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.”