The Lost Highway (48 page)

“Well, did we create this dark old world, this Sodom and Gonorrhea kind of place? No, we were thrust into it, like little slaves, trying to eke out a living and everything like that there, don’t you kid yourself. We are not the smartest puppies in the pen.”

Alex nodded.

“So we are just doing only what we have to do—predetermined or not, it suits us. Build her her own rec center without any qualms.”

Alex again nodded. It was once again Plato’s rather esoteric principle of the noble lie.

Bourque spoke slowly into his ear.

Alex took the New Testament out and held it, its old faded cover turned back to expose the front page, with its quote from Joshua: “This book of the law shall not depart from your mouth.” Alex glanced at her name at the top of the page, disappearing in the rainwater coming down from his eyes as if he was crying.

“She’d understand that you want to give it back,” Bourque said nervously. “She’d understand it—”

What Bourque was conscious of at this moment was the roadblocks Young Chapman was trying to set up in their consciousness, and he was very angered by it. This was not the time for roadblocks or for turning back, now with the very road behind them washed out, and a cavernous gap between now and their former lives. Alex was saying that if they went back now, the cavern could still be traversed.

“Well, go one way or the other,” Bourque said, challenging this philosophy.

But Alex couldn’t budge. The rain poured over his jacket and flattened his curly hair, and he stood exactly where he was. The smell of smoke always made him think of Minnie. He now thought about the logic that had propelled him to this pathway at this exact time. It was logic, he decided, to do good with the money and the ticket. The ticket was actually a way to save his life. It was much more than just money—it was simply a way to refute all of those who hated him, to still win Minnie. Here is what he imagined, at its best, the death of little Amy could do for himself and his career:

“This is what you get,” Minnie would say to Sam, “for trying to take the little child out west. She was trying to tell me how sad she was to go. So she went and threw herself into a puddle.”

“She begged you not to go,” Alex would say.

“When did you see her last!” Sam would command. (Perhaps he would be inebriated, Alex thought.)

“I brought her her New Testament and told her to keep her chin up,” Alex would say.

“But you don’t believe,” Sam would appeal, astonished, looking at his wife who was now lost to him forever.

“No, I do not—especially not after the death of such a child as this; but I knew she believed, I knew and wanted her to have it back. I did not want to destroy the faith of a child as mine was destroyed harshly.” (It was like a movie, with a somewhat British tone, or a puritanical one, yet he could see it being played out. The fact is, it could be played out no other way.)

“I am sorry, Mrs. Patch,” Rory would say. “I tried to come up here and see her—for Mr. Chapman told me to.” (Alex had not, but this was the best possible scenario he was imagining, and it could be accomplished, for in fact the noble lie allowed this.)

Sam would be devastated.

“That was kind of you,” Minnie would say.

Oh, how beautiful the lie was, how close it was to altruism and truth, and how people of every stripe in every department, at every paper, and in every way clung to the lie as altruism, over and over again, for First Nations and women and people of color. And how millions had made money traversing the line between altruism and self-service—the idea and need to cover up a bad motive with a good one. This would in fact be just one more example.

“Think of all the little native children killed,” Bourque said now. “The hundreds of years of misery and what we might do to help. So you see, what if she is tormented just a bit—it kind of makes up for the poor native children like John Proud! Especially if we help. You, in fact, could go down to Renous and counsel John Proud and everything would turn out!”

But here is what Alex said to Bourque: “How I wagged my finger, greatly annoyed and finding fault with all those who did not treat women just right. Now, unless I kill one, all will be exposed. And Markus Paul, the First Nations man, will expose it. Then John Proud will be free.”

“Then we had better go and do it.”

“But let’s ask this,” Alex said, holding him back. “What if, if, if there
is
a God?”

“Better off for it,” Leo said.

“Why?”

“God forgives.”

No lights came on, and the small tarpaper shingles, the yard littered with pulp and chips of wood, the small bleak windows, made it a reminder to Alex of his one-time plans to do some good in the world. Worse, they would be attacking two of the most vulnerable people on the river. Which in fact he had written an exposé about last year after his survey for the local New Democratic Party.

