The Lost Highway

by David Adams Richards

  —

  ALEX STARTED TO WALK THE HIGHWAY AT THREE IN THE morning. He didn’t have a clue as to where he was going. But it seemed he was going to Minnie’s house, along the old brook, staring at the rapids and the windfalls. What was he thinking of? He was thinking of suicide, of course. He could jump over the Arron Falls bridge, but he was unsure if that would do it. And if he didn’t accomplish the job, he would be a cripple going off to jail. He was also thinking of warning Minnie—and telling her to go away. Take Amy away with her. This is what he really hoped to do. But there were other things, and other concerns.

  Sam Patch was coming home with a lot of money from the tar sands. This, most of all, was his worry. And caused his great dejection. For after a lifetime of telling himself he wanted Sam to earn a respectable living, now he was jealous and fearful of falling beneath the radar in Minnie’s eyes. Of being looked at with pity, as a broke and pitiful intellectual. He could stand anything but that.

  He smelled tarpaper and vetch and cattails under the moonlight. Though he tried not to, he thought of all he had done to them. It flooded his mind, that he had not been continent. Amy, who he had wanted not to be born, under the guise of justice. Then he had taken Sam’s job away, cut out from under him. Still with the idea that he was on their side. Then he had prepared to steal a ticket and used them to do so. He was even so bloody as to think he would not give them any, unless Minnie swore she would leave Sam Patch. That was at the height of his power, when they were thinking and dreaming of $700 to put Fanny in the home, and he was thinking of $13 million.

  Now Amy knew, or she might know.

  So what had happened? All that he said he wanted—their liberation and Sam’s bounty—was about to come true, while all he secretly wanted—her suffering and Sam’s castigation—was about to be overcome by his own destruction and humiliation.

  But what had stopped him?

  He thought of all of this while staring at this small, battered, innocent house. The house was so innocent because it asked for and expected nothing.

  He turned about, and the moon shone down across the laneway, and he started to walk home. At one point he looked to his left and saw the old shed behind Fanny Groat’s with the faded white paint still visible that Minnie had written to him one night when they were children.

  “Don’t you know how I feel, look, the writing is on the wall!”

  He was staggered that it was still there.

  But as soon as he got to the highway, lights came toward him, and he turned to see the squad car of Markus Paul. He put his head down, thrust his hands in his pockets, and kept walking. The car went by, and then turned at his uncle’s lane and came back. It stopped and compelled him to stop as well.

  “Hello, sir,” Markus said, rolling his window down. “Out for a moonlit walk, are you—?”

  “Sure,” Alex answered. He tried not to shake. Still, there was a chill in the air, so shaking was okay, even appropriate.

  “You’re Mr. Chapman.”

  “Yes, that’s me.”

  “Okay—pleased to meet you finally,” Markus said, holding out his hand. “Everyone has heard so much about you over the years. I’m Markus Paul.” He said this without indicating that he knew Alex had criticized him in two of his columns in the local paper over the last two years.

  But nonetheless, both were silent for just a moment.

  “Well then—it’s late—have you been out long?” Paul asked.

  “Oh, just for a walk.”

  “Yes—I’m afraid that’s what happened to Poppy Bourque—have you seen him in your travels?”

  “Who?”

  “Old Mr. Bourque—the old gentleman with the sawdust truck. I am afraid he might still be wandering about not knowing where he is.”

  “No,” Alex said. “I tell you I haven’t seen him in a year or two.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes—a year or two or three—that’s when it was!”

  There was a pause.

  “Well I’m just driving and hoping—of course you heard he went missing?”

  Alex nodded, patted the door, and turned away, saying, “If I do see him, I will call you.”

  “Yes, you do so.” Markus waved.

  Alex walked across the gravel as if on eggs, under the moonlight receding to daybreak as time went on.

  —

  CONSTABLE PAUL WAS ALREADY SO NEAR TO THE ANSWER. He was near to it as he watched Alex Chapman cross the road.

