Barred Owl
Seven years ago I got divorced and left Kentucky, heading west. I made the Mississippi River in one day, and it just floored me how big it was. I watched the water until sundown. It didn’t seem like a river, but a giant brown muscle instead. Two days later, my car threw a rod and I settled in Greeley, Colorado. Nobody in my family has lived this far off our home hill.
I took a job painting dorm rooms at the college here in town. The pay wasn’t the best, but I could go to work hungover and nobody bugged me. I liked the quiet of working alone. I went into a room and made it a different color. The walls and the ceiling hadn’t gone anywhere, but it was a new place. Only the view from the window stayed the same. What I did was never look out.
Every day after work I stopped by the Pig’s Eye, a bar with cheap draft, a pool table, and a jukebox. It was the kind of place to get drunk in safely, because the law watched student bars downtown. The biggest jerk in the joint was the bartender. He liked to throw people out. You could smoke reefer in the Pig, gamble and fight, but if you drank too much, you were barred. That always struck me odd — like throwing someone out of a hospital for being sick.
Since my social life was tied to the Pig, I was surprised when a man came to the house one Saturday afternoon. That it was Tarvis surprised me even more. He’s from eastern Kentucky, and people often mentioned him, but we’d never met. His hair was short and his beard was long. I invited him in.
“Thank ye, no,” he said.
I understood that he knew I was just being polite, that he wouldn’t enter my house until my welcome was genuine. I stepped outside, deliberately leaving the door open. What happened next was a ritual the likes of which I’d practically forgotten, but once it began, felt like going home with an old girlfriend you happened to meet in a bar.
We looked each other in the eyes for a spell.
Tarvis nodded slightly.
I nodded slightly.
He opened a pouch of Red Man and offered a chew.
I declined and began the slow process of lighting a cigarette while he dug a wad of tobacco from the pouch.
I flicked the match away, and we watched it land.
He worked his chew and spat, and we watched it hit in the grass. Our hands were free. We’d shown that our guard was down enough to watch something besides each other.
“Nice house,” he said.
“I rent.”
“Weather ain’t too awful bad this spring.”
“Always use rain.”
“Keep dogs?” he said.
“Used to.”
“Fish?”
“Every chance I get.”
He glanced at me and quickly away. It was my turn now. If you don’t hear an accent you lose it, and just being around him made me talk like home.
“Working hard?” I said.
“Loafing.”
“Get home much?”
“Weddings and funerals.”
“I got it down to funerals myself,” I said.
“Only place I feel at home anymore is the graveyard.”
He spat again, and I stubbed out my cigarette. A half moon had been hanging in the sky since late afternoon as if waiting for its chance to move.
“Hunt?” he asked.
I spat then, a tiny white dab near his darker pool, mine like a star, his an eclipse. I hadn’t hunted since moving here. Hunters in the West used four-wheel-drive go-carts with a gunrack on the front and a cargo bin behind. They lived in canvas wall-tents that had woodstoves and cots. I’d seen them coming and going like small armies in the mountains. People at home hunted alone on foot. Tarvis looked every inch a hunter and I decided not to get into it with him.
“Not like I did,” I said.
He nodded and looked at me straight on, which meant the reason for his visit was near.
“Skin them out yourself?” he said.
I nodded.
“Come by my place tomorrow, then.”
He gave me directions and drove away, his arm hanging out the window. I figured he needed help dressing out a deer. I’m not big on poaching but with the deer already dead, refusing to help meant wasting the meat.
I headed for the bar, hoping to meet a woman. The problem with dating in a college town is that the young women are too young, and the older ones usually have kids. I’ve dated single mothers but it’s hard to know if you like the woman or the whole package. A ready-made home can look awful good. Women with kids tell me it’s just as tricky for them. Men figure they’re either hunting a full-time daddy or some overnight action, with nothing in between.
This night was the usual Pig crowd, my friends of seven years. I drank straight shots and at last call ordered a couple of doubles. I’d started out drinking to feel good but by the end I was drinking not to feel anything. During the drive home I had to look away from the road to prevent the center stripe from splitting. I fixed that by straddling it. In the morning I woke fully dressed on my couch.
Four cigarettes and a cup of coffee later I felt alive enough to visit Tarvis. He lived below town on a dirt road beside the South Platte River. I veered around a dead raccoon with a tire trench cut through its guts. There were a couple of trailers and a few small houses. Some had outdoor toilets. At Tarvis’s house I realized why the area seemed both strangely foreign and familiar. It was a little version of eastern Kentucky, complete with woodpiles, cardboard windows, and a lousy road. The only thing missing was hills.
I’d woke up still drunk and now that I was getting sober, the hangover was coming on. I wished I’d brought some beer. I got nervous that Tarvis had killed his deer in a hard place and needed help dragging it out of the brush. I didn’t think I could take it. What I needed was to lie down for a while.
Tarvis came around the house from the rear.
“Hidy,” he said. “Ain’t too awful late, are ye?”
“Is it on the property?”
He led me behind the house to a line of cotton-woods overlooking the river’s floodplain. A large bag lay on a work table. Tarvis reached inside and very gently, as if handling eggs, withdrew a bird. The feathers on its chest made a pattern of brown and white — a barred owl. Its wings spanned four feet. The head feathers formed a widow’s peak between the giant eyes. It had a curved yellow beak and inch-long talons. Tarvis caressed its chest.
“Beaut, ain’t it?” he said. “Not a mark to her.”
“You kill it?”
“No. Found it on the interstate up by Fort Morgan. It hit a truck or something. Neck’s broke.”
The sun had risen above the trees, streaming heat and light against my face. Owls were protected by the government. Owning a single feather was illegal, let alone the whole bird.
“I want this pelt,” Tarvis said.
“Never done a bird.”
“You’ve skinned animals out. Can’t be that big a difference.”
“Why don’t you do it yourself then?”
Tarvis backstepped as an expression close to guilt passed across his face.
“I never skinned nothing,” he said. “Nobody taught me on account of I never pulled the trigger. I was raised to it, but I just wasn’t able.”
I looked away to protect his dignity. His words charged me with a responsibility I couldn’t deny, the responsibility of Tarvis’s shame. Leaving would betray a confidence that had taken a fair share of guts to tell.
I felt dizzy, but I rolled my sleeves up and began with the right leg. Surrounding the claws were feathers so dense and fine that they reminded me of fur. To prevent tearing the papery skin, I massaged it off the meat. Tarvis stood beside me. I held the owl’s body and slowed turned it, working the skin free. My arms cooled from the breeze, and I could smell the liquor in my sweat. The hangover was beginning to lift. I snipped the cartilage and tendon surrounding the large wing bone, and carefully exposed the pink muscle. Feathers scraped the plywood like a broom. The owl was giving itself to me, giving its feathered pelt and its greatest gift, that which separated it from us — the wings. In return I’d give it a proper burial.