The Lost Highway

by David Adams Richards

  Bourque had found a military name for the campaign, to keep him in place: Emboldened Currents. They did not talk the last few days about “it” without this military name attached. For Bourque, this seemed so much better. The idea that this was an emboldened act was at least stabilizing. Made them seem mischievous if not quite heroic.

  Alex drank some green tea and ate a peach. Again he would have to go over to his uncle’s and get the books, for he had not gotten them the day Markus was there.

  “But if he says the paint matches?” he asked Bourquey, the name Leo wanted to be called at times.

  That is, what it came down to now had nothing to do with Amy.

  “Even if she dies we are still in the crosshairs,” Bourque did acknowledge.

  “Then why must we do it?” Alex asked.

  “It helps—for if she is not around there is still a good enough chance to charge Proud.”

  And so today—that is, the day before Amy was to be finally left alone on that lonely road—Alex proceeded in the dreary afternoon to find his books, for there was still a course on ethics he must teach. For what all this semantics did was show the lucid flexibility of his thought.

  “Yes, I am a consummate thinker,” he decided, as he crossed over the old lane where Amy had stood that night and made his way toward Chapman’s house. However, he staggered now and again, and the pale cooling grasses sometimes trapped his sandals and made his toes pain, and he labored when he breathed, and if truth be told he had not taken his blood pressure pills, for he courted in some way oblivion now, and asked someone, in some way, for it.

  The house was growing dark inside. The late shadows of afternoon crept over it, and when the rain stopped periodic bursts of sunlight came in certain windows and then faded as suddenly as they came. This happened when he was on the stairs walking to the third landing. A sudden ray of light pressed against the side of his face, bathing him in sudden warmth, and then just as spontaneously disappeared. For some reason he was shaken by this. It was simply because this used to happen to him on those long ago days after school, when he trudged up the wooden stairs to his apartment to see his mom, and for some strange reason this came back to him now.

  It was also unnerving for him to be anywhere in the house. Too much of his belittled history was here, but this only reinforced his heartbreak that he was no longer as he had been—and the torment he had endured as an innocent boy and teenager was in many respects far more appealing to him then the nausea he felt at having become a denizen of hidden actions.

  I will give my money to the church, the thought came suddenly. Why? He did not know. How insane for a man who believed in his own power and intellect.

  So he approached his room knowing that the last time he had entered here he had been free, and now he was not.

  The books were still there. His uncle for all his talk had not sold them, and not even moved them. There was his unfinished doctoral thesis (he was to finish it before tenure, but dropped it once he was pushed aside). His work, in part, was on the tragic imperialization of First Nations peoples, and the philosophical and moral duty one had to practice civil disobedience against this.

  He trembled as he remembered Saint Francis’s dialogue with Brother Leo: “In what way do we find true joy—”

  “In being tormented and left outside, broken and cold—for only on the cross is the tree of joy found!”

  He began to take the books out and lay them on his bed. He shrugged at every one he tossed, as if they no longer mattered to him. But he would have to teach them. Strangely, he could not find his Penguin edition of Aristotle’s Ethics, the one with “Athena Mourning” on its cover. He looked through his bookshelf half a dozen times. He was puzzled, because like many men who love books he could go to any bookshelf he owned and find the book he sought. Yet he could not find it here. Perhaps it was the copy he had given to Amy? No, he had given her an extra copy.

  He gathered the rest of the books and went to leave when he saw Aristotle on the bed stand by the window.

  Strange?

  He picked it up, carried it over to the rest of the books, and noticed a small piece of lined paper that must have come from a notebook. He wondered, for he didn’t remember writing anything inside this edition, what it was.

  What was written was simply this: Read page 124. Thanks a bunch, Markus.

  Alex went downstairs with the book in his hand, the others littered on the bed because he did not take them. He shook like a timid child going to the principal’s office. He could not stop shaking, and rubbing his mouth. He kept trying to rationalize why this was written, and whatever possessed Paul to ask him to do this. He hoped, or felt, that perhaps it was something benign and interesting. Something that showed that Markus truly respected him.

  This then is what Alex Chapman read on page 124:

  A bad moral state, once formed, is not easily amended.

  Again, it is unreasonable to suppose that a man who acts unjustly or licentiously does not wish to be unjust or licentious; and if anyone, without being in ignorance, acts in a way that will make him unjust, he will be voluntarily unjust; but it does not follow that he can stop being unjust, and be just, if he wants to—no more than a sick man can become healthy, even though (it may be) his sickness is voluntary, being the result of incontinent living and disobeying his doctors. There was a time when it was open to him not to be ill; but when he had once thrown away his chance, it was gone; just as when one had once let go of a stone, it is too late to get it back—but the agent was responsible for throwing it, because the origin of the action was in himself. So too it was at first open to the unjust and licentious persons not to become such, and therefore they are voluntarily what they are; but now that they have become what they are, it is no longer open to them not to be such.

