The Lost Highway (3 page)

“Ya, well you might need another one.”

“I am five hundred feet.”

“I will go get my measure.”

“Measure me all you want.”

They would yell back and forth at one another like mountain hikers yodeling away. It was all fine. And the more people knew that they yelled and squabbled, the better it was. This childish insanity had been perfectly fine, this brutal infantile tit-for-tat, until this horrible moment.

Alex now picked up a stone, threw it to the water sullenly. Then he looked at Burton, and grimaced slightly and put his hand on his arm.

“Listen, Burton, my buddy. How much?”

“A lot—if you think I don’t know,” Burton said, sniffing and spitting and grimacing.

“Come on up to my house,” Alex said.

Burton shrugged as if it didn’t matter one way or the other, and the two of them trudged off toward the wooden stairs that led up to the soft, dark woods above.

—

W
HEN HE GOT TO THE TOP
, B
URTON
T
UCKER LOOKED BACK
toward the shore and saw the last bit of twilight against the languid waters and thought fleetingly of old Mrs. Chapman, who he used to carry down the stairs of her own place to rest a while on the beach. She would always wear the big ludicrous sun hat and smoke her Players cigarettes as she painted some seagull on the waves and talked about her nephew, in between bouts of smoker’s cough and her talk of gin rummy, in hopeful terms—even when the company was going under and in the heat of midday you could hear from across the field Alex being shouted at by his uncle in the small office on the construction site.

“Fine communist you are—even a communist knows how to use a peevie.”

“I did not say I was a communist—that’s what you say.”

“Ya, you’re just like every other communist I ever met.”

“Ya, well how many did you meet?”

“You’re the first.”

“You call me a communist and I will sue you blind.”

“Like I said, fine communist you are.”

The old lady would shake her head and smoke and cough.

Burton thought of what Muriel used to say to him because he was kind to both her and her husband.

“Burton, someday, maybe a year or so after I have died, you will look down from the cliff and you will remember that I sat here this day, and when you look down across the shoreline and see a sunset that I painted with my brush, I will be thinking of you and already you will know that I have brought you a great gift for doing all these kind things for me now—and that we are all God’s children caught within his painting.”

And of course it was easy to believe, because he now could never not think of Mrs. Chapman when he looked toward the shore.

But he also knew she had died a year ago today. And now her two remaining loved ones, her husband and her great-nephew, were at each other’s throats like weasels. And he wondered, as well as he could, if there wasn’t some awful art in that.

After Sammy Patch left, the Chapman construction business sat moribund like a wounded bull moose in a bog. Men just did not come back in to work. They knew that like a dying animal, the business was done.

Old Chapman in panic tried to get a buyer. Some men tried to buy him out. The offer was good, even legitimate—but Jim couldn’t see himself selling out to people who had once worked for him. The deal went sour. And the men drifted away.

Now the old man for spite had put Alex off the property. There were books—two more shelves that he wanted to take out of the house—and his thesis. If only he had taken the truck in to have the oil changed things may have worked. The one favor the old man had asked of him.

“Take the truck in.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

Alex thought over his life—in a fleeting second, yet a multitude of events were presented to him. And this was clear: If Old Chapman got back on his feet, Alex would pay the price for that terrible falling out, and for everything else. He would be crucified if Jim got rich again. The whole point of their back and forth tit-for-tat is that neither had anything. If one of them suddenly had something, what then might happen to the other?

Of course, fleetingly he thought this: Cicero, his favorite philosopher, would tell him to let it go—that his life was more worthy than anything anyone might say or do to him. Yet Cicero didn’t convince him at this moment. For he knew that those who mocked him now would mock him worse if Jim got the money. He tried to think of a way around this. But he couldn’t. The only thing he knew was that Jimmy, with his big shaggy head of hair, his cold and indifferent meanness of spirit, would humiliate him if he ever got that money, because he had humiliated him so much when he was a boy.

He’ll find a stairs to kick me down, Alex thought.

