The Lost Highway

by David Adams Richards

  Leo’s emotion was akin to a patient learning that not only did they discover a bit of cancer, but in fact he only had a week to live.

  What Leo noticed was his wife’s body movement—her little gestures that he had witnessed ten thousand times—when she was confused or tried to please someone because she did not want an argument. And it was these gestures that made him forget what her obscenely self-confident boss had done—and made him love her all over again. He knew she was being questioned about him—Leo—and he knew he was being hunted. He knew why he feared when Markus Paul didn’t come to see him, almost as much as he feared when he did.

  It was about an hour and a half later, in his own shed, eating his supper alone, when Bourque’s sister came to tell him that Constable Paul had been to the house, and had said they had picked up Johnny Proud for the disappearance.

  “Oh I hope that’s not true,” Bourque said sadly. But he eyed his sister cautiously, thinking that Markus Paul might have sent her to trick him, and in one second remembering the thousand small betrayals that were committed by his sister’s easy gaining of confidence from him over the years, even telling Doreen when he wouldn’t be home so she could move her things. This betrayal was first and foremost in his mind now.

  But after a time he thought he was very lucky to have Proud blamed. This made him euphoric for a bit, until he thought this: If Amy was ever to keep silent about the truck, which he had convinced himself she would, she couldn’t if she believed they had arrested someone who had nothing to do with the crime. She would have to tell what she knew, as a moral obligation.

  “But what are the possibilities of her thinking this,” he wondered. “Tell me, what are the possibilities of her thinking she has to report us?”

  And the answer came: VERY HIGH.

  Sooner or later, even if it was a year from now, she would figure it out. At the very latest, on the day they cashed the ticket she would speak.

  He poured himself a last glass of wine, and stared off into nothing at all.

  John Proud being arrested actually upped the ante against them. They could not cash the ticket with Amy my love still alive.

  He snuck out later, along the old back path. He did not trust the phone (every phone he could think of was now bugged, especially the one on the highway), and he walked along the dirt path silently until he came out on the road far above the turn.

  He had to see Alex and convince him that Amy herself was their greatest liability, that certain specter called the angel of death. They could not fool themselves anymore. They must take action against Amy as quickly as possible.

  He tried for the first time in a long time to think of his soul, and it registered in his mind as turning like a small leaf on the forest floor on a cold autumn day, shriveled and dark. One part of him was thinking that he had a soul—and thinking of his youth, of praying as he struggled not to drown long ago, perhaps a very great soul.

  It would leave a scar, no doubt. But the soul would eventually heal. And in fact this is what Bourque said now: “This will scar us all.”

  He was not thinking of the body being scarred. Of course he was thinking of the soul. But the scar would heal over, and in some future day, in some way, things would be normal again.

  —

  BOURQUE HAD PIECES OF GRASS IN HIS HAIR, AND HE HAD frightened Alex to death by standing up in the garden when Young Chapman went to get his morning cucumber. Alex had run, thinking in a millisecond that Bourque had come to kill him.

  It was 7:30 in the morning. And it was cold and gray and the trees blew like ghosts, and the whole bay was riled like a fever. The little cabin sat damp and friendless, the specter of autumn upon the ground.

  For a while Bourque said nothing at all. He simply stood looking out at the bay.

  Then he said, “The problem is John Proud—he is our scapegoat, but he is the one to hurt us too.”

  “Why is that?” Alex asked, rationally. “It might be that they can get him help—this is what I have been thinking about for the last little while. We might be doing him a favor. And if he is charged, and gets help, and it takes a few years—say, seven years—when he comes out we can give him a million dollars, and then and there it will all be for the best. I have thought much about this, and this might just work!”

  “Audacious how you can help the Indian now by putting him into jail.”

  “I am not saying that.”

  “Truly audacious—” But then he added, “It is not how Amy will think of it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean sooner or later the idea of a human tragedy named John Proud will make her see the truck as a pivotal bit of evidence to clear him, and she will want to do the right thing.”

  Alex, of course, was immensely pained by this. This idea of doing the right thing was in some ways his territory.

  But what Bourque was saying was that if Amy—if Amy girl, as he sometimes called her; Amy my pigeon; Amy the pure of heart—was LESS of a girl, was LESS human, then she might not be compelled to tell the truth in this one instance and they might be able to pay her off, with a few hundred thousand and a convertible.

  But he had seen her eyes when she had handed him the berries her mother had asked her to bring to him last week, and in those eyes were recognition and shock. So sooner or later her humanity would make her turn to the police and tell them they could not accuse John Proud. So what Bourque was telling Alex was what in his lively imagination Alex already was thinking: they must destroy her humanity, which Alex had failed to destroy before.

  “If we can do something else—bring her here and offer her money—pay her money—I am open to it,” Leo said. “But if not—and all I am saying is, if not—then what are the alternative solutions?”

  Within this talk there was another conversation going on, one that was interwoven and demonstrably different than the conversation about the money. This other conversation concentrated on the fact that Bourque had been beaten half to death as a child trying to protect both his mother and his sister, that his life was utter hell, that he had found a young woman, Doreen LeBlanc, and loved her—that she had made him whole, but her leaving him was destroying him. And all of this detail made him livid.

