Strange Highways

"I figure the sonofabitch must've kidnapped her," P.J. says, "been holding her somewhere in the woods, in a shack or a hole somewhere, raping her, torturing her. You read about that sort of thing. Year by year there's more of it. But who'd ever think it would happen here, in a place like Asherville? She must've gotten away from him somehow when he let his guard down."

"What did he look like?"

"Rough."

"What's that mean?"

"Dangerous. He looked dangerous, a little crazed. He was a big guy, maybe six four, a good two hundred forty pounds. Maybe it's a good thing I didn't catch up with him. He could've creamed me, Joey, that's how big he was. I'd probably be dead now if I'd caught up with him. But I had to try, couldn't just let him run away without trying to bring him down. Big guy with a beard, long greasy hair, wearing dirty jeans, a blue flannel shirt with the tail hanging out."

"You have to take her body to the sheriff, P.J. You have to do that right now."

"I can't, Joey. Don't you see? It's too late now. She's in my trunk. It could look like I was hiding her there until you found her by accident. All sorts of interpretations could be put on it—and none of them good. And I don't have any proof that I saw the guy chasing her."

"They'll find proof. His footprints, for one thing. They'll search the woods out there, find the place where he was keeping her."

P.J. shakes his head. "In this weather, the footprints have all been washed away. And maybe they won't find where he was keeping her, either. There's no guarantee. I just can't take the chance. If they don't turn up any proof, then all they have is me."

"If you didn't kill her, they can't do anything to you."

"Get serious, kid. I wouldn't be the first guy to be railroaded for something he never did."

"That's ridiculous! P.J., everyone around here knows you, likes you. They know what kind of guy you are. They'll all give you the benefit of the doubt."

"People can turn on you for no reason, even people you've been good to all your life. Wait till you've been away at college longer, Joey. Wait until you've lived awhile in a place like New York City. Then you'll see how hateful people can be, how they can turn on you for little or no reason."

"Folks around here will give you the benefit of the doubt," Joey insists.

"You didn't."

Those two words are like a pair of body blows, a one-two punch of truth that leaves Joey deeply shaken and more confused than ever. "God, P.J., if only you'd left her back there on the road."

P.J. slumps in the driver's seat and covers his face with his hands. He's weeping, Joey has never seen him weep before. For a while P.J. can't speak, nor can Joey. When at last P.J. finds his voice, he says, "I couldn't leave her. It was so awful—you didn't see, you can't know how awful. She's not just a body, Joey. She's somebody's daughter, somebody's sister. I thought about what if some other guy had hit her and I was her brother, what would I want him to do in my place. And I'd have wanted him to take care of her, to cover her nakedness. I'd never want him to just leave her there like a piece of meat. Now I see ... maybe it was a mistake. But at the time I was rattled. I should have handled it differently. But it's too late now, Joey."

"If you don't take her to the sheriff's office and tell them what happened, then the guy with the beard, the long hair—he's going to get away. Then he'll do to some other girl the same as he did to this one."

P.J. lowers his hands from his face. His eyes are pools of tears. "They'll never catch him anyway, Joey. Don't you see that? He's long gone by now. He knows I saw him, can describe him. He wouldn't have hung around these parts ten minutes. He's out of the county by now, running fast as he can for the state line, headed for someplace as far away from here as he can get. You better believe it. Probably already shaved off his beard, hacked at his long hair, looks totally different now. What little I can tell the cops won't help them find him, and I sure as hell can't testify to anything that would convict the bastard."

"It's still the right thing to do—going to the sheriff."

"Is it? You're not thinking about Mom and Dad. Maybe if you thought about them, it wouldn't be such a right thing."

"What do you mean?"

"I'm telling you, kid, when the cops don't have anybody else to pin this on, they'll try to pin it on me. They'll try real hard. Imagine the stories in the paper. The star football player, the local boy who made good and won a full scholarship to a big-time university, gets caught with a na*ed woman in the trunk of his car, tortured to death. Think about it, for God's sake! The trial's going to be a circus. Biggest circus in the history of the county, maybe the state."

Joey feels as though he is repeatedly throwing himself against a giant, furiously spinning grindstone. He is being worn down by his brother's logic, by the sheer power of his personality, by his unprecedented tears. The longer Joey struggles to discern the truth, the more confused and anguished he becomes.

P.J. switches off the radio, turns sideways in his seat, leans toward his brother, and his gaze is unwavering. It's just the two of them and the sound of the rain, nothing to distract Joey from the fiercely persuasive rhythms of P.J.'s voice. "Please, please, listen to me, kid. Please, for Mom's sake, for Dad's, think hard about this and don't ruin their lives just because you can't grow up and shake loose of some altar-boy idea of what's right and wrong. I didn't hurt this girl in the trunk, so why should I risk my whole future to prove it? And suppose I come out all right, the jury does the right thing and finds me innocent. Even then there'll be people around here, lots of people, who'll continue to believe I did it, believe I killed her. All right, I'm young and educated, so I get out of here, go anywhere, start a new life where no one knows that I was once tried for murder. But Mom and Dad are middle-aged and dirt poor, and what they have now is pretty much all they're ever going to have. They don't have the resources to pull up stakes and move. They don't have the options that you and I have, and they never will. This four-room shack they call a house—it isn't much, but it's a roof over their heads. They almost don't have a pot to piss in, but at least they've always had a lot of friends, neighbors they care about and who care about them. But that'll change even if I'm cleared in a courtroom." The arguments rolled from him, a persuasive tide of words. "The suspicion is going to come between them and their friends. They'll be aware of the whispering ... the unceasing gossip. They won't be able to move away, because they won't be able to sell this dump, and even if they could sell it, they don't have any equity to speak of. So here they'll stay, trapped, gradually withdrawing from friends and neighbors, more and more isolated. How can we let that happen, Joey? How can we let their lives be ruined when I'm innocent in the first place? Jesus, kid, okay, I made a mistake not leaving her back there and not taking her to the cops after I wrapped her up and put her in the trunk, so go get a gun and shoot me if you have to, but don't kill Mom and Dad. Because that's what you'll be doing, Joey. You'll be killing them. Slowly."

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.