The Lost Highway (18 page)

“Yes, you don’t fool with me—I will wait my time and then you will see.”

He snapped the crowbar against his hand, and it hurt. He grimaced, once again like a child.

“And my name is not Chapman!” he shouted.

Of course in so many ways over the years the fight had been taken out of him. He had over the years almost accepted his role as an outsider and oddity on the highway, that desolate stretch where the heat now formed in the afternoon sun. Who else talked of Plato when fifteen? Who pushed him down when he had? Who anointed him with laughter when he tried to relate a story written by de Maupassant? Did he know that in order for some to exercise their manliness they set him up to be bullied and tormented, and then stepped in as his savior, hoping for a dollar? Of course he did. And he always had. And he hated himself for his knowledge without action. He was a weakling, and even now breaking into a house with a crowbar seemed to take too much from him.

He thought of this in despair. One day Old Chapman, seeing him bullied, had brought him to a cement single-story building, down on the property where he had a plant that housed bags of cement and lime.

“Come with me,” he said, “and you can get stronger.”

Old Chapman tried to make Alex lift these cement bags from the floor to the first staging, and told him Sam Patch would teach him. But nothing was more foreign to Alex than to force weights into the air, and his hands slipped. He was furious at the old man for making fun of him.

“I am not making fun,” Jim said, confused and angered by this. “I just know it will make you stronger—give yourself six months—it is not a bad thing to do, I swear! You get at it now!”

Alex never could do it, and Sam took the task to himself while Alex sat in the corner day in and day out—watching up the yard for the old man to show. Then he would jump to his feet and pretend to have just lifted a bag.

So what, he thought, and he now thought of the millions in his grasp. So none of that mattered now!

Of course he would live much better than they would with this money. That is, he would give tons of it away. Minnie would come to see who he was. For as always Minnie was in his mind. She was the principal object and artistic quest, like Dante’s Beatrice or Keats’s Frannie; he too had a woman out of reach.

Yes, it was all possible now, as soon as he got the ticket!

But what he thought would be very easy to do, once his uncle went out, he discovered wasn’t as easy as he supposed. If he got caught, he might end up in jail. The ticket would be lost. But what he also realized was this: the old man might still be home—upstairs asleep. What would happen? He would be caught at something that Burton or even little Amy might just figure out!

Well then he would make up an excuse, say he was coming for his books. Anyone would believe that! His uncle had said he would sell his books on Plato and Aristotle if he did not take them out of the house. Certainly he had a right to them.

“We will have to see,” he said.

But then Sam Patch—how could he just blame him and have him fired? Because he thought he was better than Sam—and he realized this, and was slightly ashamed. But what he was most ashamed of is that things had worked out for Sam, after all of Alex’s planning and subterfuge, and not for him, who believed always in being the master of his own fate.

So he bit down on his tongue and pried open the old shed door. The lock seemed to give way with a sudden immaculate spring, and the door fell open. It was quiet, musty, and the same internal smell of their lives that made it distinct prevalent in the air. He paused, heard nothing. He thought of his old aunt standing at the door, waving to him on the way home from school.

He had snapped the new lock open—the hinges were busted, and screws fell to the floor. He would have to replace all of this, he decided, and then he moved through the small archway into the house, thinking that his uncle was right, that he was an awful, ungrateful nephew.

“First time for everything,” he muttered. He thought of himself now as a foster child coming back to deal with those who had raised him poorly. He realized how often in life this happened, and felt strangely enough as if his life had a meaning beyond his own consciousness because of this very act. When he turned a corner into the front hallway he saw himself in a mirror, and was surprised, and did not quite recognize himself.

The house, in its bareness, seemed to display the hidden facets of Young Chapman’s life. He was reminded of himself playing in sections of the house no one went to now, when he walked through large old rooms and half-hidden sections. Sometimes he spent afternoons searching out places his mother might have stood, and standing there too.

