Sonny Boy Williamson—I should mention that this was Sonny Boy Williamson II, who was born Aleck Ford in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi in 1899, or 1908, or 1912—sang that song of his called “Nine Below Zero” that just about every other blues singer covered at one time or another, when Ransom Dunn knocked on the door again. I turned off my sander. I turned down the CD player. I opened up and said, of course, “Could you just plain come in at night and kill me while I sleep?”
Ransom Dunn said, “It’s me again. I don’t have my shotgun.” He didn’t have it leaned against my truck, either. “Listen, I got a couple favors ask you.” He stood with his feet spread apart, as if he were from one of those Midwestern states. I noticed blood splatter on the thigh parts of his blue jeans. He blinked unnaturally, as if he had a foreign object in his eye.
“I’m not doing any more eye exams,” I said. “I guess I can give you a deal on a rolling pin, seeing as I wouldn’t have to add on postage.”
Ransom Dunn shook his head. He said, “I got no idea what you talking about. People told me that I wouldn’t have no idea what you talking about, but I don’t always believe what other people say.”
I looked to the left of Ransom. A car came up Old Old Calloustown Road and I prayed that it was Harriet returning from wherever she went to get away from me. I had met Harriet back when I looked into people’s pupils. She had taught second-grade students. She was my patient and said we had something in common what with pupils, and the next thing you know we sat in a place called Sad and Moanin’ drinking draft beer and talking about idiots we knew in college who now worked on their third Christian marriages. Locals called it the S&M. So did I.
The car passed onward. I said to Ransom, “What’s up?”
“I just realized that I don’t have any room in my freezer for this deer meat. You got any room in your freezer for this deer meat? I mean, do you mind if I chain her up on that tree out front and dress her out?”
We had a freezer we kept in my workshop, half filled with corn, beans, quartered tomatoes, and blackberries mostly, nothing else. I stepped out of my workshop again and looked down the driveway. The doe no longer lay there. Ransom’d already strung her up in the tree. I walked out ten steps and looked down the road in the direction Harriet would come. “Listen, go ahead and dress it out, but if my wife comes please tell her that you just assumed it would be okay. She won’t be all that happy. It’s a long story.” I didn’t mention how part of that long story might be about how Harriet wasn’t my wife technically. Before we moved to Calloustown a real estate agent up in Columbia told us how someone spray-painted SODOM AND GOMORRAH on the tailgate of two organic farmers’ truck one time, and BOOGERISTS—probably meant to be “buggerists”—across the back windshield of a Subaru wagon owned by two men who moved to Calloustown in order to start up some kind of artist retreat that didn’t last.
Ransom Dunn said, “I appreciate it, Cuz. I had a chain in my truck, but I ain’t got no hacksaw. You got a saw I could borrow? I got a hawkbill knife, but I ain’t got a saw. And I need a Hefty bag of some sort, maybe some newspaper.”
I let him in my workshop and pointed over to where I kept a variety of handsaws. I said, “Use whatever you need.” I didn’t say anything about how I couldn’t keep Hefty bags in my household.
“Man, you got you a nice setup in here,” Ransom said. He looked over at the rolling-pin-to-be I had in the vise, the Willie Mays Louisville Slugger. “Hey, someone stoleded my boy’s baseball bat and I think that’s it, my man. Did you goddamn steal my boy’s bat?”
Fuck, I thought. Did I save the box that the baseball bat came in? I said, “It got sent to me because somebody wants a rolling pin made out of it. Listen, there had to be thousands of bats made way back when with Willie Mays’s signature on them.”
Peripherally I saw a Phillips-head screwdriver I could pick up and use for a weapon, right in this guy’s left eyeball. One time I had a one-eyed man for a client who kept complaining with the bifocal monocle we got for him.
I considered a rasp, ball-peen hammer, and an X-Acto knife. I said, “Look, man, I didn’t steal your boy’s baseball bat, I promise. I got other things to do besides steal baseball bats,” even though I thought about how easy it would be, in the old days, to lurk around Little League games before they started using aluminum.
Ransom Dunn pulled his head back somewhat and looked at me as if he wore a pair of reading glasses. He cleared his throat. “I guess it’s fair, then, for you to stock my meat,” he said.
