The Lost Highway (22 page)

“WE WILL BE PARTNERS, I SAID!”

Suddenly he realized that in order to save himself he had to not only come to grips with this, but convince Bourque not to go for the finder’s fee. In fact, the finder’s fee was probably easier to go for. So Alex caught up to his friend and tried to talk him out of this.

“There is no need of that,” he said. He realized, too, that Bourque at one time had tried to sound and look like him, modeled himself after him. So then, couldn’t he control him? He grabbed Bourque by the shirt. “Partners?” Alex said. “Come on—we will find it together?”

“I am not sure; I could just give the information to your uncle—there would be no questions and no trouble, I would demand a million, and that would be that.” This in fact would be the most legitimate way to proceed, and both knew it.

But Leo smiled a slightly reconciliatory smile when he said this—thank God.

Alex waited.

“Come on—what a man wouldn’t do for thirteen million.” Leo smiled. “I mean, I might even kill for thirteen million.” And he slapped Alex on the back—a slap that almost took his breath away.

They moved together in the night air, and soft music was heard far off from Amy Patch’s room. After ten minutes they came to the main road, their shoes covered in dust and the night still sweet smelling of clover and hay. Once on the highway, Bourque went over everything. The first thing was to make sure the uncle had no knowledge about the ticket.

“Fine—as long as he doesn’t know?”

“No—he doesn’t know.”

“But who will cash this ticket for us, if we get it—”

“I thought I would,” Alex said.

Bourque thought a moment and then told him that would be impossible. Too many people would suspect. Alex, in fact, couldn’t be seen to have anything to do with it.

“Why?”

“Because of Burton—you told him he was mistaken—he will know. By the way, where did you get the other ticket, was it yours?”

Alex went numb—his lips closed tight and he stared ahead. “No—it was Minnie’s,” he answered quietly.

“That’s a mistake,” Bourque said, “so you have to stay out of it.”

Alex realized he was right. Leo said nothing for a moment. They looked at each other.

“Well, I am not going to give it to you,” Alex said.

“No one asked you to,” Bourque answered briskly as they walked, the activity of walking seeming to heighten their drama. “But someone who can get the money for us.” He picked a blade of grass and put it in his mouth, chewing upon it as if he was deciding something.

And then Bourque, turning to Alex and grabbing his arm, said, “Of course! My uncle had his oil changed for his sawdust truck—so who would ever know. He could just claim it—Burton wouldn’t know either. Once Poppy has it, who is going to question it—a kind old man like that!”

It seemed like an obvious choice. The old uncle. Alex thought for a moment, and he was conscious of some trick coming into play. So he answered, “But that means—I mean, it means you and your uncle will have the damn ticket.”

“Don’t be silly—you will get your share,” Leo answered in a split second, staring at him inquisitively.

The word “share” bothered Alex a very great deal. He did not let on, but he was too bright not to know that this was a signal that meant something had changed in their positions, from the time of the bid. Even from the time they had left the tavern. It was a shifting of circumstance and position, within the tenuous dimensions of their association.

He thought it over as they walked toward his cabin. It was becoming difficult to breathe again, and he was worried about all kinds of things. He had always prided himself on being able to control this fellow. But now? Well, who controlled who?

When they got to his shed, his little garden illuminated in the moonlight, Alex felt his heart thumping wildly. He went into the kitchen and got some water. When he came back, Leo was curled up on the floor, sound asleep. Strangely, there was this: Alex’s seven-inch hunting knife on the counter. It was there as if a signal or a warning—or perhaps to tempt Alex to murder. He thought of this. But then how could he? He had been called “a voice crying in the wilderness” by a local reporter who’d liked what he said. Some voice if he went around stabbing Frenchmen.

So he went to bed.

The next morning Alex woke with a start, knowing in his heart he had done and said much too much. He ran into the small living room, sweating and feeble, and found no one there.

He should have killed him.

“For great virtue a great crime might be necessary.”

This is what he decided to put faith in now. Still and all, if he played his cards right, what could go wrong?

