Yes. Think we’re onto a vein here.
It was them foxes that gave me the mange.
Maybe this time. Now, another pinprick. No, wait—sorry. (He almost said, Damn, I could sense it.)
That’s okay. You’ll get one in the end. Yes, I’ve had the mange for twenty years. Can’t get rid of it.
Hmmm. (The doctor had lifted his head and broken the spell; he seemed slightly bothered, outside the vein horror.) I know humans can catch mange, but it’s easy to clear up and doesn’t last long.
Nope, sorry, Doc, the specialist (he said this with particular emphasis) said I would have it forever. Them mites love me. Just love me. Stay buried in my body, gettin’ born again!
He laughed loud and irritated the doctor, who’d convinced himself he was just about to strike it rich, and only missed because the old man’s body shook as he laughed.
Look, here’s a patch. Look, if I scratch it, it flakes. Gets infected easily.
Please try not to move your arm, Mr. R. It is quite difficult to get a vein. I will mention your situation regarding the apparent “mange” to our skin specialist, and he can take a look at you. If you’re not around mangy foxes now, it should be easy enough to clear up. You don’t have any pets with mange?
Pets? Waste of time. Always had working dogs on the farm for the sheep, but they lived outside. Never let a dog inside. Couldn’t stand them touching me. Never liked them. Wouldn’t even let them in the cab of the ute. I’ve gotta say, though, there’s nothing as beautiful as a clean fox fur—I used to say to my wife that it was as good as touching her!
I almost laughed out loud but held it in. It might kill me and kill the conversation. The monologue. I was learning stuff. I should tell you now that I’ve more than a vested interest. More than a fear of catching the mange. I have been campaigning for years to have the local annual fox-cull competition banned. Brutality. I wasn’t quite sure how, but this was invaluable info.
Look, Mr. R., I just can’t find a vein, sorry. I think I will have to ask a nurse to take blood from you.
Yes, those nurses do a lot of it, Doc. Sure you don’t want to touch this mange? Might be educational for you.
Probably not a good idea, Mr. R. I’ll mention it to the specialist.
No need, there’s no cure. It’s just part of my identity. And every time it flares and I itch I remember the farm. And these mite things are the offspring of the mites that were there when I was there. And maybe they trace their heritage right back to Europe. That’s where my ancestors came from, Germany. But they came here in the 1910s to make a life for themselves. They were never no Nazis. Just hardworking German country folk. They have red foxes there, too. Terrible creatures, foxes. Eat the livers out of chickens. Will kill twenty and sample them all and then leave the carcasses strewn about like slaughter.
I’ll go now, Mr. R., and find a nurse to take your blood.
Nothing like a fox in the spotlight.
The nurse came in after a while, but the old man didn’t say much more. He flirted with her a bit, but it seemed the fox stuff was a man’s business. The nurse had drawn the diaphanous curtain fully between us, so I couldn’t really see anything (should I have been trying to look?), but I could paint the picture through his cackling, his broken but vivid words. He was a master of semitones. The doctor scuttled in to ask the nurse how it was going, and then scuttled out. I shifted in my bed again, enough to set off the ECG alarm. It’s okay, it’s okay, just adjusting myself. It sounded odd, but no one poked their head in.
The following morning saw me slightly better, and the old man chipper. Is that the word used for one of German heritage? Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed seems nondenominational, but still pertinent in the context. I was amusing myself in small-minded ways. I hadn’t slept for a long time. Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed? A nurse swept the curtain back and said, Mr. L., meet Mr. R.—you have been neighbors for a while.
Mr. R. immediately said, Gidday, but I averted my eyes. Such confrontation couldn’t work for me. I already knew him as Mr. R.—he was always being called Mr. R. I knew him as Mr. R., fox-killing psychopath. I didn’t want a relationship with him. I didn’t want to open a dialogue! I averted my eyes, grumbled, and pointed to the ECG. The nurse swept around our beds, indifferent. I’ve got mange, Mr. R. said, but he might have been saying this to the nurse, who it turns out was just back from a two-week holiday and knew nothing of either Mr. R. or me, other than what our medical notes showed. We were clean slates for him.
By the next day I was able to chat and receive visitors. Mr. R.’s skin specialist hadn’t materialized, and I tried to hint to each of “my people” that my neighbor might have something horrifically contagious. He no longer tried speaking to me, but spoke to my visitors with enthusiasm. No matter how much I tried to signal them with hand movements and grimaces, they all replied to him. My sister even sat next to him for a while. My ECG went up and the nurses asked everyone to leave me to rest. I could have sworn I saw Mr. R. smirk. I certainly heard him cackle.
I slept long that night. For the first time in days. When I woke, Mr. R. was gone. Nurses were wheeling a new, crisply made bed into the place where he and his bed and his mange had bubbled. My curiosity surprised me. Where is Mr. R.? I asked. I was expecting to hear he died during the night, of the ailment that had brought him there; or maybe the mange had finished him off. My heart raced, and the nurses commented on the spike—not enough to set the alarm off, but getting there. And you were seeming so much better, one said. I was afraid Mr. R. had died. I really was.
Mr. R.? Well, he’s gone home. Left early this morning, just after I took your vitals. Don’t you remember? He even said good-bye.
I didn’t. Nothing. A blank.
But my heart settled, and I stared at the ceiling. Then the alarm went off and the nurses started fussing. Foxes! I yelled. Nothing else. Though deep inside my head I could feel the mange at work—and I knew Mr. R. was out there already spreading the mange, sharing the love. It was his God-appointed duty.
I have been a country boy as well, you know. I have known the dry . . . In the hard times when there was little work I went back out there, conjuring up a living . . .
It had been a drier year than usual in a very dry place. So dry that farmers hadn’t even bothered putting in crops over the autumn and winter. The dams were empty, and wells drawn on, to the point of insolvency, windmills turning hard in the blazing easterlies that came in daily. House tanks were filled with water trucked from standpipes, and only the wealthiest had kept their patches of lawn green in defiance, standing their ground in the face of suffering. Herds of cattle and flocks of sheep had been culled to bare bones, to basal metabolic rate, as the town doctor joked—and he spent most of his time propping up the wettest place in town, the front bar of the pub. He had a sick wit.
There was only one church in town, and that was Anglican, though it was hard to guess that because it did business for a number of creeds. Even Catholics turned up there occasionally—though they mainly traveled to a neighboring town also in the grip of drought, whose baptismal font was equally dusty. The few Church of Christ believers in the district worshipped in their houses—you could tell a prayer meeting was in swing by whose cars were gathered along the verges. The “C of C” tended to be town dwellers there, not so much farmers, though there were one or two
