“That’s a subtle one,” Wharton said. “It affects you more mentally.”
“I like that the best,” Runcible said.
“Yes, it’s the best. But it’s hard to explain why.”
“It’s impossible to explain why,” Runcible said.
“The best jokes can’t be explained,” Wharton said. “It’s a form of art.”
“Art,” Runcible agreed. “A good joke is art.” Turning back to his desk he picked up a letter. “I want you to read this. It’s going to Duke University. I’d like your opinion. Actually, I should have had you over here all this time to read what I’m writing. I think I’ll open up these envelopes and let you read everything over.” He tore open the manila envelope addressed to Yale.
With obvious reluctance, Wharton took the letter. He glanced over it and then, without finishing it, said, “If you had Dombrosio tell you he faked it—if he admitted it—would you accept the situation, then?” He dropped the letter on the desk.
“That asshole, Dombrosio,” Runcible said. “You want me to tell you something about him?”
“I want to know if you’d accept it then,” Wharton repeated.
“Listen,” Runcible said. “That jerk has it in for me. I wouldn’t trust anything he says, not if it has to do with me. You want to know why he has it in for me? I’ll tell you, but don’t spread it around. You remember when the police picked him up when he was drunk and got his car stuck in the ditch. Well, I was the one who called the police. Naturally I didn’t know it was him. Anyhow, they took away his license, something I didn’t know they did, but that isn’t important. And my god damn wife went down there in a gushy bucketful of remorse and poured the whole thing out to him, all about my calling.” He was silent, then. “No,” he said. “I wouldn’t believe him if he said he faked it. It would be just like him.”
“Well then that explains it,” Wharton said.
“What explains what?”
“Why he’d do it.”
Runcible said, “A guy like Dombrosio—let me tell you about him. That kind of fink. Yes, fink. I suppose I’m offending you.”
“No,” Wharton said.
“Dombrosio,” Runcible said, “is a weak, mean fink. A grudge-holder. That wife of his gives it to him; she sticks it into him on the average of once a week. She wears the pants in that family, and not only the pants; she’s got what you usually find in the pants. So what does he do? He can’t take her on, because he’s weaker than she is; she can throw him around like a dead cat. So he gets off in his workshop down there—hell, I see him; I can look out the window and see him—and he nurses that grudge, the impotent bastard. And then you know what he does? He finds a scapegoat. And I know about that. We know about that. We’ve had that for three thousand years.”
“I see,” Wharton murmured.
“No,” Runcible said. “You don’t see. Because the guy’s practically a pal of yours.”
“Take it easy,” Wharton said. “Please.”
Runcible said, “I’m sorry. So anyhow, he has to find someone he can do dirt to, someone other than his wife or his boss—when he had a boss. If he had a dog he could kick it. Christ, if he had a kid he could beat it. But he’s got nothing. Only me. He’s got me to kick and beat and spit on. And this is his way.”
“What is his way?” Wharton listened alertly.
“To get your ear,” Runcible said.
The grammar school teacher stared at him, once more red-faced.
“Sure,” Runcible said. “Now, listen. Don’t get sore. I’m not saying anything about you, just him. You’re too pure; you haven’t got a bad bone in your body—and don’t think he doesn’t know it. He knows it. He drops it in your ear that—” He gestured. “He has a workshop; he’s got the skill, the know-how—”
Wharton said, “I’m surprised at you.”
“How do you mean?”
Struggling with words, the grammar school teacher stammered, “All this elaborate theorizing. It’s as plain as the nose on your face.” Then his agitation increased. “No racial reference intended,” he said.
“Hell,” Runcible said. “I’m proud of my hook nose. My Shylock nose. I wouldn’t get it fixed for anything on god’s green earth.”
There was silence for a long time. Wharton stood off to one side, picking at his sleeve. Runcible returned to studying his letters.
