Strange Highways (7 page)

For a minute or two he was entirely possessed by the thrill of driving—just
driving
—that he had known as a teenager but never since. Deep in the thrall of the Mustang. A boy and his car. Lost to the romance of the road.

Then he remembered something that she had said when he had first seen the Mustang and had halted before it in shock.
Joey?
She had called him by his name.
Joey? What’s wrong?
Yet he was certain that he had never introduced himself.

“Some music?” she asked with a nervous tremor in her voice, as though his silent, rapturous involvement with the unrolling road was more disturbing to her than anything he’d previously said or done.

He glanced at her as she leaned forward to switch on the radio. She had pushed back the hood of her raincoat. Her hair was thick and silky and darker than the night.

Something else she’d said, which had struck him as peculiar, now came back to him:
You sure aren’t anything like I thought you’d be.
And before that:
You never seemed strange.

The girl twisted the tuning knob on the radio until she found a station playing Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road.”

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Celeste. Celeste Baker.”

“How did you know my name?”

The question made her self-conscious, and she was able to meet his eyes only briefly. Even in the dim backwash of light from the instrument panel, he could see that she was blushing.

“You never noticed me, I know.”

He frowned. “Noticed you?”

“You were two years ahead of me at County High.”

Joey shifted his attention from the dangerously slick roadway longer than he should have, mystified by what she’d said. “What’re you talking about?”

Staring at the lighted face of the radio, she said, “I was a sophomore when you were a senior. I had a terrible crush on you. I was in despair when you graduated and went off to college.”

He was barely able to look away from her.

Sweeping around a curve, the road passed an abandoned mine head and a broken-down tipple that loomed out of the darkness like the half-shattered skeleton of a prehistoric beast. Generations had toiled in its shadow to bring forth coal, but they were now gone to bones or to city work. As he followed the curve, Joey braked gently, slowing from fifty to forty, so badly rattled by what the girl had said that he no longer trusted himself to drive safely at the higher speed.

“We never spoke,” she said. “I never could get up the nerve. I just … you know … admired you from afar. God. Sounds so stupid.” She glanced at him from under her brow to see if, in fact, he was amused at her expense.

“You’re not making any sense,” he said.

”
Me?
”

“How old are you? Sixteen?”

“Seventeen, almost eighteen. My dad’s Carl Baker, and being the principal’s daughter makes everything worse. I’m a social outcast to begin with, so I have a hard time striking up a conversation with a boy who’s even … well, who’s even
half
as good-looking as you.”

He felt as if he were in a chamber of fun-house mirrors where everything, including conversation, was distorted until nothing quite made sense. “What’s the joke here?”

“Joke?”

He slowed to thirty miles an hour, then slowed further still, until he was not quite keeping pace with the racing water that nearly overflowed the wide drainage ditch along the right shoulder of the highway. The surging torrents cast back leaping silvery reflections of the headlights.

“Celeste, damn it, I’m forty years old. How could I be just two years ahead of you in high school”

Her expression was somewhere between astonishment and alarm, but then it swiftly gave way to anger. “Why’re you being like this? Are you
trying
to spook me?”
“No, no. I just-“
“Trying to give the principal’s kid a real scare, make a fool of her?”
“No, listen-“

“You’ve been away to college all this time, and you’re
still
that immature? Maybe I should be glad I never had the guts to talk to you before.”

Tears shimmered in her eyes.

Nonplussed, he returned his attention to the highway ahead—just as the Springsteen song ended.

The deejay said, “That’s ‘Thunder Road,’ from
Born to Run
, the new album by Bruce Springsteen.”

“New
album?” Joey said.

The deejay said, “Is that
hot
or not? Man, that guy is gonna be
huge.”

“It’s not a new album,” Joey said.

Celeste was blotting her eyes with a Kleenex.

“Let’s spin one more by the Boss,” said the deejay. “Here’s ‘She’s the One,’ off the same album.”

Pure, passionate, exhilarating rock-‘n’-roll exploded from the radio. “She’s the One” was as fresh, as powerful, as joyful as it had been when Joey had first heard it twenty years ago.

