The Lost Highway (4 page)

But he couldn’t.

There was a profound silence in the little room. And in this silence it was as if some kind of voice were pleading with him to let it all be.

It was, of course, the conversation he had had last week with likable, illiterate Poppy Bourque.

“Yes,” Poppy had said, “I remember your mother, and I liked her very much, and what she would say to you is if we live as we must everything will turn out.” Poor Poppy Bourque thought Alex would agree with this, and was startled by his absolutely disgusted look.

The voice of Poppy was in his mind for just a second, and then lost again.

Alex paused and quite to his surprise felt weak, breaking out in sweat. Finally he said this to Burton: “I’m his nephew, I’ll tell him about the money and check his ticket. I’ll tell him he should give you your 1 percent—”

“But I thought—well, thinking you didn’t like him.”

“Well I’m not doing this for him or me but for you, Burton.”

“Oh,” Burton said.

“I have a responsibility to you is how I look at it.”

Burton paused, screwed up his eyebrows, and felt that this was good thinking, for already he had gotten the numbers entirely mixed up. To say someone who hadn’t had won the lotto would be bad. In fact, he realized that the old man might think he was tormenting him. So he took his leave from Young Chapman and made his way back down the desolate beach, looking at the last of the seagulls and the terns skimming, and in the darkening grove above the nighthawks weaving in and out. He was perplexed and angry at not being able to remember, and why would God, if there was a God, do this to him. For this had always been the way. People had always teased him because of it—told him he owed them money when he did not because of it. Children would come in and say: “You have to give the $5 you owe me—momma says.” And he would prolong his stare, and mumble, but he would give the $5. It was, as some said, a fail-safe way to make some spare change. Burton knew this, often after the fact. And he had always got up to a new day, and tried it all again. The only one he had protecting him from this was Amy.

When he got home what seemed exciting seemed after reflection to be nothing at all. Most of the things in his life he had been talked out of. From his pocket knife when young to his Mario Lemieux autograph he once had in his garage window.

“We will wait and see,” he said. “It could be a big heap of change in my pocket. It could be.”

There was one thing that bothered him. And it was what Mrs. Chapman had said, about a gift a year after her death. In the way of the world, stranger things had happened, and Burton himself was a strange thing—a person who wasn’t even supposed to exist, because his own mother, a scared young girl of sixteen, had left him out in the snow to die, down on the Gum Road, behind the chicken coop. He had been left out on February 5, 1971, and when they found him on February 6, people said he was frozen solid and the hens had begun to peck at him. They took him to the hospital and thawed him out, and as they did he began to breathe and cry. So here he was, flesh and blood. When he met his mother years and years later, he had no idea what to do or say, so he broke out step-dancing in front of her, a smile on his face.

—

F
IVE MINUTES AFTER
B
URTON LEFT
, Y
OUNG
C
HAPMAN HAD
torn the place apart and found the local paper with the numbers printed on the second page, on the left-hand column at the very bottom: 11 17 22 26 37 41. He was in a daze now, as he put his dirty finger against one number and then the next. Were these the numbers Old Jim had at this moment in his pocket? All his life Jim had money-grubbed, and Alex had laughed at him last week: “Look where yer money-grubbing got ya.”

Again, that wasn’t the wisest thing to say.

Now he was doing things, which he seemed to witness outside of his body. He had heard that people sometimes acted this way. But this was perhaps the first time it had happened to him. Or maybe that long ago time when he had seen Minnie Patch’s skirt blow above her waist.

He hated the lotto. Like many cross men studied by university and polemical in nature, he thought it was foolhardy nonsense and very much beneath him. Yes, he had teased Minnie about it often, saying she was a fool, saying she was raising her daughter to be a fool.

“Barefoot and pregnant,” he had said, “that’s how you ended up.”

In fact, in the last year he could not see Minnie without saying something unpleasant, for hadn’t she turned out exactly like he himself had predicted?

