Skunk Hunt

by J. Clayton Rogers

  One thing movies leave out is actual pain. Our education would be infinitely enhanced if we could actually feel those bullets ripping through the actors on the big screen. Watch out, Drill-o-rama is on the way.

  We were being shot at in real time, though, and it was beholding on us to take it seriously. The nonsense that came out of our mouths evaporated cleanly, leaving us free to fight back. Another bullet through the broken window convinced me there was no time to switch places with Marvin.

  "Stop all that swerving!" I shouted at Uncle Vern.

  "What?" he shouted back, then looked in his rearview mirror and saw me trying to stand at the window. He said something to the effect that one less twit in the world wouldn't hurt the economy—or maybe I imagined it and he was simply acquiescing to the need for additional mayhem.

  Butch was again taking aim, but I beat him to the draw, probably because I wasn't aiming. I just pulled the trigger and kept on pulling until the gun stopped pissing. When I opened my eyes, the Grand Prix was gone.

  Then and there I became a convert—guns could produce miracles. They were like genie-bottles. A little rub-dub, and your foes disappeared. But I couldn't resist taking a little credit.

  "I did it!"

  My self-acclamation, so rare and precious, was short-lived. There was a plonk on the van's flank that had the unmistakable barrel-knocking flavor of metal on metal. I glanced up at the screen over Marvin's head. He had maneuvered the periscope, giving us an eye-popping view of Butch half-leaning out the passenger window. I could also see my marksmanship hadn't been so awful—the car's windshield was so starred with cracks it must be almost impossible to see through.

  The Congreves realized they wouldn't get much further before they crashed blindly into some structurally sound impediment. They solved their dilemma by roaring ahead to cut us off. I blandly handed Marvin the empty gun.

  "I think you need to reload it."

  Marvin stared at it as though I had planted an octopus on his palm.

  "You're out of bullets?" Todd asked tensely, gripping the edge of the counter.

  "I never learned..."

  Up front, Uncle Vern made a sound like a teacher smacked awake by one of his students. He couldn't believe he'd been struck, but he couldn't complain because he'd been caught napping in his own classroom.

  A loud bang announced a ferocious sideswipe. Our faces went blank as Uncle Vern lost control and we confronted our justifiable demise. When you're about to die, there's no point to emoting.

  Well, we didn't die, and a qualified actuary would probably claim we didn't even come close. In fact, when we bounced over the curb, raced through a Laundromat parking lot, then jounced over another curb and down a slope to another parking lot, we realized we might survive this crash and began screaming like hell.

  "Verrrrrnnnn!" Marvin wailed, tossing the avuncular and almost his lunch.

  Grass and dirt scooped up by the Transit's fashionably thin bumper was flung on the windshield in a series of Pollockian slaps, grass and dirt zigzagging across the glass with blind artistic aplomb.

  And speaking of dumb luck, not only did Uncle Vern manage to keep the van upright, we ended up back on the highway. Admittedly, we were pointed in the wrong direction, but even during rush hour this part of Route 1 was virtually traffic-free, most people hereabouts being either unemployed or otherwise unoccupied. The only other car in sight was the Congreves' Grand Prix, which was right on course for—

  Wham!

  They must have slammed on the brakes before broadsiding us, but the hit was still powerful enough to send us thudding off the walls like wooden marbles. The image from the telescope tilted crazily, giving the impression Butch was falling and his brother rising to the sky. But they were only halfway out of their car when a meteor the size and shape of a Dodge van swept through a gap in the median and banged into the rear door on the driver's side. The collision knocked us around some more, but it knocked the Congreves worse. They fell on the road in rowdy heaps, rolling in opposite directions. From the way they bounced to their feet, it seemed neither was hurt, yet their first instinct was flight. An unknown adversary had hit the scene, one as dumb and indifferent to vehicular mayhem as themselves, and the best vantage point from which to survey the situation was from a distance. From the way they hoofed North and South, the best distance was as far away as possible. But chicken wasn't their style and I knew they would be back as soon as they were over the shock.

  Uncle Vern had the van in gear and looked ready to rocket away when a familiar voice shouted for him to wait.

  "I thought I recognized Kendle's heap," Marvin said. "I think she's got Jeremy with her."

