Skunk Hunt (66 page)

Uncle Vern shined a beam across the road. He
spoke for us all when he said: "I feel our luck slipping away."

What had once been a drive-in theater was now
a drive-thru derelict cluttered with junked cars and a shack I
could only hope no one lived in, although it might be pretty tony
for the neighborhood.

"Why hasn't this place been condemned?" said
Yvonne. A pretty dumb question from someone whose own career had
been condemned by her complex mind-body issues. "That screen could
fall on us."

It would have been the equivalent of a cliff
sliding off and burying a party of daytrippers, a perfectly
feasible disaster-comedy. A faint breeze—and I mean very faint—sent
the screen rocking in a swirling figure 8, like some near-sighted
woman pushing her old husband's wheelchair. Maybe the car heaps had
been placed down below to save the cost of crushing. And since no
one knew in which direction the screen would fall, the cars had
been distributed at all points of the compass.

"It's a junkyard," Marvin moaned.

"A museum," Jeremy amended. I had forgotten
he had a yen for old cars.

I was briefly blinded by a slash of light
across my face. Mom had switched on her flashlight. Instead of
aiming it at the drive-in, she was rounding like a searchlight,
showing the beam on her childhood.

"Lookee down there," she said wonderingly.
"That was Madge Woodkins house. Looks like the Starlight took it
over…then dropped it."

A two-story wood frame, more or less white,
and more or less still lived in, if the cars in the driveway meant
anything.

"Like you want to draw more attention to us,
Mom?"

Hearing Todd call Mom 'Mom' was like having
your worst enemy discover your cache of Playboys. I would have
given him the old eye-glare, but I was still half-blind from the
X-ray Mom had performed on my retinas.

From habit, we looked both ways before
crossing the road, like a group of school kids being escorted by
nuns. There was as much traffic here as in the Sahara. I think we
were all in awe of the emptiness of the place, the desolation of
what was alleged to be a human habitation. I recalled the time I
traversed Hollywood Cemetery with Sweet Tooth. The feeling was the
same, sans the Confederate dead looking on from their graves.

"This is so cool," said Marvin.

We all stopped and looked at him—except Mom,
who was still flashing our presence to all and sundry (especially
dogs) in the area.

"What's so cool about it?" Michael
demanded.

"A treasure hunt in the middle
of…
this.
What's not to
love?"

"Your stupid ass, for one." Michael had the
McPherson twitch down pat. He was one of us, God help us.

"Repeat that to me when we count out the
jewels," Marvin smirked.

We paused by the old concession, a square
brick function-palace that had once taken in money and excreted
popcorn and greasy hot dogs. I began to drool. Uncle Vern poked his
beam at a broken window. Inside were benches and a frame-twisted
motorcycle straight out of The Wild One, adorned with cobwebs.

"You were conceived here." Mom's voice was so
freighted with lust it dripped off the wall. She played her light
up and down over the screen. In and out, so to speak. "I mean, both
of you were."

"Eeee-www," said Todd.

"We were watching The Vanishing Point, and we
got kind of bored."

This was the first time I had ever heard my
mother make a cultural reference.

"Eeee-www," I said.

"So you really had the hots for Dad?" said
Jeremy, stunned and stupid as usual.

"Why wouldn't you think so?" she
demanded.

"Well…it never showed at home."

"That was home. This was now."

Todd and I exchanged glances of extreme
creepipitude.

"So the Bartow Drive-in was in business
twenty-three years ago," Uncle Vern observed. "That's good to
know."

"Why?" I asked.

"Because it confirms…"

"Confirms what?"

"Shall we proceed?"

The intensity of Uncle Vern's unhelpfulness
was giving me a headache. There was no doubt he was the active
principle here. If he suddenly walked away, I'm sure most of us
would have joined him. Marvin might have raised a fuss—he was
enjoying himself, for some lame-brained reason. The rest of us were
so dismal, so lacking in the spirit of adventure, that going home
looked like the next best option. No, Uncle Vern wasn't happy about
the dark, or the place, and the fact that the dark place was very
changed from the way it had been described to him. He was operating
on sheer willpower. He had spent a lot of time and effort on this
enterprise, as I knew first-hand. He must be totally fed up with
this canned comedy and its odd cast of characters. Yet now, at this
endgame, it would be plain stupid to let up. Not only that—Marvin
would never let him live it down if he abandoned the treasure hunt
now.