  But also, now and again, woven into these two subjects was a third—and this subject was Amy. And because of the first two subjects, it was perfectly obvious that something would have to be done with Amy very soon.

  Still, no matter how desperate he felt, Alex tried to talk them out of it: “We would never get over it. We would be drowning ourselves!”

  Bourque thought for a moment and answered quite rationally. “Okay—let us think this through. Let’s say that our plight right now has given us these three options—jail or suicide or Amy. What if we do something to Amy—just something—and we are able to live with it. Then it negates the other two options, by which I mean no jail, no suicide. If we are not able to do this to Amy, jail and suicide are the options already available. And we can do them quickly!”

  This seemed somewhat rational, notwithstanding the life of Amy herself, which Alex did not care to mention as a negative in the argument. If it came to light even now that John Proud had not committed this crime, there would be more hell to pay for them when it was discovered that they had. This suddenly seemed completely logical to Alex—even more so than the fact that Johnny Proud was completely innocent in the first place.

  “If it is discovered in any way that he is innocent, we are doomed,” Alex whispered. “Even at this moment! We are done for!”

  Four times during this dialogue Bourque asked to see the ticket, now in Alex’s possession, and four times Alex showed it to him, each time hoping for some kind of revelation inherent in the myth of riches that seemed so out of place now.

  Here is what Leo said: They would open a youth center in Amy’s name, and build a monument to her in front of this center, where children could go day and night from all over the river to be safe. “Its doors would never be locke
d!”

  Then both nodded, because it seemed essential that this be done. That is, the murder seemed essential in order for them to build this center where they would be looked upon as humanitarians for doing so.

  Yet this was exactly the point, in principle of all Alex’s study. This isotopic debate that had spread itself over the surface of all his erudition for almost twenty years, that intellectualism held the key—and a somewhat golden key—to a door of discovery not dependent on faith. Now this had become quite suddenly the unexpected debate. He thought thus: If the religious moral in itself is bogus, then the idea that such a philosophy holds the certainty about good and evil is bogus too—as he often said, and usually said on behalf of women everywhere, who were the most victimized by the social idea of good and evil, and nothing in the world was more savage.

  Therefore, if ecclesiastical study developed the faulty premise of good and evil, intellectualism could open the door to reduce it to nothing, to smash it to smithereens. This also was why he was teaching his fall semester course on ethics—all of these points were germane. And here was the point, the one point damning to Amy that had come to him suddenly. Something he could hold on to to help him, in his hour of need.

  Amy, in a way, represented not womanhood (for didn’t he admire that) but represented instead the repressed view of good and evil, held by the diabolical Catholic church, that had been as far as Alex was concerned almost entirely debunked by the turn of the twenty-first century.

  So wasn’t there a principle that could be expressed as being just as truthful, and where one could understand his premise as well as Amy’s?

  Well, wasn’t there?

  Well?

  Yes there was, he decided.

  It was in fact a cautious, intellectualized relative morality where the very strangeness of his position and its attending argument could be looked upon as a subject of required intellectual debate. And if it became the subject of intellectual debate in any classroom he was in, it could be raised upon learned stilts to almost ethical opera.

  It was in fact where he now saw himself: in a common room with radical young nose pickers, debating this. And he would be able to find among those young postmodernists a few professors whose hatred of the church was such that they would at least warrant an examination of his point of view.

  “Oh, well, yes, then in that case—yes, well, in that case it does work,” he could hear them saying.

  This sudden horrid cynicism is what kept him going at this moment. He did not understand how close his intellectualizing had brought him to Leo’s own thinking. And that Leo, the smell of fear all over him, was in fact trying to stay alive just like he was, knowing that almost anyone they spoke to would condemn Proud—except Amy Patch.

  “I don’t like snitches,” Bourque said. “A snitch is dead on this here river—’cause we don’t play no games!”

  Alex looked up from his reverie. Yes, the idea of the snitch was vaguely disliked everywhere—in ancient Rome and here—and this, both intellectually and emotionally, was satisfying.

  He clutched the ticket like a drowning man. And Bourque himself was a man who had almost drowned.

  —

  AS AUGUST WORE ON, AMY REALIZED MORE AND MORE THAT she was in the crosshairs of something simply because she had seen them that night. Alex couldn’t look her way. And twice she saw Leo Bourque on the far side of the highway glaring at her and then turning his back. Five times she asked others if they had seen a truck on the highway, and looked pained when they said they hadn’t. For she realized that things were up to her.

  Worse, she tried to act as if everything were normal. When they sat in mass near the stained glass windows and heard MacIlvoy talk of honor and redemption, it all seemed wise and comforting as long as she did not have to go outside into the daylight.

  Father Mac was the first one to mention that Markus Paul was indeed looking for information about a truck seen on the night of August 16. At first she did not even think it pertained to that truck. But when she did, it struck her as if she was suddenly hit by a stone. So she began asking questions about this truck to the boys and girls at the wharf. But none had seen it.