Now he began to shake as he sat at the table. Because he wanted the same thing as everyone else. He wanted the money. With the money, he would win Minnie back. He would be as wise as Cicero told him to be. But he had to have the money.

That thing which dreams are made of. He thought of when he was a runner and how with his training and his absorption of pasta and lettuce, and grains of various kinds, he had almost managed to run a marathon. Yes, that ethically minded, self-absorbed, self-indulgent, self-righteous sport. Yes, he had made much of his running aloofness—his passion for endurance and ecological restraint. But he had not run in years.

He took some water and tried to think. His medicine was on the windowsill—medicine for the ailment he had with his heart that had come to him with age. This had happened since the fall of the business. It had happened since he had seen Minnie again. He had thought he had conquered his desire for her. It was obvious he had not. “Just a valve,” the doctor had told him. He tried to picture this valve and could not sleep some nights thinking of it, flopping back and forth in his heart like a wagging tail. When it hurt him, he would say: “It is nothing,” or “Stop hurting me if you are nothing,” and keep plodding on.

When it pained he would sit up nights and read—and what an authority he had become on the dazzling stupidity of man. So then he must steal this ticket. For what did it matter to others if he did or did not? Who would say in ten years that he had, and if they did, who would care? He had read enough of the world to know that!

Did Beaverbrook steal? Yes. Did Roosevelt and the Kennedys? A whole lot.

His well-publicized disbelief in God made it certain that no one was answerable to God. And if he believed this fully then he had to act. In fact, he was morally obligated to. This was what it finally came down to now. It was his moral duty to take the money and help the unfortunate. All his predisposition told him so.

He left his house and went out into the warm, pulpy air. Far across the river he could see the giant Ferris wheel, looking like fate in the wind, going round and round, like one of those wheels of Dante crushing, tumbling, and catapulting the grand illusionary Middle Ages into the din of the past. If he listened, he could hear the howls of children across the waters, as if they were falling into some new estimation of the cabala.

He walked through the woods and out to the highway. He was agitated that this had happened to him even though, in a way, nothing had happened to him.

Yet now Young Chapman was consumed by the idea that it had. He had not taken the truck in, and his uncle had received the ticket.

—

H
E WAS ON HIS WAY TO
M
INNIE
(T
UCKER
) P
ATCH, THE
woman he loved and Amy Patch’s mother. Because of the company’s decline, her husband Sam was away working, and about to bring home a large amount of money. They were not rich—but when he came home they would be able to afford things.

Young Chapman used to trudge up Minnie’s roadway in the winter, when they were both teenagers, and stand by the gate, looking in at those old yellow curtains hanging across blank, dirty windows in the small, cold house. He would stand in the cold almost all day long. It was as if that sad little house—filled with old and vagrant furniture, and cases of empty wine bottles stacked in the small, cold porch, with snow swishing and swashing over the back shed roof—was a place of mystery and worship. He worshipped Minnie—he actually did.

Thou shalt have no false gods before me, he remembered thinking, and yet he would stand in the cold unable to go home. “Just one glimpse at her peaked little Irish face and I’ll bolt home,” he would say.

When he got home, his uncle would often reprimand him for something he had left undone, or tell him he had to go to seven o’clock mass before he ate, stretching up to put the food away.

“Oh, let him eat,” Muriel would say.

“Not until after mass. He has communion before he gobbles food—”

So he would trudge out angry and fretful, his belly gnawing at his bones, and then come to life when he realized Minnie was at mass as well. He longed for the host, just to establish something in his guts. His uncle had the habit of kicking him when they knelt, if he didn’t answer the priest well. He was teased by some children that his father was French, and that is why his uncle despised him. So he began, then, to look for the name of his father in the phone book, and imagine himself a LeBlanc, or a Terrieux.

And each chance he had, he would walk up Minnie’s lane. This is where he was free, and where she who freed him was. This is where the snow smelled more pure, the sounds of the highway were muffled by the great pine trees. The cold hung over his land and he was in deep despair, for it was love, and he could not give her up.

“Stay away from her,” Old Jim told him once, bluntly. “You don’t need no young dark-haired cunt from the back road—have some common decency.”

