Memory Boy (12 page)

“What we're saying is that we can't go back,” my mother said to Sarah. “Your father and I won't put you children in that kind of danger.”

At that moment Danny came around the corner of the tent.

“Good morning,” my father said. More and more I admired my father's style with people. I had never seen that side of him.

Danny grunted.

“I've been thinking,” my father said, stepping toward Danny. “Maybe there's another vacant cabin around here. Let's say we find a place, then we trade with you. We move in here like we ought to, and you move in someplace nearby.”

“All well and good,” said Danny. “But there ain't a vacant cabin for a hundred miles. I know: I've made the rounds on my bike. I've got friends in Milwaukee and Detroit who wanted to come. I told them to bring a tent if they do, and make it a mighty well insulated one, because you're going to be sleeping outside this winter.”

No one said anything.

“Listen,” Danny began, “I'm gonna put it to you straight: You folks are gonna have to move on. It's a dog-eat-dog world nowadays. Basically the deal is you got somewhere to go to and we don't.”

My mother swallowed. “A family was killed last night just a few blocks from our home in Minneapolis.”

Danny stared.

“That's what you're asking us to go back to.”

Danny's gaze remained steady. “Tell you what. I'll give you a gun, teach you how to shoot it. That way you can defend yourselves. I'll give each of you a gun. Hell, one thing I got plenty of is guns,” he said with a grin.

“Our family doesn't do guns,” my mother said quietly.

Danny's smile faded. He looked at my father, who only shrugged. Nobody asked me.

“Well, don't say I didn't try to help you,” Danny said angrily. He turned on his big boot heels and stalked away. At the porch steps he stopped and looked back to us. “You can camp here one more night,” he yelled. “Then tomorrow I want you gone.” Then he disappeared into the cabin. Our cabin.

Silence hung heavier than ever before.

“Well, gang, as I was saying, any ideas for our next gig?” my father said.

“You mean like where to be homeless?” Sarah asked. Her eyes were round with anger and fear.

My mind had already gone to the hard drive of my brain. To search mode. An idea—a crazy plan—hit me like a meteor exploding inside my skull.
Built it all myself, one log at a time. Plenty of trees around. Didn't cut them all from one spot, because the warden would spot me. Maybe from the river or else the air. He was always spying. Trying to find me. Trying to catch me. But I was too smart for him. Cut one tree here, one there, then rolled them downhill. That was the only way I could handle them, seeing as I didn't have a horse. Axe and a Swede saw and a block and tackle, that's all you need to build a place. It's not fancy, but it was mine
.

The idea was so far out that I clamped shut my lips.

As a ninth grader I would have blurted it out, but not now. I needed to think more about it. And for it to work, everybody in my family needed to understand that we could not stay here at Birch Bay.

After breakfast I went over to a stump and sat where I could look out on Gull Lake. Then my gaze went to our cabin.
Made my own shingles. Plenty of white cedar in the swamp. Cut them in the winter when I could walk on the ice. One here, one there, sawed 'em in blocks, then split off shingles with my axe. Wood don't split well until it's twenty below zero. Then it cracks like glass. Roof hasn't leaked in sixty years
....

Suddenly my father sat down nearby. “Sorry—didn't mean to startle you,” he said.

“It's okay,” I said.

We were silent.

He picked up a twig, spun it briefly around his fingers. “Well, Miles, what do you think?”

“About what?”

He smiled. “Our … predicament.”

I shrugged. “In some ways, it's kind of my fault.”

“How so?”

“I was the one who wanted to leave the city.”

“And I was the one who wanted the big house,” he replied.

We were silent.

“You know, sometimes I think if I hadn't seen that audition notice for Shawnee Kingston …”

I looked down, picked up a pebble.

“But I was teaching music to seventh graders. And it was killing me. All I ever wanted to do was play jazz, and there I was, stuck teaching scales.”

I tossed my pebble hand to hand. This felt like a Talk, something we hadn't had for years.

“For me it was a question of either staying in my teaching job, and dying, or making a move to feel like I was living again,” he continued.

I pitched the pebble hard into the water. “Yeah, but did you think about us?” My voice was surprisingly sharp and loud.

He stared at the widening circles where my stone had hit. “I did. Believe me, I did,” he said. “What if I made the band and was gone a lot? What would this do to my family? What would it do to my relationship with you?” He turned to me. “I thought of all those things.”

I was silent. I was determined not to make this easy for him.

“But making the band seemed like a long shot at best,” he continued. “So I took my sticks and went to the audition. I waited in line like everybody else. There were thirty or forty would-be drummers there, did you know that?”

“No,” I said. I purposely didn't look at him.

