four times.
During the break, I hook up with the contractor to do a bit of cockie shearing. He has a few sheds not too far from town that really only need him classing, me shearing, and the farmers’ sons penning up. Easy, not pressure work, and I build up my nest egg that little bit further. Some of the others say I’m hungry, but I don’t give a shit. One day I’ll have that big house and pay for it with cash. So after we knock off one evening, we drive to the local pub for a quick drink, and run into Carcass. His misery has worn off by this stage, and he shouts us a round, which is not a common thing. We ask him how he’s been and if he’s still celibate, and he just laughs it off and says that you win some and you lose some. But he can’t quite hold it together because after a few seconds he adds . . . not that I lose many. Then he insists that our contractor make sure a less bitchy female rousy is taken on for the next run, as he has to get his tally back up. So we laugh for longer than we mean to, and finally decide to kick off. We’re moving to another shed the next day.
Where? asks Carcass.
At Ben Williams’s, we say.
Well, I’ll be damned, he comes back. That’s where I’m staying. The old bloke has a shack down the back of the place and I’ve just moved in.
The contractor is incredulous. You mean you’ve given up that swish place you’ve got in town? Given up your plasma telly and gas barbie?
Nah, says Carcass, this is a temporary arrangement, it just suits me at the moment.
I look hard at Carcass, who seems more decrepit than usual. His bulkiness shifts uneasily on his legs, and the hairs in his nose are so barbed that they’re pricking his mucous membranes. He hasn’t washed for days. He’s sweating grime.
Anyway, he adds, as we’re leaving, poke your head down when you finish work and I’ll give you a drink.
Two acts of generosity in two days, that’s overload.
We don’t see Carcass while we’re working. We check with Ben Williams regarding the location of his shack, and he says it’s about a mile down the creek. He is a flat kind of bloke, so he doesn’t offer to discuss how he came to this strange arrangement with Carcass. He just goes off to make sure the sheep penning’s going according to plan.
To tell the truth, we really just want to head home. The sheep are tough—a lot of sand in the wool—and I’ve been through a lot of cutters. I’ll be grinding all night to get them right for the next day. But victims of Carcass that we ultimately are, we drive down the track along the creek to search out the shack. It’s easy enough to find, and Carcass is already out the door when we arrive.
Good onya for comin’ down, he says. Or gloats. We’ve seen that look in his eyes all too often. They’re semi-closed and almost weeping. He fixes us with a boar-like intensity. Like he’s going to charge.
Come in, come in.
We follow him, at a safe distance. And there she is, slightly blushing, flipping the top of a longneck. A beer, guys? she asks.
Er, thanks. We look at Carcass—glowing . . . no, swollen with vindication . . . we look at her . . . ?
What? She cuts in before we can speak: Carcass had no place to stay, you know, and Ben’s my uncle, so I can use this place whenever I’m around.
We shuffle our feet and say nothing. Carcass just has that big grin on his face that says, You guys keep your mouths shut.
Well, she says, anyway, there’s room here.
We look around. There isn’t much room. The lounge is a double bed folded up for the day. There doesn’t seem to be much more than a kitchen. An outside dunny?
We have a drink, make our excuses, and leave. I make the foolish mistake of glancing back as we drive off along the creek. Carcass is at the door, giving us and anything else that might walk, crawl, slither, or fly past the thumbs up. Yep, all’s right in the world.
The seven-year itch. Sarcoptic mange. Microscopic parasites. Sarcoptes mites. Laying their waste on the skin, inside hair follicles. Secondary infections. Hair loss. Foxes plead for warmth, and wander in the full-blown light of day. A daylight foxstrike on the road.
I can’t say the doctor visibly retreated when the old man told him he’d had mange for years, but I think he wanted to. I could be projecting here. There’d be a battery of psychoanalytical terms for my response, but I’ve little faith in them. My ECG machine went wild as I hoisted myself up to listen, so I called out, It’s okay, I’m just shifting myself . . . knowing the doctor would turn his attention to me and the nurses come running. I might not die that night, but I could.
Otherwise, I was fairly compos, if a little vague and racked by constant shaking. But this conversation, between the earnest young South African doctor and the wizened but zesty old wheatbelt farmer, was something I wanted to listen to—living or dead, I reckon I had a vested interest in its progress, and that rather than eavesdropping I was, by juxtaposition, a concerned party. After all, I might come back as a mange-ridden red fox, or spread mange to my loved ones as they mourned over my corpse. I remembered my wife telling me that yoga sessions usually begin and end with the corpse posture. That helped.
Anyway, as far as I can remember, the conversation between doctor and patient went along the following lines. Bear in mind that the whole time it was going on, the doctor was trying unsuccessfully to tap a vein in the old man’s arm, to draw blood for tests pertaining to the unrelated condition—not mange, that is—that had brought him to the hospital in the first place:
It’s because of the foxes. Up on the farm. Terrible creatures.
Yes. Yes.
If you’ve seen what they do to a coop of chickens if they get in—sampling the livers and little else—you’d agree.
Yes. Yes. Sorry, another small pinprick in the arm. Having a little trouble finding a vein. (I smiled at this—I love medical tautologies.)
My veins have always been like that. I used to shoot dozens of foxes in a night. Hunt them. I have to say I enjoyed it. Enjoyed killing the killers. (Truly, his laugh after this was a cackle.)
Yes. Yes. Hmmm, they are killers. Hmmm . . . Ohhhh, no luck there, sorry. Sorry about the bruises—you’ll have some beauties. We’ll have to try the other arm.
That’s okay. Whatever it takes. I used to shoot them and skin them. I was the fastest skinner in the district. It’s what I most miss. We’ve been off the farm for ten years. We farmed out on the edge of the wheatbelt. Far as you can go. Some paddocks—and these paddocks were thousands of acres—we could only crop every few years because it was so dry. But foxes! They were everywhere. I shot them only in the head if I could, to avoid damaging the pelts. But I’d happily have shot them where it hurts most first. That’s something to be said for the mangy bastards—sorry for my French—didn’t matter where you shot them, their pelts were useless.
The doctor was hypnotized by the old codger’s ingrown veins and barely uh-hummed back.
It didn’t matter where you shot ’em! Sometimes if I was feelin’ down or off-color, I’d spread poison. That’s another story—plenty of punishment for the devils there,
