The Lost Highway (34 page)

Markus now came to Old Chapman’s house to prove that someone else was involved in the break-in here. That those who were actually responsible for the break-in at Chapman’s were in the end responsible for Poppy Bourque’s disappearance.

“Well this is a mess,” he said.

“Yes, it was riffled through,” Alex answered, trying his best to look annoyed. “This is what you hear about.”

“What is that—what do you hear about?” Markus asked.

“Well, you know, the family is at a funeral and someone decides that’s the best time to come in and go through your house.”

“Oh, but this was done before the funeral—”

“It was?”

“Yes, I am sure of it—” Markus smiled again, his face brightening for a second as if to dispel the added cruelty of a break-in at the time of a funeral. Then, looking serious once more, he said he was going to look around, and asked if he could do so.

“Sure.”

“I won’t be long then,” Markus said, and he climbed the stairs. Alex thought of following him but didn’t. Then Markus came back down and walked by Alex. Alex got up and followed him into the kitchen.

“What is it?” Alex asked.

“What is what?”

“Have you found anything?”

“Nothing.” He shook his head, and opened two or three drawers that Alex had opened.

“There is something strange here,” he said. And it was a deepening mystery to him now. He looked very perplexed.

“What?”

“Items left exactly as they were—gun cabinet not broken into, radio and portable TV exactly where they were, microwave oven, all of it easy to sell or pawn—none of it taken—none of it moved—why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Either do I—but it is pretty strange.”

“Yes—”

“Unless something else was going on.”

“And what is that?”

“Unless the person was looking for something in particular—something small.”

“Why small?”

“Cabinets are opened, nothing removed—but the three cabinet drawers are pulled out, vases turned over—a pencil holder upset—something small—a map of buried treasure on Chapman Isle.” Markus smiled. “Something that could fit into a shoebox of bills, which was riffled through here—so a piece of paper, or a coin—”

Then Markus blushed, his face turning slightly redder, and said nothing.

“What?”

“Oh nothing—I was thinking perhaps a will, but I don’t think that would fly. All I am saying is little Johnny Proud wouldn’t have been searching through a shoebox of bills sitting on top a microwave oven. He would have taken the microwave oven. But someone who was looking for something in particular would have. Something not too random, as kids say today. But something special. Something in the family. John was in Poppy’s, yes—but someone different was in here, looking for something different than John Proud was!”

Alex shrugged. And then his legs wobbled as if he had been shot, and he sat down.

That is because he suddenly, overwhelmingly, realized who John Proud was—strange that he remembered this, at this exact moment. John Proud was the boy who had thrown the rock at the bear to keep Alex from danger. That is exactly who they were talking about. Exactly!

“What’s wrong?” Markus asked.

“Nothing,” Alex said, though he couldn’t stop his leg from trembling, so much that his knee bumped the table, and he kept his head down.

Markus only nodded, looked through some pages and notes that had been scattered, and picked up some old recipes.

As he did, he spoke, with his eyes cast down: “Look—I’d like to show you this.”

“What?”

“Well, do you remember my sister Peg—during the Chapman’s Island takeover?”

“I don’t exactly—”

“Well,” Markus said, almost happily, “she died of meth poisoning four months ago. So anyway.” Here he handed an old picture to Alex that he had in the folder of his notebook. “See, you had your picture taken with her—on the front of the paper. See, she was proud, she died with that in her wallet. I was little but I remember the day that was taken. How proud she was of you standing right beside her.”

“I was proud to do so.”

“You were.”

“Of course.”

Markus paused, took the picture back, and nodded as if to himself.

“Yet, there is something. Over the years I thought, Who is giving up his property here—not one of the reporters from Toronto, none of those professors, only silly old Mr. Jim Chapman, who knew more about the First Nations than any one of them.”

“I see,” Alex said.

“That’s why I felt so badly for your uncle. That’s why I’d like to know who really broke in here—for your uncle’s sake—because so often the truth is somewhere else!”

