The Lost Highway (2 page)

He made his way to Old Chapman’s house, to tell him about the good fortune that had befallen them both. It had befallen Burton because he would receive 1 percent of the windfall—and when he calculated it, it came to a pretty penny, although he wasn’t competent enough to know what that was. In fact, Burton thought only in terms of $1000, so if anyone told him the winning ticket would be worth to him well over $100,000, and to Mr. Chapman much, much, much more, he would only be confused. Now, as he walked, he wasn’t entirely sure if he had the numbers right. Since Old Chapman had never said anything about it, Burton might very well have gotten them wrong.

So then, since everyone had always told him he was slow, or stupid, he believed this himself. If they had told him that because of what he was able to do he was wise, instead of telling him that because of what he could not do he was stupid, he might have had a happier life. But people did not care about that.

Still, it would be a terrible trick to play on someone, especially an older gentleman, if you told him he had won a large jackpot, and he did not have the right numbers. Say, if he traveled all the way to Moncton to get his prize and ended up with a teacup. Now, plagued by worry, Burton was trying to remember the numbers. But soon 11 turned into 22 and 17 turned into 33. He should head back to the garage and bring the papers and the notepad where he wrote the lotto numbers down. He turned to plod his way back.

Then something happened as he passed the old Catholic church with its grotto of the Virgin, who needed a paint job herself. “A sprucing up” about her halo. Here he heard something, and turning saw Young Chapman walking toward him—not really to meet him, but simply to pass him, on his way home. Young Chapman, with his hair sticking up above his sweatband, was dressed in summer sandals, something that Burton had never in his life worn. He was tall with a bent back and, as is sometimes the case with tall men, he had often become hysterical at a moment’s notice.

Alex once told Burton (this was late last year) that he could have made a million and a half trillion dollars but he didn’t want to be like all the other “smucks.” Burton only nodded. He said he could have written ten bestsellers if he wanted to “cash in” or “sell out.” Burton nodded. Also, that he had loved one woman, but he would not tell anyone who that was. It was a night when Alex had let his guard down and become maudlin. He had drunk six beers, which for him was an awful amount.

“I won’t tell you who she is, but I loved her with all my heart and soul. But I never touched her—never, never!”

Nonetheless, Burton knew who this woman was. Alex loved Burton’s Aunt Minnie—would always and forever love her and her alone. Her husband, Sam Patch, had worked for Alex and his uncle, but was let go last year and was now working out west, with his wife and child, Amy Patch, still here. Sometimes (and people were not fools) Alex would walk up the back road, just to stare at the house, standing in the shadows in the rain.

Burton now told Alex of the good news he had. He felt that this news supplanted any animosity the young man might have for the older Chapman. Burton said in the great gusts of words he always had when he began to speak: “I don’t think anyone will have to do anything for James now on—which is what I am trying to say, boys oh boy.”

Alex looked puzzled. And then alarmed. “Why, did something happen—did he die?”

“Not so likely,” Burton said.

“What did he come into, some windfall?” he asked now.

“Yes,” Burton said, lighting a cigarette so its smoke drifted on the air. He had never learned to puff on a cigarette. In some ways he simply spit into it, and then held it. Took it to his mouth and spit into it again, and watched the person he was speaking to for some sign of approval.

“What kind of windfall?” Young Chapman asked, looking back out toward the bay, at darkness coming over the waves. Yesterday he had phoned his uncle to ask for his copy of
Moby Dick
back.

“
Moby Dick
—you won’t even get a copy of Moby dickless. And who would ever want to have a copy of
Moby Dick
—what a bad name for a book—I could have made up a better name than that in my sleep—and who would write such a godawful book named like that—”

Most people ignored Young Chapman. They would see him coming and they would raise their arms in the air as if to fend him off, turn and go away. One night he began to talk to a man who hardly recognized him, and it was discovered that Alex was continuing a conversation he had had with this man six years before—and continuing it at the very same part of the logic.

“I am simply saying that, for instance—Stalin—Joe—would he have kept money away from his own nephew?”

