Strange Highways (15 page)

The older woman had to be Hannah, Bimmer’s mother, but she had no time to grieve for her son and daughter-in-law, because two of the next three shots were generous destiny’s gifts for her, pumped through the same window but delivered without the merry-bell music of breaking glass, killing her where she sat, as she reached for her hickory cane with one palsied hand, before either Joey or Celeste could even cry out to her.

It was late October of 1975, and the Vietnam War had ended back in April, but Joey felt as if he were in one of those Asian battle zones that had filled the television news when he was growing up. The sudden, senseless death might have shocked him into immobility and fatal indecision—except that he was actually a forty-year-old man in a twenty-year-old body, and those additional twenty years of experience had been gained during a time when sudden, senseless violence had grown commonplace. As a product of the latter decades of the millennium, he could cope reasonably well in the midst of gunfire and random slaughter.

The living room was filled with light, making easy targets of him and Celeste, so he rolled onto his side and fired the 20-gauge Remington at a brass floor lamp with a fringed shade. The roar of the shotgun in that confined space was deafening, but he pumped a fresh shell into the breech and fired at one of the end-table lamps flanking the sofa, then pumped it again and took out the lamp on the other end table.

Understanding Joey’s intent, Celeste fired one round into the television screen, silencing the sitcom. The burnt-powder stench of gunfire was immediately overlaid with the hot, astringent odor of ruined electronics.

“Stay low, under the windows,” Joey instructed. In the ear-stunning aftermath of the shotgun fire, he sounded as though he were speaking through a woolen winter scarf, but even though his voice was muffled, he could hear the tremor of fear in it. He was a child of the premillennium follies, steeled to the savagery of his fellow human beings, but he nevertheless felt as though he might wet his pants. “Follow the walls to a doorway, any doorway, just get out of the room.”

Crawling frantically along the floor in the darkness, dragging the shotgun by its strap, Joey wondered what role he was supposed to serve in his brother’s nightmare tableau. If Celeste’s parents returned to town and stepped into P.J.’s gun sights, locals would provide all twelve bodies needed for the creation of his demented bit of theater. But he must have a use in mind for Joey too. After all, he had raced to catch up with the Mustang on the county route, swung onto Coal Valley Road, and paused tauntingly, daring Joey to follow. Although he perpetrated atrocities that any normal person would call acts of madness, P.J. didn’t otherwise behave irrationally. Even within his homicidal fantasies, he operated with an appreciation for structure and purpose, however grotesque they might be.

In the Bimmers’ kitchen, the light in the oven clock cast a soft green glow that barely illuminated the room—but even that was bright enough to make most of the details visible and to keep Joey close to the floor.

Two windows. One over the sink. The other beside the breakfast table. Both had side-panel curtains and, better yet, vinyl roll-up blinds that were drawn halfway down.

Cautiously rising to his feet at the side of the breakfast table, with his back pressed to the wall, he reached out and pulled that blind all the way over the glass.

Breathing hard, both from exertion and fear, he was bizarrely convinced that P.J. had circled the house and was now directly behind him, outside, with only the wall between them. In spite of the wind and rain, maybe P.J. could track him by his loud breathing and would shoot him
through
the wall to which his back was pressed. The moment passed, and the shot in the spine didn’t come, and his terror abated somewhat.

Although he would have preferred that Celeste remain on the floor, below any possible line of fire, she risked a bullet in the arm by drawing the blind at the sink window.

“You okay?” he asked, when they eased back to the floor and met again in the center of the kitchen, staying on their knees in spite of having secured the two windows.

“They’re all dead, aren’t they?” she whispered bleakly.

“Yeah.”

“All three.”

“Yeah.”

“No chance

“No. Dead.”

“I’ve known them all my life.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Beth used to baby-sit me when I was little.”

The eerie green glow from the oven clock made the Bimmer kitchen shimmer as though it were underwater or had passed through a veil into an unnatural realm outside the flow of real time and ordinary events. But the quality of the light alone could not provide him with blessed detachment and his gut remained knotted with tension; his throat was so constricted that he could barely swallow.

