The Lost Highway (33 page)

“Why would I ever do that—I could never ever imagine doing so,” he whispered.

Then Alex made what he considered a mistake. He became angry, and said he should be the last one suspected of trying to get anyone in trouble. He had stood against fire for the First Nations.

“I lost my position at the university defending the First Nations and walked away.” He had a strange self-indulgent smile on his peaked little face when he said this, and his orange hair seemed to move slightly back and forth.

“You did?”

“I did!”

“You lost your position trying to defend First Nations people?”

“I did.”

“Well, well.”

“Yes!” Alex said, shaking his head sadly.

This, though not true, at the moment seemed as if it could be true. As if Alex’s made-up life could be true. But this was strange to Markus, for he knew the one place on the river that often agitated on behalf of First Nations—sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly—was the university. So he felt it very strange that a man like Young Chapman would lose his position for doing something 75 percent of university professors took as the norm.

Yet Alex said it, as if it was true. Markus nodded quickly as if he had just been put in his place about the First Nations people. There was a pause.

“Of course I didn’t think you could blame anyone—but there is a problem,” Markus said.

“What is it?”

“John Proud can’t defend himself—he’s been up for weeks on meth—he is now in hospital—so he is into the sleeps. He might sleep off and on for three weeks. He will never be able to say where he was or what he did. Of course you know John Proud—almost everyone on the river does—I am not defending him, but he’s almost virtually harmless. But you see he will not be able to provide an alibi—he has two or three things he stole from Poppy Bourque’s, one was a floor lamp—him trying to carry a floor lamp. He broke into other places down there. So they think he broke into your uncle’s as well. X equals Y—Poppy gone—case closed. But he doesn’t really have anything with him that I think came from your uncle’s. Nothing at all.”

“Well was my uncle’s broken into?”

“Oh yes indeed—but by whom?”

Alex shrugged, and felt sweat on his forehead, which he quickly wiped away.

“Does it matter—it may have been someone else?” Alex asked.

“Yes—I think it was someone else; but I have a feeling this someone else has something to do with Poppy Bourque. But unfortunately for us, no one else seems to.”

Alex shrugged.

“And the fact is this: All things being equal, people will believe that I will show my character and my ability by charging John with theft and implicating him in the murder of Poppy Bourque. But if I do, I forgo the investigation I am now engaged in, which is what those who think I am off on a wild goose chase want. I am in fact like a referee at a hockey game who must blow the whistle on his own hometown team even though it is late in the third period and they are already down a goal. They are waiting for me to prove I can do it, to prove myself loyal to the complexities of my job. If I do it, a possible promotion is in store, for the whole highway is abuzz this morning, saying it was John Proud. I am being asked to do the appropriate thing, to prove that I am not above the law. They are looking at me.”

He smiled at this. But Alex had only heard one word.

“You said murder of Poppy?”

“What?”

“You said murder of Poppy?”

“I did—I said murder of Poppy Bourque—”

“Yes, you did.”

“Well there you have it.”

“Murder?”

“Absolutely,” Markus Paul said without the least hesitation.

There was a long pause. Alex got up and took his medicine and sat down at the table once more. He took three pills, though he should only have taken two, and coughed a little when he drank some water.

“I see,” Alex said. “Yes, I see.”

“Do you?” Markus asked.

“Well yes—I think so!”

There was another pause. At this moment Alex became very much aware of how close Markus was to the telephone, and how he might pick it up if it rang—and what if it was Leo Bourque? He was also conscious of the fact that if Markus pressed the redial button, it would dial Bourque’s number, who Alex had called in panic yesterday. In fact, both of them seemed to realize this at the same moment. Markus glanced casually at the phone. Then he looked back at Alex.

“But is the case closed?” Markus asked. “That’s what you have to help me with.” And here Markus took a chance. “Look, I am asking for your help because I am a First Nations man and have not dealt in the world like you have. One article claiming that I might be on the right track and that you want to get to the bottom of it because of your feelings against injustice—and it was your uncle’s house!” He blinked and sighed.

