The Lost Highway Read online

  “You mightn’t have the numbers right,” Young Chapman said fitfully. “That would be terrible if you didn’t.”

  He was now in a panic, and offered to make Burton supper. Burton said he had had supper. So Alex offered an after-supper lunch. Burton said he was not so hungry at the moment.

  The idea that simple people had that this lotto was a sign from the divine when it was just a clever maneuver by a callous government to rake in millions he suddenly told Burton, exasperatedly. Burton simply nodded.

  “I know that,” Burton said. “Government is like everyone else.”

  “And do you remember when he beat me when I was eleven?” he asked. “He was the one who started calling me the big cheese. Remember—Big Cheese this and Big Cheese that?”

  “Of course,” Burton nodded, though he didn’t remember, and would have been two or three.

  “He beat me all the time—beat my head off, beat the snot out of me, half crippled me, cuffed me on the side of the head, twisted my ears,” Alex said, rubbing his dirty hands together and looking about. “Sometimes on occasion my ribs still pain,” he said. “Day in and day out I worked for nothing, and tried to please him—and I was always being kept in or yelled at. Just because I didn’t bring the wood in from under that tub and dry it—do you remember that tub?”

  “Oh yes,” Burton said, though he did not remember, “that was quite the tub.”

  “About this ticket—we have to be sure—you wouldn’t want to startle anyone into believing something they have no right to believe. That’s what the church does—do you want to be like the church?” he asked.

  “Not on your life,” Burton said. “Who would want to be like a church?”

  After this remark, Alex said nothing more. He was of course terribly ashamed of himself at this moment. But he was furious with Burton, as intelligent people are at times when they believe a person’s lack of intelligence is an affront and a danger to themselves.

  Burton stared at the floor in a strange reflective manner, as if ashamed of himself too, and as always he was trying to do right.

  Alex’s unemployment insurance would be gone in a week. But he had his course on ethics. Or at least he hoped he did. They were supposed to let him know. Now he asked whether Burton knew how much this lotto ticket was worth. His hands were shaking slightly as he asked the question, for a part of him didn’t want to know.

  “Oh yes, I know,” Burton said, not looking at him. “I know very well what it is worth.”

  “Well—what?” Young Chapman asked impatiently.

  “Thirteen million,” Burton said, shrugging. “If there is such a thing as million.”

  —

  ALEX THOUGHT, THIRTEEN MILLION. THAT WAS TOO MUCH for someone who was his enemy. An enemy having thirteen million could do untold damage. He would be the laughingstock of the river all over again as he was, as he was, as he was. The old man having thirteen million was worse than Beaverbrook having it. Yes, Beaverbrook and he wouldn’t have gotten along either.

  But there was also another consideration—that of Minnie Patch. Long had he wanted her. But if Sam came back, with his money—his little bit of money—but money much more than he had before?

  She would leave Patch for thirteen million, she would have to. Though he was a defender of the rights of women, and no one on the river could say that he wasn’t—in fact, he thought of himself as the only defender of the triangular rights of women: the right to choose, equal pay for equal work, and affordable daycare; he had made his life’s duty to maintain this ideology—any woman would succumb for thirteen million.

  But the pricklier and more feared problem was his uncle. He was suddenly terrified of what his uncle would say about him if he got his grubby hands on all that cash. He’d be worse than the popes, Alex thought. “Burnt at the stake no doubt.”

  So what he thought was this: If he could somehow get this money, he would do more good with it than his uncle, who had lost himself in anger over the company. Minnie might just come to him, and leave Sam Patch where he was, out west working. They would send Sam Patch some money, with a letter saying that they both still liked him.

  The idea always in his mind, like those of unrequited lovers, was that Minnie really still loved him. He could not escape that hope. And it would be worth thirteen million to find out.

  But then again, if James Chapman ever got this money, Alex’s life may as well be over—that is how sure he was of the old man’s enmity at this moment.

