The Lost Highway (28 page)

He decided to go the next day and bring his uncle home, and admit everything. That was the only way to clear it all up. Yes, but what was he clearing up? The death of a man who should have had no reason, ticket or no ticket, to fear anything about him. But now he realized with even more dread that none of this had had to happen.

For the first time in his life, Alex found himself pretending to be human, pretending to act in accordance with human ideals and humanity instead of simply being human. He found that this affected all manner of things: the way tea tasted, the way he walked, the way he could no longer look into a mirror face on. He had become a shadow even to himself, and all, and everything that he had mentioned in his youth now came back like bold writing to torment him.

As a man who did not believe in predetermination, or the laws of luck or chance, things he had no answer for were now happening. There was one more terribly strange sensation—and it hurt like hell. Thinking he must prove to Minnie something that essentially was unprovable, he had longed for her for years. And so he ended up stealing from her, and lying about her husband, to prove his love for her. And how much more would he do to prove love for someone he had never touched? He was a living refutation of Socrates, who blindly believed a wise man could not act against his own interest. (But of course Alex was not wise—or was he?) Now, once again, he was being pushed by events and the ticket, inconsistent in his thinking of how best to extricate himself from this. When just a few days ago he wouldn’t have conceived of saying this, he said at this moment: “I will tell Old Jim tomorrow, and we will get out of this together, no matter.”

He went to bed longing for clean sheets and an approving stare from someone—say, Amy Patch, or anyone at all.

He woke the next morning, but had a hard time walking to the truck. It seemed to stare at him as if it were living.

The long highway to Campbellton he drove—slowly and then much quicker, given to intemperate swings in his mood, he had no idea if he would make it. At times he pulled over and shook, he felt so terrible; at other times he was overcome with giddy speculation. He could not look at the seat beside him, so frightened he was.

When he arrived, the doctor took him aside and said he felt the old man would be more comfortable staying here, and that as a nephew and only living relative Alex must be aware that Jim had only weeks to live.

Alex, shaken by this news, asked Jim to stay where he was. But the old man said that was ridiculous. The hospital was short of beds—and he wasn’t going to spend his last days in a johnny shirt in a hallway. The doctor said they were worried about a drop in blood pressure. What was particularly upsetting to Alex was seeing old men in johnny shirts staring at him from beds, hooked up to IVs—some walking the hallways with IV poles. All of these men looked exactly like little Poppy Bourque. Many of them spoke French, and prattled on, and Alex was confused and then amazed that Jim was answering them in French—that he had spoken French most of his life, something Alex never managed to do.

“Take me home,” Old Chapman said to him, waving his trembling hand at nothing. Here was his fishing vest, his fishing rod, a road map, a cracked fly box, his waders covered in dried brown mud. The heavy-set nurse pointed to these with her left hand, as if indicating and even celebrating his demise. The old man’s knuckles were blue and protruded from dark wrinkled skin, as if crying out at the end of his life for justice or mercy or both.

On the way home, Jim’s voice was tired. He didn’t like how Alex drove—too bumpy. And he wanted to know who had been sitting in the middle of the seat.

Alex didn’t answer, and as they drove past certain places Jim became more and more giddy and animated. He then told Alex this: This building here, he constructed. That basement there—over there a warehouse—here is where he came to pick up a grader in 1960. When he got back home, Rosa had gone away.

“I never found her again—though I found her boy!”

Jim smiled and stared at Alex for a long time. It was unnerving. And then he said, “This is the road I built in 1955. This is my road. This road we drove when I got you at the foster home. When my search paid off! When I found you and brought you home—”

After a time he was silent. Then he said, “You know something now—you have everything that is mine.”

“I don’t need it,” Alex said.

“Well I’m not asking you if you do—but it’s yers—it always was—it was a promise I made to yer dead momma for treating her shabby.” He said this weakly, as if to himself.

“It’s all I have left.”

It was the last thing he said. They were near Tabusintac hill. When Alex turned to look, old Jim Chapman was dead, his eyes glazed, and his hands folded on his lap—exactly like Poppy’s had been. In death, Jim Chapman was seeming to tell Alex not to bother admitting what he now knew.

