The parents listened in a kind of vacuum. The idea of Minnie and Alex’s unrequited love was so painful to Sam that at moments he could think of nothing else, and then his eyes would focus once again, realizing that in a thousand ways it was all true. He looked at his watch, to see the time as if in a calculated hope of comfort. He did not want to blame, but he knew that his years and years of back-breaking, mind-numbing work, in heat and cold, in some ways meant nothing at all to her. She loved the man who read books that in the end he himself betrayed. He suddenly cringed a little, when she took his hand.
Minnie listened in despair about Alex, her feet in the new sneakers she had bought pressing together in a way she had done since childhood, making her look now, and perhaps for the first time, like a middle-aged woman.
In despair, she thought of that boy on the church lane so long ago, and his gentle, wounded smile.
—
AT ABOUT 8:30 THEY TRIED TO GET INTO THE HOUSE, BUT the door was locked. Neither knew where she was now. One went to the front door—but it was up off the ground and he couldn’t reach it. The old timbers underneath looked as if the house wouldn’t last another winter.
The other went to the bathroom window, but Amy had closed and locked it with a hammer and nail.
“Where is she?” one whispered to the other. “Where in the world did she go—can you see inside?”
Then, suddenly, an upstairs window opened and scalding water was thrown toward Bourque. He stepped back, and the window closed.
“Did you see?” he said.
“What?”
“Did you see! Imagine!”
“No—I saw nothing,” Alex said.
“Boiling water!” Bourque said, looking up at the window in amazement.
The wind blew fresh rain again, against the forlorn shingles and tarpaper of Fanny Groat’s little house, and then the rain stopped. And in the midst of it all, a magnificent rainbow appeared far over the bay just before dark.
Amy had thrown boiling water over the porch tiles toward Bourque and had slammed the window shut. She was now on the stairs with the old woman, pushing her forward. One step at a time, up the uneven stairs. She had decided that if she was killed, and Fanny witnessed it, they would kill her too. But if the old woman was hidden, she might have a chance. So Amy was actually pushing the old woman upstairs to hide her, and at the same time, in a kind of dark comic horror, telling her nothing was wrong. Old Fanny’s feet hit the steps with a clunk, and the walker wobbled, and in trying to keep her equilibrium she said, “What about me muffin and me tea—what about that?”
“Tea, tea, tea, all you think of is tea!” Amy said. She stopped on the fourth stair and then the seventh. She rested, but did not let go her grip, though now and again the old lady tried to bite her.
“It won’t work,” she said. “You can bite me to the bone, and we still have to get upstairs.”
But it was a great and fearful experience for the old lady. She did not know if Amy was now in some kind of adolescent meanness and was doing this against her. Besides, over the summer they had, as they do with old ladies and gentlemen, moved her downstairs. She had not been upstairs in months. She didn’t remember it, and was in fact frightened to revisit it.
The rain had stopped, and though the trees sagged, everything was silent, except this pathetic clunk on the stairs, which was heard at the door.
The truck fire was out, yet both Alex and Bourque still smelled of kerosene. They could hear her whispering away to the old woman.
“That is,” Markus said now, “she feared sooner or later they would break down the door. Because now they could not stop, and the terrible realization of all that had gone on that summer plagued her. The idea of Proud’s innocence—and that she was the key to everything!”
“Please let me go, you little slut,” Fanny was saying.
But Amy said nothing. She knew when and when not to answer. She finally had Fanny in the back room, and was holding her down on the bed, and was thinking what to do.
“You’re trying to smother me for my money. Help! Police!” Fanny shouted.
As Amy sat upon the woman she counted the seconds in the dark, and thought she could smell smoke. For the world plays awful tricks upon you, and in the dark more than at any other time. The clouds were ragged just above the trees, sweeping away, so a cold moon was visible.
“What do you want—what do you want? I can’t breathe, I have bumps on my tongue—I have bumps on my tongue and I can’t breathe.”
“Let me see your tongue?” Amy said. “Yes, well, your tongue is fine. Wait a moment, don’t move—don’t move! I’m going down right now for your muffin.”
“You had better,” Fanny said, straightening up. “And toast it!”
Amy stood and tiptoed downstairs, realizing how much glitter, even in the dark, her snaps, which she was so proud of once, gave off.
She blessed herself and stood by the kitchen table. She said the Hail Mary. She said, “Mary, save me tonight and help me.”
“As long as they think I am here, I can get to my house,” she decided. The way to do this was not through either door, but through a window and onto the porch.
And jump.
She had, she decided, little time left for important decisions.
—
“YOU ASK WHEN THE FIGHT BETWEEN THEM STARTED,” Markus said (although neither had asked). “It may have started in infancy between two kind of men, stereotypes to each other but nonetheless seemingly virtuous to themselves. One who liked to believe he was a genius at university, but needed the university in order to be one, who did not seem to realize the special relationship between true genius and being jilted by almost everyone you held dear. The other a would-be businessman, seller of shrimp and oysters on the dock, a hopeful wannabe for Mr. Cid Fouy, and in the end his patsy. One intellectual and one physical, one trying to be physical and the other trying to mask as intellectual, both rounding each other’s orbits until the end.”
