The Lost Highway

by David Adams Richards

  So as the days passed Markus was more certain of the involvement of Chapman and Bourque, and everyone else was less certain.

  It was so strange, almost unbelievable, and certainly, so far, unverifiable.

  Yet why?

  Why was a question that must be asked.

  For a long time he sat in his small apartment, dazzled and depressed by this why. For to think of Alex Chapman as a murderer was certainly depressing. For he had followed Alex’s career, and read his writings about the indignity suffered by the First Nations. At first he had admired him, but over the last few years he felt Alex to be a dishonest broker. Still, he wanted this Alex to be noble and, like Caesar’s wife, above suspicion. But now, after compiling his facts, or assumptions, Alex, he concluded, was guilty of knowing something that happened, and not reporting what he knew. At its best, this scenario meant that Alex might have had information about Poppy (such as child molestation) that was so horrendous he took action. In fact, Alex’s career to this point suggested that he might finally be tired of the courts and the menial sentencing of criminals. This would make him heroic, or might mitigate the stamp of guilt.

  Yet to Markus, Poppy was the most innocent of old men. He couldn’t have done anything. The worst he had done, besides dumping his sawdust, was drinking too many beers and singing Hank Williams in his French twang.

  Who could ever be so cold as to kill a man like this? Markus wondered. Oh, he knew who: those who had lost their childhood and blamed innocence and kindness for that loss.

  Yet the more he was dazzled by it the less he slept. But he was certain, just as the priest was certain, that the two involved, whoever they were, if it was not John Proud, would be depressed and paranoid and sure to blame each other. Sooner or later they would have to confront what they had done, and begin to suspect one another. He thought (did he know how close he actually was?) that it might be over a will—something on a piece of paper.

  So he kept thinking: What was it these people were after, what were they looking for? Did Poppy give it to them? The more he tried to answer this, the less and less successful he became. Until with a trick of the intellect he simply said, in Micmac, “What have they found?”

  For a day or so, he let it register and said it again and again, but was puzzled by it. Maybe they had found the will and had to have it changed. And maybe Poppy found out!

  That didn’t make sense, but more sense than anything else. Then Markus decided it had to be something else—more communal and less private than a personal will. Something that would benefit Poppy as well. That is why they went to him. So he stared out the window, at the dry dark parking lot of his forlorn apartment building on the outskirts of his reserve, with paper wrappers being blown in the air. Everything seemed to be like a sad movie picture, in black and white, when he thought of Old Poppy and his vegetable stand. He wanted to let it go, that question: What had they found? But it wouldn’t go away.

  That was the day he went to visit Leo Bourque’s ex-wife. He drove along the split highway that ran against the shore, against the sunlight shining over the corpses of a million seashells in the deepening afternoon, the water languid and milk-like, with the smell of heavy equipment and creosote logs against the deepening blues of the sky. With the pounding of the great hammer behind them, shattering cars to nothing, he brought the petite woman from the office and into the sunlight and asked questions, which she tried to feint like a boxer. No, she did not know where Leo went or what he did, or if he did or did not, and she was only certain that he had changed since she married him, like she supposed, with her one whiff of learned and practiced and coddled superiority, that all men sooner or later did.

  The innocent girl had become aloof.

  “Ah yes,” Markus said, nodding and smiling, his cheeks flush and his eyes upon the office door where her opulent boss, in his ill-fitting suit, stood as if watching guard, and as if he was there as her moral protector—which was what men who had taken over a woman’s life on the pretext of setting them free of their husbands so often did. This boss had tried to talk to Paul in the office about, well, about himself—about how he’d had to get her away from Leo Bourque. That is, as in situations like this, the other man wanted the police to join him in moral disgust of the husband. And Paul knew this, and had dealt with it as a police officer in all the ways one could. He often disliked these men more than he did the abusive husbands, or just as much. The boss then closed the door just as the great hammer shattered and crushed down on the hood of a car involved in an accident two weeks before.

  Many looked upon Markus Paul as an Indian, too big-feeling for his own good, harassing white men and women. This is what he knew he would have to put up with for the rest of his life.

  But this meeting was not unfruitful for him, as Markus discovered.

  Leo would drive about with his wife at night—and go by houses of rich people, and say he would be as rich as this. This was when he went to the parties for Fouy Construction and began to talk with words she did not comprehend, dazzling them with his need to prove to her that he was relevant to the world. It was then that she was seen at a party and hired by Cid himself to work in the office. Just as a temporary office worker at first. It was not long after this her boss would call her in at night to go over the tenders and contracts, and she would leave Bourque alone. She couldn’t get home so she would dine with the boss at Taylor’s restaurant.

  Then, one day, Chapman went under. Cid got the bid on the entire road. And Bourque tried to tell her one night in their little kitchen, smiling like a Cheshire cat and waiting for her to open her arms to him, that it was he who had done it. She felt sorry for him, because Cid had told her it was himself. She smiled and patted his hand and told him he didn’t have to lie. This infuriated him even more.

  “It was me, it was me, it was me!” Leo kept saying, spit coming from his mouth. “Alex gave up the bid—to me!” But she did not believe him, with that infuriating, infallible certainty of mind.

