I was a long way past his cabin, a long way up the road. It had been more than an hour since I had gone across the bridge over the little creek by where he lived—the swans paddling in slow circles in the creek, white like ghosts in the moonlight, with the moon’s blurry reflection wavering in their ripples, and ice beginning to form on the creek’s edges. I imagined that the swans were waiting for Amy’s next sonata, these beautiful birds for whom music was an impossibility.
I walked on farther, past the yellow lights of Billy and Amy’s cabin, up the hill. I had assumed Billy was at home, that they were both at home, maybe sitting in bed and playing a hand of cards or two before going to sleep, as Amy had told me they often did—playing cards, that is, if Billy could still remember how.
So I was surprised to see him come driving slowly over the hill, his truck slipping on the fresh snow a little; and he stopped, recognizing me in the glare of his headlights—recognizing me, I could tell, but not able to remember my name.
“Hop in, bub,” he said. “I was just out looking at things.”
I did not believe this was so. I was certain he had forgotten which cabin was his, and I tried to think of a way to tell him when he passed it—wondering if I could say something like, “Is Amy still baking tonight?” and point up the hill toward the yellow squares of light, piecy-looking through the trees.
It was a full moon, and I was surprised to see that Billy was driving with the heater on, and that his windows were rolled up. It was hot and stuffy in the truck. A shooting star streaked in front of us and then disappeared over the trees, and Billy, who was driving with both hands on the wheel, leaning forward and watching the road carefully, looked up at it but said nothing.
Deer kept trotting across the road in front of us, red-eyed in the glare of the headlights—some with antlers, some without—and Billy would turn the lights out immediately whenever he saw a herd of them—in November and December, they were beginning to bunch up and travel together, for protection, and for warmth—and I sat in my seat and gripped the high dashboard, certain that we were going to plow right through the herd.
“What are you doing, Billy?” I said.
He drove intently, slowly, but not slowly enough for my liking. I kept waiting to hear the thud of bodies, and to feel the jolt—and then when we were past the spot where we should have struck the deer, he would turn the lights back on, and the road in front of us would be empty.
“Sheriff told me to do that,” Billy would say each time it happened. “The noise of the truck scares ’em off the road. If you leave the lights on, you blind ’em, and they can’t decide which way to go—that’s how you end up hittin’ ’em—but if you turn your lights off, they can think straight and know to get out of the way.”
I had never heard of such a thing and did not believe that he had, either—and it is something that I have never heard of since—but it seemed to give him a distinct pleasure, hunched over the steering wheel and punching the lights off and gliding toward where we had last seen the herd of deer in the middle of the road. He seemed at peace, doing that, and I decided that he was not lost at all, that he just enjoyed getting out and driving at night, and so when we passed the lights of his cabin, I looked up the hill at them but said nothing.
“Take care, Billy,” I said when he let me out at my place. It was dark, and I felt that he was frightened of something.
“Take care,” he said back to me. “Do you need a light?” he said, rummaging through the toolbox on the seat beside him. “I’ve got a flashlight, if you need it.”
It was only about a ten-yard walk to my cabin.
“No, thanks, I’ll be all right. You take care now, Billy.”
“You’re sure?” he asked.
“I’m sure.”
“Take care,” he said again. “Take good care.”
He drove in a circle in my yard, found the driveway again, and headed up the road toward his house. I stood there and watched him disappear around the bend.
I watched then as Billy’s lights came back around the bend—he was driving back to my house in reverse; driving slowly, gears groaning.
Billy backed up in my driveway but didn’t get out of his big truck, just leaned out the window. He seemed embarrassed. “Can you show me how to get home?”
…
He got all the way home in January. He was still trying to cut and load stove wood, as if trying to lay in a hundred years’ supply for all of his and Amy’s fires, on the day that he did not come back—a short winter’s day, as if the apogee of waning light had finally scooped him up, had claimed him.
Amy and I went into the woods with lanterns. A light snow was falling, flakes hissing when they landed on our hot lanterns. Billy was lying on his side in the snow (having shut his saw off, but with his helmet still on), looking as if he had stretched out only to take a nap.
Amy crouched and brushed the snow from his face. There were lengths of firewood scattered all around, wood he had not yet loaded in his truck, but already the snow was covering it.
We lifted him carefully into my truck. I drove, and Amy rode with his head cradled in her lap. She removed his helmet and covered his bare head with her hands as if to keep it warm, or perhaps summon one last surge of force, or even