The fight started long before they reached the house, over exactly how to kill her—and if in any way they gave the lie away, then he, Alex realized, could not be magnificently innocent later. As he had in fact proclaimed himself during the Chapman’s Island takeover. That is, he sided, as certain poets did, at the right time with those people who he’d never had to suffer as much as. It was in fact a fine feeling. And he now took it to the next logical step. He could suffer for Amy too, as long as she drowned.
For he had processed the information this way: one must continue to believe only what others did. That is, anything could be believed or not believed, approved or not approved. But the disapproval would come against him if it was considered murder. That is why with Bourque now becoming impatient, Alex realized how badly this might play out in the morning.
“Grab fagots,” Bourque said now, “and we will smoke them out!” And he began by breaking off small limbs and placing them about the foundation of the old house.
“I said, grab fagots!” he roared, almost incoherently. His anger with Alex was increasing and becoming as hard as metal.
“Stop,” Alex said, as Bourque went to light what he had piled up about the house with the Bic lighter he had bought three weeks earlier.
So he tried to explain to Bourque what he must. That is, if they did anything to the house, all the logic he had built in order to prosecute this little war would be moot, because it would be looked upon as a true crime, and not a suicide. Only a suicide helped them out of this spot they were in. It afforded the gravest claims against Sam Patch, if she killed herself, and the winning of Minnie. It allowed Bourque his money and the defeat of the Cid Fouy empire which he had helped create.
But Bourque was ready to kill her any way he had to. For, as he said, “It is time! And an accident is good too.”
“Accident be damned, that’s not what we decided, and we know we don’t want to burn her!”
“Burn her, drown her, what’s the difference!”
This is
what Alex feared and what he argued with Bourque about. It had to be done in a way, nobly, for his secular opinions to hold water after the deed. In a way this thinking was absolutely understandable to a man in his position, not always given to passion or sentiment like some people, and quite remarkable and polemical in nature.
Not that it didn’t have a spark of insanity. But it did have common sense.
“If I am to parade about as being the one who tried to teach her ethics, I can’t be the one known to have killed her, which will happen as soon as the house goes up. And then,” he said, grabbing Bourque’s arm once more, “what about poor Fanny? She walks with a walker now, she won’t be able to get out.”
“She can move along pretty good with that walker,” Bourque said.
“Not fast enough—you know that?”
“So this will kick-start her, and she will move pretty good.”
“But in all of this we make Amy afraid, and we promised not to do so. We really promised we never would!”
“We won’t.”
“We cannot do it without her fearing!”
This now is what the argument had degenerated into: a debate on what would make the child frightened.
“I cannot take time out from killing her to convince you that she won’t be scared!” Bourque said.
So all the time Amy was wrestling with Fanny, all the time Fanny was complaining about bumps on her tongue, Alex was in a life-and-death struggle with his alter ego, Leo Bourque, and they were getting further and further away from each other. Because Alex was in the end, by his own impartial and somewhat brilliant logic, denying there was any way to kill her, if she was going to be afraid.
“We have to break the door down, and we have to get her now. You don’t know what will happen—you don’t know!” Bourque said, starting to panic. “They will kill us in jail—neither of us will see Christmas, you think they will welcome us in jail. We’re dead as soon as we go to Renous or Dorchester, if it doesn’t come off right! You talk about being frightened—you want frightened, know that you’re going to get a shiv in jail!”
Both of them were sweating uncontrollably. Uncontrollably it clung to their backs and faces and chests, and uncontrollably Bourque was deciding that he must act alone if this man was not going to. They would have to separate at the moment when one needed the other most.
“I can’t kill her if she is going to be afraid,” Alex said, shivering now and indecisive, as he often was at moments when the opposite quality was required.
“She won’t be—I promise.”
“But she is now!” Alex yelled.
Alex looked at his shadow across the ground, stretching now because of the moon all the way to where Bourque had piled his huge pile of fagots, and shivered. He was just off the lane, and just where he once walked up to see Minnie, and just where he had turned down to Jameson’s landing to meet her, and just where Harold Tucker had stopped him. He was in fact where he had been all of his life, and had not moved, and now could not. What is lamentable, he realized that almost every moment of his life had simply played out in his brain.
He turned and saw Bourque, then looked up at the sky. How turbulent it was, and how great in its turbulence. And he remembered one of Keats’ lesser sonnets.
I love to mark sad faces in fair weather
And hear a merry laugh amid the thunder!
It was what he used to sing when he tramped through a storm alone, for he was our Alex Chapman, always alone.
But he did not know he had spoken those lines, until Bourque looked at him and said, “You will have all the money to do all of that.”
“What Keats is saying is you don’t need money to do all of that—he himself died broke, in fact gave his money away. He was at one time one of my great heroes—I must go back to him!”
“Where is he?”
Alex did not answer.
“Well, you can give your money away too,” Bourque said. “I myself am not going to stop you. I still, however, am going to get my Porsche—drive it up to Cid Fouy’s office just to see the look on his face.”