Alex looked at him and nodded understandingly. Then he spoke: “I don’t know—you see it—you are emotionally involved, and I think it could very well have been Johnny—and if he is in such terrible shape, he can’t be held responsible—not morally or ethically, physically perhaps, but not otherwise—”

“That is what I think.”

“You do?”

“Of course I do—did and will—especially when he admitted to it.”

“He admitted to it?”

“Yes, and then he fell into his deep Rip Van Winkle snooze. He’ll be kept under by medication for six or seven days or more. But you see, here is what I think—he would have admitted to the Kennedy assassination if we wanted him to, just to get out of the torment he was feeling at that moment. That is what is so painful to me at this moment—he blamed alcohol and drugs for the death of his mother and then over the last fifteen years goes on a rampage himself. Who in the world would not think he killed or at least misplaced Poppy—put him somewhere? I come to you because you are a teacher of ethics. You are teaching a course—you did your master’s and doctoral thesis on ethics. I need some help here because I am in a bind.”

“Well, I did my doctoral thesis—well—it isn’t quite finished and it wasn’t on ethics so much.” Alex thought a moment, then gave a peculiar sniff and said, “If he did it he should be held responsible.”

“If he did do it?”

“Yes.”

“That, of course, is what I think. However, knowing your views on this, on the”—here he looked at his notebook once again—“‘sometimes shared responsibility of society in the involvement of minority crime,’ as you stated in a letter to the editor in 1980 during the Chapman’s Island takeover, you seemed to want to protect some of the people more as victims. I just wanted to know—”

“Well, in the heat of the moment—” Alex began.

Had Markus simply read it and remembered, or was he researching him? Alex did not know that Markus had read many of Alex’s articles three nights before, to prepare for this interview, even the articles Alex was preparing to use in his course on ethics. That he had interviewed many people about Alex already, that he had been up almost four days reading everything he could about him.

“So you think Proud might have?”

“Well, he could very well have,” Alex said sheepishly, and he flushed deeply. “But then again I don’t know if we can hold him responsible. Besides, my whole idea is that which you just said.”

“Either do I,” Markus said. “But I thought I was on the right track until last night when all this came out—I mean a very different track. I mean the truck track, and the idea that an English and a French guy are in this together!”

To Alex, a bomb had been placed in the room, and he was tied up, and it was now ticking.

But Markus simply continued: “Then it all came out and he is under guard at the hospital—and I am supposed to wrap things up. You should see the shape he is in. He has lost upwards of forty pounds and sixteen teeth—well, fourteen and two are loose—all because of methamphetamine. You can poke around in his mouth now that he is asleep and haul them out with your fingers!”

“That is awful.”

“But right now I don’t know—this is the difficulty I am in. I have my suspicions, based on signs about Poppy Bourque’s, that it is not one but two people. Yet I am told not to pursue that, and if I do, I am a racist. This is what certain people are saying.”

“That’s silly,” Alex managed, “and ethnically insensitive.”

“Yes, there you have it! I knew you’d understand—” he said, still smiling.

“Yes of course—” Alex said, with a flash of emotion.

Markus smiled. He then asked Alex’s permission to go into the uncle’s house that afternoon, at about two.

“You can join me,” he said.

Alex nodded but couldn’t find the words.

—

A
LEX MADE HIMSELF A CUP OF HERBAL TEA, AND LOOKED
over the statement given about his uncle’s death. His uncle wouldn’t have ever lived beyond October, even if he hadn’t fallen from the boat. He had cancer in his liver, which had spread to his lungs. He had left his nephew everything, but with kind instructions to provide for Amy Patch’s scholarship. And if Alex reneged or declined the property in any way, it was to fall to Sam Patch. This had been talked about over the years between the old man and Muriel in order to do something for Sam and his family. It was in fact a largesse conditional upon the temperament of Alex himself. The old man felt he did not have to change it in order for Alex to be chagrined by what it said.