Fumbling spare shells from his pockets, dropping them through his shaky fingers, Joey said softly, “It’s my fault.”

“No, it’s not. He knew where they were, where to find them. He knows who’s still left in town and where they live. We didn’t lead him here. He’d have come on his own anyway.”

The dropped shells rolled away from him as he tried to recover them. His fingers were half numb, and his hands were shaking so badly that he gave up trying to reload until he calmed down.

Joey was surprised that his heart could still beat. It felt like cold iron in his chest.

They listened to the deadly night, alert for the stealthy sound of a door slowly easing open or the telltale clink of broken glass underfoot.

Eventually he said, “Back home, earlier, when I found the body in the trunk of his car, if I’d called the sheriff then and there, none of these people would be dead now.”

“You can’t blame yourself for that.”

“Who the hell
else
should I blame?” He was instantly ashamed that he had responded so harshly. When he spoke again, his voice was bitter and remorseful, but his anger was directed at himself, not at her. “I knew the right thing to do, and I didn’t do it.”

“Listen,” she said, finding one of his hands in the green gloom, holding it tightly, “that’s not what I meant when I said you couldn’t blame yourself. Think about it, Joey. Not calling the sheriff—you made
that
mistake twenty years ago, but you didn’t make it tonight because your second chance didn’t begin with P.J. at the house today, didn’t begin with the finding of the body. It began only when you reached Coal Valley Road. Right?”

“Well …”

“You weren’t
given
a second chance to turn him in to the sheriff earlier.”

“But twenty years ago I should’ve-“

“That’s history. Terrible history, and you’ll have to live with that part of it. But now all that matters is what happens from here on. Nothing counts except how you chose—and continue to choose—to handle things
after
you took the right highway tonight.”

“Haven’t handled them well so far, have I? Three people dead.”

“Three people who would’ve died anyway,” she argued, “who probably
did
die the first time you lived through this night. It’s horrible, it’s painful, but it looks as if that part of it was meant to be, and there’s no changing it.”

Sinking deeper into anguish, Joey said, “Then what’s the point of being given a second chance if it isn’t to save these people?”

“You might be able to save others before the night is through.”

“But why not all of them? I’m screwing up again.”

“Stop beating yourself up. It’s not for you to decide how many people you can save, how much you can change destiny. In fact, maybe the purpose of being given a second chance wasn’t to save anyone in Coal Valley.”

“Except you.”

“Maybe not even me. Maybe I can’t be saved either.”

Her words left him speechless. She sounded as though she could accept the possibility of her own death with equanimity—while for Joey, the thought of failing her was like a hammer blow to the heart.

She said, “It may turn out that the only thing you can really accomplish tonight is to stop P.J. from
going on from here.
Stop him from committing twenty
more
years of murder. Maybe that’s the only thing expected of you, Joey. Not saving me. Not saving anyone. Just stopping P.J. from doing even worse than what he’ll do tonight. Maybe that’s all God wants from you.”

“There’s no God here. No God in Coal Valley tonight.”

She squeezed his hand, digging her fingernails into his flesh. “How can you say that?”

“Go look at the people in the living room.”

“That’s stupid.”

“How can a god of mercy let people die like that?”

“Smarter people than us have tried to answer the same question.”

“And can’t.”

“But that doesn’t mean there
isn’t
an answer,” she said with rising anger and impatience. “Joey, if God didn’t give you the chance to relive this night, then who did?”

“I don’t know,” he said miserably.

“You think maybe it was Rod Serling, and now you’re stuck in the Twilight Zone?” she asked scornfully,

“No, of course not.”

“Then who?”

“Maybe it was just … just an anomaly of physics. A random fold in time. An energy wave. Inexplicable and meaningless. I don’t know. How the hell could I know?”

“Oh. I see. Just some mechanical breakdown in the great cosmic machinery,” she said sarcastically, letting go of his hand.

“Seems to make more sense than God.”