“I’ll see you later on,” Wharton said finally. He seemed to be worn-out, now. His animation had subsided. “I’m going to drop by Walt Dombrosio’s place to talk to him face to face.”
“Suit yourself,” Runcible said, intently studying a letter and not looking up at the grammar school teacher. “If you want to pal around with that fink, that shithead, go ahead. It’s a free country.”
“Good-bye,” Wharton said.
Runcible grunted and continued reading as the door shut after the teacher.
As he walked down the hill to the Dombrosio house, the grammar school teacher thought to himself that he could never shake Runcible’s faith. Because it was not faith; it was an affirmation.
The man declared that the thing was true. It was his religion, his dogma. He had seized a position, like a bulldog on a mound, and he meant to chew up all comers and spit them out, large and small alike.
Even if there were proof—even if absolute evidence did arise to back up his claim—that would not affect him.
Wharton thought, Neither proof for nor proof against is meaningful to him and his position. And that’s what I call true idealism. In the correct and best sense of the term.
Flashing his lantern ahead of him he picked out the path that led to Dombrosio’s front porch.
I don’t know why I’m going here, he thought. I know that Walter did it. And he certainly isn’t going to write it out and notarize it. In fact, he thought, suppose I do get him to say it; I get him to admit it in public, say, to one of the newspapers. Won’t that make Runcible seem even more ridiculous?
At the bottom porch step he stopped short. I’ll just be piling on more evidence to the contrary, he realized. How strange this is. By getting Walt to confess publicly, I’ll just make Runcible’s plight a trifle worse—in fact, a good deal worse.
If he’s determined to go on, then the worst that could happen would be to get Walt to come out and prove that he manufactured the skull.
They’re both crazy, he said to himself. One of them sawing and painting away in his workshop, the other at his desk writing letters and gathering citations from reference books. Both of them ingesting all there is to know about Neanderthal Man. A race that existed forty thousand years ago. All the data, the minutiae. Abandoning their real work, he thought. Their workaday jobs. Runcible not at his realty office, Dombrosio not in town searching for and finding new employment.
At least, he thought, I can go in there and tell Walt Dombrosio what I think of him.
But he tarried. He did not go in. He considered. And at last he turned around and went away.
I have to face facts, he said to himself. It’s fruitless to talk to either of them. I might as well bow out.
Otherwise, he said to himself, I’ll be just like them.
Early the next morning Leo Runcible was awakened by the telephone. When he had got out of bed and gone into the hall to answer it he found himself hearing an unfamiliar voice.
“You don’t know me,” the man said. “My name is Dudley Sharp. I’m attached to the anthropology department at UC. This is Leo Runcible I’m talking to, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” he said, holding the phone with one hand and tying the sash of his bathrobe with the other.
“I hope I didn’t wake you,” Sharp said. “But I wanted to talk to you as soon as it’s practicable. Bowman gave me an opportunity to examine your first skull and the later find, the more intact skeleton that he and Doctor Freitas turned up. Now, you understand—I hope you understand—that both finds have been thoroughly worked on by someone recently. In the past year or so, judging from the resins used.
But you also understand, don’t you, that they didn’t start from scratch. That is, in both cases they worked on actual skeletal remains which they got hold of somewhere. They didn’t build a skull or a skeleton. They used him, the way the Piltdown hoaxer rebuilt an actual very old human skull and a chimpanzee jaw.”
“Yes,” Runcible said, rubbing his eyes with his thumb and forefinger.
“I’m very much interested in the authentic remains which lie beneath the worked-over layers,” Sharp said. “If you follow me. In other words, I’ve been briefly trying to reconstruct—I don’t mean I’ve physically altered or harmed your finds; I mean I’ve mentally tried to picture what the individual or individuals who did the work had before them to start with. The two skulls—in fact the entire skeleton, the later find—are very peculiar.”
“How?” Runcible said.
“The hoaxer has augmented in some cases, and in others evidently entirely reconstructed,” Sharp said. “I’d better see you face to face; this is costing me too much. I’m paying for this myself. Can I drop over, say sometime later today or tomorrow?”