  “Alex Chapman wouldn’t even talk to a man like you,” she had said. Of course she regretted it. But it was said.

  Markus looked at her broad white forehead, and her blunt little nose.

  They had such a big contract because Chapman had gone under, and she was indispensable to her boss now. She went to Campbellton with him in his Cessna plane, to see about a road job, and spent the night.

  “In separate rooms,” Doreen said, as if Markus should be the one to understand this.

  Leo, however, began to plead with her to leave the job, begged her to leave her job, because he could see the handwriting on the wall. She told him she would not. She wanted to learn to fly that Cessna plane. Cid said he would teach her.

  Later that month, Leo fell from a heavy loader and busted his hip. He was out of work.

  “He came to me last week and said he would get a lot of money.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know—I am not sure—but Cid had nothing to do with it!” she said, protective of her man with the Cessna airplane. “But he said, ‘I’ve won the jackpot.’”

  Markus gave a start, and he flushed, his eyes widened, and he said nothing. Except he was thinking of ethics and a moral code of some kind, and the tragedy of Leo Bourque.

  “Why would Alex give up a bid?” he asked himself.

  She turned her head away, in the listless heat of tar and afternoon and a blood-red dying sky, as her boss looked out the door window, smiling at Markus Paul obsequiously—something he would never do to this dark-haired, small-breasted woman, who looked quite a bit like Minnie Patch, and Markus supposed something he would never have to do with Leo Bourque, with all his big words in the wrong place. Not that this boss would actually know what those words meant, or have ever read a text where those words would be placed, or have tried in some desperate winter storm near the back roads of Tracadie to struggle through Balzac. He did not have to impress anyone, having his new Cessna airplane, as Leo, alone and frantic, had tried to do. />
  “He said last week he was going to be rich,” Doreen told him. “He told me he would have a surprise for everyone.”

  “He told me,” Cid offered from the door, as the soft wind blew his tie back over his neck, “that he would buy a Porsche.”

  “He did.”

  “Yes,” Cid said, hesitating and then laughing.

  “How?”

  “I do not know—but he often said things like that, from the first day I met him, but I never saw him with nothing trash like that!” Cid said.

  “Like that, but not that,” Markus answered, and looked toward the sun, blood-like against the wide sky.

  “Pardon?”

  Markus did not bother answering. He asked instead, “A jackpot. Do you know of any?”

  “Pardon me? Pardon-moi?” Leo’s wife asked.

  “What jackpot, I wonder—?”

  ——

  How long did it take to glean this information from this young and handsome woman and her altruistic boss? Ten minutes exactly. And did she have to say everything for Markus Paul to understand what had happened? She only had to say a tenth of it. And he knew. The young woman turned and went back inside, and the great large hammer fell again. The little mustached Cid, with his flat face and opulent rump, was waiting.

  So now, this new development put more pieces together.

  Alex had now floundered into middle age, and Alex’s moral debt had to be paid. Would this jackpot pay it?

  Markus Paul had watched this debt become apparent and increase exponentially over the last six or seven years. Could he go to Alex and confront him?

  Markus Paul had no moral debt. He could stare you in the eye and tell the truth.

  He wondered about this, as night fell, and the cry of gulls faded, and the shore birds slept, their wings turned inward like miniature pterodactyls on the waves.

  Markus then went back to Poppy Bourque’s house, up the crooked rock drive and in the back way. Just, as he decided, the murderer must have.

  A small and untidy little spot of a house on an old road—where it seemed to hold the memories of a thousand family nights, now gone forever. A vase filled with papers and bills, where there had once been flowers. A picture of a horse-riding woman with a white cowboy hat. A picture of Madonna and child that seemed, though forty-five years old, still pristine.

  An autographed picture of Rocket Richard.

  But here is what Markus was thinking: why weren’t the box of bills and vases with pencils turned over here, like they were at Chapman’s, if both places were ransacked by John Proud? Of course that was the question.

  Where would Poppy be, Markus thought, obviously very agitated at the idea of not being able to help the old man.

  Earlier he had gone to the hospital. He took John Proud’s shoes and looked at the bottom of them, then turned his stinking and fetid pants inside out, and opened his wallet again. Empty except for his name written in it. In his jacket pocket three Export cigarettes, a hash pipe, some tinfoil, and in his inside pocket, in Kleenex, a syringe.

  Then he had woken Proud by shaking him slightly.

  “What were you doing in the house—what were you looking for—what jackpot?”

  But Proud could not help him—he didn’t understand anything. He had not remembered much of where he was or why.

  He had been on his way back to his hunting lodge when he was stopped.

  “Why the lamp?”

  “I don’t know—I still have a sense of humor,” John said.

  Markus left his wasted body, the ribs protruding from his weakened chest, and went back to Poppy Bourque’s. He stared out across the desolate back field toward Leo’s small shed that looked forsaken in the wind. Far above, seagulls rested on the air; far above, a plane carrying uncaring people from London to Toronto, Markus a tiny speck on the ground.

