The Lost Highway

by David Adams Richards

  Alex looked at him and nodded understandingly. Then he spoke: “I don’t know—you see it—you are emotionally involved, and I think it could very well have been Johnny—and if he is in such terrible shape, he can’t be held responsible—not morally or ethically, physically perhaps, but not otherwise—”

  “That is what I think.”

  “You do?”

  “Of course I do—did and will—especially when he admitted to it.”

  “He admitted to it?”

  “Yes, and then he fell into his deep Rip Van Winkle snooze. He’ll be kept under by medication for six or seven days or more. But you see, here is what I think—he would have admitted to the Kennedy assassination if we wanted him to, just to get out of the torment he was feeling at that moment. That is what is so painful to me at this moment—he blamed alcohol and drugs for the death of his mother and then over the last fifteen years goes on a rampage himself. Who in the world would not think he killed or at least misplaced Poppy—put him somewhere? I come to you because you are a teacher of ethics. You are teaching a course—you did your master’s and doctoral thesis on ethics. I need some help here because I am in a bind.”

  “Well, I did my doctoral thesis—well—it isn’t quite finished and it wasn’t on ethics so much.” Alex thought a moment, then gave a peculiar sniff and said, “If he did it he should be held responsible.”

  “If he did do it?”

  “Yes.”

  “That, of course, is what I think. However, knowing your views on this, on the”—here he looked at his notebook once again—“‘sometimes shared responsibility of society in the involvement of minority crime,’ as you stated in a letter to the editor in 1980 during the Chapman’s Island takeover, you seemed to want to protect some of the people more as victims. I just wanted to know—”

  “Well, in the heat of the moment—” Alex began.

  Had Markus simply read it and remembered, or was he researching him? Alex did not know that Markus had read many of Alex’s articles three nights before, to prepare for this interview, even the articles Alex was preparing to use in his course on ethics. That he had interviewed many people about Alex already, that he had been up almost four days reading everything he could about him.

  “So you think Proud might have?”

  “Well, he could very well have,” Alex said sheepishly, and he flushed deeply. “But then again I don’t know if we can hold him responsible. Besides, my whole idea is that which you just said.”

  “Either do I,” Markus said. “But I thought I was on the right track until last night when all this came out—I mean a very different track. I mean the truck track, and the idea that an English and a French guy are in this together!”

  To Alex, a bomb had been placed in the room, and he was tied up, and it was now ticking.

  But Markus simply continued: “Then it all came out and he is under guard at the hospital—and I am supposed to wrap things up. You should see the shape he is in. He has lost upwards of forty pounds and sixteen teeth—well, fourteen and two are loose—all because of methamphetamine. You can poke around in his mouth now that he is asleep and haul them out with your fingers!”

  “That is awful.”

  “But right now I don’t know—this is the difficulty I am in. I have my suspicions, based on signs about Poppy Bourque’s, that it is not one but two people. Yet I am told not to pursue that, and if I do, I am a racist. This is what certain people are saying.”

  “That’s silly,” Alex managed, “and ethnically insensitive.”

  “Yes, there you have it! I knew you’d understand—” he said, still smiling.

  “Yes of course—” Alex said, with a flash of emotion.

  Markus smiled. He then asked Alex’s permission to go into the uncle’s house that afternoon, at about two.

  “You can join me,” he said.

  Alex nodded but couldn’t find the words.

  —

  ALEX MADE HIMSELF A CUP OF HERBAL TEA, AND LOOKED over the statement given about his uncle’s death. His uncle wouldn’t have ever lived beyond October, even if he hadn’t fallen from the boat. He had cancer in his liver, which had spread to his lungs. He had left his nephew everything, but with kind instructions to provide for Amy Patch’s scholarship. And if Alex reneged or declined the property in any way, it was to fall to Sam Patch. This had been talked about over the years between the old man and Muriel in order to do something for Sam and his family. It was in fact a largesse conditional upon the temperament of Alex himself. The old man felt he did not have to change it in order for Alex to be chagrined by what it said.

  It was an old will, so maybe he had had no time to change his wishes. Or perhaps in the end he didn’t really want to. Perhaps he was thinking of Rosa and the man who led her astray. So Alex had the entire property, including Chapman’s Island and Bartibog wharf. That is, over 120 acres, warehouses, sheds, barn and paddock, and what was left of the equipment, some of which was in fair condition. Even without the ticket, he would have made some kind of life for himself. That is, though the old man had gone under, there was no requisite lien on the property, and Alex was now solvent. If this “thing” had not happened he could have been the gentleman farmer Mr. Roach had wanted to become, while still teaching his ethics course.

  My God, what a beautiful life he might have had!

  Perhaps one more little act would still allow it.

  Not a thing had stopped him but himself. But if his “crime” was discovered, it would all go to Sam. This in its own way was calculated to scald him.

