The Lost Highway

by David Adams Richards

  Bourque knew very well what to say to his partner, and spoke now as if his life depended upon it: “That is what they will say, Alex—listen to me, they will say you visited her when Sam was away, and tried to comfort her. Got her into a course on ethics to cheer her little bauble head up. But you who knew she was depressed could not help her with this boy. The ethics course was done for that reason! SEE! Once that is realized nothing will stop us—we will be as free as birds! Look how it can be envisioned by people! To benefit you!”

  Alex listened to this, and it seemed logical as long as Bourque spoke. It was Plato’s noble lie that could catapult him into the future. Plato’s noble lie stating that someone might be sacrificed and a lie be told, a public manipulated if great good could come of it. So if he held on to this, then it could be managed. That is, the very manipulating of the truth sounded far more tempting and very much more desirable than the truth. Alex wasn’t immune to succumbing to it, as long as he listened to Bourque speak. In fact, he had manipulated the truth all of his life.

  Bourque in a way had become the new Plato. Because Bourque by now knew exactly how to play on Alex’s vanity and make it seem like reason. The desire to believe that his own altruism concerning this girl tried to prevent her from taking her life, even though the girl’s mother had shunned him, was something the very noblest of humans could say was splendid. In fact, this alone urged him to carry out their plan.

  There was even something else—it might be discovered that his family had set aside money for her scholarship, something in Chapman’s will. Alex knew he could say very easily he had insisted upon this. And he would have, if he had thought of it, he decided.

  “I knew she was bright—I tried to keep her alive!”

  “Well,” Markus Paul would say, “from the earliest time you have tried to show wisdom in the face of your enemies!”

  “I am just an ordinary man!”

  “How many of us would like to be as ordinary as you! Look what you have done—tried to give back whole islands and everything else!”

  So Bourque continued in this soothing and in many respects brilliant vein: People would think that Amy had relied upon him and him alone, because she was so bright. That she could not rely upon her semi-illiterate father. In fact it might be better if she did die, so people could have Alex say, Yes, she was coming to visit me—brought me buckets of blueberries—I insisted she be allowed, because I knew I must try to help her. But there was this boy, and you know young girls and boys! Once she came from the church, from some course she was taking down there, and cried her little eyes out! Father Mac didn’t understand!

  “Oh, I’m not going to say that—I will only say she herself came to me.”

  And there was of course one more advantageous bit of fiction that could be catapulted into the truth: “Some very worthy people at the university know what you tried to have done—when she was about the size of a sweet pea—but they will see how you stood for life once she was born,” Bourque said with sympathy and understanding. It was as if he himself were changing his stringent mind about this procedure.

  And Alex was somewhat comforted. He mulled this over, and ate a carrot.

  “My good God, you know—just like with John Proud he tried to protect them his whole life,” Bourque whispered. “That’s what they will say—you won’t even have to grow a beard to be recognized as an intellectual!”

  And Minnie; the idea that this might bring her to him some night was a fact not to be sneezed at.

  “Not to be sneezed at,” Bourque said, continuing his polemic, and rubbing Alex’s shoulders as if he was a boxer getting ready to stand in the ring.

  Alex thought of this for a moment.

  “Paul is getting closer,” Bourque said. “I don’t think he has much figured out—and Sergeant Bauer and others are angry at him for leading the department on a wild goose chase and making a mockery of justice. So it might all quiet down once Proud is charged. Paul might face charges himself!”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I only know what everyone else on the damn highway knows. They are thinking of charging Markus Paul with impeding a police investigation—that’s what some people say, and how angry the police are with him. Soon after this is all over, you will be the only man—the only one the river looks to.”

  ——

  Bourque told him to come with him, and they went down to the beach. It was cold again, and the waves looked mean and choppy toward the North Cape. Alex stared across the water to the island, and the old barricade he had helped the First Nations men build when they took over the island.

  “Come with me now,” Bourque said.

  They walked along the shore all the way to Arron Brook and then back through the woods to Glidden’s pool.

  “What will happen to our souls?” he asked Bourque as they approached Glidden’s pool in the evening, with the trees swaying above them. “I mean, on the very off chance that we have one?”

  Bourque was startled, his hands moved slowly and he folded them and leaned against an old black spruce.

  “Better off for it,” Leo said, rubbing his nose.

  “How in God’s name will we be better off for it?”

  “Makes it stronger,” Bourque said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean—” Bourque said angrily, “you are worse than my wife—what I mean is better off. What I mean in the intransigence of the morning air, in this small little square root of a place we now exist in—what I am saying, what I am saying is that, well, in a way we will be quite a bit better off—financially. And if we build that center and put Amy’s statue up, we will end up helping far more children than we hurt—a thousand children helped, and one hurt—that is the only way to think of it. And if you don’t think governments don’t think of it this way, we must act then like a government just for this brief moment.”

  Bourque continued: “You will stand in by Vince’s rock—you silly, stupid fucker—and I will stand about the turn near Glidden’s pool. She won’t come here alone, even when she puts her pollywoggles in she has someone come with her—so you will get her and bring her to me. But if she goes down on the road to seek help, I will be able to see her. We will get her, and we will quickly, without hesitation, put her in the water—we have to get a lot of water in her puny lungs. She won’t feel so much—we will tell her we want to take her somewhere, her mom is sick or something!”