Half the furniture was covered in white sheets. The grandfather clock had stopped. The calendar had not been changed since Muriel’s death, and if truth be told he had not been in since then. Really, he had left his uncle to himself. After his aunt’s death, his uncle tried to get him to come for supper and invited him to play cribbage. Old Chapman had left Muriel’s apron—with its flowers, daisies with the smiling faces—hanging near the back stove, placed there by her on the last day of her life. Alex, who hated sentiment, was suddenly sorry for his uncle, without wanting to be.

Then he noticed something that froze him. His uncle’s medication had been left behind, forgotten on the table. He had forgotten it and so would get dizzy spells if he did not have it. A panic set in.

Alex knew he should take him this bottle of medicine. But then, how could he?

For moments he stood petrified staring at this bottle of green and white pills.

“He must have another one with him,” he said. But he knew this probably wasn’t the case.

He did not know the house would bring this compassion for his foe to life.

He did not understand that crime was always better if done in groups of three or four—where no one played the ultimate role.

That is, sin was almost always a collaboration.

Still, he had to stay the course, keep going until the end. He was shaking violently and speaking to himself.

“If I get the ticket I will give so much of it away I will live in almost the same kind of poverty I do now. In fact, people will look upon me as an example of what a good man would do with money. People will know why I studied the way I did all these years. This is true, but first I have to find the ticket.”

He thought of Minnie and the Beatles album that long ago day. She would come to him, once he had this ticket, and he would have what he had wanted from the moment he first saw her.

He searched that afternoon for almost four hours. The house was closed up, and when he came into the sunshine his eyes squinted as much as those of a condemned prisoner. He thought of what Father Hut had told him: “To give your life for others is both the greatest challenge and the greatest joy.”

Nonsense, he now thought. At any rate, he knew all that.

And then he would think, Perhaps there is no ticket at all.

He went back to the kitchen and began to search through the drawers more and more forcefully, until the drawers themselves were messed up and he had to then try to straighten them out. But in his wild search some papers had fallen out onto the floor, and he didn’t know which drawer they had fallen from. He hadn’t even noticed, and it was as if a trick had been played upon him. He couldn’t believe that he who wanted to be careful had left his boot prints on these papers. He picked them up hurriedly. He began to shake. It was of all things his great-aunt’s recipe for the chocolate pie she made him when something bad had happened—when his pens had been taken, his coupons destroyed, or he’d had to walk home from a dance alone—and she had wanted to take his pain away.

“Give me the ticket!” he yelled.

—

A
LEX THOUGHT OF HIS UNIVERSITY DAYS, AND HOW LITTLE
he had done with all he had learned. He thought too of how many people had far less opportunity than he, and had made much more of their lives. He thought too of how he had tried to change and inflame Minnie, by writing her letters and telling her of how many women were independent. But no matter how angry his letters were to her—how much he accused her—he could not forget her for a second, and that she had married a man beneath him. He went to bed each night at university dreaming of Minnie coming to him.

“Sam will never take you off the river—I would have,” he wrote her once. But at all these points in his dreaming, where they would fly away to some exotic spot, there was no little Amy sitting beside her. And in his mind Amy did not exist.

That is, he had been able to decide by all proper methods her demise, without ever seeing her. Until one day, after he had returned home, she simply appeared from behind the car, as fully alive as he had ever been, with her hands, feet, and eyes exquisitely her own—not just now her own, but her own eternally.

So now he had placed her, this brilliant, elfin, and awkward little girl, in his ethics course to instruct her on how to live.

He lay down that afternoon, and fell in and out of sleep. He began to remember other moments in his life, with his right arm over his eyes and his feet up on the couch arm.

——

He and his mother walking to the train station.

