Skunk Hunt (53 page)

"You're the man from the farm, right?" I
reasoned. I gave Todd a butt-out look when he glanced at me
questioningly. "Am I right? I can't think of anyone else who might
have gone to all this trouble. You've been trying to give Jeremy
and Barbara and me our share of the Brinks money, and I really
appreciate that. Maybe you're trying to set it up so that we don't
look like accessories. That's very considerate. But it's gone too
far, and I'm not just talking about Carl and Dog. I've never been
the type of guy who looks for his identity, you know? I didn't go
searching for my roots, but I still dug up this—"

"Whoa," said Todd with a scowl, looking like
a newly harvested Mr. Potato Head.

"Calm yourself, Mute," said the older
stranger, raising a hand.

"And that's another thing—you know a helluva
lot about the McPhersons. Until we got those letters, only my
family knew my nickname. Are you a long-lost cousin? Skunk never
talked much about his past. I never even met my grandparents. We
must have a million relatives buried in the woods." Another thought
occurred to me. "Or were you in prison with Skunk?"

This drew a curious sound from the young man
at the other end of the cargo bay. He had not said a word so far,
giving me a moony stare when I introduced myself and my "moron
brother". Maybe that was because I was being a bit of a moron
myself, seeing as he obviously knew who we were. I waited for him
to elaborate on his weird snort, but he went back to fiddling with
knobs and joysticks on the van-length counter. It turned out the
Transit was even equipped with a periscope, hidden in the tall
roof. Run silent, run deep. I thought at any moment this crate
would spring a snorkle or a pair of wings.

"If you don't know where the Brinks money is,
where did the thousands of dollars you gave me come from?" I said.
"Don't tell me it came out of your own pocket."

"Not at all," the man said, adding
cautiously, "For now, let's just say they came from your trust
fund."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Todd snapped,
tired of being left out of the conversation and forcing himself
onto the information highway. "You can't say it's none of our
business."

"He can and did," the young man at the front
snapped back, looking at us directly for the first time. Something
about us unsettled him and he immediately broke eye contact,
turning back to his scope.

"I think I could do with some names here,"
Todd said. "I'd like to know who I'm dealing with." He paused,
giving me a cagy look I couldn't begin to decipher. "Did you send
out those letters? If so, Mute is right. You know a lot about us
that can't be explained."

"Explained under normal conditions," I
elaborated, then blushed, because we all understood what he was
saying. I had taken it for granted that my brother's idiocy needed
clarification. I had only known him a few hours and already assumed
the need for translation, as if he was a diplomat from Dumbville.
Unfortunately for my self-esteem, he had said the very thing I had
been about to say.

"Explanations will come," said the older
stranger, and the younger one (his son? there was a resemblance)
promptly...elaborated.

"Yeah, you need to wait. Take a look here.
This guy has passed back and forth a half dozen times."

We craned our heads for a look at the top
screen. From my seat on the floor all I could see was a blur of
light, like scum on a florescent pond. I pushed myself up some and
saw the crowd in front of my house. The young man was panning his
camera to the left, following somebody walking down the sidewalk. I
couldn't get a good look at him, but a sharp intake from the older
man told me this was someone he'd rather not see.

Todd had somehow managed to stand and was
looking at the screen. "Okay, a rubbernecker," he said. "What about
him, besides being ugly?"

"Butch Congreve," said the older man
flatly.

Properly motivated, I made it to my feet and
stared. The man was just turning around the corner. "You sure?" I
asked as he passed out of sight.

His grunt hinted that he knew the Congreves
all too well, which left me treading water in another pool of
unanswered questions. He spoke past me to the young man up
front.

"Marvin, don't you think it's about time we
dropped all of this? It's become far too dangerous for everyone
involved."

"Nyet," said the young man, a bit nastily.
"And don't give me that line about the Tuscan villa. I don't speak
Italian. Oh, and thanks for telling them my name."

"You don't speak Russian, either," the older
man shot back.

