The Lost Highway (44 page)

“Oh I’m not sure—there is no body of the poor old lad. The thing is, with the methamphetamine and the B&E John could do almost as much time—”

“Well I’d like to get him for the murder too—I mean, since he did it and everything.”

“Well we are working as fast as we can,” Markus said. He kept eating, staring down at the bowl. “Did you ever see Alex Chapman and John together?”

“Who?”

Markus put the spoon in his mouth, chewed, picked up a piece of bread, and shrugged. “With John—I mean, as a native rights activist—Alex Chapman?”

“Never,” Bourque said, with obvious disdain at the name. “Never—leave you Indians alone is what I say, then everyone could get along.”

“Oh ya, you say that?”

“Sure I do.”

Markus looked at him, put his spoon down and drank his small glass of wine. “Well there you go—”

Bourque did not answer this. Markus watched as Bourque lit a native-brand cigarette and offered him one.

“Sure,” Markus said. He stared around the little shed, and across to Poppy Bourque’s, and as if thinking of something his face lighted up, as it usually did, and he said: “So, Leo, what would you do if you won the lotto?”

Bourque said nothing. He simply stared.

Finally he said, “I don’t know—who knows. I hear many who get it blow it.”

“Is that what you would do—blow it?”

“I have no idea,” Bourque said, with a tone of voice which indicated he did not like being condescended to, and he was tough enough even with Markus Paul not to have to be.

Paul acknowledged this with a smile. “Well I know you don’t, and either do I—but someone you or I know very soon will have over $13 million.”

“How—?”

“A ticket was sold here somewhere.”

“Oh, well there you go,” Bourque said.

They stared at each other uncomfortably, eye to eye.

“You know what I’d do?” Markus said.

“What?”

“You know how Cid Fouy had that old Corvette?”

Bourque shrugged.

Markus smiled again.

“I’d get myself a Porsche. Put him to shame. That is, if I ever got hands on that ticket!” He added: “Sure as hell!”

—

W
HAT WAS COMING APART IN
B
OURQUE’S PLANS WAS THE
actual physical aspect of the case. He knew this as Markus left—yes, it would all fall apart, trucks and tires and footprints in the sand. There was almost no way to alleviate this. He paced and grumbled and threw the almost full pot of chowder his sister had lovingly gave him over the floor. Then he had to mop it up, and felt all the stings of the world. He wondered about Alex, and what he might be doing. And was anything worth it anymore. That is, was tomorrow still the day? That is, though Bourque now realized it was all but over, he still looked blindly for a way out.

What was closing in on his partner was the mental fatigue and torture. They wouldn’t see another few days without some desperate measure taking place. Neither of them knew what this measure would be. But both of them now lived constantly in each other’s minds and skin.

The man known as Alex Chapman still paraded about, slowly of course, still elaborated on how he would find the cure for cancer once all of this was put behind him, still said he was doing it for his mother’s memory, still wanted and insisted that people call him professor when he taught his course on ethics. Still thought that someday very soon, after he received his money, he would revive his career at another university—perhaps the wonderfully secular University of Toronto itself. That is, his whole life was as positive as a terribly right-thinking member of the New Democratic Party—except for the lotto ticket itself. Such is the prize that once had is soon taxing.

At noon tomorrow, Mrs. Hanson would leave the child alone with Fanny to go down and pick up Minnie and Samuel Patch coming in on the plane. Sam was actually named after Sam Johnson by his mother’s doctor, Dr. Hennessey, who was reading Boswell at the time. But this Sam had grade 7. There would for the first time that summer be no attendant adults around. Only Amy and the old lady.

They had to entice Amy out of the house. The ruse actually was Minnie herself, and he, Alex, was supposed to be the ruser, for Amy knew him.

“Just tell her Minnie was in a car accident and is laying face down in a ditch somewhere, gurgling and kicking.”

“That, however, may be a little offputting.”

“Why?” Bourque had asked yesterday.

“She might expect a ruse if it is me.”

