Skunk Hunt (27 page)

Kendle studied this ovulatory landscape with
the awe of the criminally deprived.

"Is this your sis or your lady in waiting?"
she said.

"No one's waiting for me," I said.

"You didn't have carnal knowledge of her, did
you?" She rubbed up against me. I hoped it was an accident.

"Is that cop talk?" I asked.

"I hope no one jumps out of the underwear
drawer and shoots us," she said, massaging her holster.

"She took all her underwear with her when she
moved out."

"And I'm sure you checked."

Gimme a break. Of course I checked. And I'm
sure Skunk checked, before me. Scientific curiosity, hillbilly
style.

Next came my parents' bedroom, scene of
reluctance, misery and transitory euphoria, if you count drunken
ruts in that category. I never knew Skunk and Mom when they weren't
miserable with each other, but in those early days there wasn't
much to compare them against. Misery loves company, and there was
plenty of that on Oregon Hill. It all added up to a kind of ecstasy
of hopelessness. The McPhersons fit right in, what with all the
slapping around and besottedness and bouts of lethargy that verged
on the comatose. A little crucifix sat on the dresser, the only
beacon of spirituality on the premises, courtesy of Mom. Her
suicide seemed to indicate its inefficacy, or maybe she really had
gone to a better place. I had been reluctant to add it to the pile
of junk in the dining room, maybe out of an unconscious dread that
I would land in a worse place. Skunk must have suffered from the
same superstition, seeing he had left the cross in place all those
years he had slept there by himself. There were no pictures of Mom
anywhere, and I don't remember ever seeing one.

"It's actually neat in here," Kendle
observed, by which I assumed she meant relatively clean and
uncluttered. I had even made Skunk's bed after I heard of his
demise. A Miss Havisham thing, I guess. This little temple to my
parents' existence, which would never be occupied again unless the
mice took over in winter.

We moved on. I winced as she stuck her head
in my room.

"Hey!" she exclaimed lowly.

Expecting a comment on the gooey bachelor
funk, I gave a resigned "Yeah..."

"Books!"

"They're not mine," I said.

"Then why is one of them lying open on your
bed?" she asked, casting investigative glances in either direction
before entering.

"It's from the library," I protested. When I
was a kid, reading anything but comic books amounted to a high
crime. Culture was chugged from a can while watching Judge Judy.
Even 20/20 was an intellectual stretch, so you can imagine Skunk's
reaction when I got hooked on the Hardy Boys. And since you can
imagine it, I don't need to go into details.

Kendle went over to my seedy bed and flipped
the book over. She gasped. I backed away in embarrassment.

"What are you doing reading
about
her
?" she
demanded.

"It's got lots of stuff," I reasoned.
"Adventure, sex...even a cool massacre."

"'Catherine de Medici'," Kendle read, her
wonder increasing as it dawned on her that it was non-fiction. "So
you're into ancient history..."

I had always been interested in
history. Even as a kid, whenever Sweet Tooth threatened to hit me
with a crying fit unless I joined her with her dolls, I insisted on
calling Ken Sir Yeranus and Barbie Lady Poopalot. Catherine de
Medici wasn't exactly Babylonian, but I guessed for Yvonne Kendle
anything pre-Sex in the City was tarnished by age. She was behaving
like all the alphabet-challenged yokels of my youth, as though I
was some kind of mutant chimp blowing off the
Times
with all the aplomb of an Einstein. But
there was a big difference: appreciation. Her fat blue eyes went
from disbelief to approbation. My slob-hood was forgiven because it
was explained. Scholars didn't have time to maintain a proper
house.

She flipped through the book, causing a
rather specific ache in my head as she lost my page. "How can you
remember all these foreign names?"

"I can't," I said truthfully. "Especially all
the Charleses."

"Who was Francis I?" she asked, testing
me.

"Catherine's father-in-law, father of Henry
II, king of France, big spender, big loser as a military leader,
big winner with the women," I said, recalling the salient
points.

"Good enough," said Kendle, nodding and
shaking her head in appreciative amazement. "You may not have a
good head on your shoulders, but at least it's not empty. "You
know," she added, "I've always wanted to go to Paris."

What was it with women and Paris? They made
it sound like a couture machine. They'd walk in frumy and walk out
Yves St. Laurent.

