The Lost Highway

by David Adams Richards

  There was a long pause.

  “Well?”

  “Well, what?” Alex asked.

  “Do you think I will get my family back with the money?”

  “How should I know?”

  “Well,” Bourque said offhandedly, “let me tell you—if you think it’s bad now, my sister is going to go to the police—”

  That night she did just that!

  —

  SO MANY PEOPLE BELIEVE THAT WE DO NOT WANT OR celebrate murder. In fact, at all times we do. The police themselves need it, and so do lawyers need it, to make cases for or against, and prove themselves out. The papers, too, want and relish it, to make outrage and moral certitude against it. Rumor needs it to be salacious against it, or to have the very idea of salaciousness inform us. And who knew this but those in the twentieth century who used it for their own means and comfort? There was also, and Alex was just beginning to feel this, a certain moral compass attached to the very act. It was a horrible act—unless you discovered that by this act something civil and good might happen that could lessen the act itself or even make it appropriate. Alex knew this is what Leo was saying about shortening Poppy’s life by only a year, but for a good reason. He also knew this is what murderers from all over the world said. “For great good a great crime might be necessary.”

  He also knew that the very ethics course he taught could dispense much intellectual energy discussing it.

  By the second evening it was discovered that Poppy Bourque had disappeared into nowhere. The first thing on people’s minds was that he had wandered off, that he was acting strangely, that in fact people should have kept an eye upon him for he might have been in the beginning stages of dementia or Alzheimer’s, the way he dumped his sawdust. So in some ways it was looked upon as an ordinary event.

  Still, it surfaced along the lost highway later that evening that something might be amiss. People spoke of a vendetta—perhaps a retaliation against Poppy for something. Because he had been a troublemaker when young. Still, who could ever have a vendetta now against Poppy Bourque, the little man with the vegetables? It was then that people became helpful to the family, saying they would try their best to find him. By ten that night it was all Leo himself spoke about.

  The households on the highway, frightened by this event, were still ecstatic over their late-night conversations. It heightened everything at this time of year. You see, the nights were just starting to cool. So with the coolness came that faint dimension of eroticism. So those along the lost highway wanted scandal. The priest in Barryville wanted it, but did Father MacIlvoy? No, he did not. Again to the little group in his seminar he spoke of crime and how easy it was to justify something you yourself had done. He spoke not of the crime, if it was one, but of those who may have committed it. He said that at this moment they were convincing themselves it was for the best. They would go on trying to do this, he said, because it was the only way to negate what it was they had done. But, he said, they had lessened their own humanity by this venture.

  Then he said that if anyone knew anything about this disappearance, perhaps they had better go to Markus Paul. He did not think that Amy was looking at him more intently than anyone else, until September 2. But by then it all had come and gone. The worry had settled on her compassionate, childlike face.

  Yet in another way a greater imbalance was taking place. Everyone in some way was celebrating this crime and pretending not to. Father MacIlvoy said this was almost certain to happen. And he was right.

  “People will love this, because so many have forsaken what they should love,” he said.

  Those who did not know the “victim” now said they did. Those who knew him said they knew him better. Acquaintances called him their best friend. Those who had outs with him—those people said they in fact were the ones who tried to protect him. Then the rumor started that his throat was cut, because they had found a knife. Leo Bourque went to see about this knife but was told it was simply a rumor. This rumor among others was the first indication that murder silenced no one and nothing, and that if Leo was suspicious and worried now, just you wait a day, and then two and then three, and that the person he would worry most about, of course, would be his partner in the crime.

  But for now Leo simply acted as others did, saying the same things as them.

  “It was the Indians down at the old hunting camp—it was that crew,” certain people said.

  People stared at each other’s throats, wondering how easy they were to slice, and felt nauseous over this thought. All played in murder’s bloody discourse and found it beneficial, for outrage or some other more venal reason. Even those who were hauled in for questioning puffed out their chests and wallowed in their infamy. For a while. The idea that Poppy had money, and his throat was cut for money, was something not taken seriously—except for the fact that some people could kill over ten dollars.