They had moved out now, out into the lane, backing away from the house, because of the sudden feeling Alex had that this was useless and his life was over. He would not go to jail tonight. He decided he would die before he did.
Once that thought came it did not diminish, but in fact clarified all other thoughts. He had been thinking this, in fact, most of the day, from the moment Bourque had told him about the clothesline. There in that instant did he realize that nothing about this protected him from the onslaught that would sooner or later come. But there was also this—and it meant his end, if he said it. He knew this now, as one of the great moments in his life. He knew and thanked God he knew it!
“I cannot kill a child—and Bourque, you probably can’t either.”
He first told himself this while the truck was blazing in the half-moribund yard, with the leftover rebar from the bridge sitting like Picasso’s wild stickmen on skinny horses. I cannot kill a child, he had told himself, when he had reasoned that not to do so would expose the very foundation of his theories on goodness and drench him in contempt. So he had buoyed himself to do it and made his way to Fanny’s house, its very essence crying out for justice for an old woman and a young girl who had saved up money to put snaps on her jeans, so she would look like other kids who had ten times the money. And he knew this. And was ashamed. Still he said it had to be done, and they had gone to the door. And he had heard the old lady peeing, and Amy wiping her and getting her up, and again the horrible shame had come over him.
The shame had been growing, and he had tried to swallow it until Bourque started to pile the bushes up.
Now he had backed this man out into the road where he had played as a child, where he had hoped for kindness from others, and much kindness he had never received. Where he had asked for his mother’s forgiveness, where he had prayed for Minnie’s love, where he had studied the stars with as wise an eye as anyone, and for the priesthood with some humility, where he spoke about terns and gulls and sandpipers to the sweet summer air, and sank his feet into the muck, where his best dreams were never realized, yet this road still was; he knew, now and forever, that he could not do it. He could not. Yet, he had tried to do it once, and believed in its wisdom.
As moonlight shone on the old drenched shed, he saw the faded words Minnie had written to him years and years ago: “Don’t you know how I feel, look the writing is on the wall!”
“If I do this I am damned,” Alex said.
“Shut up,” Bourque said, accusingly, “You are talking just like Poppy! I won’t take it—don’t talk like Poppy or we won’t get our money!”
Alex was silent, tottering on the ledge he had made for himself so long ago, the ledge he could climb to and hide on, the ledge that was crumbling.
“I can’t,” he said finally, “I can’t.”
There was a silence. Far away they heard a coydog yap; the moon was now out.
“I will die tonight and so will you,” Alex said, for the first time realizing that the position he was in had allowed him this desire to “be half in love with easeful death.”
“Do it and we will be free—you and Minnie will be one again!”
“I can’t,” he said, putting his hands in his pockets as if being stubborn. “Please, just let’s go—who knows yet what good might happen!”
He tried to grab Bourque’s arm, but Leo shrugged and stepped sideways. A chill came up from the ground, and the coydog became loud again.
Then Bourque turned away, and looked into the trees, as if turning his back on a former colleague forever. There were tears in his eyes. He was thinking of Doreen and how close he might have been to winning her approval just once more. He too knew that if this did not happen he would have to die, as going to jail was impossible for him.
When Bourque turned back, Alex had disappeared. He was absolutely furious at this betrayal, right at the moment. And just then, at that time
, he saw a glittery form drop from the sky, land, and run, glittering under the moon. It was Amy, trying to make it back to her house, to phone the police. If he had not piled the fagots up just where he had, she would have broken her leg, but they in turn had broken her fall, like a springboard, and she ran, glittering as someone said, “all over her legs and arse up over the Lean-to hill!”
“How dare you?” Bourque whispered, and took off after her, hobbling because of his bad hip but knowing he had to hurry if he was to cut her off by Vince’s rock.
If you run from someone, they almost always assume that you are guilty.
—
AMY HAD LEFT FANNY WHERE SHE WAS, JUMPED TO RUN around the shed, which allowed Leo to run diagonally toward her, passing by the far side of the house. But she was gone into the field, and only the sparkles on her pants kept her in view. He ran after her knowing what she knew—she would have to turn through the trees, toward the path, and get into her house to call 911.
Both understood this, and both were acting upon this insight. So just at the end of the diminutive crooked field, where an old deer trail was, and where laying deer had bent the yellow grasses, she turned into the woods, crashing the limbs before her in the dark. Then there was silence.
He walked off the cut and waited, in among some trees that had been scarred and brought leafless by blight. He heard Arron Brook moving down toward Glidden’s pool. Certainly she could not cross Arron, she would drown, so since she was now between him and the furious heavy brook she would move north toward her house, which would bring her along the old apple orchard and the burned house of the unhappy Roaches, the family who had tried to destroy Chapman, and who had brought to life Charlie Roach, who had succeeded in establishing a son who seemed to have finally done the job. There were tiny foundation stones there in the moonlight, like some gothic picture, so wild and beautiful amid the curling fog. But she wouldn’t be able to disappear so easily among them, as she was now in the deep undergrowth. So he waited for her to come out. Like one who knew how to hunt would wait on a deer.
The Lost Highway Page 40
