The old man pointed. On its side, in the dirt, lay a sheep. At first the vet thought it was dead. But as he walked up to it the sheep opened its eyes. It kicked its legs slightly.
“I been getting it up,” the old man said. “But as soon as it lies down it can’t get back up again.”
Fifteen or twenty other sheep stood here and there, some of them watching. The old man squatted down beside the sick sheep, took hold of its fleece, and dragged it up. The sheep managed to get a purchase on the ground; it stumbled forward and then slowly tottered a few steps. It did not seem to see where it was going. Once, it fell forward onto its knees and then down on its face. But it managed to struggle back up.
The vet noticed that the sheep dragged its hindquarters. A spinal infection, he thought. The sheep wobbled about like a broken machine; its parts seemed to fly off in opposite directions until its rear dragged and its legs slid out from beneath it. The sheep sat down heavily and then tipped over and lay on its side once more, as he had first found it.
“I think you’re going to have to destroy it,” the vet said.
The old man said, “No, that’s my best ewe. I get two lambs out of her every year. She’s only six years old.”
Opening his bag the vet got out his instruments. With a rectal thermometer he took the sheep’s temperature, and then with his stethoscope he listened to its lungs. It did not have much of a fever, and its lungs sounded all right.
“No pneumonia,” he said. “Not yet, anyhow.”
Holding the sheep with his knee, he examined its rear legs and spine. Maybe it’s tetanus, he thought. But more likely it’s a cyst in the spine.
“I’ll give it a shot of antibiotics,” he said. He got out the bottles and needle, and presently he had done all he could do for the sheep. “You watch it,” he said. “If it dies, better have an autopsy made to find out what it had. So it won’t infect the rest of your flock. Give it about a week.” He began putting his instruments away. The sheep lay where it was, its eyes open and staring; it made no move to get up.
“I think a dog got it,” the old man said.
“No,” the vet said. “There’s no sign of an injury.”
“Terrible black dog got in here last year,” the old man said. “I mighta got him, but I didn’t get my gun in time.”
As he started to leave the corral, the vet heard a coughing noise. He picked out a ram standing with its head down, its front legs wide apart. The ram coughed, shook its head, stood breathing heavily.
The vet said, “That ram there. That could possibly be lung worm. I don’t say it for sure, but it could be.”
The old man said nothing.
“You don’t want it to get into your pasture,” the vet said. “In wet, it gets down in and can infect the whole flock.”
“Don’t worry about that ram,” the old man said, walking with the vet from the corral and back down the road. “I got over three hundred sheep. That ram’s just tired. He just bred all them ewes. He sneezes like that because he’s tired.”
“Lung worm is highly infectious,” the vet said. Seated in his truck he wrote out a bill and handed it to the old man. The old man read it, reached into his jeans and got out a leather purse; from it he took three dollars and passed them up to the vet.
“Don’t ever come back,” the old man said.
The vet was astonished.
“My ram’s okay,” the old man said. “It was a courtesy, my calling you to come out here. I wanted to give you the business.”
After a moment the vet found his voice and said, “Three dollars to drive twenty miles out here and give a shot of antibiotics—that isn’t much business.”
The old man said, “I don’t need you to look at my ram. I didn’t call you to look at my ram.” He turned and walked away, back to the other old men seated along the wharf.
For a moment the vet sat without starting up the motor of his truck. He felt like yelling after the old man that he had lost money making this trip out here, and that he was giving him good advice, free advice, about his ram. That the ram might infect the man’s whole flock, and that this might save the flock, this advice. But the old man did not want to hear that another sheep was sick; it was hard enough for him to accept that his best ewe was dying of a spinal cyst. He believed a dog had injured her and that she would get well with the aid of a shot from the vet. The old man was scared and angry, and it was the vet who had brought him the bad news, so it was the vet who was responsible.
I ought to know these old farmers by now, the vet thought as he started up the truck. They lead simple lives and anything that upsets them scares them.