“Of course,” Runcible said. “Or I could come there, to the university.”
“That would be better,” Sharp said. “It’s hard for me to get away; I have classes until late afternoon.”
“You think that there is a Neanderthal skull beneath the layers that were deliberately added?” Runcible said.
“Oh no.” The man seemed to laugh. “Nothing like that. But the skulls are atypical. It may be that the hoaxer, once he had the notion of fabricating a Neanderthaloid skull, searched around for a skull that would serve as a good basis. He may have tried to procure an actual Mousterian skull and failed, so he did the next best thing; he got hold of a malformed skull—I don’t know where or how—and off he went. You ask if it’s a Neanderthal skull underneath, so to speak; but recall, the radioactive dating method has already established that it’s only a few hundred years old at the most.”
“True,” Runcible said.
“I’ll see you, then,” Sharp said. “Glad to have talked to you. When you get over here I can go deeper into it with you. For one thing I want to inveigle you into letting me try to restore the skull and intact skeleton as they were. But I have a hunch that’ll be hard to get your permission for.”
Before Runcible could say anything the man had rung off.
After he had got dressed he returned to the phone. Janet was still in bed; she had not wakened up. He dialed the operator and gave the number of the Chronicle.
Presently he was talking to someone at the paper.
“Listen,” he said, after he had identified himself. “You’ve had a good time running humorous articles about me, for purposes of circulation building. And that’s all fine. Now I want you to do something. I want you to call the University of California, the anthropology department, and interview a professor there named Dudley Sharp. In fact, maybe you had better send a man over there.”
The newspaper asked why.
Runcible said, “Through various tests—he can discuss them with you; I can’t—I’m not a scientist—he’s established a few things that indicate something a little different than the glib idea that’s probably sold you people a lot of papers, that my finds are fakes. Hoaxes.”
The newspaper agreed to follow up the lead, and Runcible hung up with a deep sense of satisfaction.
He ate breakfast with more gusto than he had in months.
15
In his workshop, sharpening a wood gouge, Walter Dombrosio looked up to see Michael Wharton standing in the doorway. With him was another man, tall, with dark-rimmed glasses and a crew cut, very young, smiling friendlily.
“We rapped on the front door,” the young man said, “but nobody heard us, so we came on in. Mr. Wharton thought your wife might be home but then he remembered that she would be in town at work.”
Wharton said, “This is Dudley Sharp from the University of California.”
With wariness, his heart hammering, Dombrosio at last shook hands with Sharp. “I was busy,” he said.
Wharton said, “He wants to find out where you got the skull and skeletal remains.”
“Yes,” Sharp said, still smiling, holding on to Dombrosio’s hand. “This is all on an informal basis, of course. I can assure you that you won’t put yourself in any jeopardy by telling me. I’m here as a private person, like Mr. Wharton, here, who I understand teaches at the local grammar school.”
“Where I got what skull?” Dombrosio said. But he knew that they knew.
Wharton, naturally, had worked it out. He felt frightened, but after all, he had expected it. He had prepared what he would do and say.
“The remains that you planted on Runcible’s property,” Wharton said. His face had a pinched quality; he spoke brusquely, as if he wanted to say as little as possible. It was obvious to Dombrosio that the grammar school teacher had not wanted to come. He wanted to leave, now; he hung back near the door. All this was distasteful to him. It was Sharp who had got him to come here.
“What’s the matter, Wharton?” Dombrosio said, feeling anger at the man. “If you don’t like it here, take off.”
His eyes twinkling, Sharp said, “I prevailed on Mr. Wharton. Let’s you and I discuss this, and leave him out; all right? That would be fairer. You tell me where you obtained the skulls and that will be the end of it; we won’t pursue the topic with you. Nothing related to what you did or why; we’re not concerned with that.”