The situation had dropped a level, from the
improbable to the inane. I shared a clueless glance with Todd, who
was cluelessness multiplied since he had—until today,
apparently—been kept in the dark about the Congreve brothers and
their place in the world scheme. One thing came through loud and
clear, though. With the appearance of Butch Congreve, that scheme
had become infinitely more hairy.

"You think he's visiting the scene of the
crime?" I ventured. "Like, reliving the moment?"

"I never understood why they dreaded your
father," said the older man. "Individually, Butch and Baptist
Congreve are capable of anything. Together..."

Everything
....

Marvin continued to visually troll through
the thinning crowd of onlookers. It didn't take him long to get a
strike.

"Contestant Number 2," said Marvin, pinning
another man on his main screen.

I had never known the Congreves. The brothers
were a soiled pair of soiled socks Skunk had met in prison. During
the Brinks trial, the defense lawyers had broken their knuckles
from all the finger pointing, stirring the facts into a thick
fudge. No one who looked at my father would mistake him for an
innocent patsy forced to act as a getaway driver for the primary
goons. But the man on the screen with the improbable name of
Baptist could have turned anyone else into an unwilling slave. Even
here, inside a locked vehicle, I was tempted to throw up my hands
and yell, "I give up! Take it all!" I certainly didn't like the way
he turned away from the house and stared directly at the
Transit.

"I think he suspects..." said Todd in a
queasy voice.

"I think he
knows
," said the older man, his words stretched
through tightened lips.

Marvin gave him a look, catching Todd
and me in a visual vise. "Okay, Uncle Vern, how would he
know
?"

"Never mind. Just make sure his brother isn't
on the other side."

"You mean behind us?" Marvin frantically
played the joystick of his periscope. The next thing we knew, the
screen was filled with the face of Butch Congreve. With some major
dental work and plastic surgery, he would have almost looked human.
The mere image of his yellow teeth left a smear on the lens. He
couldn't have seen the periscope, hidden in the tinted canopy, but
he knew it was there.

"What a ham," Todd said as Butch worked some
fragments of what looked like raw squirrel out of his teeth. If he
was as unnerved as I was, I don't think my brother was being
flippant.

I found myself wondering at my wonder.
The Congreves were not from Oregon Hill, but they were bred from
similar stock. I had grown up surrounded by trolls like this for
the first twenty years of my life. Those people had not
changed—they had only been evicted. If one of my old neighbors
suddenly appeared, he might look like this, unkempt, unshaved,
undeodorized, with the cranial capacity of a rodent. How had the
usual become unusual to me? I was now accustomed to college
students, who could be every bit as disheveled, disagreeable and
inebriated. But those students rarely...well,
stank
. I'm not saying they ranked hygiene among
the higher virtues, but they were aware of bathtubs and
showers—which was more than you could say for Butch, who would need
a rake and hoe to loosen his topsoil. I swear I could smell him
through the video feed.
Eau de Skunk
for sure, an unpatented brand.

"He won't do anything, Uncle Vern," Marvin
said hopefully. "Not with all these cops around."

"Think again," Uncle Vern sighed as Butch
began fumbling at the front of his baggy jeans.

"Do you see that?" Marvin gasped. "Do you see
that?"

Of course we saw it—we had a front row seat.
The bottom of the class structure, or maybe its complete collapse.
We could hear the splash through the wall as Butch took a whizz
against the side of the van. The students on the porches on this
side of the street also had an unfettered view. They were pointing,
laughing, shouting in amazed protest. Yet they seemed as
disinclined as my old neighbors to summon the police from across
the street, out of sight from the proceedings. They probably
thought he was a homeless bum who had no choice in the matter—in
which case, they should have observed a sympathetic silence.
Besides, this unhygienic act of civil disobedience was not all that
uncommon. I had seen plenty of students use Oregon Hill as an
outdoor toilet, a nostalgic return to the old days. The only
difference was in degree, with Butch using a parked vehicle instead
of a bush to hide his business.

He took his time zipping up, dangling
publicly as he appreciated his bladder's brushwork. He was a
regular Jackson Pollock, totally immersed in his art. I sort of
admired his panache.