  Of course this talk of murder was vastly premature. And people kept telling each other this. So a search was started, and each hour people were thinking this is the hour he will be found.

  —

  CONSTABLE MARKUS PAUL, HOWEVER, WAS NO FOOL, YOUNG as he was, and he believed he had been given a murder to solve. Rumors started as to who it might or might not be. The rumors pointed to two men at Fouy Construction who’d had an argument with the old fellow three days before over sawdust spilling off his truck onto their car.

  “That’s the rub,” some said.

  They were interviewed and said they had nothing to do with it.

  Constable Paul found no reason not to believe them, and let them go. Constable Paul, as young as he was, had his eyes set upon something: the turn of the wheel in the sawdust, of a truck on a lane fifty yards from the house, where the old man in his laziness had dumped some sawdust he was supposed to take upriver. That was the problem, the old man had made a ton of enemies because he dumped sawdust all over. He would dump sawdust on your lawn and then try to steal away before you found out.

  So, many people were interviewed.

  “Who would kill old Poppy Bourque over dumping some sawdust?” people asked. It was annoying but, in retrospect, it was endearing. But a truck had turned into this lane and onto a small pile of sawdust, so the tracks remained—even though two police cars had thoughtlessly turned there. Markus was trying to piece the evidence together from this supposed truck. There was no body to prove anything had ever taken place. But everyone knew it wasn’t the old man’s truck there. Rumors soon got out of hand. Young Markus Paul began to look around for this truck—it might have been a Ford, it might have been wearing Goodyear tires. It may have just been two lovers in the night—two kids drinking their hopes away. Some people were saying it was a gang of criminals looking for drug money—one man said he knew there were four people involved, that they had been seen on the road for days. And then, supposedly, there was a woman with them dressed in leotards, and they said wearing no bra whatsoever. Then there was the idea, and Sergeant Bauer was most interested in this, that at that old hunting camp on the barrens Micmac kids and young white men and women had parties and drugs.

  Still, as they questioned people about the old man’s impossible crime of dumping little piles of sawdust, the tracks got colder under the seemingly indifferent whitened sky. They searched inch by inch the long swamp behind the spring. Only Markus stubbornly, and many said stupidly, held to the fact that this truck was from the English side of the road, and was the truck they should be searching for.

  “I think he went for a walk and got lost in the cedar swamp,” Leo said, eating dinner at his sister’s. For this is what most of the police themselves thought. All except for that troublemaker Markus Paul.

  The little girls went looking for him, by themselves and then in groups, and others too, and then the search and rescue brought a helicopter and a Cessna plane. Dogs came with two RCMP officers. They searched from the cedar swamp to the old spring and back, inch by inch over the bug-fouled swamp. Every time they brought in some new eq
uipment, or used a new tactic, they decided this would be the hour he was found. Bridgette was told to go out on the fringe of the barrens and call his name loudly, in case he was confused. She called his name so loudly she giggled, and then she began to cry.

  Then Constable Paul brought one of the German shepherds Poppy’s hat, and the dog went immediately along an old track to the pile of sawdust and then wagging its tail to the road. There, in the midst of traffic and heat, it turned in circles with the scent lost.

  Constable Paul late on the second day said he believed it was foul play. But some others believed it was all a big stink over nothing. People said he went for a walk and got lost. Others said he had a woman in Quebec that he liked to go and shag.

  But Markus Paul knew he had been painting his signs for the fair and seemed to have left the house suddenly.

  No body, no proof, and at the small police station Markus Paul was a Micmac man on the highway between the French and English. By the third or fourth day they began to talk against Constable Paul on the road, saying he was trying to make a mountain out of a molehill and over what, a little hill of sawdust. That he was a renegade Micmac for sure, and should be looking to the hunting camp that his grandfather used to own, because that is where the real trouble was.

