black plastic and to drape the plastic with bouquets of flowers and bunches of cut ferns.
    In a mood to punish himself, Joey stepped to the yawning hole. He peered over the 
curtain to see exactly where his dad would be going.
    At the bottom of the grave, only half buried in loose earth, lay a body wrapped in 
blood-smeared plastic. A naked woman. Face concealed. Ribbons of wet blond hair.
    Joey stepped back, bumping into other mourners.
    He was unable to breathe. His lungs seemed to be packed full of dirt from his 
father's grave.
    As solemn as the sepulchral sky, the pallbearers arrived with the casket and 
carefully deposited it onto a motorized sling over the excavation.
    Joey wanted to shout at them to move the casket and look, look below, look at the 
tarp-wrapped woman, look at the bottom of the pit.
    He couldn't speak.
    The priest had arrived, his black cassock and white surplice flapping in the wind. 
The interment service was about to begin.
    When the casket was lowered into that seven-foot-deep abyss, atop the dead woman, 
when the grave was filled with earth, no one would ever know that she'd been there. To 
those in the world who loved her and sought her with such desperation, she would have 
vanished forever.
    Again Joey tried to speak, but he was still unable to make a sound. He was shaking 
violently.
    On one level, he knew that the body at the bottom of the grave was not really there. 
A phantom. Hallucination. Delirium tremens. Like the bugs that Ray Milland had seen 
crawling out of the walls in Lost Weekend.
    Nevertheless, a scream swelled in him. He would have given voice to it if he could 
have broken the iron band of silence that tightened around him, would have shouted at 
them, would have demanded that they move the casket and look into the hole, even though 
he knew that they would find nothing and that everyone would think him deranged.
    From the grave or from the mound beside it rose the fecund smell of damp earth and 
rotting vegetable matter, which called to mind all the small, teeming creatures that 
thrived below the sod-beetles, worms, and quick-moving things for which he had no names.
    Joey turned away from the grave, pushed through the hundred or more mourners who had 
come from the church to the cemetery, and stumbled down the hill, through the ranks of 
tombstones. He took refuge in the rental car.
    Suddenly he was able to breathe in great gasps, and he found his voice at last. "Oh, 
God, oh, God, oh, God."
    He must be losing his mind. Twenty years of all-but-constant inebriation had screwed 
up his brain beyond repair. Too many cells of gray matter had died in the long bath of 
alcohol.
    He was so far gone that only another taste of the same sin would give him surcease. 
He took the flask from his coat pocket.
    Aware that a month's worth of gossip was in the making, the startled mourners at the 
grave site must have followed his stumbling flight with considerable interest. No doubt 
many, afraid of missing the next development, were still risking the disapproval of the 
priest by glancing downhill toward the rental car.
    Joey didn't care what anyone thought. He didn't care about anything any more. Except 
whiskey.
    But his dad still wasn't buried. He had promised himself that he would remain sober 
until the interment was complete. He had broken uncounted promises to himself over the 
years, but for reasons that he could not quite define, this one was more important than 
any of the others.
    He didn't open the flask.
    Uphill, under the half-bare limbs of the autumn-stripped trees, beneath a bruised 
sky, the casket slowly descended into the uncaring earth.
    Soon the mourners began to leave, glancing toward Joey's car with unconcealed 
interest.
    As the priest departed, several small whirlwinds full of dead leaves spun through the 
cemetery, exploding over headstones, as if angry spirits had awakened from an uneasy rest.
    Thunder rolled across the heavens. It was the first peal in hours, and the remaining 
mourners hurried to their cars.
    The undertaker and his assistant removed the motorized casket lift and the black 
plastic skirt from around the open grave.
    As the storm resumed, a cemetery worker in a yellow rain slicker stripped the tarp 
and flowers from the mound of excavated dirt.
    Another worker appeared behind the wheel of a compact little earthmoving machine 
called a Bobcat. It was painted the same shade of yellow as his raincoat.
    Before the open grave could be flooded by the storm, it was filled-and then tamped 
down by the tread of the Bobcat.
    "Goodbye," Joey said.
    He should have had a sense of completion, of having reached the end of an important 
phase of his life. But he only felt empty and incomplete. He had not put an end to 
anything-if that was what he had been hoping to do.
    
    
    5
    
    BACK AT HIS FATHER'S HOUSE, HE WENT DOWN THE NARROW STEPS FROM the kitchen to the 
basement. Past the furnace. Past the small water heater.
    The door to P.J.'s old room was warped by humidity and age. It squealed against the 
jamb and scraped across the sill as Joey forced it open.
    Rain beat on the two narrow, horizontal casement windows that were set high in one 
basement wall, and the deep shadows were not dispersed by the meager storm light. He 
flicked the switch by the door, and a bare overhead bulb came on.
    The small room was empty. Many years ago, the single bed and the other furniture must 
have been sold to raise a few dollars. For the past two decades, when P.J. came home, he 
had slept in Joey's room on the second floor, because there had been no chance that Joey 
would pay a visit and need it himself.
    Dust. Cobwebs. Low on the .walls: a few dark patches of mildew like Rorschach blots.
    The only items of proof that remained of P.J.'s long-ago residence were a couple of 
movie posters for flicks so trashy that the advertising art had an unintentionally campy 
quality. They were thumbtacked to the walls, pus yellow with age, cracked, curling at the 
corners.
    In high school, P.J.'s dream was to get out of Asherville, out of poverty, and become 
a filmmaker. "But I need these," he had once said to Joey, indicating the posters, "to 
remind me that success at any price isn't worth it. In Hollywood you can become rich and 
famous and celebrated even for making stupid, dehumanizing crap. If I can't make it by 
doing worthwhile work, I hope I've got the courage to give up the dream altogether 
instead of selling out."
    Either fate had never given P.J. his shot at Hollywood or he had lost interest in 
filmmaking somewhere along the way. Ironically, he had achieved fame as a novelist,