Free Skunk Hunt by J. Clayton Rogers Page B

matched) was just outside the Imax theater,
planted there as a consolation to the busloads of nursing home
residents wheeled in every week and who stared uncomprehendingly at
the exhibits: Space Gallery, Bodies in Motion, Electriworks, the
Foucault Pendulum, the Science Sleuth Theater, the Human Genome
Project, the giant granite kugel. But the popcorn stand triggered
memories of carnivals, old cinema houses, the crunch-munch of
toothy days long-gone. The elderly faces melted into fondness as
they peered past their cataracts at the sixteen ounces of popcorn
beckoning to them from beyond the glass. The machine was hot, and I
had an unfortunate tendency to salt the contents with my sweat.
Occasionally someone would notice this bit of unintentional
bio-terrorism and stomp away in disgust. Otherwise, customers
happily ingested the ureic spice of life.
    Not the oldsters, though. They smacked their
bare gums and fell into dreamy swoons, but all they could savor was
the aroma. To tell you the truth, they looked like mutants. It
didn't help my attitude to know I was headed in the same
direction—if I was lucky.
    I heard the roar of a futuristic spaceship
from the theater. The five-o'clock show was coming to an end as the
Interplanetary Explorer Regurgitation fired its landing rockets and
lowered itself in the great vomitorium of Earth. Needless to say,
its passengers looked longingly up at the stars, wishing they were
back on Mars.
    There weren't many customers for my
sweat-stained popcorn after a show. Like most theatergoers, they
weren't there to watch the credits, but were racing for the exits.
Funny how we'll sit through a film, even a good one, then treat it
like the plague. Think of the name of a single gaffer. See? You
don't like to see things through to the end, either. I guess we're
all like that. We all like fresh starts, as opposed to stale
endings, and we keep racing to new beginnings before finishing what
we've begun.
    The possibility of a new beginning had been
blazing a hot eager trail through my mind ever since the arrival of
the pseudo-Skunk letter. Of course it couldn't have been from Dad.
He was most definitely gone, commiserating with his ancestors in
the great white-trash heap in the sky. I mean, I saw him at the
morgue, right? Becoming one of the undead was implausible, but it
would have fit Dad's style. Returning from an all-nighter,
returning from jail, returning from the grave. But philanthropy was
even more improbable—statistically speaking, in fact, a McPherson
impossibility.
    Wherever the letters came from (all the
envelopes had been postmarked Richmond), the promise of unspeakable
riches...OK, I'll speak about them...sent shivers of hope through
me. Invisible shivers, fortunately. Rampant greed is never
sightly.
    From a very early age—I'd say from the
cradle, but then you wouldn't believe me—I knew that life wouldn't
happen for me. Obviously, I'm alive, but I mean life —the glamour, the swelling pride of
accomplishment, the virtues of consistency, the sweet smell
of...well, the sweet smell. It's a genetic fault, this tendency to
just wait for things to happen. At least I hope so. I'd hate to
think it was my fault. But
good things do happen to good
people, and bad people, and the indifferent. It could be good luck.
It could be bad luck. It could be the simple luck of
lucklessness.
    I wasn't really hoping that good things
come to those who wait. I was waiting naturally, like a ground hog,
just sitting around. Sooner or later a shadow was bound to appear.
Of course there was the possibility that it wouldn't be my shadow.
    Am I a victim of my environment? Am I a
victim at all? In my neighborhood, I've heard of some lowlifes
becoming mid-lifes, some mid-lifes going on to become successful
something-or-others. Inadequacy begins in the home, and that's
where I live. More precisely, though, it begins inside your own
skin, the ultimate prison.
    Eight-hundred and fifty thousand
dollars. Okay, divided by a