The Lost Highway (14 page)

Alex, the ethicist, did not understand the urgency. Bourque, whose life was at stake, did.

“I gave you the bid,” Alex said. “Why would you come here—I will get the police is what I will do.”

But Bourque was no longer under the mistaken impression that Alex was someone very special, the boy he had tried to communicate with when he was up north. Now angry at having done Alex’s dirty work, he was just as incensed at himself.

“Oh, go get the police—but before you do, you have to give me five hundred. Before the big bid, Cid was always worried—now he’s a success and my wife’s gone to him—and whose fault is that!”

There was in a strange way some truth to what he was saying. But he was more dumbfounded than malevolent, and he looked at the ground as he spoke. His left hand shook, as if he couldn’t control it. This, too, had happened since he fell from the loader. He had taken night courses to try and learn English better, and now this was given up. That is, in mid-life, with as many delusions and false hopes as most people, his life was put on hold, or turned in another direction.

It was the mirror image of what Alex had wanted to happen to himself in regards to Sammy Patch. Sammy to go away, the business to succeed, and he to have Minnie. It had simply happened on the other side of the lost highway to chubby Cid Fouy.

In spite of everything, Alex asked Leo to wait for the five hundred, and prayed for him not to come back. But he did.

“You said you would have it—I have people I have to pay, bills and things.”

Alex realized it was in some way his doing, and could not rid himself of the responsibility of Leo Bourque. Alex’s stomach pained, and his chest hurt. He had no more money—not a bit.

“But you have to, I am already living in Poppy Bourque’s shed!”

“Okay, we will see,” Alex said. “Give me another week or so and I promise things will be better! I’ll meet you at Brennen’s and give you the money then!”

They had been on the school bus together as kids, and now this! But as always with Alex, he was sure there was some way to extricate himself from responsibility, and do what he had to do to make the best of it.

That was when he refused to take Jim’s truck unless he was paid the five hundred he felt owing to him. He needed the money desperately and could tell no one why.

“You won’t do this one thing for me?” Jim had said, sounding more hurt then he had in years.

“Not until you pay me.”

“Pay you for what?”

“My severance from the company.”

But there was no severance. There was no company.

So his uncle took the truck in.

—

A
S MUCH AS HE HATED HER FOR HER BETRAYAL
, A
LEX STILL
wanted his first love. So tonight he was going over to see Minnie and to fool her. Intellectually, he was in a terrible position. In a way he was planning to steal the lotto ticket from his uncle, the tyrant, to keep her respect. What would come of his self-respect if he was a derelict left with nothing, after years of preaching his wisdom to her? In fact, his vanity had always allowed a lack of personal integrity that became more pronounced now that he was in this bind. Alex knew Sam Patch would come home sometime at the end of the summer, perhaps with as much as $80,000 in his pocket, maybe more. Alex, who had always said Sam needed a better life, now hated the prospect that Sam might return and allow his wife and daughter to have one. A life that would in fact shine brighter than his own. This alone allowed a pathological reassessment of his role in the world. He became more driven to succeed at something.

But as Alex came to the small house, off the back highway, near Arron Falls Road, a place of quiet mystery, he suddenly thought, as if he was studying Thomas Merton again: Is this the way of my and Leo’s chastisement? (For some reason, he did not know why, he included Leo.)

He waited for an answer in the dull silence, one that of course didn’t come. In fact, he had waited for an answer for twenty years, ever since Harold Tucker had refused to allow him to pass.

There was a smell of heavy water in the clouds, and he looked up at the dark murky sky, as if there were strange beings above his head he might touch. They might be all about him now, just as many people believed, watching him, praying for him, asking him to be still and know that I am God.

A first tentative flash of lightning was seen.

Inside was like all small houses here along the dark back road. The kitchen was where people lived. The living room had an old sunken couch and a huge TV—but the old house was in a poor location and they could get only one channel. There was a bear head on the wall, from a Sam Patch hunt long ago. Could Sam have earned more, and better, if he had not been a protégé of old Jim Chapman for twenty years. Of course. Jim had taken advantage of his poverty and uncertainty at a time when he was a boy to keep him in poverty. Was this heartless? Chapman had grown up himself in the same way, even more brutal, and knew nothing better. So to Jim it was just business.

