There was silence. Alex looked mystified, his blond eyelashes almost invisible when he blinked.
“The keys to the truck, that was small enough to riffle through jars and drawers—keys to the truck, that’s what he might have been riffling through things for.”
“Oh I see, yes,” Alex said relieved. “That certainly explains everything—”
“Except why would he go upstairs to try to find the keys?”
“Well, they could have been up there,” Alex said excitedly.
“Yes, they could have—”
Alex smiled at Markus, who didn’t seem to know this, and walked himself to the door. Markus rose, came behind him, brushing off his knees. He suddenly remembered a line Alex had said once last year when he was speaking about his takeover at Chapman’s Island. The line came to him now because he was thinking again of how Alex was fudging his moral responsibility, and he couldn’t prove why. But Markus had thought this a wonderful line at first until he realized that what it actually did was enforce a quality upon both races that neither deserved, and therefore made both red man and white man less human. But he said it now as Alex started to open the shed door: “When the red man fights against the white man, I am on the side of the red man.”
“Yes,” Alex said quickly. He flinched slightly as he unlocked the door. They went into the cool small outer room of the house, where sunlight made a sudden dazzling entrance, and Alex did not turn around.
“Ah yes,” Markus said after a moment, “I knew I was wrong.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you said you never took the truck.”
“I did not take it, no.”
“Then the keys were hanging on the key holder—just as they would have been when your uncle went to the Restigouche—and here they are now—”
“But he could have taken them and put them back? Or I could have put them there after I got my uncle.”
“Of course, well, yes—I know this, but you did not tell me that—that is, that you put them somewhere else? Then what was he riffling through the house for, what was he searching for—if the keys were there, and as you said, or hinted, they were there when you took them and went to get your uncle—but the bowls and jars and drawers were looked through—what, for a combination to a safe?”
“Perhaps,” Alex said quickly.
“Do you have a safe?”
“No—but Proud wouldn’t have known.”
“No—” Markus paused, “but he wouldn’t have searched to find the combination of something he didn’t know you had or had not—and in many break-ins the people simply take the safe if it is small enough.”
Alex was again silent. He looked perplexed, he blinked very quickly. His hair was caught in the sunlight through the kitchen window. Markus looked perplexed as well, looking at him closely. Then he shrugged and smiled and Alex gave a relieved: “I see—well, well, well.”
Then he turned about, ran the tap water very quickly, and washed his face. But there was no hand towel, and he stood with his face covered in drops of water, smiling. Markus pretended not to notice this.
“So we are almost back to square one—unless you used the truck yourself, before the day you went to get your uncle, and placed the keys somewhere else—”
“No—” Alex said with some torment, for the time to say this had come and gone. Now he could not say it without creating more suspicion.
“But we know that John Proud never used the truck either—”
“Why?”
“Well, to assume he did is to assume he came back and placed the keys on the key board exactly where they are, and then spent a lot of time riffling through papers—and though he was searching for things to rob, never took any item he could sell. He did not steal the 22.250 rifle in the upstairs hallway. Nor did he steal the truck!”
“No, he wouldn’t have done that,” Alex said, using both sleeves to wipe his face like a cat might use its paws.
“But you see, that’s a problem.”
“Why—I mean if you could just tell me why is everything all of a sudden a problem—that’s the thing, everything is a problem now, just because John Proud is in a bind. I mean, I am not trying to say he is guilty, I know there are many who like to blame the First Nations, I am not one. You know how many articles I’ve written—and who had his picture taken with your sister. So there! But we have to deal with some kind of reality.”
Markus paused for a moment. His hair was cut so that it was bunched at the top and shaved on the sides. It gave his cheeks and eyes a more pronounced and defining expression, which in some would seem sharp or aggressive but in Markus always made him appear jovial and dimpled, as if he was blushing. He stared at Alex a long, long moment—so Alex actually thought of running. Then he took a small pair of tweezers from his pocket and simply picked something off of Alex’s sleeve.
“I wonder where that came from?” he asked, smiling.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know,” Markus said, holding a small worm up to the window on the tweezers’ pincers. Then he said, “A maggot—on your sleeve!”
“A what?”
“A maggot.”
Alex said nothing. In fact, he was on the verge of confessing.
But Markus put the maggot into the sink, and simply said this: “That’s the thing, I am trying to deal with some kind of reality. Last year the Penniac man, who got off, left me shamefaced. Now I believe people want to blame an Indian for this, because of that. But it is not going to happen, not on my watch. For John Proud is innocent of everything except possibly trying to destroy himself.”
“Me, me—wants to blame the Indian man—me—I’m Alex Chapman—that’s who I am.”
“No, listen, please don’t get upset—I am not saying you.”
“Me of all people,” Alex continued, suddenly laughing at this absurdity.
Markus looked at him, stepped around him, ran the tap so the maggot would flush into the drain, and then said, “Well, we will figure it all out—come, I want to show you something.”