—

T
HE OLD MAN WAS WAKED IN THE SMALL CHAPEL AT ONE
end of the church. It was what Jim had requested, and Alex was happy about this, first because so few came, and second because he could not have people in the old man’s house. Nothing had been put straight in it since he and Leo had looked for the ticket, and he was worried someone would think a break-in had occurred.

The chapel was small. It was a closed coffin, with a picture of Jim sitting on it. In happier times it seemed. Fanny Groat was the first at the chapel, with Minnie and Amy. Fanny wore a fox shawl, and with her dyed black hair, her coarse-colored lipstick and her intensely self-absorbed face, she kept asking him questions about so many things that he finally went into the small side room and sat by himself, leaning ahead in his chair as if about to bolt. Burton stood alone with a kind of whimsy, his shadow cast by the light of one electric candle, and then some stragglers came in: some men from work, some women from the Catholic women’s league, some old soldiers who seemed happy to see other old soldiers there.

Father MacIlvoy came up to Alex and said, “It comes to us all sooner or later.”

A rather stupid saying, Alex decided.

The day was sweet and warm—one thought of a fine harvest—as they lowered the brown coffin into its resting place. Two of the pallbearers were those rough boys Jim had given the wine to on the day he held the party for Alex. One was bald. The other had ballooned to 270 pounds.

Alex longed to see Minnie alone—but when she came toward him, he turned quickly away, as if he had been scalded, and when he turned back she had gone down the steps of the church. There, as he came down, Amy was walking up. For the first time they looked at each other with a kind of mutual terror that came from a certain hidden knowledge. Amy seemed to be trying to decide what this knowledge was.

She looked away, smiling slightly, and he, feeling he must, patted her shoulder, then rushed toward the long lane to go home.

—

I
T WAS TWO HOURS AFTER THE FUNERAL OF
J
IM
C
HAPMAN
before Leo came out of his old shed, chewing a radish. It had spitted rain a little, the drops falling on the deep dust in the driveway, making deep dark marks in the dust and then drying out, leaving a kind of spotted depth.

He had worked all day quietly in the yard, on the wood. He spoke to no one. He, however, did wave at some cars. At about four in the afternoon Markus Paul arrived in his squad car, after his other work was done, to tell Leo that he believed the search would have to be discontinued, at least discontinued with the assumption that Old Poppy was alive, and might now be continued and scaled back with the certainty that the man was dead. He then took a walk up and down the drive looking, for some reason, at the truck’s tire marks.

“Dead—that’s bad news,” Leo said. They conversed in French—for Markus Paul was trilingual, knowing his own Micmac, French, and English.

“It will break the little girls’ hearts,” Leo said with certainty. “I will go out tonight and start the search again.”

“Where would you go?” Markus asked, by way of asking.

“Perhaps, who knows, he took a walk on the highway and was hit by a truck—sometimes that happens and they don’t report it.”

“Well, that’s true enough,” Markus said. “He could be somewhere along a ditch, the poor old man. These are tire marks from Poppy’s truck?”

Bourque nodded. “Why do you want to know?”

“Ah, nothing so much—just interested to know what truck was in that small woods lane.” He asked this as an inquiry, and Bourque knew it.

Bourque shrugged.

“Which way,” Markus asked, “would he have gone? I mean if he went out for a walk, late at night without his truck?”

“Up or down—one way or the other,” Leo sniffed.

“Yes—but for the fact that he was an old man, he might have done so. But I believe—here is what I believe, between you and I, Leo, and keep this in confidence please—I believe he was in for the night, and someone came to his house. I believe they enticed him out for a drink—maybe they had something for him, or wanted him to do something for them. In fact, I have tried to put myself in his shoes. I am an old man in for the night, getting ready for the biggest day of the year. I haven’t even finished loading my truck. Why would I expend energy going out? Perhaps I would go out if I knew someone—better yet since I was painting my signs and had no beer in the fridge, for the last bottle was empty with cigarette butts in it, then I might go for a beer—or if someone wanted to celebrate something with me. Someone who said he would come back later and help me get ready. So I am thinking someone French.”

