The Lost Highway (30 page)

He was unsure of where they were going, until crossing into the back lot of Chapman’s he was suddenly aware. They had placed the body in the old junkyard behind the pilings near the collapsed cinder block—out of sight of the world. The place was a yard or two from where Alex had plodded up to break open the locks and look for the ticket. Only a few flies buzzed there during the funeral, and once when he saw one of the men walking toward the cinder block, he shouted, “No, not that way—go around if you need to get to the road!”

Bourque whispered that they would now take this body and place it somewhere it would never be found. Bourque was certain that this would free them—just a few more hiding places and they would be free. He turned and said to his friend, “Do you believe in Christ?”

“No,” Alex said, stopping up right behind him. (He had to say this. Part of him knew it was asked just so he would say no, and in his present state he would be forced to say no, even if Christ himself had asked it. But always there was still an option to break through the cinder block and say, I do believe; even now.)

“Well then,” Bourque answered as lightheartedly as he could, “what is there to worry about? This is just men meting out what they must.” Leo smoothed his mustache, and smiled slightly.

Alex remembered here a line from Dostoevsky which he hated: “Without Christ in their lives mankind will fail.” It was a strange time to think of this line but he could not help thinking of it. He could not get it out of his mind. His head pulsed as if the very moonlight was coming in and out of it.

“Big Cheese,” Bourque said, slapping Alex on the back.

“Don’t call me Big Cheese anymore,” Alex said. It was what certain First Nations men had called him when he went to a band meeting and said he could solve their problems. Like so many professors he believed his one and only way to legitimacy was to posture intimacy with those who had lost everything.

Bourque went with certainty to the old boards behind the cinder blocks and began removing them. The first thing Alex saw in the moonlight was the black sneakers with the big bows. He had tried to put all of this out of his mind. He still in some part of his mind thought of this as a nightmare that he would wake up from. That he would be happy, that he would be safe.

Then when Bourque grabbed the man’s shoulders and asked Alex to grab his feet, the sudden smell was so powerful Alex thought he might vomit.

“Now,” Bourque said, “can’t you tell—we have to bury it—that’s the only decent thing to do. That is, now that we are in this position I want to do the decent thing!” He looked with questioning and real sympathy upon Alex.

“Where?” Alex said.

“Where—you haven’t figured that out? In with your uncle—of course.”

“What?”

“Who in the world would look into a new grave?”

“You can’t be serious.”

“Of course I am serious—!”

“I won’t,” Alex stammered.

But Bourque then simply moved away.

“Where are you going?”

“It’s no longer my problem—it’s on your uncle’s land, in your uncle’s truck—what in the world have I to do with it?”

He was walking toward the highway with almost carefree exuberance.

“Come back then,” Alex said, “come back—but isn’t it sacrilegious?”

Leo returned, hands in pockets and shuffling a bit, and shaking his head.

“You see, you are using old ideas—but Poppy needs a resting place too!”

For a moment Alex couldn’t move, and then he did so, so quickly bending over to pick up the feet it startled Bourque.

They moved the body slowly out under cover of darkness and through the woods, Leopold Bourque carrying a spade shovel.

Far into the night, until after twelve, they waited for the priest’s light to go out, the body stiffened before them, still with the big white bows expertly tied, the eyes still half opened, the matted gray hair covered now with maggots.

Then, struggling, they made it out to the freshly dug grave. In the distance was the grotto, with the candle Amy had lighted, still glowing. When Alex looked up he saw the Virgin’s arms reaching out to him just the way he had imagined when he’d wrung it out of his consciousness, as Auguste Rodin must have.

But what was more burdensome was this: He knew of MacIlvoy’s tough, tough life, and the so-called “miracle” that had happened to him when he was nineteen. He entered the Holy Cross the year before Alex, just after this so-called miracle.

He remembered Pavarotti’s “Ave Maria,” as he got on his knees and began to dig with his hands.

“Just a song—the world is sold for a song,” Bourque commented when Alex mentioned it.

“Yes, yes, you are right!”