"So I guess you can go, now that we know no
one's waiting to ambush me," I said, perhaps with a trace of
hope.

"Not while there's a gun in the house."
Kendle sidled up to me.

"You mean yours?" I asked nervously.

"No, I mean this."

She reached out and touched my erect pistol.
I jumped back. Police brutality!

"That thing's been cocked ever since we came
in here," she observed with sherlockian acumen. "It's obvious you
need a mommy."

This was a seriously demented conflation:
cocks and Mom. I turned to flee, but she was really spry for a Plus
Size and she was on me before I could take another step. She
reached around and snagged me good, all the while gobbling into my
ear, "Mommy...mommy...mommy."

The most fearsome instincts are the ones that
come unbidden. You run when you want to stand, your macho chips
going syrupy and drooling out your butt. You go in demanding a
raise and come out wearing pink. Want to sleep, can't sleep, want
to stay awake, and nod off. The heart ramps up, the brain damps
down. You want privacy and land in a crowd. You want a crowd and
can't even find a friendly dog. You want to get laid and come face
to face with a Viking.

Yeah, my heart wanted mommy in the worst way,
even if my mind lusted after Kant. You don't often hear about men
being ravished. By women, I mean. You can't blame the target if
that's where the bullet wants to go. I was a participant, let's
say, in an uneven negotiation with an arms dealer. She had all the
weapons, but I had the ammunition. She would do anything to get
loaded, just to stay in business.

Awkward analogies aside, I was having a hard
time holding my own as Kendle twisted me around like a soggy
pretzel and goose-stepped me towards the bed. I understood now why
all those Victorian heroines fainted when a seducer had them in
their clutches. It wasn't a sudden lack of oxygen to the brain, but
passive resistance. A dead weight is a lot harder to tote around
than a thrashing body. Fainting was out, since I didn't want to
look like a wuss, but my alternative, thrashing, wouldn't have won
me a spot in the WWF kindergarten.

Falling on the bed, I felt Catherine de
Medici goosing me from behind. I wanted to warn Kendle against
damaging city property, but something erupted overhead and a pair
of mammary stormclouds smothered my protests. My spine pinched into
the mattress and I wheezed like the last living Confederate. When
being crushed, it's hard to focus on details, but I couldn't ignore
the red-hot marble that rolled into my mouth. I was commanded to
suck, and then to suck harder. I was sucking wind, but I'm not used
to multi-tasking—I don't like tasking at all—and I murmured a
demand for breathing space.

"Little boy wants air?" she half-spoke and
half-tongued in my ear.

"Little boy wants oxygen tank."

Throughout all of this, and in spite of being
crushed and occasionally kneed, the center of attention remained
preternaturally stiff—which made the weight all the more painful.
Kendle came to the conclusion that I would not be much of a lover
if she killed me and eased off enough to give me a sliver of
daylight. My relief was cut short when she slid her hand under my
waistband and grabbed my mister so hard that I threatened to become
a miss.

"Let's go to Paris," she gasped.

I guessed she was referring to the book
digging painfully into my coccyx. I wanted to tell her that
Catherine de Medici was actually from Florence, then decided
circumstances were such that facts wouldn't register. This was all
fantasy born of desperation. We all like to think we're beautiful
when we're duking it out with the opposite sex. That, or we're too
horny to care. She thought she was Marilyn Monroe. Being a realist,
I was comparing myself to Woody Allen.

I heard a loud thud and was alarmed at the
thought of her gun hitting the floor and going off accidentally,
especially with my bare ass in range. But the only explosion was
the loud snap of her jogging pants as she stretched the waistband
over her hips.

They say that all women are the same in the
dark, which is no more than the puny alibi of drunks who go to bed
with a hot babe and wake up with Eleanor Roosevelt. But I was stone
sober, the evening sun was sending X-rays through my window, and
even when I closed my eyes I couldn't deny I was dealing with
something a lot more substantial than the scarecrows of past
experience. Still, my situation wasn't entirely negative. Her broad
nipples had an undeniable chocolaty appeal, her skin carried a
faint hint of pecan roll and her carving tongue carried traces of
nougat. I was a kid in a candy shop. The temptation was enormous. I
began to consider the benefits of overindulgence.