In the back room Amy, the child, slept at night, with a statue of the Virgin Mary by her bed.

Tonight Alex asked the little girl how she was, though he could not forget that he had once placed money in his back pocket to implement her destruction. So no matter how much he wanted to reassure Minnie of his care, his smile always showed insincerity. It was just that way. It had been fine when he was at university, where all his concerns, sincere or insincere, were the same concerns manufactured by others. But here, in this backwater—as he at one time liked to call it—it was different. Your concerns were understood to be manufactured or not. They had known him from a child. He was simply one of them, no matter how much he believed he knew.

He looked at the little girl now, and she smiled, her eyes like burning and beautiful beads. She was terribly shy, and had been all her young life. She was sitting at the table putting snaps on her jeans and one of her shirts.

“They will make me glow in the dark,” she said, laughing. But she was really putting them on because she loved to play the guitar and liked to look like a music star.

—

A
LEX WAS BRIEF
. D
ID THEY BY ANY CHANCE BUY A LOTTO
ticket? Yes, Minnie said, for they had started to buy them every week. His look was pale and agitated and hair stuck out over his head in curls, his nose was sharp and white and still had some freckles. In fact, if he had done nothing in his life but collect garbage along the road, he would have looked the same. He wore thick, heavy glasses that he was continually taking off and putting on.

When and where did they buy this ticket, he asked, adjusting his glasses once more. They bought it for the Wednesday draw, at the grocery store in town. He could hear himself sounding officious and earnest—he suddenly realized he disliked this kind of voice in almost everyone else. The little girl looked at him curiously, smiled slightly, and then put her head down again. Then she looked up under her eyebrows at him, for a second.

Did they still have it?

His Minnie Mouse looked puzzled, but said she must have and went into the den where the TV sat, to look among the papers. He watched her movement as if in a trance. Finally she came out with the ticket, held it in her hands, and started to tear it in two.

“For God sake, no!” he yelled, jumping up and grabbing it. He took the ticket and looked at it. The numbers were not even close: 5, 7, 14, 20, 31, 45. Still, it would have to do.

“Can I have it—please.” His lips moved despite himself, and he tried to remain calm. Yet he was sweating. Was this in fact (and this thought came so suddenly he felt cold) just another way to destroy them? Did he want to destroy them completely and was this a way to do it? He looked at Minnie, her tired warm eyes confused, and smiled.

The little girl, Amy, took the ticket and examined it, looked at him curiously. She rubbed her nose and listened to the wind picking up. Then she went and got the numbers of the winning ticket from the paper and read them very seriously.

“I don’t know why you would want it,” she said. “I don’t think it won.”

“If I work this out, we might get some money—and it will be for all of us,” he said now. He coughed into his hand and tried to look nonchalant.

“Oh,” Amy said. That was all. She was in bare feet and wearing a long slip, not knowing that at almost fifteen she was a young woman, and looked like Minnie herself had at that age.

He adjusted his glasses once more and smiled at her. She looked at him impishly with her mouth twisted up into a half smile.

Now things must be done, before everything in his life fell away. It was either do this or die.

“Maybe a few hundred dollars, who knows,” he said hoarsely. “If so, I will give you half, Amy, how is that?” He moved his hand through his hair, and tried to dispel the ever-present cynical smile of his worst angels.

“Fine,” Minnie said. Amy simply nodded, and managed to look both serene and elfin at the same time, her ears sticking up through her dark tossed hair, her lips sticky from eating taffy.

“Yes,” he continued, “but there is something I have to see about before the money comes. So fair is fair—don’t worry—it is not so bad—just something I have to see about.”

At that moment he was calculating how many millions he would actually give them. He thought that for over half his life he had dealt in papers and research, and now in grubby lotto tickets. He would give them something—but not Sam Patch. Not after all he had been through.