“This woman has one small fuse box, no phone, heats with wood, has arthritis, is vulnerable completely to some kind of menace or attack at night! Only a little neighbor girl comes over to give her comfort, and of course I do what I can!”

This would not look so good. This would not enhance his resumé.

“Well, I’m going to the door. You think I should?” Bourque asked. “We will wave the New Testament and smile. We have to get her just outside enough to grab her without the old bat knowing—okay?”

“Wait, it’s not late enough yet,” Alex said, with purpose holding him back.

“How late does it have to be?” Bourque replied, quite seriously.

“Please, please, a bit later than this.”

—

M
ARKUS
P
AUL TRIED TO REMEMBER HIS STEPS AND
movement that night of September 2, and then the next day. So excited was he at having the paint established as being almost certainly the paint from Poppy Bourque’s, he did not remember much of that night.

But then he had to piece together Amy’s steps. This is what he discovered over the long hours the next day, and what he finally told her parents as they sat at the table in the cramped little house, Sam’s homecoming jarred into the kind of freefall one has in a dream, where to hit the ground is to die forever.

It was the late afternoon of September 3 before Markus arrived at Patch’s lane, dried with caked mud, some small maples near the front steps and a small growth of windswept flowers against the east window, which looked back toward Lean-to Creek, and the divide of Arron Brook. He was visiting one of the last family holdouts upon the lesser Gum Road, with its parallel track along the river, and the long-forgotten Jameson tote road, where many a boy and girl had popped or lost their cherries in the past seventy years. As he walked, Markus looked at the Patches’ house and realized that in so many ways they had lived in the same way his parents had, beguiled and stupefied by a world they didn’t quite belong to, resting assured and assuring one another that they someday would, and never quite achieving that consistency of knowledge the world imparted as wonder and wisdom one day and scorned the next. So they, like his parents were and always would be, in at least a certain way outcasts. The present Sam brought home for Amy, with its yellow ribbons and pink wrapping, sat in the center of the table, forgotten completely from the moment Sam had set it down. A present that proved their outcast status, a blouse and matching shorts already out of date, which Sam wouldn’t have guessed in a million years but Amy realized in a nanosecond.

The new watch Sam wore—the only timepiece he had ever bought—seemed dazzling in its indictment against him, and Minnie, indicted too by the new diamond he had given her in the airport lounge, though neither were anything if not innocent of all. Yet the tragic scope of humanity now rested on their shoulders, and made Sam’s watch, bought with exuberance at his new and carefree life where money could be earned, seem somewhat naive and then self-accusatorial. This did not go unnoticed by Markus Paul, as little ever did.

He had just been down at the truck, he said, and the house, he said, where they had found, he said, the ticket. And yes it was, he said, worthy of its estimate of $13.2 million, such was the ways of the world, he said. The truck actually burned only what was unnecessary to prove the case against the two, and made the evidence almost mythically stand out against them, as if some creature of God, or some fairy that Amy had boldly stated she had once been saved by, had herself boldly stood up and procured the evidence against the two, so startling the fire was, to enable them to see exactly what evidence was there. So he said. He smiled a little and put his hat on the table, and offered Sam a cigarette.

“Can you tell us, as best you are able, what happened to her last night?” Sam asked. And although Sam almost never feared, his body trembled.

Markus told them Amy knew she could not make a move until dark—that was wise, and very wise, so she didn’t turn on the lights. She quietly sat watching the old woman nod off. She hardly breathed. She went about the house looking for the old shotgun she remembered being there. But it no longer was. A knife would be taken from her, she realized.