  Two men.

  English and French?

  Who saw any English and French men together over the last week, either in the tavern at Neguac or in Brennen’s?

  Three men had seen Alex Chapman and Leo Bourque sitting together at Brennen’s tavern arguing and shaking. What was strange is that they both were shaking and it was so warm. When was this? Two nights before Poppy’s disappearance.

  That is, forty-eight hours before the disappearance, they were sitting together. And that is, within forty-eight hours after the disappearance, Markus was almost certain he knew who had committed the crime—that it was most likely on the spur of the moment, but that it was a murder.

  Now he had to find out why.

  That is what made him drive the highway late at night. He was simply looking, and thinking. This is what made him stop and speak to Alex, his certainty that Alex had helped murder someone. When he watched him cross the road, he was positive.

  Someone must have seen them together, sometime on that night. Someone must have seen them in or near the truck.

  There was, however, one hitch: Other police officers believed it was someone else, and they knew who. An Indian who was down at Markus Paul’s own camp. This is why they believed Markus wanted the investigation to go in another direction.

  “If you accuse a French or English guy and it turns out to be someone renegade from your reserve,” his superior, Sergeant Bauer, told him, “you are done—you may as well go peeling pulp.”

  Markus Paul did not have to be told anything so obvious.

  —

  THOUGH THEY SUDDENLY REALIZED THEY COULD NOT STAND the sight of each other, Bourque came to see Alex again two days later. In fact, Alex had phoned Bourque twice to see where he was but got no answer.

  Leo said Markus Paul had been to see him too much.

  “Twice in the last day, with his big chubby-cheeked smile on his fat chubby-cheeked face!”

  He asked Alex again about the ticket, and again he realized the terrible predicament of not being able to cash it.

  But then he came to the real purpose of his visit.

  “If this harassment continues, I may have to go to the paper,” he said, “and give my side of the story.” He gave the kind of self-important look he himself seemed impervious to, which men of limited experience often do when discussing media.

  “In what way?”

  “Well I will just say, Many people like Markus Paul think I killed my uncle, but I had no part in it. I have given to charity every year since 1979! It is most likely an Indian, you know what they’re like—kill each other all the time!”

  “You can’t possibly do that—that’s the same as admitting it—no one just walks into the paper and does that. It’s like signing a confession,” Alex said. “You’ll be on the front page of every paper in the province!”

  “I will?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that so!”

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “I do say.”

  “But you wanted to give yourself in as well,” Bourque said.

  “No I didn’t,” Alex lied.

  “Will we ever get to cash the ticket?” Bourque said speculatively, to offset Alex’s hysteria and his realization that Alex was, at least on this point, in the main, right.

  “We will cash it next week, as soon as we are sure Amy can keep her little trap shut,” Alex said. “Say, if they go away—if we can convince them to live somewhere else?”

  “You wouldn�
��t be able to stand it if Minnie left!”

  “Well I am trying to think of reasonable alternatives!” Alex yelled.

  Bourque shrugged, and sniffed politically at this. “So what do you think?”

  “About what?”

  “What should we do about her? Amy!”

  “I don’t know,” Alex said.

  Bourque looked at him a long moment. “Well, see what jail actually does to you and your high blood pressure pills!”

  Now the beaches were metaphysically changing, so slightly one might not notice it unless one lived here. The sands were slightly harder, the seagulls’ cries sharper, the sky was taking on a deeper blue—the edge of the island looked farther away.

  “My boy—everyone knows you wanted her gone before,” Leo said.

  “That’s not true,” Alex said, his speaking muffled. “I did not want her gone—she was not who I wanted gone. I just did not want another woman to suffer.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “I didn’t want my Minnie to suffer—my God, she was just a kid—if I couldn’t do that for her, what kind of friend would I be?”