“How do you know that?”

“Well, I don’t yet. But he spoke to Bridgette at quarter to nine, told her he was painting his signs and for her to get ready to be an ear of corn.”

“Does that matter?”

Markus shook his head. “He could not have gone too far in the dark—he didn’t take his flashlight. He didn’t take his truck. He had no reason to go unless someone offered him a drink. Most of his life he spent alone—most of his visitors, all in the last five years, were Acadian—at least 90 percent of them were.”

“Perhaps.”

“There is no one nearby who had him over for a drink—I checked—and the first English house is six miles farther upriver. So.”

“So.”

“So that likely makes the visitor French—but where would they be going to—?”

Leo shrugged, and looked down as if inspecting something.

“Brennen’s,” Markus Paul said, his face suddenly emptying of gravity and becoming delighted. “What do you think—Brennen’s?”

“Why?” Leo asked, his legs buckling just slightly.

“Simply because it is closest—fifteen miles closer than the bar downriver. So say they were on the way to Brennen’s.”

“Why couldn’t they go to the French bar downriver?”

“Well I don’t know—you got me there—but a couple of reasons: one, it was late, and they would want to get to the tavern before it closed, they would go to the closest one. He would go if he was told they wouldn’t be all night—say, for an hour or so.”

Leo shrugged again, turned his head away and immediately scratched his ear—a nervousness not lost on Markus.

“He mightn’t have gone with anyone—or if he did he may be somewhere else right now—”

“True enough!”

“So why Brennen’s if they were French?” Leo contended.

“Well, French go there,” Markus said.

Leo shrugged.

“You go there at times?”

Leo shrugged.

“Or maybe there was someone with them—English guy?” Markus paused, and then nodding at his own answer continued. “You see, an English guy driving; a French guy goes to the door.” (Here Markus pivoted on his legs a little to show his theory.) “They started to take him somewhere. But they didn’t make it. No one did—at least no one we can account for—so something happened on the way—”

“That’s if any of it happened,” Leo said.

“That’s right—that’s if any of it happened,” Markus said, staring at Leo for a long moment. “I know it’s far-fetched,” he said quietly.

“Did you check the camp where Johnny Proud hangs out?” Leo asked.

“Oh yes—and I will again—it’s all still open.” He smiled.

“Well that’s good,” Leo said. “I just hope the old lad comes walking up me drive. I’d certainly give him a big hug!”

“So would I,” Markus said.

Markus Paul believed it was murder over something—perhaps money. Probably committed late at night when Poppy was in a truck or fleeing from a truck. He believed Poppy had trusted those he was with. He believed it was two people. He also believed it was a French and an English man traveling together who knew the area. He believed it was an English man driving. All of this was easy for him. Police car tire marks didn’t hide the fact that the passenger side of the truck had two people come to it: Poppy and someone else. This in fact was terribly easy for him, even though his colleagues’ footprints hampered the evidence.

If it was an English-speaking and a French-speaking man—who were younger than the missing man—the French fellow would probably go to the door; the English man might be the one driving. That, to Markus, meant the truck came from upriver not downriver toward Shippigan or the French villages as Leo believed. He had already thought the truck was from the English side of the phone booth—simply because of where it was parked, on the English side. If it was from the French side, it would have been parked on a lane almost identical down from the house, not up. So all of this was suggested simply by the way the truck’s front tires had been positioned on the little pile of sawdust on the old logging lane.

“Of course,” Sergeant Bauer said, “that could have happened that morning or the evening before—and it may have been other people entirely.”

And all that could be true, if one did not think like Markus Paul.

Markus believed something terrible had happened, and the men had hidden the body. In the last two days, some had wondered why Markus would get the case. People who knew him said wasn’t his daddy worse than anyone, and what about his drop-her-pants sister and his renegade cousin Johnny Proud! This is what they were whispering already behind his back, and this is what he already knew. And they had begun to look at the reserve, which rested just in back of Poppy Bourque’s, as the place where the real culprit came from.