The Lost Highway (37 page)

Alex knew this to be true as well. All of this then he knew to be true, up until the moment he thought of Amy. Then he could not accomplish in his mind that which they were planning to do.

But his partner took another leap of logic and said this, while looking back down at the floor again and again whispering into the darkness before them, “I have long been interested in wife beating.”

“What—what do you mean?” Alex said, breathing harshly against the quiet blackness.

“I simply mean this, fool. I have never hurt my wife, but she hurt me. And I know two women from downriver who killed their husbands, their defense being they feared for their lives—I am simply assuming the husbands did not have time to fear for theirs before they were shot. If they had taken the ultimate act, as bad as that was, they themselves would be living. This is what we must do in order to continue to live. Amy will terrorize us if we don’t.”

Alex’s mother had died of a broken heart. He used to go out at night and search for his father so he would take his mother’s heartbreak away.

“I will get the money,” she kept telling him, “I will, just you wait and see!”

And Alex’s life had started out with the deep conviction he could change this, change the very act of needing money or of ever hurting women. He could not stand to hear a woman cry.

Bourque told him that all that was beside the point now.

Alex tried to think of Socrates telling Plato one afternoon, after eating some soup, that he was going across the street for a moment to drown a child.

“Why?”

“So she won’t snitch that I stole some ducks!”

And Plato saying, “Get her!”

Bourque in this darkness had taken a quantum leap to land on Stalin’s plateau. That is, would it stop with Amy? Would they have to kill Fanny, and then Minnie, and then old Mrs. Hanson who owned the little store—or the nurse that came in twice a week?

Alex knew very well that poor little Koba the Dread had never any intention of stopping his killing until there was no one left but him.

He decided Bourque was a terrible right winger. So that, too, was in a way a mark against him. So now he looked at Bourque and tried to infuse the man with this kind of polar enmity.

But then he suddenly felt this: Leftism—the fashionable angst-ridden bullying kind he had known, that which paraded itself as just and morally superior and a balm to women, the kind he had used to subjugate Minnie—was now in limbo, or had been washed away, or at least it had entered a different stage, covered up in politics and perfume, where in its transition it had made the common justice seekers, who were now entitled and privileged, spoiled and infantile by their very views of the world. Were the right wingers better? Of course not. But the ideas Alex had of peace, along with other elaborate men and women of conscience, had by their varying forms of hypocrisy enabled war and bloodshed and the untold slaughter of millions.

“She is very, very sad about Rory—” Leo said. “That’s what little Bridgette told me. She was his sweetheart and now he is—well, people drift apart—I know it’s terrible, but they do! The only thing she has beyond that bridge in that little alcove is her pollywogs. And now they are taking that little spot away from her. It is tragic, really.” Bourque actually had tears in his eyes.

“Terrible times,” Alex whispered now.

It seemed all of this and more to Leo also, who asked Alex genuinely if he wanted to go and lie down, or have some tea.

“If worse comes to worse, and we have to, we can always blame Burton—everyone knows what he’s like! A little girl-diddler if there ever was one!”

—

I
T WAS STARTLING, BUT THAT NIGHT SITTING IN THE
darkness Alex was compelled to tell Leo about the Maid of Orleans; that is, almost the same story that Amy told.

What he wanted to know was how “Bourquey,” as Bourque was suddenly insisting he be called, would understand it, fathom it, and to what conclusions they might come regarding it, and did it have anything to do with them—that is, did 1430 have anything to do with them? Was it really more than five centuries ago, or could it have been just yesterday?

What did that little girl look like? In fact, could she have looked a bit like Amy Patch? In fact, at this moment Alex was sure she had. He asked this, as Bourquey was making him tea.

“I doubt it—” Bourque said.

“Can we be sure, Bourquey?” Alex’s hair stuck up in huge curls from his forehead—because he hadn’t managed to get it cut.

Leo shrugged and said, “It was probably a different case!”

Alex trembled. He spoke about her hearing the voice of God. He realized that atheists like himself (and he was the first, he said, to admit it) always had a problem with this little girl—oh, they wanted to admire her, for her courage, but they didn’t in the end believe her. George Bernard Shaw was one. Perhaps it was her diet, who knew what they ate back then? Pig intestines, mostly.

