Season Cycle

Autumn: the Fox River

We paused before the bridge by the big water tanks; shiny pewter bulbs on stilts. The moon clambered out of the trees across the river, humming in faraway Canadian yellows; the soft tones of sinking ships. A dark lint blemish moving across the luminous disc slowly split into separate birds. Downriver unseen things clunked and thumped in the distance.

It was corn country. The roads were long and flat; a vast, dusty grid thrown over endless acres of tall yellow-green stalks. I�d walked miles in the cool dust, scuffing rocks, catching fox on the breeze, hemmed in by rustling, fibrous walls. We�d come to the end of the fields now. Behind us at the last intersection a tractor like a dark red clot sat hunched for morning, a cough waiting deep in its diesel lungs.

We stood near the bridge on bare, oil-stained concrete. White clouds surfed over the hills on a moonlit wind. Rusted leaves assembled indecisively around an old fuel bowser, flew apart again. Ben crouched smoking against the cold, a hunch of denim. I stood listening to the hushed, sibilant alphabet of the river as it drowned leaves slowly into Wisconsin.

The horizon rumbled, then two yellow cones probed the night. A big truck came gradually towards us out of the corn. I stepped out, and it stopped, slowly and heavily in a falling cadence of gear-changes, then stood shuddering impatiently. The smell of cow shit, which perhaps it had been trying to outrun, settled around it in a warm pall. I noticed silvery script on the deep blue enamel of the door: the truck was called Pinnochio. High above us the dark cockpit was suffused by a glowing swirl of green smoke.

The window lowered and the driver�s head emerged in a menthol halo. What he said was lost in the continuous thunder, but we got on board, hauling ourselves up into the sudden intimacy of the cabin.

He had the heat turned up. He was big; smelled of engine oil, wore a torn burgundy parka. His stubble glowed green in the light from the dashboard instruments, and it was stained with something that might have been egg. He coughed smoke; admitted he was �getting worse�. Steel guitars on the radio competed with the deep sonorous rumble of Pinocchio�s engine. Ben looked at the floor and I looked ahead into the darkness.

On the other side of the bridge the corn gave way to forest. We crossed, thrumming through a single, pale pool of streetlight, leaving an explosion of leaves in the air behind us. Then the highway took us, the bare trees closing overhead like skeletal hands.