The Lost Highway

by David Adams Richards

  Alex watched, then remembering the money his uncle had written to Mr. Roach, the messages he had placed in the papers looking for Alex’s mother, he was unable to come to terms with his betrayal, and turned and went home.

  Bourque stayed in Chapman’s house another hour, searching every room. He tried to be calm but he left much on the dull hardwood floors. Agitated and sweating he moved to the last few rooms on the third floor. There he paused and lit a cigarette. For five minutes he conjured up visions of the ticket and tried to remain calm.

  I will find it—and no one will get it before I do, he thought.

  When he entered the last small room upstairs, Alex’s, the moon was just coming out—the rain had stopped, and light glowed on the top of the truck and made it shimmer. He saw all of this in a daze because of his long hard day—but again the truck, parked behind the house and up against the willows at the edge of the property, struck him. He glanced up at the moon, and decided to leave. Then, quite suddenly, he was sure he knew where the ticket must be.

  He turned and headed back toward Alex’s. He was sorry that Alex was mixed up in this, and wondered if there was any way to keep him quiet if he found the ticket and did not want to share it. But this was a fleeting thought.

  “For now it is better if we share—for it will be one less person to worry about—later—later we will see.” He could not help but think this, even though he did not take it seriously. Of course he would give Alex his share, even though he still blamed the man for his difficulty. Again something plagued him, and he was uncertain as to exactly what. Then he shivered. Amy Patch.

  Leo Bourque crossed over the great desolation and moved under the moon, in the direction of Chapman’s little cabin.

  He had deduced certain things. Some people would get their noses bent out of joint by this, and he was certain some people would want an investigation. Poppy Bourque, therefore, was the key. Everyone loved him, just as everyone distrusted Jim Chapman. Poppy must cash this out for them—and say nothing about it too!

  —

  “WELL THEN WE FIND THE TICKET AND GO OUR SEPARATE ways—”

  “Yes,” Alex said, “that might be okay.”

  Bourque had come in without even knocking, and taken wine from the cupboard without even asking, and drank from the bottle without even hesitating. Thus began Alex’s true reversal of fortune. Up until this moment, as certain as he said he didn’t, he had always felt superior to this man. Now this man ran him, maneuvered him the way he wished.

  For the time being, Alex thought now, and he suddenly became animated.

  They began to discuss where the ticket might be. Leo was calm as he drank.

  “Let’s just say I have a firm idea of where it is,” Bourque said. “I might be wrong—and if I am we are still flat broke—if I am not wrong, however!”

  Bourque talked of his mother, and how she never had a penny and he was doing it for her. That all Poppy Bourque ever had was a pile of sawdust. Tears shimmering in his eyes, he talked about his father and his sister, and his look became fixated, his jaw set. But there was something that Alex could not readily put his finger on. Some self-deception unregistered yet present. For he had felt the same things himself.

  “Fine,” Alex said, shivering.

  Alex had experienced this same feeling in university, this feeling that what was said was not true but elevated to the status of truth by people who hid their own natures from themselves, in a kind of weird juxtaposition between learning and falsehood that they embraced with great connivance, in pleasant clothes.

  This, too, was how he felt about Bourque’s analogy. There was a lie somewhere. He looked at Bourque and the vague and uneasy familiarity came back. In a fleeting moment, a voice said, “You are going deeper into the abyss and might never return.”

  Just at this same moment Bourque was speaking about all the people on the lost highway who he loved. In fact, he seemed to love everyone at that moment.

  He spoke of his wife and said, “Yes, what could she do once I started taking pills—I was a mess. So she went out and got fucked by someone else, does that matter?” The way he said it showed he was trying to force himself to disregard it but could not.

  Alex, though, was aware of this voice, this small authoritative warning from his mother: “Stop now.”

  When Bourque simply said, “Well let’s go get this ticket—and no more fooling about.”

  “What do you want to do, search the house again—?”