  “The only one who would feel free of being detected by Leo, was Leo. The only one who would feel comfortable at not being discovered by Alex, was Alex,” Markus reasoned, thinking of the “break-ins” at the respective houses. He was looking for a jackpot. He even, or also, thought of digging in the dirt basement, where somebody had dug sometime before—but realized that the previous dig was only to find a sewer line, when the new sewer lines were being put in. And so he came upstairs and brushed off his shirt.

  John Proud would be transferred down to the Richabucto jail in a week. Then the prosecutorial weight would be placed upon him, Markus Paul, to bring some kind of credible information for a charge. He entertained the idea that John Proud was with these other two, Bourque and Alex, but persuaded himself that this was not so. Proud had no friends, no one would trust him to go in with them on anything. In fact he was or could be considered the poster child of what happened to First Nations men because of generations of neglect and abuse.

  Besides, as the kids liked to say, this was totally random. That is, it wasn’t a crime until the actual crime was committed. At least this is what Markus Paul had decided, so it wasn’t even a crime that came off the back of a botched robbery, Markus decided.

  Markus Paul left the house and went back to his apartment. He had the hash pipe and the tinfoil with him, and the old syringe with some of John Proud’s blood in it, and set them on the table, along with John Proud’s wallet. The wallet looked immaculate, new, had been carried by John for a year. He never had a thing in it. He just wanted to have one. He set the wallet down, and then feeling guilty Markus Paul zippered the wallet back up, placed the hash pipe upon it, and set them both on the coffee table by themselves.

  —

  POPPY’S HOUSE HAD NO ONE IN IT FOR ABOUT AN HOUR AND a half. Then suddenly the door opened and Markus came in again. He began to look through the cupboards and baskets and cups, the drawers everywhere. He upset that vase, and looked through bills and receipts. Angry and resentful with himself that he had not discovered what should be discovered. But now his face was determined, his methods professional, and his search intricate.

  Why?

  Because he had gone home and cooked himself some spaghetti, was sitting before the TV waiting for the sports and saw an advertisement for the 649 lotto, and the information that a ticket worth thirteen million had been sold in northern New Brunswick and so far not claimed. He stood, and began looking here and there for a ticket he himself had bought three weeks before.

  While doing so, he realized he was searching in very small places for a piece of paper.

  Christ almighty, he thought, this is ridiculous.

  He went to John Proud’s wallet, and opened it carefully, looking through it. He zippered it up again. He went back and sat down, stared at his dinner, finished his tea, lit a cigarette, and thought of Alex, and Leo Bourque.

  Over the last four days he had written down twelve things all of this might be about, scratching things off one minute and adding things the next, unsure of why he was doing so, like, as he thought, a gamester playing a Ouija board. He kept these silent thoughts away from Sergeant Bauer and others, for they had no use for his obsession with the truck.

  Things like “car payment,” “money owed,” “hidden assets,” “real estate,” “fear of Poppy knowing something,” “fear Poppy will tell something,” “couldn’t let him out of the truck,” “couldn’t let him go home,” “couldn’t let him go to the fair,” “gambling money owed,” “must have a weapon.”

  And every once in a while he kept coming back to “couldn’t let him out of the truck.”

  And then this, after he initially came back from Poppy’s: “Some small item at Mr. Chapman’s house—they were looking for a piece of paper—a piece of paper—looking in drawers and small bill jars for what—it has to be a piece of paper—Poppy discovered they found this piece of paper. They didn’t search Poppy’s house for it!”

  A piece of paper!

  Over the last two days Markus Paul had thought of a piece of paper. And what would be on a piece of paper one was looking for. He had put down “numbers to a safe,” and though
t that had to be it. But what if Old Chapman had no safe? He would have to get into the house and look. But if that was the case, he was at a loss.

  And then this, just now which even he laughed at: “lotto ticket worth $13 million.”

  But he knew from his work the old Sherlock Holmes adage, even if he himself never read Conan Doyle or watched Sherlock Holmes movies: If one excludes all other possibilities, the possibility that is left, no matter how unlikely, must be the one that is true.

  —

  BOURQUE WAS NOT AT ALL CALM, FOR MARKUS PAUL WAS AT his uncle’s all day. He could see the squad car there, and wanted to go over and ask him what was going on. But he hesitated. He knew that if it was nothing to do with him, Markus would come over and speak. He waited, and Markus did not come over. Therefore, it had to be something to do with him. So he walked up the road, and thumbed a ride to Brennen’s tavern. Then after a few beers, with his nerves settled, he went to see Alex. He was now very angry and knew things had to proceed quickly. He had to convince his Siamese twin or be doomed. The only way to convince him was to prove to him how esteemed he would be once this was done. This was the sleight of hand on which everything else hinged.

  So he said, “We will have one opportunity and no more. We drown her in the current of Glidden’s pool. The day she is alone—that day and no other!”

  “People will find out,” Alex said, as a challenge.

  “No,” Bourque explained. “They will say: ‘That crazy little kid, she loved that boy so much that she couldn’t stand going away.’”

  This was the one and only hook on which it could all ride.

  Yes, she had trouble with a boy and was depressed about leaving him and going out west. In fact, the idea of her leaving had not only made it imperative that they kill her but logical that she, depressed about going out west, would take her life.