“You’re an idiot,” the man said. “He killed his nephew.”

But Alex plodded on, certain that he had a right to say what he had to say. And this year his course on ethics was once again going to be offered. He was going to talk in this course about the wise man being the good man, bereft of petty desire. And in the last moment he was going to mention his uncle keeping the house from him.

“Lotto,” Burton sniffed now.

“Lotto,” Alex whispered, perplexed, as if it didn’t register. He had never thought of anyone actually winning a lotto. He pressed his lips together as if he were a child. It might have been the pool hall lotto worth $60 every Tuesday night. But there was a feeling deep in his body that it was very much more.

He kept his face to the bay for another moment, and shoved his hands into his jeans pockets. The sand was now cooling. He did not completely trust Burton Tucker to know this.

Burton, too, was thinking this. For as long as he was alive it seemed that nothing important had been given to Burton except, in a strange way, life itself. But there was also, especially about a lottery—yes, especially about a lottery—an enticement to believe in fate, some design from the heavens themselves. Yes, the witch’s hurly-burly still captivated even professors of economics. So many people played lotto on the auspiciousness of birthdays and wedding anniversaries, or some dim remembered date that they had tucked away in their mind, all thinking that these particular moments were sweet wormholes into the deity of luck.

Alex knew Minnie Patch played the lotto every week. He thought of this now.

“Lotto,” Burton said again, with the infuriating self-righteousness slow people sometimes have, and nodded goodbye, as if his mission to Alex’s great-uncle bore all the certainty of purpose of a saintly pilgrimage.

Alex looked up toward the steeple off to his left, to the fading grotto of the Virgin.

“Come,” he said, suddenly holding Tucker’s arm, “where you off to?”

“To tell Mr. Chapman.”

Alex’s whole rationalization, for life itself, was Darwinism modified by randomness.

This, too, is what he taught in his course. In fact, his life was known by this kind of secular obstinacy, and he had defined himself by it in a way which had set him apart from others. Oh, there were many on the river who didn’t believe in anything anymore, just like he, but his crusade against everything his uncle was had taken it to a different level.

In fact, he believed that what had happened to him over the last twenty-three years proved conclusively, once and for all time, the absence of any divinity. He was both fair and honest, and yet never got ahead. He had remembered his mother dying with such pain, when two days before her death it was his birthday and she had struggled that day to get up and celebrate with him. Each time he thought of this, his legs would begin to tremble and water would start in his eyes. He was correct when he said to his students, in his course: “You can be a good man, a kind man, an officer of the human race, without having luck on your side. I have suffered enough, and have harmed no one.”

The worst of it was, it was all true.

Some nights at the garage over the past summer he would tell Burton, with great poignancy, that his mother’s death had caused a death in him. And that for a long while religion had replaced her, for he felt he had nothing else. Until he said he finally understood something grander: that there was nothing in shadows but whimsy, that religion was a corporation, and that the cardinals were shareholders in the deceit. So he told Burton that a fly was not ordered to light upon the table, and there was no consequential determination when it put its little hairy feet down. From that fly one could move up or down the entire genetic scale, far past his great-uncle’s “brutal” construction firm, to realize that a whole universe could explode and no god ordered it or cared. It was empty and devoid of meaning until we made it so. He said it was ridiculous for a priest, in this day and age, of all days and ages, to think he could take holy water and bless something. Especially a house. Burton remembered Alex said that the poorer the Catholics were the more they were blessed, but they never seemed to get any richer. They even stunk. He said: “If God cared, there would have been no Holocaust.”

“Sure, God don’t care,” Burton would say, more to keep a friend than to reveal an opinion. And the man would nod, as if he had a friend. “Sure—God never cared—and if I saw God, I’d tell him so.”

And then Burton would trail off and try to go somewhere, and say he liked to get home early to watch
The Dukes of Hazzard
and he hoped Alex didn’t mind. For Burton was simple-minded and went to church because others did.

Alex’s master’s thesis was on Stalin’s five-year plans and the historical significance of the battle of Stalingrad, and how the Second World War was really one against Stalin and his progressive ideology.

