The Lost Highway (49 page)

“Why,” Minnie said, “would he do this to us?”

Markus did not answer this.

“I was always very fond of him,” she said, and she could not stop her voice from giving away a kind of yearning.

Sam said nothing. His hands, so powerful they looked in a way deformed, were placed on his lap, his new watch gleaming in the late summer air. Her new and only diamond ever on the finger of her left hand. He said nothing. When she looked at him, his eyes stared straight ahead.

“He couldn’t a been himself,” Sam said. “Something must have happened to him.” This to mitigate somewhat Minnie’s statement.

“Yes,” Markus said.

Sam himself was entertaining what all people wish to entertain, at certain moments, which is love for others. Love, even for Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, or Saddam Hussein.

“Yes, I believe at that moment he was not himself, but he was wrestling greatly with himself. And soon he would come to some other determination,” Markus said.

“What determination?”

“That he could not act, I suppose.”

And so they paused just a little.

“Her bravery is what we want to honor,” Markus said. “I am prepared to write to my commanding officer about it tomorrow, and see if she cannot receive some kind of citation.”

But the night before in the house, no citation was thought of. They had descended the four of them, into hell. Fanny started to ask if there was someone there, and she began to shake. Her eyes became watery and dim, she looked about the warm old house trying to find comfort in it. But it did not seem comforting, or even her place anymore. The knitting basket she no longer knitted from, where she hid candies from the kids, as a joke. The plate with a picture of Pope John XXIII. She grasped at these items as signs of security, and looked at the frail little girl taking care of her.

“What is wrong, Amy—what is wrong?”

But then everything was silent. So Amy, her little legs trembling under jeans with those snaps she thought would impress her friends, went about as if making plans for a dinner party, regardless of the tornado at the door.

“Nothing—but I will stay here as long as you do as I say,” Amy said. “You sit at the table and drink your tea.”

And she poured the woman tea, and tried to think what to do. There was nothing except hot water to heave in their faces if they came in. Old Fanny was not so unbecoming or not so mean now. That is, her personality was imbued with some measure of infinity that Amy realized she would have to protect to the death.

Markus paused and spoke of how he had accidentally discovered the ticket was sold by Burton. Then he informed them that Burton, all summer, had been telling people that someone would hurt the children. So, Markus said, his colleagues went to Burton and asked him about this. They were afraid it was Burton himself who might, being a man-child, worry about hurting children. But Burton, no matter how many times they took his hat or hid his little scow, had no intention of hurting anyone.

“He simply felt over this long hot summer that someone else would, and he didn’t know who. And in the end it came to these two.”

“How strange can the world be?” Sam Patch asked, his whole body suddenly shivering, his new shirt still stiff at the collar and crinkly at the arms.

He said he remembered sending a note by email to Mr. Bourque’s daughter, Bridgette, telling her to inform Leo of a job, where money would be well worth it. He did it as a gesture, to let Bourque, who was fired the same as he was, know he was thinking of him. Now he was sitting here, not a month later.

The idea, of course, could be construed as flowering from unrequited love on both their parts. It had happened to one and then the other over the years.

“What I am saying,” Markus told them, his hat sitting on the table by Amy’s present, and not mincing words even though Sam was there, “is that they both believed if they just did something grand, both would attain what they had lost, in some way, and that was love. They did not know they would ever be involved in anything besides the purloining of a ticket. And especially Mr. Bourque did not know—as he set his sights on Burton’s to buy a Bic lighter that August day, he who was planning to go out and see you, Mr. Patch, and get a job—that he would be involved in the murder of someone he loved three nights later. But soon he felt Amy’s death a matter of self-preservation—and not only that, a matter especially to young Mr. Chapman of saving face with the woman he loved, Amy’s mother.

“The consequences would be dire, but allowable as long as it wasn’t blamed on them. If it was blamed on them, Mr. Chapman’s whole reason for living his life, the forty years he had lived, would be nothing. His believing that he could at long last have your woman for himself.