  Todd and I emitted grunts equally proportioned between disgust and loathing. I gave him a quizzical look. How well did he know Jeremy?

  "What are you doing here?" Uncle Vern demanded, lowering his window as Jeremy trotted up.

  "I planted a GPS on your van," he announced casually. Before Uncle Vern and Marvin could respond with oaths (with equal amounts of disgust and loathing), Jeremy hastened to add, "We need to get going. The cops'll show up or the Congreves'll be back, and I don't want either. Does this thing still run?"

  "I believe so," said Uncle Vern with a kind of Old World weariness that was a clue to where all this was headed, although I couldn't guess that at the time. He had already begun pulling away when Jeremy shouted, so my brother's question was a waste of rhetoric, except he was out to prove a point: we had to haul ass—but where were we headed?

  "Mine, too," said Jeremy. This was proven when the van began backing away from its cracked nest in the Grand Prix. Someone else was responsible for heave-hoeing into the Congreves. The tilted periscope provided only a silhouette in the driver's seat, but when the van had pulled off a half dozen yards our guess was confirmed when we saw Yvonne Kendle's wicked grin. She was a masher, all right. And a smasher.

  There was a plonk on the side of the van.

  "What that a bullet?" Marvin demanded, losing his grammar with a jump.

  "We'll meet at the usual place!" Jeremy shouted, racing back to his car.

  "We most certainly will not," grumbled Uncle Vern, hitting the gas. A few rattles had been added to the clobbered van, but otherwise we seemed to be in good shape.

  "We're not headed for the usual place," Marvin said.

  "We need distance, first," came Vern's response, which I agreed with wholeheartedly, especially after hearing another metallic thwonk on the rear panel. The police must be nowhere in sight, still, or else the Congreves wouldn't be subjecting us to a long-distance fusillade. That was my theory, at least. Were they all really watching a movie being made downtown? Jesus, was it a Spielberg production?

  But what was this about Jeremy and a 'usual place'?

  "Have you been conspiring with Jeremy?" I shouted over the engine noise coming through the shattered rear window.

  "You don't want to know," Marvin responded for his uncle. "You'll find out soon enough, but you'll be sorry you asked."

  After making it as far as Bellwood without being followed, Uncle Vern turned onto a side road and began a zigzag drive back to Richmond.

  Well...almost....

  CHAPTER 26

  The improbability of improbability is only increased (but not eliminated) by its improbability. You might believe that's like saying the inanity of inanity is only increased by its inanity, but in that case there's no chance of elimination.

  Why am I striking off on this abstract path? Don't worry, its a short path. In fact, it ends right here, at the meat and potatoes buffet.

  The 'usual place' turned out to be Todd's house, which opened a world of wonders. I had sort of suspected my twin was a part of what I could only think of as a conspiracy, and this cinched it. I should have guessed more than I had when I saw the registration for Todd's Jaguar.

  Marvin did a lot of wincing and moaning as he came through the door. I thought at first he was reacting to Todd's apocalyptic housekeeping, but when I s
aw real pain on his face I realized he really had been shot, and not all that long ago.

  My math skill was indecently limited, ranging from null to numbskull, but this particular 2 + 2 was a no-brainer: there had been a gunfight at the Ice Boutique and this twerp had managed to ace two grown men before himself going down. I gave Marvin a solicitous arm, and mentally congratulated Skunk on plugging him.

  At this point the math became circular, a never-ending pi that riddled common sense. Why would Marvin be stalking me? What if I caught him out—as I had, sort of—when, as a loyal son, I might return the favor he had done my father? He couldn't be looking to recover stolen jewels, since (alas) Skunk had never come close to successfully robbing his store.

  How wrong I was. Ahem. And then...how right I was. Double-hem.

  Jeremy followed Uncle Vern inside. He had probably just saved our lives, so I granted without too much disgust his shit-eating grin. Following him like a snow plow shoving a full load came Yvonne Kendle. She was not grinning, although she had been the actual engineer of our salvation. Maybe she was having second thoughts about ramming the Congreves temporarily out of the picture.

  Apparently not knowing what else to do, Todd attempted to play host. "Anyone want a—"

  "Beer," said Yvonne peremptorily.

  "Any particular kind?" he asked, sounding too much like me, both in tone and in the particulars.

