Strange Highways
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
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