He was somewhat at a loss for words and wanted to say something nice. He smiled and said he put Amy’s name in to take his night course on ethics. That he would teach her the great subjects, and they could transform her.

“I don’t know if I want to,” she said. She smiled up at her mother, as if asking for help.

“Oh, you’d love it—it would be good for you to use your brain,” he said offhandedly. “It would challenge you—to hear what I have to say!” He smiled at this nonchalantly and then was silent. “I put your name in, at any rate. Don’t worry, you won’t have to pay—you will just be allowed to go. Did you get the book on ethics by Aristotle I sent over?”

“I did,” Amy said.

“And what do you think—I mean, of a man who lived three hundred years before Christ?”

“Very ethical—” Amy said, laughing.

It was then that Minnie told Amy to thank him, and she did. He nodded. She folded her thin hands together and sighed, and thought of the ticket was diminished.

He stayed for a cup of tea, and could not help but slurp it nervously. He was in fact out of tea at his house. He was ashamed to go to the welfare office because the main worker there had once been a student of his in university. So though he stalked the welfare office, he could not go in.

The wind blew, and tree limbs tapped against the window. As soon as the storm came Minnie stood and, taking holy water from the crisper in the fridge, began to sprinkle the room. She rushed over and touched Amy’s forehead and Amy blessed herself nonchalantly, not so much out of commitment as out of practice. When she tried to touch Alex’s forehead he brushed her hand away, miffed that after all these years she would not know him.

“Oh, I am sorry,” she said.

She hauled the plugs out of the wall sockets for precaution, turned off the kettle, and sat down.

“I’ll be back,” he said, sticking a piece of raisin bread into his pocket. He stood, touched Amy’s cheek, and smiled.

“Don’t go out, it’s lightning,” Minnie cautioned.

So he stood at the door.

“Well,” he answered boldly, “I know for a fact we have little chance to be hit by lightning.”

“Except if God wants,” Amy said, as if speaking to herself. He took no notice of what she said.

And with this, he took a step out the door.

——

He walked along in the night, which was still warm, and witnessed sections of the forest light up with a peculiar crackle, so that he could see his boots over mud, see fern cones in among the slopes along the hidden forest floor.

He had decided that he would switch tickets. But he had to have luck in this regard. That is, he was fortunate enough to know his uncle. Old Chapman had had lotto tickets before—and they lay for months in a cupboard without him even checking what they said. Alex was willing to bet Chapman had no idea he had in his shirt property worth $13 million.

And why shouldn’t Young Chapman take it? He remembered asking for money one night to go to a dance at school, and Old Jim pinching the money out of his hand as rain dripped off the loose door of the barn, as if he was squeezing it out of his pores—so anguished he was to let go of it.

“I never went to no dance when I was young,” he kept saying. “I worked from the time I was thirteen—me and Artie.”

“Who is Artie?”

The old man let go of the money and said, “Never you mind who Artie is.”

Later, much later, Alex found out that Artie was his grandfather, Rosa’s dad, whom Jim had frozen out of the business because of that grader accident that ironically had taken his other grandfather. Artie had died broken-hearted about this death in 1957.

“Don’t worry,” Jim said after Alex discovered this. “He would be proud of you!”

But it was always like that. His own life was an enigma the world kept from him. So now he would pay his great-uncle back. To pay someone back it was best to negate who they were as a human being.

As Alex walked a huge bolt of lightning, energized in the pulpy warmth of night, flashed over his head, and showed the reddish mud at his feet, and even lighted up his shadow before him, so close he could feel heat. And he thought a strange thought: What if I was killed now, when I am so close to becoming so rich? It was a strange, strange sensation, so he picked up his walk to quicken his homecoming.

Taking off her clothes, Amy went over and said good night to her pollywogs, which were growing legs. She had four plastic cartons. In one was “the first stage,” then came “the noticeable changes,” then “almost croaking,” and finally, “happy hoppers.” At the happy hoppers stage she would band them and let them go into Glidden’s pool, only to return the next summer to see if she could find any.