One thing about big women: they
flow
. And I went with the flow, her
hot skin soaking me as she somehow bared more and more of it, and
even more mysteriously bared more of mine. It was sort of like
being assaulted by a polar bear, but one of those nice Christmas-ad
polar bears, and even if she had been more of the Wild Kingdom
variety I really didn't have much choice in the matter.

I wondered if I would be able to rotate
myself on top and, if I managed it, if I should take the
opportunity to sprint for the door. But this kind of speculation
went by the wayside when I felt a tight venereal vise close on my
manhood and, between gasps for air, I began to enjoy myself.

"Oh..." she said, easing down slowly.
"Paris..."

Oregon Hill. Oh well, six of one, half
a dozen of the...
oh
...

Catherine de Medici was all hot and rumpled
beneath me. The next reader who checked out this book would puzzle
over the stains.

Kendle's tits really did taste of cocoa
blend. Maybe it was her soap. Or maybe she was the Easter
bunny.

"We're going to Paris..." she moaned, as
though gloating over a boarding pass.

I wanted to tell her I didn't have a
passport. Was she planning to smuggle me to Europe in her
carry-on?

Granted, cops are allowed to have a sex life,
or else the breed would die out. The fates had decreed that on this
day I should be humping one of them in my bed. But I could not
suppress a sense of guilt at playing bounce the balls with the very
enemy who had dogged my father most of his life. The good guys were
the bad guys, in my world scheme. In this town, where the spelling
is atrocious and 'old' is spelled 'olde', 'fun' is a four-letter
word. It didn't seem right (or proper) that one of those assigned
to stop people from having fun should be having so much of it at my
expense. On the other hand, I had more than once heard Skunk say
"Screw the cops", so in some sense I was getting vengeance and
rescuing the family honor.

"We're going to Paris, Paris, Paris," the
woman in the upper bunk intoned breathlessly, taking flight. A lot
of things can go through your head during intercourse, but the idea
of hurtling through space in a tuna can would have deflated me in
an instant. I focused on the strictly practical, like how to enjoy
this moment while avoiding a crippling injury.

Things appeared to be progressing to the
standard coital release when the closet door was flung open and
there stood Dog.

Preoccupied with landing her plane at Charles
de Gaulle Airport , Kendle did not notice the newcomer.

"Paris!" she cried out. "Paris!"

I was sort of stuck in that magical moment
when a man is almost as helpless as when he's passed out drunk. If
I tried to push her off, she would interpret the movement as my
contribution to the orgy.

Dog didn't spend much time gawping. He raised
his hands to either side of his head and pulled at the hair jutting
down from under his straw hat.

"I can't stand it!" he announced in a kind of
barking hiccup and ran for the door.

Kendle opened her eyes and began to
decouple.

"He's gone," I gasped. Taking hold of her
thighs, I pulled her back down. We spent the next five minutes
re-arousing and achieving a rousing I-can't-stand-it.

CHAPTER 16

That Dog had been gawping at our antics
through the closet door was easier to swallow than the thought of
him playing snippets of Skunk over the phone. From what I had seen
of Carl Ksnip's pet bone muncher, the technological challenge of
operating a tape recorder would have been, for Dog, comparable to
me launching a moon rocket. Still, when I thought back on the call
to the Science Museum and the apparent fumbling at the other end of
the line, it seemed possible that Dog had been taught the rudiments
of playback.

Kendle was put out by the intrusion, once she
had recovered from our sordid tryst. She slopped a washrag over her
vital areas, dressed, and departed with a meager, "See you in the
funny papers."

Actually, it was a fitting epitaph to the
day. I was happy to have gotten laid, but perfectly miserable over
the means. It's not that I'm adverse to plump women, or tacit rape,
or inappropriate behavior by vested authority. They, and the
detective's overweening assumption that I was gung-ho on the idea
of being smothered by a menacing white cloud, could be brushed
aside once I had punched the big ticket. Yet I had in some sense
become a police lackey. If my brother and sister found out about
this they might stop laughing long enough to realize I was now a
threat. It's a well-known fact that people talk too much in bed.
One of the great benefits of onanism is its inherent secrecy.
There's no one to talk to when you're jerking off, which Jeremy and
Barbara probably thought was how I spent my entire adult life. 'Ol'
Mute won't be spilling any secrets while he's whacking the
mattress.' Ugh.