Skunk Hunt (58 page)

"He told me himself," my mother answered.
"You were the only one willing to clip his toenails. He really
appreciated that."

"But we all took turns," I said. "I
remember..."

Yeah, I remembered the man who had the
gumption and energy to commit strong-arm robberies but was too lazy
to bend over and use those same arms to trim his toes. I also
thought I remembered Barbara and Jeremy doing their fair share,
alternating over Skunk's scaly feet and yellow toenails and
breaking a sweat as they pressed both hands on the clipper. But now
it dawned on me that what I recalled was their
saying
they had taken their turn. I had been
hoodwinked, again. Not only mute, but as dense as a cinderblock.
All those times I had rolled off the skunk socks, trying to hold my
breath as I hovered between gassing and asphyxiation, a chore all
the more onerous in memory because my siblings had conspired to
foist the job on me, alone. I turned to Jeremy, who mugged a
gag.

"Asshole," I said.

"Don't forget the assette," he said—his
chickenshit way of halving his share of complicity. Besides, I had
already halfway forgiven Sweet Tooth. Clipping Skunk's toenails was
no task for a girl.

Then I saw Jeremy looking in Mom's
direction. He wasn't talking about Barbara. Agreed, it would have
been nice of our mother to partake in the cuticle ritual, but that
she didn't was not evidence of moral turpitude. The way those
fragments of nail flew up from the clipper, she was as vulnerable
as the rest of us to shrapnel wounds. I remembered that, at the
time, I was glad she didn't insist we clip
her
nails, too.

Yvonne was probing Jeremy with a wary eye.
After his great welcoming of a mother he had thought dead by her
own hand, Doubletalk had too-readily dispensed with his affection
for her. I didn't know if Yvonne put much stock in her relationship
with my lousy brother. If her fling with me in my bedroom was any
indication, it couldn't be much. Still, if she was counting on some
kind of moral fidelity from Jeremy, it was shot down at that
moment. He was dissing Mother—his very own mother! The same woman
he had wept over not five minutes ago. How much easier it would be
to dismiss a slob of a girlfriend.

"You say I was Skunk's favorite—for whatever
reason," I said, dodging the toenails. "You think he told me
something about something, probably money, but not the Brinks
money. Sorry, but you're not giving me enough clues."

"I told you all he wouldn't tell," said
Marvin, whose two cents fell unappreciated.

"We all knew he wouldn't tell," Jeremy
elaborated, additional pennies that went uncollected.

Mom leaned forward. "Tell your ol' mother,
dear: where is the money? We know you haven't spent it, or you
would have moved out of that dump a long time ago."

You may have noticed by now that, among my
other literary violations, I have a marked tendency to break the
narrative flow. The next line should naturally be "What money?"
Instead, I'm going to take this opportunity to remark on another
failing: none of my characters are very likable. It is a rule in
storytelling that even the baddest of bad guys has to have some
redeeming features. Either they're handsome, or smart, or uxorious,
or neurotic (hey, these days that's considered redeeming), or
all-powerful, or all-weak and, above all else, have a
semi-sympathetic motive for their misbehavior. Hell, you could drop
a tear for Grendel. And yet, after all this labor and spilled ink,
it's suddenly dawned on me that none of these options apply to this
cast of characters—myself included. That's reality for you. You
look for the silver lining and find another cloud. We were all
losers, and the thimble of sympathy we deserved was the sympathy we
got. We'd be lucky if weeds grew on our graves.

So back to the money. It was beginning to
seem that, somehow, Skunk had absconded with the interest that had
accumulated from his ill-gotten and apparently well-invested booty.
I was feeling twisted in every way. Everywhere I looked I saw only
creeps, and they were sliming me with their creepiness. There was
really only one answer to Mom's question. I looked straight into
her Medusa eyes and said:

"I'm not telling."

With that, I sought out an empty chair and
dropped into it, feeling pleasantly mortal.

CHAPTER 27

It usually goes this way: I think,
therefore I am. It should actually read: I think, therefore I
am.... Because it's really a question. Am
what
?