“They could, they believed, after time readjust their lives to this child’s death. It was in fact—” he paused here, and then said, looking at his notebook, “a kind of seeking of great truth by the ultimate lie. For they were going to do good by her death, in a way, sanctify her afterwards.”

“What do you mean?” Sam asked.

“Make her a saint,” Minnie whispered. “Just as had happened to certain women throughout our history—like Joan of Arc.”

The parents listened in a kind of vacuum. The idea of Minnie and Alex’s unrequited love was so painful to Sam that at moments he could think of nothing else, and then his eyes would focus once again, realizing that in a thousand ways it was all true. He looked at his watch, to see the time as if in a calculated hope of comfort. He did not want to blame, but he knew that his years and years of back-breaking, mind-numbing work, in heat and cold, in some ways meant nothing at all to her. She loved the man who read books that in the end he himself betrayed. He suddenly cringed a little, when she took his hand.

Minnie listened in despair about Alex, her feet in the new sneakers she had bought pressing together in a way she had done since childhood, making her look now, and perhaps for the first time, like a middle-aged woman.

In despair, she thought of that boy on the church lane so long ago, and his gentle, wounded smile.

—

A
T ABOUT
8:30
THEY TRIED TO GET INTO THE HOUSE, BUT
the door was locked. Neither knew where she was now. One went to the front door—but it was up off the ground and he couldn’t reach it. The old timbers underneath looked as if the house wouldn’t last another winter.

The other went to the bathroom window, but Amy had closed and locked it with a hammer and nail.

“Where is she?” one whispered to the other. “Where in the world did she go—can you see inside?”

Then, suddenly, an upstairs window opened and scalding water was thrown toward Bourque. He stepped back, and the window closed.

“Did you see?” he said.

“What?”

“Did you see! Imagine!”

“No—I saw nothing,” Alex said.

“Boiling water!” Bourque said, looking up at the window in amazement.

The wind blew fresh rain again, against the forlorn shingles and tarpaper of Fanny Groat’s little house, and then the rain stopped. And in the midst of it all, a magnificent rainbow appeared far over the bay just before dark.

Amy had thrown boiling water over the porch tiles toward Bourque and had slammed the window shut. She was now on the stairs with the old woman, pushing her forward. One step at a time, up the uneven stairs. She had decided that if she was killed, and Fanny witnessed it, they would kill her too. But if the old woman was hidden, she might have a chance. So Amy was actually pushing the old woman upstairs to hide her, and at the same time, in a kind of dark comic horror, telling her nothing was wrong. Old Fanny’s feet hit the steps with a clunk, and the walker wobbled, and in trying to keep her equilibrium she said, “What about me muffin and me tea—what about that?”

“Tea, tea, tea, all you think of is tea!” Amy said. She stopped on the fourth stair and then the seventh. She rested, but did not let go her grip, though now and again the old lady tried to bite her.

“It won’t work,” she said. “You can bite me to the bone, and we still have to get upstairs.”

But it was a great and fearful experience for the old lady. She did not know if Amy was now in some kind of adolescent meanness and was doing this against her. Besides, over the summer they had, as they do with old ladies and gentlemen, moved her downstairs. She had not been upstairs in months. She didn’t remember it, and was in fact frightened to revisit it.

The rain had stopped, and though the trees sagged, everything was silent, except this pathetic clunk on the stairs, which was heard at the door.

The truck fire was out, yet both Alex and Bourque still smelled of kerosene. They could hear her whispering away to the old woman.

“That is,” Markus said now, “she feared sooner or later they would break down the door. Because now they could not stop, and the terrible realization of all that had gone on that summer plagued her. The idea of Proud’s innocence—and that she was the key to everything!”

“Please let me go, you little slut,” Fanny was saying.

But Amy said nothing. She knew when and when not to answer. She finally had Fanny in the back room, and was holding her down on the bed, and was thinking what to do.

“You’re trying to smother me for my money. Help! Police!” Fanny shouted.