Instead of being angry, he thought, I should feel sorry for him. But he could not. There had been so much of this; it always scared farmers to find out that they had not only sick animals but animals with highly contagious diseases. I always have to take the blame, he said to himself. No wonder the last vet left. No wonder Dr. Bryant couldn’t make a go of it, here.
I should have stayed in Canon City, he said to himself. On my brother-in-law’s ranch.
Look at those old men, he thought. Seated along the broken down wharf, hands on their knees. Waiting for the oyster barge. What do they do? Open the oysters? Stare out across the water. Never fix or repair anything. Never paint their houses. Never go anywhere, except bring their oysters into town once or twice a week and pick up supplies. They might as well be dead and buried.
He drove up the road past the wharf and through the old town itself, past the abandoned grocery store with its broken windows stuffed with rags, past what had been a feed store, a barn that had been the blacksmith’s place for the entire area. To his right he saw the old abandoned original Carquinez School. The building, square and yellow, still had its flagpole. But no flag. The front steps had fallen away. The door hung open. Inside, he saw only darkness.
Now the road rose as it circled back. He passed shacks made of boards, tarpaper, without foundations, leaning and settling into the sand. A rusting auto body, upside down, lay in one yard and he saw two children playing nearby. Worse than Poor Man’s Hollow, the vet said to himself. The children wore dirty rags and their hair hung down in strings, uncut, like the hair of animals. In a sense this was an extension of Poor Man’s Hollow. Some of these people were itinerant farm workers, fruit pickers and mill workers…at least, he supposed they were. Actually, he did not know how they survived. They couldn’t all live off the oyster farm.
As he drove on, the vet saw something that surprised him. From the top of a shack a television antenna stuck up, held by guy wires, a three-section mast at least fifty feet tall.
So they have TV sets out here, he thought.
On his drive back, up the ridge and among the fir groves, he took a moment to flip open his note pad to see what his next call was. His wife had taken the information and he read it for the first time. In her neat hand she had written, “Sheriff Christen. 11:30 to 12:00. At Mr. Runcible’s house, not office.”
There’re no animals there, he thought. At least, none that I know of. And why the sheriff?
Sometimes Christen called him in when an animal had died and there was suspicion of poisoning. In the past, dogs and cats had got rat or gopher bait, and Christen had wanted to know if it looked deliberate. Maybe the Runcibles have a cat, he thought. There were plenty of cats in the area; all the farmers had them, to protect their feed.
I might get five dollars for that, he thought. So far today he had made nothing; the cost of medicine and gas had eaten up what he had taken in.
At the Runcible house he found ruddy-faced Sheriff Christen in his Sam Browne uniform, and Leo Runcible wearing a cloth cap, tennis shoes with holes in the toes, paint-stained trousers, and a heavy cotton sweater. This was the first time he had ever seen the Realtor in anything but a business suit and tie, and at first he did not recognize him. With them was a third man whom he had never seen before. There were several cars parked in front.
“You didn’t see Dr. Terance, d
id you?” the sheriff asked him. “We’re waiting for him, too.”
The vet said, “What’s going on?”
“We want you to look at some old bones,” the sheriff said. To Runcible, he said, “You know the vet, Dr. Heyes.”
“Yes,” Runcible said, shaking hands with the vet. “Glad to see you, Doctor.” The unfamiliar man held out his hand and Runcible said, “This is—what’s the first name? Bill? Bill Baron from the San Rafael Journal.” Runcible’s face had a glazed expression; his eyes gleamed. His voice, the vet noticed, was gruff, as if he was nervous or under pressure.
“I didn’t see Doctor Terance,” he said as he shook hands with Baron. “What kind of old bones?”
The three of them led him along the side of the house, into the backyard. A section of fence had been lifted aside, and the men took him into a field behind the yard. There, among boulders and piles of dirt, the vet saw an excavation. The hole had laid bare the base of two huge rocks. The dirt had spilled away naturally, he saw, and in addition there had been recent digging. Shovels lay around here and there, and in cardboard cartons he saw what looked like granite stones.