It was an old will, so maybe he had had no time to change his wishes. Or perhaps in the end he didn’t really want to. Perhaps he was thinking of Rosa and the man who led her astray. So Alex had the entire property, including Chapman’s Island and Bartibog wharf. That is, over 120 acres, warehouses, sheds, barn and paddock, and what was left of the equipment, some of which was in fair condition. Even without the ticket, he would have made some kind of life for himself. That is, though the old man had gone under, there was no requisite lien on the property, and Alex was now solvent. If this “thing” had not happened he could have been the gentleman farmer Mr. Roach had wanted to become, while still teaching his ethics course.

My God, what a beautiful life he might have had!

Perhaps one more little act would still allow it.

Not a thing had stopped him but himself. But if his “crime” was discovered, it would all go to Sam. This in its own way was calculated to scald him.

—

L
ATER THAT AFTERNOON
A
LEX WENT OVER TO THE HOUSE
, and went inside and waited for Markus, who said he was going to be back to check inventory. In all of this there was a second sensation that he was feeling, a kind of cat and mouse, a flirtatious examination of Alex himself by Markus Paul that Alex tried not to notice. He sat on the chair in the dining room, a room he almost never went into unless called to do so, as long as he had lived here. It made him feel like an outsider in his own house. He felt the sweat on his back dry, and he shivered, as one does when they come inside out of the summer heat. He smelled the oak tables and dining room cabinets in this enclosed space. He thought he might try to put things back in order in the house—certain drawers had been pulled out, and many things were scattered. Then he decided that he couldn’t do this. He would be accused of hampering the investigation. He had also a certain thrill come over him when he thought that he wouldn’t be held accountable if this thing stuck against Mr. Proud. They would be completely liberated, which in a sense is how he thought. The crime wouldn’t have been committed. He felt this euphoria, knowing it came from a native’s wrongful accusation—the very thing he had fought all his life.

Yet he decided in a certain way it might be the best thing. For Proud could get the help he needed to overcome a methamphetamine addiction, while at the same time not be held completely accountable for his actions. It was also strangely timely that he had read an article in
The
New Yorker
about methamphetamine moving into communities in the east, coming from the rural west. So that was not his fault. And John Proud might even get his teeth fixed. Perhaps it would work out. The only thing problematic was that Proud had already confessed. It struck him now that when Proud recovered they would press him to remember where the body was. Why this bothered Alex, he didn’t know. But it was laid out upon a very grave feeling, disassociated from anything in particular, vague yet endlessly vast, surrounding him as dust surrounds a planet. He heard that there were theories and even seminars on vagueness, by various professors, and he wished he could listen to one. Say, if in the mud huts of all this vagueness, demons or terrors or angels were in the air, hovering about the microwave, making sure of things in some other dimension, a dimension that, if it did not control our lives, played out its part in a fascinating kind of exchange of which we ourselves were almost never aware.

His continual uneasy horror over what had really happened, and where the body actually was, and his underlying part in the mystery, was in fact surrounding him in a vague balloon, like chloroform. This now shaped everything about him and his relationship with the world. It certainly foretold of trouble. He tried to think moderately about the two books he was going to assign in his course on ethics, along with the old masters:
The Da Vinci Code
and
In Cold Blood.
Now, feeling outside his own sphere of recognizable armor, he decided he would not offer either book. They no longer pertained to what he really wanted to say. And what did he really want to say? Two weeks ago he could have rattled off his entire seminar.

“Once this is over,” he whispered, “once this is all over.”

Just then there was a knock on the half-opened door and the voice of Constable Paul.

“Yes,” Alex said from the dining room. “I’m in here.” Calmness came over him, and he was happy about this. He didn’t want to be nervous and shaky in front of a police officer.

The one thing he did not know was that Constable Markus Paul was not at all convinced that Johnny Proud had done anything in this house. He was in fact convinced that Johnny, his cousin, had committed no serious crime. In fact, the very idea that Proud went into Poppy Bourque’s house to search for something to sell showed he had no idea a disappearance had taken place, and that the police were watching the property twenty-four hours a day.