He asked Burton about this ticket and if he had sold it, or had just given it away.

“I didn’t sell it,” Burton said. “I give it as part of the deal on oil change—just like you advised.”

“I never advised that,” he said, “you made some mistake—I never did.” Everything about this night was suddenly trancelike. His shelf of books, the wondrous world of history and philosophy, stared him in the face. Those bold secular humanists whom he believed in. Could they help him now? Why couldn’t belief in those books give him peace now? For what he argued at least as well as most was his indifference to the desires of man.

“Yes,” he would say drinking at the tavern, after his sixth or seventh beer, “I am completely indifferent to the desires of man—” Of course he knew he wasn’t. But he liked to say it. It impressed a few indifferent people.

“Well—” he answered now, “what I mean to say is if you didn’t sell it, then you won’t get the percentage—I don’t think.”

“Oh,” Burton said. And he did look wounded, slightly, by this remark. Burton was easily wounded, and would for days disappear because of an uncalled-for remark. But still and all, he was wounded because of the hidden glee in Alex’s remark—the kind that says: I will not be happy if you get a sniff more than I do.

“So would your percentage be a big score or what?” Alex asked, putting his hand through his matted hair and down the back of his neck.

“I don’t know,” Burton said. “But I should tell him anyways—if I get the percentage or not.”

“You mightn’t have the numbers right,” Young Chapman said fitfully. “That would be terrible if you didn’t.”

He was now in a panic, and offered to make Burton supper. Burton said he had had supper. So Alex offered an after-supper lunch. Burton said he was not so hungry at the moment.

The idea that simple people had that this lotto was a sign from the divine when it was just a clever maneuver by a callous government to rake in millions he suddenly told Burton, exasperatedly. Burton simply nodded.

“I know that,” Burton said. “Government is like everyone else.”

“And do you remember when he beat me when I was eleven?” he asked. “He was the one who started calling me the big cheese. Remember—Big Cheese this and Big Cheese that?”

“Of course,” Burton nodded, though he didn’t remember, and would have been two or three.

“He beat me all the time—beat my head off, beat the snot out of me, half crippled me, cuffed me on the side of the head, twisted my ears,” Alex said, rubbing his dirty hands together and looking about. “Sometimes on occasion my ribs still pain,” he said. “Day in and day out I worked for nothing, and tried to please him—and I was always being kept in or yelled at. Just because I didn’t bring the wood in from under that tub and dry it—do you remember that tub?”

“Oh yes,” Burton said, though he did not remember, “that was quite the tub.”

“About this ticket—we have to be sure—you wouldn’t want to startle anyone into believing something they have no right to believe. That’s what the church does—do you want to be like the church?” he asked.

“Not on your life,” Burton said. “Who would want to be like a church?”

After this remark, Alex said nothing more. He was of course terribly ashamed of himself at this moment. But he was furious with Burton, as intelligent people are at times when they believe a person’s lack of intelligence is an affront and a danger to themselves.

Burton stared at the floor in a strange reflective manner, as if ashamed of himself too, and as always he was trying to do right.

Alex’s unemployment insurance would be gone in a week. But he had his course on ethics. Or at least he hoped he did. They were supposed to let him know. Now he asked whether Burton knew how much this lotto ticket was worth. His hands were shaking slightly as he asked the question, for a part of him didn’t want to know.

“Oh yes, I know,” Burton said, not looking at him. “I know very well what it is worth.”

“Well—what?” Young Chapman asked impatiently.

“Thirteen million,” Burton said, shrugging. “If there is such a thing as million.”

—

A
LEX THOUGHT
, T
HIRTEEN MILLION
. T
HAT WAS TOO MUCH
for someone who was his enemy. An enemy having thirteen million could do untold damage. He would be the laughingstock of the river all over again as he was, as he was, as he was. The old man having thirteen million was worse than Beaverbrook having it. Yes, Beaverbrook and he wouldn’t have gotten along either.

