Skunk Hunt

by J. Clayton Rogers

  "If he so much as lays a finger on any of us, he'll end up back in Jonesville," Mom said with a kind of deranged blissfulness. "I only have to say the word to his parole officer..."

  She had a weapon, and she was ready to use it. But Skunk came home a subdued man. It had nothing to do with getting humped in prison. Jeremy, who took after Dad in so many ways, had also been a guest of the State, serving in the sump-pit at Powhatan for almost two years. He told me that once his fellow inmates found out he was Skunk's son, no one tried to play drop-the-soap with him. There isn't a lot of communication between state and federal prisons. For Dad's reputation to extend so far had to mean something.

  "It still wasn't very nice," Jeremy had said.

  "I've heard stories."

  "What do you know? Any place that uses urinal cakes as room deodorizers is living hell."

  It was our belief that Skunk behaved for a whole two years because he didn't want to do anything that would risk his Brink's stash. Dad possessed an odd mixture of infinite patience spiced with an occasional, frenzied 'give-it-to-me-now'. We wondered if he would wait for a decade, if necessary, before going near the money—at the risk that someone else would find it, leaving him with a dozen empty bags. He must have ground his teeth to nubs worrying about it, but we saw only a man calmly sleepwalking through his days. There appeared no awareness on his part that his family was hounded by bill collectors, was chronically addicted to filing tax extensions, and more than once experienced real hunger. It was like a long mourning period after the death of a close relative.

  But I guess the delay was inevitable. After all, we were being watched.

  It was nothing specific. An unfamiliar face looking at us in a familiar way. A strange car on the street. A sense of being followed—felt most strongly by Jeremy, whose backside instinct was so refined it amounted to anal radar. First, we thought it was the cops. Then Brinks detectives. Then friends or family of the Congreve brothers. Or simply greedy bastards who smelled loot in the vicinity. In the end, Jeremy and I concluded it was a combination of all of them. Barbara said we were paranoid.

  "Dad says there's no money. Why don't you believe him?"

  "You have the life of a natural victim ahead of you," Jeremy responded. Unlike me, he could spot a loser a mile away. Must have been all that practice with the mirror.

  Incidentally, Mom began using Dad's prison moniker at home and in public. It was better than Countess or Turd Blossom, but "Skunk" left a lot to be desired. We don't know if he came by it because of his personality or a lapse in hygiene. Probably a lot of both. There wasn't much of the rose about him. On the other hand, BO in the BOP is probably no novelty. And the first thing Dad did after greeting (or grunting) us when he arrived home was empty the 30 gallon hot water tank in the longest non-pornographic shower I'm aware of. He wanted to get the prison's PCMS antiseptic off of him as fast as he could.

  He was stoic about his experience. "Don't say sorry—sorry is chickenshit," was a standard Skunk refrain. It was not a matter of evading fault. You did what you did and paid the consequences. Bitching and moaning about fate wasn't in his repertoire. I was always concerned that if he ever shot someone, he would face the victim and his family in the courtroom and shrug. But it never came to that. He never had to confront Marvin Hemmings and his parents because he had died in the botched assault on the Ice Boutique.

  All of this became a little problematic seven months after the robbery attempt, when Barbara, Jeremy and I were presented with a real puzzle. In spite of what we saw on the surveillance videos, in spite of the fact that I had looked down on Dad's pale mad-dog face in the morgue and spoken the immortal words, "Yeah, that's him," in spite of what the coroner's report said ("death by single gunshot wound to the upper left quadrant")...in spite of everything our senses told us, the media told us, and the distilled officialese of three millennia of undertakers told us...we received evidence that Dad wasn't dead.

  CHAPTER 2

  We got our letters via snail mail. I was still living in the old family house in Richmond, on Oregon Hill. For some reason I had it in mind that Jeremy was shacked up with a woman in a converted motel bungalow on Route 1—or maybe that was just where I expected him to be, extrapolating from past behavior. Meanwhile Barbara, after a brief sordid career, had an epiphany of common sense. The last I heard, she had married a lineman and moved to South Carolina.