  "Lots."

  Todd scrunched up his face, as though he had never heard of the brand. He came back with a Miller Lite, drawing a chubby frown from my one-time playmate.

  "What?" Todd asked, his tone suggesting freeloaders who got freebies left preferences at the door.

  "I don't believe in 'lite'," said Yvonne.

  My face twitched in syncopated sympathy with Todd's as he suppressed the obvious comeback. Interestingly enough, Jeremy too gave a twitch, supplying evidence that genes did not have to be identical to rough out similar reactions.

  Todd handed the Miller to me and went back to the kitchen. He returned with a Heineken. Yvonne nodded like someone receiving her due, requiring no thanks on her part. I would probably get the same reaction from her if I played 'Hail to the Chief'. Since I consider outsized self-esteem as much a disease as in-your-face self-effacement, I could only criticize her for being my opposite.

  "Wish I'd been here to see your face when you saw his face," said Jeremy, finding a small valley next to Yvonne which he occupied with some difficulty. She snapped at him for disrupting her guzzle.

  I looked around. "You talking to me?"

  "You see any other Mutes around here?" he answered, laughing at his own pun.

  "So you've known—"

  "How could I not?" Jeremy cut me off. "Okay, I couldn't remember the Ferncrest address. But I remember leaving this house with one its one shitty fucktardo and arriving on Oregon Hill to find another fucktardo just like him. A real punching bag."

  I felt all eyes on me: Uncle Vern, Marvin, Todd, Jeremy, Yvonne. They had a knowing look, the kind of look Julius Caesar got from his fellow senators. I wasn't in on the Big Joke, and I could only pray the joke didn't include daggers. I got the horrible feeling that these people knew me better than I knew myself. Considering all that had happened lately, it was probably true. I was the guy who lived in Skunk's house, but was otherwise doing nada for his posterity.

  "O…kay…" I said, blushing.

  Uncle Vern was munching on his moustache. Marvin was catering to some secret cavity behind his lower lip. Yvonne was bug-eyed behind her Heinekin. Jeremy continued to savor his pun, as though knowing it would be the only witticism he would come up with in his lifetime. Todd was the most unsettling of all, looking exactly the way I would have looked had the situation been reversed. It was obvious that, outside of Vern and Marvin, no one here had realized the unexplained investments had paid off so handsomely—or, in my case, that there had been any investments at all.

  I was only staring back at them, but Uncle Vern took it as a sign of rudeness. "What are you gaping at? My scar? I was in a car accident. Satisfied?"

  "I wasn't going to mention it, but now that you've brought it up, that's one ugly scar."

  I didn't intend it as a cosmetic depreciation of his appearance--only as a dull observation of fact. But I might have said, "Hey, you're ugly, get over it," and gotten the same glum glare in return. The Vern-Marvin team was pretty battered, one getting over a wreck, the other a gunshot wound. Calculating the time since I had hovered over Skunk's corpse in the morgue, I wondered if the two had received their injuries around the same time, even the same day. But I recalled nothing in the news reports about the owner of Ice Boutique being present during the attempted robbery. Just a dumb-ass clerk with inordinate luck. On a snowy day….

  "You don't seem upset with me," Marvin ventured.

  "For killing Skunk and...his crony?" I said, looking at Todd, then at Jeremy. "Well? Aren't either of you upset? He was our dad. Remember? Well, maybe not Todd. He was outsourced to Haliburton. It's only chance that we look alike."

  To my surprise, they turned not to Marvin, but to Uncle Vern.

  "It wasn't all Marvin's fault," he said lowly, as if hoping we wouldn't hear.

  "And Skunk's crony, as you put it, was my father," Todd added. "So far as I'm concerned. I couldn't and wouldn't have a father named 'Winny'."

  Whoever's father was whoever, neither Todd nor Jeremy seemed all that put out that we were in the company of the man who had snuffed both of them. Maybe they had had time to grow accustomed to his company in all those secret meetings they had held in the usual place. If there was any disgruntlement on their part, it appeared directed at Uncle Vern. Not wanting to be left out, I joined them in giving the oldest man in the room a hard glance. It didn't last long. I think I've mentioned that I'm not a stare-down artist. It was enough, though, to miff Uncle Vern, who probably thought I was still overly intrigued by his scar. Fortunately for me, he was distracted by Todd and Jeremy.