The only thing amiss was that Bourque had taken Alex’s old hunting knife.

—

I
T WAS
A
UGUST
15,
THE
F
EAST OF THE
A
SSUMPTION
. V
ERY
few people in the world might know this. Far, far less would observe it. It was now a few days before the agricultural fair started, where Poppy Bourque sold his lettuce and potatoes, with a big sign that read: Poppy’s Radish, Turnip, and Patats!

Amy had been told all her life about the Feast of the Assumption by her mother and father. She came from the store, where she bought a pop and a bag of chips, which she did on Friday nights, and then walked along the beach to see if there were any starfish. There was an east wind now. Across on a flat, near the steps down to the beach, stood the grotto and the Virgin, and Amy Patch walked there and lit one candle, and it, protected from the wind, burned. Her hair was dark and unruly about her ears, her skin smelled of salt and seaweed. She had a tiny mole on the same side of her face as Minnie.

Amy knelt before the Virgin, and looked at the face staring at her: childlike, intense, kind, human. The weather had made it more so in the last five years, and had given it more “truth.” The Virgin’s right hand was lifted out toward her, as in greeting, her left hand across her heart. The statue had never moved, yet the elements had made her more transfigured than before.

Amy blessed herself, kissed her hand, and touched the Virgin’s heart. She was about to leave, and then she turned and came back.

“Do you know what I think,” Amy whispered to the Virgin, far away from the steps and in the darkness. “I think old Mr. Chapman has a ticket worth a lot of money and doesn’t even know—that’s what I think—but if I told Mom that this is what Alex did, she wouldn’t believe me. Besides, I don’t want to tell on him. It is so strange a thing—I can see his whole brain working away trying to get this money, with no one else knowing! But if I am wrong—what a thing to say! So tell me what to do.”

But of course no answer came. Who would believe in virgins anymore, or in God, or in Jesus, Moses, or any other mythology? All had been trampled underfoot by the somewhat smug and pedestrian certainty of modern man.

Man was not powerful? Ha, not a religion in the world man couldn’t topple with a shrug! And Amy had seen this shrug among her friends, all dallying toward something else, precocious and certain of their invincibility.

But, as always, that was the way of youth!

—

O
VER THE ROOF OF
M
INNIE’S HOUSE THE RAIN FELL, AND
through the woods, where all the paths led to trout pools, the paths of boys and girls, the paths of fairies and hobbits so innocent that, like Amy, their sexuality or desire was never a question until someone commanded that it should be, and beat them down for it, and submitted them to the idea that their human desire was foul, when it was God given and as brilliant as the sun.

There would be no child left in the snow, if as God intended, love and forgiveness were understood. Amy, too, dreamed that night of a boy meeting her in the field where sweet black-eyed Susans waved, and as she lay down her clothes were taken away, until she wore nothing and the sun beat down upon her, and her legs were opened. Who then was this boy she didn’t know who came into her dream to strip her naked?

She woke one time to the sound of the raccoon against the window, and fell back to sleep and the dream was gone.

—

T
HROUGH THE GREAT LONG UNCUT FIELD BEHIND
McDurmot’s tired old house, and down the church lane, a lone figure stood. Rain sweeping in from the bay fell over the top spire of the church, and he passed by the grotto to see the candle flicker and in the wet, dreary night to smell wax.

Now, after six months in the wilderness, Bourque decided this is how he would proceed. He was now much more resolute in what he had to do. Tragedy allowed his psyche to expand. He would act with decisive strokes and attain all that he sought. He would do it within the next week or two. He would do it for one reason: to get back at his wife who had betrayed him. He would also pay Alex back for having brought him the bid.

This, to him, was a betrayal of his whole life, and he could not let it rest. He had never hurt his wife, had loved her, and he was gullible enough to think that she loved him. So things would have to change, and he knew in his heart that this ticket was the only way to change them.