There were a hundred things she might or might not have done, but now they had been whittled down to one. She had to hide Fanny, and leave the house in the dark, and go, by one path or the other, through the rain, with one thought in mind, to get to a phone, and call 911 before they caught her. She realized with the giant clarity of a winged angel near her shoulder that if they caught her she would be killed. She knew, in fact, that they themselves had become something other. That “it” that Leo Tolstoy spoke about was present in them, Markus said. Neither Sam nor Minnie had heard of Tolstoy. So he told them that now either one or both would not be able to stop—and if one did stop, it would propel the other to keep going, with more and more vigor until the task was done, blaming his partner of betrayal, and demanding all the money for himself.

“Do you see?” Markus asked, about the direction of his logic.

Both nodded.

For they did not need Tolstoy to understand it. They had lived in its environs since they were born, been privy to all the grandeur and the indignity of man.

Amy was, after all, the only witness. But at least the dread of not being informed was gone, and she had decided, all eighty-six pounds of her, to fight.

—

J
UST AFTER DARKNESS FELL AT ABOUT QUARTER PAST EIGHT
she began to move Fanny to the stairs.

“But I don’t want to go, you haven’t made me my toast and tea.” This was a ritual, the toast and tea, Fanny dunking her toast into the tea and telling stories about her countless beaux and her younger years, as the clock ticked quietly and comfortingly. It was the trivial ritual that had started in the summer but, then again, should not be overlooked. But initially Amy felt they had to forgo it.

But when she came near, and tried to get Fanny to take the walker, Fanny scratched her, saying she wanted to be alone. At first, like most arguments, it was contained and reasonable, but still and all Amy knew better what might happen if Fanny was privy to the knowledge Amy now seemed certain of—that on that little trip up the path, her mind swimming with the thoughts of some miraculous hope, she had come across men who had just murdered. And she herself at this moment had greatly figured out why, just as Markus had earlier in the day.

“No, you have to go now.”

Amy’s face was cut by one of Fanny’s nails, so she grabbed the old woman’s hands and pinned her back.

“I don’t want to hurt you, but if I have to carry you, you are going upstairs and you will stay there.”

“You are not my mother, missy—I will tell you that. Why, you couldn’t hold a candle to my mother—”

“I am, however, your caretaker, and you are in my care!” Amy said, physically forcing the old lady, who was trying to hold on to the chair, to her feet. And all this time, too, Amy was trying not to indicate why she was being so unreasonable with the elderly woman.

“But I have to go to the toy-let, girl.”

“Well then come along, but you will have to sit in the dark.”

“I never heard anything so ridiculous, by a young girl. Why should I have to sit in the dark? Why do I have to sit in the dark?”

And she turned, and with Amy’s help began to use the walker, with its shiny surface, seeming as if it had captured a wounded animal and was some strange kind of animated cage.

“Turn on the light, girl, so a woman can wipe her twat!”

“Just do what I say, please,” Amy said calmly.

She now looked through the bathroom window. It led to a small back field of dark wet clover and some maples in two scraggly rows, near the alders where a small creek called Lean-to swept toward the indolent part of Arron Brook that would claim great ferocity near Glidden’s pool. She could open it now. But, Markus told her parents, her best instinct was to protect the old lady. So she sat the old lady on the toilet and let her pee. Then she put the kettle on to make tea.

It was then that they started to come toward the door. But she knew they could not speak, for they would give themselves away to Fanny. One of them waved her little New Testament in the air.

——

“What did she decide?” Sam asked.

“She decided not to let them in the house—and therefore she gave herself away, because they knew now that she knew about them! She looked out the window at them, and they at her. So finally the three of them, staring for that terrible moment at one another, were certain of what had to happen!”

“Who?” Minnie asked, staring at her feet. “Who would try to trick a child?”

“They would,” Markus said, without too much love for them at the moment.

So Markus continued, holding his notebook in the heat, his face suddenly sweating, and going over what he had discovered. Reading it off to them, he would stop at every half page and explain something, his hair cut close to his head except for the top, which made his cheeks look fat. The afternoon was very warm, and all of them were sweating. Though Sam had offered him a beer, as part of protocol he didn’t take it. The doors were opened and the late summer flies buzzed uncertainly, as if not understanding why grand avenues were suddenly so available to them.