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.
“He’s right outside. You want me go get him?” She took the can of beer from me, and I thought about how I would have to tell Ransom Dunn that between the time he took off, I drove down to the Calloustown and Country Pick-Pay-Go.
I stared at the pressure cooker’s top and imagined what it would be like to shove my face straight down into the meat. I wondered if it would be enough to kill me. I’d heard somewhere along the way that burning to death was the worst of all, and that drowning was the best. People always had these kinds of lists. Cancer worse than a massive heart attack, hanging worse than drug overdose, those kinds of things. My relatives had found a variety of ways to kill themselves, but none out of boredom, which was the means of dying I feared worse. Muddy Waters sang songs about wanting to be a catfish, or about being a diving duck. Those were animals that didn’t consider the heaviness of existence, evidently.
With no warning I found myself enveloped in that miserable, relentless feeling that I needed to be elsewhere, as in living with my ancestors. I’d not felt this particular feeling since that last official day of working as an optician, a day that included six glaucoma and two diabetes patients one after another all blaming me for their conditions.
I looked at the two-pronged fork and thought about a story I read back in college — for the record, future opticians shouldn’t be forced to take literature courses — wherein a Japanese soldier disembowels himself. I imagined that, on the list of death pains, disembowelment would be right below self-immolation. I thought of the long-term forms of suicide — smoking and drinking, working out in the sun for years on end without sunscreen, tearing down asbestos-riddled attics, driving without a seatbelt. I thought of Hansen’s disease and realized that I got off track in terms of self-inflicted downturns. Somewhere along the line I got stuck wondering if it would be worse jumping off a building head first onto the concrete below, or picking up a live electrical roadside line following a tornado or hurricane. I wondered if two black mamba strikes simultaneously would be worse than jumping out in front of a Greyhound bus driven by an impatient man with blues songs running through his head and a questionable wife at home.
When the Dunns and my wife walked into the kitchen, one after the other, I thought two things: “How long have I been out of focus?” and, “Is this one of those interventions everyone’s talking about lately?” My wife laughed and enwrapped Boo Dunn’s shoulder. I’m talking Harriet slung her head back in a way that showed off her back molar dental work. Ransom Dunn carried in two bottles of Merlot that appeared to be bought either online or from a real wine store sixty miles away. My wife said, “We’ve not had anyone over for dinner for a long time. Well, ever, now that I think about it.”
Boo Dunn said, “Why don’t y’all let me make some pizza dough, and we can put some of that other venison on it for a topping. I know it sounds weird, but there’s nothing much better than deer pizza. Let me use one of your specialized rolling pins, there, Duncan.”
“I’m not much of a wine man, myself,” Ransom said. He stood close to me and stared down at the pressure cooker. “I saw where you had some bourbon back there in your spot,” he said, pointing his thumb. His wife and Harriet seemed to be running off to look at a shower curtain, or throw rug, or curio cabinet, or stylish Venetian blinds, or baker’s rack, or collection of swizzle sticks, stuff like that.
My nineteen-year-old ex-stray pound dog Sophocles dragged himself into the kitchen and looked up at me. He directed his nose toward the pressure cooker. I said to Ransom, “I’ve had this dog ten years. He won’t die.”
“Yeah,” said Ransom. “I guess he don’t want to.”
I walked Ransom into the den. We turned on the television. What else could we do? Sophocles followed us, pulling his back legs the way he did. In the kitchen, something bad happened and the pressure cooker blew. Maybe I didn’t crank the top on tight enough. I said, “Damn.”
Boo and Harriet came out of the guest bedroom saying “What was that?”
I said, “We might have to call out for some food.” I said, “Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.”
No one responded. The Dunns looked at me, though, as did Harriet. Did I see in their faces some kind of accusatory glance? Did they think I rigged the pressure cooker to blow? I looked down at Sophocles and thought about how I could’ve just as easily named him Homer or Ray Charles. Even my dog seemed to look at me as if I’d done something wrong and on purpose.
“The deer’s on the ceiling,” Boo Dunn said.
We all looked up that way. Harriet walked into the kitchen and opened the wine. She didn’t say anything about how I was a loser with bad luck. She didn’t look up at what dripped back down on our floor. Me, I looked at my wristwatch and thought about how many days I had to break my family’s record. Barely — if anyone listened closely — we could hear Sonny Boy Williamson singing about bringing eyesight to the blind, I swear. Ransom said something about how he didn’t think what plastered itself to the ceiling would eventually start a fire. Then he asked me if I had two harmonicas anywhere around.
Spastic
The Calloustown station remains open twenty-four hours a day, though no Greyhound or Trailways bus has pulled up for passengers to disembark in fifteen years. The building — plastered-over cement blocks that nearly look stucco, thus exotic among the mobile homes, wooden bungalows, shingle-sided shotgun shacks, and fieldstone salt boxes — holds, still, a linoleum-floored waiting room with chairs shoved in three rows along the walls. There are two restrooms, both with working sinks and toilets, and a glass-fronted booth where someone sold tickets, offered advice, and tagged luggage. A television’s mounted in the southwest corner of the waiting room, six inches from touching the ceiling. There’s a half-filled gumball machine, the proceeds of which aid small children with birth defects. No one has ever thought to crack open the globe and steal its pennies. An empty cigarette machine with a rust-splattered mirror and rusted silver knobs stands in the corner—$1.75 a pack for Lark, Camel, Lucky Strikes, Pall Mall, Viceroy, Kent, Winston, Marlboro. There’s the smell of Juicy Fruit in the air, of plastic, of instant coffee.
The personnel’s vanished, the bus line having chosen a different route between Columbia and Savannah, but the electricity’s still on. Because there’s no community center, YMCA, Lions Club, rec center, Moose Club, Jaycees, Ki-wanis International, Rotary Club, or Shriners Club in Calloustown, the more community-minded men — the ones who’ve lived to retirement age, or given up altogether — meet daily at the depot. They have come to realize that their town needs a famous resident in order to attract tourists, which will revive the economy. They have realized that it’s better to have a diverse population instead of nearly everyone named either Munson or Harrell. These free thinkers have concluded that annual festivals — such as their own Sherman Knew Nothing celebration to point out all that the general missed by swerving away between Savannah and Columbia during his march — don’t bring in the recognition or revenue. How can, like the old days, a Calloustown child grasp enough knowledge and culture to understand the importance and benefits of fleeing?