  —

  LATER THAT AFTERNOON ALEX WENT OVER TO THE HOUSE, and went inside and waited for Markus, who said he was going to be back to check inventory. In all of this there was a second sensation that he was feeling, a kind of cat and mouse, a flirtatious examination of Alex himself by Markus Paul that Alex tried not to notice. He sat on the chair in the dining room, a room he almost never went into unless called to do so, as long as he had lived here. It made him feel like an outsider in his own house. He felt the sweat on his back dry, and he shivered, as one does when they come inside out of the summer heat. He smelled the oak tables and dining room cabinets in this enclosed space. He thought he might try to put things back in order in the house—certain drawers had been pulled out, and many things were scattered. Then he decided that he couldn’t do this. He would be accused of hampering the investigation. He had also a certain thrill come over him when he thought that he wouldn’t be held accountable if this thing stuck against Mr. Proud. They would be completely liberated, which in a sense is how he thought. The crime wouldn’t have been committed. He felt this euphoria, knowing it came from a native’s wrongful accusation—the very thing he had fought all his life.

  Yet he decided in a certain way it might be the best thing. For Proud could get the help he needed to overcome a methamphetamine addiction, while at the same time not be held completely accountable for his actions. It was also strangely timely that he had read an article in The New Yorker about methamphetamine moving into communities in the east, coming from the rural west. So that was not his fault. And John Proud might even get his teeth fixed. Perhaps it would work out. The only thing problematic was that Proud had already confessed. It struck him now that when Proud recovered they would press him to remember where the body was. Why this bothered Alex, he didn’t know. But it was laid out upon a very grave feeling, disassociated from anything in particular, vague yet endlessly vast, surrounding him as dust surrounds a planet. He heard that there were theories and even seminars on vagueness, by various professors, and he wished he could listen to one. Say, if in the mud huts of all this vagueness, demons or terrors or angels were in the air, hovering about the microwave, making sure of things in some other dimension, a dimension that, if it did not control our lives, played out its part in a fascinating kind of exchange of which we ourselves were almost never aware.

  His continual uneasy horror over what had really happened, and where the body actu
ally was, and his underlying part in the mystery, was in fact surrounding him in a vague balloon, like chloroform. This now shaped everything about him and his relationship with the world. It certainly foretold of trouble. He tried to think moderately about the two books he was going to assign in his course on ethics, along with the old masters: The Da Vinci Code and In Cold Blood. Now, feeling outside his own sphere of recognizable armor, he decided he would not offer either book. They no longer pertained to what he really wanted to say. And what did he really want to say? Two weeks ago he could have rattled off his entire seminar.

  “Once this is over,” he whispered, “once this is all over.”

  Just then there was a knock on the half-opened door and the voice of Constable Paul.

  “Yes,” Alex said from the dining room. “I’m in here.” Calmness came over him, and he was happy about this. He didn’t want to be nervous and shaky in front of a police officer.

  The one thing he did not know was that Constable Markus Paul was not at all convinced that Johnny Proud had done anything in this house. He was in fact convinced that Johnny, his cousin, had committed no serious crime. In fact, the very idea that Proud went into Poppy Bourque’s house to search for something to sell showed he had no idea a disappearance had taken place, and that the police were watching the property twenty-four hours a day.

  Markus now came to Old Chapman’s house to prove that someone else was involved in the break-in here. That those who were actually responsible for the break-in at Chapman’s were in the end responsible for Poppy Bourque’s disappearance.

  “Well this is a mess,” he said.

  “Yes, it was riffled through,” Alex answered, trying his best to look annoyed. “This is what you hear about.”

  “What is that—what do you hear about?” Markus asked.

  “Well, you know, the family is at a funeral and someone decides that’s the best time to come in and go through your house.”

  “Oh, but this was done before the funeral—”

  “It was?”

  “Yes, I am sure of it—” Markus smiled again, his face brightening for a second as if to dispel the added cruelty of a break-in at the time of a funeral. Then, looking serious once more, he said he was going to look around, and asked if he could do so.

  “Sure.”

  “I won’t be long then,” Markus said, and he climbed the stairs. Alex thought of following him but didn’t. Then Markus came back down and walked by Alex. Alex got up and followed him into the kitchen.

  “What is it?” Alex asked.

  “What is what?”

  “Have you found anything?”

  “Nothing.” He shook his head, and opened two or three drawers that Alex had opened.

  “There is something strange here,” he said. And it was a deepening mystery to him now. He looked very perplexed.

  “What?”

  “Items left exactly as they were—gun cabinet not broken into, radio and portable TV exactly where they were, microwave oven, all of it easy to sell or pawn—none of it taken—none of it moved—why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Either do I—but it is pretty strange.”

  “Yes—”

  “Unless something else was going on.”

  “And what is that?”

  “Unless the person was looking for something in particular—something small.”

  “Why small?”

  “Cabinets are opened, nothing removed—but the three cabinet drawers are pulled out, vases turned over—a pencil holder upset—something small—a map of buried treasure on Chapman Isle.” Markus smiled. “Something that could fit into a shoebox of bills, which was riffled through here—so a piece of paper, or a coin—”

  Then Markus blushed, his face turning slightly redder, and said nothing.

  “What?”