Markus, taking the keys, turned and went out the back way, through the shed again. Alex turned out the kitchen light and followed him with his hands in his pockets, and every few feet he tried to yawn. But now this fan, this summer fan whirring in the back of his conscience, was forcing him to sweat, was forcing the valve in his heart to squeak, was forcing untold thoughts too. He saw the truck again, like he did when he was at the lighthouse watching it through the binoculars; it had its own animation, its own aura about it now, and this aura was in a way dark and sinister.
Markus turned to him and said, as if he were answering a dialogue Alex had had with someone sometime before, “I do not know if there is a God.”
“Pardon?”
“I do not know if there is a God—”
“I see.”
“But I think God, if there is a God, directed me to this.”
“Directed what to you where?” Alex asked now, squinting in the fading sunshine.
“I think I am right. And Sergeant Bauer is dead wrong. I think John Proud had nothing to do with this. You see, someone had this truck, and I think—I think Poppy Bourque was in it. I can’t prove it—well, it would be circumstantial, as they say, but I will have a bit of evidence that I can match with something, I think. Then this case can be looked at in another way.”
“How can that be if John Proud didn’t take it?” Alex asked derisively.
Markus shrugged. “Well, it might mean—it might mean someone else had the truck—someone who knew where the keys were!”
There was a long and terrible pause, a thirty-second pause of incredible tension. But Markus did not seem tense; he simply watched Alex, with happy-go-lucky eyes. Then he said, “You don’t mind if I show you—it might help the case if I could take a sample of something?”
“No,” Alex said, “of course I don’t mind!”
“I have permission to open this truck and take a sample—?”
Paul got on his knees again, and with his buck knife took a small sample of something at the edge of the door, placing it into an envelope. Then he unlocked and opened the door, and looked at the side of the door near the latch.
“It’s small but I can detect it—can you see—it stretches from the tip of the door back to here.”
“See what—I can’t—what—I can’t see blood—if you think I can see blood—I don’t see any blood.”
“No there is not a bit of blood as far as I can see,” Markus said. “At least not right here.”
“Then what, if no blood?” Alex said, squinting.
“Paint,” Markus said. “Paint—this spot of green paint—here and here—from Poppy brushing against it while getting into the truck.”
Alex’s eyes closed for a long moment. He opened his eyes slowly and then shut them fast again. Then finally he opened them. He saw the truck keys Markus was handing him dangling in front of his face. Alex for a moment tried to think of blaming his uncle. But Markus stopped him with this: “We were a warring people—and our men were warriors of great skill.”
“I know,” Alex said seriously.
“We fought with the Beothuks, and the Inuit who came to our Northern Islands—warred with the Maliseet and Huron—killed and were killed—”
“I know that,” Alex said.
“I do not expect the Maliseet or Inuit or Huron to apologize to me, nor I to them—”
Alex said nothing.
“What I mean to say, Alex Chapman, is I don’t want forced apologies from people who are singled out to blame—besides, I liked your uncle, he was kind to my sister and me. But,” he said, “you have the opportunity now to give the island to us.”
Alex watched Markus leave, and walked out to the road to make sure he was gone. Then he went and sat in the middle of his worn and corroded property, with belts and motor housing stretched against the baleful sun. Here out of sight, he began to vomit and could not stop. The paint in the truck was certainly another terrible complication.
Alex was a man who was ill. He was like a man who, having an operation, believes he will be well, and yet a complication arises where they have to alter the prognosis. After an initial period of euphoria, thinking whatever embolism has been taken away, the symptoms come back. He is again operated on, and again feels he will be fine. But he has now entered the second stage, where the doctors are simply trying to correct some mistake made in the first stage, and since they do not correct it, the patient enters, because of the first and second stage, a third stage, where the illness is dire and life threatening. Still the patient hopes all will be well if the treatment in the third stage works.
This is where Alex Chapman now was, sick in body and soul, precariously knowing he was soon to be caught, and still trying to discover some way out. But the only way out for him now was to deal with Amy Patch—and yet even if he did, by now he was in such an advanced decline the operation might be worthless.
—
ON AUGUST 26 AMY LEFT FANNY’S AND WENT TO THE STORE to get bread and milk, using money from the jar in the kitchen, used only for Fanny, where every penny was accounted for. She clutched this money and walked along the ditch, spying the cattails now rising in the afternoon sun and the black daisies near the border of Annie Everette’s house, a woman dead some forty years before. At the store she heard how John Proud should be hanged.
“It’s not that he’s an Indian, it’s just that anyone to do that to an old man like Poppy Bourque—” Mrs. Hanson, in her large dress and her hair gray and pinned back, said while she rang in change and made adjustments to her hair every five seconds.
So as Amy left the store, holding her bread and milk for Fanny’s breakfast, a greater responsibility followed her, here and there, as if a small human shape. She took time to cut some cattails and held them in her arm, and navigated the path up the slope and then back onto the Gum Road. And at all these moments, she saw the human shape beside her, perhaps as real as Bourque’s and Alex’s connection to themselves.