They were hidden by the big white pines that towered over all the other trees here, and they could hear the river sweep beneath them, just as Alex had when he first came here as a little boy. Using the name Chapman, until he realized it was unpopular—and then returning to his name, the name of his father, Roach. Then back to Chapman again, always a lost child searching for who he was. Still, he refused to look into the grave, as if by doing so he would be committing an injustice to the memory of the old man who had fed and clothed him all those years ago.

Almost a sacrilege, if he believed in such a thing.

They placed the body on top of the coffin, and Alex turned his head away.

Bourque informed him that Poppy’s family had put up a reward of $500 for information. Well, he said seriously, they could afford no more—and the little girls themselves chipped in with their lemonade and cookie money. This only furthered Alex’s feeling of being lost. But he decided that Bourque might be insane.

They went back to the cabin. Bourque then returned to normal conversation. He asked seriously if Alex would take possession of the house, and if he would try to start the construction company—plowing would still garner him some money, and he could build up the business again. He could get a good hay crop in, and use square bales instead of the big circular ones, for farmers liked them better. Besides, clover was in abundance over at Chapman’s Island, and he could let Greg Henry’s horses graze there.

There was still contracting to be done, but he must have the proper attitude. He must be more compassionate than the old uncle.

“Do it for the people,” Bourque said.

But then Bourque stopped smiling. Lighting a cigarette, he spoke of predestination. He said he always had wondered about this idea—and did Alex? He was trying to be philosophical after a long day, like someone might after a hard day in the woods and gathered to camp at night.

“There is no predestination,” Alex managed after a long enough pause.

“How can you be so sure? It is just strange that I am at all involved in this,” he said, very seriously. “When if you had just been patient it all would have come your way. Say if you had just waited until today—this day—the ticket would have been yours, no one would have cared, and Poppy would still be dumping his sawdust.”

His voice inflected a certain blame cast upon his friend. And he continued, not as an adult but now as an adolescent, a boy perhaps fourteen.

“I did not mean to kill him,” he said. “He was going to phone your uncle—and I reacted—but you were the one who yelled. So it wouldn’t have stopped until I had used the knife. But you see, if I didn’t, if I had used common sense, the ticket would still be yours—all would be solved. So what I am saying now is that your predestination did not have to do with the ticket—but had to do with certain people whose lives are now in danger because of it.”

“What people?”

Bourque said nothing for a moment about what people. Bourque however realized that the initial plan had been the best—that is, the ticket should have nothing to do with him. He couldn’t simply take the ticket and go to Moncton. It might be discovered that something had gone on between him and Poppy. He reflected upon this almost happily, in a way showing his authority.

“You see, we wanted them to think the ticket was Poppy’s. Now they will suspect it was his, and we can’t have that—we have to make them think you got it from your uncle. How strange. Everything is exactly the way it should be, except you have put yourself in a cage and have thrown away the key.”

Alex listened, and stared strangely at this man who now seemed to control his breathing.

“There is of course another teeny-weeny, small, and insignificant loose end.”

“What loose end?” Alex managed.

“Her.”

“Who?”

“Amy. She had to come up the lane at that very time—she is the only one who can link us together with the truck. So, I am thinking something must be done!”

“Nothing—nothing more can be done,” Alex said. “Not to her.”

Bourque lifted his hand. “You don’t think I killed someone—well, now you have to. I don’t want Bridgette to find out,” he said. “First of all, she will run and tell her mom!”

Alex didn’t answer.

“It is easy to make it all go away—so there are only the two of us. Besides, drowning in the summer—a girl like her sneaking out at night to swim or see a boy—that’s what we’ll say happened—you see, it is what happened to Sam Patch’s sister fifteen years ago—remember?—well, that’s what happens—she’ll have gone swimming—I will put a bathing suit on her—and bingo!”

“I won’t do anything to her—she can’t even swim, the little thing is frightened of water!”

Bourque shrugged. “Even better. If you want anything out of this, you decide—it was you made a mess of it with them!”

