The Lost Highway

by David Adams Richards

  “I won’t tell you who she is, but I loved her with all my heart and soul. But I never touched her—never, never!”

  Nonetheless, Burton knew who this woman was. Alex loved Burton’s Aunt Minnie—would always and forever love her and her alone. Her husband, Sam Patch, had worked for Alex and his uncle, but was let go last year and was now working out west, with his wife and child, Amy Patch, still here. Sometimes (and people were not fools) Alex would walk up the back road, just to stare at the house, standing in the shadows in the rain.

  Burton now told Alex of the good news he had. He felt that this news supplanted any animosity the young man might have for the older Chapman. Burton said in the great gusts of words he always had when he began to speak: “I don’t think anyone will have to do anything for James now on—which is what I am trying to say, boys oh boy.”

  Alex looked puzzled. And then alarmed. “Why, did something happen—did he die?”

  “Not so likely,” Burton said.

  “What did he come into, some windfall?” he asked now.

  “Yes,” Burton said, lighting a cigarette so its smoke drifted on the air. He had never learned to puff on a cigarette. In some ways he simply spit into it, and then held it. Took it to his mouth and spit into it again, and watched the person he was speaking to for some sign of approval.

  “What kind of windfall?” Young Chapman asked, looking back out toward the bay, at darkness coming over the waves. Yesterday he had phoned his uncle to ask for his copy of Moby Dick back.

  “Moby Dick—you won’t even get a copy of Moby dickless. And who would ever want to have a copy of Moby Dick—what a bad name for a book—I could have made up a better name than that in my sleep—and who would write such a godawful book named like that—”

  Most people ignored Young Chapman. They would see him coming and they would raise their arms in the air as if to fend him off, turn and go away. One night he began to talk to a man who hardly recognized him, and it was discovered that Alex was continuing a conversation he had had with this man six years before—and continuing it at the very same part of the logic.

  “I am simply saying that, for instance—Stalin—Joe—would he have kept money away from his own nephew?”

  “You’re an idiot,” the man said. “He killed his nephew.”

  But Alex plodded on, certain that he had a right to say what he had to say. And this year his course on ethics was once again going to be offered. He was going to talk in this course about the wise man being the good man, bereft of petty desire. And in the last moment he was going to mention his uncle keeping the house from him.

  “Lotto,” Burton sniffed now.

  “Lotto,” Alex whispered, perplexed, as if it didn’t register. He had never thought of anyone actually winning a lotto. He pressed his lips together as if he were a child. It might have been the pool hall lotto worth $60 every Tuesday night. But there was a feeling deep in his body that it was very much more.

  He kept his face to the bay for another moment, and shoved his hands into his jeans pockets. The sand was now cooling. He did not completely trust Burton Tucker to know this.

  Burton, too, was thinking this. For as long as he was alive it seemed that nothing important had been given to Burton except, in a strange way, life itself. But there was also, especially about a lottery—yes, especially about a lottery—an enticement to believe in fate, some design from the heavens themselves. Yes, the witch’s hurly-burly still captivated even professors of economics. So many people played lotto on the auspiciousness of birthdays and wedding anniversaries, or some dim remembered date that they had tucked away in their mind, all thinking that these particular moments were sweet wormholes into the deity of luck.

  Alex knew Minnie Patch played the lotto every week. He thought of this now.

  “Lotto,” Burton said again, with the infuriating self-righteousness slow people sometimes have, and nodded goodbye, as if his mission to Alex’s great-uncle bore all the certainty of purpose of a saintly pilgrimage.

  Alex looked up toward the steeple off to his left, to the fading grotto of the Virgin.

  “Come,” he said, suddenly holding Tucker’s arm, “where you off to?”

  “To tell Mr. Chapman.”

  Alex’s whole rationalization, for life itself, was Darwinism modified by randomness.

  This, too, is what he taught in his course. In fact, his life was known by this kind of secular obstinacy, and he had defined himself by it in a way which had set him apart from others. Oh, there were many on the river who didn’t believe in anything anymore, just like he, but his crusade against everything his uncle was had taken it to a different level.

  In fact, he believed that what had happened to him over the last twenty-three years proved conclusively, once and for all time, the absence of any divinity. He was both fair and honest, and yet never got ahead. He had remembered his mother dying with such pain, when two days before her death it was his birthday and she had struggled that day to get up and celebrate with him. Each time he thought of this, his legs would begin to tremble and water would start in his eyes. He was correct when he said to his students, in his course: “You can be a good man, a kind man, an officer of the human race, without having luck on your side. I have suffered enough, and have harmed no one.”

  The worst of it was, it was all true.

  Some nights at the garage over the past summer he would tell Burton, with great poignancy, that his mother’s death had caused a death in him. And that for a long while religion had replaced her, for he felt he had nothing else. Until he said he finally understood something grander: that there was nothing in shadows but whimsy, that religion was a corporation, and that the cardinals were shareholders in the deceit. So he told Burton that a fly was not ordered to light upon the table, and there was no consequential determination when it put its little hairy feet down. From that fly one could move up or down the entire genetic scale, far past his great-uncle’s “brutal” construction firm, to realize that a whole universe could explode and no god ordered it or cared. It was empty and devoid of meaning until we made it so. He said it was ridiculous for a priest, in this day and age, of all days and ages, to think he could take holy water and bless something. Especially a house. Burton remembered Alex said that the poorer the Catholics were the more they were blessed, but they never seemed to get any richer. They even stunk. He said: “If God cared, there would have been no Holocaust.”