  “It’s John Proud,” someone told her.

  She sat in her bedroom and read books for her course on ethics that she believed would help her.

  Why did Alex not look at her anymore? She had long known Alex’s flaw was one of false sympathy. And false sympathy, like tin notes in an orchestra, was always sooner or later understood exactly for what it was. It was similar to her father wearing a new shirt to go to an interview—it never seemed to fit over his dark hands and bull neck.

  She went looking for her copy of the New Testament that she took with her to the seminar on Saint Mark, and couldn’t find it. She searched the house, and then realized that she had not had it since that night, and it must have fallen from her pocket when she fell. She would think about it lying there, and wonder if she should go back to get it. But she couldn’t go back to it, because she was frightened of that lane. Why was she?

  The almost ecstatic reverie she had had over Saint Mark that wild night had also gone, just like that erotic dream early in the summer when her clothes were taken off. Now each day she helped Fanny Groat get from her bed to the toilet and back, would clean her bum and dress her, and sit and read to her in the afternoon. For the care of the elderly left to the young is still prevalent in places in the country.

  Every day Fanny wanted her lipstick put on, and her fur stole. And Amy did so. Then Fanny, seated in a chair, her body having the aspect of a shell, waited for some interesting story, or gave orders to get her muffins, or to open a window or close it, or to light her cigarettes for her.

  “It’s too sticky—open the window—it’s too sticky.”

  Then after five minutes: “It’s cold, that east wind come up again—close that window, girl!”

  Or: “Go get my slippers—you didn’t bring them from the living room—I can’t just sit here without slippers—what are ya, crazy!”

  Or: “Tell me a story—”

  Amy would tell her stories from history. But after relating the story of Joan of Arc—how the young maid of Orleans took on the English army, and was betrayed by Charles VII, the very king she had placed upon the throne, and was therefore burnt to death—Fanny sat before her, a sly smile on her face, and said, “You are lying—that never happened—that’s the kind of stories a girl like you gets up to. It’s better if you had a boyfriend to tickle your mustn’t-touch-it—get screwed, then you’d not get up to all this mischief.” And with an accusatory look said, “You are making it all up—!”

  Amy knew that the truth could be held up as a lie, very easily. People did it all the time. That is why she didn’t tell her mother about Alex and the ticket, because she did not want to be accused of lying. “Besides, if Alex has the ticket he would have cashed it!” she reprimanded herself. “He gave our ticket to Burton to try and help us—it just didn’t work out—that’s why he came back and told us!”

  “What are you mumbling for—stop this mumbling and get me a muffin!”

  Still, for some reason she wasn’t quite sure of, Amy would try to get home before dark, but often she couldn’t. Now, each night as darkness approached, there was a feeling of dread. She would look out at the water puddle halfway down the dirt drive. It was still and murky, and reflected the trees. One late afternoon, busy with Fanny, she turned to look at it, and she could see the water swaying and rippling, as if someone had just stepped through it. Her heart began to pound, and she felt a small unsettling terror pass through her. She looked in all directions, and went to all the windows but could see no one.

  That was the day she learned Johnny Proud had been arrested. She sat by the front window and watched the lane until it got so dark she could not tell trees from shadows. And just as she took her eyes away, she was sure she saw something move from one side of the lane to the other once again—a shadow, she was sure, of a man. But of co
urse she was aware that this was her imagination.

  But he has been arrested, she thought about John Proud, so things must be getting back to normal!

  She had Fanny pray with her, which she did often with the old woman, to give her comfort. “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy Name,” she whispered.

  Then she stood up quietly, and went and locked the door. Suddenly, a deep belief that she must protect this old woman overcame her, from somewhere deep inside her. This old woman who had spilled coffee on her back when she was a child, and slapped her when her parents went away, so she would sit in the dooryard alone and cry.

  She locked the door, and decided that there was darkness on the face of the deep, and that it was her job to protect this eighty-two-year-old.

  Some nights when Mrs. Hanson couldn’t get up, Amy would stay over with Fanny, sleep on the cot and stare into the darkness, listening to the tick-tock of the clock in the hall. Usually Minnie would come over as well. But once or twice Amy was left alone. It was at those times she did not sleep until she saw the morning sun.

  —

  MOST OF THAT SUMMER FANNY WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT Amy’s love life. But Amy could tell her nothing, and Fanny was angered by this.

  “I have a boyfriend called Rory, and I think he likes me—like on Friday night I go get my pop and bag of chips—sometimes he sits beside me on the steps, and talks about baseball—we knew each other since we were kids.”

  “Have you ever been kissed?”

  “No!”

  “Will you ever be kissed?”

  “I don’t know—maybe Rory will someday—I—”

  “God, girl, yer useless, some young boy shoulda had a whiff of it by now, it’s better if you went with some young buck,” she said. And she laughed until the peppermint fell from her mouth.

  Amy thought of this as she sat with Fanny. No, she would not be like this. For Fanny, people said, was once a brilliant girl.