Strange Highways Read Free

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 or to a show to celebrate the passage of another workweek - while Joey found nothing to celebrate about having endured another seven days in the prison that was his life.
     Shortly before eleven o'clock the storm broke. Brilliant chains of molten-silver lightning flashed and rattled across the wedge of sky, providing him with flickering, unwanted reflections of himself in the window. Rolling thunder shook the first fat raindrops from the clouds; they snapped and spattered against the glass, and the ghostly image of Joey's face dissolved before him.
     At half past midnight he rose from the chair and went to the bed. The room was as black as a coal mine, but even after twenty years he could find his way around without light. In his mind's eye, he held a detailed image of the worn and cracked linoleum floor, the oval rag rug that his mother had made, the narrow bed with simple painted-iron headboard, the single nightstand with warped drawers. In one corner was the heavily scarred desk at which he had done his homework through twelve years of school and, when he was eight or nine, had written his first stories about magical kingdoms and monsters and trips to the moon.
     As a boy, he had loved books and had wanted to grow up to be a writer. That was one of the few things at which he hadn't failed in the past twenty years - though only because he had never tried. After that October weekend in 1975, he'd broken his long habit of writing stories and abandoned his dream.
     The bed was no longer covered by a chenille spread, as it had been in those days, and in fact it wasn't even fitted with sheets. Joey was too tired and fuzzy-headed to bother searching for linens.
     He stretched out on his back on the bare mattress, still wearing his shirt and jeans, not bothering to kick off his shoes. The soft twang of the weak springs was a familiar sound in the darkness.
     In spite of his weariness, Joey didn't want to sleep. Half a bottle of