But the truth of the matter was that Alex, who was the personification of a university system, believed he was against systems. Alex, who had more power because of how he thought, believed he was against the powerful. A man who disbelieved in evil and, though he made many mistakes, saw none of it in his own nature. Not once in his teaching ethics to students did any opinion form that was not the prized opinion of the secular. This then was his, Alex Chapman’s, ethical purity, which was in a way not so far removed from the error of ethnical purity. This ticket hunt was just an extension of it, of what he had presumed to be ethical. The university had forsaken him. Well then, they would see what became of him. That is, in the realm of approval or disapproval, who would approve of him once he had this money?
He no longer had keys to the house, because his uncle had changed the locks, an old man proving his displeasure at the last of his life, but he didn’t mind that. Poor old Jim once controlled the whole of the stinking highway from Route 8 to Route 11, and on to Route 224—no one would dare go against him. His door could have been left opened a million days and in that state, sublime and indifferent to the world, no one would have bothered his house. But now, his empire sinking, palsied, he locked the doors because his nephew had hurt him.
“I will not be held back by a lock—in fact I welcome them,” Alex said.
Today his uncle went for a week to fish big salmon on the big Restigouche, which flowed like a grand giant between Quebec and New Brunswick, as he had done every year at the Feast of the Assumption. He had friends he met and continued to. They were all braggarts just like he was, Catholic boys too. This year would be no different. So Alex would wait until his uncle left the house today.
Then he would get inside, find the ticket, take it to Moncton. He would have to hire a lawyer, and remain absolutely anonymous. Then he would come back, and lay low for a while. Give his uncle $100,000 or so, say: “You see, this is what I saved for you.”
But now the heat was bothering him, and he was dizzy, and he took his blood pressure pill. The trees above his shed and the great house beyond waved slightly in the gusts of hot wind, the shoreline was exquisite in its bluish waves. Across the way, the little island shimmered in green. All of this was majestic and, as he knew when young, worth more than any money. This is what he used to think when Old Jim refused him any.
“As long as I have a view like this, who can say I do not own the world?”
What had happened between them? Who could say? When did that moment in Alex’s childhood come when he thought he had been forsaken by the gruff old man? He didn’t know. When was the smell of tea, and beans, and the sharp wind coming across the field at twilight not enough?
But now he thought of the coupons he had saved to buy his book on shore birds, and what had happened long ago, how his pens were thrown away, and how the whole school bus laughed when these things happened to him. That is, long forgotten pain, that had in some small ways been etched into his heart and on his face over the years, came back on a semi-regular basis.
But though Alex believed he had all and everything covered, something was going on that he had not thought of at all.
Burton, of the Tucker clan, of the poorest of the poor, who had by his own industry and the help of childhood friends from Chatham opened a garage four years ago, had now purchased the one thing he believed would make his life like other people’s. That is, if he could not think, a computer could think for him. If he could not measure and scale and combobulate, a computer could do it. A computer could make him wise, all at once. Make him, he believed, like everyone else. He in his own mind had put that much faith in one.
And Amy had told Burton she would set up a computer he had bought the week before. Amy and Minnie had been with him that day, and both had tried to talk him out of buying it. Burton insisted, stamping his feet, and decided to make a scene if they didn’t allow him to, for they did not know what he was thinking, that soon he would be as smart as they were.
After getting his way, Burton sat in the car’s front seat, now and again tapping one of the big boxes with his deformed fingers, as they drove back down the dust-laden highway, with shore birds in the heavens circling far above.
He had no idea what to do with this computer, beyond tapping his fingers on the box. But Amy did, having helped set up the computers in the school. And the next morning, early enough that there was still dew on the grasses along the way, she walked down her lane, just as Alex, his eyes blinking from the sun, came out into Old Chapman’s yard. She did not know if he saw her, but he didn’t wave, and so she turned on the flat, pale highway and made her way to the garage.
She walked along, seeing the garage in the distance, it too looking desolate in the heat, with its white cement and curious broken cars. The garage was closed today, so it was the day to set the computer up.
In half an hour she had it up and going, so she began to copy Burton’s crumpled receipts into it—day, month, year, payment, for each receipt he had piled in a shoebox. She had told him she would do this, and it would save him time, and he wouldn’t lose any of his billing. That is, as she and her mother had always done, they made the best of what was offered them.
It wasn’t a long process, the receipts going back only two months or so, which is when Burton started the business’s fiscal year. (Not that he started it, but that the accountant from town, WP and Maine, came down to do his books at that time.) Amy thought little of the oil changes and oil sales, the filters and spark plugs and Goodyear tires—until she discovered that she was also compiling lotto numbers, tickets that had been given out as a bonus for these oil sales.
There were five of them since August 8.
So she copied them as well, thinking nothing much about this, until she came to the two first receipts—from that day in early August when there were two oil changes. One was Poppy Bourque. She almost overlooked the very first receipt, but found it too and began to copy it in.
The lotto number had been crossed and scratched out and another one written over it.
