A son with a pickup is handy when you need to move a body

When someone asks you to help dispose of a body, you’re supposed to ask questions.

This is why I’m a little worried about my son, James.

As a kid, he hung on me like a barnacle. If I was doing yard work, he was doing yard work. If I had a quarrel with his mother and went down to the pub for a burger and beer to cool off, James would meet me there on his bike.

We fished, we rode bikes, we nearly lost our hearing at monster truck rallies. We watched old episodes of “Dukes of Hazzard” and “Walker, Texas Ranger.” (When you name a kid Jim Bob, he’s gonna grow up liking that sort of thing.)

Until he was 13, he was my shadow and I missed him when he reached that age (as most boys do), where I was no longer cool enough to hang with. I knew the honeymoon was over the day I overheard him refer to me to a friend as “The Dark One.”

James was my third ride on the parental merry-go-round, though, so I knew enough to not be offended. Like my older son, Jordan, before him, Jim-Bob eventually grew out of that phase and we were friends again.

These days we get together once a week for Bad Movie Night. We still go fishing, bike riding, all that stuff. My point is, after 30 years, we know each other well. Or I thought we did.

Maybe that’s why James had no questions when I told him I needed help disposing of a body.

The texted conversation went like this.

ME: Hey kiddo! Whazzup? You free tomorrow afternoon?

JAMES: Yup. Gotta work until 5, but free after that.

ME: Can you help me get rid of a dead body?

Now see, this is the point at which a normal person might say, “What the hell? A what!?” But not James.

He texted back: “I’ll bring a Sawzall with a good metal blade. Should be alright for body dismemberment.”

ME: I don’t think we’ll need that. But you will want some heavy gloves, a small tarp and maybe some rope.

JAMES: OK, no problem. I’m down.

This response worries me. Despite the fact I used to live in Detroit, I’m not mobbed up; I’m not a “made man.” When I “hit” someone, it’s usually a slap on the back to help dislodge a piece of partially-chewed steak. The only “capo” I understand is the kind that attaches to the neck of a guitar to raise the pitch. I’ve never even seen all the “Godfather” movies, so not only am I not a hit man, I’m barely a man at all.

So why was James all “no problem” about taking on a job that’s generally considered a major felony? I mean, he’s my son and I love him, but it’s not like he owes me a 20-to-life stretch in Shawshank. Why was he so willing to become an accessory after the fact? (I’ve never seen “The Godfather” but I’ve seen every “Law & Order” ever made; can you tell?)

I wondered, has he done this sort of thing before? Does he think I have? And if I had, hasn’t he ever wondered why I never did it to him, back when he was 14 and going through those difficult teen years? If ever I was going to kill someone, it would have been James at 14.

I ended our text with, “OK, then, I’ll see you tomorrow after work. Don’t forget to bring gloves; maybe even one of those face mask things. The smell’s pretty strong.”

And now, I thought, the questions will come: Who did you kill? Were there witnesses? It wasn’t Mom, was it?

But nope. Not one question.

Now, I knew “the body” in question belonged to a deer that had died next to the house sometime this past winter. James did not. So how could there be no questions?

He showed up the next evening with his big pickup truck and a pair of heavy gloves. When I showed him the carcass he said, “Oh, it’s a deer.”

He sounded neither disappointed nor relieved

And I’m supposed to be The Dark One?

No amount of research will make me Jack London

Working at a newspaper, one is often called upon to write on topics about which one knows little or nothing. 

As a reporter, I’ve covered politics and crime (the two being inextricably linked), education, religion, business and entertainment. I’ve written about natural disasters, man-made disasters, good deeds, heroes, villains, murderers and saints.

All in all, it’s an interesting way to make a buck and I have few regrets. But I am often forced to expound at length on a variety of unfamiliar subjects. This requires research. Sometimes a lot of research. I hate research, though I will admit it has forced me to learn a little bit about a great many things. In conversation, this makes me seem smarter than I really am, so it’s not all bad.

At the moment, I’m working on two stories for an upcoming outdoors magazine; one on fishing, one on hunting. I’ve been fishing for decades and know my way around a lake. Research required: zip.

The story on hunting, however, is going to take a little more effort. I’ve gone hunting just once in my life and the experience, though memorable, did not provide the material required for, say, a Jack London novel.

The year was 1975; outdoorsman Euell Gibbons was on TV telling people some parts of a pine cone are edible; John Denver was extolling the virtues of a Rocky Mountain High; soccer teams were surviving plane crashes in the Andes by snacking on their dead teammates. Men were men, women were women, and small woodland creatures knew enough to keep the hell out of the way when they heard the sound of a pair of Vibram-soled hiking boots tromping through the woods.

I was caught up in the whole back-to-nature movement and spent most of my free time backpacking in places like the Bruce Trail, Porcupine Mountains and any stretch of Michigan shoreline not crowded with beach homes, condos and shops selling T-shirts.

However, naturist though I was, I had never really lived off the land. I had yet to take that final step into complete self-reliance. And I wanted to.

So I bought a sharp knife and a cheap paperback that explained how to catch, clean and cook small game and, thus armed, headed into the woods. I had no guns at the time, so I settled on fashioning a deadfall trap from a hank of rope, a section of log and a branch that overhung a well-traveled deer trail.

I won’t go into the mechanics of a deadfall trap here other than to say that — if all goes well — a bunny is supposed to wind up squished beneath a falling log. The design is essentially Roadrunner-esque and when I saw the finished product, I realized it had about as much chance of catching a bunny as Oprah has of catching Lance Armstrong.

Which is why I was surprised when, less than two minutes after walking away from the trap, I heard the log come crashing to the ground. Sure enough, a dead bunny lay beneath it.

It was the first time I had intentionally murdered an animal. I was determined to honor the bunny’s spirit (or some such other new-age baloney I adhered to at the time) by cooking and eating it.

How-to book in hand, I carried Bugs’ earthly remains to the lake, where I proceeded to skin it, gut it, behead it and otherwise prepare it for cooking. My efforts in this regard bore almost no resemblance to the tidy drawings in the book, and what was left of that poor critter by the time I got it skewered and roasting over a fire would have been considered too gory even for inclusion in a Sylvester Stallone flick.

I cooked it anyway. And tried eating it. My bunny flambe tasted like the deodorant liner from a ninth-grader’s gym shoe. I choked back three bites before giving it up for a bad business and boogieing to the nearest pizza parlor.

So ended my foray into the world of Grizzly Adams. Too bad. If I could have stuck with it, I’d have less research to do before writing my upcoming hunting story.

But really, pizza tastes SO MUCH better than bunny, and the research is so much more agreeable.

Contact Mike Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com or (616) 548-8273.