“If I was Stalin,” he would often tell Burton, “no uncle would bother me.”

“No, of course not—if you was Stalin—haven’t met him myself—nor do I expect to, but if I do—well, boys oh boys—” Then silence would overcome him. There would be a long embarrassed moment.

“I’m only saying,” Alex would declare.

“I know,” Burton would say. “You is only saying.”

“God loves you too—just like he loves me,” Poppy said to Alex one night.

Alex disliked this particular association, for he felt and he always had felt superior to Poppy Bourque, who always wore a big T-shirt with a lobster saluting you and saying,
BON AMI
!

“Where are you going?” Alex asked Burton now.

“Tell him,” Burton said.

“Tell who—?”

“Tell Old Jimmy Chapman.”

“Tell him what?”

“Tell him he won the lotto—and is rich as can be.”

“You mean he doesn’t know?” Suddenly Alex’s face expanded slightly, as if brightening on this darkening night, the one frail and undeniably elusive glimmer of hope.

“No—unless he’s keeping it all to himself.”

They were on the shore slope, in the dark and the spent day, where they could smell idle oil on the waves and hear the last calls of gulls sweeping over the water, near the little island called Chapman’s Island. Alex’s house was on the left, up a wooden staircase from the beach, into the dark stand of wood. It was a small place, hidden by half-dead spruce trees. The dooryard was dirt, and the trees in back had been scorched by a forest fire twenty-three years before, and Alex as a boy had gone out and helped beat back the flames with a broom.

“How do you know he has won?” Alex asked, curious. “If he doesn’t—shouldn’t he know—shouldn’t he have come to tell you?”

“I wrote down his number after I give him the ticket for the oil change. He mustn’t have looked at it yet.”

It struck Young Chapman as absolutely absurd, this moment, for just as the stars were now coming alive in the sky above the evening smoke, above the wonderful river and the twinkling lights, so was his imagination being kindled by all of this. For wasn’t it he who had convinced poor Burton to give out free lotto tickets? (They weren’t free; he just charged it on the oil change.)

But more to the point, wasn’t it Alex who had been asked by James Chapman to take the truck in for an oil change on that day? And what had he said?

“Take it in yourself, I’m no longer under your thumb—”

“Fine—then my thumb won’t be lifted to help you—” Old Chapman had retorted.

And both had tried to slam the receivers into each other’s ear.

What a moment to pick to say no. How could he have decided at that moment to? What was he thinking? Well, there might be an answer. The answer, of course, explained by his former religion, was that he never decided—that he had chosen freely, but had not decided. He thought of this explanation given in his first year of Catholic study: God either wills or allows, and so Satan sweeping toward the heavenly host did not know that every beat of the great expanse of his wings, toward his own destruction, had been understood a million, million, and plus a million years, and yet it was still Satan’s choice. The old priest who explained this seemed very pleased, as if he himself was getting back, if not at Satan, at some form of pestilence that had plagued him in his youth. And then all of them traipsed behind him as they went down to the wharf to bless the herring boats. That night two boats were lost in a storm. Leo Bourque’s captain, Eugene Gallant, died.

“I’ll write you out of the will,” the old man had said in exasperation last week.

“You have nothing left anyway,” Alex had gloated. Well, he shouldn’t have said that. That wasn’t very nice.

“We’ll see,” Chapman answered, “all the things I have and will have and you will have nothing—you’ll freeze your little rat-shaped arse off!”

“Ya—we’ll see old Jimmy boy.” Alex said, “Go blow yer nose.”

When he went back to the house three days ago to pick up some of his books, he was ordered not to come within five hundred feet of the house.

“You are not allowed to see my chimney smoke—that’s what the officer said.”

Alex would stand five hundred feet away, and the old man would yell at him:

“If that is 499, I’m phoning.”

“It’s exactly five hundred—I counted them—exactly five hundred.”

“Well, my feet are bigger than yours and it’s my feet that count.”

“The only time your feet counted was when you were booting me in the arse.”