  I may as well be buried up to my neck in pig slop, he thought. And then he thought again of jail. For if Jim Chapman got the money, Leo Bourque would tell about something Alex Chapman had done to the company a year ago. A very small little thing, but nonetheless it had destroyed the company completely.

  How could I know I’d ruin the company, he had thought many times. Though he knew because he taught ethics that he had known, and that he didn’t even have to teach ethics to have known.

  That could mean jail. He would be like an angel falling from heaven—that’s how low he would have sunk. He remembered the picture in his bedroom when he was a boy, of Satan and his herd falling through the sky. He always stared at the impassive non- expressive clouds about them as they fell, hurling through, as his great-aunt once said, “their own baleful conscience.”

  What a mess, he thought, panicking slightly. He stared at his wide and almost terrified eyes looking back at him from his mirror across the room. All those books, what good had they ever done—he may as well have eaten them, rather than have read them. And all those silly self-centered, pick-arsed authors that he wanted to be. What had they ever done? Did one of them win thirteen million?

  Over the last few months, since the business went under, he had been waiting for the other shoe to drop. For in a way he was the one who had caused the business to fail, and left Old Jim and his employees broke.

  So now the shoe had dropped.

  If there was a lost highway where souls traveled, this was it. It was a lost highway because those going downriver met the French communities that didn’t belong to them. Those French who came upriver met the English communities where they would never be welcome. The signs in both languages led nowhere at all, and right in among them were the Micmac, with their own language and as many problems.

  Such was this lost highway that sat along the edge of the bay and called itself a land. James Chapman himself had done much to aggravate this isolation by tearing French signs down in the 1970s, and so too had a mayor from the French side by painting over the English signs with the Acadian flag.

  But things had changed three years ago. The highway bids along this section of the province were now under French control, and people in power remembered Mr. Chapman, the Englishman who had tried to destroy them with his bids. Alex had blamed his uncle for his bigotry rather than the French who put Jim under; Alex had long ago decided his uncle and not the French was bigoted. He had believed for a time that his real father was in fact French.

  Now, about this other stuff—the millions—he would have to act, he knew this. He would have to do something he never did before—break into the house and steal that ticket. Or if he was being watched, as he was, find someone else to. He would have to, if he wanted to survive. Or he could let James Chapman have his winning, and it would mean the end of his life. That is, he would never be able to live down Jim Chapman’s hubris, nor would he be able to crawl back.

  So it was now, at this moment, that Young Chapman became resolved never to tell Old Chapman what he may have won, even unto death. He would do everything to get this ticket for himself. He would be resolved to do so, and not lessen his resolve until he had succeeded. This is what he must do in order to secure his independence. There was one moment when he thought he should not do this, and this was the time to let the idea go.

  But he couldn’t.

  There was a profound silence in the little room. And in this silence it was as if some kind of voice were pleading with him to let
it all be.

  It was, of course, the conversation he had had last week with likable, illiterate Poppy Bourque.

  “Yes,” Poppy had said, “I remember your mother, and I liked her very much, and what she would say to you is if we live as we must everything will turn out.” Poor Poppy Bourque thought Alex would agree with this, and was startled by his absolutely disgusted look.

  The voice of Poppy was in his mind for just a second, and then lost again.

  Alex paused and quite to his surprise felt weak, breaking out in sweat. Finally he said this to Burton: “I’m his nephew, I’ll tell him about the money and check his ticket. I’ll tell him he should give you your 1 percent—”

  “But I thought—well, thinking you didn’t like him.”

  “Well I’m not doing this for him or me but for you, Burton.”

  “Oh,” Burton said.

  “I have a responsibility to you is how I look at it.”