“This isn’t a question of fair or not, fucker,” I said. “I didn’t steal your boy’s baseball bat. That’s that. If you want to cut her up and stock her in my freezer, fine. I couldn’t care less one way or another,” I said, almost throwing in how we don’t eat meat outside of wild salmon we had to drive sixty miles to buy, or farm-raised catfish from Mississippi they stock down at the Calloustown Superette.
Ransom started laughing. He said, “I wouldn’t’ve believed you, except you said ‘fucker.’ That means you’re telling the truth. If everyone said ‘fucker’ at the end of a sentence, it’d be more believable. ‘I am not a crook, fucker,’ like that. ‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman, fucker.’”
I said, “You need any help out there with that deer?”
He said, “You know what? I bet I could use some help. Hell, I ain’t field dressed a deer in a while.”
I thought, damn. I thought, had to ask. I wondered if Sonny Boy Williamson ever sang a song about dead deer hanging from a tree, and said, “Let me go get some old paper bags and paper.”
Ransom cut the tendons on the deer’s back- and forelegs. He stripped the animal’s hide down much like I had seen Amazonian tribesmen pull bark from a tree in order to make cloth. He stripped that doe’s hide down much like I—as a child—had pulled a catfish’s skin down using a pair of pliers while it still croaked. Ransom cut out meat from the animal’s back, handed it over to me to bag, and then swiveled the body around to slice out roasts from its haunches.
The deer’s inner organs—heart, liver, spleen, kidneys, bladder, colon—spilled out finally right there at the base of my best oak tree.
I said, “Man.”
“Good meat,” he said. “We’re lucky to get this thing so fresh. One time I hit a deer up there,” he pointed, “about five miles away, and by the time I could get back to it she already had turkey buzzards atop her.”
I said, “That fast?”
He said, “Well, in between I got arrested for some things, and had to spend a few days in jail. You know how that goes.”
I nodded. I had no clue what he meant, of course, but I nodded. I said, “I have a hawkbill knife. Don’t think that I don’t have a hawkbill knife. I got all kinds of knives! Hawkbill’s my favorite, though.”
I should mention that I often drink bourbon while making my specialized bread rollers. Hell, I did the same when checking people’s vision, from time to time, though no one ever complained.
Ransom said he’d never heard of Sonny Boy Williamson. He said he listened mostly to George Jones, Merle Haggard, Buck Owens, and Loretta Lynn. Tammy Wynette, Johnny Cash, Patsy Cline, Hank Snow. He said, “If they was on Hee-Haw back in the day, then I listened. Me and Boo went to Nashville one time, and we seen a old boy named Elmer Fudpucker right there on the street where people hung out. Boo got his autograph. She keeps it in a box right where she keeps her momma’s engagement ring.”
We’d stuffed my freezer with the venison, which didn’t take up more than a couple cubic feet, to be honest. I don’t know if Ransom wasn’t much of a butcher, or if a deer doesn’t offer up all that much meat, but it didn’t take up space, to speak of. I said, “How long you been living in Calloustown?”
“Life,” he said. “I left one time for Vietnam, but I come back. That was my only time out of here.”
I nodded. I said, “You don’t look old enough to have fought in Vietnam.”
“No, I’m not. I left for Vietnam just
because I wanted to go over there to do some fishing, back in about 1998, but I never made it any farther than the airport. I got this cousin over in Forty-Five who lied to me. He said people didn’t need a passport to go to Vietnam. Played a trick on me. He also said you can just walk into an airport with some cash and they’ll put you on a plane. I don’t hold that one against him, seeing as at one time it was probably true. But you can’t just up and go to a foreign land without a passport, it ends up.” I stared at Ransom for a while, wondering if he japed me. He kept eye contact, then said, “Fucker.” He said, “I listen to Willie Nelson, David Allan Coe, Waylon Jennings, Hank Williams, and that other guy. Lefty Frizzell. And I like the way Crystal Gayle looks.”