Marvin was breathless with horror, unable to
remove his eyes from the screen as Butch slowly, finally
re-inserted his penis into his pants inch by inch by inch by inch
by inch by inch by inch by inch.

"I guess now you believe all my
'exaggerations', as you put it," Uncle Vern said in a tone that
was, given the circumstances, eerily complacent. "You, of all
people, should have known better. Unless, of course, you're denser
than I thought. Getting shot wasn't enough to convince you."

Marvin gave Uncle Vern a warning glance that
said a lot without saying anything.

"You were shot?" Todd asked the young man.
"When? Where? Who?"

At the moment, though, we all had smellier
fish to fry. Butch Congreve circled around the van and approached
my house, creating a swath of incredulous looks and wrinkled
noses.

"He got our license plate number as he
passed," Uncle Vern observed.

"Did he write it down?" asked Marvin.

"Do you see him carrying a notepad?"

"Then he'll forget," Marvin asserted. "He
doesn't look like he could remember where his nose is, let alone a
license."

"I'm sure he remembers every cent of what's
due him," said Uncle Vern, a bit more wary of Butch's mathematical
ability. "Or what he thinks is due him."

Fuzzy logic. You had to love it. The money
belonged to the companies and institutions who had hired Brinks to
haul it. This wasn't a case of possession being nine-tenths of the
law.

We returned our attention to Butch, standing
a few feet back on the civilian side of the yellow police tape
strung out to either side of my house. If I didn't know better,
there was genuine bemusement under all that grit and grime. Baptist
Congreve came back around the corner and joined him, exchanging
twelve cubic yards of raw earth just by talking. Baptist shrugged,
then Butch shrugged. Butch nodded towards the Transit and Baptist
gave him a punch, as though to warn him against showing off—or
showing their hand.

"What are they doing?" Uncle Vern thought out
loud.

"Returning to the scene of the crime," said
my idiot brother, as if a cliché snatched off the discount shelf at
Trite-mart could answer all questions.

"Taunting the cops," said Marvin, who shopped
at the same store.

"Why don't we get out and ask them?" I said.
Really, all I wanted to do was dash into my house and pee. All this
time in the van had accumulated liquid-wise, and I felt no
inclination to squeeze myself into the small booth behind the
driver's seat that I suspected hid a chemical toilet—at least, it
smelled like artificial vomit.

Alarmed by my suggestion, Uncle Vern wiggled
his gray eyebrows at me. "The police will take you into
custody."

"I didn't shoot anyone."

"Two men killed in your house? You'll be
taken in for questioning."

"I'll bet even the cops have a toilet in
their station," I said, then bit my tongue.

"We have facilities here," Uncle Vern
informed me.

"Ugh," said Marvin, confirming my dread of
semi-public toilets.

"It's no worse than the toilets at the bus
depot," Uncle Vern countered.

A trio of 'ugh's rose in response to this
observation. It was obvious Uncle Vern hadn't taken a bus in a
long, long time.

"Anyway, you can't leave without exposing
us," said Uncle Vern. "The police will want to know why you sat
here for hours and only came out to urinate. They'll be even more
suspicious."

They certainly would, I thought. They would
also have plenty of questions for Uncle Vern and Marvin, who did
not seem thrilled by the idea of being questioned. Self-serving
bastards.

"They're leaving," said Marvin, drawing our
attention back to the screen. Sure enough, the Congreve brothers
were sauntering away, trying to look inconspicuous and failing
miserably. I was surprised they had hung around long enough to be
spotted, had any of the cops been paying attention. These
characters must be indelibly burned on John Law's municipal mind.
Natural suspects.

Uncle Vern thought the same thing. "It
doesn't make sense, those two coming here like that."

"You think they didn't kill Carl and Dog?" I
asked.

"They don't act as if they know what is going
on."

"'Act' being the key word," Marvin sneered.
"You expect them to do a song and dance? 'Hey, everybody, we did
it! We're stars!'"