The Lost Highway

by David Adams Richards

  “Well, go one way or the other,” Bourque said, challenging this philosophy.

  But Alex couldn’t budge. The rain poured over his jacket and flattened his curly hair, and he stood exactly where he was. The smell of smoke always made him think of Minnie. He now thought about the logic that had propelled him to this pathway at this exact time. It was logic, he decided, to do good with the money and the ticket. The ticket was actually a way to save his life. It was much more than just money—it was simply a way to refute all of those who hated him, to still win Minnie. Here is what he imagined, at its best, the death of little Amy could do for himself and his career:

  “This is what you get,” Minnie would say to Sam, “for trying to take the little child out west. She was trying to tell me how sad she was to go. So she went and threw herself into a puddle.”

  “She begged you not to go,” Alex would say.

  “When did you see her last!” Sam would command. (Perhaps he would be inebriated, Alex thought.)

  “I brought her her New Testament and told her to keep her chin up,” Alex would say.

  “But you don’t believe,” Sam would appeal, astonished, looking at his wife who was now lost to him forever.

  “No, I do not—especially not after the death of such a child as this; but I knew she believed, I knew and wanted her to have it back. I did not want to destroy the faith of a child as mine was destroyed harshly.” (It was like a movie, with a somewhat British tone, or a puritanical one, yet he could see it being played out. The fact is, it could be played out no other way.)

  “I am sorry, Mrs. Patch,” Rory would say. “I tried to come up here and see her—for Mr. Chapman told me to.” (Alex had not, but this was the best possible scenario he was imagining, and it could be accomplished, for in fact the noble lie allowed this.)

  Sam would be devastated.

  “That was kind of you,” Minnie would say.

  Oh, how beautiful the lie was, how close it was to altruism and truth, and how people of every stripe in every department, at every paper, and in every way clung to the lie as altruism, over and over again, for First Nations and women and people of color. And how millions had made money traversing the line between altruism and self-service—the idea and need to cover up a bad motive with a good one. This would in fact be just one more example.

  “Think of all the little native children killed,” Bourque said now. “The hundreds of years of misery and what we might do to help. So you see, what if she is tormented just a bit—it kind of makes up for the poor native children like John Proud! Especially if we help. You, in fact, could go down to Renous and counsel John Proud and everything would turn out!”

  But here is what Alex said to Bourque: “How I wagged my finger, greatly annoyed and finding fault with all those who did not treat women just right. Now, unless I kill one, all will be exposed. And Markus Paul, the First Nations man, will expose it. Then John Proud will be free.”

  “Then we had better go and do it.”

  “But let’s ask this,” Alex said, holding him back. “What if, if, if there is a God?”

  “Better off for it,” Leo said.

  “Why?”

  “God forgives.”

  No lights came on, and the small tarpaper shingles, the yard littered with pulp and chips of wood, the small bleak windows, made it a reminder to Alex of his one-time plans to do some good in the world. Worse, they would be attacking two of the most vulnerable people on the river. Which in fact he had written an exposé about last year after his survey for the local New Democratic Party.

  “This woman has one small fuse box, no phone, heats with wood, has arthritis, is vulnerable completely to some kind of menace or attack at night! Only a little neighbor girl comes over to give her comfort, and of course I do what I can!”

  This would not look so good. This would not enhance his resumé.

  “Well, I’m going to the door. You think I should?” Bourque asked. “We will wave the New Testament and smile. We have to get her just outside enough to grab her without the old bat knowing—okay?”

  “Wait, it’s not late enough yet,” Alex said, with purpose holding him back.

  “How late does it have to be?” Bourque replied, quite seriously.

  “Please, please, a bit later than this.”

  —

  MARKUS PAUL TRIED TO REMEMBER HIS STEPS AND movement that night of September 2, and then the next day. So excited was he at having the paint established as being almost certainly the paint from Poppy Bourque’s, he did not remember much of that night.

  But then he had to piece together Amy’s steps. This is what he discovered over the long hours the next day, and what he finally told her parents as they sat at the table in the cramped little house, Sam’s homecoming jarred into the kind of freefall one has in a dream, where to hit the ground is to die forever.

  It was the late afternoon of September 3 before Markus arrived at Patch’s lane, dried with caked mud, some small maples near the front steps and a small growth of windswept flowers against the east window, which looked back toward Lean-to Creek, and the divide of Arron Brook. He was visiting one of the last family holdouts upon the lesser Gum Road, with its parallel track along the river, and the long-forgotten Jameson tote road, where many a boy and girl had popped or lost their cherries in the past seventy years. As he walked, Markus looked at the Patches’ house and realized that in so many ways they had lived in the same way his parents had, beguiled and stupefied by a world they didn’t quite belong to, resting assured and assuring one another that they someday would, and never quite achieving that consistency of knowledge the world imparted as wonder and wisdom one day and scorned the next. So they, like his parents were and always would be, in at least a certain way outcasts. The present Sam brought home for Amy, with its yellow ribbons and pink wrapping, sat in the center of the table, forgotten completely from the moment Sam had set it down. A present that proved their outcast status, a blouse and matching shorts already out of date, which Sam wouldn’t have guessed in a million years but Amy realized in a nanosecond.