  "Don't give me that accusing look," he told them. "I explained it to you a hundred times."

  "Yeah, an 'accident'," Todd sneered.

  "It was an accident."

  "Only because you didn't let me in on it." This came from Marvin, who had added his roundhouse glare to the visual assault against Uncle Vern.

  "Mea culpa, and let's shut up about it," said Uncle Vern testily. "We agreed we wouldn't talk about this to anyone without permission."

  Permission from whom? I wondered. I expected a chorus of incredulous guffaws from Todd and Marvin and Jeremy, as would be appropriate in any classroom of over-aged underachievers. Instead, they deflated, and with that I saw any hope that my numerous questions would be answered slip away.

  But I would give it a shot.

  "Who wrote those letters? And did you really get any letters, or was it just me?"

  Oddly enough, I got an answer. Of sorts, and after a pause long enough to brew coffee, if anyone had wanted a cup.

  "Skunk wrote them," said Uncle Vern.

  Todd and Jeremy protested loudly. It was an a-hah moment. I wasn't the only one being kept in the dark, after all.

  "I saw him laid out, don't forget," I said. "He didn't mail those letters from the post-mortem office."

  They gave me a sour look. A mute wasn't supposed to be clever. He wasn't supposed to say anything at all.

  "Did you ID Winny Marteen, too?" Uncle Vern asked.

  "Why should I?"

  "If not you, then who?"

  He was getting back at me for gawping at his scar. At least, that was how I interpreted the smug tug of his lips. "How should I know and why should I care? Didn't Todd—"

  When Todd showed me Winny's picture—next to my mother, I was almost sure of it—and claimed them as his parents, he seemed to have no idea Winny was dead. This had to be another lie. I poked him with my eyes. "Didn't you say this Ben Neerson aka Winny Marteen died in Cluelessland or somewhere?"

  "Hong Kong," Todd blushed. "That was what I was told by...someon
e. It wasn't until last week I knew how he really died. It wasn't me who ID'd him."

  Uncle Vern made the same kind of warning harrumph he had given Marvin in the van when the pimpled wonder told me he had shot my father.

  You won't believe what happened next. Well, you probably don't believe any of this, but what happened next is the cincher. It happened, sure. But there are still people around who don't believe George Washington was real—or Sherlock Holmes, for that matter.

  There was a light yet sharp tread on the stairs. Someone had been upstairs, listening in. Everyone in the room was surprised when the newcomer finally appeared. But surprised in different ways. Uncle Vern and Marvin were more put out than astonished, as though the newcomer was committing an utterly unexpected, borderline horrific faux pas. Yvonne Kendle's reaction was similar, but much higher on the cagy scale, as if she knew this was a moment that demanded silence. On the other hand, Jeremy and me fell into Laurel and Hardy mode.

  For a week I had received hints that this moment would come. Someone of average intelligence—the common reader, for example—would have seen this coming a mile away. But caught up as I was by hurricane forces, I had not seen the kettle boiling away merrily in the middle of the storm. There had been no red herrings being tossed about in the waves. The picture of a Barbara-like chin and the possibility that my mother was the unlikely wife of Winny Marteen had been real. I knew that because she was now standing before me.

  As though stunned by a blow, I staggered backwards. Something squelched under my foot. There was a shout of pain. And then I was falling onto a coastline of fat and beer suds.

  Under normal circumstances, Yvonne would have easily tossed me aside like a discarded turd, but I had flung my arms backwards to cushion my fall and they became unnaturally ensnarled. My hand somehow swooped under her blouse and got tangled in her oversized bra. A romantic might claim "we were as one", but an engineer would assert we were spatially disabled. Yvonne finally managed to throw me onto Jeremy's lap. This being comparatively solid ground, I should have been able to leap up. But my one-shot lover gave me a shot to the chest that knocked me into Jeremy's chin. He grunted with pain, then gave a shout as I planted my hand on his crotch and pushed off. I stumbled backwards, disorientated, and would have landed on the floor if someone had not taken me by the arm and steadied me. Alarmed, I yanked loose and turned—and came nose-to-nose with my allegedly dead mother.