Bones

“You know a lot about the law, don’t you?”

“A little more than the next guy on some things, yeah.”

“Okay,” Cal says excitedly, “we’ve got a problem out at the work site.”

Cal was a licensed contractor and the latest work site was a 70-year old single family dwelling in South San Francisco. Cal was to repair the decaying foundation of the house, a two-week job that represented the first work he had in months.

“We got the house up off the foundation,” Cal said. “There was a crawlspace underneath and it was just rotting away. I picked at some of the debris with my hammer and all these bones and a skull came rolling out.”

“A human skeleton?”

“Yes. Question: do we have to report this?”

“Of course you do, Cal!”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m positive.”

“Shit. Goddamnit. That’s what I thought you were gonna say. I was already trying to talk the owner out of it but –”

“You have to report it.” I took a drag off my cigarette and listened to the silence on the other end of the line. I could tell Cal was quietly fuming.

“Damnit. Now this job’s gonna take a month instead of two weeks.”

Cal thanked me and hung up. I returned to my cup of coffee at the bar, resumed reading a shockingly bad Capote novel, and two hours later, when Cal swiveled through the door, I had the rest of the story.

“It wasn’t an adult skeleton,” Cal said. “It was a baby. The fingers on the hand bone are just a couple of centimeters long. I just left the place a few minutes ago. There are technicians from the coroner’s office all over the place. It’s a big mess now.”

“A baby? Jesus, Cal.”

“There was a family that used to live in that house in the Thirties. Italians from the Old Country. Apparently, the daughter got pregnant and it turned out that the priest from the church down the street was the one who knocked her up. The church sent him packing but the girl never had the baby, they think, or at least no one ever saw her with a baby. Sometimes people would ask, you know, ‘What happened? You were pregnant and all’. And then the family would usually say that they sent him off to be raised by relatives in the country.”

“So she miscarried or went full term and killed the baby, then put the corpse in the crawlspace?”

“I’m not saying that’s what happened.” Cal insisted, wagging a calloused finger in my face. “Don’t repeat that story. I’m just telling you what the owner told me. His parents knew the original owners, the Italians.”

Cal ordered a beverage of his own creation: a half pint of Guinness Stout mixed with a half pint of Klausthaler non-alcoholic beer.

“I’m so pissed off,” Cal said. “The owner threw me off the work site when the coroner guys showed up, just told me to go home. I don’t even know if or when the job will continue now.”

He licked beer foam off his bushy mustache.

“So tiny. I hope that wasn’t a human skeleton. I hope it was a monkey.”