Strange Highways Read Free Page A

replace what had been destroyed by alcohol; extreme vitamin-B deficiency was the primary cause of hangovers. He knew all the tricks. His drinking was methodical and well organized; he approached it as though it were his profession.
    He found the makings of breakfast in the kitchen: a piece of stale coffee cake, half a glass of orange juice.
    After showering, he put on his only suit, a white shirt, and a dark red tie. He hadn’t worn the suit in five years, and it hung loosely on him. The collar of the shirt was a size too large. He looked like a fifteen-year-old boy dressed in his father’s clothes.
    Perhaps because the endless intake of booze accelerated his metabolism, Joey burned off all that he ate and drank, and invariably he closed each December a pound lighter than he’d begun the previous January. In another hundred and sixty years, he would finally waste away into thin air.
    At ten o’clock he went to the Devokowski Funeral Home on Main Street. It was closed, but he was admitted by Mr. Devokowski because he was expected.
    Louis Devokowski had been Asherville’s mortician for thirty-five years. He was not sallow and thin and stoop shouldered, as comic books and movies portrayed men of his trade, but stocky and ruddy faced, with dark hair untouched by gray—as though working with the dead was a prescription for long life and vitality.
    “Joey.”
    “Mr. Devokowski.”
    “I’m so sorry.”
    “Me too.”
    “Half the town came to the viewing last night.”
    Joey said nothing.
    “Everyone loved your father.”
    Joey didn’t trust himself to speak.
    Devokowski said, “I’ll take you to him.”
    The front viewing room was a hushed space with burgundy carpet, burgundy drapes, beige walls, and subdued lighting. Arrangements of roses loomed in the shadows, and the air was sweet with their scent.
    The casket was a handsome bronze model with polished-copper trim and handles. By phone, Joey had instructed Mr. Devokowski to provide the best. That was how P.J. would want it—and it would be his money paying for it.
    Joey approached the bier with the hesitancy of a man in a dream who expects to peer into the coffin and see himself.
    But it was Dan Shannon who rested in peace, in a dark-blue suit on a bed of cream-colored satin. The past twenty years had not been kind to him. He looked beaten by time, shrunken by care, and glad to be gone.
    Mr. Devokowski had retreated from the room, leaving Joey alone with his dad.
    “I’m sorry,” he whispered to his father. “Sorry I never came back, never saw you or Mom again.”
    Hesitantly, he touched the old man’s pale cheek. It was cold and dry.
    He withdrew his hand, and now his whisper was shaky. “I just took the wrong road. A strange highway … and somehow … there was never any coming back. I can’t say why, Dad. I don’t understand it myself.”
For a while he couldn’t speak.
The scent of roses seemed to grow heavier.
    Dan Shannon could have passed for a miner, though he had never worked the coal fields even as a boy. Broad, heavy features. Big shoulders. Strong, blunt-fingered hands cross-hatched with scars. He had been a car mechanic, a good one—although in a time and place that had never offered quite enough work.
    “You deserved a loving son,” Joey said at last. “Good thing you had two, huh?” He closed his eyes. “I’m sorry. Jesus, I’m so sorry.”
    His heart ached with remorse, as heavy as an iron anvil in his chest, but conversations with the dead couldn’t provide absolution. Not even God could give him that now.
    When Joey left the viewing room, Mr. Devokowski met him in the front hall of the mortuary. “Does P.J. know yet?”
    Joey shook his head. “I haven’t been able to track him down.”
    “How can you not be able to track him down? He’s your brother,” Devokowski said. For an instant before he regained the compassionate expression of a funeral director, his contempt was naked.
    “He travels all over, Mr. Devokowski. You