He spins the wheel hard, angry. He cannot pull away from the house fast enough. The truck lurches forward. A bee-stung horse. Snow and ice spit out from under the wheels, like a curse from a teacher’s mouth, like buckshot scattering through the air and bloodying the breast of a duck flushed from the water. The back end of the pickup, light and bouncy, skids wide and loose.
When it happens, he feels the sound of the impact as much as he hears it: like a soda can crushed by a stomped foot. But it’s two distinct sounds: the heavy thud of the boot and the gossamer crinkle of metal folding on itself.
Except the sound does not come from a soda can crushed by a foot. He knows what it is immediately. He stomps hard on the brake pedal, the truck stopping as violently as it started. He sits. The stereo is loud in the stillness, so he thumbs it off, but the windshield wipers squeak, so he turns them off too and then stops the motor.
It is too quiet. If everything were going to be okay, there would be a word. A voice. A sound. Something. Anything. But the only sound he can hear is an echo, a memory, the undertone that came with the thud and crumple of metal: the inevitable weakness of a body. He wishes it had simply been an empty soda can. But he knows it was a human being.
He gets out of the truck. He moves as slowly as he can force himself to.
He hit a deer once, more than a year ago, not long after he got the truck running, but that was different. The animal bounded out in front of him. Dumb-eyed and desperate. He barely had time to touch the brake before his fender tore open the deer’s belly. When he stopped the truck and walked back to where the deer was crumpled on the shoulder, it was still alive. A sort of miracle.
But the wrong sort of miracle. Guts spilled onto the asphalt, the slow sodium light of the streetlights washing everything down. The doe’s breath a desperate whistle of blood. Her right hind leg scraping weakly against the ground as if she was still trying to stand. He watched her like this for a minute or two and then went back to his truck. If he’d had his hunting knife with him, he could have been merciful, but there was nothing to do other than head home to hose off the blood and gore. He had to use a pair of pliers to fish out a chunk of the doe’s skin that was lodged in the creased fender.
Now he walks the long way around the front of the truck, touching the hood and then looking at the memory of the deer imprinted on the front fender; the metal still bears an ugly kiss.
When he has made his way around the truck, he looks. The body is ten, twenty feet behind the bed of the truck. He knows it is a person, but in the shadows and the false light coming from the house, it could be anything else. He wants it to be anything else. A soda can. A doe. But it is, and always will be, stubbornly, a dead body.