Name: Jim Chapman
Truck make/year: Ford 150/1996
Serial number: H987JH695
Lotto ticket number: 5, 7, 14, 20, 31, 45
She copied these numbers into the computer in a kind of stunned silence. How did her numbers get on the receipt? She glanced at the clock. It was twenty-seven minutes past ten. She felt sweat under her arms and along her back. She wondered if Mr. Chapman had gone yet or was still at home, or should she talk to him? She was in fact too shy to. Alex was an adult, after all, and a teacher too. So he would know what was best, wouldn’t he? She took the old piece of paper, where Chapman’s truck and lotto information was first written, and put it in her pocket. The problem was she could not tell what the crossed-out numbers were.
She must now rush to sit with Fanny Groat, and make her breakfast.
She rushed out the door, and up the silent highway. Her eyes were large, her lips pressed together. She was thinking of English literature. Strangely, she remembered a line from Browning: “Gazooks, here’s a grey beginning.”
—
ALEX HAD MADE HIS WAY TO HIS UNCLE’S, AND AMID SOME small birds sat on the narrow iron fence that separated his old icehouse from Jim Chapman’s main yard. In his pocket he had stuffed a flyer that had been put in his mailbox. From Poppy Bourque: VISIT POPPY AT HIS POTATO STAND! It was always a delight to see his mailbox flag up, and so often a disappointment when he found nothing but these flyers.
Well, certainly he would find the ticket by the time that stand opened, Alex decided. Now and again he looked at his oversized pocket watch, scratched his nose. Then he took a walk toward the highway. From there he walked past Jim Chapman’s gate and made his way along an old trail in back of the house, toward the water. He climbed the mechanical lighthouse, realizing suddenly that all of this activity was bothering him, and he was very dizzy. He sat down near the reflectors and using his binoculars began watching the house.
Jim Chapman’s truck did
not move; for three hours not a sound came from the desolate old place, the machines and cinder block of the back acres lay in silent turbulence. It was as if he was looking through a time machine into the past and seeing himself there as a child, a woebegone boy with nothing who sat about on a block and watched the men.
Now and again he looked at his pocket watch and imagined, as in the time machine, the clock whirring back through the years, the lighthouse he was on being the time machine itself. Yes, he was there as a child, amid those sheets of tin and broken, derelict machines.
Tin sheets that lay hot in the sun. Nothing moved. Just Amy walking back up the highway from someplace, and a fat bee or two quietly zigzagging, and now and again a ticking sound from somewhere amid the green bushes. He had studied bees, he thought, and he was content to think of bees for a while, and how they lived their lives. How the drones lived and died, and how once in anger a man had called him, Alex Chapman, an academic drone. Him of all people!
Yet if only he was!
Then, suddenly, he realized something. It came to him as he was thinking of going home to rest. The truck was actually telling him, by where it was parked, that the house was empty.
“Your uncle did not drive me—I am parked under the tree at the back because I will not be taken,” the truck whispered through the casual wind of mid-morning, the still rich, abundant smell of summer.
It was like a shiver of hope ran through him. Jim had gone. The truck wasn’t taken. He had left with someone else in the fishing party. The whole yard, the acres behind it, were left unattended. The truck, dumb in its physicality, now seemed wholly animated and alive.
“Song of joy,” Alex whispered to himself, through half-burnt lips. “Song of joy—song of joy!”
He thought of his study of ethics and how he pinpointed various crimes committed by people like his uncle over the years. It would not be so bad, getting this ticket for himself.
He got down and moved along the old grasses, yellowed and burnt by the sun, his own hair lightened to orange by this sun, as the day was heating, and the sunlight left shafts of color on the great empty iron and steel bodies that lay crippled throughout the yards. His head moved barely visible among these gaunt and metallic stallions of other years.
In the great acres of Chapman’s desolation was the smell of tar shingles and commodities of a bygone time, wasting away, that gave the scent of baking cardboard and dry shingles, and each acre he passed he seemed to relive some of his sad life. Here he was when he first came, the old rocking horse once in his room; here he was when he first saw; here he was when he first noticed—and all these memories were vague and seemingly sad. He moved through these acres like moving through time, remembering how his youthful hope was bled away in a thousand nights of reckless tyranny and forced labor. So now he was doing this for that child who was brought to this house as an orphan. In a way he was getting restitution for all orphans, and making good on a claim for them as well as he. He would pay Jim back not only for Chapman Island, which should belong to the Micmac, but for his mother as well, and the legacy she should have been left. What might he have lived like if Jim had given him a chance, he now decided.
He went to the house, however, like a scared child—the same child who had gone there in hope when he left the foster home, carrying a small cardboard suitcase. He went to the doors and tried them like he would some stranger’s mansion, and found them locked. All the doors had new locks, as gaudy as brass on old woodwork, and his ancient key fit none. Even the shed was locked, for the first time he could remember.
But that is nothing now, he thought, I will have my revenge.
But still some small part of him felt desolated by being locked out, hurt that his uncle no longer trusted him. And some small part of him told himself he still loved his uncle and his uncle loved him. But now that was a very small part indeed.
