The Lost Highway (29 page)

Markus had searched Poppy’s house for the last two days trying to discover something missing people might have wanted, but couldn’t. Poppy had almost nothing at all.

After Markus Paul left, Leo sat out in his T-shirt that showed his body to be as strong as iron, and he stared down through the back woods that went for acres, as if he was thinking of something, or remembering something.

“Ah, yes,” he said, “yes, well there you go.”

How close to solving it Markus had come, just off the top of his head, just by noticing the beer was gone, and the painting was stopped, and the flashlight wasn’t taken. How close someone could get to the truth over such incidental things, so Bourque knew they would have to hide the body soon. Far from trying to emulate Alex now, as he did when he was younger and wanted to be educated, he discovered Alex to be a weakling and a vast problem.

The big cheese, he thought, the big cheese!

But he suddenly realized there was a far greater problem, coming like a torpedo into view on the starboard side of his life.

He thought so suddenly of Amy it was physically painful, almost as if she were present beside him. That little girl who once gave him a cupcake she had made in her little girl’s oven that Sam had gotten her for Christmas. The girl with the impish smile who could play a guitar as well as anyone he knew.

He remembered that he had stood at the door, and snow fell on the cupcake, and she said, “Oh, I will get you another one.” And she ran back into the kitchen in her panties and T-shirt to get another, carefully bringing it to him. But snow fell on that cupcake too. Tears came to her eyes as she stared at the snow on her cupcakes, and she ran to get another.

“Oh my dear I like snow,” Leo had said, laughing.

Now, he began to wonder. This was a dangerous moment. For what would happen if she went and told Markus she had seen Alex and him together? That would go a long way to prove the Indian’s theory.

But then his thoughts would trail off. It would in a way prove nothing. Best to let it go. Then he thought: She was the only witness who saw them together that night. He was a relative of Poppy Bourque. He had told Sergeant Bauer and everyone who asked him that he was home. If she told people she saw him?

He would have to talk to Alex. To see what Alex would say, and just to see if the theory Alex preached about years ago at university held water. For Alex’s was the classic intellectual idea that murder could hold juridical weight in the right circumstances. Alex himself had written an essay about this in the paper years before when he was trying to hold Chapman’s Island for the native band.

“What if someone gets hurt?” a reporter with a little mustache and a crooked face had asked Alex, tantalizingly.

“Sometimes a person has to get hurt to understand things must change,” Alex had said, born of the knowledge that he himself was almost certain not to be harmed.

Bourque had read it and thought it was very smart at the time, and it lingered in his mind later, when he took the bid to his boss. Now it was playing in his mind again.

But there was something else as well, and it has to be said now. To Bourque, the act of abortion was murder. It didn’t obsess him or absorb him—he didn’t bother marching against it, or ever think of blowing up clinics—and he knew in his heart that some intellectuals like Alex loved the thought that common, stupid men like Bourque thought this way. So he had kept it to himself much of his life. Still, he wouldn’t or couldn’t change his mind about the act. That is, he did not mind if people did the act, but he refused to call it anything else but what he considered it was. Do it if you want, but I refuse to legitimize it, he might say.

So this is what he felt Alex had wanted to make legal (for he wrote many times that it should be), and he knew, as did a lot of people his age, why Alex had left the priesthood, and how much he loved Minnie.

This is what “stupid” Bourque was thinking as he sat out on his sawhorse and scratched his arms, and watched as afternoon wore on.

Amy and the fair and the painted sign, and Poppy. All of this now swam in Bourque’s mind.

“Loose ends,” Leo said, “too many loose ends that I have to take care of all by myself.”

He lit a cigarette, and loaded some wood, and crossed the field in the dark, where the east wind howled out like wounded monsters just at dusk.

Yes, he would have to talk to the big cheese soon. He would have to talk to the big cheese tonight.

—

L
ISTENING TO THE SAME WIND WAS
A
LEX
C
HAPMAN, WHO
had not eaten in days. He had come back from the funeral, and was still in his suit. He sat in the corner of the largest of the three rooms. His whole world had been turned upside down from the moment he started to look for the ticket.

