The Lost Highway

by David Adams Richards

  So, for her mom and dad she must go on. Then she would become someone great, and even famous. That is, those who sometimes influence one to greatness are those who have lost their own.

  Later that afternoon, she heard a board clatter again. She ran to the large front window, and saw a tree wave just beyond the lane.

  She rationalized randomness in her mathematics as never being random, and every flare from the sun produced a wind across the lilacs where the hummingbirds trembled their wings. And she was certainly smart enough to understand it, more than many.

  What was worse was this. Just as soon as she began to relax and think of everything as her imagination, just as soon as she would begin to think of things she would like to do, and how people would someday think she was a fine girl, and she would go on great long trips to exciting places, just when she relaxed, she would hear the snap of a branch outside—something would sway and then stop, and that small bit of terror inside her would begin again to grow.

  She thought of the things she had discovered about Alex. She always tried her best not to have this influence her. That is, in so many ways she was far more considerate than Alex himself. She remembered the letters she had found in the back of a box in her mother’s closet late last year. (She did not tell her mother she had read them.)

  She remembered every line as she sat in the old hard-backed rocking chair looking out at the drive, with its ruts and puddles, keeping guard like a little picket.

  She had been amazed to learn that Alex, fully alive himself, did not want her born. She felt nauseous when she read this, and a deep shame and anger overcame her. He was adamant she would end up a terrible burden, and that Sam was “no father to be proud of or look up to!”

  She thought of Sam coming home with his left hand bashed on a piece of machinery, blood on the old cloth he had wrapped it in. She was certainly proud, and loved him then!

  Then another letter which to her seemed even more insidious: he did not want her baptized. His argument was a sound one. The child was innocent, and no he wouldn’t be godfather to a baptized child, for what was more innocent than a child?

  He had not wanted her born, but then he wanted to protect the idea of her innocence by keeping her from baptism.

  Then she suddenly thought: What if it was Poppy Bourque’s ticket? And they stole it—that’s what it is about—

  She tried to be polite to the elderly woman, who had her share of trouble, and who couldn’t sit still without giving her some order so Amy was constantly run off her feet. At first Amy had tried to be pleasant about this, but there were so many orders she was now sullen and angry. When Mrs. Hanson came into the house, Fanny would say, “Oh thank God you’re here, dear, this little child has no sense.”

  Mrs. Hanson would shrug and look over at her with preconceived disapproval.

  But the next morning the orders would start again.

  One afternoon when they were playing checkers, Fanny asked out of the blue: “Do you have yer hair between yer legs yet?”

  At first she didn’t answer.

  “Come on, tell me! A beautiful girl like you! What, are ya too proud?”

  Amy nodded. “Of course,” she said.

  “Why do girls need hair between their legs?” Fanny asked.

  “I don’t know,” Amy said.

  “To prove that women are stronger than men,” Fanny said.

  “How?”

  “I tell you this—if you use it right, one little cunt hair of yours can pull a battleship.” Fanny smiled.

  This, Fanny said, was Fanny’s advice and should be taken.

  The heat, of course, had made the little house both rancid and decrepit, and by this time of year the weeds had grown up almost over the windows. It was a secluded place, off a lane and a side road on the lost highway, where people could come right up to the window and look in.

  —

  IF YOU GO ALONG THAT ROAD NOW YOU WILL SEE NOTHING there. It has been replaced by the hours that have passed since Amy walked home one afternoon and found her mother and father were buying a house out west, that Sam had been wanting to tell them all year that there was no need for him to return. On that day there were still two houses, a small shed here and there, a pouring stream that crossed from one side of Arron to the moss and stump-laden woods and ran into Bartibog. It was still there as yet. That was a few years ago now, when Amy walked home that noon hour with the sun falling on the blueberry field and the old gravel pit still visible beyond the beginning of Jameson’s tote road, and the sun just above the trees.