It was already after dark—and they had to go down a long street with almost no lights except the light of a store at the end, and there his mom stopped and bought him a bag of candy—he remembered her hands were raw in the cold. She had spent the afternoon dressing him up, making him presentable to a man he did not know very well at all. Then she instructed him on what to say, and how to say it. But when they got there, his father was leaving. That man called Roach who hated him for being born, who hated of all things Alex’s nationality—for Roach disliked the Catholics, and didn’t mind telling Rosa so.

But that night he even smiled at little Alex and touched his cheek in kindness. Alex didn’t understand, and smiled back. But after that Mr. Roach didn’t look at him. He didn’t want to look at his son. He didn’t know what to say to him. Alex lifted his bag of candy, and smiled. The man’s lips trembled slightly, but he turned sideways. The smell of diesel signified a parting—and this man, Alex overheard, accused his mother of getting pregnant to make him stay.

It became evident that he thought she would have money from the Chapman business, and that she had been disowned because of this very man she tried now to hang on to. It took Alex years and years to understand this. This sorrow-laden evening in the snow. This sad, sad parting of people who should have loved.

Alex tried to understand by watching him, his movements. He remembered all of this now. There was a sudden Protestant reserve to Roach’s hatred of them, their Catholicism, and his self-indulgence at what his family had put up with on their behalf. It had gone back, it seemed, to Alex’s own grandfather, who had been in a dispute with Old Jim.

So now Roach reminded them. Yes, this was the right time to turn on them, when they were alone and defenseless.

His mother stood on the platform, and she did not cry while others were there in the sweet sorrow of parting. His mother was a young girl, really, in a cold foreign town. She had schedules for buses in her coat pocket to travel back through the drifts of snow to her apartment.

Thinking of this, Alex lying on the couch was so rigid he couldn’t move.

Why did he think of these things now? Why did he think of Mr. Roach, his father? He tried not to believe he had become anything like his father. That Eugene Gallant was his father.

He had hated men like his father, Mr. Roach, all of his life. Those stiff, puritanical, edgy frauds of some past injury they never themselves partook in but could bring up in a second as their own. And thinking this, he realized he had done it too. On Chapman’s Island with the Micmac, and many times in trying to control Minnie.

“No,” he said, “I was never like that!”

Was this the reason he wanted Minnie not to have the child—to keep her from some disgrace he felt he had once caused his own mother? But would he have stopped his own existence to prevent such a disgrace?

In some ways Alex thought of all men as Mr. Roach, and all women as his mother.

—

T
HE NEXT MORNING
A
LEX WOKE IN A SWEAT, COUGHING
. For a moment no thought came to him except a nice one, of being by the river as a child, watching fish in a pool. He thought of this and stretched. Another day, and the heat and soundlessness of the little shack. Then he sat bolt upright and remembered he hadn’t fixed his uncle’s shed door, he had left it open. Anyone could have gotten in. What if someone else found the ticket?

“Let me find the ticket today, and I will never ask you for another thing,” he said, his heart pounding. He got out of bed, and walked to a chair where he sat.

“Get me the ticket!” he said, taking his blood pressure medicine.

But who was he saying this to?

Could man have hope in anything without believing in something beyond themselves? This was the whole idea of the lotto. Wasn’t it?

It was perverted Christ worship. The sole idea of his ethics course was to debunk this.

Now he had come full circle.

He got up and pulled on his pants, went to the bathroom and washed—looked suddenly at his orange, ragged hair, and trembled to think how much he looked like his great-uncle.

He looked across the room into a mirror. His hair was matted, his beard gray and grizzled. He could pass for anyone along the lost highway now. Any of the dozens of men he had grown up with, who he at one time had thought he was so different than.

If he had money, nothing would ever bother him. He believed, in fact, he would get back at everyone. Except: no one had bothered him in years. No one had cared why or what he did, or what he said. After all his learning, the thousands of books he had read, he was waltzing with ghosts that no longer existed. Women who no longer knew him, who could pass him in the street and not recognize him, or ever say his name in longing. The breasts he once desired were now old. All gave and were given up, and still he evoked the idea that someone was waiting for him.