The Lost Highway Read Online Free PDF

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.
    —
    F IVE MINUTES AFTER B URTON LEFT , Y OUNG C HAPMAN 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