  I had no idea if she had started a family. All of us had adopted incompatible habits, and as a result we didn't care much for each others' company. Mom had died while we were all still living at home, but we still would have scattered like maddened hornets when we turned 18. I escaped by staying in place, although most people would consider living with Skunk as doing exceptionally hard time. He was a walking San Andreas Fault who clobbered anyone who fractured his drunken reveries. Rarely one to pin blame unless it profited his Grand Design (something to do with universal annihilation, I think), he idly speculated that his violent behavior resulted from crimes committed by the top-billed villain gracing the FBI's Most-Wanted marquee: Society. Then he laughed off the excuse as unadulterated bullshit. ("Lawyers eat five courses of BS before breakfast—helps them to digest.") He smoked five packs of unfiltered Camels a day, half of the butts landing in the toilet, which he wouldn't flush to save his life. He demanded his unworthy children trim his Bessemer-processed toenails, giving us a gruff kick if we pinked the quick. If Skunk had been a barber, he would have shaved years off your life.

  The house on Pine had belonged to my grandfather, himself a descendant of an ironworker who had helped roll iron for Confederate artillery at the Tredegar foundry, the ruins of which were just down the hill. It pleased Skunk that his ancestors had contributed to the rolls of dead and dismembered Yankees. The only reason the McPhersons had been able to hold onto the Oregon Hill house was because it was as seedy and dilapidated as everyone else's, and real estate developers were busy elsewhere. But when the university up the road began to expand, property values exploded. White trash was gradually supplanted by student trash.

  As a species, the McPherson's were not world travelers. In fact, almost entire generations had slumped and dissolved on their front porches in alcoholic hazes that wavered between wrath and conviviality. Skunk was equally disinclined to move on. Despite the rising property tax, and the fact that the people we saw from our porch were increasingly alien, we doggedly held onto the Pine Street residence. Whenever Dad went to prison, the IRS and city tax collector would begin hounding Mom. We faced eviction from a house that had been paid for in full almost a hundred years ago.

  "We're like the Indians," Mom once moaned. "They're going to stick us on a reservation."

  I thought it was a valid analogy. We've become more discreet about how we displace unwanted tribes. We might not indulge in a happy hour of genocide anymore, or weep crocodile tears of remorse as we take over the vacant land, but the practice is still pretty much in place.

  Mom was gonging us to the need to find paying jobs. After a lot of lazy harrumphing, I began swimming through the dismal swamp of help-wanteds. Which turned out, in my case, to be not much more than a leaky birdbath. I had graduated from high school, meaning I possessed no special skills beyond being a pest. I started at the 7/11 and worked my way down. After spending a couple of years scraping out toilets at the bus terminal and improving my social and reading skills by perusing the anti-drug messages on urinal screens, I leapt up the scale to popcorn concessionaire at the Science Museum. I was thoughtful enough to wash my hands before taking the job.

  Jeremy's contribution to the household kitty consisted of a variety of burgled homes and small businesses. He didn't do badly, but it has to be admitted that he didn't accrue any benefits, unless you included free education at Powhatan's prison school.

  Barbara did infinitely better than the rest of us combined, finding remuneration at the Shockhoe Slip Gentleman's Club PFZ (Panty Free Zone), where she was a danseuse whose specialty was pole dancing and being und
erage. The 451st man to stuff bills down her g-string included a marriage proposal, and she found him hunk enough to accept. I met him once or twice and he seemed as serious about matrimony as other men a notch above my social stratum (he actually enjoyed working at a steady, good-paying job). They went down to Greensville, where his parents lived, to tie the knot. After that, all communication stopped.

  Mom's death a few years later was quick and merciful. She shot herself in the bedroom. That might seem a pretty conclusive commentary on the miseries of life, but I didn't find out until later there was more to her death than met the eye. We kids were either at school or busy skipping it when this took place. We never saw the body. Actually, we saw nothing at all, not even a trace of blood. We came home to a Skunk who was completely dry-eyed. I thought later she might have hung on longer had she known that, ten years down the road, Skunk too would meet death by gunshot.

