Strange Highways

God."
     He must be losing his mind. Twenty years of all-but-constant inebriation had screwed up his brain beyond repair. Too many cells of gray matter had died in the long bath of alcohol.
     He was so far gone that only another taste of the same sin would give him surcease. He took the flask from his coat pocket.
     Aware that a month's worth of gossip was in the making, the startled mourners at the grave site must have followed his stumbling flight with considerable interest. No doubt many, afraid of missing the next development, were still risking the disapproval of the priest by glancing downhill toward the rental car.
     Joey didn't care what anyone thought. He didn't care about anything any more. Except whiskey.
     But his dad still wasn't buried. He had promised himself that he would remain sober until the interment was complete. He had broken uncounted promises to himself over the years, but for reasons that he could not quite define, this one was more important than any of the others.
     He didn't open the flask.
     Uphill, under the half-bare limbs of the autumn-stripped trees, beneath a bruised sky, the casket slowly descended into the uncaring earth.
     Soon the mourners began to leave, glancing toward Joey's car with unconcealed interest.
     As the priest departed, several small whirlwinds full of dead leaves spun through the cemetery, exploding over headstones, as if angry spirits had awakened from an uneasy rest.
     Thunder rolled across the heavens. It was the first peal in hours, and the remaining mourners hurried to their cars.
     The undertaker and his assistant removed the motorized casket lift and the black plastic skirt from around the open grave.
     As the storm resumed, a cemetery worker in a yellow rain slicker stripped the tarp and flowers from the mound of excavated dirt.
     Another worker appeared behind the wheel of a compact little earthmoving machine called a Bobcat. It was painted the same shade of yellow as his raincoat.
     Before the open grave could be flooded by the storm, it was filled - and then tamped down by the tread of the Bobcat.
     "Goodbye," Joey said.
     He should have had a sense of completion, of having reached the end of an important phase of his life. But he only felt empty and incomplete. He had not put an end to anything - if that was what he had been hoping to do.

    5

BACK AT HIS FATHER'S HOUSE, HE WENT DOWN THE NARROW STEPS FROM the kitchen to the basement. Past the furnace. Past the small water heater.
     The door to P.J.'s old room was warped by humidity and age. It squealed against the jamb and scraped across the sill as Joey forced it open.
     Rain beat on the two narrow, horizontal casement windows that were set high in one basement wall, and the deep shadows were not dispersed by the meager storm light. He flicked the switch by the door, and a bare overhead bulb came on.
     The small room was empty. Many years ago, the single bed and the other furniture must have been sold to raise a few dollars. For the past two decades, when P.J. came home, he had slept in Joey's room on the second floor, because there had been no chance that Joey would pay a visit and need it himself.
     Dust. Cobwebs. Low on the .walls: a few dark patches of mildew like Rorschach blots.
     The only items of proof that remained of P.J.'s long-ago residence were a couple of movie posters for flicks so trashy that the advertising art had an unintentionally campy quality. They were thumbtacked to the walls, pus yellow with age, cracked, curling at the corners.
     In high school, P.J.'s dream was to get out of Asherville, out of poverty, and become a filmmaker. "But I need these," he had once said to Joey, indicating the posters, "to remind me that success at any price isn't worth it. In Hollywood you can become rich and famous and celebrated even for making stupid, dehumanizing crap. If I can't make it by doing worthwhile work, I hope I've got the courage to give up the dream altogether instead of selling out."
     Either fate had never given P.J. his shot at Hollywood or he had lost interest in filmmaking somewhere along the way. Ironically, he had achieved fame as a novelist, fulfilling Joey's dream after Joey had abandoned it.
     P.J. was a critically acclaimed writer. Using his ceaseless rambles back and forth across the