“Really?”

“Pig guts was a big source of nourishment.”

“I can see that,” Bourque said. “They wouldn’t be so bad in a stew!”

And of course the feminists found her problematic. He knew that. But, Alex said, as if he just had an epiphany, many feminists he knew found every woman outside their comfort zone of political gain problematic. Alex had always tried to agree with them, to agree with their sense of entitlement, cast in an arena of victimhood. How could he abandon them now for a little saint like Joan?

“You can’t abandon them,” Leo said, “for women had to bear the brunt!”

“Don’t tell me, I know how women had to bear the brunt—I knew it before you!”

“Did not!”

“Well, at any rate so you see here it is—if Joan of Arc came along again, she would again be burned—so I am just following the new religion. They would have to burn her to a crisp.”

“Well we aren’t going to burn Amy—we are only going to drown her—!” Bourque answered victoriously.

It was strange for Alex to say all this. But did he want to change his opinions now? Could he protect Amy, who disagreed with everything he had ever said, if he himself was in danger to be put in jail for life? He would not last in jail. He would perhaps be raped. Most certainly killed. But to do it for Amy Patch? To go to jail in order to keep her alive? That was true courage. Of course he had been arrested for protesting the lack of a women’s clinic. He had spent a night in jail, and was interviewed the next day. He had believed he was courting danger then!

But, he said, even the French didn’t believe our little maid, and he asked Bourquey, as Bourque was insisting he be called, if they as atheists had a problem with Amy, just as atheists had a problem with little Joan.

“Not a bit of it, boy,” Bourque sniffed.

“Well, she has taken a course on Saint Mark!”

“Lot of good it did her,” Bourque said.

But Leo wanted to know what happened to Joan.

So Alex continued. The British controlled a good deal of France, and Charles VII was an absent king, a worldly king without a country.

“Is that so?”

This voice Joan heard. This voice of God coming to a peasant girl, and this voice told her to raise an army. Over persecution and ignorance, she did, and she battled the English and defeated them—it was a masterful, wondrous thing, Alex said. Yet she was captured.

“Cookie?” Bourque asked. He had brought a bag of homemade cookies from his sister.

Alex munched on the cookie as he spoke, a napkin on his knee. And then the dilemma for Charles, back in power on the throne: the little girl captured by the English; the English willing to leave him on the throne if he just gave them the little lady. Why? Because they did not want anything to do with a warrior who heard the living God. It would be better if she had heard the devil or nothing at all. In a way, the English gave Charles the option of keeping grand France in exchange for little Joan.

“Do you see how this was a predicament?”

“Absolument,” Leo said, scratching his pocked face quickly—and quicker than usual.

“A worldly predicament?”

“Oui.”

“And one without precedent, really, except maybe the inescapable quandary of—”

“Of who?”

“Why, of Pontius Pilate.”

“Really.”

“Yes.”

“You don’t say.”

Bourque was now sitting at the table with him. They could see each other’s eyes and faces and no more. Alex tried a bit more of the cookie.

Yes, the quandary was much the same. And they too, the judges of 1430, wanted to have Joan admit that she didn’t hear the voice of God. She could not admit such a thing.

“I suppose she couldn’t if she thought she did,” Leo said, taking her side.

“No, they wanted her lessened, just as we want Amy lessened.”

Bourque gave a start, and then nodded neither one way or the other. For Alex was making a comparison that was not entirely comforting. But Alex, if he had ever searched for the truth, must search for it here.

“And King Charlie was much like me—this big cheese didn’t mind giving up his integrity—his soul, if he had any—by giving up the savior of his kingdom, by giving up this sweet child—like Amy keeping care of old Fanny Groat all summer long in the dark little place up the hill!”

“That stretches it,” Bourque said. “That really stretches it!”

There was a long pause as he finished his cookie.

“And so what happened to the little girl?”

“She was burned at the stake—with an unfortunate aside.”

“And what was this unfortunate aside—I mean, it seems unfortunate already.”

“Ah—you see, for young girls especially, the executioner always had pity, and would strangle them just before the fire was lighted. But she was guarded by so many English troops he couldn’t manage to do it, so she was burned alive.”

