The Lost Highway Read Online Free PDF Page B

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.
    —
    H E WAS ON HIS WAY TO M INNIE (T UCKER ) P ATCH, 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