Bartow Drive-in might have been defunct for
less than a quarter of a century, but it looked as if it had been
trashed by William Tecumseh Sherman his very own self. We were
close enough now that all the creaking and moaning of the trusses
sounded over our heads.

"That's Meg Tawthorne's place," Mom growled
lowly. She was shining her light at a shabby line of trees beyond
which I presumed was the house in question. There was an
adversarial quality in her tone. Meg and Mom had been competitors.
I thought I smelled a skunk. But it was irrelevant to the task at
hand. At any point in her 45-ish years she could have taken a day
trip out here to verify old memories. But she was choosing now, of
all times, in the impractical darkness, to stir up her youth. I
hadn't known her maiden name until this evening (shame on me!), but
she was definitely betraying some McPherson impracticality.

"Where is it, Mute?" Uncle Vern was
sensible enough not to turn his light on my face as I turned to
him. Standing behind the spot like that, he became an accusatory
shadow-man. He could have been my conscience. Where is it, Mute?
Where is…everything? Why didn't you come to Bartow years ago, as
soon as Skunk told you where the (what I had assumed) the Brinks
money was? And yes, I was
still
clipping his toenails at twenty-four. A son's duty doesn't
end with maturity, and trimming your father's nails ranks right up
there with pushing wheelchairs and pulling the plugs off iron
lungs.

"There are too many things in my head," I
complained. "I can't deal with all of this. Truly, I only have two
hands and one dick."

"Got half that right," snapped Jeremy.

Skunk knew that I was too spineless to dart
off to the West Virginia wilds by myself unless ordered by him to
do so. But that command had never come. My father seemed content to
live on the ill-gotten interest that accrues from criminal
investments. Which begged the question: why hadn't he come back to
this godforsaken place himself? Why had he arranged the deal that
had cost him his life, instead of returning here and digging up his
retirement nest egg? I could think of only one reason: that nest
egg was somehow contaminated. Had Uncle Vern lost his trust? Did
Skunk think he would hock the jewels and skedaddle with the
proceeds? That was possible, sure. But the roundabout methods Uncle
Vern and Marvin had used to try and scare me into betraying the
hiding place hinted at something more complex. It was too bad I
hadn't gotten myself into this mess. At least then I would have
someone to blame besides a dead man.

"Are there any poles left?" I said.

"Poles?" Marvin asked.

"Yeah, 'poles'." Jeremy snotted himself as he
came up next to me. "You don't understand English?" Then he
visually took aim at my shoulder, which was still throbbing . "What
kind of poles?"

"He means where they put the speakers," Mom
answered. "The ones you hooked on your car door. You could turn the
sound way up, or…" Her voice went dreamy. "Turn the sound off. You
know, for those little private moments."

Todd made a gagging sound that I fully
concurred with. Skunk out here, busting open the egg that would
produce the two of us…all steamy and hot and gooey and Barry Newman
pouting moodily on the giant screen, surrounded by hot and steamy
woods, the windows fogging up….

I made a gagging sound.

"There's some poles," Yvonne said, heaving
herself through the narrow lanes of rusting metal. "See? Between
the cars."

"I hope we don't have to push one of these
crates out of the way," Marvin said, gearing up his slacker
credentials. I might get stuck with the shovel, but it would take
several people to move a derelict car, some of which looked pretty
immovable. A number of them, in fact, were propped on
cinderblocks.

"A7," said Uncle Vern, reading off the faded
lettering on one of the poles. "Legible enough."

A7 was off-center in the front row. Craning
my head up, I felt I was practically pressing my nose against the
ravaged screen. Someone watching a movie from this angle would have
been confronted by cinematic giants. One of the stains looked like
a silhouette of John Wayne in Fort Apache. I could almost imagine
the screen soaking up all the movies ever flashed onto its panels,
emitting them for history in a halflight.