“I daresay she won’t.”

“Well she might,” Alex said peevishly. “And if she does, the game is over.”

“I daresay she won’t.”

“What if she brings Old Fanny with her?”

“Then it’s curtains for them both,” Bourque said. “With all due respect to Fanny, she’d drown as quick as a kitten.”

“But then will they say both of them committed suicide over the same boy?”

“Well no, but she might have tried to save little bitty Amy?”

Bourque had convinced Alex (and did it take so much convincing?) that if Amy lived, it thwarted his altruistic and humanitarian plans. This worked on a plain that took hours upon exhaustive hours of reasoning to reach. Then Alex teetered upon this elusive plain for a second, thinking all would be well, only to find himself one short hour later having to navigate the same murky and foul terrain to reach it all over again, with Bourque’s help. That is why all of this repetition went on, day in and day out, with the same problems and same solutions discussed again and again. However, Bourque seemed already to have found a foothold on this plain and remained, teetering but balanced.

Bourque had found a military name for the campaign, to keep him in place: Emboldened Currents. They did not talk the last few days about “it” without this military name attached. For Bourque, this seemed so much better. The idea that this was an emboldened act was at least stabilizing. Made them seem mischievous if not quite heroic.

Alex drank some green tea and ate a peach. Again he would have to go over to his uncle’s and get the books, for he had not gotten them the day Markus was there.

“But if he says the paint matches?” he asked Bourquey, the name Leo wanted to be called at times.

That is, what it came down to now had nothing to do with Amy.

“Even if she dies we are still in the crosshairs,” Bourque did acknowledge.

“Then why must we do it?” Alex asked.

“It helps—for if she is not around there is still a good enough chance to charge Proud.”

And so today—that is, the day before Amy was to be finally left alone on that lonely road—Alex proceeded in the dreary afternoon to find his books, for there was still a course on ethics he must teach. For what all this semantics did was show the lucid flexibility of his thought.

“Yes, I am a consummate thinker,” he decided, as he crossed over the old lane where Amy had stood that night and made his way toward Chapman’s house. However, he staggered now and again, and the pale cooling grasses sometimes trapped his sandals and made his toes pain, and he labored when he breathed, and if truth be told he had not taken his blood pressure pills, for he courted in some way oblivion now, and asked someone, in some way, for it.

The house was growing dark inside. The late shadows of afternoon crept over it, and when the rain stopped periodic bursts of sunlight came in certain windows and then faded as suddenly as they came. This happened when he was on the stairs walking to the third landing. A sudden ray of light pressed against the side of his face, bathing him in sudden warmth, and then just as spontaneously disappeared. For some reason he was shaken by this. It was simply because this used to happen to him on those long ago days after school, when he trudged up the wooden stairs to his apartment to see his mom, and for some strange reason this came back to him now.

It was also unnerving for him to be anywhere in the house. Too much of his belittled history was here, but this only reinforced his heartbreak that he was no longer as he had been—and the torment he had endured as an innocent boy and teenager was in many respects far more appealing to him then the nausea he felt at having become a denizen of hidden actions.

I will give my money to the church, the thought came suddenly. Why? He did not know. How insane for a man who believed in his own power and intellect.

So he approached his room knowing that the last time he had entered here he had been free, and now he was not.

The books were still there. His uncle for all his talk had not sold them, and not even moved them. There was his unfinished doctoral thesis (he was to finish it before tenure, but dropped it once he was pushed aside). His work, in part, was on the tragic imperialization of First Nations peoples, and the philosophical and moral duty one had to practice civil disobedience against this.

He trembled as he remembered Saint Francis’s dialogue with Brother Leo: “In what way do we find true joy—”

“In being tormented and left outside, broken and cold—for only on the cross is the tree of joy found!”