But most ironic was this: If he had just left things alone, he would have had the property and the ticket, and would now have been safe and secure for life. In his anguish he had given the ticket to his worst enemy.

At different points in the day he would remember his mother’s stringy hair, the drab yellow walls, the children crying out in the apartment behind them, the little girl Pat who he liked and who he believed he would remain with forever, the great red dog that scared him (there was a red good dog and a red bad dog, he remembered), the man who said he knew Miller Britain. All of this made him cry out: “I have never done anything like that!”

And the answer: You have done what you have done.

He thought of what they should have done and might have done differently, and came back to the same answer.

Go to the police, he heard.

How could he say anything to the police? What would happen if he did say something?

Shame, jail, prison, death.

At his uncle’s funeral he had listened to the mass in a kind of anguish. So he had left the church early and far across the lot was his grotto, its hood covered in falling leaves and a clear blistering wind coming from off the bay. And just as he was looking in the Virgin’s direction, the sound of “Ave Maria,” sung by Pavarotti, that Jim had requested for his funeral mass, came to him in all its wonder, as if reaching once again, and once more, and always, always toward what life is supposed to be.

That old hypocrite, he thought, when he thought of Jim, screwed every woman he could. Still and all, the song he requested had no hypocrisy, and perhaps Jim had known this.

Fearing he would collapse, Alex turned as soon as the graveyard prayers were over, and hurried first to the little reception and then back to his cabin. He hurried, walking alone up the dirt road, so people watched him go, as if watching a madman.

Of course the house was his now, the debt was paid at death, and the ticket was actually his as well. His uncle had left him everything. In fact, he should ask Bourque to give it to him to cash. But no, the idea of Amy knowing something stifled that thought. They could not cash the ticket yet.

He went to his own shed and locked the door.

—

A
LEX STAYED IN THE SMALL BACK BEDROOM, WITH THE
plastic grocery bags over the small window and garbage bags with cans and bottles collected about the room, and hid.

He decided that it was time to go away, anywhere. And he packed his bags, and sat alone by the window. Then he thought that if he left, he left others to that man, Leo Bourque, and he could not do that. Bourque had to go away first. But that was not the only reason. Any sudden movement would turn all eyes upon him, he felt. He had to act natural.

—

B
OURQUE, TOO, PRETENDED TO HIMSELF HE HAD NOT DONE
this. In fact, he had discovered somewhat of an excuse. Poppy had been too friendly to those nieces of his? Well then—he found out, and had to protect them! You don’t do that! Anyone could see! How dare he! Bean sprouts, my foot! So this is what he would say if he had to say it, that Poppy was trying things with the girls. But he didn’t want to use that judicial plum unless he had to.

Then he turned his thoughts toward Alex, and what must now be done with the body of Poppy Bourque. Just as it is when doing a bad job putting in drywall that you were forced to continue, and make corrections as you went along to mask your mistakes, so too with this. But he was also thinking it wasn’t too difficult to see that though Alex had done nothing, Bourque could say that Alex had done everything. That might be his real ticket out of this mess, and over the next few hours he began to slowly formulate Alex’s culpability.

For he was too smart not to know that this is exactly what Alex must be doing with him.

One could surmise it was Alex who discovered the ticket, and went alone to Poppy Bourque—he driving his uncle’s truck—he using the ticket from Minnie (his lover) to discredit his uncle’s ticket to Burton. All of this was a calculation which showed malicious intent. Bourque believed he had enough on Alex now in fact to turn him in. The knife he had used was the hunting knife he took off Alex’s table the first morning he woke there.

He went to the phone to call Markus Paul and then reassessed this. No, now was not the time to turn anyone in. Paul would realize in a second they were both involved. He simply must control Alex in order to protect himself, until he got the money.

In reality, Bourque wanted to change, be good like he was when a boy, but was in no position to change right now. He could change only after these things were accomplished. Then he could become a goodwill ambassador for his village. Shake hands, run for mayor. But until such time he had to stay near Alex, the big cheese.

