Strange Highways

room, leaving Joey alone with his dad.
     "I'm sorry," he whispered to his father. "Sorry I never came back, never saw you or Mom again."
     Hesitantly, he touched the old man's pale cheek. It was cold and dry.
     He withdrew his hand, and now his whisper was shaky. "I just took the wrong road. A strange highway ... and somehow ... there was never any coming back. I can't say why, Dad. I don't understand it myself."
For a while he couldn't speak.
The scent of roses seemed to grow heavier.
     Dan Shannon could have passed for a miner, though he had never worked the coal fields even as a boy. Broad, heavy features. Big shoulders. Strong, blunt-fingered hands cross-hatched with scars. He had been a car mechanic, a good one - although in a time and place that had never offered quite enough work.
     "You deserved a loving son," Joey said at last. "Good thing you had two, huh?" He closed his eyes. "I'm sorry. Jesus, I'm so sorry."
     His heart ached with remorse, as heavy as an iron anvil in his chest, but conversations with the dead couldn't provide absolution. Not even God could give him that now.
     When Joey left the viewing room, Mr. Devokowski met him in the front hall of the mortuary. "Does P.J. know yet?"
     Joey shook his head. "I haven't been able to track him down."
     "How can you not be able to track him down? He's your brother," Devokowski said. For an instant before he regained the compassionate expression of a funeral director, his contempt was naked.
     "He travels all over, Mr. Devokowski. You know about that. He's always traveling, on the move, researching. It's not my fault ... being out of touch with him."
     Reluctantly, Devokowski nodded. "I saw the piece about him in People a few months ago."
     P.J. Shannon was the quintessential writer of life on the road, the most famous literary Gypsy since Jack Kerouac.
     "He should come home for a while," Devokowski said, "maybe write another book about Asherville. I still think that was his best. When he hears about your dad, poor P.J., he's going to be broken up real bad. P.J. really loved your dad."
      So did I, Joey thought, but he didn't say it. Given his actions over the past twenty years, he wouldn't be believed. But he had loved Dan Shannon. God, yes. And he'd loved his mother, Kathleen - whose funeral he had avoided and to whose deathbed he had never gone.
     "P.J. visited just in August. Stayed about a week. Your dad took him all over, showing him off. He was so proud, your dad."
     Devokowski's assistant, an intense young man in a dark suit, entered the far end of the hallway. He spoke in a practiced hush: "Sir, it's time to transport the deceased to Our Lady."
     Devokowski checked his watch. To Joey, he said, "You're going to the Mass?"
     "Yes, of course."
     The funeral director nodded and turned away, conveying by body language that this particular son of Dan Shannon had not earned the right to add "of course" to his answer.
     Outside, the sky looked burnt out, all black char and thick gray ashes, but it was heavy with rain.
     Joey hoped that the lull in the storm would last through the Mass and the graveside service.
     On the street, as he was approaching his parked car from behind, heading for the driver's door, the trunk popped open by itself and the lid eased up a few inches. From the dark interior, a slender hand reached feebly toward him, as if in desperation, beseechingly. A woman's hand. The thumb was broken and hanging at a queer angle, and blood dripped from the torn fingernails.
     Around him, Asherville seemed to fall under a dark enchantment. The wind died. The clouds, which had been moving ceaselessly out of the northwest, were suddenly as unchanging as the vaulted ceiling of Hell. All was lifeless. Silence reigned. Joey was frozen by shock and cold fear. Only the hand moved, only the hand was alive, and only the hand's pathetic groping for salvation had any meaning or importance in a world turned to stone.
     Joey couldn't bear the sight of the dangling thumb, the torn nails, the slow drip-drip of blood - but he felt powerfully compelled to stare. He knew that it was the woman in the transparent gown, come out of his dream from the night before, into the waking world, though such a thing was not possible.
     Reaching out from the shadow of the trunk