He said, “What’s this guy talking about? It’s not new.
Born to Run
is twenty years old.”

“Stop it,” she said in a voice colored half by anger and half by hurt. “Just stop it, okay?”

“It was all over the radio back then. He knocked the whole world on its ass. The real stuff.
Born to Run.”

“Give it up,” she said fiercely. “You’re not scaring me any more. You’re not going to make the principal’s nerdy kid cry.”

She had fought back her tears. Her jaw was clenched, and her lips were tightly compressed.

“Born to Run,”
he insisted, “is twenty years old.”

“Creep.”

“Twenty years old.”

Celeste huddled against the passenger door, pulling as far away from him as she could.

Springsteen rocked.

Joey’s mind spun.

Answers occurred to him. He dared not consider them, for fear that they would be wrong and that his sudden rush of hope would prove unfounded.

They were traveling through a narrow passage carved from the mountain. Walls of rock crowded the blacktop and rose forty feet into the night, reducing their options to the road ahead and the road behind.

Barrages of cold rain snapped with bullet-hard ferocity against the Mustang.

The windshield wipers throbbed—
lubdub, lubdub
—as though the car were a great heart pumping time and fate instead of blood.

At last he dared to look at the rearview mirror.

In the dim light from the instrument panel, he could see little, but what little he
could
see was enough to fill him with wonder, with awe, with wild exhilaration, with fear and with delight simultaneously, with respect for just how very strange the night and the highway had become. In the mirror, his eyes were clear, and the whites of them were
luminescent
white: They were no longer bleary and bloodshot from twenty years of heavy drinking. Above his eyes, his brow was smooth and unlined, untouched by two decades of worry and bitterness and self-loathing.

He jammed his foot on the brake pedal, the tires shrieked, and the Mustang fishtailed.

Celeste squealed and put out her hands to brace herself against the dashboard. If they had been going fast, she wound have been thrown out of her seat.

The car skidded across the double yellow line into the other lane, coward the far rock wall, but then slid into a hundred-eighty-degree turn, back into the lane where they’d begun, and came to a stop on the roadway, facing the wrong direction.

Joey grabbed the rearview mirror, tilted it up to reveal a hairline that had not receded, tilted it down past his eyes, left, right.

“What are you doing?” she demanded.

Though his hand was shaking uncontrollably, he found the switch for the dome light.

“Joey, we could be hit head-on!” she said frantically, though there were no headlights approaching.

He leaned closer to the small mirror, turned it this way and that, craned his neck, trying to capture every possible aspect of his face in that narrow rectangle.

“Joey, damn it, we can’t just
sit
here!”

“Oh, my God, my God.”

“Are you crazy?”

“Am I crazy?” he asked his youthful reflection.

“Get us off the road!”

“What year is it?”

“Drop the stupid act, you moron.”

“What year is it?”

“It isn’t funny.”

“What
year
is it?” he demanded.

She started to open her door.

“No,” Joey said, “wait, wait, all right, you’re right, got to get off the road, just wait.”

He swung the Mustang around, back in the direction they had been heading before he’d slammed on the brakes, and he pulled to a stop on the side of the road.

Turning to her, pleading with her, he said, “Celeste, don’t be angry with me, don’t be afraid, be patient, just tell me what year it is. Please. Please. I need to hear you say it, then I’ll know it’s real. Tell me what year it is, and then I’ll explain everything—as much as I
can
explain it.”

Celeste’s schoolgirl crush on him was still strong enough to overcome her fear and anger. Her expression softened.

“What year?” he repeated.

“It’s 1975,” she said.

On the radio, “She’s the One” rocked to its glorious end.

Springsteen was followed by a commercial for the current big hit in the movie theaters: Al Pacino in
Dog Day Afternoon.

The past summer it had been
Jaws.
Steven Spielberg was just starting to become a household name.

The previous spring, Vietnam had fallen.

Nixon had left office the year before.