Spread out at the base of a eucalyptus tree were bones. Sheriff Christen led him to the bones, knelt down, and pointed.
“Looks like bear,” the vet said. “Deer.”
“How long ago killed, would you say?” the reporter said.
The vet picked a bone up. It felt dry and light; it had turned yellow, and the edges were jagged. Taking out his pocketknife he scraped at the end. The bone had become hollow; the marrow was long since gone. It had no moisture in it of any sort.
“Hard for me to say,” he said. “Seems thoroughly weathered.”
“Look at this one,” Runcible said.
The vet accepted the bone and saw that it had become partly petrified. Almost like rock, he thought. He had seen whale bones like this. Fossilized. Thousands, perhaps millions of years old.
“I’d say this is quite old,” he said.
“What’s it from?” the reporter said.
The bone seemed to him to be a large joint, perhaps an old cow hip end. Ball and socket, once. But for a cow bone it seemed unusually massive.
“What do you want Terance for?” the vet said.
The three men glanced at each other. Then, at last, Sheriff Christen stepped down into the excavation. The vet followed him; together they made their way down the base of the rock. A kind of cave had been exposed. He saw the signs of water; the rock was worn smooth. Once, he decided, this had been the mouth of a stream.
Exposed, at the back of the cave, lay a skull. Someone had propped the dirt roof of the cave up with two-by-four sections. Around the skull he saw other bones, and shells, mostly oyster shells. And, he saw, there was a tapered granite tool of some kind.
“My god,” the vet said. “Somebody got murdered?”
The other men grinned. Sheriff Christen said, “Well, maybe.”
“A long time ago,” the reporter said.
“Oh,” the vet said, understanding. Now he bent down near the skull. “Can I pick it up?” he said. “Or is it too fragile?”
“Put your hands under it,” Runcible said, in an authoritative voice. “So you’re supporting its weight. Go ahead.”
With care, the vet ran his hands down the sides of the skull until he had a grip on it. They had had it out before; he could tell that. Taken it out and put it back, he thought as he lifted the skull from the dirt.
At once he saw that there was something wrong with it. “Wow,” he said. “It’s deformed or something.”
“Or something,” Runcible said.
From behind them a voice called. They turned, and the vet saw a man running towards them through the eucalyptus trees, carrying an armload of books. As the man ran he yelled, “I was right! I have it here! You can tell by the teeth!”
A book fell from his arms and struck the ground, its leaves fluttering. The man started back, hesitated, then continued on towards them. The vet recognized him, now. The fourth grade teacher, his face aflame with excitement.
“The crown and root runs together!” Wharton yelled at them. Beside the vet the sheriff began to chuckle in a low voice. Runcible, tensely, watched the grammar school teacher approach. The reporter kept the same manner as before, one of interest mixed with reserve. “The teeth are fused,” Wharton yelled, and arrived beside them, panting and holding out a book. “The teeth are all exactly alike!”
By its shape the vet recognized it as a text book, with a library stamp on the spine. Wharton was showing them a photograph, and in a glance he saw that it was of a skull, first profile and then full-faced. Wharton held the photograph next to the skull which the vet held; the man’s hands were shaking, and he continued to repeat himself.
The reporter said, “It’s not possible.”
“Why not?” Runcible said.
“They never have found one before,” the reporter said.
“That’s a fine reason,” Runcible said loudly. “A great reason. What kind of a reason do you call that? I’ll tell you what kind of reason I call that.” His voice rose hoarsely, trembling. “That’s a horse’s ass reason; do you know that?” He stared at the reporter with anger. The reporter shrugged. “I suppose,” Runcible said, “that airplanes won’t fly and the Russians didn’t reach the Moon.”
