Strange Highways (12 page)

Joey cannot speak.

“It’s so easy to destroy them, me. But it’s even easier to do the right thing, Joey, even easier just to believe.”

Pressure. Crushing pressure. Joey might as well be in a deep-sea submersible instead of a car, at the bottom of a trench four miles under the ocean. Thousands upon thousands of pounds of pressure per square inch. Testing the integrity of the car. Bearing down on him until he feels as though he will implode.

At last, when he finds his voice, it sounds younger than his years and dismayingly equivocal: “I don’t know, P.J. I don’t know.”

“You hold my life in your hands, Joey.”

“I’m all mixed up.”

“Mom and Dad. In your hands.”

“But she’s dead, P.J. A girl is dead.”

“That’s right. Dead. And we’re alive.”

“But … what will you do with the body?”

When he hears himself ask that question, Joey knows that P.J. has won. He feels suddenly weak, as if he is a small child again, and he is ashamed of his weakness. Bitter remorse floods him, as corrosively painful as an acid, and he can deal with the agony only by shutting down a part of his mind, switching off his emotions. A grayness, like a fall of ashes from a great fire, sifts down through his soul.

P.J. says, “Easy. I could dump the body somewhere it’ll never be found.”

“You can’t do that to her family. They can’t spend the rest of their lives
wondering what happened to her. They won’t ever have any hope of peace if they think she’s … somewhere in pain, lost.”

“You’re right. Okay. I’m not myself. Obviously, I should leave her where she can be found.”

The internal grayness—sifting, sifting—gradually anesthetizes Joey. Minute by minute he feels less, thinks less. This strange detachment is vaguely disturbing on one level, but it is also a great blessing, and he embraces it.

Aware of a new flatness in his voice, Joey says, “But then the cops might find your fingerprints on the tarp. Or find something else, like some of your hair. Lots of ways they might connect you to her.”

“Don’t worry about fingerprints. There aren’t any to find. I’ve been careful. There’s no other evidence either, none, no connections except …”

Joey waits with bleak resignation for his brother—his only and much loved brother—to finish that thought, because he senses that it will be the worst thing with which he has to deal, the hardest thing he will have to accept, other than the discovery of the brutalized body itself.

“… except I knew her,” says P.J.

“You knew her?”

“I dated her.”

“When?” Joey asks numbly, but he is almost beyond caring. Soon the deepening grayness in him will soften all the sharp edges of his curiosity and his conscience.

“My senior year in high school.”

“What’s her name?”

“A girl from Coal Valley. You didn’t know her.”

The rain seems as if it might never end, and Joey has no doubt that the night will go on forever.

P.J. says, “I only dated her twice. We didn’t hit it off. But you can see, Joey, how this will look to the cops. I take her body to the sheriff, they find out I knew her … they’ll use that against me. It’ll be that much harder to prove I’m innocent, that much worse for Mom and Dad and all of us. I’m between a rock and hard place, Joey.”

“Yes.”

“You see what I mean.”

“Yes.”

“You see how it is.”

“Yes.”

“I love you, little brother.”

“I know.”

“I was sure you’d be there for me when it counted.”

“All right.”

Deep grayness.

Soothing grayness.

“You and me, kid. Nothing in the world is stronger than you and me if we stick together. We have this bond, brothers, and it’s stronger than steel. You know? Stronger than anything. It’s the most important thing in the world to me—what we have together, how we’ve always hung in there, brothers.”

They sit in silence for a while.

Beyond the streaming windows of the car, the mountain darkness is deeper than it has ever been before, as if the highest ridges have tilted toward one another, fusing together, blocking out the narrow band of sky and any hope of stars, as if he and P.J. and Mom and Dad now exist in a stone vault without doors or windows.

“You’ve got to be getting back to college soon,” P.J. says. “You’ve got a long drive tonight.”

“Yeah.”

“I’ve got a long one too.”

Joey nods.

“You’ll have to come visit me in New York.”

Joey nods.

“The Big Apple,” P.J. says.

“Yeah.”

“We’ll have some fun.”

“Yeah.”

“Here, I want you to have this,” P.J. says, taking Joey’s hand, trying to push something into it.

“What?”

“A little extra spending money.”

“I don’t want it,” Joey says, trying to pull away.

P.J. grips his hand tightly, forcing a wad of bills between his reluctant fingers. “No, I want you to have it. I know how it is in college, you can always use a little extra.”

Joey finally wrenches away without accepting the bills.

P.J. is relentless. He tries to shove the money into Joey’s coat pocket. “Come on, kid, it’s only thirty bucks, it’s not a fortune, it’s nothing. Humor me, let me play the big shot. I never get to do anything for you, it’ll make me feel good.”

Resistance is so difficult and seems so pointless—only thirty dollars, an insignificant sum that Joey finally lets his brother put the money in his pocket. He is worn out. He hasn’t the energy to resist.

P.J. pats him on the shoulder affectionately. “Better go inside, get you packed up and off to school.”

They return to the house.

Their folks are curious.

Dad says, “Hey, did I raise a couple of sons who’re too dumb to come in out of the rain?”

Putting an arm around Joey’s shoulders, P.J. says, “Just some brother talk, Dad. Big-brother-little-brother stuff. Meaning of life, all that.”

With a smile, Mom teasingly says, “Deep, dark secrets.”

Joey’s love for her at the moment is so intense, so powerful, that the force of it almost drives him to his knees.

In desperation, he retreats deeper into the internal grayness, and all the bright hurts of the world are dimmed, all the sharpness dulled.

He packs quickly and leaves a few minutes before P.J. Of all the goodbye hugs that he receives, the one from his brother is the most all-encompassing, the most fierce.