That is, they had been locked in union from the first time Alex had stepped on the school bus. Bourque had started to torment him then as a joke. Then when he reversed his opinion he tried to emulate him, spout big words. Though he was sorry for both these actions, it was too late now to stop.

—

A
LEX VOMITED SIX TIMES IN THE TWO HOURS SINCE HE GOT
home.

As the day passed by, those who had not betrayed themselves in such a terrifying way went on with their lives. Alex had seen them at the funeral, and he had seen them in the small reception hall later on. He had seen Amy attending to old Irene McDurmot with such care and grace—something in all his life he himself had never been able to do.

“Don’t let him get out of the truck!” he remembered yelling to Leo, as he threw up. That is what had caused everything to happen. His panic had caused Leo to panic as well. That split second had dissolved his life into wet ashes. Forever he would taste them. It might have been better not to panic.

It was after ten that night when Bourque arrived. All of a sudden, out of the dark cool night, he was at the door. There was the smell of a shore fire and the wind blew the tops of the old ragged spruce.

“So sorry about yer uncle,” Bourque said, holding out his hand.

Alex simply watched Leo as he pulled up a seat.

“Why aren’t you back over at your uncle’s house—it’s yours now,” Bourque said.

He said the ticket was in a safe place and they would go down next week and get the money. That would be the best way to proceed. He said he had decided to give Alex his full share since he had been through so much, and justice called out for kindness.

“Now you have to come with me,” Bourque said, soothingly. “You were the one who wanted me as a partner; now that I am, you have to help me as a partner would and should—for there is nothing you can do now to separate yourself from me. Once you decided, you decided—and now it is all up in the air. Just think,” Bourque said with an almost philosophical seriousness, “if you had waited just a few more days the ticket would have come to you. If you had gone to Jim in the first place it all would have been yours, but,” here he shrugged, “you did not—and now you are stuck. That is what is so particular about it, isn’t it—that is what is so strange about it. Here people said you knew what you were doing—I used to hear people say that, very much—and it made me want to be like you. I tried to read like you and talk like you, and sometimes when people mentioned your name I would butt in to say I knew you on the bus, and then I tried to protect your reputation. What propelled you to make the biggest mistake?” Here he continued, again philosophically, “So I have to protect you once more. If you don’t do what I say no one will believe you didn’t do what I say—for I will bring you down as far as I’m down.”

“I don’t care what people think of me now,” Alex said, his head still lowered, fumbling still with his long thin fingers.

“Of course you do—that’s who you are—”

Alex was silent. He felt he did not deserve people saying that to him.

“So come with me now,” Bourque shrugged a powerful shrug, “and we will take care of it all together. Forget the old life you had, it is now no longer possible; the life you have now is the only one to concentrate on.”

Caught off guard Alex looked up sheepishly, his eyes brimming with tears. “It was all a mistake, so why can’t we just admit to it as a mistake and get on with our lives?”

“Quite impossible. We—Markus Paul and I—are looking for my uncle—so I don’t know what direction that will lead us, but I am still hoping we find the old fellow safe and sound.”

That sounded completely insane, except for one peculiar aspect: Bourque was now aligning himself with those on the outside who did not know anything about the sordidness that had happened.

“Just remember—I am far better at this than you are. Whatever you were better at is no longer able to protect you. What I am better at is what just might see you through.”

He got up and left the cabin, and Alex, after a moment, followed.

They went out and down to the beach and walked along the cooling sand. Small waves limped to the shore saturated by seaweed and pebbles, and then drifted back, as if wanting no part of them. The clouds still moved above them, dreamy in August, and the moon shone down on a bit of the bay. They could smell driftwood smoke in the night from a party of boys and girls.

A buoy made an outline in this moonlight, and yet all of this once so mesmerizing to Alex was now a torture. How could living cause so much dread? So much fear in a handful of dust? Alex only wanted to die. In fact, one of the local criminals, after killing an old man, had said, as a way to gain his parole, “I wish I could trade places with him, I cry my little bitty eyes out.” What this statement allowed was Alex to feel akin to a great and unwholesome shame.