Refractions of the Dying Light : KING OF THE ROAD<i> by Paul Hemphill (Houghton Mifflin: $18.95; 296 pp.; 0-395-49860-0) </i>

Paul Hemphill sets the tone of this sentimental but endearing story by having his foil, the 40-ish son of the book’s main character, reading the familiar Dylan Thomas poem, “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” to a class of stupos in his last teaching day at an obscure junior college in the Florida Panhandle.

The verse, “Rage, rage against the dying of the light . . .”, is, of course, meant to prepare the reader for what’s next, which is the son’s return home to see his aging father who is currently incarcerated in a fundamentalist alcoholism-rehabilitation facility after being expelled from the retirement center where he and his wife have been living since she came down with Alzheimer’s.

Sonny Hawkins finds his father Jake practically terrorizing the alcohol-treatment facility--gambling with the patients, playing loud music, disrupting activities and finally making good with his threat to run away. Now, old Jake is a “character,” as the saying goes--profane, joke-cracking, cigar-smoking and bourbon-drinking, an ex-trucker who has been stewing in his juices since he gave up the road several years earlier.

The first thing Jake does when he gets back to the old family home in a rundown blue-collar section of Birmingham is start drinking whiskey again and reminiscing with Sonny about brighter days. Sonny, a recovering alcoholic himself, accepts all this bluster and braggadocio as stoically as he can until Jake starts talking about going back on the road.

Out behind the house is Jake’s old truck, the Dixie Redball IV, idle for years until Jake begins to tinker with it again. It isn’t long before the Redball is spit-and-polished and ready to roll. Jake persuades an old acquaintance, a tire dealer he’s served for years hauling retreads, to let him make one last haul. Sonny, naturally, is appalled at the idea of a 70-year-old drunk getting behind the wheel, but Jake manages to persuade his old boss to let him deliver a load of tires out to Nevada and then pick up another load of recaps for the trip home. It’s not that Jake is just a simple trucker, he’s also an expert in the bidding and buying of tires he hauls.

Well, nothing will do except that Sonny must accompany Jake on this “last roundup,” as it were, and the pair of them--sad, middle age failure Sonny and crazy, twilight-yeared, irascible Jake--set out on a 5,000-mile cross-country adventure.

You can’t help but like old Jake. He might be a stubborn, opinionated racist but he also can be tender and understanding, and able to enjoy the company of blacks. He always finds ingenious ways to avoid the roadside truck scales and fleeces gouging motel owners who are trying to fleece him. At an age when Sonny ought to be “fathering” Jake, it is just the other way around. Sonny marvels at his father’s stamina and courage at a time when his own is faltering.

This father-and-son odyssey takes Jake and Sonny on back roads Jake never needs a map for, and to nostalgic old haunts decaying amid modern progress. In one touching episode, Jake pulls off at an ancient truck stop he always used to stay in, only to find it shut down and empty, victim of a new interstate highway nearby.

But in a small dwelling behind the place, Jake finds Minnie, wife of the owner--who has since died--and she reopens the restaurant one last time, just for them, serving a dinner of “chicken-fried steak, mashed potatoes and sawmill gravy, and biscuits.” By the end of the evening, Jake and Minnie are dancing to Country tunes played on an old Wurlitzer. “While the fiddles played, Minnie took Jake by the hand and led him to the jukebox. She in her denim skirt, he in cowboy boots and polyester slacks of hideous green, they held each other close and danced. Across the road, the new moon and the stars high in the Kansas sky glistened on the lazy Arkansas River. On the road itself, the loneliest road in America, big rigs thundered into the night, rattling the windows as they passed.”

More than anything, this novel is a labor of love, of the admiration of a son for his father, which is probably not such a common thing these days, if it ever was. Hemphill obviously knows what he’s talking about when it comes to trucks and trucking, and the dedication for the book cites his father as “the last trucker.” But the story also fulfills its original premise--that of the Dylan Thomas poem--and it is uplifting to see the triumph of old Jake Hawkins, raging successfully against “the dying of the light.”

Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

--Dylan Thomas, 1952.