Strange Highways

the other car," she said, gazing out at the dark highway, and the tremor in her voice became a shudder that shook her whole body.
     "I think so," Joey said. "I think ... he's done it before. The blonde wrapped in plastic."
     "I'm scared."
     "We have a chance."
     "You still haven't explained. You haven't told me. What about the
Chevy you thought you were driving ... your being forty years old?"
     She released his hand, leaving it covered with her blood.
     He wiped the blood on his jeans. With his right hand he focused the flashlight on her palms. "The wounds are getting worse. Fate, your
destiny, whatever you want to call it - it's reasserting itself."
"He's coming back?"
     "I don't know. Maybe. Somehow ... when we keep moving, you're safer. The wounds close up and start to fade. As long as we're moving, change can happen, there's hope."
     He switched off the flashlight and gave it to her. He popped the hand brake and drove back onto Coal Valley Road.
     "Maybe we shouldn't go the way he went," she said. "Maybe we should go back to the county route, to Asherville or somewhere else, anywhere else, away from him."
     "I think that would be the end of us. If we run ... if we take the wrong highway like I did before ... then there's not going to be any mercy in Heaven."
     "Maybe we should get help."
     "Who's going to believe this?"
     "Maybe they'll see ... my hands. The blood on your fingers when you touch me."
     "I don't think so. It's you and me. Only you and me against everything."
     "Everything," she said wonderingly.
     "Against this man, against the fate you would have met if I hadn't taken the turn onto Coal Valley Road - the fate you did meet on that other night when I took the county route instead. You and me against time and the future and the whole great weight of it all coming down like an avalanche."
     "What can we do?"
     "I don't know. Find him? Face him? We just have to play it as it lays ... do what seems right, minute by minute, hour by hour."
     "How long do we have to ... to do the right thing, whatever it is, to do the thing that'll make the change permanent?"
     "I don't know. Maybe until dawn. The thing that happened on that night happened in darkness. Maybe the only thing I have to set right is what happened to you, and if we keep you alive, if we just make it through to sunrise, maybe then everything's changed forever."
     The tires cut through puddles on the rural lane, and plumes of white water rose like angels' wings on both sides of the car.
     "What's this 'other night' you keep talking about?" she asked.
     She gripped the extinguished flashlight in both hands in her lap, as though afraid that something monstrous might fly at the Mustang from out of the darkness, a creature that could be repelled and banished by a withering beam of light.
     As they drove through the deep mountain night toward the nearly abandoned town of Coal Valley, Joey Shannon said, "This morning when I got out of bed, I was forty years old, a drunk with a rotting liver and no future anyone would want. And this afternoon I stood at my father's graveside, knowing I'd broken his heart, broken my mom's heart too ...."
     Celeste listened raptly, able to believe, because she had been given a sign that proved to her that the world had dimensions beyond those she could see and touch.

9

OUT OF THE RADIO CAME "ONE OF THESE NIGHTS" BY THE EAGLES, "Pick Up the Pieces" by the Average White Band, Ronstadt singing "When Will I Be Loved," Springsteen pounding out "Rosalita," "Black Water" by the Doobie Brothers - and all of them were new songs, the big hits of the day, although Joey had been listening to them on other radios in far places for twenty years.
     By the time he had recounted his recent experiences to the point at which he had seen her disabled Valiant, they had reached the top of the long slope above Coal Valley. He coasted to a stop in gravel at the side of the road, beside a lush stand of mountain laurels, though he knew that they couldn't linger for long without risking a reassertion of the pattern of fate that would result in her murder and in his return to living damnation.
     Coal Valley was more a village than it was a town. Even before the insatiable mine fire had eaten a maze of tunnels under the place, Coal