Dead leaves hang for most of the winter on the beech saplings that sprouts in the shelter of the birch.  Within errant sunbeams lost in the undergrowth, they are golden swatches dandifying a lattice of gray trunks swallowed in snowdrifts.  Twisting in the slaps of the February gales they'll be clusters of dim flames in the headlights of the nerve-racked travelers skidding around the highway's eternal curves.   By the end of March, one by one the leaves will give up and vanish.  Taken in the moist turbulence of a squall, they'll skid over the forest's wallows, gather in swirls to blow about clearings or skitter across the road like panicked rats.  They'll be drenched by sleet to rot in mossy pulchritude, or floated from spring freshets to muddy floods and carried miles to sink in the depths of a marine abyss.   Mere shadows vanishing in darkening emerald, expiring vestiges of seasons past.  Dead and gone.  At last.

     In tonight's black crystal, the beech leaves are still fluttering.  Here and there enough snow has drifted from the shoulders of the roadway to reveal a pair of eyes peering from the shelter of a granite boulder. Fox or coyote out to claim what's left of a road kill in the dusty wake of my rig's eighteen wheels.

     Tighter curves, steeper grades.  Gravel flies.  The forest briefly parts where a stream changes to a pond almost beneath the highway.  A scattering of twinkles cast on ice flashes by the corner of my eyes and the screech of rubber on tar changes to tormented rumble as this eighty-thousand pounds load of potatoes lumbers over a bridge heading into the darkness of another canyon split by a faded centerline.   At the top of a hill, the narrow band of star-studded blackness fans open to the face of a moonlit cliff.  Falling from snowy shelves into dark maelstroms, a sweep of ledges sinks below tree tops as the road drops across another stream and rises once more up a steeper hill to level under an open sky.

     Moonlight again softens the glare of the headlights. I check the trails to the discrete parking spots at the edge of an overgrown field.  There will be no one there tonight, it must be fifteen below under the contorted limbs of the maple drooping over mounds of rotted planks, the ruin of the Coachman's Glory.  Horses with steaming flanks once caught their wind under the tree while teamsters celebrated their conquering of the hill with draughts of beer foaming in steins stamped with the roadhouse's mark, a whip slashing a spur.  Now the trampled grounds are a sweep of weeds and tonight's arctic chill has only slowed the decay of the Glory's timbers under frozen slime.  The house's tankards were melted into bullets to aim at the pointed helmets of the Kaiser's gray hordes in a nearly forgotten war.   The coachmen and their teams have long gone to flecks of dust, a few perhaps riding on the icy blow that burdens the patches of sedge locked in frozen snow.

The diesels' halting whine has replaced the claps of the whips.   And the sleepy-eyed drivers of sleek foreign roadsters calmly finger their machines into higher gear where implacable couriers once spurred exhausted mounts neighing for the gentler air of the valleys below.   Even the name of the place has faded to the reveries of nursing home invalids, or the confines of ancient maps rolled on musty racks in neglected archives.  This is now Suzanne's Hill, the haunt of a ghost, a maiden taken in her prime.  Now given to hitchhiking, I was told.  Was that spirit watching when a man fell to a shotgun blast here?

     Not likely, I'll say. I don't believe in ghosts and I don't care for ghost stories though there is money enough to be made in the genre.  I ought to try it instead of collecting rejection emails for the lyrical travel tales I keep sending to moron publishers of commercial drivel.  Yeah, write spooky yarns of refined literary quality and make enough to stay off that cussed machine.  Ward off hemorrhoidal discomfort, wear tweed, smoke a pipe, exchange pheromones with receptionists at New York publishing houses, screw comely English majors at writers seminars.

     Or go back to teaching junior high.   Dream on, Emil.   Daydream in the nighttime and drive. That's all there is left to do on this truck. Nothing on the radio but static, or the harebrained howls of call-in show hosts.  Worse, Roy Orbison's Greatest Hits lay jammed in the innards of the tape player.  It's a dual disaster in the image of my love life.   I've got an acid-tongued bitch at home for a wife, and on the side a hot 'n' rocking little honey doing ten months in Dunham for selling a bag of grass to a narc.   Sweet Gail.  Wouldn't I love to push the eject button for her.

     It was summertime when she came aboard right here on Suzanne's Hill where I had stopped to wait for my rig to cool down, where her Saturday night date had stranded her.   She wouldn't put out, she said.  The guy was a jerk and the car was full of mosquitoes.  She thought they went for wine coolers, the carbon dioxide probably.  I said the cheapskate should've brought Chivas Regal, looked to me like she'd be worth the treat.  We were fast friends after that.  Strange thing about the girl, a mix of free spirit willfulness and vulnerability with a cynical grin that could melt her face in joy at the hint of a compliment.  We sat there awhile, heat lightning silently glowing on the windshield now and then, with me listening to her tales of country lane urchin raised by her grandmother in a minuscule house at the foot of the hill.  I knew the place, I passed it every trip.   A couple miles out of Lamartine, where someone once settled to farm a miniature of a clearing. The highway slides gently into a hollow and there is a tiny building hugging the tar, almost a mirror image of the shed that pretends to be a barn on the other side.  I usually breeze through in the late part of the evening, doing sixty or more.  For an instant the headlights expose the dark red of the buildings, the white trim, the jutting shapes of clutter about the grounds, the weeds.  Most nights the glow of a television screen touches the corner of a window, but there has never been a vehicle parked there in the years that I have driven this road. Never a cow, never a sheep in the pasture that's turning into hardhack bushes and wild rose thickets just ahead of the alder battalions, vanguard of the deep woods.

     I said I wished I had driven past the little red house some September morning way-back-when, and seen her in pigtails waiting for the school bus with her lunch of corn bread and blackberries in a paper sack.  There was a distant, steady rumble of thunder.  In the dark of the cab, the clicks in the cooling engine were spacing and waning as heat rose between us.  Between and within.  A car topped the hill, its headlights flashing in the truck's side mirror to paint her profile in white neon.  The glow washed over her shoulders below hair that was cold fire against the window. Queer elf of ephemeral ice now telling of kin.  A woman also stranded here after a lover's quarrel, her aunt Suzanne, killed by the logging truck she tried to flag down in driving rain for a ride home.  Suzanne, now the hill's resident ghost.

     Twilight zone stuff, I thought, and one strange choice for a date with Gail.  Then lightning gave me her face again.  With tears.  I waited for the thunder to rumble down, said there were demons here to exorcise, bad karma.  Raindrops were drumming on the roof of the cab when we crawled into the bunk.  Was that our moaning or the howl of the wind mixing in the din of the storm?  Were there waves of ozone, or sulfur, breaking against the old truck rocking in the gusts?  Was the steamy heat of passion caught in a passing draft when the feeling of an ice sheet on my back arched my body to drive more pleasure into the wild creature writhing under me?

     Some nights are better than others.  Better than tonight, without a doubt.  Coasting down another incline, well south of Suzanne's Hill.  Approaching civilization, taking in roadside trailers buttressed by broods of banged-up vehicles cocooned in snow banks, a coke sign alight in the window of a darkened market behind a pair of mismatched gas pumps.  Power lines, telephone lines, cable TV lines.  The glow of town lights over the crest of the next range of hills, the promise of a donut and an extra-large coffee.  Extra cream, extra sugar.  To brighten my mood.

NEXT:  YOU'RE SO VAIN, SUZANNE