They were still in North Carolina when the sun came up, burning orange-red through the fog, and they stopped for breakfast at a small diner that had a smokehouse attached to its side, through the wood-slat cracks of which issued slow blue smoke. The scent of the smoke caught their attention as if a clothesline had been strung across the road.
The diner was built from old cinder blocks and the parking lot was red clay with scattered beds of gravel. Numerous low swales held muddy water. The lot was filled with old mud-splattered trucks and cars, bald-tired and with sprung-out taillights and headlights duct taped in place. All of the license plates were local, and none of the vehicles had bumper stickers of any kind—as if the drivers led lives so pure as to be unconcerned of anything beyond their immediate control.
Russell and Sissy went out back first to take a look at what was cooking. They found glistening pork ribs and ham steaks blushing as red as oak leaves in autumn. Some chickens, too.
“I’m hungry,” Russell said. They stood there in the blue smoke, letting it bathe them for a while, and looked out at the forest dropping away below them: sweetgum, hickory, oak, loblolly, mountain laurel. They could see more ridges, more knolls and valleys, gold lit, through the framework of green leaves and branches. Tobacco country, down in the lowlands. Russell took another look at the hams. “This is my country,” he said. “Or getting real near it.”
He turned and studied the mound of fresh-split oak sitting next to the grill. Fuel for the coming day’s work of altering the taste of a thing. He didn’t possess a trace of fat. It would be hard to guess where the calories went on him. It was his own opinion that they just sort of vaporized, like coal or some other combustible shoved into a glowing furnace.
When they went inside, the diners all swiveled to study them unabashedly, and at length. Sissy had never felt so on display. Old farmers in blue denim overalls and straw hats staring at her through Coke-bottle glasses. Canes. Gap-teeth, gold teeth, tobacco teeth. Finally Sissy felt compelled to speak. “Hello,” she said.
One of the old farmers gestured the nub of a finger toward Russell, and then toward their car, and toward the canoe perched atop it.
“Son,” he said, “what are you doin’ with that owl?”
They looked out the window and saw that an owl, bent-looking and ruffled, was sitting on the hood of their car, blinking. It had gotten sucked up into the canoe, and Russell had been driving so fast it must have ridden pinned back in the stern, unable to get out. Now that the car had stopped and the pressure had been released, the owl seemed scarcely able to believe it was free.
“Can it fly?” one of the old men asked. Others were staring at Russell now.
“We must have scooped it out of the sky,” Russell said.
Only about half of them believed him. They set their papers down and sipped their coffee and watched the owl with interest and speculation. “It seems disinclined to fly,” one of the men said.
“Hit’s watching us back,” said another, and now it seemed as if a gauntlet had been laid down, so that there was no way the old men would let the owl—this ruffled, yellow-eyed interloper—out-stare them, and they crouched forward, leaning over their steaming cups of coffee, and surveyed the owl, which was still squatting in similar fashion, hunch-shouldered, as suspicious of the events that had brought him to this place as were the old men.
Sissy and Russell settled in to eat: road-weary and ravenous, they settled slowly, firmly, back into the real world. Russell could not decide what to exclude from the menu, so he ordered one of everything—pancakes, grits, ham, fried eggs, ribs, bacon, biscuits, gravy—and as if to counterbalance his gluttony, Sissy ordered a cup of coffee and a thin piece of ham.
They ate in silence. A slash of morning sunlight fell across their table, and, after so much darkness on their drive through the night, the sunlight seemed now to carry extra sweetness and clarity.
Russell finished his first helpings and decided to focus thereafter on the fried eggs and ham. The waitress brought him another plate and he stretched—the cracking of tight ligaments in his back sounded almost musical—and told the waitress she’d better just start frying eggs, and that he’d tell her when to stop.
One of the old men noticed the new plate of food and marked a little tally of it on his napkin.
Russell ate steadily for over half an hour: two eggs, ham, two eggs, ham. The restaurant ran out of eggs after he had eaten twenty-four, though they still had some ribs and ham left; but finally Russell said he had had enough, and he leaned back and stretched and patted, then thumped, the taut skin of his belly.
He reached out and took Sissy’s hand fondly, and they sat there for a while alongside the old men, in the mild sunlight, and watched the owl.
“Hit wants in to eat some ham, too,” one of them speculated.
“If a cat walks by, that owl’ll kill it,” another warned, and now they began to look about almost eagerly, hoping for such a drama.
As if bored by not eating, Russell decided to order a single pancake for dessert, and when it arrived he doused it with syrup and then ate it slowly, with much satisfaction, and said, “Damn, I wish I had an egg to go on top of this,” and the old men laughed.
Russell finished and then got up to go to the bathroom. The waitress got on the phone and began ordering reinforcements for the larder. Sissy noticed that the phone was an old black rotary dial
