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 bourbon. 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.”