  That was when there was still life here, when Fanny still sat out in the sun on the withered steps, her head mirrored in the old paned window, with its paint-peeled frame, and one antenna sticking up behind the stovepipe near the second floor, and she complained that no one visited her, and when an osprey or two circled in the sky, and then in a swoop came down into Arron Brook talons to grab a fish, where an eagle, larger, would wait at the riverbank all day for the flash of a fin from a salmon. Or a bear or two walked silently through the tumbled-up fagots that had been cut along the power line years before that, or a panther still strode at dark, swiftly. It was gone now simply because there was no one left, and two hundred years of life on the Gum Road seemed to have gone away. Amy would be forced to leave her little place, her small bees and raccoon in the tree near Lean-to lane. What would happen to all those secret places she knew?

  Amy was the last child born here, and she went home to discover that her mother was leaving for northern Alberta to meet her father, and they were going to finalize a deal on a house. That she would stay with Fanny and Mrs. Hanson at Fanny’s for two days. That on the third day Amy would have to keep Fanny alone—but that Sam and her mother would be back by one o’clock in the morning, for it was a late flight coming out of the west, and Mrs. Hanson was driving down to pick them up.

  They would be able to put Fanny in the home in Tabusintac, and Amy would be able to say goodbye before they all left for another life.

  The old pathways she had traveled, no other child would; the place where she placed her pollywogs would be forgotten. The liveliness she had when she walked, so that it seemed the birds sang for her, would disappear as if someone were walking off camera and becoming invisible; and so everything she loved and desired here would never be the same. And in that, and perhaps because of that, a sadness would come to the birds and the leaves, and the eagle that waited in stillness waiting for a fin in the rip.

  They were all going now—and it was as if after two hundred years this life was no longer worthy and some machine and men and piles of sludge out west were more frantic and needed, with cowboy hats and coats and the gloating idea of prosperity.

  This is what Amy discovered wearing a kerchief around her neck, and watching the roadway with a sunburned face. When she walked home that day, the life she knew would change forever. What a sad place the Maritimes had become, for so many wonders to be longed for and forgotten, turned over to the dark earth, and like an old fence no longer recognizable as yours, a land gone away.

  “It is for the best,” Minnie said, “isn’t it, dear?”

  But what would happen to George the raccoon, and Lester the skunk—where would her pollywogs be next spring, and how many bees would fall into the bottom of the hive—where would everything go without her, those places she had been and believed she would always be? Those places deep in her heart that no one else knew. What other children would come to take care of them if she left and went away? What other child would be able to bring the buck deer, whose antlers were now in velvet, into the yard with an apple and a lick of salt. What would happen to that buck she had trained to know who she was, whenever she gave a soft doe call with her tongue? How many other young girls could do that? And who would care? Sometimes the buck came even now walking along the road toward her, its velvet antlers resembling a halo in the soft weather.

  “We will have a good life yet,” Minnie said. “Sam promised.”

&
nbsp; “I know,” Amy said, with the first tinge of grown-up bitterness. “He has always sought your love! Always, no matter what!”

  —

  IN TWO DAYS ALEX KNEW THAT MINNIE AND SAM WERE leaving. Everyone knew. It came as an astonishment that the last twenty years of his life, in one way or the other spent scheming to get her back, were now irreversibly foiled.

  How could he have had a life so stupid and meaningless? He was down to eating pabulum in the last two days, for his heartburn was so bad.

  “I can’t even munch a carrot,” he said now.

  “There is big, big money out on the oil patch,” Bourque commented in appreciation of Sam and Minnie’s decision. “He has to take advantage when he can! In fact, he’ll be more appreciated out there than he ever was here! You never appreciated him. Old Jim never appreciated him. I always did myself. Did you ever see Minnie naked—I did, in a field one summer day.”

  “Don’t talk about her like that!” Alex insisted.

  Bourque shrugged. He was smiling and happy to have them out of his hair. “Gone daddy gone. Talk about luck—Proud in jail and Amy gone!”

  He almost danced about the little kitchen. And Alex, too, felt relieved.

