Dove Season

Dove season begins in the late spring when the weather grows warm and the air holds a sweet smell and promise. We were energetic and drove off with a box of thirty Keystone Lights and a pair of twelve gauge shotguns, out to the country where their cousins live. 

Down a few miles of dirt road we met the kid and all his extended family. The kid was in his mid twenties, was burnt tan, and wore only tattered jeans with holes in the knees and boots.  Across his back in archaic font was tattooed “Dirty South”.  

 At first we would stand around and drink, taking aim at doves sitting on the telephone wires that were the only markers across the flat landscape of neatly plowed spring farms. Enough had been drunk for the men to flex their trigger fingers, talking trash and celebrating their prowess whenever a dove would spin off of a wire or clasp their wings shut mid flight and dive headlong into the ground. 

As the small mountain of empty silver cans was growing, so did my delusions of talent. But then I would shoot and nothing happened so my confidence quickly ebbed and I went out back to practice in solitude.  A bird sat on a bush twenty yards away.  I took aim and the gun and the bird jolted instantaneously and I walked over with renewed belief in my competence, but the kid had been watching and called to me “That ain’t no dove, man.  That’s a mockingbird.”  I stood over it and the bird looked back darkly at me wings open bearing its soft underside.  I thought to myself I would never shoot a mockingbird again.

“Lets get in the car and find some more,” he called as he jammed his thumb under the ribs of a limp dove and tore out the two breasts to keep for the grill. Four of us jumped into the car and swerved down the dirt roads, guns akimbo out every window taking aim at anything that quietly sat on the wires overhead.  One was felled and floated down to the ground and it struggled as it flapped in circles like one wing was nailed to the dirt.  The kid skipped out of the car, stepped on the crippled wing and pulled the head of with a small spurt of blood like a shook can of coke. He tossed the head into the bushes and threw the rest in the back of the car.

We took our downy pile of dead birds back to the house stood around the hill of empty cans, drinking quicker.  The kid started playing on an old motorcycle, trying to skid circles in the grass but he lost control and the bike fell down and he bruised and burned his leg underneath.  His father’s girlfriend with a sunken chin laughed and made a remark that maybe only he heard.

As quickly as he fell he leaped up.  We all heard the shuck of the loaded twelve-gauge but did not anticipate it to be leveled at her mouth from a foot away.  His eyes were dark with redness and rage and his neck flared and his hands trembled. He told her that she was inbred and swore to God that he would kill her.  The old men lowered their beers and quietly and shamefully called the name of their own kin.  Moments passed filled with what everyone did not want to happen and then he turned the gun away and his father glowered.

The kid walked off and then pulled me aside and asked for a ride home.  As we drove miles back to his trailer I wanted to speak with him about what he did, but he only spoke about the things he swore to do if it happened again.