He’d been driving for nine hours when the deer didn’t cross the road.
He saw it standing on the shoulder, caught in the headlights — one eye bright, one in shadow, motionless with the specific motionlessness of an animal that has not yet decided. Then it was behind him, and he watched the mirror until the shoulder was dark again. He didn’t brake. Twenty years of interstate and he’d learned that the deer either crossed or they didn’t, and braking was what made it worse.
Something about the deer stayed in the cab after. Not the image exactly. The quality of its attention. The way it had been standing at the edge of something it couldn’t calculate.
His back had passed through pain hours ago into a flat numbness that he thought of as the body’s version of white noise. He shifted, and the seat made the sound it always made, and he settled into a new position that was the same position. He’d tried those bead seat covers once. Marge had bought them off a late-night ad. They felt like driving on a cheese grater and he’d given them to the dog to sleep on, and the dog had also rejected them.
Marge was probably asleep now. She slept early when he was out, turned the TV on in the bedroom and let it talk to her until she dropped off. He’d asked her once if she was lonely when he was on the road. She said she was used to it, which he understood was not the same thing.
The road was straight here. Flat country — Kansas or late Missouri, he’d stopped keeping track at the state line. The white lines came at him in a rhythm that was almost but not quite steady, and his hands knew the slight corrections, the micro-adjustments for wind and grade that he couldn’t have described but that his body made continuously, the way you adjust for breathing.
A song was stuck in his head. Not a song he’d chosen — the last thing the radio had played before he turned it off outside Salina. Something country, a woman’s voice, a lyric about a porch light left on. He’d turned it off because the sentiment was too neat, but the melody kept running three hundred miles later, the hook surfacing every few minutes like something he couldn’t quite land.
He thought about his father for no reason. Not a memory exactly. His father at the kitchen table, reading the paper, not looking up. An image that was always there and never meant anything, that arrived in these hours the way the song did — unbidden, without instruction. He didn’t know why this image and not another. Forty years with his father and a thousand better memories, but the one that came back on the interstate was always the paper, the kitchen, the not-looking-up.
The engine droned. A sign passed — the mileage to somewhere he wasn’t going, just passing through. He was always passing through. Wichita was a number, Denver was a number, and home was a number too, the one that got smaller.
His eyes were doing the thing. The road starting to look painted, two-dimensional, a flat image of a road rather than a road. He knew what this meant and he opened the window, and the air hit him cold and smelled like cut grass and something chemical, and his heart did the thing it did when the road snapped back, and he gripped the wheel until the shaking stopped. He closed the window. It would happen again in an hour.
He passed a truck going the other direction. Its headlights crossed his in a moment of shared brightness, and then it was gone, and the dark was darker for having been briefly lit.
He thought about the deer again. Not the deer itself. What the deer was doing standing there. The body ready for either direction, the animal not yet committed. He’d seen a thousand of them in twenty years and the moment before was always the same — that vibrating stillness, the whole creature poised at the edge of something the body would decide before the head could.
In forty minutes he’d reach the truck stop outside Emporia. He’d order coffee and the cup would be too hot to hold for the first minute and he’d hold it anyway, because after four hundred miles the heat was something. He could feel the ghost of it already in his palms.
The song came back. The porch light. Left on.