The Lost Highway

by David Adams Richards

He did not know the house would bring this compassion for his foe to life.

  He did not understand that crime was always better if done in groups of three or four—where no one played the ultimate role.

  That is, sin was almost always a collaboration.

  Still, he had to stay the course, keep going until the end. He was shaking violently and speaking to himself.

  “If I get the ticket I will give so much of it away I will live in almost the same kind of poverty I do now. In fact, people will look upon me as an example of what a good man would do with money. People will know why I studied the way I did all these years. This is true, but first I have to find the ticket.”

  He thought of Minnie and the Beatles album that long ago day. She would come to him, once he had this ticket, and he would have what he had wanted from the moment he first saw her.

  He searched that afternoon for almost four hours. The house was closed up, and when he came into the sunshine his eyes squinted as much as those of a condemned prisoner. He thought of what Father Hut had told him: “To give your life for others is both the greatest challenge and the greatest joy.”

  Nonsense, he now thought. At any rate, he knew all that.

  And then he would think, Perhaps there is no ticket at all.

  He went back to the kitchen and began to search through the drawers more and more forcefully, until the drawers themselves were messed up and he had to then try to straighten them out. But in his wild search some papers had fallen out onto the floor, and he didn’t know which drawer they had fallen from. He hadn’t even noticed, and it was as if a trick had been played upon him. He couldn’t believe that he who wanted to be careful had left his boot prints on these papers. He picked them up hurriedly. He began to shake. It was of all things his great-aunt’s recipe for the chocolate pie she made him when something bad had happened—when his pens had been taken, his coupons destroyed, or he’d had to walk home from a dance alone—and she had wanted to take his pain away.

  “Give me the ticket!” he yelled.

  —

  ALEX THOUGHT OF HIS UNIVERSITY DAYS, AND HOW LITTLE he had done with all he had learned. He thought too of how many people had far less opportunity than he, and had made much more of their lives. He thought too of how he had tried to change and inflame Minnie, by writing her letters and telling her of how many women were independent. But no matter how angry his letters were to her—how much he accused her—he could not forget her for a second, and that she had married a man beneath him. He went to bed each night at university dreaming of Minnie coming to him.

  “Sam will never take you off the river—I would have,” he wrote her once. But at all these points in his dreaming, where they would fly away to some exotic spot, there was no little Amy sitting beside her. And in his mind Amy did not exist.

  That is, he had been able to decide by all proper methods her demise, without ever seeing her. Until one day, after he had returned home, she simply appeared from behind the car, as fully alive as he had ever been, with her hands, feet, and eyes exquisitely her own—not just now her own, but her own eternally.

  So now he had placed her, this brilliant, elfin, and awkward little girl, in his ethics course to instruct her on how to live.

  He lay down that afternoon, and fell in and out of sleep. He began to remember other moments in his life, with his right arm over his eyes and his feet up on the couch arm.

  ——

  He and his mother walking to the train station.

  It was already after dark—and they had to go down a long street with almost no lights except the light of a store at the end, and there his mom stopped and bought him a bag of candy—he remembered her hands were raw in the cold. She had spent the afternoon dressing him up, making him presentable to a man he did not know very well at all. Then she instructed him on what to say, and how to say it. But when they got there, his father was leaving. That man called Roach who hated him for being born, who hated of all things Alex’s nationality—for Roach disliked the Catholics, and didn’t mind telling Rosa so.

  But that night he even smiled at little Alex and touched his cheek in kindness. Alex didn’t understand, and smiled back. But after that Mr. Roach didn’t look at him. He didn’t want to look at his son. He didn’t know what to say to him. Alex lifted his bag of candy, and smiled. The man’s lips trembled slightly, but he turned sideways. The smell of diesel signified a parting—and this man, Alex overheard, accused his mother of getting pregnant to make him stay.

  It became evident that he thought she would have money from the Chapman business, and that she had been disowned because of this very man she tried now to hang on to. It took Alex years and years to understand this. This sorrow-laden evening in the snow. This sad, sad parting of people who should have loved.

