Out of the Woods: Stories by Chris Offutt

Author:Chris Offutt [Offutt, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2016-02-15T16:00:00+00:00

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.

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