ONCE WHEN I was a small boy of ten or eleven I was traveling late at night with my father on a narrow country road. I had been counting the number of beers he drank that night, nine or ten of them, and I was anxious about his driving.
Neither of us had spoken for a long time. What was there to say?—the beers, the narrow road, the stubble fields, a bare bulb shining out in the darkness from a porch far back from the road, the yellow headlights? What was there to talk about? The car held the road on the curves, the heater was making its familiar sound.
Then I saw a road sign, bright yellow and diamond-shaped, and on it I read the word SLOW. My father kept on driving at the same speed and did not slow down, though I knew he had seen the sign. So I was bold. I said, “Did you see that sign?”
Immediately my father let up on the gas and the car began to slow down. He said, “You’re right. We should go back.”
He pulled his car onto the berm and stopped and looked back over his left shoulder for safety and then pulled out onto the road again and made a U-turn.
I was frightened. I said, “Why are we going back?”
My father shifted the gears and we began driving back in the direction we had come. “The sign,” he said. “I’m going back to see the sign.”
I said, “Why? Why are we doing that?”
He said, “Isn’t that what you meant? Didn’t you want to go back?”
I said, “I wanted you to slow down. I was afraid.”
We drove on in the darkness for a minute. My father said, “The sign didn’t say SLOW.”
I said, “It didn’t? I thought it said SLOW.”
My father said, “It said OWLS.”
So we kept driving and I didn’t argue. I listened to the quiet sound of the heater fan. I saw the red eyes of a rabbit on the roadside. I saw the stubble fields. For one second I believed I had lived a very long hard life and that I was all alone in the world.
Then the sign came into view again, the back of the sign, of course. My father slowed the car and pulled over to the right and when he had come to a complete stop he checked over his shoulder for safety and made another U-turn so that we might face the sign again and read its message. The headlights made the sign huge and bright.
My father had been right. The sign said OWLS.
We kept sitting there for a long time. The engine was running, there was a small vibration.
Then my father turned off the engine. The early-spring night air was cold, but he rolled down the windows.
I knew my father wanted me to be quiet. I’m not sure how I knew this. I knew he wanted us to listen. I scarcely breathed I was listening so hard. I did not move at all.
Then I heard the owls overhead. I heard the soft centrifugal buffeting of their feathers on the night air. I heard a sound from their owl-throats so soft that I believed it was their breathing. In my mind I counted them and thought that they were many. The owls were circling and circling and circling in the air above us.
I don’t know what I believed would happen. I think I believed I would feel the fingers of my father’s hand touch my arm, the sleeve of my shirt. I believed I would turn to him and for the first time in my life I would know what to say. I would tell him all my secrets. I believed my father would say, “I love you.” This was what it meant to sit in a car with your father in the middle of the night and listen to a flock of owls while looking at a diamond-shaped sign that said OWLS.
Then he rolled up his window, and so I rolled up mine. In the darkness he said, “You know, your mother is a terrible housekeeper.”
We only sat there looking at the OWLS sign. I knew things would not go well after this.
And so then he started up the car and we drove away, back along the dark road, and we did not say anything else to each other that night, and he drank a few more beers.
All I mean to say is this: Many years later I fell in love with a woman, and she was beautiful and strange. One afternoon, after we had made our love, we lay in a band of sunlight that fell across our bed and I told her the story of my father and the dark road and the sign that said OWLS.
I said, “You don’t believe me, do you?”
The woman said, “Have you ever told this story to anyone before?”
I said, “I told my mother. That same night, after my father and I got home and my mother came upstairs to tuck me in.”
The woman said, “Tell me again about your room, then, with the fake stars on the ceiling.”
I told her what she already knew. I said, “It was an attic room, with a slanted ceiling. A desk, and even my clothes drawers were built into the wall to save space. There was a crawlspace in the back of my closet, where I sat sometimes, in the rafters. On the ceiling above my bed were pasted luminous decals of stars and the planets and the moon. Saturn had rings. A comet had a funny tail.
She said, “Tell me again about the real moon.”
I said, “The moon outside my window.”
She said, “How large was it?”
I said what I had told her many times. I said, “It was a peach-basket-size moon.”
She said, “And you were lying in your bed, with the fake stars shining down on you and the peach-basket moon outside your window, and then . . .”
I said, “I heard my mother coming up the stairs to tuck me in.”
She said, “Your mother had been worried about you, out in the car with your father when he had been drinking.”
I said, “Yes, she had been worried. She would never say this.”
She said, “What did she say?”
I said, “She said, ‘Did you have a nice time with Daddy tonight?’”
She said, “What did you say?”
I said, “I told her the story about seeing the sign. About stopping and listening to the owls in the air.”
She said, “What did your mother say then?”
I said, “She said, ‘That’s about like your daddy.’”
She said, “Your mother didn’t believe you?”
I said, “She was right. There was no OWLS sign. It’s ridiculous. There is no way to hear owls in the air. And, anyway, think about the coincidence of a drunk man and his oversensitive kid stopping at just the moment the owls happen to be flying above a sign.”
She said, “Hm.”
I said, “And you know that thing my father said. That thing about ‘Your mother is a terrible housekeeper’?”
She said, “Mm-hm.”
I said, “That’s a part of an old joke we used to hear in the South when I was a boy. The punchline is, ‘My wife is a terrible housekeeper, every time I go to piss in the sink it’s full of dirty dishes.’” I said, “I think I made the whole thing up.”
She said, “Where did the owls come from?”
I said, “I’m not sure. Do you remember in Winnie-the-Pooh, the character named Owl?”
She said, “Yes.”
I said, “Remember, somewhere, in one of those books, we learn that Owl’s name is misspelled on a sign as WOL. Maybe that’s where I got the idea. I just happened to think of that book. Jeeziz. It’s possible I made this whole thing up.”
She said, “Are rabbits’ eyes really red?”
I said, “I don’t know. I saw a blind dog in my headlights one time, and its eyes looked red. Christ.”
The way the sunlight fell across the bed was . . . Well, I was so much in love.
She said, “Was your father magic?”
I said, “I wanted him to be.”
She said, “He might have been.”
Now she looked at me, and it was the night of the owls all over again. The car’s heater, the vibration of the engine, the red eyes of the rabbit, the stubble fields, the music of the odd birds in flight, the OWLS sign before me. And also the feeling that there was someone beside me to whom I could tell my most terrible secret and that the secret would be heard and received as a gift. I believed my clumsy drunken inexpert father, or my invention of him, had prepared me for this magic. The woman beside me said, “I love you.”
In that moment every good thing that I had expected, longed to feel with my father, I felt with her. And I also felt it with my father, and I heard his voice speak those words of love, though he was already a long time dead. He was with me in a way he could not be in life.
For one second the woman and I seemed to become twins, or closer than twins, the same person together. Maybe we said nothing. Maybe we only lay in the band of sunlight that fell across our bed. Or maybe together we said, “There is great pain in all love, but we don’t care, it’s worth it.”