  He had let go of the stone and it was too late to get it back. If only he had not let go of the stone, and become what he had become, and now it was not in his power not to be such. This was Aristotle, the man he was about to teach Amy and others. Many of them were middle-aged, privileged women belonging to book clubs. Some would dote on him and bring him cookies. He liked the feeling of authority and being coddled at the same time. He had wanted Amy to see this, too, so she would recognize him as the same learned figure those poor ladies did. Their husbands worked at the mines or in the mill; they would go to Christmas parties where their husbands would dance half the night with the secretaries. And there was at times much sadness in these women’s lives. At times, with all his mild manners, he liked to rebuke them about their ignorant, self-satisfied husbands, and they would look startled and guilty.

  That is, in many ways he had really let go of the stone long, long, long ago. The stone had fallen far away from him now. To get it back he would have to become like Saint Francis said, broken and alone, tormented and outcast. But would his own Brother Leo ever acknowledge this?

  He stood at six foot two. His thin body was becoming crooked, and his back was bending down. He could still manage a hysterical look whenever he was frightened or annoyed.

  All I have done for everyone, he thought, all I have done—what will become of me now?

  He crossed the darkening field and saw a buck deer, with its horns in velvet, standing in shadow down the way, near those trees that he associated with his aunt and his mother. Sunlight came on those velvet antlers and glowed, as if a halo. It was Amy’s Stardust, which had crossed the road.

  The deer turned and moved against the grain of the day, and like some elliptical shadow disappeared beyond the old woodlot. But Alex kept looking behind him for this deer, while coming into Chapman’s lane. He turned his head to watch it again, seeing the antlers glowing as it made its jump, just where he and Leo had come to a stop on that horrible night.

  Suddenly he tripped over a windfall, and found himself covered in mud.

  “Damn,” he said.

  Yet what was even more startling was sitting right before him in the lane: a New Testament. He picked i
t up and looked at its soiled, wet pages, and the name on the inside cover: Amy.

  He wanted to leave it there, where it was, but was compelled to bring it back to his cabin, to try to dry it out, to take care of it, for some reason, like a mother does a child. Not because it was the New Testament but because Amy was written on the inside cover.

  He had intended to bring Plato and Cicero and Aristotle, and ended up with this.

  After it was dried just enough, he closed his eyes for a long time, and decided that he would give this God a chance. That is, he would open the book and read one line. This line would in fact tell him if there was a God watching him or not. He knew this was a silly self-delusion. Yet—what James Joyce thought might not be what he any longer thought. Or could think. That is, the fact that he was implicated in murder had made him confront the very nature of himself and his relation with God, if there was one.

  He realized when he opened his eyes he was sitting very much like he had when he was a child in his room. He opened the little faded book and read one line.

  He stared at this line for ten minutes, wondering if it was real. That is, if the line was meant for him to read, at that moment, or simply a random bit of writing that had nothing whatsoever to do with him. That is, there was only one of two ways to look upon this. Either some greater force, mysterious and unseen as it was, had allowed him to read this line—the very line he was searching for (though he wouldn’t quite admit to it)—or nothing he did meant anything outside this horrible little place. The one line was from the Gospel of John: “And you are unwilling to come to me that you may have Life!”

  He suddenly thought that it was the first time Jesus had spoken to him in sixteen years. And what he said was—true.

  Darkness was coming, night’s sweet silence. He picked the knife out of the hiding place, the blood still on it from Poppy Bourque, and held it until the dark night fell.

  So he thought suddenly not of Saint John but of magnificent five-foot-four John Keats: “Darkling I listen and at times have been half in love with easeful death.” From a poem of genius almost no one read anymore.

  —

  AMY WENT TO TWO PEOPLE THAT DAY, TO SEEK HELP. BUT she did not find it. Her face in its troubled state was even more delightfully kind and human. It was the feature of its impish humanity, her unruly hair, her feet that seemed to dance when she walked, that Rory had loved as a boy.

  Robin and Rory were now an item, and like all kids had moved off from the little world to the big world and had no time for people like Amy now. And Robin attended to a much more uniform philosophy of the world, where society dictated that her whims be taken seriously, and only her future, her ideas, her pleasures, and her hopes mattered, and her parents, and even her schooling, were there for the fulfilling of these as best they could.

  Rory’s father was an adjuster with Doan Insurance, and Rory looked upon his life as more positive because of it and the people his father dealt with, some of whom were influential men in the area. So he too had finally left his Gum Road sweetheart behind. He had stopped going to church, and shrugged with condescension that she still did. He had the stubble of a little beard he was trying to grow, his self-amused blue eyes staring out of a chubby, somewhat impertinent face. And Robin had her license now, so she and Rory were sitting in her mother’s small car near the church lane, smoking and talking, when Amy walked up to them. When they realized she was there, they both looked at each other wisely and then began to giggle as Robin blew smoke into the silent late summer air in petulant superiority.

  “What the heck are you doing?” Rory said like an older brother.

  “What?” She smiled, her heart pounding at the disrespect he now was capable of showing for her, staring out the window as if she was the joke she herself didn’t get.

  “Yer damn pants, what have you got on them?” Robin asked.

  “I put glitter snaps on them,” Amy whispered. “I thought they’d look nice—so?”

