Strange Highways

United States as material, he produced highly polished prose that had mysterious depths under a deceptively simple surface.
     Joey envied his brother - but not with any malice. P.J. earned every line of the praise that he received and every dollar of his fortune, and Joey was proud of him.
     Theirs had been an intense and special relationship when they were young, and it was still intense, though it was now conducted largely at great distances by phone, when P.J. called from Montana or Maine or Key West or a small dusty town on the high plains of Texas. They saw each other no more than once every three or four years, always when P.J. dropped in unannounced in the course of his travels - but even then he didn't stay long, never more than two days, usually one.
     No one had ever meant more to Joey than P.J., and no one ever would. His feelings for his brother were rich and complex, and he would never be able to explain them adequately to anyone.
     The rain hammered the lawn just beyond the ground-level windows of the basement. In a place so far above that it seemed to be another world, more thunder crashed.
     He had come to the cellar for a jar. But the room was utterly empty except for the movie posters.
     On the concrete floor near his shoe, a fat black spider seemed to materialize from thin air. It scurried past him.
     He didn't step on it but watched it race for cover until it disappeared into a crack along the baseboard.
     He switched off the light and went back into the furnace room, leaving the warped door open.
     Climbing the stairs, almost to the kitchen, Joey said, "Jar? What jar?"
     Puzzled, he stopped and looked down the steps to the cellar.
     A jar of something? A jar for something?
     He couldn't remember why he had needed a jar or what kind of jar he had been seeking.
     Another sign of dementia.
     He'd been too long without a drink.
     Plagued by the persistent uneasiness and disorientation that he'd felt since first entering Asherville the previous day, he went upstairs. He turned off the cellar lights behind him.
     His suitcase was packed and standing in the living room. He carried the bag onto the front porch, locked the door, and put the key back under the hemp mat where he had found it less than twenty-four hours ago.
     Something growled behind him, and he turned to confront a many, rain-soaked black dog on the porch steps. Its eyes were as fiercely yellow as sulfurous coal fires, and it bared its teeth at him.
     "Go away," he said, not threateningly but softly.
     The dog growled again, lowered its head, and tensed as if it might spring at him.
     "You don't belong here any more than I do," Joey said, standing his ground.
     The hound looked uncertain, shivered, licked its chops, and at last retreated.
     With his suitcase, Joey went to the head of the porch steps and watched the dog as it hunched away into the slanting sheets of gray rain, gradually fading as though it had been a mirage. When it moved around the corner and out of sight at the end of the block, he could easily have been convinced that it had been another hallucination.

    6

THE LAWYER CONDUCTED BUSINESS FROM THE SECOND FLOOR OF A BRICK building on Main Street, above the Old Town Tavern. The barroom was closed on Sunday afternoons, but small neon signs for Rolling Rock and Pabst Blue Ribbon still glowed in its windows brightly enough to tint the rain green and blue as it fell past the glass.
     The law offices of Henry Kadinska occupied two rooms off a dimly lighted hallway that also served a real-estate office and a dentist. The door stood open to the reception room.
     Joey stepped inside and said, "Hello?"
     The inner door was ajar, and from beyond it a man responded. "Please come in, Joey."
     The second room was larger than the first, although still of modest proportions. Law books lined two walls; on another, a pair of diplomas hung crookedly. The windows were covered with wood-slat venetian blinds of a type that probably had not been manufactured in fifty years, revealing horizontal slices of the rainy day.
     Identical mahogany desks stood at opposite ends of the room. At one time Henry Kadinska had shared the space with his father, Lev, who had been the town's only lawyer before him. Lev had died when Joey was a senior in