He stood. His presence towering over Alex but his voice was very reasonable, and who was he beginning to remind Alex of, with his mustache and his dark, blistering eyes? In some way Bourque had become what Alex had made him. His own portrait of Joseph Stalin, friend of the proletariat, that he once drew on the back of his scribbler when he was taking Russian history in 1982, and writing with faint wisdom against Ronald Reagan.

Bourque turned, his hands quickly waving at something in front of him. Then he turned and came back.

“I am simply saying that without God—or who you think is God—there is no truth, just a series of questions, and that means everything is true and nothing is true. So you have been implicated in a murder I could claim that I myself have had nothing to do with. I have as much of a chance as you to escape penitentiary.”

Here he picked up the phone. Bourque seemed to be inflamed by his logic, and was perhaps dedicated to seeing out his threat.

“Put the phone down,” Alex said, terrified. “Don’t be so crazy—I thought you were logical—”

“I am—I am, at that! Who will ever miss a little girl from the Gum Road!”

Then Bourque took the ticket and gave it to him.

“You’re the one who has to keep it,” he said.

“What if I tear it up?” Alex asked, taking it, his long white fingers trembling with the pressure of holding it, and smiling with civility at his friend.

Bourque turned. He smiled slightly too. Then he said, “Go on—tear it—we are still in the same predicament! A dead body and a girl who knows we were together!”

Alex could not bring himself to tear the ticket. Yes, if they hadn’t murdered he would have torn it—but now that they had murdered for it, how could he bring himself to waste so much money? It would be a waste of Poppy Bourque’s life, and Poppy Bourque meant more to him than that!

—

A
LEX STARTED TO WALK THE HIGHWAY AT THREE IN THE
morning. He didn’t have a clue as to where he was going. But it seemed he was going to Minnie’s house, along the old brook, staring at the rapids and the windfalls. What was he thinking of? He was thinking of suicide, of course. He could jump over the Arron Falls bridge, but he was unsure if that would do it. And if he didn’t accomplish the job, he would be a cripple going off to jail. He was also thinking of warning Minnie—and telling her to go away. Take Amy away with her. This is what he really hoped to do. But there were other things, and other concerns.

Sam Patch was coming home with a lot of money from the tar sands. This, most of all, was his worry. And caused his great dejection. For after a lifetime of telling himself he wanted Sam to earn a respectable living, now he was jealous and fearful of falling beneath the radar in Minnie’s eyes. Of being looked at with pity, as a broke and pitiful intellectual. He could stand anything but that.

He smelled tarpaper and vetch and cattails under the moonlight. Though he tried not to, he thought of all he had done to them. It flooded his mind, that he had not been continent. Amy, who he had wanted not to be born, under the guise of justice. Then he had taken Sam’s job away, cut out from under him. Still with the idea that he was on their side. Then he had prepared to steal a ticket and used them to do so. He was even so bloody as to think he would not give them any, unless Minnie swore she would leave Sam Patch. That was at the height of his power, when they were thinking and dreaming of $700 to put Fanny in the home, and he was thinking of $13 million.

Now Amy knew, or she might know.

So what had happened? All that he said he wanted—their liberation and Sam’s bounty—was about to come true, while all he secretly wanted—her suffering and Sam’s castigation—was about to be overcome by his own destruction and humiliation.

But what had stopped him?

He thought of all of this while staring at this small, battered, innocent house. The house was so innocent because it asked for and expected nothing.

He turned about, and the moon shone down across the laneway, and he started to walk home. At one point he looked to his left and saw the old shed behind Fanny Groat’s with the faded white paint still visible that Minnie had written to him one night when they were children.

“Don’t you know how I feel, look, the writing is on the wall!”

He was staggered that it was still there.

But as soon as he got to the highway, lights came toward him, and he turned to see the squad car of Markus Paul. He put his head down, thrust his hands in his pockets, and kept walking. The car went by, and then turned at his uncle’s lane and came back. It stopped and compelled him to stop as well.

“Hello, sir,” Markus said, rolling his window down. “Out for a moonlit walk, are you—?”