Sonny Boy Williamson kept singing about a funeral and a trial, that song about how he’d kill his wife and then undergo prosecution. I waited for Ransom to say something about how I might be an N-word lover. He didn’t. He even seemed to nod his head at the right times, and then said, “I take it all back. I went to Jackson, Mississippi, one time, too. My mother had a first cousin who married a man down in Jackson, and then she died. We went to the funeral, for some reason. I was a kid. This was summer, and we were on our way down to Tybee Island anyway. Next thing you know, I was sitting in some place down in Jackson eating a pig ear sandwich,” Ransom pointed at my speakers, “listening to music a lot like this here.”
I said, “You want a beer or something? I got some cold beer inside.”
“You know what, I believe if I listened to this kind of music for too long I might take that shotgun of mine and blow my brains out. Yeah, I’ll have a beer,” Ransom said.
I didn’t get up immediately. I got stuck wondering if my parents listened to Sonny Boy Williamson, or if my other relatives did. “Wait, I forgot. I don’t have any beer left,” I said, seeing as I needed to get him out of my house for one, and go find one of Harriet’s happy CDs—the Go-Gos, maybe, or the B-52s—and see if it would turn my mind around.
Ransom sucked at his teeth twice, something that irritated me in people. One time I had a receptionist named Donna who sucked her teeth, and I finally talked her into applying for a job I found in the want ads at a dental clinic. Ransom said, “They say you had a nervous breakdown, Duncan. You don’t seem to be all that on edge, if you ask me. My wife Boo—now she’s on edge. But you seem pretty normal to me.”
How come Harriet shows up nonstop bothering me when I don’t want her to, but she won’t appear when I need her? I said, “That’s what they say, huh? Well, I didn’t have a mental breakdown. I just made a decision to stop what I was doing. End of story.”
Ransom got up out of his chair. He patted the freezer and walked over to run his hand across the rolling pin I worked on. “They say a lot of things. They say I’m crazy! They say I joined the volunteer fire department because I like to light fires. They say I broke into Calloustown High back in the day and changed all my grades so I’d graduate top of the class. There’s a lot of things they say. Fuckers.”
I got up from where I sat, pulled out the drawer where I kept my collection of awls, and pulled out a half-filled pint of Old Grand-Dad. I took two hits, looked at my watch, and said, “Oh, man, I’m supposed to call up Harriet.” I pulled out my cell phone, pretended to punch some numbers, and put the phone up to my head. I said, “Hey, I forgot to call you up,” and then waited for what I thought was the proper time for a response. I said, “Oh, man, I completely forgot,” and then a series of okays.
I hung up and said to Ransom, “If it’s not one thing it’s ten others.”
“Wife’s got you on a short leash, huh?” he said, smiling. “I know what you mean.”
“She’s on her way home, and we’re supposed to meet some people for supper. She’s at the store, buying store things for this supper we’re going to.”
Ransom said, “I get it. I’ve overstayed my welcome. I get it. Light wasn’t on on your phone. Anyway. Okay.” He walked to the door. “Listen, I appreciate your holding onto my venison. I’ll come over and get half of it when we got room back at the house freezer.”
“I was talking on the phone,” I said. “Here!” I held the phone out. “Punch Redial,” I said, praying that he didn’t take me up on it.
He had his hand on the doorknob. My phone rang at the same time that a horn honked in the driveway. Ransom opened the door. I flipped open the phone. Harriet was screaming into the receiver, but it didn’t matter, because we could hear her voice from outside. “What’s this deer carcass doing hanging out on the tree?” and “I can’t leave the house ever without something bad happening!” and “Goddamn you, Gosnell, are you trying to make our property value go down?” and so forth. Stuff like that.
I shrugged toward Ransom Dunn and said, “Wife’s home.”
Ransom said, “I didn’t really hit that deer out in front of your place. I hit it, but I brought it back here and pretended, just so I could see you for myself. Around here they say that if you’re ever feeling like life can’t get any worse, come by your house and check you out.”
I said to my wife, “Hey, honey.”
She held her hands on her hips. “I can’t take it anymore, Duncan.” She pointed back to the deer hide hanging from Ransom’s chain. “I know you have some issues, and I’ve tried to skirt away from them, but turning our front yard into an abattoir is about the last thing I can take.”
Ransom said, “Ma’am,” and got in his truck. He backed out of the driveway, then chugged out onto Old Calloustown Road. I think I could hear him laughing, and then he honked his horn.