  “Not on your life,” Bourque said, sniffing and smiling.

  “Well, where?”

  There was a pause and then Bourque smiled, as if he had just thought of something. “Will you give me an extra million or two if I get you this ticket right now?”

  Alex did not know if he was serious. “What do you mean—if you have it you better tell me,” Alex said, perhaps for the first time in his life asserting himself in front of a grown man. He was angry now, furious at this cat and mouse and also at this awful assumption Mr. Bourque had, that he could play this cat and mouse with his uncle’s ticket, and that Alex wouldn’t mind this horrible disregard of the Chapman family. Alex was also furious with himself for allowing this.

  “Oh I will tell you,” Bourque said, “and I will give it to you tonight—but I want an extra million out of your end to give to my uncle, for he is the key here. He must claim the ticket. We might have a problem if either of us did it—but we’ll say it is his—he got his oil changed in his old sawdust truck at the same time. Well, how do tickets get mixed up when you have a retard like Burton. Once he has it, he has it, and no one will say nothing—”

  Alex was silent. Then: “I don’t want all my money taken away—in fact it was my idea—”

  “But it is not your ticket—and I know where it is. It will still leave you with five million.”

  “Five!”

  “I will get six—a finder’s fee—since I know where it is—and my uncle gets two—he was going to get one anyway, but now he gets two—two is the amount. If we give him two it will shut him up—he is a wonderful man but he is a blabbermouth. Just a sawdust truck-driving fucker.”

  “Well what about my uncle—?”

  “Your uncle is your problem—I want nothing to do with your uncle,” Bourque said emphatically.

  There was a long and desperate pause as Alex tried to calculate what he could not, with Bourque staring at him.

  “What have you decided?”

  “I have decided we will do it tomorrow—”

  “Tomorrow might be too late.”

  “Tomorrow,” Alex said, for some reason.

  Doing it “tomorrow” instead of “tonight” would change their lives forever.

  —

  WEDNESDAY AND SATURDAY NIGHTS AMY TOOK A COURSE on Saint Mark at the church. So she would have to leave home after supper and make her way down the road and along the highway, with the sky clear and the distant stars steady and the dull chunks of sawdust off old Poppy Bourque’s truck, which had small bits of shiny crystal in them, under her feet. He had, that old man, loved Minnie’s mother for years and she did not love him back. He had waited for her but she had not. They said he once bought her a diamond ring, and when she refused it he threw it into the dirt on the Gum Road. To this day kids still looked for that ring when they walked it. The only thing that seemed to be left of this memory was his sawdust tracks on the road.

  As always people divide these journeys into sections, so did Amy. The long section was from the point of Old Chapman’s house down the steep grade to the church lane. Here, if she was late, she would leave the highway and walk through the junkyard, coming out on Chapman’s lane, then walking below Young Chapman’s cottage and along the windswept beach, up the steps, and into the church vestry, where chairs were set in a semicircle and a pot of tea was brewing. It saved about ten minutes.

  This, in fact, was her last night, the course finally coming to an end.

  Almost everyone at this study—from Irene Mc
Durmot to Betty and Lorne Everette—were senior citizens, some nearly eighty, and Amy a fifteen-year-old girl sitting among them, wondering what she was doing here. She had come in here one night, to sit in a pew. It was mainly just to get out of the rain for a time. But people were sitting down in the vestry, and Father MacIlvoy beckoned loudly through the open door: “Well I’m glad some young people still think this is great fun.” And waved her in, before she had a chance to close the big church door and escape.

  When she entered, the door closed with a thud behind her, and the smell of oak and burning candles encompassed her, and she was trapped. So she signed up for a course on Saint Mark, who she decided, now that it was all coming to an end, was the practical saint among the four gospel writers. Yet whose message to her was not one of the law, but one of the spirit of the law. And the priest MacIlvoy seemed to embody this as well. Well, she had a crush on MacIlvoy because he was so kind, and that’s why she couldn’t say no to the course. He had been a tough boy, a good hockey player, and at one time a delinquent—or so was said. But something had happened to him, and overnight he had changed. He became a priest, even when the priesthood was being ridiculed and scorned, and seemed to say to one and all: “If it is scorned by so many then it must have some value.”

