Bunny owns the double-wide free and clear, but Pawpaw still had a loan on the acre: $558 a month. Then there’s V-1 Propane + Idaho Power + Lakeport Utilities + trash + Blue River Bank for the mattress loan + insurance on the Pontiac + flip phone + snowplowing so she can get the car out of the driveway + $2,652.31 past due on the Visa + health insurance, ha ha, just kidding, she’ll never afford health insurance.
She finds at-will employment cleaning rooms at the Aspen Leaf Lodge—$10.65 an hour—and picks up dinner shifts at the Pig N’ Pancake—$3.45 an hour plus tips. If no one is ordering pancakes, Mr. Burkett makes her clean the walk-in, and no one tips you for cleaning the walk-in.
Every weekday six-year-old Seymour gets off the school bus by himself, walks down Arcady Lane by himself, opens the front door by himself. Eat a waffle and watch a Starboy and do not leave the house. Are you listening, Possum? Can you touch your ears? Can you cross your heart?
He touches his ears. Crosses his heart.
Nonetheless, as soon as he gets home, no matter the weather, no matter how deep the snow, he drops his backpack, goes out the sliding door, ducks under the wire, and climbs through the forest to the big dead ponderosa in the clearing halfway up the hill.
Some days he only senses a presence, a tingling at the base of his neck. Some days he hears low, booming whooos riding through the forest. Some days there’s nothing. But on the best days Trustyfriend is right there, drowsing at the same guano-spattered intersection of trunk and limb where Seymour first saw him, ten feet off the ground.
“Hello.”
The owl gazes down at Seymour; the wind ruffles the feathers of his face; in the whirlpool of his attention spins an understanding as old as time.
Seymour says, “It’s not just the desk either, it’s the smell of Mia’s pickle stickers, the way it gets after recess when Duncan and Wesley are all sweaty, and…”
He says, “They say I’m weird. They say I’m scary.”
The owl blinks into the fading light. His head is the size of a volleyball. He looks like the souls of ten thousand trees distilled into a single form.
One afternoon in November, Seymour is asking Trustyfriend whether loud noises startle him too, whether sometimes it feels as though he hears too much—and does he ever wish the whole world were as quiet as this clearing is right now, where a million tiny silver snowflakes are flying silently through the air?—when the owl drops from its branch, glides across the clearing, and lands in a tree at the far side.
Seymour follows. The owl slips silently down through the trees, back toward the double-wide, calling now and then as though inviting him along. When Seymour reaches the backyard, the owl is perched on top of the house. It sends a big, deep hoo into the falling snow, then twists its gaze to Pawpaw’s old toolshed. Back to Seymour. Back to the toolshed.
“You want me to go in there?”
In the overstuffed gloom of the shed the boy finds a dead spider, a Soviet gas mask, rusty tool boxes, and on a hook above the workbench, a pair of rifle-range ear defenders. When he puts them on, the din of the world fades.
Seymour claps his hands, shakes a coffee can full of bearings, bangs a hammer: all muted, all better. He goes back into the snow and looks up at the owl standing on the gable of the roof. “These? Are these what you meant?”
Mrs. Onegin allows him to wear the muffs at Recess, during Snack, and at Reflection Time. After five consecutive school days without reprimand, she agrees to let him switch desks.
Miss Slattery the counselor awards him a donut. Bunny buys him a new Starboy DVD.
Better.
Whenever the world becomes too loud, too clamorous, too sharp at the edges, whenever he feels that the roar is creeping too close, he shuts his eyes, clamps the muffs over his ears, and dreams himself into the clearing in the woods. Five hundred Douglas firs sway; NeedleMen parachute through the air; the dead ponderosa stands bone-white beneath the stars.
There is magic in this place.
You just have to sit and breathe and wait.
Seymour makes it through the Thanksgiving Pageant, through the Christmas Music Spectacular, through the pandemonium that is Valentine’s Day. He accepts toaster strudel, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, and croutons into his diet. He consents to a bribe-free shampoo every other Thursday. He is working on not flinching when Bunny’s fingernails tat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat on the steering wheel.
One bright spring day Mrs. Onegin leads the first graders through puddles of snowmelt to a light-blue house with a crooked porch on the corner of Lake and Park. The other kids swarm upstairs; a librarian with freckles all over her face finds Seymour alone in Adult Nonfiction. He has to lift one of the cups of his ear defenders to hear her.
“How big did you say he is? Does he sort of look like he’s wearing a bow tie?”
She brings down a field guide from a high shelf. On the very first page she shows him, there’s Trustyfriend, hovering with a mouse clamped in his left foot. In the next photo, there he is again: standing in a snag overlooking a snowy meadow.