But there was also another consideration—that of Minnie Patch. Long had he wanted her. But if Sam came back, with his money—his little bit of money—but money much more than he had before?

She would leave Patch for thirteen million, she would have to. Though he was a defender of the rights of women, and no one on the river could say that he wasn’t—in fact, he thought of himself as the only defender of the triangular rights of women: the right to choose, equal pay for equal work, and affordable daycare; he had made his life’s duty to maintain this ideology—any woman would succumb for thirteen million.

But the pricklier and more feared problem was his uncle. He was suddenly terrified of what his uncle would say about him if he got his grubby hands on all that cash. He’d be worse than the popes, Alex thought. “Burnt at the stake no doubt.”

So what he thought was this: If he could somehow get this money, he would do more good with it than his uncle, who had lost himself in anger over the company. Minnie might just come to him, and leave Sam Patch where he was, out west working. They would send Sam Patch some money, with a letter saying that they both still liked him.

The idea always in his mind, like those of unrequited lovers, was that Minnie really still loved him. He could not escape that hope. And it would be worth thirteen million to find out.

But then again, if James Chapman ever got this money, Alex’s life may as well be over—that is how sure he was of the old man’s enmity at this moment.

I may as well be buried up to my neck in pig slop, he thought. And then he thought again of jail. For if Jim Chapman got the money, Leo Bourque would tell about something Alex Chapman had done to the company a year ago. A very small little thing, but nonetheless it had destroyed the company completely.

How could I know I’d ruin the company, he had thought many times. Though he knew because he taught ethics that he had known, and that he didn’t even have to teach ethics to have known.

That could mean jail. He would be like an angel falling from heaven—that’s how low he would have sunk. He remembered the picture in his bedroom when he was a boy, of Satan and his herd falling through the sky. He always stared at the impassive non- expressive clouds about them as they fell, hurling through, as his great-aunt once said, “their own baleful conscience.”

What a mess, he thought, panicking slightly. He stared at his wide and almost terrified eyes looking back at him from his mirror across the room. All those books, what good had they ever done—he may as well have eaten them, rather than have read them. And all those silly self-centered, pick-arsed authors that he wanted to be. What had they ever done? Did one of them win thirteen million?

Over the last few months, since the business went under, he had been waiting for the other shoe to drop. For in a way he was the one who had caused the business to fail, and left Old Jim and his employees broke.

So now the shoe had dropped.

If there was a lost highway where souls traveled, this was it. It was a lost highway because those going downriver met the French communities that didn’t belong to them. Those French who came upriver met the English communities where they would never be welcome. The signs in both languages led nowhere at all, and right in among them were the Micmac, with their own language and as many problems.

Such was this lost highway that sat along the edge of the bay and called itself a land. James Chapman himself had done much to aggravate this isolation by tearing French signs down in the 1970s, and so too had a mayor from the French side by painting over the English signs with the Acadian flag.

But things had changed three years ago. The highway bids along this section of the province were now under French control, and people in power remembered Mr. Chapman, the Englishman who had tried to destroy them with his bids. Alex had blamed his uncle for his bigotry rather than the French who put Jim under; Alex had long ago decided his uncle and not the French was bigoted. He had believed for a time that his real father was in fact French.

Now, about this other stuff—the millions—he would have to act, he knew this. He would have to do something he never did before—break into the house and steal that ticket. Or if he was being watched, as he was, find someone else to. He would have to, if he wanted to survive. Or he could let James Chapman have his winning, and it would mean the end of his life. That is, he would never be able to live down Jim Chapman’s hubris, nor would he be able to crawl back.

So it was now, at this moment, that Young Chapman became resolved never to tell Old Chapman what he may have won, even unto death. He would do everything to get this ticket for himself. He would be resolved to do so, and not lessen his resolve until he had succeeded. This is what he must do in order to secure his independence. There was one moment when he thought he should not do this, and this was the time to let the idea go.