“Ahh,” Bourque said, spitting.

He told Alex to shut up. He talked about once getting a steam burn instead. Then he turned to go, back along the lost highway well after night had fallen.

—

M
ARKUS
P
AUL WAS BRILLIANT, AND TOUGH, AND WITHOUT
debt in the world. Of course I am not talking about financial debt. He had enough of that. I am speaking of moral debt. He had nothing of that. And how did he know, how could he be sure of having no moral debt, when so many millions upon millions of people did? He knew that Johnny Proud did not kill Poppy Bourque, and he knew that everyone believed he had. Proud had lost thirty-four pounds and most of his teeth from meth. But even in his delusion he was not a murderer. But in defending Proud a defaming was set against Markus, to which he never believed he would be vulnerable. They said of him he was wanting to deflect guilt from his cousin to shadows who were never there. Some truck that may have been just a young boy getting jerked off by his girlfriend who wanted at this time in her life to remain a technical virgin. They laughed and told him one hot sour day that they would search for a spot of cum to prove it.

Markus saw how the whites simply assumed Proud’s guilt, and were contented with being assured of it. And he saw how his own reserve believed it, and in fact like the whites around them, wanted it as well. For if it was John Proud, that little boy who had thrown the rocks at the bear to protect the seminary student—if it were him, well so many local and immediate problems would be solved on the reserve. He wouldn’t be waking up drunk in other people’s houses, or trying to break into cars. He would be out of the white man’s hair and off the reserve as well.

In jail where he belonged. For he had finally gone and done it.

Bourque was right. Poppy had problems with the men at the camp, and had threatened to phone the police. So that was the tie-in that Bauer was using. Markus, though he knew of this, wanted to dispel it, for he believed it a red herring.

Still, if he had said it was that way, Markus would have solved the case and have gotten a promotion. QED. This is what everyone wanted; even the band chief, who stated he was angered they would immediately charge a First Nations man, secretly wanted Proud out of his hair.

All, then, were waiting for Markus to say the case was solved, and get a promotion and walk about like a big Indian. But he could not. And not being able to do this, caused those who he had admired, and who he believed had once admired him, to change toward him. To open doors for others, and close them when he approached, and to keep information about the case from him, so he was seriously hampered, even concerning the imprint of the tires. For everyone knew who did it, and who had confessed.

They wanted the Proud case solved.

Well, Markus stubbornly said, he could not solve that case. He might solve another one involving a truck late at night. He might be able to do that. But doing so would lead him down a darker, more harrowing, and less traveled road where even the more liberal of our society might blame him for so-called pettifogging. But he believed this was the road he must stay on. Until he was successful or until he was proven wrong.

It was quite simple, and he had already mentioned it to Alex. Nothing was taken from Old Chapman’s house, and nothing was missing from Poppy Bourque’s the night he disappeared. It was only after the fact that John Proud came back and tried to steal a floor lamp. But is that the reason he came back? Markus did not think so. That is, perhaps Leo Bourque, who knew him, and knew what shape he was in, sent him there as a decoy.

Yet others decided John Proud was breaking into old men’s houses, and carrying them off and putting them somewhere where they could not be found. Markus wanted to talk to the professor of ethics about this, but as he did he became more and more aware of a man fudging his own moral standard. It was what people did, and Markus saw it all the time. But he was surprised how quickly Alex conceded guilt for Mr. Proud, when he had not conceded guilt on a man who a few years before had been guilty. That is, Alex had marched to a drum for the rights of the First Nations, and called anyone who would not see his point of view racist. Markus Paul himself did not march. He would be living proof of the rights of the First Nations. That is, he would be living proof of the dignity of a human being. That was unfortunate for him. Because it meant he could not fudge his moral standard, as did certain men who pretended to have a moral standard regarding his rights as a First Nations man. They had wanted him to become more visible, and he hadn’t. They had wanted him not to charge the Penniac man, and he had. And as strange as it was, they wanted him to charge the Proud man, and he could not. So the idea was that this was favoritism for his cousin, and the worst case of native nepotism. If he was wrong it would be written about everyplace. He knew this and steadied himself.