  The mental stability of anyone who chose to live alone in the same house with Skunk McPherson could be legitimately challenged. But unlike everyone else in my family, I had never been plagued by demons. I had a practical side, though, and pure essence of practicality is always ugly. One of Dad's cronies was Winny Marteen, another of the few remaining Oregon Hillers whose bloodline included some double-entry genetics. I suspect there was some inbreeding in the McPherson past, too, which is reason enough to pass over the family tree. At the time I thought none of this affected me.

  Winny found it difficult to maintain a poker face. He puttered behind Skunk with a kind of aching glee, as though he couldn't get enough of my father's abuse. Whenever I complained, in my pre-concessionaire days, about long hours pushing broomsticks, washing dishes and sharing the sweat of foreign labor, Winny would give me a shrewd look and say, "It won't last."

  I thrive on thin hopes, and that was enough for me. Winny was hinting that the Brinks loot was real, that Dad knew where it was, and that one day he could recover it and all would be fine. So you see, it made logical, sane sense to work like a dog to keep the mad dog in clover, relatively speaking. At least I made the rent and utilities and put enough food on the table to keep the beriberi at bay.

  After Dad and Winny drove out to the Ice Boutique to meet their idiotic fate, I was left alone in the house, with a little more money than I was used to. I no longer had to feed the old man (Winny too, on occasion), and the utilities bill was automatically cut in half. I could afford to go out on a few dates. But there weren't many citified country girls left in my neighborhood, and the college girls wanted nothing to do with me. Try as I might, I couldn't imitate the rapid-fire collegiate patois of blurs and empty air.

  The letter arrived midway through March. With its 12-point Arial font, it did not look personalized. I was about to toss it when I took note of the return address on South Pine Street. My street. My house number. And the name: A.C. McPherson.

  Jokes come in varying degrees of sickness, and this scored at the top of the scale. I studied the postmark: Saunders Station. That was the USPS branch for Oregon Hill. Jesus.

  Going strictly by the envelope, whatever was inside was from my father, from inside this house. I was tempted to start searching for him in the cupboards. I stared at the urn on the fireplace mantelpiece. At the coroner's, an assistant had studied my ratty appearance and informed me I could forgo all costs of a burial by donating Dad's shabby remains to science. He gave me the name of a company that acted as middleman. I couldn't imagine what Science would want with this corrupt version of humanity, but I thought it worth a shot. I found out that for a nominal fee of $150 (for paperwork processing, ha-ha), I could wash my hands of Dad's remains. It sounded like a good deal. Besides, I was curious to learn if the medical students came across a heart as rotten in death as it had been in life. I forked over the fee.

  A few months later I got a call from the middleman. Science had finished with Skunk and they were wondering where to deliver the ashes. I asked if they could tell me what they had found in the old demon's hulk besides a well-aimed 9mm slug. They said they couldn't tell me, the answer I pretty much expected. If I refused to take the ashes, I would have been stuck with a disposal fee, so I told them to bring them on. The sugary blonde on the other end of the line (okay, maybe she was a 60-year-old divorced housewife struggling to make ends meet, but she had the sound) offered to sell me a cremation urn. She said I could review the different styles on-line, but I didn't own a computer and barely knew how to boot up the one at the city library. She began mentioning discount items, and I stopped her at the Eternal Cremation Urn.

  I suppose I chose that for Dad's ashes because of the name. I wanted to make damn sure he didn't come back to life, at least in my lifetime. For extra security I left the ashes in the sealed plastic bag they had arrived in. It reminded me of a tobacco pouch, except it was clear. Dad would remain fresh and pure, untainted by human hands. And in that $27.95 urn, he would stay that way for eternity, especially after I removed the yellow Temporary Container sticker from the bag.

  Or so I had thought.

  I opened the envelope and encountered an all-too familiar scrawl on an 8 and a half by 11 sheet of plain paper.

  Mute, Greetings.