  He had come along the year after Father Porier had died, and made a few changes. One was to place the grotto of the Virgin at the front of the church—for it was said that it was to her he prayed after years of defiling her memory.

  The way MacIlvoy spoke and what he thought important was not at all the law, even of the church, so much as the spirit of the law. The spirit of the law brokered all others, and made all law, in the end, insignificant. This is what so many parables, like the one about the good samaritan, stated, and the wind that came now and again reinforced it. That is, the nature of the law destroyed, and would always destroy, but the spirit of the law liberated you from all and everything. This is what she had learned from the course. To the secular world the law mattered very much—for everything was based on approval or disapproval. But there was, MacIlvoy said, another greater law.

  And when she realized what the priest said, what Mark was saying, she was staggered by beauty. That a man would write this, and then for two thousand years this would be used against others, and he, that man Mark, and all his brothers would be ridiculed and what they said cheapened. If this was the case, the world was doomed. She saw the grand dance of the world very much before her eyes this night.

  Saint Mark’s was of course a dangerous idea, a very bold one. Yet it was not thought about as bold or dangerous anymore, for those who promoted it seemed stymied and timid. Yet they had carried this message for two thousand years: That you could find freedom and ecstatic joy even when bound by a wheelchair.

  This is what the spirit of the law not only allowed but requested people do. This is what MacIlvoy tried his best to instill in them. He was a very plain speaker, but one who was very comfortable with the things he said.

  Tonight, listening to him, Amy’s idea of life was an inextinguishable lamp of joy, and inside, beyond all the confusion of her mother and father, who did not love each other enough, and all the problems with money, and the problems besides of all and everything, hers was an inexplicable love of life told to her from some living word. Word that was as true as water in the earth springing forth to quench her soul at the lower end of Glidden’s pool. As she listened to MacIlvoy read these words, she felt almost disembodied, and a part of the greater universe—but a universe not of form or substance but substantial and formless, vast as the creator.

  Among old and young, when the recesses of the vestry were cast in dark and the walls were lighted far away with candles, the message of Mark, read by MacIlvoy, stirred in her this wonder of some great “other” meaning for herself and the rest of mankind, a meaning caught in erstwhile glimpse of a greater wonder than could ever be known. And she had not even known the course was going to take place until she had stumbled into the room to rest out of the spitting rain.

  Now, she stared at Irene McDurmot’s hands, and realized the difficulty of the journey—for Irene’s journey was almost over, and yet still it was one that saw at moments the true and utter majesty of the world, even though now her head nodded, and she was asleep, and except for the wrinkles of her face like a child. One of the youngsters kicked Amy’s foot and winked when Irene’s head fell forward.

  But Amy did not stir. Irene—to her, at this moment, and having known something of her life—was a great lady, and no kick would do for laughter. She was transfixed. The difficulty of the journey made it spellbinding, the glow along the old walls increased the message.

  “Christ is with you,” MacIlvoy said, and he touched her forehead and made the sign of the cross.

  That alone, she thought at this moment, was greater than every bomb and torture man had ever devised.

  “Whenever two of you meet in my name, I am present with you,” MacIlvoy whispered.

  Her heart beat as soft as the air. The place was serene and still, with worn daily mass missiles lying on the far table. For a long while after the session ended she sat where she was, as others moved about her.

  She left and walked alone along the beach, a radiant joy in her eyes.

  So often the young are given this great gift of the heart in the autumn wind, seen only as spindly-legged children walking home in the cold, but when catching them at a right moment, you see their turbulent faces filled with awe.

