Strange Highways

cleansed him inside. He had breathed in corruption, swallowed it. Blended whiskey offered considerable antiseptic power.
     He unscrewed the cap from the flask and took a long swallow. Then another.
     Choking on the spirits, gasping for breath, he replaced the cap, afraid that he would drop the flask and waste the precious ounces that it still contained.
     Kadinska hadn't followed him out into the storm, but Joey didn't want to delay another moment. He started the car, pulled away from the curb, splashed through a flooded intersection, and drove along Main Street toward the end of town.
     He didn't believe that he would be allowed to leave. Something would stop him. The car would sputter, stall, and refuse to start. Cross traffic would crash into him at an intersection, even though the streets seemed deserted. Lightning would strike a telephone pole and drop it across the road. Something would prevent him from getting out of town. He was in the grip of a superstition that he could not shake or explain.
     In spite of his dire expectations, he reached the town line and crossed it. Main Street became the county road. Forests and fields replaced the huddled and depressing buildings of Asherville.
     Still shuddering as much from fear as from having been soaked by the rain, he drove at least a mile before he began to realize how strangely he had reacted to the prospect of receiving a quarter of a million dollars. He had no idea why a sudden windfall should have terrified him, why a stroke of good fortune should instantly convince him that his soul was in peril.
     After all, considering how he had lived his life thus far, he was doomed to Hell anyway, if it existed.
     Three miles outside Asherville, Joey came to a three-way stop. Directly ahead of him, beyond the rural intersection, the county route continued: a glistening black ribbon dwindling down a long, gradual slope into the early twilight. To the left was Coal Valley Road, leading to the town of Coal Valley.
     On that Sunday night twenty years ago, when he had been on his way back to college, he had planned to take Coal Valley Road twelve miles through the mountains, until it connected with the old state three-lane that the locals called Black Hollow Highway, then go west nine miles to the Pennsylvania Turnpike. He always went that way, because it was the shortest route.
     But on that night, for reasons he had never since been able to recall, he had driven past Coal Valley Road. He'd followed the county route another nineteen miles to the interstate and had taken the interstate in a roundabout loop toward Black Hollow Highway and the turnpike. On the interstate he'd had the accident, and thereafter nothing had ever gone right for him again.
     He had been driving his ten-year-old '65 Ford Mustang, which he had salvaged and restored - with his dad's help - from an auto junkyard after the original owner had rolled it. God, how he had loved that car. It had been the only thing of beauty he'd ever owned, and most important, his own hands had brought it back from ruin to glory.
     Recalling the Mustang, he hesitantly touched the left side of his forehead just below the hairline. The scar was an inch long, barely visible but easily felt. He remembered the sickening slide, his car spinning on the rain-slick interstate, the collision with the signpost, the shattering window.
     He remembered all the blood.
     Now he sat at the three-way stop, staring down Coal Valley Road to his left, and he knew that if he took this route, as he should have taken it on that eventful night long ago, he would at last have a chance to put everything right. He would get his life back on track.
     That was a crazy notion, perhaps as superstitious as his earlier certainty that fate would not allow him to drive out of Asherville but this time he was right. It was true. He had no doubt that he was being given another chance. He knew that some superhuman power was at work in the fading October twilight, knew that the meaning of his troubled life lay along that two-lane mountain route - because Coal Valley Road had been condemned and torn up more than nineteen years ago, yet now it waited to his left, exactly as it had been on that special night. It was magically restored.

    7

JOEY EASED THE RENTAL CHEVY PAST THE STOP SIGN AND PARKED ON the narrow shoulder, on the dead-end side of the