  Alex tried to understand by watching him, his movements. He remembered all of this now. There was a sudden Protestant reserve to Roach’s hatred of them, their Catholicism, and his self-indulgence at what his family had put up with on their behalf. It had gone back, it seemed, to Alex’s own grandfather, who had been in a dispute with Old Jim.

  So now Roach reminded them. Yes, this was the right time to turn on them, when they were alone and defenseless.

  His mother stood on the platform, and she did not cry while others were there in the sweet sorrow of parting. His mother was a young girl, really, in a cold foreign town. She had schedules for buses in her coat pocket to travel back through the drifts of snow to her apartment.

  Thinking of this, Alex lying on the couch was so rigid he couldn’t move.

  Why did he think of these things now? Why did he think of Mr. Roach, his father? He tried not to believe he had become anything like his father. That Eugene Gallant was his father.

  He had hated men like his father, Mr. Roach, all of his life. Those stiff, puritanical, edgy frauds of some past injury they never themselves partook in but could bring up in a second as their own. And thinking this, he realized he had done it too. On Chapman’s Island with the Micmac, and many times in trying to control Minnie.

  “No,” he said, “I was never like that!”

  Was this the reason he wanted Minnie not to have the child—to keep her from some disgrace he felt he had once caused his own mother? But would he have stopped his own existence to prevent such a disgrace?

  In some ways Alex thought of all men as Mr. Roach, and all women as his mother.

  —

  THE NEXT MORNING ALEX WOKE IN A SWEAT, COUGHING. For a moment no thought came to him except a nice one, of being by the river as a child, watching fish in a pool. He thought of this and stretched. Another day, and the heat and soundlessness of the little shack. Then he sat bolt upright and remembered he hadn’t fixed his uncle’s shed door, he had left it open. Anyone could have gotten in. What if someone else found the ticket?

  “Let me find the ticket today, and I will never ask you for another thing,” he said, his heart pounding. He got out of bed, and walked to a chair where he sat.

  “Get me the ticket!” he said, taking his blood pressure medicine.

  But who was he saying this to?

  Could man have hope in anything without believing in something beyond themselves? This was the whole idea of the lotto. Wasn’t it?

  It was perverted Christ worship. The sole idea of his ethics course was to debunk this.

  Now he had come full circle.

  He got up and pulled on his pants, went to the bathroom and washed—looked suddenly at his orange, ragged hair, and trembled to think how much he looked like his great-uncle.

  He looked across the room into a mirror. His hair was matted, his beard gray and grizzled. He could pass for anyone along the lost highway now. Any of the dozens of men he had grown up with, who he at one time had thought he was so different than.

  If he had money, nothing would ever bother him. He believed, in fact, he would get back at everyone. Except: no one had bothered him in years. No one had cared why or what he did, or what he sa
id. After all his learning, the thousands of books he had read, he was waltzing with ghosts that no longer existed. Women who no longer knew him, who could pass him in the street and not recognize him, or ever say his name in longing. The breasts he once desired were now old. All gave and were given up, and still he evoked the idea that someone was waiting for him.

  As he turned he saw the quote from Khrushchev on the wall above his books, a quote he had put there proudly when he came back to the river: “Get rid of the devil and priests will have nothing to do.”

  He wanted people to see that quote when they came into the house. Just after he made the grotto for the church, Father MacIlvoy came to his house one afternoon, to talk about old times and pay him for the statue.

  Alex childishly said, “There is no devil in here—” and pointed to Khrushchev’s words.

  “I didn’t expect there to be,” MacIlvoy said humbly.

  “I have nothing to confess,” Alex said.

  “Live long enough and you will,” MacIlvoy answered merrily.

  Money. Goddamn money.

  He remembered his father, Mr. Roach, again, riddling her with guilt over money she was trying to get him.

  “I will get it,” she would say, closing her raw hands in determination, “just you wait and see.” And she would nod with determination as rain fell over the greasy window of Lester’s Coffee Shop. Roach would be annoyed, tell her to sit up straight, not to sniff.