But he disobeyed. He had to. It was his first rebellion.

He left notes in her mailbox, professing what he called then his “like” for her. And he was sick at heart, and this feeling was somehow satisfying in itself. Her mother always said she wasn’t home. He knew that her older sister, June Tucker, had a child at sixteen and hid the fact from the family, put the baby boy behind the chicken coop, and fled to Toronto. The child, Burton, lived.

Because of this, Minnie’s father said she wasn’t allowed to speak to boys until she was twenty-six. Alex was dejected, but later that winter Minnie had the little boy, Burton, bring him a note. It was written in a light green ink, on paper from her history scribbler, and said she would like to see him, and maybe go to the sock hop if she could get permission. That she would try to get permission from her father. This, Alex knew, and so did she, was impossible. But still, in her youthful heart, in her love of life, as boys and girls so often have, did she hope for this.

Alex wrote back saying they would meet.

Minnie was a convent girl, with a spotless white blouse and a skirt, and on that dark night in frigid weather he thought of her soul, like that white blouse she wore. He thought of this when he saw her one day walking through the old creamery lot, with its junked pipes and tattered blocks.

She had black hair, and small crooked teeth, that he loved. She, too, at this time was in the Lenten crosshairs and fasted. The convent was in deep despair because it was closing, the nuns being sent elsewhere and the town being thrust forward into the secular age. But still fifteen students remained at the convent, and she was one.

Then came the night when she told him her father had found out, and would not allow her to see him anymore. The sock hop was out of the question. It was reported that the old man had taken her socks.

“Did he?” Alex asked infuriated.

She hauled up her pants over her ankles to show her sockless boots.

Alex said that when he saw her father, he would give him a piece of his mind. They walked along the Gum Road, in the freshly fallen snow, and he felt at home for the first time since his own mother’s death. He did what his uncle said without complaint, because he was thinking of her.

Then he found out when her birthday was.

“I will meet you Thursday at the forks of Arron Falls,” he said, “after four o’clock. I will have a gift for you. After school.”

“I don’t know if I can,” she said. She was wearing a scarf and her eyes shone in the dooryard light, as a bit of snow fell out of the twilight and landed on the old sled path and fell more gloomy in the trees. All of this might seem or look depressing to one who did not know or revel in its great beauty as he did. The fields filled with snow, and acres and acres of lots stretching down the long highway into the void, with prip-props holding pulp wood extending into the night. There was nothing sweeter in the world, and if he traveled one million miles he would come back to its sparse and terrible beauty some day.

“No—you have to,” he said. “I promise you I will be there.”

“Then I promise you I will be,” she replied, squeezing his hand, and turning and running toward her house, her woolen coat flying behind her, snow flying about her bare ankles.

He listened that night to what his uncle said about the state of their affairs, and what did he, an orphan like him, think he was going to get if he traipsed off with the daughter of a boozer.

“Her face’ll get old and tired and you’ll be looking for a woman who has some class,” the old man said in fitful duty to some regulation. He jabbed at the bowl of his pipe with a pick, and looked quickly at his nephew. He had married a woman with some class, he said, and he expected as much from Alex.

Alex did his chores in the warehouse (rolling a barrel from one end to the other, which he had just rolled to the other end the day before) and said nothing. Collected the rats from the traps in the back of the barn and threw them out. Some nights, his uncle might wake him. He would get up, under the flare of a lantern, to go out along the back hall and cross into the barn, where a moose was hanging from a tripod, or a deer stiffened in death hung upon a hook, and Alex would help his uncle take the hide off these animals with a three and a half–inch knife. It was a long, disgusting process to Alex, for his uncle did not need the meat or the money. Alex was always conscious of how these animals died.

The meat was cut up and sold to people along the highway. His uncle tallied the earnings every year from this illegal enterprise, and bought things he needed for the barn or house. Most of the money he stored away. Alex could not stand the look of a rifle, and on those darkish days he became opposed to everything associated with them.