—

L
ATER IN THE AFTERNOON
A
LEX WENT HOME, AND TRIED
to concentrate on his course on ethics, but could not manage to focus. All he could focus on was the horrible feeling that things in his past—his concern for women, his concern for First Nations—all which he prided himself on, were now being re-examined, and he of all people was found wanting.

Markus was using Alex’s very claim of altruism to dismantle who he said he was. And Alex knew this, and could no longer pretend or prevent it!

Markus in fact was studying them both, and had been now for a week. He knew how Alex and Leo had come together on the school bus, and was piecing together how they had lived ever since, and how little by little their unsettled and unsettling lives came together once again to wreak havoc with one another.

Markus’s little notebook with the emblematic eagle, which his colleagues derisively called the bible, had twenty new pages of notes. He kept that picture of his sister in it always. At first he had been proud of it, but as time went by his heart went against Alex’s easy adopting of other people’s misery to make a name for himself. And so now his gaze turned toward Alex and all he had done.

“They couldn’t have gone there to kill him,” Markus said to himself. “Poppy leaving so willingly seems to attest to amiability.”

—

B
OURQUE HAD BEEN REELING UNDER THE WEIGHT OF
others’ opinions of him, too. They told him he could do nothing most of his life. When he was young he had tried to prove them wrong. And at each juncture it seemed they were right. Yet he realized when he found the ticket that all opinions are subject to change—and that this change coming about by chance was even better. He could reclaim more than some measure of his former self. But for one thing. It was a self that would have had nothing to do with his former self. He would be very rich, and much different in one way, and not changed at all in another. That is what the lotto did. In fact, he thought many of the same thoughts Alex had, coming to them in the same way. And it also came down to the same two things: there were people who had injured him he could get back at, and his wife would return to him—his daughter Bridgette would live with them again. But he would have to make his wife suffer just a little. She had made him suffer unduly. He would think of how she got the job because of him—and then him being sent out on the loader so Cid could be alone with her. He would think of him telling his wife that he was the one who had made Cid rich, and how, after a life of being disappointed in him, she dismissed this claim. And thinking of all of this, he would shake and then hit something.

——

On the eighth day after the disappearance Bourque went for a walk along the herring-stinking beach, and looked out at the full water, light and milky blue, and he remembered his love of this land as a child. He sat on an old log, as he was wont to do, where from across the T—as they called the little inlet—he could watch his estranged wife in her boss’s office. And what was vastly annoying to him, he saw her boss pat her behind as she walked around the desk. Confused by this, he jumped up and began to walk back up the beach, until he saw Markus Paul’s police car driving along the narrow inlet road toward Fouy’s Construction. It was as if someone had hit him very hard to make him realize something very important—so he turned and walked closer.

Paul disappeared into that clapboard office building for a moment, behind the door to the tired stairway and little pressboard door; so Bourque could follow him in his mind’s eye. Then the front glassed door opened, so from where he was Bourque could see how Constable Paul brought his ex-wife to the police car, and began speaking to her.

Leo’s emotion was akin to a patient learning that not only did they discover a bit of cancer, but in fact he only had a week to live.

What Leo noticed was his wife’s body movement—her little gestures that he had witnessed ten thousand times—when she was confused or tried to please someone because she did not want an argument. And it was these gestures that made him forget what her obscenely self-confident boss had done—and made him love her all over again. He knew she was being questioned about him—Leo—and he knew he was being hunted. He knew why he feared when Markus Paul didn’t come to see him, almost as much as he feared when he did.

It was about an hour and a half later, in his own shed, eating his supper alone, when Bourque’s sister came to tell him that Constable Paul had been to the house, and had said they had picked up Johnny Proud for the disappearance.