It was in its vague attachment every feeling of goodness wrestling with her hope that she not have to say anything. But over the last while, as her mother started to clear out the closets of the only house she had known, started to speak of a distant place, she knew she must complete the task God, if there was a God, had given her. No, she was not prone to thinking of herself as a messenger, she was prone as a teenaged girl to thinking of how someday in the quiet of a field a boy would lay with her, and she daydreamed about this as other boys and girls her age did.
Yet the more she read the books assigned to her by Alex Chapman, the more she realized that for three thousand years man had the same hopes and desires and, moreover, the exact same responsibilities perhaps, and just perhaps given to them by the exact same God.
When she thought of Alex, and the lotto ticket, a strange tumbler was turned, and she could think clearly of the night she saw the truck. From that she could think of Poppy Bourque’s movements, and from that she could think that Poppy had found out about this ticket and wanted to tell. Was Poppy with them, and had they killed him by then—? This was absolutely absurd and she cursed herself for thinking this.
Alex—that was the stumbling block. How could Alex be involved? It was impossible. And if it was impossible then she had no attendant shadow of responsibility, of duty far beyond her age.
However, she did not know why there was so much fear in her. Leo Bourque was absolutely right. If John Proud had not been arrested on suspicion of murder, Amy might never have felt an obligation to understand what she had seen. For this was what plagued her. And the more it plagued her, the more fear she had.
She thought she had seen a pair of sneakers sticking out just beyond the lights of the truck. But it may have been just two roots of the old pine tree that was there. She kept telling herself that her mind—a first rate mind it was, in its potential more powerful than Alex Chapman’s, the one who had once wanted to destroy the potential of this mind (for he never thought of it as ever being a mind like his)—was mistaken.
But she knew in her heart this was on Alex’s behalf, so she wouldn’t send him to prison. In a way she was like every child who is taught to trust an adult who then proves to be untrustworthy. Some part of her was ashamed. She wanted to exonerate him. This is what her mind was trying to do. But by August 26, four days before her mom left, a week before her dad was to come home, she realized she just might have seen something—she might have seen the body of Poppy Bourque—and John Proud was innocent. She could not tell her mother this. That is, she wanted to prove that she was right before she did.
For there was one other thing. She knew it was problematic, and thought of it as a vague shadow across her reason. If she was wrong in any way about what she saw! If it was an innocent meeting between the two, her reporting she saw the body of Poppy Bourque would be thought of as terrible a miscarriage of justice as one could imagine on this river! If she was wrong (and she still thought she might be—because everyone assumed it was John Proud), then she would be marked as a young child who told fibs, who went to a seminar at the Catholic church about Saint Mark and the spirit of the law and then told lies about someone who did not believe and had fallen away from the church. (There was of course the history between her and Alex, which would make it look like a form of revenge—and after he had enrolled her in his modern egalitarian ethics course, it would look like a casting of stones against a kindly man.) It was also playing into Markus Paul’s hands, and many were now saying he was a manipulator. That is, she would be taking sides with the man who wanted for his own gain to help his guilty cousin. This was the weight upon her, to keep silent. But what if Markus Paul was right?
Yet if she tattled and was wrong, she knew in her heart it would mark her family for years to come. She knew that she would be loo
ked upon as a deceitful Irish Catholic girl trying to discredit a moderate secular man, who had always liked her and had tried to help her family. People would turn their backs on her. And then she would think of Rory and Robin! What would they say? What kind of a friendship would she have left with them?
All of this she had to think about, daily. She would not get the Beaverbrook scholarship that so many believed she was entitled to.
If she just kept quiet, would things not go away? She thought so, but as the days wore on she realized that she was frightened after dark. And every day, alone, she had to keep the old woman content. The dread would go away, and then come back. When it went away, she would be completely secure and sure that she was silly. When it came over her, she was surrounded by vague and insubstantial phantoms.
For a while, however, she thought they were just phantoms. So she started to take the old woman for walks again, along the lane during the afternoon, just after one o’clock, after the wind starting in from the bay moved the leaves on the tallest of birches, and they were separated from everyone else in the world by five hundred yards of twisting road and old-growth trees.
It was during the walk on August 28 that Amy suddenly had the overpowering feeling someone was watching her. At first she hoped it was Rory, who she hoped still liked her. Or Mrs. Hanson, who had come early to see them. Then she thought it was probably the buck deer in velvet who was gollywopping about for an apple.
“Stardust, you come out—now you come along out of there—come on now!”
But no one answered, and no buck deer named Stardust came forward. The silence made everything sinister. The trees waved, sometimes picking up scuds of dust upon the lane. She looked behind her, back down to the Jameson’s old tote road being covered up in the shadows of afternoon, seeing big leaves being blown by wind across the empty friendless pathway, and then she put her hand up and covered her eyes to look. And when she did, shading her eyes to look, she saw something that made her heart fail. Stardust was indeed on the lane—but over three hundred yards away at the turn, looking back at her—or perhaps not at her at all!
The Lost Highway Page 33