  “God,” Robin said, “country bumpkin. Those went out of fashion ten years ago.”

  Amy smiled. Even more in her sorrow her face somehow looked wondrous.

  “Well I’ve been waiting ten years to put them on,” she said. “And I have mastered ‘All Along the Watchtower.’ That’s over ten years old and that’s not out of fashion! And there is no country bumpkin in that!”

  She walked back down her lane by herself, and after a time, tears in her eyes, she began to run.

  Who could she speak to now?

  ——

  She made the call to Markus the next afternoon. The afternoon of September 2. The afternoon Mrs. Hanson went down to Moncton to pick up her mother and father.

  Bauer took the call, but why should he tell Markus Paul, simply because a young girl said she had seen a truck off a back lane? The girl probably wanted attention. Bauer and Paul had just had an argument over charging Proud that had lasted three hours. Bauer had won an argument which he himself took to be irrefutable. So in this regard Amy was at least three hours too late.

  —

  MARKUS PAUL LOOKED INTO HIS BOOK OF NOTES WHILE sitting against the desk in the outer office of the small clapboard RCMP building, with the flag moving in the autumn heat.

  It was now September 23.

  The truck had been confiscated the day after he had taken John Proud to Richabucto. That is, on September 3.

  It sat impounded in the yard, up on blocks, its tires off, its doors off, its seat taken out. The sky was deep, deep blue, the bay—not so far away that it couldn’t be seen—was as blue, and wind chimes tinkled in the office like small angels were moving them.

  Markus had found out, by miracle or accident or a little of both, that there was a lotto ticket sold by Burton when he stopped at the garage to buy some cigarettes for his charge, John Proud, on the day he drove him to jail in Richabucto, September 2.

  Burton, when Paul asked the question about the now infamous lotto ticket, because he realized Burton sold them, said simply, “I sold it most likely.” And looked very sternly at his friend.

  “Oh, you did—well, to who—Poppy Bourque?”

  “Not so likely,” Burton sniffed. “No, not so likely—sold it to someone else.”

  “Who, Burton? I would appreciate it if you could tell me. Why didn’t you tell us before, you must have known that I was interested—I asked a hundred people. It might solve everything.”

  “Yes, it might.” Burton shrugged. “No one believed me in the first place,” he said, sniffing a little sanctimoniously in the pulpy afternoon air. “So I sit here and say nothing—and you sent those other two in, and didn’t come yerself, I figure you didn’t care enough!”

  “Well, try me,” Markus said, “see if I will believe you,” realizing the last thing to do was to become exasperated with a soul who had been belittled and beaten most of his life.

  “Jimmy Chapman,” Burton said, turning away and straightening some fall fliers on the counter, as if he was trying to hide the name behind his actions.

  “Mr. Jim Chapman?” Markus asked.

  “Why yes,” Burton scolded, “Jimmy Chapman—I assume!”

  Paul drove to Richabucto and then to Moncton, knowing that with this information, if it was true, the case would soon be solved. He did not tell his cousin yet. For his cousin had other serious problems, and he wanted to get him help.

  “Alex found the ticket—the old man was fishing—Bourque got involved—why? Blackmail. So they went to Poppy—to get him to claim it?”

  If that was the scenario, it was now very easy to see how things had gone wrong. Markus jotted this down, as he always did. “It was Poppy’s honesty that killed him.”

  The one thing he never realized was the danger Amy Patch was in. That she was the one elusive witness to the two of them with the truck.

  —

  NOW, ON SEPTEMBER 23, MARKUS WAS REVISITING HIS notes. He came to a page that said, “Bodecia,” and turned it to read what he had collected and written about her
.

  Amy was eighty-six pounds. She had spent the summer putting snaps on all her jeans and shirts and decorating her room, to make it more grown-up. She wore red sneakers with the tongues turned down, and she would try and make sure she stepped around every puddle so not to stain them. So her friends now said, when he asked why they had abandoned her, “Her life was random—”

  It was more random because she was a girl on a lane and was leaving them to go away. They liked to talk that way—it confused the adults, without which confusion life itself would be no fun—and not move a muscle toward the future. It was strange that Markus, for all his driving the highway, never knew this little girl.

  Still, Markus Paul had now pieced together what had happened that summer with her, from the moment she left grade 9 and took the bus back down the old highway to the night of September 2, when Mrs. Hanson drove down to pick up her parents in Moncton.

  He knew the times she went for ice cream, or each time she went to the mall, telling her mother she was meeting friends. Most days were spent with either Fanny or her mother—or looking for Burton’s hat, or his boat, which the kids hid on him. She would wade along the shore looking for it until she spied it, then find the oars and row it back up the Bartibog. Two or three days later it would have disappeared again.

  Markus had made a note of this too, and those children now denied they hid Burton’s boat on him or took his hat. This, in fact, was what put her in conflict with other kids, because many of them, bored and indolent, had taken to playing pranks on a man she was honor bound to help. So she would look for his hat and find it in the weeds, or look for his scow and find they had hauled it up on ground near the church—or that they had pulled the plug on his freezer full of ice cream. Amy went online and messaged her friends to leave Burton alone.