  Burton paused, screwed up his eyebrows, and felt that this was good thinking, for already he had gotten the numbers entirely mixed up. To say someone who hadn’t had won the lotto would be bad. In fact, he realized that the old man might think he was tormenting him. So he took his leave from Young Chapman and made his way back down the desolate beach, looking at the last of the seagulls and the terns skimming, and in the darkening grove above the nighthawks weaving in and out. He was perplexed and angry at not being able to remember, and why would God, if there was a God, do this to him. For this had always been the way. People had always teased him because of it—told him he owed them money when he did not because of it. Children would come in and say: “You have to give the $5 you owe me—momma says.” And he would prolong his stare, and mumble, but he would give the $5. It was, as some said, a fail-safe way to make some spare change. Burton knew this, often after the fact. And he had always got up to a new day, and tried it all again. The only one he had protecting him from this was Amy.

  When he got home what seemed exciting seemed after reflection to be nothing at all. Most of the things in his life he had been talked out of. From his pocket knife when young to his Mario Lemieux autograph he once had in his garage window.

  “We will wait and see,” he said. “It could be a big heap of change in my pocket. It could be.”

  There was one thing that bothered him. And it was what Mrs. Chapman had said, about a gift a year after her death. In the way of the world, stranger things had happened, and Burton himself was a strange thing—a person who wasn’t even supposed to exist, because his own mother, a scared young girl of sixteen, had left him out in the snow to die, down on the Gum Road, behind the chicken coop. He had been left out on February 5, 1971, and when they found him on February 6, people said he was frozen solid and the hens had begun to peck at him. They took him to the hospital and thawed him out, and as they did he began to breathe and cry. So here he was, flesh and blood. When he met his mother years and years later, he had no idea what to do or say, so he broke out step-dancing in front of her, a smile on his face.

  —

  FIVE MINUTES AFTER BURTON LEFT, YOUNG CHAPMAN HAD torn the place apart and found the local paper with the numbers printed on the second page, on the left-hand column at the very bottom: 11 17 22 26 37 41. He was in a daze now, as he put his dirty finger against one number and then the next. Were these the numbers Old Jim had at this moment in his pocket? All his life Jim had money-grubbed, and Alex had laughed at him last week: “Look where yer money-grubbing got ya.”

  Again, that wasn’t the wisest thing to say.

  Now he was doing things, which he seemed to witness outside of his body. He had heard that people sometimes acted this way. But this was perhaps the first time it had happened to him. Or maybe that long ago time when he had seen Minnie Patch’s skirt blow above her waist.

  He hated the lotto. Like many cross men studied by university and polemical in nature, he thought it was foolhardy nonsense and very much beneath him. Yes, he had teased Minnie about it often, saying she was a fool, saying she was raising her daughter to be a fool.

  “Barefoot and pregnant,” he had said, “that’s how you ended up.”

  In fact, in the last year he could not see Minnie without saying something unpleasant, for hadn’t she turned out exactly like he himself had predicted?

  Now he began to shake as he sat at the table. Because he wanted the same thing as everyone else. He wanted the money. With the money, he would win Minnie back. He would be as wise as Cicero told him to be. But he had to have the money.

  That thing which dreams are made of. He thought of when he was a runner and how with his training and his absorption of pasta and lettuce, and grains of various kinds, he had almost managed to run a marathon. Yes, that ethically minded, self-absorbed, self-indulgent, self-righteous sport. Yes, he had made much of his running aloofness—his passion for endurance and ecological restraint. But he had not run in years.

  He took some water and tried to think. His medicine was on the windowsill—medicine for the ailment he had with his heart that had come to him with age. This had happened since the fall of the business. It had happened since he had seen Minnie again. He had thought he had conquered his desire for her. It was obvious he had not. “Just a valve,” the doctor had told him. He tried to picture this valve and could not sleep some nights thinking of it, flopping back and forth in his heart like a wagging tail. When it hurt him, he would say: “It is nothing,” or “Stop hurting me if you are nothing,” and keep plodding on.