  The new watch Sam wore—the only timepiece he had ever bought—seemed dazzling in its indictment against him, and Minnie, indicted too by the new diamond he had given her in the airport lounge, though neither were anything if not innocent of all. Yet the tragic scope of humanity now rested on their shoulders, and made Sam’s watch, bought with exuberance at his new and carefree life where money could be earned, seem somewhat naive and then self-accusatorial. This did not go unnoticed by Markus Paul, as little ever did.

  He had just been down at the truck, he said, and the house, he said, where they had found, he said, the ticket. And yes it was, he said, worthy of its estimate of $13.2 million, such was the ways of the world, he said. The truck actually burned only what was unnecessary to prove the case against the two, and made the evidence almost mythically stand out against them, as if some creature of God, or some fairy that Amy had boldly stated she had once been saved by, had herself boldly stood up and procured the evidence against the two, so startling the fire was, to enable them to see exactly what evidence was there. So he said. He smiled a little and put his hat on the table, and offered Sam a cigarette.

  “Can you tell us, as best you are able, what happened to her last night?” Sam asked. And although Sam almost never feared, his body trembled.

  Markus told them Amy knew she could not make a move until dark—that was wise, and very wise, so she didn’t turn on the lights. She quietly sat watching the old woman nod off. She hardly breathed. She went about the house looking for the old shotgun she remembered being there. But it no longer was. A knife would be taken from her, she realized.

  There were a hundred things she might or might not have done, but now they had been whittled down to one. She had to hide Fanny, and leave the house in the dark, and go, by one path or the other, through the rain, with one thought in mind, to get to a phone, and call 911 before they caught her. She realized with the giant cla
rity of a winged angel near her shoulder that if they caught her she would be killed. She knew, in fact, that they themselves had become something other. That “it” that Leo Tolstoy spoke about was present in them, Markus said. Neither Sam nor Minnie had heard of Tolstoy. So he told them that now either one or both would not be able to stop—and if one did stop, it would propel the other to keep going, with more and more vigor until the task was done, blaming his partner of betrayal, and demanding all the money for himself.

  “Do you see?” Markus asked, about the direction of his logic.

  Both nodded.

  For they did not need Tolstoy to understand it. They had lived in its environs since they were born, been privy to all the grandeur and the indignity of man.

  Amy was, after all, the only witness. But at least the dread of not being informed was gone, and she had decided, all eighty-six pounds of her, to fight.

  —

  JUST AFTER DARKNESS FELL AT ABOUT QUARTER PAST EIGHT she began to move Fanny to the stairs.

  “But I don’t want to go, you haven’t made me my toast and tea.” This was a ritual, the toast and tea, Fanny dunking her toast into the tea and telling stories about her countless beaux and her younger years, as the clock ticked quietly and comfortingly. It was the trivial ritual that had started in the summer but, then again, should not be overlooked. But initially Amy felt they had to forgo it.

  But when she came near, and tried to get Fanny to take the walker, Fanny scratched her, saying she wanted to be alone. At first, like most arguments, it was contained and reasonable, but still and all Amy knew better what might happen if Fanny was privy to the knowledge Amy now seemed certain of—that on that little trip up the path, her mind swimming with the thoughts of some miraculous hope, she had come across men who had just murdered. And she herself at this moment had greatly figured out why, just as Markus had earlier in the day.

  “No, you have to go now.”

  Amy’s face was cut by one of Fanny’s nails, so she grabbed the old woman’s hands and pinned her back.

  “I don’t want to hurt you, but if I have to carry you, you are going upstairs and you will stay there.”

  “You are not my mother, missy—I will tell you that. Why, you couldn’t hold a candle to my mother—”

  “I am, however, your caretaker, and you are in my care!” Amy said, physically forcing the old lady, who was trying to hold on to the chair, to her feet. And all this time, too, Amy was trying not to indicate why she was being so unreasonable with the elderly woman.

  “But I have to go to the toy-let, girl.”

  “Well then come along, but you will have to sit in the dark.”

  “I never heard anything so ridiculous, by a young girl. Why should I have to sit in the dark? Why do I have to sit in the dark?”

  And she turned, and with Amy’s help began to use the walker, with its shiny surface, seeming as if it had captured a wounded animal and was some strange kind of animated cage.

  “Turn on the light, girl, so a woman can wipe her twat!”

  “Just do what I say, please,” Amy said calmly.

  She now looked through the bathroom window. It led to a small back field of dark wet clover and some maples in two scraggly rows, near the alders where a small creek called Lean-to swept toward the indolent part of Arron Brook that would claim great ferocity near Glidden’s pool. She could open it now. But, Markus told her parents, her best instinct was to protect the old lady. So she sat the old lady on the toilet and let her pee. Then she put the kettle on to make tea.

  It was then that they started to come toward the door. But she knew they could not speak, for they would give themselves away to Fanny. One of them waved her little New Testament in the air.

  ——

  “What did she decide?” Sam asked.

