Strange Highways

deserted.
     The house was so humble, small, narrow, plain - yet at the moment it felt vast, a place of unexpected dimensions and hidden rooms where unknown lives were lived, where secret dramas unfolded. The silence was not an ordinary quiet, and it cut through him as a woman's scream might have done.
     He opened the door and went into his bedroom.
     Home again.
     He was scared. And he didn't know why. Or if he knew, the knowledge existed somewhere between instinct and recollection.

    2

THAT NIGHT, AN AUTUMN STORM MOVED IN FROM THE NORTHwest, and all hope of stars was lost. Darkness congealed into clouds that pressed against the mountains and settled between the high slopes, until the heavens were devoid of light and as oppressive as a low vault of cold stone.
     When he was a teenager, Joey Shannon had sometimes sat by the single window of his second-floor bedroom, gazing at the wedge of sky that the surrounding mountains permitted him. The stars and the brief transit of the moon across the gap between the ridges were a much needed reminder that beyond Asherville, Pennsylvania, other worlds existed where possibilities were infinite and where even a boy from a poor coal-country family might change his luck and become anything that he wished to be, especially if he were a boy with big dreams and the passion to pursue them.
     This night, at the age of forty, Joey sat at the same window, with the lights off, but the sight of stars was denied him. Instead, he had a bottle of Jack Daniel's.
     Twenty years ago, in another October when the world had been a far better place, he'd come home for one of his quick, infrequent visits from Shippensburg State College, where with the help of a partial scholarship, he had been paying his way by working evenings and weekends as a supermarket stock clerk. His mom had cooked his favorite dinner - meatloaf with tomato gravy, mashed potatoes, baked corn - and he had played some two-hand pinochle with his dad.
     His older brother, P.J. (for Paul John), also had been home that weekend, so there had been a lot of laughter, affection, a comforting sense of family. Any time spent with P.J. was always memorable. He was successful at everything that he tried - the valedictorian of his high-school and college graduating classes, a football hero, a shrewd poker player who seldom lost, a guy at whom all the prettiest girls looked with doe-eyed interest - but the best thing about him was his singular way with people and the upbeat atmosphere that he created wherever he went. P.J. had a natural gift for friendship, a sincere liking for most people, and an uncanny empathy that made it possible for him to understand what made a person tick virtually upon first meeting. Routinely and without apparent effort, P.J. became the center of every social circle that he entered. Highly intelligent yet self-effacing, handsome yet free of vanity, acerbically witty but never mean, P.J. had been a terrific big brother when they had been growing up. More than that, he'd been - and after all these years, still was - the standard by which Joey Shannon measured himself, the one person into whom he would have remade himself if that had been possible.
     In the decades since, he had fallen far short of that standard. Although P.J. moved from success to success, Joey had an unerring knack for failure.
     Now he took a few ice cubes from the bowl on the floor beside his straight-backed chair and dropped them into his glass. He added two inches of Jack Daniel's.
     One thing that Joey hadn't failed at was drinking. Although his bank account had seldom been above two thousand dollars in his entire adult life, he always managed to afford the best blended whiskey. No one could say that Joey Shannon was a cheap drunk.
     On the most recent night that he'd spent at home - Saturday, October twenty-fifth, 1975 - he had sat at this window with a bottle of RC Cola in his hand. He hadn't been a boozer back then. Diamond-bright stars had adorned the sky, and there had seemed to be an infinite number of possible lives waiting for him beyond the mountains.
     Now he had the whiskey. He was grateful for it.
     It was October twenty-first, 1995 - another Saturday. Saturday was always the worst night of the week for him, although he didn't know why. Maybe he disliked Saturday because most people dressed up to go out to dinner or dancing