A couple of miles outside of Asherville, he becomes aware of a car closing rapidly behind him. By the time he reaches the stop sign at the intersection of the county route and Coal Valley Road, the other vehicle has caught up with him. The driver doesn’t stop behind Joey but swings around him, casting up great sheets of dirty water, and takes the turn onto Coal Valley Road at too high a speed. When the tire-thrown water washes off the windshield, Joey sees that the car has stopped after traveling a hundred yards onto the other highway

He knows it is P.J.

Waiting.

It isn’t too late.

There is still world enough, and time.

Everything hinges on making a left turn.

That is the route he had intended to take anyway.

Just turn left, as planned, and do what must be done.

Red taillights, beacons in the dismal rain. Waiting.

Joey drives through the intersection, straight ahead, passing the turnoff to Coal Valley, taking the county route all the way to the interstate.

And on the interstate, although he still invites the devil of detachment into his heart, he can’t prevent himself from recalling certain things that P.J. said, statements that have a more profound meaning now than they’d had earlier: “It’s so easy to destroy me, Joey … but … even easier just to believe.” As if truth were not an objective view of the facts, as if it could be whatever a person chose to believe. And: “Don’t worry about fingerprints. There aren’t any to be found. I’ve been careful.” Caution implied intent. A frightened, confused, innocent man wasn’t rational enough to be cautious; he didn’t take steps to ensure that he’d eradicated all the evidence linking him to a crime.

Had there been any bearded man with greasy hair—or had that been a Charles Manson-inspired convenience? If he’d hit the woman up on Pine Ridge, hit her hard enough to kill her instantly, why wasn’t his car damaged?

Southbound in the night, Joey becomes increasingly distraught, and he drives faster, faster, faster, as though he believes that he can outrun all the facts and their dark implications. Then he finds the jar, loses control of the Mustang, spins out, crashes …

… and finds himself standing by the guardrail, staring out at a field full of knee-high grass and taller weeds, not quite sure what he’s doing there. Wind howling down the interstate with a sound like legions of phantom trucks hauling strange cargo.

Sleet stings his face, his hands.

Blood. A cut above his right eye.

A head injury. He touches the wound, and a brightness spirals behind his eyes, brief hot fireworks of pain.

A head injury, even one as small as this, provides infinite possibilities, not the least of which is amnesia. Memory can be a curse and a guarantee against happiness. On the other hand, forgetfulness can be a blessing, and it can even be mistaken for that most admirable of all virtues—forgiveness.

He returns to the car. He drives to the nearest hospital to have his bleeding wound stitched.

He is going to be all right.

He is going to be all right.

At college again, he attends classes for two days, but he finds no value in following the narrow highways of formal education. He is a natural autodidact anyway and will never find a teacher as demanding of him as he is of himself. Besides, if he is going to be a writer, a novelist, then he needs to acquire a fund of real-world experiences from which to draw on for the creation of his art. The stultifying atmosphere of classrooms and the outdated wisdom of textbooks will only inhibit development of his talent and stifle his creativity. He needs to venture far and wide, leave academia behind, and plunge into the turbulent river of life.

He packs his things and leaves college forever. Two days later, somewhere in Ohio, he sells the damaged Mustang to a used-car dealer, and thereafter he hitchhikes west.

Ten days after leaving college, from a desert truck stop in Utah, he drops a postcard to his parents, explaining his decision to begin the experience-gathering process that will give him the material he needs to be a writer. He tells them that they should not worry about him, that he knows what he’s doing, that he’ll keep in touch.

He’s going to be all right. He’s going to be all right.

“Of course,” Joey said, still kneeling beside the dead woman in the deconsecrated church, “I was never all right again.”

The rain on the roof was a mournful sound, like a dirge for her, the doubly dead, in that she died so young.

Joey said, “I drifted from place to place, job to job. Fell out of touch with everyone … even with the dream of becoming a writer. I was too busy for dreams. Too busy playing the game of amnesia. Didn’t dare see Mom and Dad … and risk coming apart, spilling the truth.”

Turning away from the deserted nave over which she had been keeping watch, returning to his side, Celeste said, “Maybe you’re being too hard on yourself. Maybe the amnesia wasn’t just self-delusion. The head injury
could
explain it.”

“I wish I was able to believe that,” Joey said. “But the truth
is
objective, not just what we’d like to make it.”

“Two things I don’t understand.”

“If there’re only two, then you’re way ahead of me.’

“In the car with P.J. that night-“

“Tonight. It was twenty years ago … but also just tonight.”

“—he’d already convinced you to believe him, or at least to go along and get along. Then, after he had you in the palm of his hand, he told you he knew the dead girl. Why would he make a revelation like that when he’d already won? Why would he risk raising your suspicions again and losing you?”

“You had to know P.J. well to understand. There was always this … dangerous quality about him. Not recklessness, not anything that anyone found truly scary in any way. Just the opposite. It added to his allure. It was a wonderful, romantic sort of dangerousness, a thing that people admired. He liked to take chances. It was most obvious on the football field. His maneuvers were often so bold and unorthodox—but they worked.”

“They always said he liked to play on the edge.”

“Yeah. And he enjoyed driving fast, really fast—but he could handle a car about as well as anyone in the Indy 500, never had an accident or traffic ticket. In a poker game, he’d bet everything he had on a single hand, even a bad one if the timing felt right to him—and he nearly always won. You can live dangerously, almost to any extreme, and as long as you win, as long as the risks you take pay off—then people admire you for it.”

Standing over him, she put her hand on his shoulder. “I guess that also explains the other thing I didn’t understand.”