  “But she is afraid of water,” Alex said, smiling, as if this was a hitch in their whole plan.

  “Can you swim?”

  “No,” Alex admitted, “I don’t swim.”

  Bourque slapped him again. “There, for being stupid.”

  “Stop that, Jesus Christ!” Alex yelled.

  “Don’t you see, that doesn’t matter—we are not going to ask her if she likes water—don’t be ridiculous, you just don’t do that. Besides,” Bourque calculated, “the fact that she hates water shows the kind of state her poor little pea brain was in over this boy Rory. And this boy treated her bad, don’t you worry—he needs a good slap, he treated her so bad, which means, when it all comes down to it, that killing herself was probably the only thing she could do!”

  They were silent for a long time.

  Then Bourque added with compassion, before they started to walk back, “So what do you think, how does that sound?”

  —

  MARKUS PAUL REMEMBERED IN THE NEW TESTAMENT HOW Jesus told his listeners they wanted a sign for everything, and he would not give them one for they lacked belief. They mocked belief and wanted a sign. Well, here it was. Everything pointed away from John Proud, but no one believed him. Sergeant Bauer, who was incensed that a man who had confessed was not yet in jail, was the worst. Yet the signs were everywhere and they did not see those signs.

  The simplest things they did not understand. They did not understand ambition as much as greed. Greed they saw as being compatible to the estate of John Proud. Markus had come to see this as a
crime of ambition. He did not know how or why, but he felt the two had killed Poppy for ambition. Perhaps, strangely enough, for a lotto ticket that Poppy himself did not have. And why? Because, as he said, of the rapacious ambition of those two. By “of those two” of course he meant Bourque and Chapman. They were both exceedingly ambitious. What was the ambition about? He knew Bourque had grown up in a house without a chair. That could make a man ambitious.

  There was something else very obvious. Leo Bourque had been to Poppy Bourque’s that night. Why? Simply a process of elimination. It had to be him, for no one else had visited old Mr. Bourque in the past twelve years except for the girls, their mother, and Leo Bourque himself. So unless Poppy left with a complete stranger then by easy process of elimination Markus had whittled it down to Leo. There was something else. Poppy Bourque’s lights were out, but the porch light was left on. Poppy had turned the lights out, left the porch light on because he believed he would come back in the dark. So as far as Markus could fathom, Poppy was thinking of going out for an hour or so with someone he knew, at least coming back before daylight. That means he either got lost or was taken away. He did not take his flashlight, which, Markus was informed by Bridgette’s aunt, he always did when he walked up the highway at night. This meant he was with someone and being driven somewhere. And it meant that most likely, with the porch light on, he went willingly. Also, all of this information he had acquired without the help of Leo, who was not forthcoming. But when Markus Paul said this to Sergeant Bauer, just as when he said things about the truck, few listened to him.

  But Markus now had something else. He had confirmation of Leo Bourque’s fingerprints on one item in Old Poppy’s house. Bourque’s fingerprints were on file because of him having gotten angry and threatening his wife. And one might say his fingerprints should be on everything in Poppy Bourque’s house, because he was always there. But then again, it was what it was on that was the salient point, which no one seemed to think important. So Markus kept it to himself.

  It was on the beer bottle that had cigarette butts in it. And that beer bottle very likely contained the last beer Poppy ever drank. It had been picked up by Bourque, who had dropped a cigarette into it. It was the only cigarette that was native brand. Poppy rolled his own from Players tobacco. Bourque had come into the house, and Poppy got ready to go out. Leo picked up the bottle and put his butt into it, just as Poppy was washing the paint off his hands. Markus envisioned a scenario where Leo had lit a cigarette in the truck and walked to the house, while Alex waited.

  So Paul listened to those he considered very stupid people and was silent, and those people believed, as the only Micmac in the department, Paul was trying to thwart this investigation about a Micmac who had already confessed. It was a very slippery slope, they said, from enthusiasm to impeding progress. It was also, in the court of public opinion, something that would be looked askance at. Markus himself thought of it differently. That is, because of his race he was the enabler of their misdirection, and he knew it and could do nothing about it. He himself was the one red flag, and yet he himself had to keep pressing for their direction to change. Yet the more he pressed, the more he was the red flag, and the greater enabler of their misdirection did he become. If he stopped swimming against the current, took the easy road, he would be considered wise and brave, and Sergeant Bauer would applaud him and offer him the promotion he sought.

  Markus Paul sat alone at lunch and most of the day, ate in the little restaurant by himself and went back to his apartment at night. He drank beer and stared out in hope at some spot in the trees as if some great magician of his people, the god Glooscap himself, who tamed the great bull moose by breaking his back, would make a path through the clouds and revisit him after four hundred years of his people being in the wilderness.