  As Amy walked up the pathway from the rock-strewn beach, toward the lane, and stepped beyond the first row of small fir trees, toward Chapman’s lane, she heard two men arguing. It sounded strange and urgent, like a rustle of leaves—or “rats’ feet over glass in our dry cellar.” She slowed her walk and listened, curiously hoping for the telltale word, to make everything joyful once more.

  “Look,” one said, “it is over, leave it go—and you’ll see how it all works out—and besides it weren’t my fault it was yours! It was your fault too!”

  The other, shaking his head, simply was saying, “Oh oh, oh, oh.”

  “I know, but still—nothing bad has happened at all—in fact, these things are unavoidable in cases like this.”

  At this moment she stopped in her tracks, then started to back up without even knowing why. But fear welled up in her. As she stumbled, both looked her way. She fell to the ground, but stood immediately and started to brush her slacks off.

  “Hello there,” Leo Bourque said.

  She could just make out his eyes, as penetrating as a beam of light, glancing as he spoke. The other man turned, his own look somehow senile or deranged. He glanced back at her but for the first time did not nod.

  “Hello Alex,” she said.

  She walked by them quickly. Jim Chapman’s truck was sideways on the lane, as if its brakes had been jammed on, doors opened and engine running.

  When she got to the corner she ran, for some strange reason plagued her heart. Along the highway she did not stop.

  Alex saw and heard her as if in a dream. In fact, in the next few days he would not remember meeting her there, until Leo Bourque anxiously told him so. Told him they were looking for a truck. Told him she was the only one who knew.

  —

  TEN MINUTES BEFORE AMY HAD LEFT HER HOUSE TO WALK to the Saturday course on Saint Mark, old Jim Chapman’s truck moved slowly downriver, with Alex driving. It was a strange moment for Alex. He thought fleetingly about it. For all his worldly energy had come to this; the boy who once bullied him was going with him to this rendezvous with the uncle they hoped would help them claim a ticket they had not yet found. Although Bourque, sure of himself, said he would show Alex the ticket that night. They were in the truck of the uncle whom Alex had disowned, after stealing the keys from the house. So the sum total of Alex’s life had come to this, and he was the last person to think it would.

  Alex Chapman believed that man was the creator of his own destiny. He dressed warmly because of it,
made sure he took aspirin and vitamins and blood pressure pills. He had millions of intellectuals who agreed with him; the Canadian broadcast radio defined him and them every day as being the most rational and astute, and even the ones willing to save the world from itself. Politically correct thought abounded. Sanctity of the faith was almost always laughed at. He was devoted especially to the rights of women and the First Nations people. His many articles always said so. He was devoted especially to exposing social ills that others had created. He laughed at all religion as superstition. And if anyone called him on it he said, “I was a priest so I should know.” He mocked G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis and applauded Dan Brown.

  There was not a moment of grandeur in the common man that could not be turned against the common man for the benefit of some new idea. He had learned at university as much falsehood as anywhere else—and how to give up others at the drop of a hat for personal gain—yet people made thousands and thousands a year clinging to this falsehood. Worse, as a student he had done whatever he could to shock adults—and in some ways he still did. There were always people singled out for blame. And for a few years Alex helped orchestrate this blame. Like his uncle, who he used as a scapegoat a hundred times. At one time other professors were frightened of him, for he might blame them, and so sided with him against those who were too weak or too honorable to side with anyone. The power given to him in small rooms of study was surprising, even to himself.

  Knowing Minnie would have heard about his power he could not stop. He loved the idea of being outrageous. Of harming reputations. If he decided they needed to be harmed. That was up to him. In secret he had tried very hard to find the lie in Father MacIlvoy, which would entertain his friends. He did not, but as he said, that meant nothing. MacIlvoy was a priest and therefore culpable. He had been dazzled by his own rise to power within the student activists. He was mesmerized by the idea that he would get a tenure-track job, all the while feigning disinterest, knowing that they couldn’t take it from him.