Among my family and assorted guests, there
was no doubt about it. They let me know what they thought I was via
groans, curses, oaths and—above all—threats. You see, while they
had been stringing me along (some from the beginning, some only
recently), hoping I would betray my hand, they had not been
absolutely positive that I had known that Skunk had a stash apart
from the Brinks haul. The irony was that they had created their own
uncertainty. If I hadn't been in the dark about Mom, my twin
brother, the house on Ferncrest and all the things I hoped or
semi-hoped to learn about this evening, I might have submitted to
their greed. But I hadn't known, I didn't know, and I wouldn't
know, unless this woman—who I was beginning to think of as Mr. Big
instead of as my mother—began to shed some light on all those dark
corners. My tendency to draw stories from their source placed Mom
at the forefront. She was the only one who could explain the
mysterious comments Skunk made the month before his death.

For the first time in my life I stopped the
babble of an irate mob with an upraised hand. If I had had this
talent as a kid, I might not have been so screwed up today.

Of course, they only obeyed because they
thought something reasonable and profitable would come out of my
mouth.

"Is it too much to ask..." I began, stopping
when I realized I hadn't formulated my questions. Hell, where to
begin?

"You want someone to blame," said my mother
flatly.

"That would be a start. But blame for what? I
understand the game you played over the last two weeks. You were
hoping I would get worried over the money. That I would think the
cash at the farm and in the water plant was part of the loot and
you would follow me when I went to check the hiding place. All that
computer business was you..." I turned to Marvin. "You set up the
messages, and when you found out I didn't know the first thing
about computers, you sent Jeremy to act as my jockey."

Marvin gave me a long, flat stare. "What do
you mean, you don't understand computers? Everybody understands
computers."

"Meet the Neanderthal," I bowed.

"But I've heard you use the library
computer."

"With massive assistance from a very patient
lady at the reference desk," I said. "Who's your source?"

Marvin turned his skeptical gaze on Jeremy.
"So you're the one who accessed treasure447?"

"The whatcha-what?" said my more oafish
brother.

"Yeah," I added. "At Starbucks. The laptop,
remember? Or has that gone the way of the sniper on Route 6?" I
mimicked a conical object entering one side of his skull and
exiting the other side with remarkable ease.

Jeremy gaped idiotically. "Aw, you guys."

He looked and sounded so convincing that
everyone else immediately put me on the chopping block. I was a
liar. So were they. We were all liars, without a single gram of
truth between us. It made for a sour atmosphere. Marvin had a
constipated expression, as though he wanted to yell at me to stop
playing games, but knew too well I could come back on him verbatim.
And then another odd thing happened. He began to speak, then
dropped his vowels and consonants. He gaped at his uncle, who was
gritting his teeth.

My mother had not said a word for several
minutes. She wore the same startled look as when I mentioned the
sniper. Whatever was plucking her nerves seemed centered on Jeremy.
To catch her attention, I asked:

"Are you really my mother?"

I won't say I was expecting subtlety from
her, but it was obvious there was more to Mom than met the eye, and
I thought that might include the kind of calm slyness that was de
rigueur among highly placed criminals.

"What kind of dumb-ass question is that?" she
said.

Okay, she wasn't Rhonda Fleming. But then,
abruptly, she cranked her stiff bones out of the chair and walked
over to Todd.

"Don't you see the resemblance?" Placing a
finger under his chin, she tilted his head. Todd stood like a dumb
muffin as Mom used him as a stand-in for me, highlighting his jaw
with a stroke of her thumb, tugging at his hair and giving his
earlobe a rather vicious fillip. "You don't favor Skunk, you know.
Everything you've got is me."

Macho aspirations aside, it's a rare boy
indeed who is pleased to learn he resembles his mother more than
his father. In this case, that would mean Todd and I also favored
Barbara, our a-go-go slut of a sister. But I wasn't about to check
my bra size. I gave my arms a good flex, an Amazonian gut check.
Still, there was no denying the wussness of my position. Even Mom
had dodged the onerous and somewhat hazardous chore of clipping
Skunk's nails. I was the chump. The addle-pated geek. And a nutless
geek, too, without an ounce of cybersense.

