Skunk Hunt Read Online Free PDF Page A

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