  “Oh nothing—I was thinking perhaps a will, but I don’t think that would fly. All I am saying is little Johnny Proud wouldn’t have been searching through a shoebox of bills sitting on top a microwave oven. He would have taken the microwave oven. But someone who was looking for something in particular would have. Something not too random, as kids say today. But something special. Something in the family. John was in Poppy’s, yes—but someone different was in here, looking for something different than John Proud was!”

  Alex shrugged. And then his legs wobbled as if he had been shot, and he sat down.

  That is because he suddenly, overwhelmingly, realized who John Proud was—strange that he remembered this, at this exact moment. John Proud was the boy who had thrown the rock at the bear to keep Alex from danger. That is exactly who they were talking about. Exactly!

  “What’s wrong?” Markus asked.

  “Nothing,” Alex said, though he couldn’t stop his leg from trembling, so much that his knee bumped the table, and he kept his head down.

  Markus only nodded, looked through some pages and notes that had been scattered, and picked up some old recipes.

  As he did, he spoke, with his eyes cast down: “Look—I’d like to show you this.”

  “What?”

  “Well, do you remember my sister Peg—during the Chapman’s Island takeover?”

  “I don’t exactly—”

  “Well,” Markus said, almost happily, “she died of meth poisoning four months ago. So anyway.” Here he handed an old picture to Alex that he had in the folder of his notebook. “See, you had your picture taken with her—on the front of the paper. See, she was proud, she died with that in her wallet. I was little but I remember the day that was taken. How proud she was of you standing right beside her.”

  “I was proud to do so.”

  “You were.”

  “Of course.”

  Markus paused, took the picture back, and nodded as if to himself.

  “Yet, there is something. Over the years I thought, Who is giving up his property here—not one of the reporters from Toronto, none of those professors, only silly old Mr. Jim Chapman, who knew more about the First Nations than any one of them.”

  “I see,” Alex said.

  “That’s why I felt so badly for your uncle. That’s why I’d like to know who really broke in here—for your uncle’s sake—because so often the truth is somewhere else!”

  —

  LATER IN THE AFTERNOON ALEX WENT HOME, AND TRIED to concentrate on his course on ethics, but could not manage to focus. All he could focus on was the horrible feeling that things in his past—his concern for women, his concern for First Nations—all which he prided himself on, were now being re-examined, and he of all people was found wanting.

  Markus was using Alex’s very claim of altruism to dismantle who he said he was. And Alex knew this, and could no longer pretend or prevent it!

  Markus in fact was studying them both, and had been now for a week. He knew how Alex and Leo had come together on the school bus, and was piecing together how they had lived ever since, and how little by little their unsettled and unsettling lives came together once again to wreak havoc with one another.

  Markus’s little notebook with the emblematic eagle, which his colleagues derisively called the bible, had twenty new pages of notes. He kept that picture of his sister in it always. At first he had been proud of it, but as time went by his heart went against Alex’s easy adopting of other people’s misery to make a name for himself. And so now his gaze turned toward Alex and all he had done.

  “They couldn’t have gone there to kill him,” Markus said to himself. “Poppy leaving so willingly seems to attest to amiability.”

  —

  BOURQUE HAD BEEN REELING UNDER THE WEIGHT OF others’ opinions of him, too. They told him he could do nothing most of his life. When he was young he had tried to prove them wrong. And at each juncture it seemed they were right. Yet he realized when he found the ticket that all opinions are subject to change—and that this change coming about by chance was even better. He could reclaim more than some measure of his former self. But for one thing. It wa
s a self that would have had nothing to do with his former self. He would be very rich, and much different in one way, and not changed at all in another. That is what the lotto did. In fact, he thought many of the same thoughts Alex had, coming to them in the same way. And it also came down to the same two things: there were people who had injured him he could get back at, and his wife would return to him—his daughter Bridgette would live with them again. But he would have to make his wife suffer just a little. She had made him suffer unduly. He would think of how she got the job because of him—and then him being sent out on the loader so Cid could be alone with her. He would think of him telling his wife that he was the one who had made Cid rich, and how, after a life of being disappointed in him, she dismissed this claim. And thinking of all of this, he would shake and then hit something.

  ——

  On the eighth day after the disappearance Bourque went for a walk along the herring-stinking beach, and looked out at the full water, light and milky blue, and he remembered his love of this land as a child. He sat on an old log, as he was wont to do, where from across the T—as they called the little inlet—he could watch his estranged wife in her boss’s office. And what was vastly annoying to him, he saw her boss pat her behind as she walked around the desk. Confused by this, he jumped up and began to walk back up the beach, until he saw Markus Paul’s police car driving along the narrow inlet road toward Fouy’s Construction. It was as if someone had hit him very hard to make him realize something very important—so he turned and walked closer.

  Paul disappeared into that clapboard office building for a moment, behind the door to the tired stairway and little pressboard door; so Bourque could follow him in his mind’s eye. Then the front glassed door opened, so from where he was Bourque could see how Constable Paul brought his ex-wife to the police car, and began speaking to her.