But suddenly I had balls, and they
weren't going down so well, so to speak. I knew where the money was
and had been hurled to the front rank of influence. I could stick
it out right here—in fact I already had, for one of those
present—and no one would dare laugh. That was my hope, at least.
The deaths of Carl and Dog had at least removed the penalty of
torture, or so I hoped. Then I remembered Jeremy and
thought...
oops
.

"Maybe you think you know the whole story,"
said Mom, flattening the air with her hand, then brushing back an
imaginary horde that was intent on tearing me limb from limb. As of
yet, no one had taken a step in my direction. "Maybe you think you
know more than we do. But just because you know one thing we don't,
that doesn't mean you know much."

I spent a moment sorting this out. Her
overestimation of what I knew must be biological, I thought. Maybe
she thought that, because she had breast-fed me (had she?), the old
psychic bond still existed. The thought gave me kind of an ugh
feeling. I could think of no link between us beyond the cans of
pork and beans and tuna that she cracked open for dinner. Really,
that was my strongest memory. In these days of post-Oprah
grievances, bland food and bland emotions are pretty tame. Mom had
ignored me, I had ignored her. It worked out well enough.

"You're the reason we're in this
predicament," said my mother.

Wow. 'Predicament'. No wonder my lexicon is
so extensive.

"'We'?" I said.

"Your brothers and sister, my associates."
She emphasized 'ass-', which I supposed meant not all was
hunky-dory within the ass-ociation. I also supposed she was talking
about Marvin and Uncle Vern. Did Carl and Dog also belong in that
little group?

"I can't imagine what I did that was so
awful," I said casually, but sounded guilty as hell.

"You were born," Mom said flatly.

I took this at face value, as a sarcastic
prelude to a litany of my shortcomings, until she added, with a nod
at Todd:

"And him."

"What did
I
do?" my lesser half protested, forgetting the
plural pronoun.

"I already told you."

I mulled this over. "You mean that we were
born twins?"

"Do you remember a bearded man who used to
come snooping around the house when you were a boy?" Mom asked.

"I don't remember anyone shaving much," I
said, involuntarily noticing the shady patch above her lip.

"I mean a real cartoon beard, with a
point."

Oddly enough, I did recall that beard, and
Todd and I had been talking a little about the man behind it only a
couple of hours ago. I realized now that Dr. Whacko stuck in my
mind because it was one of the few times—perhaps the only time—that
I had seen Skunk try to reason someone out of his house instead of
simply chasing him out the door. It was before Jeremy's time, but
if Barbara had been here she might have remembered the stranger,
too. I summoned an impression of a dormant weasel suddenly waking
up and trying (sleepily) to solve the riddle of his surroundings.
If my parents' reaction to him was any indication, he was a pest
who was chronically indisposed to take 'no' for an answer, or even
as an option. He gave us kids the willies, because he was always
approaching us with candy canes and a creepy smile. I hate candy
canes. Give me chocolate, every time. And blood-sucking needles?
Forget 'em!

But wait...he had also given us ice
cream....

I spent so much time researching my navel
that my audience began to grumble, sort of like hard-core Grateful
Deaders compressing their bladders during the Captain and Tennille
warm-up.

"You remember," Mom nodded with the kind of
marvelous self-confidence that had alienated me from most of
mankind. I was looking at a perfect negative of the downtrodden
creature I had known as a child. "But do you remember his
name?"

"Dr. Whacko."

"That's what you and Sweet Tooth called him.
He was a professor at UVA or URA or..." Mom's higher education
petered out quickly. "One of those big places. You know, with their
own basketball teams."

Marvin was rolling his eyes. The University
of Richmond being home to the Cavalier Assholes, I marked him as a
recent graduate. "You mind, Mrs. Neerson? I did a little googling
on this."

Neerson, Neerson, Neerson...the name on the
will. So Winny had moved out here with Mom and changed his
name.