  He even went along the road to small stores, to ask if anyone had come in to see about a lotto ticket. Though many, many did, no one remembered anything to do with Poppy Bourque. He would think this quest showed him to be a complete idiot. So he would try to reason other ways, and came back always to this: “Is it such an unusual thing, a lotto ticket—it must be—it has to be, but whose and why?”

  He had no luck, however, so he thought long and hard about the truck in Chapman’s yard, about the break-in at the Chapman property. There were two in the house, at different times. It was not hard to figure out. They were looking for something very small. Then, after a few beers, it always came back to this: Why did the nephew, long a major player in the fight for Indian rights, suddenly fudge his moral equivalency? Why did he backtrack on support of those who he had written about in the papers? What was the problem that he would not support this man now when the evidence was both flimsy and circumstantial?

  How come?

  This, in fact, should have been Alex’s greatest fight.

  Because he knows who did it, and Proud did not do it, Markus Paul thought. Which meant someone close to him or he himself did it?

  “Glooscap will know,” Markus Paul said, thinking of the ducks in the air and birds in the great bed of the trees. “But Glooscap will not tell us mere mortals—for that we must figure it out ourselves.”

  That is, what Young Chapman suspected was true. Markus Paul was studying him and finding his love of justice to be a perverse and self-serving anomaly. He did not set out to find this; it is simply what he found, by process of elimination.

  What made Markus ill and queasy about this as he drank his beer that late afternoon with the smell of fall in the woods? It was his pent-up desire to blame Alex, because Markus had liked old Jim Chapman, and was very fond of him. It was Jim Chapman who had helped him through university. And Alex did not know this.

  So the last thing he was saying was that a white man couldn’t feel the sting of injustice against the native. Surely he did not believe that it was only the native who understood the world? There was enough injustice in the world to go around. And most white men knew in some way the depths of betrayal they caused the First Nations people. In fact, what was strange, Old Jim had himself. And in some way Markus had had a relatively easy life compared to some whites, even Alex Chapman himself. No. It was something else: “REASON being.”

  So Markus bided his time and wondered about all of this energy, these small whirlwinds blowing back and forth just under the surface of things.

  And Markus in a way (in a way he did not know himself until this moment) wanted to put a stop to Alex Chapman, and his assumption that he knew better than other white men, because he believed he could approve or disapprove of the value of people like his uncle and like Minnie. And now Markus realized it had all come to this moment on the lost highway. That he had long watched Alex do this, and he would try to put a stop to it here. He would do this because of the self-important picture Alex had taken beside Markus’s sister, who was now dead and in the arms of Glooscap.

  He shook slightly as he thought of it, toasted Glooscap, and said a prayer.

  He just might quarantine Alex, who had damaged the reputation of his uncle for twenty years.

  He just might show Alex that a man could and would appropriate everything in the world and anything from a life, except truth. Truth was something one could not, ever, appropriate.

  He thought about the lotto ticket: What if the uncle, Jim Chapman, had the lotto ticket and Alex stole it!

  Then he thought: It has to be wrong—he got everything in the will.

  Still, he must decide to follow his gut instinct or not. It was follow the lotto ticket theory to the end of the line or not!

  He sat smoking a cigarette and looking out at the darkness creeping over the bay and the foreboding look of cold coming in off the swells.

  They are certain to do something else—something will force them, he thought.

  So he decided to go once again to see Mr. Chapman.

  —

  THE DRIVEWAY WAS FLAT, WHITE WITH DUST AND COVERED in fine gravel, and the sun was still warm on his uniform. He sat on his haunche
s looking at the tires of Old Chapman’s truck, and heard Alex coming up behind him in a kind of remote, hesitant way, peculiarly watching first from the trees, and then along the old creosote logs, and then up the path that 120 workers had taken over the fifty years of Chapman’s company, coming and going, ebb and flow, like lost dusty planets circling some faint falling star called Chapman’s Paving and Construction until that star imploded and drove them hither and yon into a botched universe.

  Alex was about twenty yards away when Markus finally said, in his soft Micmac voice, “Do you know what I can’t tell?”

  “What?” Alex asked, startled that his presence was known and that it had been known, and that in some way because of his surreptitious movement a state of guilt might be registered by the man.

  Alex stopped walking and then started once more. He had come over to get some books that he wanted to show his class. He had the list written down because he now forgot things so easily, his mind was often a vague whirr, as if some fan were inside and he couldn’t stop it, like the fan you might hear in summer in another room and spend half the night awake in shadows. He certainly did not want Markus here, and he was wondering if he shouldn’t make some kind of demand—this was, after all, private property, Old Jim had signs everywhere. But Markus simply said, “I can’t tell if these are the tire marks.”

  “What tire marks?” Alex said, offhandedly.

  “The tire marks at the old road, if they were—well, it just might be the reason.”

  “Reason—what reason?”

  “The reason John Proud was at the house, to take and bring the truck back—that makes sense, doesn’t it?”

  “I am not sure,” Alex said.

  “Oh of course it does.” Markus turned and smiled. “It would almost have to be him—if this is the truck—”

  “Why—?”

  “Well, it means he was here sooner, and it means that we know what he was looking for—and then why he came back—but of course you would have to notice if the truck was gone, wouldn’t you?”