Amiable Gerald Ford was in the White House, caretaker president of a troubled country. Twice in September, attempts had been made on his life. Lynnette Fromme had taken a shot at him in Sacramento. Sara Jane Moore had gone after him in San Francisco.

Elizabeth Seton had become the first American to be canonized by the Roman Catholic Church.

The Cincinnati Reds had won the World Series in seven games.

Jimmy Hoffa had disappeared.

Muhammad Ali was world heavyweight champion.

Doctorow’s novel
Ragtime.
Judith Rossner’s
Looking for Mr. Goodbar.

Disco. Donna Summers. The Bee Gees.

Now, although still soaked, he realized that he wasn’t wearing the suit in which he had attended the funeral and which he had been wearing when he’d fled Henry Kadinska’s law office. He was in boots and blue jeans. Hunter’s-plaid flannel shirt. Blue-denim jacket with sheepskin lining.

“I’m twenty years old,” Joey whispered as reverentially as he once would have spoken to God in the hush of a church.

Celeste reached out and touched his face. Her hand was warm against his cold cheek, and it trembled not with fear but with the pleasure of touching him, a difference that he was able to sense only because he was young again and acutely sensitive to the currents of a young girl’s heart.

“Definitely not forty,” she said.

On the car radio, Linda Ronstadt launched into the title song from her current hit album: “Heart Like a Wheel.”

“Twenty years old,” he repeated, and his vision blurred with gratitude to whatever power had brought him to this place, this time, this miraculous passage.

He wasn’t merely being given a second chance. This was a shot at

whole new beginning.

“All I’ve got to do is the right thing,” he said. “But how will I know what it is?”

Rain beat, beat, beat on the car with all the fury of judgment drums.

Moving her hand from his cheek, smoothing his rain-soaked hair back from his forehead, Celeste said, “Your turn.”

“What?”

“I told you what year it is. Now you’re supposed to explain everything.”

“Where do I start? How do I … make you believe?”

“I’ll believe,” she softly assured him.

“One thing I know for sure: Whatever I’ve been brought back here to do, whatever I’m supposed to change, you’re at the center of it. You’re the heart of it. You’re the reason that I have hope for a new life, and any better future I might have hinges on you.”

As he’d spoken, her comforting hand had withdrawn from him. Now she held it over her heart.

For a moment the girl seemed unable to breathe, but then she sighed and said, “You get stranger by the minute … but I’m starting to like it.”

“Let me see your hand.”

She took her right hand from her heart and turned it palm up.

The dome light was still on, but even that didn’t provide enough light for him to read the meaning of the stigmata.

“Give me the flashlight,” he said.

Celeste handed it to him.

He switched on the beam and studied both her palms. The wounds had been fading when last he’d looked. Now they were deep again and oozing blood.

Reading the reawakened fear in his face, she said, “What do you see, Joey?”

“Nail holes.”

“There’s nothing.”

“Bleeding.”

“There’s nothing in my hands.”

“You can’t see, but you’ve got to believe.”

Hesitantly, he touched her palm. When he raised his finger, the tip of it glistened with her blood.

“I can see it. I can feel it,” he said. “It’s so frighteningly real to me.”

When he looked at her, she was staring wide-eyed at his crimson fingertip. Her mouth was an oval of surprise. “You … you must’ve cut yourself.”

“You can see it?”

“On your finger,” she confirmed, a tremor in her voice.

“In your hand?”

She shook her head. “There’s nothing on my hands.”

He touched another finger to her palm. It came away wet with her blood.

“I see it,” she said tremulously. “Two fingers.”

Transubstantiation. The precognitive vision of blood in her hand had been transformed by his touch—and by some miracle—into the real blood of her body.

She touched the fingers of her left hand to the palm of her right, but they found no blood.

On the radio, Jim Croce—not yet dead in a plane crash—was singing “Time in a Bottle.”

“Maybe you can’t see your own fate by looking at yourself,” Joey said. “Who of us can? But somehow … through me … through my touch, you’re being … I don’t know … being given a sign.”