Free All That I Have by Castle Freeman

Babcock here?”
    I was taking it slow, you see. In process serving, of course, you have to have the customer in person, in front of you. You have to serve his face, as they say. We all knew that. Chum wasn’t going to make it easy.
    “He’s upstairs,” said Mrs. Babcock.
    Behind her, over the door of their house, was an open window.
    “Mr. Babcock?” I called out. The blackflies were crawling around in my hair, they were crawling down my collar, up my nose, they were buzzing in my eyes, in my ears.
    Something came flying out of the upstairs window and landed at my feet. It was a glass Mason jar, a canning jar, held about a pint. It didn’t break, but it lay there in a pool of what had been in it — a yellow liquid that might have been flat beer. It wasn’t flat beer.
    “Mr. Babcock?” I called. “It’s e sheriff ’s. I need to talk to you.” I flapped and flailed and batted around my head at the cloud of bugs.
    “I know who you are,” said Chum from inside, but he stayed back from the window so I couldn’t see him. Another Mason jar came out the window. It hit the ground and broke, and what was in it splashed over Mrs. Babcock’s and my shoes. I took a step back from the house.
    “Mr. Babcock?” I called. “Chum?”
    “I ain’t saying so. You didn’t hear me say it’s me,” said Chum. “I know who you are and I know why you’re here. You’ve got another god damned summons, don’t you?”
    Then I thought I had an idea.
    “Yes, sir, I do,” I said. “I do have a summons. Mr. Babcock, the bugs are awful out here. Can I come inside?”
    “Heh, heh,” said Chum. “Hell, no, you can’t come inside.” A third jar flew out the window and broke against my patrol car.
    “How many jars has he got up there?” I asked Mrs. Babcock.
    ”Quite a few, it looks like,” she said. “He knew you’d be along. He’s been saving up.”
    “Bugs are pretty savage today, ain’t they?” called Chum from inside. “You don’t want to be standing around out there. Here’s what you do. Put your summons away, get back in your rig, go home, and tell Ripley Wingate he can take his summons, stick it up his ass, and bust it off.”
    Nobody had anything to say to that. Mrs. Babcock turned to me. “Let me see your paper,” she said.
    I handed the writ to her. She took it out of its envelope, raised her bug veil, read the summons. She stuck it back into its envelope.
    “This ain’t going to work,” she said. “He ain’t going to take it. You’d better go.”
    “What about the writ?”
    “Leave your paper with me,” said Mrs. Babcock. “I’ll see he gets it.”
    “You know I can’t do that, Mrs. Babcock,” I said.
    “Well,” she said, “you’d better go, then.” She handed me the summons.
    I went back to the department and told Wingate I couldn’t serve Chum.
    “ ‘Course you couldn’t,” said Wingate.
    I told him the circumstances: the blackflies, Mrs. Babcock, the Mason jars, what was in the Mason jars, the upper window. Wingate nodded.
    “We’ll give him another whirl in a day or two,” said Wingate.
    “A day or two? Why not now?”
    Wingate seemed to think about this, and then, “No,” he said. “We’ll let him work, we’ll let him develop for a little.”
    So it was a couple of days later that Wingate and I went out to Babcocks’ together. We had our writ, and this time each of us had his own anti-bug headgear — county issue. We found Mrs. Babcock out front, and the three of us were standing there in our black veils like a club of beekeepers getting ready to go to a funeral, when here comes Chum out of the house in his own bug net, a specially heavy, dark, long one, and he starts right in on Wingate.
    “Sent the big boy today, I see,” said Chum. He was having a fine time. “You’ve got your paper with you, I guess.”
    “We’ve got it,” said Wingate.
    “This is a dogshit business, here, Sheriff,” said Chum. “I never moved that son of a bitch’s stakes. Why