“Oh I hope that’s not true,” Bourque said sadly. But he eyed his sister cautiously, thinking that Markus Paul might have sent her to trick him, and in one second remembering the thousand small betrayals that were committed by his sister’s easy gaining of confidence from him over the years, even telling Doreen when he wouldn’t be home so she could move her things. This betrayal was first and foremost in his mind now.

But after a time he thought he was very lucky to have Proud blamed. This made him euphoric for a bit, until he thought this: If Amy was ever to keep silent about the truck, which he had convinced himself she would, she couldn’t if she believed they had arrested someone who had nothing to do with the crime. She would have to tell what she knew, as a moral obligation.

“But what are the possibilities of her thinking this,” he wondered. “Tell me, what are the possibilities of her thinking she has to report us?”

And the answer came: VERY HIGH.

Sooner or later, even if it was a year from now, she would figure it out. At the very latest, on the day they cashed the ticket she would speak.

He poured himself a last glass of wine, and stared off into nothing at all.

John Proud being arrested actually upped the ante against them. They could not cash the ticket with Amy my love still alive.

He snuck out later, along the old back path. He did not trust the phone (every phone he could think of was now bugged, especially the one on the highway), and he walked along the dirt path silently until he came out on the road far above the turn.

He had to see Alex and convince him that Amy herself was their greatest liability, that certain specter called the angel of death. They could not fool themselves anymore. They must take action against Amy as quickly as possible.

He tried for the first time in a long time to think of his soul, and it registered in his mind as turning like a small leaf on the forest floor on a cold autumn day, shriveled and dark. One part of him was thinking that he had a soul—and thinking of his youth, of praying as he struggled not to drown long ago, perhaps a very great soul.

It would leave a scar, no doubt. But the soul would eventually heal. And in fact this is what Bourque said now: “This will scar us all.”

He was not thinking of the body being scarred. Of course he was thinking of the soul. But the scar would heal over, and in some future day, in some way, things would be normal again.

—

B
OURQUE HAD PIECES OF GRASS IN HIS HAIR, AND HE HAD
frightened Alex to death by standing up in the garden when Young Chapman went to get his morning cucumber. Alex had run, thinking in a millisecond that Bourque had come to kill him.

It was 7:30 in the morning. And it was cold and gray and the trees blew like ghosts, and the whole bay was riled like a fever. The little cabin sat damp and friendless, the specter of autumn upon the ground.

For a while Bourque said nothing at all. He simply stood looking out at the bay.

Then he said, “The problem is John Proud—he is our scapegoat, but he is the one to hurt us too.”

“Why is that?” Alex asked, rationally. “It might be that they can get him help—this is what I have been thinking about for the last little while. We might be doing him a favor. And if he is charged, and gets help, and it takes a few years—say, seven years—when he comes out we can give him a million dollars, and then and there it will all be for the best. I have thought much about this, and this might just work!”

“Audacious how you can help the Indian now by putting him into jail.”

“I am not saying that.”

“Truly audacious—” But then he added, “It is not how Amy will think of it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean sooner or later the idea of a human tragedy named John Proud will make her see the truck as a pivotal bit of evidence to clear him, and she will want to do the right thing.”

Alex, of course, was immensely pained by this. This idea of doing the right thing was in some ways his territory.

But what Bourque was saying was that if Amy—if Amy girl, as he sometimes called her; Amy my pigeon; Amy the pure of heart—was LESS of a girl, was LESS human, then she might not be compelled to tell the truth in this one instance and they might be able to pay her off, with a few hundred thousand and a convertible.

But he had seen her eyes when she had handed him the berries her mother had asked her to bring to him last week, and in those eyes were recognition and shock. So sooner or later her humanity would make her turn to the police and tell them they could not accuse John Proud. So what Bourque was telling Alex was what in his lively imagination Alex already was thinking: they must destroy her humanity, which Alex had failed to destroy before.

“If we can do something else—bring her here and offer her money—pay her money—I am open to it,” Leo said. “But if not—and all I am saying is, if not—then what are the alternative solutions?”