The Lost Highway (40 page)

It was on the beer bottle that had cigarette butts in it. And that beer bottle very likely contained the last beer Poppy ever drank. It had been picked up by Bourque, who had dropped a cigarette into it. It was the only cigarette that was native brand. Poppy rolled his own from Players tobacco. Bourque had come into the house, and Poppy got ready to go out. Leo picked up the bottle and put his butt into it, just as Poppy was washing the paint off his hands. Markus envisioned a scenario where Leo had lit a cigarette in the truck and walked to the house, while Alex waited.

So Paul listened to those he considered very stupid people and was silent, and those people believed, as the only Micmac in the department, Paul was trying to thwart this investigation about a Micmac who had already confessed. It was a very slippery slope, they said, from enthusiasm to impeding progress. It was also, in the court of public opinion, something that would be looked askance at. Markus himself thought of it differently. That is, because of his race he was the enabler of their misdirection, and he knew it and could do nothing about it. He himself was the one red flag, and yet he himself had to keep pressing for their direction to change. Yet the more he pressed, the more he was the red flag, and the greater enabler of their misdirection did he become. If he stopped swimming against the current, took the easy road, he would be considered wise and brave, and Sergeant Bauer would applaud him and offer him the promotion he sought.

Markus Paul sat alone at lunch and most of the day, ate in the little restaurant by himself and went back to his apartment at night. He drank beer and stared out in hope at some spot in the trees as if some great magician of his people, the god Glooscap himself, who tamed the great bull moose by breaking his back, would make a path through the clouds and revisit him after four hundred years of his people being in the wilderness.

He even went along the road to small stores, to ask if anyone had come in to see about a lotto ticket. Though many, many did, no one remembered anything to do with Poppy Bourque. He would think this quest showed him to be a complete idiot. So he would try to reason other ways, and came back always to this: “Is it such an unusual thing, a lotto ticket—it must be—it has to be, but whose and why?”

He had no luck, however, so he thought long and hard about the truck in Chapman’s yard, about the break-in at the Chapman property. There were two in the house, at different times. It was not hard to figure out. They were looking for something very small. Then, after a few beers, it always came back to this: Why did the nephew, long a major player in the fight for Indian rights, suddenly fudge his moral equivalency? Why did he backtrack on support of those who he had written about in the papers? What was the problem that he would not support this man now when the evidence was both flimsy and circumstantial?

How come?

This, in fact, should have been Alex’s greatest fight.

Because he knows who did it, and Proud did not do it, Markus Paul thought. Which meant someone close to him or he himself did it?

“Glooscap will know,” Markus Paul said, thinking of the ducks in the air and birds in the great bed of the trees. “But Glooscap will not tell us mere mortals—for that we must figure it out ourselves.”

That is, what Young Chapman suspected was true. Markus Paul was studying him and finding his love of justice to be a perverse and self-serving anomaly. He did not set out to find this; it is simply what he found, by process of elimination.

What made Markus ill and queasy about this as he drank his beer that late afternoon with the smell of fall in the woods? It was his pent-up desire to blame Alex, because Markus had liked old Jim Chapman, and was very fond of him. It was Jim Chapman who had helped him through university. And Alex did not know this.

So the last thing he was saying was that a white man couldn’t feel the sting of injustice against the native. Surely he did not believe that it was only the native who understood the world? There was enough injustice in the world to go around. And most white men knew in some way the depths of betrayal they caused the First Nations people. In fact, what was strange, Old Jim had himself. And in some way Markus had had a relatively easy life compared to some whites, even Alex Chapman himself. No. It was something else: “REASON being.”

So Markus bided his time and wondered about all of this energy, these small whirlwinds blowing back and forth just under the surface of things.

And Markus in a way (in a way he did not know himself until this moment) wanted to put a stop to Alex Chapman, and his assumption that he knew better than other white men, because he believed he could approve or disapprove of the value of people like his uncle and like Minnie. And now Markus realized it had all come to this moment on the lost highway. That he had long watched Alex do this, and he would try to put a stop to it here. He would do this because of the self-important picture Alex had taken beside Markus’s sister, who was now dead and in the arms of Glooscap.