  “I’m sorry,” she would answer, “I haven’t been feeling so well.”

  “There are other girls in the office, Rosa,” he would say. “There are other girls, they have outlooks—you don’t have an outlook. They have plans—you don’t have plans. They are interesting to be around.”

  “It must be nice for them,” Rosa answered.

  Later, when she tried to say that she did not have this money, it provoked a fight over him. Alex would listen to them, his face quiet and serene, hoping the arguing would stop. It never did.

  He remembered how once, after an argument, Roach went out to his Christmas party and he and his mother stayed alone. Very late at night he came in singing, stumbling. He got angry when he saw Alex sleeping in the bed with his mom.

  “Get him out of there!” he said. “Jesus Christ!”

  He told Rosa there was a girl named Diane—and was she ever nice.

  Alex would watch for the derelict, who always smiled at Alex when he saw him.

  He decided this morning he would give Minnie money if she left Sam Patch. This was not as inexcusable as one might think. For Sam Patch, to his way of thinking, had deceived Minnie—and left her alone. Just like Mr. Roach had his mother. Simply speaking, why couldn’t Sam have provided a better life for Minnie than he had, if he really loved her?

  He gives her nothing, Alex thought in a practical way, and left her alone with that little child.

  Of course Alex sent Sam away as much as anyone, and it was he who was worried Sam would come back to the lost highway with a lot of money as people from the oil patch were now doing.

  How could he convince her, then, if he didn’t find the ticket?

  —

  THERE WAS NO SIGHT OR SOUND FROM THE CHAPMAN house. A pale, thin cloud moved across the otherwise cloudless sky. On the radio, which sat on the counter inside Alex’s own little house, he heard of the “two glorious weeks of summer left.”

  When he was very little he used to rush out and try to catch the first snowflake on his tongue. He would persuade his mother to come out and be with him, and watch as they melted away in Saint John’s darker south end streets. It wasn’t the Saint John of today with its fresh sidewalks and cafés and lights draped across pleasant walkways. It was the old postwar Saint John with its waterfront closed in by fog and battered timber, and streets twisting away in the fog. And how he loved it there. And now he thought of how young his mother had been when she died at twenty-nine, and how he was now much older than her, and how she lived with him alone, cut off from the inheritance because of this Roach man she had followed there, who was physically adverse to her, who disliked her in a visceral way once the money was not forthcoming.

  When Old Jim found out she was pregnant, he said, “You marry no Protestant or you’ll get not a sniff from me.”

  So she followed her man to Saint John, he already twenty-six years old. A manager of some warehouse of some small company. They waited for her uncle to change his mind. He, this man, thought she was rich. Why wouldn’t he think this? Now he didn’t even hide the fact that he blamed her for not being so. That is, he could not believe he had made such a disastrous mistake, a bad calculation from such a calculating man.

  Roach had lived to the north of the highway, and he said he was always cut out of things by Chapman, who accused his family of being squatters.

  He had learned to hate Chapman, and fear him.

  And so he set his eyes on her! Her with her little bit of money and her music lessons!

  He kept suggesting that she must be able to cash in some trust fund, would she not? At first she was surprised, then deeply empty, and would sit in Lester’s Coffee Shop waiting for him after work, with Alex in the old iron stroller.

  “I will get it,” she said dreamily, “I promise I will.”

  “Because if you do, we live much better—that’s all I am saying—I am saying nothing but that. I want a life for both of us.”

  “I know,” she said dreamily, “yes.”

  Sometimes at nineteen she would pretend to be going to the post office for the money. But she would simply push Alex in his stroller about King’s Square in the wind and rain, not knowing how to come home and tell Roach.

  Alex went to first year elementary thinking, all three feet of him, of an inheritance that his mother would hand to him. By that time her man had gone.