As Amy sat upon the woman she counted the seconds in the dark, and thought she could smell smoke. For the world plays awful tricks upon you, and in the dark more than at any other time. The clouds were ragged just above the trees, sweeping away, so a cold moon was visible.

“What do you want—what do you want? I can’t breathe, I have bumps on my tongue—I have bumps on my tongue and I can’t breathe.”

“Let me see your tongue?” Amy said. “Yes, well, your tongue is fine. Wait a moment, don’t move—don’t move! I’m going down right now for your muffin.”

“You had better,” Fanny said, straightening up. “And toast it!”

Amy stood and tiptoed downstairs, realizing how much glitter, even in the dark, her snaps, which she was so proud of once, gave off.

She blessed herself and stood by the kitchen table. She said the Hail Mary. She said, “Mary, save me tonight and help me.”

“As long as they think I am here, I can get to my house,” she decided. The way to do this was not through either door, but through a window and onto the porch.

And jump.

She had, she decided, little time left for important decisions.

—

“Y
OU ASK WHEN THE FIGHT BETWEEN THEM STARTED
,” Markus said (although neither had asked). “It may have started in infancy between two kind of men, stereotypes to each other but nonetheless seemingly virtuous to themselves. One who liked to believe he was a genius at university, but needed the university in order to be one, who did not seem to realize the special relationship between true genius and being jilted by almost everyone you held dear. The other a would-be businessman, seller of shrimp and oysters on the dock, a hopeful wannabe for Mr. Cid Fouy, and in the end his patsy. One intellectual and one physical, one trying to be physical and the other trying to mask as intellectual, both rounding each other’s orbits until the end.”

The fight started long before they reached the house, over exactly how to kill her—and if in any way they gave the lie away, then he, Alex realized, could not be magnificently innocent later. As he had in fact proclaimed himself during the Chapman’s Island takeover. That is, he sided, as certain poets did, at the right time with those people who he’d never had to suffer as much as. It was in fact a fine feeling. And he now took it to the next logical step. He could suffer for Amy too, as long as she drowned.

For he had processed the information this way: one must continue to believe only what others did. That is, anything could be believed or not believed, approved or not approved. But the disapproval would come against him if it was considered murder. That is why with Bourque now becoming impatient, Alex realized how badly this might play out in the morning.

“Grab fagots,” Bourque said now, “and we will smoke them out!” And he began by breaking off small limbs and placing them about the foundation of the old house.

“I said, grab fagots!” he roared, almost incoherently. His anger with Alex was increasing and becoming as hard as metal.

“Stop,” Alex said, as Bourque went to light what he had piled up about the house with the Bic lighter he had bought three weeks earlier.

So he tried to explain to Bourque what he must. That is, if they did anything to the house, all the logic he had built in order to prosecute this little war would be moot, because it would be looked upon as a true crime, and not a suicide. Only a suicide helped them out of this spot they were in. It afforded the gravest claims against Sam Patch, if she killed herself, and the winning of Minnie. It allowed Bourque his money and the defeat of the Cid Fouy empire which he had helped create.

But Bourque was ready to kill her any way he had to. For, as he said, “It is time! And an accident is good too.”

“Accident be damned, that’s not what we decided, and we know we don’t want to burn her!”

“Burn her, drown her, what’s the difference!”

This is what Alex feared and what he argued with Bourque about. It had to be done in a way, nobly, for his secular opinions to hold water after the deed. In a way this thinking was absolutely understandable to a man in his position, not always given to passion or sentiment like some people, and quite remarkable and polemical in nature.

Not that it didn’t have a spark of insanity. But it did have common sense.

“If I am to parade about as being the one who tried to teach her ethics, I can’t be the one known to have killed her, which will happen as soon as the house goes up. And then,” he said, grabbing Bourque’s arm once more, “what about poor Fanny? She walks with a walker now, she won’t be able to get out.”

“She can move along pretty good with that walker,” Bourque said.

“Not fast enough—you know that?”

“So this will kick-start her, and she will move pretty good.”

“But in all of this we make Amy afraid, and we promised not to do so. We really promised we never would!”