The skull in the photograph was labeled Neanderthal Man. The vet thought, That’s right; it isn’t possible. They’ve never found any remains in the New World, of any dawn men or extinct men, or whatever they’re called. Runcible stood with his face flushed, yelling into the face of the reporter. Beside him, Wharton continued to jabber on about the books; he kept trying to show Sheriff Christen something, but the sheriff stood off to one side, still chuckling to himself, grinning on and on.
Above the racket, the vet managed to think to himself. It must be one of Runcible’s publicity gags, he thought. Like that sign, or when he had all the buildings painted. It must be a fake.
12
On Saturday morning Walt Dombrosio walked down to the post office before twelve, since at twelve the window closed and although he could get the mail from their box he could not get magazines or packages. In the box he might find a red card saying that there was mail too big for the box, and he might have to spend the rest of Saturday and all day Sunday wondering what it was.
This Saturday, when he opened the box, he found a slender dark brown small envelope from the bank; it had a transparent window, and his name and address were written in pen, not typed. He knew at once what it was. Several times in the past year or so he had got one of these. It was a notice that their current account was overdrawn, and that the bank had handled the check anyhow, at a special rate.
As soon as he was outside the post office he tore open the envelope. He was right. The check, put through against “insufficient funds,” was for only ten dollars, so that meant there was not even ten dollars in the account. Sherry had made out the check, he noticed. In his heart he felt wild fright; he began to walk back up the hill towards the house as rapidly as possible.
When he got back home he found his wife out on the patio, seated in a wicker chair in her halter and yellow shorts, reading a book.
“Listen,” he said, “we’re overdrawn.”
Sherry said, “No, we’re not.”
“What do you mean we’re not?” he said. “Look at this notice.” He waved it at her, and, at last, she put down her book and accepted it from him.
“They’re wrong,” she said presently.
“The bank is never wrong,” he said. “When was the bank ever wrong?” Her lack of concern goaded him into a frenzy; he felt as if he were watching a world in slow-motion.
“I went over the check books just the other day,” Sherry said. “We have about two hundred dollars in the account. I’ll call the bank.” She read the name of the teller. “I don’t recognize this man,” she said. “He probably doesn’t know us; he probably put a check through to my old a
ccount, the one we closed when we opened our joint account.”
“It’s Saturday,” he said. “The bank’s closed.”
That did not seem to bother her; she put down the notice and again picked up her book. “I’ll call them Monday,” she said. “Or you can go in. You’ll be here; I’d have to call from the City. So maybe you should go in.”
With as much control as possible, he said, “Maybe you better go inside and get the checkbooks and go over them again. Now.”
“No,” she said, with a hint of exasperation. “I just did.”
“Where’s the last statement?”
“In the drawer,” she said. “I suppose.”
He went inside the house and into the bedroom. For the last few months he had been letting her reconcile the checkbooks, since it was her salary that they were depositing, now, not his. She wanted to, and he could not stop her. And she wrote the checks for the bills.
Her attitude was one of competence; she always wrote out her checks neatly, filling in the number of the check—which he could never remember to do—and the stub. Her writing was precise and legible, and the bills got opened, examined, and paid before the tenth. And yet here they were; here was this overdraft notice.
The statement, he discovered, had not been opened. And it was almost two weeks old. Seated on the bed he tore the large bulky brown envelope open, spilled out the canceled checks, and studied the account sheet which the bank had made out. It showed a balance of only forty-five dollars.
He ran back outdoors, carrying the sheet and the checks, “Look,” he cried with ferocity, holding them between her and her book. “Why didn’t you open this? How could we have two hundred dollars balance? Two weeks ago we had only forty-five, and we haven’t made a deposit since the third—have we?” She did not answer. “Have we?” he yelled down at her.
“You stop screaming at me,” she said in her low, deadly tone, “or there’s going to be a real fight.”
More quietly, his voice shaking, he said, “Where are the checkbooks? I want all three. The big one and the two little ones.”
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