Calloustown (11 page)

It's not like I've always been aware of my family's sudden choices to exit a world made up of unemployment, broken hearts, IRS audits, early onset arthritis, hypertension, lackluster restaurant choices, terminal skin conditions, and alcoholism. I grew up with parents who understood their ancestors—thus why they would let me read everything except Hemingway, or why they blacked out Greco-Roman history tomes when Nero showed up, or told me I needed to swerve from any Rothko paintings should I ever take a field trip to a museum of modern art.

They brought me up as best they could, shielded me from how my uncle Carl asphyxiated himself, how my aunt June cut her wrists with a Bowie knife, how one of my grandfathers stepped in front of an Amtrak and the other went skydiving without a parachute. Then my mother and father—right after I graduated college—spent a Sunday night drinking bourbon while eating a special barbiturate pie. I took some jobs, I did some family research, and then I retreated for the most part. No matter, if I make it to forty-nine years old I'll hold the record for longest-living Gosnell on this particular sad branch.

I expected my “common-law wife” Harriet to be knocking on the door, locked out, and that's why I thought nothing of opening up without considering what dangers could be out there. Harriet doesn't have the possible gene. She's originally from North Dakota and has a great-aunt who's something like 114 years old. Sometimes I say things to Harriet like, “What does a woman who's 114 years old do?” and the answer's always, “She looks forward to making peanut brittle for the volunteer fire department's annual fundraiser.” Makes fucking peanut brittle once a year! Sorry, but I side with my dead family members when it comes to this. I side with Socrates—who drank some goddamn hemlock—when it comes to how the unexamined life is not worth living. Harriet says, “Well, maybe she's examining whether or not she can make the perfect peanut brittle each year, just like you think you can design the perfect kitchen utensil.”

I said to the shotgun guy, “Hey. Hey, hey, hey,” and looked behind me for some kind of weapon while closing the door.

This was from my ex-garage, which I used for a workshop. People who know of my possible genetic flaw say to me, “Duncan, why would you leave a job finally making such good money as an optometrist in order to move to the middle of nowhere and run hand tools that might backfire on you?” They say, “What's to say you won't get depressed one day and run the circular saw across your jugular?”

To them I say, “What's to say I wouldn't get depressed from women arguing with me about how they don't need bifocals, then one day self-dilating my eyes and run out into midday traffic?”

“I ain't here to hurt no one,” the man said from the other side of my door. “I'm kind of your neighbor. Here. I've put my gun up leaned against your truck.”

I cracked the door back open, armed with my DeWalt Variable Speed belt sander in one hand and a Black & Decker cordless twelve-volt lithium drill in the other. For some reason I thought it necessary to blurt out, “I know all about the goddamn Second Amendment.”

The man didn't stick out his hand. He said, “Gosnell, right? Me and my wife's been meaning to come by here and welcome you to Calloustown. I'm Ransom Dunn, from up the road.”

I said, “Good to meet you, Ransom. Duncan,” and set down my tools to shake his hand. I didn't say, “We've lived here for four years.” I thought, Ransom Dunn? What a cool name.

“I just wanted to tell you that I hit a deer down at the end of your driveway. It ain't dead, and I want to put it out of its misery. Way we do it around here, you get half and I get half, seeing as it's on your property.”

I stepped outside and looked at his shotgun. It didn't look all that stable leaned against my bumper—what were the chances of it falling over and discharging? I said, “Damn. Your truck okay?”

I don't want to ever say anything about anyone else's vehicle, but Ransom's truck looked as if he'd hit a good fifty deer. He said, “It's running.”

I looked down the gravel driveway. The deer—a doe—kept lifting her head in an attempt to get up. I said, “Listen, you go ahead and take her all. I appreciate the offer, but my wife and I are about venisoned out, if you know what I mean.”

See how I did that? I made it sound like A) I hunted on a regular basis and had a freezer full of deer meat; and B) we weren't vegetarians for the most part, though Harriet was a vegetarian who wouldn't let me cook what with the chances I'd put Drano in the soup.

Ransom Dunn said, “That's mighty neighborly of you, my man,” and “Y'all come on over some Saturday night we'll chew some venison jerky, drink beer. Your wife oughta meet my wife, Boo. Women 'round here need women. Does your wife like to paint by numbers like mine?”

Ransom and Boo Dunn. Boo Dunn sounded like that good sausage from down in Louisiana. I thought, if Harriet and I were named Ransom and Boo Dunn, we'd probably go out on the road and never question the apparent meaningless of life. I said, “Okay,” and picked up my tools.

Back in my workshop I cranked up some Sonny Boy Williamson singing “Keep It to Yourself” and turned on my electric fan. I didn't want to think about that deer with a barrel to her temple. I wanted to drown it out, much like I used to drown out people screaming about how they didn't have glaucoma, or hypertension, or diabetes, or torn retinas. I had one man spit right in my own eyes one time when I told him that he had a cataract. They say dentists have a high suicide rate, but I would bet any dentist who says, “You have a cavity” doesn't equal the effect of his or her saying, “You're about to go blind” when it comes to the depression that follows for both health professional and patient.

Let me say that even Sonny Boy Williamson's good loud harmonica won't drown out a shotgun blast from a hundred yards away.

I put a cheap, handleless rolling pin in my vise, drilled out what needed to be drilled out, and shoved car cigarette lighters into both ends. Sometimes I make sure they match—two Buick Electra lighters, two Comets, two Dodge Dusters, two Fairlanes. But I understand that, in the real world, modern marriages suffer through mixed allegiances, that there are Chevy-only women married to Ford-only men, and that they won't purchase one of my one-of-a-kind rolling pins unless they're both represented. It's just like Yankees/Red Sox families, or Auburn/Alabama families, or Harvard/Yale families. It's like Wonderbread/ Sunbeam families, or Duke's/Hellman's mayonnaise families.

People pay $66 dollars apiece for my one-of-a-kind rolling pins, even in the recession. My average rolling pin—it's twenty inches long and might best be called a “dowel” before I shove the lighters in both ends—costs me about nine bucks. I get the lighters for a dollar apiece, down at a number of auto salvage places in and around the Calloustown area, plus up in Columbia when I get Harriet to drive me past EyeCU Optical, where I worked for twenty years.

I sell my work in boutique kitchen appliance shops, through a website, on eBay, and on Amazon.com. I understand the notion of supply and demand, and go full force. One day there will be no more cigarette car lighters, seeing as the automotive industry now designs vehicles without even ashtrays. One day there will be no more flour, and carbohydrate-addicted people will commit suicide.

I heard a blast, and then I heard another. Did Ransom miss the first time? Was he some kind of sadist? Did the doe's eye stare back at him in a way that made Ransom Dunn take a second shot to eradicate the sad doe-eyed glance from his future dreams?

I worked on a second rolling pin: a specialty order made from a wooden Louisville Slugger baseball bat so that when the breadmaker rolled dough there'd be an indention that spelled out “Willie Mays” in script. Who has that kind of money to ruin a vintage ash bat? I looked on the Internet and saw where such bats went for $65 apiece in and of themselves. The signature was at the sweet spot, which meant I had to cut it down, then sand down the thicker end. I don't want to question anyone's motives or needs, but I wondered about this particular person's ego in regards to rolling out biscuits with “Willie Mays” on the top crust.

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 S
ODOM
AND
G
OMORRAH
on the tailgate of two organic farmers' truck one time, and B
OOGERISTS
—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.”