He began to take the books out and lay them on his bed. He shrugged at every one he tossed, as if they no longer mattered to him. But he would have to teach them. Strangely, he could not find his Penguin edition of Aristotle’s
Ethics,
the one with “Athena Mourning” on its cover. He looked through his bookshelf half a dozen times. He was puzzled, because like many men who love books he could go to any bookshelf he owned and find the book he sought. Yet he could not find it here. Perhaps it was the copy he had given to Amy? No, he had given her an extra copy.

He gathered the rest of the books and went to leave when he saw Aristotle on the bed stand by the window.

Strange?

He picked it up, carried it over to the rest of the books, and noticed a small piece of lined paper that must have come from a notebook. He wondered, for he didn’t remember writing anything inside this edition, what it was.

What was written was simply this: Read page 124. Thanks a bunch, Markus.

Alex went downstairs with the book in his hand, the others littered on the bed because he did not take them. He shook like a timid child going to the principal’s office. He could not stop shaking, and rubbing his mouth. He kept trying to rationalize why this was written, and whatever possessed Paul to ask him to do this. He hoped, or felt, that perhaps it was something benign and interesting. Something that showed that Markus truly respected him.

This then is what Alex Chapman read on page 124:

A bad moral state, once formed, is not easily amended.

Again, it is unreasonable to suppose that a man who acts unjustly or licentiously does not wish to be unjust or licentious; and if anyone, without being in ignorance, acts in a way that will make him unjust, he will be voluntarily unjust; but it does not follow that he can stop being unjust, and be just, if he wants to—no more than a sick man can become healthy, even though (it may be) his sickness is voluntary, being the result of incontinent living and disobeying his doctors. There was a time when it was open to him not to be ill; but when he had once thrown away his chance, it was gone; just as when one had once let go of a stone, it is too late to get it back—but the agent was responsible for throwing it, because the origin of the action was in himself. So too it was at first open to the unjust and licentious persons not to become such, and therefore they are voluntarily what they are; but now that they have become what they are, it is no longer open to them not to be such.

He had let go of the stone and it was too late to get it back. If only he had not let go of the stone, and become what he had become, and now it was not in his power not to be such. This was Aristotle, the man he was about to teach Amy and others. Many of them were middle-aged, privileged women belonging to book clubs. Some would dote on him and bring him cookies. He liked the feeling of authority and being coddled at the same time. He had wanted Amy to see this, too, so she would recognize him as the same learned figure those poor ladies did. Their husbands worked at the mines or in the mill; they would go to Christmas parties where their husbands would dance half the night with the secretaries. And there was at times much sadness in these women’s lives. At times, with all his mild manners, he liked to rebuke them about their ignorant, self-satisfied husbands, and they would look startled and guilty.

That is, in many ways he had really let go of the stone long, long, long ago. The stone had fallen far away from him now. To get it back he would have to become like Saint Francis said, broken and alone, tormented and outcast. But would his own Brother Leo ever acknowledge this?

He stood at six foot two. His thin body was becoming crooked, and his back was bending down. He could still manage a hysterical look whenever he was frightened or annoyed.

All I have done for everyone, he thought, all I have done—what will become of me now?

He crossed the darkening field and saw a buck deer, with its horns in velvet, standing in shadow down the way, near those trees that he associated with his aunt and his mother. Sunlight came on those velvet antlers and glowed, as if a halo. It was Amy’s Stardust, which had crossed the road.

The deer turned and moved against the grain of the day, and like some elliptical shadow disappeared beyond the old woodlot. But Alex kept looking behind him for this deer, while coming into Chapman’s lane. He turned his head to watch it again, seeing the antlers glowing as it made its jump, just where he and Leo had come to a stop on that horrible night.

Suddenly he tripped over a windfall, and found himself covered in mud.

“Damn,” he said.

Yet what was even more startling was sitting right before him in the lane: a New Testament. He picked it up and looked at its soiled, wet pages, and the name on the inside cover: Amy.

He wanted to leave it there, where it was, but was compelled to bring it back to his cabin, to try to dry it out, to take care of it, for some reason, like a mother does a child. Not because it was the New Testament but because Amy was written on the inside cover.