Seymour’s heart catapults.
“Great grey owl,” she reads. “World’s largest species of owl by length. Also called sooty owl, bearded owl, spectral owl, Phantom of the North.” She smiles at him from inside her sandstorm of freckles. “Says here that their wingspans can exceed five feet. They can hear the heartbeats of voles under six feet of snowpack. Their big facial disk helps them by collecting sounds, like cupping your hands to your ears.”
She sets her palms beside her ears. Seymour takes off his muffs and does the same.
Every day that summer, as soon as Bunny leaves for the Aspen Leaf, Seymour pours Cheerios into a baggie, heads out the sliding door, passes the egg-shaped boulder, and slips under the wire.
He makes Frisbees from plates of bark, pole-vaults over puddles, rolls rocks down slopes, befriends a pileated woodpecker. There’s a living ponderosa in those woods as big as a school bus stood on end with an osprey nest at the very top, and an aspen grove whose leaves sound like rain on water. And every second or third day, Trustyfriend is there, on his branch in his skeleton tree, blinking out at his dominion like a benevolent god, listening as hard as any creature has ever listened.
Inside the pellets the owl coughs into the needles the boy discovers squirrel mandibles and mouse vertebrae and astonishing quantities of vole skulls. A section of plastic twine. Greenish pieces of eggshell. Once: the foot of a duck. On the workbench in Pawpaw’s shed he assembles chimerical skeletons: three-headed zombie voles, eight-legged spider-chipmunks.
Bunny finds ticks on his T-shirts, mud on the carpet, burrs in his hair; she fills the tub and says, “Someone is going to have me arrested,” and Seymour pours water from one Pepsi bottle into another and Bunny sings a Woody Guthrie song before falling asleep on the bathmat in her Pig N’ Pancake shirt and big black Reeboks.
Second grade. He walks from school to the library, settles his ear defenders around his neck, and sits at the little table beside Audiobooks. Owl puzzles, owl coloring books, owl games on the computer. When the freckled librarian, whose name is Marian, has a free minute, she reads to him, explaining things along the way.
Nonfiction 598.27:
Ideal habitats for great greys are forests bordered by open areas with high vantage points and large populations of voles.
Journal of Contemporary Ornithology:
Great greys are so elusive and easily spooked that we still know very little about them. We are learning, though, that they serve as threads in a meshwork of relationships between rodents, trees, grasses, and even fungal spores that is so intricate and multidimensional that researchers are only beginning to comprehend a fraction of it.
Nonfiction 598.95:
Only about one in fifteen great grey eggs hatch and make it to adulthood. Hatchlings get eaten by ravens, martens, black bears, and great horned owls; nestlings often starve. Because they require such extensive hunting grounds, great greys are particularly vulnerable to habitat loss: cattle trample meadows, decimating prey numbers; wildfires incinerate nesting areas; the owls eat rodents that have eaten poison, die in vehicle collisions, and fly into utility wires.
“Let’s see, this site estimates the current number of great greys in the U.S. at eleven thousand one hundred.” Marian retrieves her big desk calculator. “Say, three hundred million Americans, give or take. Hit the three, now eight zeroes; good, Seymour. Remember the division sign? One, one, one. There you go.”
27,027.
Both of them stare at the number, absorbing it. For every 27,027 Americans, one great grey owl. For every 27,027 Seymours, one Trustyfriend.
At the table beside Audiobooks he tries to draw it. An oval with two eyes in the center—that’s Trustyfriend. Now to make 27,027 dots in rings around it—the people. He makes it to somewhere around seven hundred before his hand is throbbing and his pencil is dull and it’s time to go.
Third grade. He gets a ninety-three percent on a decimals assignment. He accepts Slim Jims, saltines, and macaroni-and-cheese into his diet. Marian gives him one of her Diet Cokes. Bunny says, “You’re doing so well, Possum,” and the moisture in her eyes reflects the lights of the Magnavox.
Walking home one October afternoon, ear defenders on, Seymour turns right onto Arcady Lane. Where this morning there was nothing, now stands a double-posted four-by-five-foot oval sign. EDEN’S GATE, it reads,
COMING SOON
CUSTOM TOWNHOMES AND COTTAGES
PREMIER HOMESITES AVAILABLE
In the illustration, a ten-point buck drinks from a misty pool. Beyond the sign, the road home looks the same: a dusty strip of potholes flanked on both sides by huckleberry bushes, their leaves flaring autumn red.
A woodpecker dips across the road in a low parabola and disappears. A pine marten chatters somewhere. The tamaracks sway. He looks at the sign. Back at the road. Inside his chest rises a first black tendril of panic.