  —

  ALEX’S TERROR OVER THOSE HOT LONG DAYS WAS THAT JIM Chapman would come home and figure everything out. Alex stayed in the backroom with a jacket placed over his head and shook as if he was ill, waiting for something. He did not care about the ticket. Many times he ran to the toilet and was sick to his stomach.

  But, as luck or fate or chance would have it, Jim Chapman did not return from his fishing trip. No one had paid much attention to this, because of the excitement over Old Poppy, but in fact it was common knowledge and others thought Young Chapman knew. Old Jim had taken a dizzy spell and fallen from the canoe, and gashed his head on a rock the very night Poppy Bourque disappeared. He had forgotten his medicine on the kitchen table. He was taken over the old camp road by Jeep to the hospital in Campbellton. A few days passed and Alex began to have all kinds of worry about what Jim’s absence could mean. But then at about ten o’clock on the third day after he was to return, the phone rang. Alex finally picked it up. At first it was very confusing, and Alex thought the hospital was telephoning about Poppy Bourque, saying that he had regained consciousness.

  The doctor said Jim needed a pacemaker, and his days of fishing were over.

  “He is asking you to come and get him, though I would like him to stay here for another few days. He says he wants to go home.”

  Jim’s fall had kept him unconscious, and when he woke he thought of his nephew. Alex, in trepidation (for some reason), asked to speak to his uncle. When the call went through, the old man spoke in a weak, almost terrified voice. In fact, he didn’t seem to remember the argument they’d had over taking the truck for an oil change. He said it would be his last fishing trip. His friend’s younger brother had been there and had made fun of him about going bankrupt and losing the bid to a Frenchman. He didn’t like being made fun of, and he had gotten lost the first afternoon, trying to find Duggan’s pool.

  “I’ve fished up Duggan’s pool all me life and couldn’t find it.”

  “I am sorry they laughed at you,” Alex said, his hand clutching the receiver.

  “And I lost my compass—and now—” Here he was silent, knowing he was talking like a child and not wanting to.

  Jim managed to say he had caught a large male salmon, about twenty-nine pounds, and had slipped in the bow of the canoe just after he had landed it. He said he did not want Mr. Lutes’s brother to take his fish, and wondered if Alex could sort that out for him.

  “He’ll take it on me and say he caught it—so go up to the house and see if he has it in the fridge,” Jim said.

  The truck key was in its usual place, Jim said. “On the key board in the kitchen—if you have to get a key to the outside door, Minnie has the new one—”

  Once again he said it would be his last fishing trip—that he got lost, and that he had lost his compass.

  “I’m sorry,” Alex said again.

  That was that. The old man hung up without saying goodbye—but then he never said goodbye to anyone.

  Alex sat in his hot room staring out over the trees toward Chapman’s Island. For the first time Alex saw this relationship between he and his uncle as a kind of harsh and stupid love. An old man sitting in the office of the foster home with his hat in his hand, proudly saying, “I’ll take care of the boy.” As if the whole world was or should be interested in this decision. The party he threw for Alex was in fact calculated to show that he as an uncle was to be commended.

  Tonight Alex realized things he had not taken the time to think of before. The roadway hated Jim, and Alex had learned to as well—and used the roadway’s hatred to exact a victory by taking the bid and blaming it on Sam Patch. He did it with such smugness that suddenly he was overcome by shame. Sometimes, in his old age, Jim looked peevishly out at the world as if bearing in his old soul the hope of a final—not reconciliation, as Alex had once thought—no—more than this—a terrible peevish hope of vindication.