He shook slightly as he thought of it, toasted Glooscap, and said a prayer.

He just might quarantine Alex, who had damaged the reputation of his uncle for twenty years.

He just might show Alex that a man could and would appropriate everything in the world and anything from a life, except truth. Truth was something one could not, ever, appropriate.

He thought about the lotto ticket: What if the uncle, Jim Chapman, had the lotto ticket and Alex stole it!

Then he thought: It has to be wrong—he got everything in the will.

Still, he must decide to follow his gut instinct or not. It was follow the lotto ticket theory to the end of the line or not!

He sat smoking a cigarette and looking out at the darkness creeping over the bay and the foreboding look of cold coming in off the swells.

They are certain to do something else—something will force them, he thought.

So he decided to go once again to see Mr. Chapman.

—

T
HE DRIVEWAY WAS FLAT, WHITE WITH DUST AND COVERED
in fine gravel, and the sun was still warm on his uniform. He sat on his haunches looking at the tires of Old Chapman’s truck, and heard Alex coming up behind him in a kind of remote, hesitant way, peculiarly watching first from the trees, and then along the old creosote logs, and then up the path that 120 workers had taken over the fifty years of Chapman’s company, coming and going, ebb and flow, like lost dusty planets circling some faint falling star called Chapman’s Paving and Construction until that star imploded and drove them hither and yon into a botched universe.

Alex was about twenty yards away when Markus finally said, in his soft Micmac voice, “Do you know what I can’t tell?”

“What?” Alex asked, startled that his presence was known and that it had been known, and that in some way because of his surreptitious movement a state of guilt might be registered by the man.

Alex stopped walking and then started once more. He had come over to get some books that he wanted to show his class. He had the list written down because he now forgot things so easily, his mind was often a vague whirr, as if some fan were inside and he couldn’t stop it, like the fan you might hear in summer in another room and spend half the night awake in shadows. He certainly did not want Markus here, and he was wondering if he shouldn’t make some kind of demand—this was, after all, private property, Old Jim had signs everywhere. But Markus simply said, “I can’t tell if these are the tire marks.”

“What tire marks?” Alex said, offhandedly.

“The tire marks at the old road, if they were—well, it just might be the reason.”

“Reason—what reason?”

“The reason John Proud was at the house, to take and bring the truck back—that makes sense, doesn’t it?”

“I am not sure,” Alex said.

“Oh of course it does.” Markus turned and smiled. “It would almost have to be him—if this is the truck—”

“Why—?”

“Well, it means he was here sooner, and it means that we know what he was looking for—and then why he came back—but of course you would have to notice if the truck was gone, wouldn’t you?”

There was silence. Alex looked mystified, his blond eyelashes almost invisible when he blinked.

“The keys to the truck, that was small enough to riffle through jars and drawers—keys to the truck, that’s what he might have been riffling through things for.”

“Oh I see, yes,” Alex said relieved. “That certainly explains everything—”

“Except why would he go upstairs to try to find the keys?”

“Well, they could have been up there,” Alex said excitedly.

“Yes, they could have—”

Alex smiled at Markus, who didn’t seem to know this, and walked himself to the door. Markus rose, came behind him, brushing off his knees. He suddenly remembered a line Alex had said once last year when he was speaking about his takeover at Chapman’s Island. The line came to him now because he was thinking again of how Alex was fudging his moral responsibility, and he couldn’t prove why. But Markus had thought this a wonderful line at first until he realized that what it actually did was enforce a quality upon both races that neither deserved, and therefore made both red man and white man less human. But he said it now as Alex started to open the shed door: “When the red man fights against the white man, I am on the side of the red man.”

“Yes,” Alex said quickly. He flinched slightly as he unlocked the door. They went into the cool small outer room of the house, where sunlight made a sudden dazzling entrance, and Alex did not turn around.

“Ah yes,” Markus said after a moment, “I knew I was wrong.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you said you never took the truck.”

“I did not take it, no.”