He managed, after some argument and struggle, to get both of them out of the house; like door-to-door salesmen they hung on tenaciously, retreating step by step. Sharp talked pleasantly, rapidly, constantly, until finally he had shut the front door and locked it.
Still trembling, he threw himself down on the couch in the living room.
Well, it was known. What now? Was there a way they could get him? A law he had violated? Giving false information to the police? But he had given no information; he had simply buried the junk, first on his land and then on Runcible’s. Trespassing, possibly.
The most serious involved the original bones and skulls themselves. There they might have him. If they could prove how he had got them. And that was exactly what they were interested in.
I have to deny it, he decided. No matter what happens. It’s one thing for them to accuse me; after all, I could have done it—I have the skill and tools. I have the ability and I live in the area. But that won’t prove I did it. Nobody who dislikes Runcible will be convinced; they’ll take my side against him. So by god I’ll deny it until I’m dead. Even if Timmons and Jack Vepp say I did it.
He had a brilliant idea, then. I’ll say I got the idea of faking it after he found the skulls, he decided. I decided to make additional skulls and skeletons because he found them; I decided to do it and plant them on my land, but I changed my mind and gave up. The work I did at Donkey Hall—that had nothing to do with what Runcible found.
Nobody can prove that the work I produced is the same work that Runcible dug up. I defy them to do it.
Let them come here and threaten me all they want, he said to himself. Like they did today. The hell with them.
Going back to his workshop he resumed the sharpening of the wood gouge, feeling in him a grim, powerful assurance. A certitude that he knew could not be broken by anything that happened. He was in some inner sense safe.
But then a moment later he thought, All they had to do is look over the possibilities. There’s only one place I could get it at. If they think about it they’ll realize that, and if they go there and dig around they’ll be sure; they’ll find the parts missing.
And, he thought, that’s something Jack Vepp can tell them because he was along; it was his jeep we used that night and his map and shovels and Coleman gasoline lantern.
Christ, he thought dismally. I know there’s a law against grave robbing. Even those old abandoned graves that nobody knows about hardly, with those wooden crosses, no descendants bringing flowers or ke
eping the grass cut, the whole place falling into ruins. Wharton would know about it; he knows all the old structures in this area. Worse, he may even know who’s buried there; he can get hold of the families.
But even Wharton would not know that. The graves were too old, too abandoned. There hadn’t been a person buried there in sixty years. The most recent date that he and Vepp had made out on the crude wooden tombstones—or boards, actually—was 1899. And one of the names only had been at all familiar. The families did not now exist in the area. Of course, the glass jars lying around…he had thought that possibly they indicated that some relatives had been by with hand-picked flowers. Vepp thought no; he had argued that the jars had been left by fruit pickers who were winos, who had sneaked there to drink. Fruit pickers and mill workers and milkers who had used the place because no one came there.
That graveyard, he thought, belongs to us all; it’s part of the historical background of this area, and no one was using the bones buried there—no one has lost anything. We have a right to them, just as we have a right to the Indian relics, the arrowheads and granite tools, left over from before that. The older bones.
We are the descendants, he decided. We’ve inherited all that stuff, there. Including the wooden headstones, if we want them.
Carrying a shovel, Sheriff Christen trudged on up the path ahead of the others. Behind him came the vet, Doctor Heyes, and then Dudley Sharp from the University of California, and then Wharton the fourth grade teacher, and finally Leo Runcible and Seth Faulk.
A barbed wire fence surrounded the graveyard. The hillside, overgrown with tall brown oats, was safe from cattle; a second fence, made of stakes and boards, had been put up outside the barbed wire. Brambles had heaped themselves up onto the second fence, and some had got as far as the barbed wire. The brambles were black and thick, and Runcible saw within them the burrows of gophers.
With surprise he saw several wooden crosses outside the barbed wire, outside the graveyard. Brambles and oats had almost covered the crosses, and he wondered if anyone had noticed them besides him.