  You probably never expected to hear from me again. Remember when I told you only a dummy trusts people to obey crosswalk and yield signs? The same goes for morticians. They might say I'm dead as a doornail—but you should stick a nail in a dead man to make sure. At noon on April 1 I want you to go to www.treasure447.com. You need three words to log in, no space between. Your word is first, and it's 'brinks'. Sweet Tooth and Doubletalk have the other passwords. You three being so trustworthy, you might want to keep them secret from each other. If one of you got all three words, he could log in without telling anyone else. And then everything would be his. Or hers. Don't try this before the 1st of next month—the site won't be there. And at 12:15 that same day the site will go down. You'll have fifteen minutes. Don't miss your chance. Skunk.

  I went to the fireplace mantelpiece, took down the Eternal Cremation Urn, and checked its contents. The skunk was still in his burrow, complete with metal ID disk.

  If it wasn't from my father, then who? Or what? You could have picked up nine pounds of ashes like this at any barbecue pit at a state park. I peered at the clear bag, looking for small pieces of burnt wood or briquettes.

  The letter itself seemed proof of forgery. Aside from a 'wish you were here' postcard he had sent to Jeremy from the Jonesville tank, I'd never known Skunk to scrawl so much as a note. The reference to a website was added evidence that this was some kind of hoax. About the only difference between his computer illiteracy and mine had been that at least I knew what a computer was.

  I couldn't ignore Sweet Tooth and Doubletalk, Skunk's nicknames for Barbara and Jeremy. But 'Mute' was something Dad had called me on only a handful of private moments. I'll explain why later. Or I might not.

  The clincher was the bit about crosswalk and yield signs. Not long before the Brinks job, Skunk, feeling uncharacteristically paternal, had given me my first driving lessons. I was all of nine. He wanted to go to the 7/11 but it was Memorial Day weekend and he was concerned about all the extra police assigned to traffic duty. He must have balanced his drunkenness against my age and decided I was the lesser risk. Pulling the seat up as far as it would go, I just managed to reach the pedal and brake with my right foot. I did pretty well on my way to the store, but coming back I encountered a three-way merge near the Belvedere ramp. I slowed down, checked out the yield signs, and mentally translated 'right of way' as 'right away'. Just as I came up to the intersection, an old VW van came puttering up and nearly sideswiped me before cutting me off.

  "Did you see that!" I complained.

  Dad said nothing.

  About fifty yards down the road we came to a crosswalk near VCU. The northern fringe of Oregon Hill had already been occupied by students, and I had developed a healthy disrespect for them. Seeing several ahead of me, I ignored the yield-to-pedestrian sign and breezed t
hrough, delighting in the loud oaths in my wake.

  "If they hadn't jumped out of the way, you'd have killed them," Dad grunted.

  A few nine-pins less in the world was of no great concern to a 9-year-old. When we pulled up in front of the house, however, Dad twisted open his bottle of malt liquor (never a tin can—in some things he was a purist), and said:

  "You almost got in a wreck for trusting a yield sign. Then those kids almost got killed for trusting you at a crosswalk. Only a dummy trusts traffic signs." He nodded sagely, then added, "Besides, you could've got me arrested."

  At which point he whacked me. I suppose I deserved it. And it certainly drove the lesson home. I sure as hell didn't need to hear it again, especially in a letter that arrived seven months after Dad's alleged death.

  When we were younger, the three McPherson brats had a knack for grabbing every ounce of salt they could discover to rub in each others' wounds. If Barbara and Jeremy had known about my little contretemps, they would have gleefully stung me with it even to this day. It had been a few years since I had seen either of them, but I was sure if we met again, they would remind me first thing of the time I pooped in the tub—when I was four. Reason enough to dismiss a family reunion.

  CHAPTER 3

  "Hey Mute, remember the time Ol' Skunk came into the bathroom and thought you were playing with a toy boat. He went ape when he reached in and found a toothpick with a paper sail stuck a turd!"

  I grunted...a very Skunk-like utterance. My mother once told me this was the one and only time Dad ever attended me in the bath. I'm sure it left an impression on him. Maybe he thought I always let go in the tub, and Mom kept it a secret from him. Since I remembered none of this, it might have been true. It kind of sounds like something I'd do. But enough about me.