  “She decided not to let them in the house—and therefore she gave herself away, because they knew now that she knew about them! She looked out the window at them, and they at her. So finally the three of them, staring for that terrible moment at one another, were certain of what had to happen!”

  “Who?” Minnie asked, staring at her feet. “Who would try to trick a child?”

  “They would,” Markus said, without too much love for them at the moment.

  So Markus continued, holding his notebook in the heat, his face suddenly sweating, and going over what he had discovered. Reading it off to them, he would stop at every half page and explain something, his hair cut close to his head except for the top, which made his cheeks look fat. The afternoon was very warm, and all of them were sweating. Though Sam had offered him a beer, as part of protocol he didn’t take it. The doors were opened and the late summer flies buzzed uncertainly, as if not understanding why grand avenues were suddenly so available to them.

  “Why,” Minnie said, “would he do this to us?”

  Markus did not answer this.

  “I was always very fond of him,” she said, and she could not stop her voice from giving away a kind of yearning.

  Sam said nothing. His hands, so powerful they looked in a way deformed, were placed on his lap, his new watch gleaming in the late summer air. Her new and only diamond ever on the finger of her left hand. He said nothing. When she looked at him, his eyes stared straight ahead.

  “He couldn’t a been himself,” Sam said. “Something must have happened to him.” This to mitigate somewhat Minnie’s statement.

  “Yes,” Markus said.

  Sam himself was entertaining what all people wish to entertain, at certain moments, which is love for others. Love, even for Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, or Saddam Hussein.

  “Yes, I believe at that moment he was not himself, but he was wrestling greatly with himself. And soon he would come to some other determination,” Markus said.

  “What determination?”

  “That he could not act, I suppose.”

  And so they paused just a little.

  “Her bravery is what we want to honor,” Markus said. “I am prepared to write to my commanding officer about it tomorrow, and see if she cannot receive some kind of citation.”

  But the night before in the house, no citation was thought of. They had descended the four of them, into hell. Fanny started to ask if there was someone there, and she began to shake. Her eyes became watery and dim, she looked about the warm old house trying to find comfort in it. But it did not seem comforting, or even her place anymore. The knitting basket she no longer knitted from, where she hid candies from the kids, as a joke. The plate with a picture of Pope John XXIII. She grasped at these items as signs of security, and looked at the frail little girl taking care of her.

  “What is wrong, Amy—what is wrong?”

  But then everything was silent. So Amy, her little legs trembling under jeans with those snaps she thought would impress her friends, went about as if making plans for a dinner party, regardless of the tornado at the door.

  “Nothing—but I will stay here as long as you do as I say,” Amy said. “You sit at the table and drink your tea.”

  And she poured the woman tea, and tried to think what to do. There was nothing except hot water to heave in their faces if they came in. Old Fanny was not so unbecoming or not so mean now. That is, her personality was imbued with some measure of infinity that Amy realized she would have to protect to the death.

  Markus paused and spoke of how he had accidentally discovered the ticket was sold by Burton. Then he informed them that Burton, all summer, had been telling people that someone would hurt the children. So, Markus said, his colleagues went to Burton and asked him about this. They were afraid it was Burton himself who might, being a man-child, worry about hurting children. But Burton, no matter how many times they took his hat or hid his little scow, had no intention of hurting anyone.

  “He simply felt over this long hot summer that someone else would, and he didn’t know who. And in the end it came to these two.”

  “How strange can the world be?” Sam Patch asked, his whole
body suddenly shivering, his new shirt still stiff at the collar and crinkly at the arms.

  He said he remembered sending a note by email to Mr. Bourque’s daughter, Bridgette, telling her to inform Leo of a job, where money would be well worth it. He did it as a gesture, to let Bourque, who was fired the same as he was, know he was thinking of him. Now he was sitting here, not a month later.

  The idea, of course, could be construed as flowering from unrequited love on both their parts. It had happened to one and then the other over the years.

  “What I am saying,” Markus told them, his hat sitting on the table by Amy’s present, and not mincing words even though Sam was there, “is that they both believed if they just did something grand, both would attain what they had lost, in some way, and that was love. They did not know they would ever be involved in anything besides the purloining of a ticket. And especially Mr. Bourque did not know—as he set his sights on Burton’s to buy a Bic lighter that August day, he who was planning to go out and see you, Mr. Patch, and get a job—that he would be involved in the murder of someone he loved three nights later. But soon he felt Amy’s death a matter of self-preservation—and not only that, a matter especially to young Mr. Chapman of saving face with the woman he loved, Amy’s mother.

  “The consequences would be dire, but allowable as long as it wasn’t blamed on them. If it was blamed on them, Mr. Chapman’s whole reason for living his life, the forty years he had lived, would be nothing. His believing that he could at long last have your woman for himself.

  “They could, they believed, after time readjust their lives to this child’s death. It was in fact—” he paused here, and then said, looking at his notebook, “a kind of seeking of great truth by the ultimate lie. For they were going to do good by her death, in a way, sanctify her afterwards.”

  “What do you mean?” Sam asked.

  “Make her a saint,” Minnie whispered. “Just as had happened to certain women throughout our history—like Joan of Arc.”