  Alex sat in the dark, wondering how to extricate himself from all of this. It was a horrible moment, for he realized he had been cast into the role of a patsy by the universe. Just like everyone else. And that was no fun. He remembered reading about all those men forced into the role of patsy in their lifetimes. He never thought he would be one. But the instant he made the decision to go forward sparing no one in his chance to get the ticket, he had been tricked by his own malfeasance of spirit. He thought he knew how to play out a hand, but all along it was being played out in another way, on him instead of by him. Someone or something else was in charge. Now nothing he could do would change that decision not to tell his uncle about the ticket. That in fact the moment he had asked Burton to walk up those steps was Poppy Bourque’s death warrant—no one aware of it. And if he was supposed to be aware and hold his fate in his own hands, which was the idea behind capturing the ticket in the first place, why was he not aware of that?

  He decided to go the next day and bring his uncle home, and admit everything. That was the only way to clear it all up. Yes, but what was he clearing up? The death of a man who should have had no reason, ticket or no ticket, to fear anything about him. But now he realized with even more dread that none of this had had to happen.

  For the first time in his life, Alex found himself pretending to be human, pretending to act in accordance with human ideals and humanity instead of simply being human. He found that this affected all manner of things: the way tea tasted, the way he walked, the way he could no longer look into a mirror face on. He had become a shadow even to himself, and all, and everything that he had mentioned in his youth now came back like bold writing to torment him.

  As a man who did not believe in predetermination, or the laws of luck or chance, things he had no answer for were now happening. There was one more terribly strange sensation—and it hurt like hell. Thinking he must prove to Minnie something that essentially was unprovable, he had longed for her for years. And so he ended up stealing from her, and lying about her husband, to prove his love for her. And how much more would he do to prove love for someone he had never touched? He was a living refutation of Socrates, who blindly believed a wise man could not act against his own interest. (But of course Alex was not wise—or was he?) Now, once again, he was being pushed by events and the ticket, inconsistent in his thinking of how best to extricate himself from this. When just a few days ago he wouldn’t have conceived of saying this, he said at this moment: “I will tell Old Jim tomorrow, and we will get out of this together, no matter.”

  He went to bed longing for clean sheets and an approving stare from someone—say, Amy Patch, or anyone at all.

  He woke the next morning, but had a hard time walking to the truck. It seemed to stare at him as if it were living.

  The long highway
to Campbellton he drove—slowly and then much quicker, given to intemperate swings in his mood, he had no idea if he would make it. At times he pulled over and shook, he felt so terrible; at other times he was overcome with giddy speculation. He could not look at the seat beside him, so frightened he was.

  When he arrived, the doctor took him aside and said he felt the old man would be more comfortable staying here, and that as a nephew and only living relative Alex must be aware that Jim had only weeks to live.

  Alex, shaken by this news, asked Jim to stay where he was. But the old man said that was ridiculous. The hospital was short of beds—and he wasn’t going to spend his last days in a johnny shirt in a hallway. The doctor said they were worried about a drop in blood pressure. What was particularly upsetting to Alex was seeing old men in johnny shirts staring at him from beds, hooked up to IVs—some walking the hallways with IV poles. All of these men looked exactly like little Poppy Bourque. Many of them spoke French, and prattled on, and Alex was confused and then amazed that Jim was answering them in French—that he had spoken French most of his life, something Alex never managed to do.

  “Take me home,” Old Chapman said to him, waving his trembling hand at nothing. Here was his fishing vest, his fishing rod, a road map, a cracked fly box, his waders covered in dried brown mud. The heavy-set nurse pointed to these with her left hand, as if indicating and even celebrating his demise. The old man’s knuckles were blue and protruded from dark wrinkled skin, as if crying out at the end of his life for justice or mercy or both.

  On the way home, Jim’s voice was tired. He didn’t like how Alex drove—too bumpy. And he wanted to know who had been sitting in the middle of the seat.

  Alex didn’t answer, and as they drove past certain places Jim became more and more giddy and animated. He then told Alex this: This building here, he constructed. That basement there—over there a warehouse—here is where he came to pick up a grader in 1960. When he got back home, Rosa had gone away.