  When it pained he would sit up nights and read—and what an authority he had become on the dazzling stupidity of man. So then he must steal this ticket. For what did it matter to others if he did or did not? Who would say in ten years that he had, and if they did, who would care? He had read enough of the world to know that!

  Did Beaverbrook steal? Yes. Did Roosevelt and the Kennedys? A whole lot.

  His well-publicized disbelief in God made it certain that no one was answerable to God. And if he believed this fully then he had to act. In fact, he was morally obligated to. This was what it finally came down to now. It was his moral duty to take the money and help the unfortunate. All his predisposition told him so.

  He left his house and went out into the warm, pulpy air. Far across the river he could see the giant Ferris wheel, looking like fate in the wind, going round and round, like one of those wheels of Dante crushing, tumbling, and catapulting the grand illusionary Middle Ages into the din of the past. If he listened, he could hear the howls of children across the waters, as if they were falling into some new estimation of the cabala.

  He walked through the woods and out to the highway. He was agitated that this had happened to him even though, in a way, nothing had happened to him.

  Yet now Young Chapman was consumed by the idea that it had. He had not taken the truck in, and his uncle had received the ticket.

  —

  HE WAS ON HIS WAY TO MINNIE (TUCKER) PATCH, THE woman he loved and Amy Patch’s mother. Because of the company’s decline, her husband Sam was away working, and about to bring home a large amount of money. They were not rich—but when he came home they would be able to afford things.

  Young Chapman used to trudge up Minnie’s roadway in the winter, when they were both teenagers, and stand by the gate, looking in at those old yellow curtains hanging across blank, dirty windows in the small, cold house. He would stand in the cold almost all day long. It was as if that sad little house—filled with old and vagrant furniture, and cases of empty wine bottles stacked in the small, cold porch, with snow swishing and swashing over the back shed roof—was a place of mystery and worship. He worshipped Minnie—he actually did.

  Thou shalt have no false gods before me, he remembered thinking, and yet he would stand in the cold unable to go home. “Just one glimpse at her peaked little Irish face and I’ll bolt home,” he would say.

  When he got home, his uncle would often reprimand him for something he had left undone, or tell him he had to go to seven o’cl
ock mass before he ate, stretching up to put the food away.

  “Oh, let him eat,” Muriel would say.

  “Not until after mass. He has communion before he gobbles food—”

  So he would trudge out angry and fretful, his belly gnawing at his bones, and then come to life when he realized Minnie was at mass as well. He longed for the host, just to establish something in his guts. His uncle had the habit of kicking him when they knelt, if he didn’t answer the priest well. He was teased by some children that his father was French, and that is why his uncle despised him. So he began, then, to look for the name of his father in the phone book, and imagine himself a LeBlanc, or a Terrieux.

  And each chance he had, he would walk up Minnie’s lane. This is where he was free, and where she who freed him was. This is where the snow smelled more pure, the sounds of the highway were muffled by the great pine trees. The cold hung over his land and he was in deep despair, for it was love, and he could not give her up.

  “Stay away from her,” Old Jim told him once, bluntly. “You don’t need no young dark-haired cunt from the back road—have some common decency.”

  But he disobeyed. He had to. It was his first rebellion.

  He left notes in her mailbox, professing what he called then his “like” for her. And he was sick at heart, and this feeling was somehow satisfying in itself. Her mother always said she wasn’t home. He knew that her older sister, June Tucker, had a child at sixteen and hid the fact from the family, put the baby boy behind the chicken coop, and fled to Toronto. The child, Burton, lived.

  Because of this, Minnie’s father said she wasn’t allowed to speak to boys until she was twenty-six. Alex was dejected, but later that winter Minnie had the little boy, Burton, bring him a note. It was written in a light green ink, on paper from her history scribbler, and said she would like to see him, and maybe go to the sock hop if she could get permission. That she would try to get permission from her father. This, Alex knew, and so did she, was impossible. But still, in her youthful heart, in her love of life, as boys and girls so often have, did she hope for this.