What would he ever do with Alex, that nephew, the foster child and orphan, who remained his biggest obstacle? Bourque did not know. But his estimation of what he might be able to do had changed from his admiration of that man, and he was fraught with pent-up expectation. The man, with or without his degree, was simply a boy, and Bourque knew he could control him. Now the money was so close, no X factor could make him fail. But what if it did fail? Then what? Well, he must do everything in his power not to have it fail. And he recognized that sooner or later Alex would be a problem. This came to him just as a slight shudder, and he tried to dismiss it; that is, dismiss considering what to do about it now.

He had watched Amy leave the church without much thought of how important she would be in his quest to finally achieve all of this. She was always on the outside, this Amy. And this was significant, too—because she spent much of her time with her cousin Burton. She had one friend, Rory. But everyone said he had gone off with someone else.

Yes, I will have to watch her, he thought. That is, Bourque was suspicious of her because her solitude had made her a companion of a mentally disabled man who had the computer. Amy had no idea of this, of course. Other girls went in twos and threes to the store on Friday night, Amy walked alone, and this had registered on Leo, who was smart enough to know that she might be a problem.

Leo stepped beyond the grotto, picked up a Styrofoam cup half filled with water and threw it in childish glee at the candle. It sputtered and went dead, but as he descended the lonely twisted steps, the candle Amy had lit came to life again and flickered against the dark.

—

A
LEX WAS NOT ASLEEP
. H
E HAD BUILT A FIRE, AND WAS
staring into the dark where his fireplace, still lighted by some embers, burned low. He was shivering, and though not destitute, he felt he was. For he knew he had made a large mistake. How could he have been so foolish? Drink, of course. Even at university—a place where he placed certainty in his morality—he got drunk too easily.

He had trusted the wrong someone, and now that someone was deciding how everything would work. Alex was jealous of this. But he had no strength of character to stop it. This is what his study of ethics did. It challenged him to do better, but he always failed. And he thought this: Leo would search for and find the ticket. It would be over for him, then. He had to stop it—had to, but how?

Then the idea came that all might turn out and that Leo was his friend.

Alex thought of all the past ridicule he had suffered as a boy, after his mother died. And for what? For what reason was so much ridicule heaped upon him? The horrible death of his mother. The taunting of kids on the bus. The failure to win Minnie. The ultimate failure with his doctorate—and his consequential ouster at the university, a place where he had placed all his pride and certitude. All had floundered.

Last year, when he went back to visit an old professor, the man had forgotten his name. But as much as he was terrified of this past coming back to haunt him, as much as he hoped it would not, there was no answer.

Just silence and in the silence the words: You have done what you have done.

That was all. The sum total of all his plans and ambitions came to this sentence: You have done what you have done.

He shivered and tears came to his eyes. For suddenly he thought of the time his uncle bought him a bicycle, and couldn’t teach Alex how to ride it because he had never ridden one himself.

“I’m sorry—I was put to work when I was nine,” was all he said.

And then once when they were alone not so long ago, just when night was falling, the old man had looked over at him and said, “I’m sorry.” Not for anything in particular, but for everything altogether.

There was something else he had seen on the third day when searching his uncle’s house. In a drawer in his uncle’s room, a dozen or more faded personal ads that had been put into the papers between 1960 and 1965: “Rosa Beth Chapman, traveling or living with son or daughter, or anyone knowing of her whereabouts, please contact James Oliver Chapman, 506-987-9017. Concern for her safety. Reward to be offered.” Just as Aunt Muriel had once told him. After Rosa left his uncle had never given up looking for her. Alex had not believed it. At that time he didn’t have to.

The personal ads had been stuffed away in an envelope, things that make the heart go weak. There was also something else—it was a bank notice of payment in the amount of $4541.11, the year Old Jim brought him home from the foster home. It was a payment—one time—for Mr. Roach to be out of their life—his son’s life—money for nothing, part of the legacy Mr. Roach had connived for. What was worse was the realization that Mr. Roach had taken this money, and never came back. What was worse was the seemingly insignificant amount.

Still, beyond all the rectitude of Muriel, this showed more than anything the old man’s troubled love.