"Well?" Uncle Vern persisted. By reading off
the pole ID, he must have thought he was priming my pump. But I
felt my pump shut down. I know the whole point of bringing me out
here had been to let me disclose the last fragment of vital
information on-site, with everyone present. If one or a select
party of them tried to coerce the location out of me (it wouldn't
take much), the others (it was understood by all) would be left
out. So they were keeping me alive and healthy for as long as it
was necessary to guarantee everyone's so-called rights—excluding
Sweet Tooth. But why include Michael Schwinn and Yvonne Kendle? It
would have been to Uncle Vern's benefit to leave them roasting in a
premeditated car wreck. Weren't they in as much danger as me?

"Hey!" Yvonne shouted at me. "You want to
stop rotating on your stick?"

"Yeah," said Michael. "Quit jerking off. Tell
us the goddamn pole number."

These weren't comments from people who
thought they were on death's doorstep. Just the reverse:
that
I
was on death's
doorstep. Why was that so?

Knock knock. Who's there? Dummy. Dummy who?
Dummy Mute, who doesn't see that Michael and Yvonne probably have a
certifiable safety net against mortal harm. Something akin to a
letter in a safe place, with the envelope reading: "Do not open
unless I disappear down a high-powered wood chipper." I had not
taken out such an insurance policy. Nor could I fake having one
now, not with any credibility. You can take this as evidence of the
truthfulness of my story. Only a completely honest idiot would
confess such a fault.

"Hold the light this way," I said to Uncle
Vern, pointing to the edge of the lot.

"Toward the trees?" he said eagerly. "That
would make sense. Less chance of being spotted."

In fact, ever since Mom had pointed her light
in the direction of Meg Tawthorne's old house, I had hoped to see
signs of life through the trees. A porch light, the sound of a car
up a driveway. If Meg still lived there, she would be Mom's age, a
hardbitten country girl, prematurely aged and haunted by the twin
demons of ignorance and superstition—or so my own ignorance and
superstition told me would be the natural result of permanent
residence in the hollers. Such a woman would be prey to fears of
all the things the scientists up the road had explained away long
ago. But there were more parochial dangers that were very real:
gnarly moonshiners and clandestine meth lab gauchos moving product
by night, greasing palms and slitting throats with equal aplomb. If
you didn't mess with them, they would (usually) leave you alone.
But if my theoretical observer spotted strange lights in the old
drive-in, would she call the sheriff, or leave well enough alone?
It was more likely that she wasn't there, awake or asleep. These
backwoods hovels are not only primitive, but ephemeral. The
hardscrabble life leaves few scars.

Assuming they were penned or leashed, even
the baying hounds would have presented a hopeful sign, except the
sound came from the wrong direction.

I reached the treeline. Everyone but my
mother was tagging along, each making sure all revelations were
properly shared. Their greedy little eyes swiveled with the light.
Every so often a junk car would emit a peep or growl. It was like a
landlocked reef, sharks and their prey lurking just out of sight.
Feeling very much like a guppy, I gave an authoritative grunt.
Guppies don't grunt, you might say. Well, not until
now
.

"What?" Jeremy thrusted forward
carnivorously. Somehow the shovel had ended up in his hands. He
held it out to me.

"Not here," I said, waving him off.

"Then why—"

"I'm just getting my bearings," I said, with
a couple grains of truth.

"What nonsense," said Uncle Vern. "It's a
simple A-B-C with a very basic numeric value."

"There's nothing simple about
this
." Trapped in Uncle Vern's
improvised klieg light, I mimed a theatrical wand over the broad
lot. "In case you haven't noticed, some of the poles are
missing."

"Not enough to miss a beat," snickered
Marvin, not missing a beat.

"Shadows…junks…and look, a raccoon!"

"Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!" laughed
Yvonne.

"I won't answer for your health if you force
us to dig up every slot in this drive-in," Uncle Vern said.

"There's no need to threaten me," I said.

"Would you rather not be warned?"