Calloustown

Sonny Boy Williamson for Dinner

Normally I don’t answer the side door if a man’s knocking outside while holding a shotgun in his crooked arm. I don’t even have guns in the house. It’s not like I tell everyone around here — that could only lead to break-ins, and talk that I was truly queer, capricious, unpatriotic, and/or nonresistant — but I don’t keep guns, rope, safety razors, gas stoves, tall kitchen plastic garbage bags, garden hoses, or pills around. There’s a chance that my DNA makeup isn’t the same as my parents, aunts and uncles, grandparents on both sides, and some stray cousins, sure, but I don’t want to take the chance. Because I might have what microbiologists, geneticists, psychiatrists, and palm readers haven’t yet discovered — the suicide gene. I won’t marry, I won’t have children, I’ll barely have a pet unless it’s a shelter dog over the age of nine. I’ll drive on occasion, but always attempt to take routes without bridges or thick roadside trees seeing as I might become manically depressed and veer. I’ve been thinking about moving to one of those southwest deserts — no rivers to cross, and most cacti are probably no match for my pickup — but the boredom there might, of course, send me outside to juggle vipers in a careless fashion.

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 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 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.”

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.