What was more painful was knowing his uncle would never in a thousand years suspect him of ever breaking one of these locks! And did this not then make it a crime?
He went back to the lot, searched in the dry burn and scald of old paint in the wind and found a rusted crowbar in the soil. He began to think he had a reckless soul and he was very happy to have one.
“Yes, you don’t fool with me—I will wait my time and then you will see.”
He snapped the crowbar against his hand, and it hurt. He grimaced, once again like a child.
“And my name is not Chapman!” he shouted.
Of course in so many ways over the years the fight had been taken out of him. He had over the years almost accepted his role as an outsider and oddity on the highway, that desolate stretch where the heat now formed in the afternoon sun. Who else talked of Plato when fifteen? Who pushed him down when he had? Who anointed him with laughter when he tried to relate a story written by de Maupassant? Did he know that in order for some to exercise their manliness they set him up to be bullied and tormented, and then stepped in as his savior, hoping for a dollar? Of course he did. And he always had. And he hated himself for his knowledge without action. He was a weakling, and even now breaking into a house with a crowbar seemed to take too much from him.
He thought of this in despair. One day Old Chapman, seeing him bullied, had brought him to a cement single-story building, down on the property where he had a plant that housed bags of cement and lime.
“Come with me,” he said, “and you can get stronger.”
Old Chapman tried to make Alex lift these cement bags from the floor to the first staging, and told him Sam Patch would teach him. But nothing was more foreign to Alex than to force weights into the air, and his hands slipped. He was furious at the old man for making fun of him.
“I am not making fun,” Jim said, confused and angered by this. “I just know it will make you stronger—give yourself six months—it is not a bad thing to do, I swear! You get at it now!”
Alex never could do it, and Sam took the task to himself while Alex sat in the corner day in and day out—watching up the yard for the old man to show. Then he would jump to his feet and pretend to have just lifted a bag.
So what, he thought, and he now thought of the millions in his grasp. So none of that mattered now!
Of course he would live much better than they would with this money. That is, he would give tons of it away. Minnie would come to see who he was. For as always Minnie was in his mind. She was the principal object and artistic quest, like Dante’s Beatrice or Keats’s Frannie; he too had a woman out of reach.
Yes, it was all possible now, as soon as he got the ticket!
But what he thought would be very easy to do, once his uncle went out, he discovered wasn’t as easy as he supposed. If he got caught, he might end up in jail. The ticket would be lost. But what he also realized was this: the old man might still be home—upstairs asleep. What would happen? He would be caught at something that Burton or even little Amy might just figure out!
Well then he would make up an excuse, say he was coming for his books. Anyone would believe that! His uncle had said he would sell his books on Plato and Aristotle if he did not take them out of the house. Certainly he had a right to them.
“We will have to see,” he said.
But then Sam Patch—how could he just blame him and have him fired? Because he thought he was better than Sam—and he realized this, and was slightly ashamed. But what he was most ashamed of is that things had worked out for Sam, after all of Alex’s planning and subterfuge, and not for him, who believed always in being the master of his own fate.
So he bit down on his tongue and pried open the old shed door. The lock seemed to give way with a sudden immaculate spring, and the door fell open. It was quiet, musty, and the same internal smell of their lives that made it distinct prevalent in the air. He paused, heard nothing. He thought of his old aunt standing at the door, waving to him on the way home from school.
He had snapped the new lock open—the hinges were busted, and screws fell to the floor. He would have to
replace all of this, he decided, and then he moved through the small archway into the house, thinking that his uncle was right, that he was an awful, ungrateful nephew.
“First time for everything,” he muttered. He thought of himself now as a foster child coming back to deal with those who had raised him poorly. He realized how often in life this happened, and felt strangely enough as if his life had a meaning beyond his own consciousness because of this very act. When he turned a corner into the front hallway he saw himself in a mirror, and was surprised, and did not quite recognize himself.
The house, in its bareness, seemed to display the hidden facets of Young Chapman’s life. He was reminded of himself playing in sections of the house no one went to now, when he walked through large old rooms and half-hidden sections. Sometimes he spent afternoons searching out places his mother might have stood, and standing there too.
Half the furniture was covered in white sheets. The grandfather clock had stopped. The calendar had not been changed since Muriel’s death, and if truth be told he had not been in since then. Really, he had left his uncle to himself. After his aunt’s death, his uncle tried to get him to come for supper and invited him to play cribbage. Old Chapman had left Muriel’s apron—with its flowers, daisies with the smiling faces—hanging near the back stove, placed there by her on the last day of her life. Alex, who hated sentiment, was suddenly sorry for his uncle, without wanting to be.
Then he noticed something that froze him. His uncle’s medication had been left behind, forgotten on the table. He had forgotten it and so would get dizzy spells if he did not have it. A panic set in.
Alex knew he should take him this bottle of medicine. But then, how could he?
For moments he stood petrified staring at this bottle of green and white pills.
“He must have another one with him,” he said. But he knew this probably wasn’t the case.
The Lost Highway Page 14