  “Sure, God don’t care,” Burton would say, more to keep a friend than to reveal an opinion. And the man would nod, as if he had a friend. “Sure—God never cared—and if I saw God, I’d tell him so.”

  And then Burton would trail off and try to go somewhere, and say he liked to get home early to watch The Dukes of Hazzard and he hoped Alex didn’t mind. For Burton was simple-minded and went to church because others did.

  Alex’s master’s thesis was on Stalin’s five-year plans and the historical significance of the battle of Stalingrad, and how the Second World War was really one against Stalin and his progressive ideology.

  “If I was Stalin,” he would often tell Burton, “no uncle would bother me.”

  “No, of course not—if you was Stalin—haven’t met him myself—nor do I expect to, but if I do—well, boys oh boys—” Then silence would overcome him. There would be a long embarrassed moment.

  “I’m only saying,” Alex would declare.

  “I know,” Burton would say. “You is only saying.”

  “God loves you too—just like he loves me,” Poppy said to Alex one night.

  Alex disliked this particular association, for he felt and he always had felt superior to Poppy Bourque, who always wore a big T-shirt with a lobster saluting you and saying, BON AMI!

  “Where are you going?” Alex asked Burton now.

  “Tell him,” Burton said.

  “Tell who—?”

  “Tell Old Jimmy Chapman.”

  “Tell him what?”

  “Tell him he won the lot
to—and is rich as can be.”

  “You mean he doesn’t know?” Suddenly Alex’s face expanded slightly, as if brightening on this darkening night, the one frail and undeniably elusive glimmer of hope.

  “No—unless he’s keeping it all to himself.”

  They were on the shore slope, in the dark and the spent day, where they could smell idle oil on the waves and hear the last calls of gulls sweeping over the water, near the little island called Chapman’s Island. Alex’s house was on the left, up a wooden staircase from the beach, into the dark stand of wood. It was a small place, hidden by half-dead spruce trees. The dooryard was dirt, and the trees in back had been scorched by a forest fire twenty-three years before, and Alex as a boy had gone out and helped beat back the flames with a broom.

  “How do you know he has won?” Alex asked, curious. “If he doesn’t—shouldn’t he know—shouldn’t he have come to tell you?”

  “I wrote down his number after I give him the ticket for the oil change. He mustn’t have looked at it yet.”

  It struck Young Chapman as absolutely absurd, this moment, for just as the stars were now coming alive in the sky above the evening smoke, above the wonderful river and the twinkling lights, so was his imagination being kindled by all of this. For wasn’t it he who had convinced poor Burton to give out free lotto tickets? (They weren’t free; he just charged it on the oil change.)

  But more to the point, wasn’t it Alex who had been asked by James Chapman to take the truck in for an oil change on that day? And what had he said?

  “Take it in yourself, I’m no longer under your thumb—”

  “Fine—then my thumb won’t be lifted to help you—” Old Chapman had retorted.

  And both had tried to slam the receivers into each other’s ear.

  What a moment to pick to say no. How could he have decided at that moment to? What was he thinking? Well, there might be an answer. The answer, of course, explained by his former religion, was that he never decided—that he had chosen freely, but had not decided. He thought of this explanation given in his first year of Catholic study: God either wills or allows, and so Satan sweeping toward the heavenly host did not know that every beat of the great expanse of his wings, toward his own destruction, had been understood a million, million, and plus a million years, and yet it was still Satan’s choice. The old priest who explained this seemed very pleased, as if he himself was getting back, if not at Satan, at some form of pestilence that had plagued him in his youth. And then all of them traipsed behind him as they went down to the wharf to bless the herring boats. That night two boats were lost in a storm. Leo Bourque’s captain, Eugene Gallant, died.

  “I’ll write you out of the will,” the old man had said in exasperation last week.

  “You have nothing left anyway,” Alex had gloated. Well, he shouldn’t have said that. That wasn’t very nice.

  “We’ll see,” Chapman answered, “all the things I have and will have and you will have nothing—you’ll freeze your little rat-shaped arse off!”

  “Ya—we’ll see old Jimmy boy.” Alex said, “Go blow yer nose.”

  When he went back to the house three days ago to pick up some of his books, he was ordered not to come within five hundred feet of the house.

  “You are not allowed to see my chimney smoke—that’s what the officer said.”

  Alex would stand five hundred feet away, and the old man would yell at him:

  “If that is 499, I’m phoning.”

  “It’s exactly five hundred—I counted them—exactly five hundred.”

  “Well, my feet are bigger than yours and it’s my feet that count.”

  “The only time your feet counted was when you were booting me in the arse.”

  “Ya, well you might need another one.”

  “I am five hundred feet.”

  “I will go get my measure.”

  “Measure me all you want.”