  Leo contemplated this. Then he continued: “Amy was to be a woman, and she would have suffered—for that little moment when they speared her like a fish.” Bourque smiled.

  When he said this, Alex again became weak and started to shake.

  “Last week if you had asked me what I was up to, I would have told you I was on my way out west to work in the oil patch with Sam Patch, that Sam actually said he could get me hired,” Leo said angrily. “What did I have to do this for? Oh Sam, I’ll be out sometime but first I have to stick around for a day or two and kill Poppy, and then see to Amy. Then I’ll be out. All as I did was go to the tavern, and then to Burton’s—and then the numbers—why didn’t I just go away? How do these things happen?”

  Alex couldn’t answer. He was in a daze for a long time, looking down at the floor.

  And then struck by this memory, Alex told his friend.

  One day the seminarians prayed over a child dying of leukemia. It was a standard practice for them to do this. They all traipsed up like little saints, mobile penitent things, and went into the room. Novices from the convent as well as young men from the Holy Cross, all pretending to be holier than one another, carrying the colors of their special disciplines into the room with them. It was a faded room with two small beds. Plastic sheets covered one of them. The room itself eschewed a kind of indolent mid-afternoon emptiness, a room overcome by bare walls on which small plaques were distributed at certain points.

  The mother—heavy, with broad shoulders, and thick legs in torn stockings, smelling of wash—stood at the door looking in as they kneeled about the boy’s bed. They were at the child’s house up on the highway in his small bedroom. His whole life had been spent there in the opened aired emptiness of that particular room. As they prayed, the child opened his eyes and spoke for the first time in two weeks: “Mom, they are all here.”

  And the mother said, “Who is all here, sweetheart?”

  And the boy said that all his relatives were there. “Uncle Pete and Dora and Uncle John Ross,” he said. They were sitting beside the bed, smiling in comfort, ready to take him to heaven. “They are saying they will bring me to heaven today.”

  And he blessed himself, smiled, folded his hands on his lap, and died. He mentioned Uncle John Ross, who had died thirty-five years before in a hay bailing accident as a man of twenty and was someone the child wouldn’t have known. He mentioned Dora, a girl of eight who had died twelve years before John Ross.

  “A miracle,” one of the novices said, blessing herself, her chubby cheeks red with emotion.

  Alex remembered being very confused by all of this.

  A bag of the boy’s marbles were still sitting on the shelf. And when he had blessed himself, the boy’s reflection was strangely caught up in the prism of these marbles. This is what Alex remembered seeing. They prayed the rosary and then they went out into the late sunshine and crossed the road.

  The boys in the seminary debated this event for many a day, at first open to it all. But after a time cynicism crept in, even in those studying for the priesthood. And they decided it was a hallucinatory thing, that the boy had mistaken them for his relatives. This was the most obvious explanation. Alex walked in the fields and helped with the one old horse. Then Cid Fouy arrived in his new car, and they all chased it.

  Later, some made fun of the novice who had blessed herself when she said it was a miracle. Some even began to make fun of the child, and the mother, and the house itself. There were certain areas of the seminary where silence and obedience were paramount, and it was in these places where they became most giddy.

  “Yes,” one kept saying, “hallelujah, God just came to New Jersey.” (This was the name not of the state but of the small village along the broken highway.)

  And once they began to make fun of it, they couldn’t stop.

  “Next we will see the Shroud of Turin,” some said.

  Alex was with the intellectuals at the seminary, who often mocked the faith they were embracing and kept it at arm’s length. They would look at each other in church and burst out giggling, so four of them were brought before the Monsignor. But it gave them a fine intellectual feeling, because they were studying for the priesthood simply to call it a delusion. Alex, always a questioner, was quite happy to be so, and to make known that he could call a spade a spade. He became a kind of de facto leader of the group of boys who did this.

