Creep out of bed when your wife is asleep. When your kids are tucked quietly into their rooms and there's nothing to watch except reruns you hated the first time around.
Creep away when the mothballed closet of memory begs for a gasp of fresh air. Rummage in the ragbag your wife stores in the basement, all those old T-shirts from bands who played music so loud it might make you cry now. All those acid-washed jeans you can't bear to be rid of, living out their sad days in a jumble of cast-off but not thrown away clothes, tangled up with your wife's miniskirts and bikinis and, Christ, the remnants of your own brief foray into spandex.
Ignore all those misguided fashions and focus on finding a single tube sock. Pull it from the snarl like a white snake from its den then close up the bag and tuck those rags away in a corner where one day your children will find them and wonder.
Stretch a strip of masking tape from one end of the sock to the other, hold your breath and spraypaint it black. Let the paint dry a few minutes then peel off the tape and voila!—a polecat with a hole in the toe. Stuff it with handfuls of other old socks, tie the open end with fishing line, and let the monofilament run for a while before cutting it away from the spool.
Now crouch in the bushes on one side of the road while your striped partner hides on the other, with the almost invisible high-tensile line strung over the asphalt between. When a car comes—and they always come if you wait long enough—pull your skunk into the street with a jerk, out into oncoming traffic, and laugh when the driver slams on the brakes.
In your day the curses of motorists rose blue as cigarette smoke from their unrolled windows on hot summer nights, because everyone smoked and no one's car had air conditioning. Sometimes they saw you on the side of the road. Sometimes they'd get out of their cars and give chase or shout vulgar threats from the road, and sometimes you had to run through backyards as familiar to you as your own, up trees, over fences, breathing hard in the house against the back door in the dark and your parents still sleeping upstairs.
Real adults never got out of their cars. Only college students home for the summer would bother to threaten or follow, so much older than you at the time and so much younger than you are now, shouting what they would do when they caught you but they never did even once. They gave up the chase and went back to their cars, off to their parties and lame summer jobs they would long for someday while bogged down in disappointing careers. Perhaps they drove off recalling their own games of skunk, played upon your parents while you slept in the backseat, only half woken when your father stopped short in the road.
And now here you are in the bushes again, pulling another sock into some other street. A car screeches and stops and the driver leaps out so you stand to run but his angry eye catches your own. He's old enough to be your son, or an older boy your son looks up to in school. The skunk might as well be his sock, left behind after basketball practice, or track—you'll never outrun someone who still wears tube socks. You're caught in mid-exit, frozen in time, and this brand-new driver beside his brand-new car stares you down like you aren't worth the chase, some middle-aged loser who hides in the bushes jerking a painted sock tied to a string.
You gather your skunk without speaking, no longer trying to hide. You reel in the fishing line around your hand but your victim peels out and drives off without waiting, grinding over your sock and bursting it open and dragging half of its innards away down the road. You hope he'll at least tell his friends about this, about getting skunked on the road, but then you realize word might reach your son and you hope instead that you aren't worth the trouble of telling.