I said to Harriet, “Where did you ever learn the word ‘abattoir’?” Or I yelled it, as she followed Ransom out, then turned the other way, back toward Columbia, I figured. I thought, issues.
There’s something about eating venison alone, probably. I didn’t wait around like most people would—say, a month—to see if Ransom Dunn would return for his half of what I had in the freezer. I knew. I’m not saying that I’m a soothsayer or anything, but it’s the same way I could tell how people coming into my office wanted to argue with me concerning their vision. As soon as I saw a eighty-year–old woman show up, walking as forceful as a Parisian runway model, I knew for certain that I’d hear, “I need you to tell the DMV that I have a good breadth of vision field” within two minutes, like I did with Mrs. Esther Crawford that time, whom I felt sorry for, and for whom I filled out the information saying that I performed a vision screening, plus some other things.
And then she drove through a four-way stop sign two months later, and her two grown children showed up at my office blaming me for everything, which might’ve been true.
Thirty minutes after Ransom and my wife left separately I got out this cookbook put out by the Southern Foodways Alliance and figured out how to season my deer meat and cook it just like a regular roast in a pressure cooker. I went around the house and put different CDs in every available player I had—a regular stereo system, a boom box in the bedroom, another in our unused third bedroom. I played Little Walter, and Snooky Pryor, and James Cotton to go along with Sonny Boy Williamson playing in my workshop. I set the shoulder meat off on the counter and read through the recipe twice. I pulled out carrots, potatoes, and onions from the refrigerator, found a Ziploc of jalapenos I’d frozen from the summer, and listened to those harmonicas howling cheerless from every direction. I’d be willing to bet that, if asked, most old white country boys in this area would say that banjos provided the best background music to cooking deer, but they’re wrong: it’s a pure, clear blues harmonica that’s necessary for serenading a recently killed ruminant.
I brought the venison to a boil twice, to get out any wild taste, then set it in the cooker.
And I listened for the door to open, which it finally did.
I expected Harriet to return on a rampage. Then I figured that Ransom might show up with some kind of story about how his own wife kicked him out—I kind of doubted that he even had a wife, for some reason—and that he wanted some b
ourbon. Out of all the scenarios that went through my head, as Snooky played a song called “Big Guns,” I didn’t expect Boo showing up, all apologetic for her husband’s rudeness.
I yelled, “Hey, hey, hey!” like that, because I thought she had a pistol in her hand.
“Mr. Gosnell?” she said. “I thought I heard someone say come in. I’m sorry. I’m Boo Dunn, Ransom’s wife.”
I still held a wooden-handled Mr. Bar-B-Q stainless-steel two-prong meat fork in my right hand, wondering if anyone would buy something like it with a car cigarette lighter shoved into the end. I said, “You scared me. Hey. Jesus, you scared me. I didn’t hear you come in.”
“I knocked. I rang that doorbell, but I noticed the light wasn’t on so I doubt if it works.” Boo Dunn looked pretty normal, compared to her husband. She wore a pair of olive-green army pants and a gray T-shirt with Calloustown High Ostriches printed across the front. Her sandals didn’t appear to be of a disreputable quality. Sometimes back when I worked with women’s vision I caught myself fixated on their shoes more than I did their pupils, probably so as not to fall in love, have them plead for both marriage and children, then have to warn them that I came from a long line of Gosnells who lost the will to prosper. Someone should do a scientific study, by the way, comparing people with flat feet and their tendency toward astigmatism.
I said, “Calloustown High Ostriches,” knowing that it might come out more like “Calloustown Hostages,” which it did. I said, “Half of this venison is mine. I’m not stealing from you.”
Boo Dunn shook her head sideways. “My husband said he was a little worried about you. He wanted me to come over here and teach you how to cook up that thing. He thought you looked like you maybe didn’t have a clue.”
I said, “Who’s your husband?” just to mess with her. “I’m kidding. Hell, you might as well call up Ransom and tell him to come over. What’s it take for this? Like, two hours? You want a beer or anything?” I said. I opened up the refrigerator and pulled out two cans of PBR. My classmates made fun of me back in the day for drinking PBR, until they all noticed that there was a P B R right in the middle of the standard Snellen eye exam chart, line eleven.
Calloustown Page 9