  This moment came back to him now, as if it had happened just an hour ago. The room had been engulfed in sorrow when the child died, and yet the mother, shaken to her foundation, was ecstatic. She wanted to claim it a miracle, and went to the seminary to have the students back her account. But by that time they were skeptical of what they had heard, and wouldn’t. Some, one or two, became angry with her. So she was silent in front of their mocking and went away. The child was buried simply, and the mother’s belief was strengthened but theirs was not.

  Alex told Bourque about this now and Bourque nodded, and said that was not a worry to him. Alex whispered that MacIlvoy, who hadn’t been there, still believed in the miracle, and brought it up to him just last year.

  “How can he believe when he wasn’t present, and I who was present and heard it and saw it and should believe don’t?”

  But Bourque said that was because Alex knew how to figure things out the right way, and wasn’t soft in the head like MacIlvoy.

  “I think he got hit one too many times playing hockey!”

  Then he flicked some dust off the table as if he was annoyed because Alex’s newfound hope rested in something he had supposedly long given up.

  “But I have to tell you who is buried on either side of my uncle,” Alex insisted. “On one side is that kind, brave little boy (much braver than you or I, Bourque) and on the other is his uncle John Ross—how could this be! That is why I couldn’t stay in the cemetery the day of my uncle’s funeral, I was too confused.”

  “Well what do you propose?” Leo said with some measure of annoyance. “Let’s pick a book off the shelf and read a line,” Bourque said, “any line from a book, and we will do exactly what it says. What do you have, a bible—take a bible—no bible? What’s this—Stalin—well, who was he, what did he have going on?”

  “What did he have going on?” Alex mimicked, his face blushing.

  Bourque was furious at this and threw the book toward him. Then he said, “Well the first thing you should do is clean the truck, and things like that—just in case. I would help but I can’t.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean if the two of us were seen cleaning the truck it would seem obvious—there’s the English and French guy cleaning the truck, I wonder what they are up to!”

  Bourque smoothed his hair, lighted another smoke, and took his leave. Still, he was right. How long would it be before they asked about his uncle’s truck?

 
Tomorrow.

  —

  ALEX RAN ACROSS THE YARD AS IF HE WAS SUDDENLY BEING chased by the seagulls above him, and moved the truck down toward the kiln, hidden to the road, and began scrubbing the seat later that day. Leo had assured him that Poppy had not bled on the seat, just on the throw blanket over it, which they had discarded along with the body.

  But now, even though he was sure he couldn’t see it, he knew it was there—spots of blood—yes, perhaps that is what Old Jim saw, before he died. He cleaned the seats and cut a small piece of carpet out of the floor that looked darker than the rest. He scrubbed the vinyl dashboard.

  “There, that’s better,” he kept saying, his teeth chattering, his arms covered in soapsuds.

  All the while the wind whistled in from the bay, the trees swayed, and summer was ending. The swaying of the trees now seemed to be so sad, as if when he looked he saw his mother standing under them turning to wave before she left for good. And why would she leave for good if she loved him? Amid all his certainty about the lifelessness of death, which was a big part of his new course on present-day morality, both Muriel and his mother were present with him all that afternoon. They stayed in the trees in the wind, by the branches down the lane, and seemed to be trying to help him in some way.

  Then he thought that there was not a day during the fair for the past twenty years that he did not see Old Poppy’s truck going by—you could hear it coming a mile or two away.

  Strangely and desperately, he missed its sound.

  He decided he would change the tires. He would go to Burton’s the next afternoon and say he had decided to get the tires on sale. Burton always had a tire sale in the fall. That would be reasonable. No one would have anything to say about it. It was just the nephew coming over to get tires on his uncle’s truck, growing a goatee and teaching at the university. Yes, that was it. He believed that Markus was a nice young man, but would not suspect him. He needed to distance himself from Leo. In fact he saw this as the ultimate test, to distance himself from Leo. He had the ticket again, and he could say once he got the tires changed that he had had nothing at all to do with Leo. As a matter of fact, whatever Leo said could be challenged.