He made a face. The idea of manual labor
conflicted with his purpose in life. He settled into a position
between lolling and tense expectation, like a cat watching a fish
bowl. His demeanor contrasted so sharply with yesterday's that I
found myself searching his nose for any sign of redness. Was he
snorting?

"What are you gawping at?"

"I'm wondering if you're hyped up on
something," I said, pretty boldly, I thought.

"What's it to you if I am?" he said, pinning
me down with a sharp glance.

"What we're doing could end up being
dangerous." Nothing wrong with stating the obvious, especially to
the oblivious. "Don't you think we need clear heads?"

"Okay, Rinso-brain, you think we should spend
a month in rehab before we set out on this mission?" Jeremy
grinned. He thought he was being clever.

"There's no sense in making things worse," I
said.

"You used to know how to keep your mouth
shut," he said.

"Have you forgotten someone took a shot at us
yesterday? I may have only been a warning, but it got my attention.
Yours too, if I recall."

"You're so full of shit." Jeremy's lip
twisted upwards, like a hooked fish. "Anyway, any bad guys show up,
I got it covered."

"How so?" I persisted.

Jeremy hopped out of the chair and walked for
the stairs.

"Where are you going?"

"To see if you're as dumb as you look,"
Jeremy said.

I followed him upstairs and into our old
bedroom. I grew queasy when he stood at the door. This was my
personal space, now, the heart of my comforting solitude, even if I
did not always choose to spend my nights here. I looked quickly for
anything one brother might want to hide from another. Smutty
magazines, dirt (real dirt, I mean), and little treasures that
might reflect poorly on my character—like the plastic T-Rex I had
swiped from work, sitting prominently on my cluttered bedstand next
to a half-empty glass of cheap sweet port. It was the room in its
entirety, including contents, that burst the bubble of my paltry
existence. Jeremy had no right to see this, he no longer shared in
the spirit of the house. I wanted him out of there, fast.

But he did not seem to notice anything out of
place. Unlike Barbara, he had not wormed his way out of the muck.
To him, my bedroom was right and normal. The neat-as-a-pin prig of
yesterday was gone. What a slob.

He went to the closet but did not look
inside. Instead, he kicked a threadbare rug out of the way and sat
on the floor.

"What are you doing?" I demanded.

He didn't answer. He began worrying at one of
the floorboards, bleached practically white by age and scuffing.
Managing to get his fingers under the tiny rim, he lifted the
board.

"A hiding place?" I said weakly.

Jeremy's snicker was easily translated: 'Yes,
dumb ass, it's been here all these years and you never knew.'

He pulled out what looked like a rectangular
cookie tin from the niche. Tucking it under his arm, he rose and
began to leave the room.

"You want to put the board back?" I fumed,
getting what I expected when he didn't answer. I peeked down the
hollow and caught a whiff familiar from the days of Skunk. My
stomach dropped. I'd never seen my father clean a handgun—come to
think of it, I rarely saw him clean anything, including himself.
But on a couple of occasions I had found him hunched in a corner of
the house looking over a gun in preparation for yet another social
outrage. Even shady dealers can have a sense of armamentary
decorum, and these guns had usually been field-stripped and
cleaned. I knew the smell of Rem-Oil. That was what I was smelling
now. Every time I went to my closet I had trod on this nasty
secret. I didn't berate myself too much. The cops had searched the
premises several times while Skunk was alive, and they had missed
it, too. Just as they had missed the other hiding place, which
Jeremy had obliviously stomped across as he went to the closet.

I found Jeremy in the kitchen, opening the
tin. I didn't recognize the gun he pulled out, but I assumed it had
belonged to our father. With a wicked grin, he displayed it under
my nose.

"The Euthanizer," he announced. It sounded
like the name of a WWF hunk-o-beef.

I had lived alone with Skunk for the last
three years of his life. It gave me a real family thrill to think
he had stashed it away in my bedroom. Would he have fingered me if
the police had found it?

"How did you know it was there?" I asked
Jeremy.

"I put it there before I left home," he said
blandly.

"But you were seventeen—"

"Sixteen," Jeremy corrected. "I traded for
it."

"Traded what?" I asked.

"What else?" he smirked. "Sweet Tooth."

"You traded sex with our sister for a
handgun?" I said in disbelief.

"Yeah, it was a great deal." Jeremy shook his
head. "I almost felt sorry for Dalton, ripping him off like
that."