Skunk Hunt Read Online Free PDF Page B

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