“Then the keys were hanging on the key holder—just as they would have been when your uncle went to the Restigouche—and here they are now—”

“But he could have taken them and put them back? Or I could have put them there after I got my uncle.”

“Of course, well, yes—I know this, but you did not tell me that—that is, that you put them somewhere else? Then what was he riffling through the house for, what was he searching for—if the keys were there, and as you said, or hinted, they were there when you took them and went to get your uncle—but the bowls and jars and drawers were looked through—what, for a combination to a safe?”

“Perhaps,” Alex said quickly.

“Do you have a safe?”

“No—but Proud wouldn’t have known.”

“No—” Markus paused, “but he wouldn’t have searched to find the combination of something he didn’t know you had or had not—and in many break-ins the people simply take the safe if it is small enough.”

Alex was again silent. He looked perplexed, he blinked very quickly. His hair was caught in the sunlight through the kitchen window. Markus looked perplexed as well, looking at him closely. Then he shrugged and smiled and Alex gave a relieved: “I see—well, well, well.”

Then he turned about, ran the tap water very quickly, and washed his face. But there was no hand towel, and he stood with his face covered in drops of water, smiling. Markus pretended not to notice this.

“So we are almost back to square one—unless you used the truck yourself, before the day you went to get your uncle, and placed the keys somewhere else—”

“No—” Alex said with some torment, for the time to say this had come and gone. Now he could not say it without creating more suspicion.

“But we know that John Proud never used the truck either—”

“Why?”

“Well, to assume he did is to assume he came back and placed the keys on the key board exactly where they are, and then spent a lot of time riffling through papers—and though he was searching for things to rob, never took any item he could sell. He did not steal the 22.250 rifle in the upstairs hallway. Nor did he steal the truck!”

“No, he wouldn’t have done that,” Alex said, using both sleeves to wipe his face like a cat might use its paws.

“But you see, that’s a problem.”

“Why—I mean if you could just tell me why is everything all of a sudden a problem—that’s the thing, everything is a problem now, just because John Proud is in a bind. I mean, I am not trying to say he is guilty, I know there are many who like to blame the First Nations, I am not one. You know how many articles I’ve written—and who had his picture taken with your sister. So there! But we have to deal with some kind of reality.”

Markus paused for a moment. His hair was cut so that it was bunched at the top and shaved on the sides. It gave his cheeks and eyes a more pronounced and defining expression, which in some would seem sharp or aggressive but in Markus always made him appear jovial and dimpled, as if he was blushing. He stared at Alex a long, long moment—so Alex actually thought of running. Then he took a small pair of tweezers from his pocket and simply picked something off of Alex’s sleeve.

“I wonder where that came from?” he asked, smiling.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know,” Markus said, holding a small worm up to the window on the tweezers’ pincers. Then he said, “A maggot—on your sleeve!”

“A what?”

“A maggot.”

Alex said nothing. In fact, he was on the verge of confessing.

But Markus put the maggot into the sink, and simply said this: “That’s the thing, I am trying to deal with some kind of reality. Last year the Penniac man, who got off, left me shamefaced. Now I believe people want to blame an Indian for this, because of that. But it is not going to happen, not on my watch. For John Proud is innocent of everything except possibly trying to destroy himself.”

“Me, me—wants to blame the Indian man—me—I’m Alex Chapman—that’s who I am.”

“No, listen, please don’t get upset—I am not saying you.”

“Me of all people,” Alex continued, suddenly laughing at this absurdity.

Markus looked at him, stepped around him, ran the tap so the maggot would flush into the drain, and then said, “Well, we will figure it all out—come, I want to show you something.”

Markus, taking the keys, turned and went out the back way, through the shed again. Alex turned out the kitchen light and followed him with his hands in his pockets, and every few feet he tried to yawn. But now this fan, this summer fan whirring in the back of his conscience, was forcing him to sweat, was forcing the valve in his heart to squeak, was forcing untold thoughts too. He saw the truck again, like he did when he was at the lighthouse watching it through the binoculars; it had its own animation, its own aura about it now, and this aura was in a way dark and sinister.