  Alex would walk up from St. Patrick’s and St. Michael’s, with his pants itching his legs, and his new bookbag, and each day it got a little colder. He remembered now the snap of the apple in his teeth, and the warm corner store where he bought his bag of chips. He remembered one year, at the first snow, she didn’t want to go out because she couldn’t find her pink scarf, and they searched everywhere for it, and he kept saying: “Come, Mom, or the snow will be gone.”

  There was a smell of tin and diesel in the air when they went out, along the black iron fence where cartons and paper cups were caught, and the snow came down in the alleyway, and his mother held him up to catch the first flake on his tongue.

  What had happened, from those days until now? And why had it? And how had his life gone? And who was to blame? Or why did he think he had to blame anyone? Certainly he couldn’t even blame Mr. Roach, caught in the same turmoil as everyone believing half-truths in order to blame other people.

  Every year when the first snow fell, he thought more and more about his mother—and why she had done certain things. He remembered her one night drinking a whole bottle of wine, alone, and then laughing and singing and telling him all kinds of stories.

  For a moment when thinking of her each day, he no longer wanted to rely upon approval or disapproval. He only wanted to love and to forgive.

  —

  HE DID NOT KNOW DURING THAT LONG AGO CHILDHOOD time that she was having problems with another man at work (this was a year or so after his father, Roach, had left them), a businessman of a certain class who managed the store in his gray suit and flush face, who touched his female employees’ breasts just slightly when he squeezed by them as they worked, or what was far worse, laughed at injury to others with a loud laugh, just as he did at anyone who held in his hand the gift of knowledge. He asked her out when he found out she was alone with a child. And that was it, wasn’t it? Alex became a trump card for virile men who wanted to fuck her. His mother rebuffed this boss, with his paycheck and his loud suit, for she was waiting for her Mr. Roach to come back, because in her dreams she belonged to him, like those be-bop-a-lula songs he could sing into his microphone at the high school dances. So her bo
ss then turned his attentions to Alex’s mother’s friend Pearl.

  As far as Pearl believed, this boss was going to leave his wife and children and marry her. Alex’s mother tried to dissuade this woman without telling her of the proposition she herself had had from that same plump boss, but to no avail. Alex saw this gentleman once at the apartment. He had come in, with his short legs and mustache, abrasively speaking of someone who he had “got the better of.” Seeing a painting that Miller Britain had given Alex’s mother out of some deep kindness one day at Lester’s Coffee Shop, the man had said, “He don’t see the world like I do if you ask me,” and guffawed.

  His mother, with her little painting, the only one she had, was left little by this remark. She smiled plaintively, and it was the only kind of smile she had left.

  “I like the painting,” Alex said, standing up for his mother as he had done for no one else. He had met Mr. Britain, the day his mother was given that painting.

  But his mother’s boss hooted at the painters in Saint John, like Humphrey and Britain—and poets like Nowlan—those men who had, above all, visions of greatness and tramped the streets unknown. And of course, that was it—they were exposed to the elements of scandal and mocking, and this man who managed the south end Steadman’s store knew if anything how to mock, titter, and be dismissive of greatness in his midst, for that was the way to herd together in this country—and Alex saw this later on in the seminary, among the “nose-picking boys” as he called them, and just as much, in the secularly conscious universities of the cluttered Maritimes, with women he once embraced as being independent, who said and did only what their friends said and did, and took that as freedom. It was all nonsense, he knew. So he must find the ticket.

  “I could tell you lots about Miller Britain,” the boss had sniffed. “Insane and everything else, if you ask me! Yells at the top of his lungs, if you ask me. Was up at the nuthouse there and wanted to jump off the reversing falls, and my cousin who’s the custodian there says so for a fact! And don’t even take care of his daughter!”

  Perhaps it was then that Alex began to hate this kind of man, the BOSS, and then men, and took it upon himself to decide who was and was not that man. Who he could approve and disapprove of. But in his fury he could never decide well enough what kind of man he himself should be. He took ethics, studied hard, so he could see who was and who was not that kind of man. And now it came down to this: Sam Patch, good, kindly Sam Patch, was that kind of man. And he must save Minnie from him—for she at some point would still come to him.