“So we’re not in the Twilight Zone, huh? Now we’re aboard the starship Enterprise with Captain Kirk, assaulted by energy waves, catapulted into time warps.”

He didn’t reply.

She said, “You remember
Star Trek
? Anyone still remember it up there in 1995?”

“Remember? Hell, I think maybe it’s a bigger industry than General Motors.”

“Let’s bring a little cool Vulcan logic to the problem, okay? If this amazing thing that happened to you is meaningless and random, then why didn’t you get folded back in time to some boring day when you were eight years old and had the puking flu? Or why not to some night a month ago, when you were just sitting in your trailer out in Vegas, half drunk, watching old Road Runner cartoons or something? You think some random anomaly of physics would just by purest chance bring you back to the most important night of your life, this night of all nights, to the very moment it all went wrong beyond any hope of recovery?”

Just listening to her had calmed him, although his spirits had not been lifted. At least he was able to pick up the spilled shells and reload his shotgun.

“Maybe,” she said, “you’re living this night again not because there’s something you have to
do
, not to save lives and bring down P.J. and be a hero. Maybe you’re living this night again only so you’ll have one last chance to believe.”

“In what?”

“In a world with meaning, in life with some greater purpose.”

At times she seemed able to read his mind. More than anything, Joey wanted to believe in something again—as he had when he’d been an altar boy, so many years ago. But he vacillated between hope and despair. He remembered how filled with wonder he’d been a short while ago when he’d realized that he was twenty again, how grateful he had been to something-someone for this second chance. But already it was easier to believe in the Twilight Zone or in a fluke of quantum mechanics than in God.

“Believe,” he said. “That’s what P.J. wanted me to do. Just believe in him, believe in his innocence, without one shred of proof. And I did. I believed in him. And look where that got me.”

“Maybe it wasn’t believing in P.J. that ruined your life.”

“It sure didn’t help,” he said sourly.

“Maybe the main problem was that you didn’t believe in anything
else.”

“I was an altar boy once,” he said. “But then I grew up. I got an education.”

“Having gone to college a little, you’ve surely heard the word ,sophomoric,’” Celeste suggested. “It describes the kind of thinking you’re still indulging in.”

“You’re really wise, huh? You know it all?”

“Nope. I’m not wise at all, not me. But my dad says—admitting you don’t know everything is the
beginning
of wisdom.”

“Your dad the jerkwater high-school principal—suddenly he’s a famous philosopher?”

“Now you’re just being mean,” she said.

After a while, he said, “Sorry.”

“Don’t forget the sign I was given. My blood on your fingertips. How can I not believe? More important, how can
you
not believe after that? You called it a ‘sign’ yourself.”

“I wasn’t thinking. I was all … emotional. When you take time to think about it, apply just a little of that cool Vulcan logic you mentioned-“

“If you think hard enough about
anything
, you won’t be able to believe in it. If you saw a bird fly across the sky—the moment it’s out of sight, there’s no way to prove it existed. How do you even know Paris exists—have you ever been there?”

“Other people have seen Paris. I believe them.”

“Other people have seen God.”

“Not the way they’ve seen Paris.”

“There are a lot of ways to see,” she said. “And maybe neither your eyes nor a Kodak is the
best
way.”

“How can anyone believe in any god so cruel that he’d let three people die like that, three innocent people?”

“If death isn’t permanent,” she said without hesitation, “if it’s only a transition from one world to the next, then it isn’t necessarily cruel.”

“It’s so easy for you,” he said enviously. “So easy just to believe.”

“It can be easy for you too.”

“No.”

“Just accept.”

“Not easy for me,” he insisted.

“Then why even bother to believe that you’re living this night again? Why not write it off as just a silly dream, roll over, go on sleeping, and wait to wake up in the morning?”

He didn’t answer. He couldn’t.

Although he knew it was pointless to try, he crawled to the wall phone, reached up, and pulled the receiver off the cradle. No dial tone.

“Can’t possibly work,” Celeste said with an edge of sarcasm.