Perdido - Hardcover

Five dead skunks lay on the highway in front of the Guadalupe lumberyard. Two of them had been badly mangled by cars. The other three were intact and Will thought they looked as though they'd keeled over in mid-step. The place was quiet and empty, with just a couple of vehicles parked way off to the side that belonged to Joe and his brother, Lawrence. The air outside the building smelled rank. Lawrence was behind the front counter when Will walked in.

"What's with the skunks?" he asked.

Lawrence was leafing through a trade magazine. "Keep the door closed," he said, without looking up. "It's bad out there."

"It's bad in here," Will said and pushed the door shut with his foot.

"Not as bad as before. It's worse early in the morning, but then you get used to it." He flipped through the pages of the magazine quickly. Lawrence was nineteen years old and was the second youngest of eight brothers who all worked, off and on, at the store. The business had been run by their father and before that their grandfather, who had bought it for too much money from the Medina family. Lawrence tossed the magazine aside and reached for another one. He spent from seven-thirty in the morning to five in the afternoon behind the front desk reading hardware literature and making lists of what to order that Joe always ignored.

"So," Will said. "What were you, attacked?"

Lawrence studied the catalogue in his hands and then swiveled on his stool and tossed it in the trash. "We borrowed a trap from Lloyd," he said. "Been catching a skunk a day all week." He straightened out his back and stretched. "It's too hot to work today. What do you want, anyway?"

"You're trapping skunks, then bringing them over here and running them over?"

"Did you just come over here to bother me?" Lawrence asked. "They're from the yard. From under the building."

The lumberyard had always been infested with skunks. Even in the dead months of winter you could catch the faint odor of skunk wafting up from the floorboards. One spring, a few years back, Enrique, the youngest brother who must have been all of twelve years old at the time, had come up with the idea to gas them. He and Lawrence hooked up the exhaust pipe of their delivery truck to a long hose and pumped the fumes under the foundation. They all thought this was a great idea until everyone inside began to get headaches.

"How do you get the skunk out of the trap without getting sprayed?" Will asked.

"The skunk can't lift his tail in the trap," Lawrence told him. "We drag the trap out to the road and open it. The skunk runs like hell and Enrique shoots it."

They looked at each other for a few seconds without saying anything. Finally, Will asked, "Where's Joe?"

"In the office."

Joe was laid out in the chair behind his desk, his hands wrapped around the back of his head, his legs stretched out to the side. "Qu pasa, Will?" he said.

Will pulled a chair out from against the wall and sat down. "Not much," he said, smiling. "So why is the highway littered with the dead?"

Joe rocked his chair back and forth gently. "Nasty out there, isn't it?"

"Maybe you ought to at least shovel them off the road, Joe. There's people around here these days who might question the massacre of small animals."

"If I leave them out there it's a warning to the other skunks," Joe said. "Besides, we're getting a good crowd every morning. If the supply holds out we can sell tickets." He pushed himself forward in the chair with some effort. His fingers played with the papers on his desk. "So how come you're not working?"

Will shrugged. "We had a job fall through. We've got a deck to build next week so we're taking a long weekend." For a few seconds neither one of them spoke and then Will asked, "Anyway, you still got that redwood out in the yard?"

"It's sitting out there aging."

"Good," Will said and stood up. "So, save me about five hundred square feet, will you?"