  Yet after the initial euphoria of thinking that Amy would be out of sight, out of mind, and their problems would be over, came a sudden and startling twist. Both became aware at almost the same instant of what pressure Amy would be under to tell what she knew before she left the province. Or worse, as soon as she got away from them, so they couldn’t stop her.

  In fact, Leo was in the midst of celebrating when this realization struck him like a punch.

  Suddenly both realized she would be out of reach.

  The fact that Amy had not said anything yet only heightened their concern of what she would say as soon as she got a chance. So once this danger was recognized, by Alex and Leo, it became a significant prod to go through with the “act” against her.

  “It is as if she hasn’t realized what exactly she saw yet, and is trying to talk herself out of thinking she has seen anything,” Bourque reasoned. “But sooner or later—well, we’re dead, that’s all there is to it!”

  So in the early evening of the second day after they made certain she was going, with a cold east wind blowing the trees wildly and shadows playing dangerously across the walls, they had a meeting. The lights in Alex’s cabin were turned off so no one would see them in there. They could just make out each other’s features, if they got close, and once or twice they bumped into each other as they moved around.

  “I know where Amy is now,” Bourque said. “I’ve been over there four times. She sits there staring out the window—or reads a book. Do you know she reads really important books—not like the kind my wife reads, the trash romances, but the kind you read for your ethics course!” he said with some admiration.

  Here Alex struggled not to sob.

  “The problem is, she is with Fanny—and I don’t want to have to kill her too, you understand, I am not a bad man. Amy stays at the house three nights a week. Then Mrs. Hanson comes and stays. But we have nothing against Mrs. Hanson. Or at least I don’t. So Minnie leaves next week. The third day Amy is alone, this is what I learned from Burton. Mrs. Hanson is going down to pick them up. Minnie and Sam won’t be home till later in the morning, maybe two or three. That is when we have to act. The problem is, even if Amy is alone with Fanny, as long as Minnie is near, or Mrs. Hanson, we are in a bind—but when they go—ACT,” he said with great decisiveness.

  “How do we act?”

  “You know what I mean. Once she goes to Markus, once that happens, you may as well never have existed—every variance of your existence will matter not the least!”

  This was said exactly, and even the word variance was used—meant as discrepancy more than clash—and Bourque used it because he felt himself able to, as he said as a child, “swing some words around!”

  And now he walked with his hands behind his back, doing just this.

  “The problem for Proud is that his camp is in the proximity of Old Poppy—and there had been disagreements with Poppy over Proud’s friends and their habits, noise and Poppy’s sawdust. This is what we have in our favor—you must understand that. It is the constant negative in Markus’s theory—something he will not tell you when he tries to interrogate us. So we have this in our general favor, my friend.”

  Leo had always wanted to speak well, first in French, and when he went to school and was forced and beaten by his father to learn English, then in that language. It showed in fact how incredibly bright he truly was. He had often used these words in the wrong place to impress people he wanted to like him, and to try to be more like them. A few years before he would stand with his wife, spouting out great verbosity, until she was red in the face, and he would sputter the words again and again, entrenched in the idea that he must impress her friends to impress her. But now he didn’t care what they meant—he was determined to use them as he saw fit, which made him in his new power of boasting slightly comic. But it did add a measure of danger to him. For a man who had the gumption to use them had to have the gumption to feel worthy enough to. He was unsure of the meaning of many of them, but they felt right.

  The moon now was over Bourque’s right shoulder—only half his face was visible. And quite suddenly he did remind Alex of one of his former heroes in the heroic struggle, Joseph Stalin. For the first time the terrible wish he had made—“send me someone from my past to help me find this ticket”—came to him as caustic divination.

  He shuddered.

  “It would be better if Amy had never been born,” Bourque said now, philosophically. “Yes, much better if she had been snipped off when she was still in the acorn stage. We have the acorn stage of man, now, and that’s when she should have been killed.” He looked at Alex with a great deal of accusation. “But you didn’t get the job done—and look what happened!”