  They would yell back and forth at one another like mountain hikers yodeling away. It was all fine. And the more people knew that they yelled and squabbled, the better it was. This childish insanity had been perfectly fine, this brutal infantile tit-for-tat, until this horrible moment.

  Alex now picked up a stone, threw it to the water sullenly. Then he looked at Burton, and grimaced slightly and put his hand on his arm.

  “Listen, Burton, my buddy. How much?”

  “A lot—if you think I don’t know,” Burton said, sniffing and spitting and grimacing.

  “Come on up to my house,” Alex said.

  Burton shrugged as if it didn’t matter one way or the other, and the two of them trudged off toward the wooden stairs that led up to the soft, dark woods above.

  —

  WHEN HE GOT TO THE TOP, BURTON TUCKER LOOKED BACK toward the shore and saw the last bit of twilight against the languid waters and thought fleetingly of old Mrs. Chapman, who he used to carry down the stairs of her own place to rest a while on the beach. She would always wear the big ludicrous sun hat and smoke her Players cigarettes as she painted some seagull on the waves and talked about her nephew, in between bouts of smoker’s cough and her talk of gin rummy, in hopeful terms—even when the company was going under and in the heat of midday you could hear from across the field Alex being shouted at by his uncle in the small office on the construction site.

  “Fine communist you are—even a communist knows how to use a peevie.”

  “I did not say I was a communist—that’s what you say.”

  “Ya, you’re just like every other communist I ever met.”

  “Ya, well how many did you meet?”

  “You’re the first.”

  “You call me a communist and I will sue you blind.”

  “Like I said, fine communist you are.”

  The old lady would shake her head and smoke and cough.

  Burton thought of what Muriel used to say to him because he was kind to both her and her husband.

  “Burton, someday, maybe a year or so after I have died, you will look down from the cliff and you will remember that I sat here this day, and when you look down across the shoreline and see a sunset that I painted with my brush, I will be thinking of you and already you will know that I have brought you a great gift for doing all these kind things for me now—and that we are all God’s children caught within his painting.”

  And of course it was easy to believe, because he now could never not think of Mrs. Chapman when he looked toward the shore.

  But he also knew she had died a year ago today. And now her two remaining loved ones, her husband and her great-nephew, were at each other’s throats like weasels. And he wondered, as well as he could, if there wasn’t some awful art in that.

  After Sammy Patch left, the Chapman construction business sat moribund like a wounded bull moose in a bog. Men just did not come back in to work. They knew that like a dying animal, the business was done.

  Old Chapman in panic tried to get a buyer. Some men tried to buy him out. The offer was good, even legitimate—but Jim couldn’t see himself selling out to people who had once worked for him. The deal went sour. And the men drifted away.

  Now the old man for spite had put Alex off the property. There were books—two more shelves that he wanted to take out of the house—and his thesis. If only he had taken the truck in to have the oil changed things may have worked. The one favor the old man had asked of him.

  “Take the truck in.”

  “Go fuck yourself.”

  Alex thought over his life—in a fleeting second, yet a multitude of events were presented to him. And this was clear: If Old Chapman got back on his feet, Alex would pay the price for that terrible falling out, and for everything else. He would be crucified if Jim got rich again. The whole point of their back and forth tit-for-tat is that neither had anything. If one of them suddenly had something, what then might happen to the other?

  Of course, fleetingly he thought this: Cicero, his favorite philosopher, would tell him to let it go—tha
t his life was more worthy than anything anyone might say or do to him. Yet Cicero didn’t convince him at this moment. For he knew that those who mocked him now would mock him worse if Jim got the money. He tried to think of a way around this. But he couldn’t. The only thing he knew was that Jimmy, with his big shaggy head of hair, his cold and indifferent meanness of spirit, would humiliate him if he ever got that money, because he had humiliated him so much when he was a boy.

  He’ll find a stairs to kick me down, Alex thought.

  He asked Burton about this ticket and if he had sold it, or had just given it away.

  “I didn’t sell it,” Burton said. “I give it as part of the deal on oil change—just like you advised.”

  “I never advised that,” he said, “you made some mistake—I never did.” Everything about this night was suddenly trancelike. His shelf of books, the wondrous world of history and philosophy, stared him in the face. Those bold secular humanists whom he believed in. Could they help him now? Why couldn’t belief in those books give him peace now? For what he argued at least as well as most was his indifference to the desires of man.

  “Yes,” he would say drinking at the tavern, after his sixth or seventh beer, “I am completely indifferent to the desires of man—” Of course he knew he wasn’t. But he liked to say it. It impressed a few indifferent people.

  “Well—” he answered now, “what I mean to say is if you didn’t sell it, then you won’t get the percentage—I don’t think.”

  “Oh,” Burton said. And he did look wounded, slightly, by this remark. Burton was easily wounded, and would for days disappear because of an uncalled-for remark. But still and all, he was wounded because of the hidden glee in Alex’s remark—the kind that says: I will not be happy if you get a sniff more than I do.

  “So would your percentage be a big score or what?” Alex asked, putting his hand through his matted hair and down the back of his neck.

  “I don’t know,” Burton said. “But I should tell him anyways—if I get the percentage or not.”