  “Don’t say that,” Alex said, for some reason shuddering.

  “It would have saved a bucket of blood,” Bourque said theoretically about what should have happened fifteen years before. Alex knew that in effect Amy’s very life imposed upon him this further responsibility to protect himself, and that perhaps every footstep he had made since had in some way been instructed by her birth. And that his life had in fact been thrown into the maelstrom because of her.

  Revenge might cure him of the last fifteen years of his life.

  Both of them had now slipped into a moral coma where anything could be argued to be right, and if decided as right then nothing was wrong.

  “Have you heard of Stalin?” Alex finally asked weakly, hoping that Bourque had not, even though he had mentioned the book a few days before.

  “Who’s he—does he know something?” Bourque said.

  Here, even in his despair in this dark cold little room, Alex laughed.

  “Does Stalin know something—ha, that’s a good one.”

  Bourque was angered by this laughter. He didn’t know what to say. But then he told Alex this: that he did not like to be laughed at, and Alex better not laugh at him again. This was his most humiliating fact! He had been nothing more than a janitor at Fouy Construction. When Bourque brought the bid over and Cid Fouy saw he was useful, he gave him a job—he took a course on loaders and began to work on one. All of this he did, thinking that Cid loved him. But Cid wanted him out of the yard on the loader to go at his wife’s snatch. Then Cid told Bourque’s wife that it was himself who had arranged to undercut the Chapman bid, by logic alone, and he was in a position of power where he and not Leo was believed.

  Leo had fumed at this in front of his wife, but nothing he said was believed by her. He was a common laborer, and Cid was Cid.

  This was the comic despair Leo was fighting. His wife left him because Cid convinced her Leo was delusional and lying. That’s why he had to be rich, and that’s why he had to have the ticket.

  “And that’s why I told Cid and Doreen last week I was going
to buy a Porsche.”

  “You told them what?”

  “Do not worry—they never believed me anyway,” he smiled. “It’s just that they made me so angry! So I told them I had more money than they could believe—so there!”

  And this in a rambling way is what he told Alex about himself now: Some years ago Leo would go to dances and sputter his big words to Cid, and his wife would blush and say, “Please Leo.” Yet he couldn’t seem to stop, because he had wanted to follow Alex’s lead and be important.

  “Please Leo,” his wife would say, as he tried to get his tongue around a set of words like “undulating like certain specter grasses that I saw as a boy.” And the boss, with his huge tie and his tight pants stretched over his opulent rump, would smile, at first with utter surprise at how easily this wife, of all wives (for she was so innocent), would be delivered to him like an examining magistrate, and then more cynically, like a head on a plate, as his pecker imagined, and then finally amused at the bafflement before him, the apologia of a man’s entire life, as if in trying to say “symmetrical tandem those queer-shaped undulating grasses of my bonny youth; and the elusive internal morass of coming to madness or adulthood I do not know,” Leo was in effect spilling his rocky marriage upon the floor. For the words seemed to make no sense and—half in French, half in English—they were an utter bewilderment of phraseology under those cocksucking strobe lights. But in his own mind, in Leo’s own mind, they were—these words, if he could possibly deliver them—the one balm to free himself of the restraints of the woods, where as they said of him, “He never sat upon a chair until seven.”

  Finally he was left sputtering and gesturing drunkenly by himself, ennobled only in his own mind, for that one moment a free man, and a clever one, and one that could if he wanted say: “Twizlewooded slope and fractured plates of clouds over the grand dark waters where I did wander, I tell you that much, I wandered through all the snapdragon grasses and the wind in the willow, until my cock itself came stiff.”

  And at the end of that night his wife was waltzing with the boss, his posterior raised to accommodate his small dancing feet, the dalliance obscene in its predictability, and Leo was at a table at the end of the hall in word and gesture drunk. The next afternoon he willed himself to jam gears and fell headfirst from the loader. Why? Because it was all meant to happen. He knew it now in his utter grief. He spoke to Alex with tears streaming down his cheeks.