“Anyway, each person was supposed to do five minutes—no more—of a Brubeck standard. So I got started. And we clicked. There's no other way to explain it. I found this rhythm. This groove. Jimmy and Carolyn and Shawnee kept playing and playing—probably fifteen minutes or more. I knew in my heart I was a good drummer, but this band—real musicians—brought it out in me. While we jammed, everything but the music went out of my head. When we finished, Shawnee and the others were laughing and clapping, and it was then I realized that I could give up anything—even my own family—for that kind of feeling.”

I looked at him angrily.

His brown eyes were shiny and full. “It was the saddest moment of my life,” he said. And walked away.

I sat there for a few minutes. I stared out at the water. Then I looked back at my family. They were sitting on the dusty grass and looking at their shoes. I got up and walked over to them. When none of them even glanced up at me, I understood this to be the lowest point ever in our family life.

“I have an idea,” I said to them. “A place we can go.”

AFTER THE NURSE TOLD ME
about Mr. Kurz's death, I stood there in the hallway alone. I had the strange feeling that something in my life had tilted.

Shifted.

Spilled.

My next instinct was to get the hell out of Buena Vista. In a daze I headed down the hall, but somewhere I missed a turn. I thought the main door was just ahead, but suddenly I was walking through another wing of Buena Vista. More white-haired people, room after room of them. I walked faster. There were attendants in white uniforms here and there, but I didn't stop to ask my way.
I've never really been lost in the woods. I've been turned around for a couple of days, but never lost
.

Suddenly I arrived in a big open room with a high ceiling: the chapel. It was like a mini church built inside Buena Vista. Our family seldom went to church, especially after my father was gone, but now I stopped. More than anything, after the gleaming rat's maze of hallways it was the open space that felt good. Across, an old lady was playing the piano and a few quavery voices from wheelchair types were singing along. It was pathetic, but then again it kept them from looking at me. I sat down in a pew. I was actually slightly dizzy.

As I gathered my wits, the whole conversation with the nurse came back:
Bad news, Miles.... I won't lie to you.... His family never even came for his ashes.... He never got around to telling me which river.... Sorry. I gotta go. The living, you know....

The living. That was me. I looked up to the front of the chapel. I'm not much for religion, but at that moment my head cleared. Ideas have a kind of wind that blows away brain fog; suddenly I knew what needed to be done.

Retracing my steps, making the right turns this time, I found Mr. Kurz's hallway. I went room to room until I found the nurse.

“Miles,” he said with a puzzled look. He was cleaning a skinny old man's butt. The sight did not bother me a bit.

“Mr. Kurz's ashes,” I said.

He looked at me. “Yes?”

“You said they're here?”

“That's right.” He kept wiping.

“I know what river,” I said.

A half smile came onto his face. “And?”

“And I'll scatter them,” I said. “I'll do it. I want to do it.”

He turned back to the pale, thin legs of the old man; he slipped on a diaper, then covered him with a blanket, tucking it tightly along the bed. He nodded his head toward the hallway, where we could talk.

“The paperwork says family,” the nurse said. “Mr. Kurz's family.”

“They didn't come,” I said.

“Hey, it's a sad business, picking up an urn of ashes of a loved one. It's something that's easy to put off.”

I shrugged. He started walking; I followed.

“Sometimes a family takes several months—even a year—to come by for the clothes or whatever is left. We call them and call them. They say, ‘We're so sad. We just can't
bear
to come.' Finally we say, ‘There was a wallet—or a purse—some valuables that should be claimed.' Then they come right away.”

I looked up.

“In other words, Miles, wait here,” the nurse said. He smiled as he pointed. We had stopped by the storeroom—Mr. Kurz's room. I stepped inside. This time it didn't feel sad at all.

Within a couple of minutes the nurse ducked into the room carrying something wrapped in a white towel. He unwrapped a jar not much bigger than a maple syrup bottle.
HANS R. KURZ
was written on the side. “Here you go, Miles,” he said.

I took the jar.

“What?” the nurse asked.

“I expected it to be heavier.”

The nurse laughed. “No, we just get lighter and lighter as we get older. Pretty soon we hardly weigh anything at all.” He glanced over his shoulder at the doorway.

“You won't get in trouble, will you? I mean, if his family comes for him and he's not here?”

The nurse grinned. “Hey, things get lost, misplaced, misfiled—we do the best we can, right?”

“Thanks,” I said.

“No problem.”

There was a pause, and then—awkwardly—we shook hands.

“Don't drop him, Miles!” The nurse laughed. “Mr. Kurz wouldn't like that.”

“MR. KURZ,” I SAID TO
my family. “He had a cabin.”

My parents looked at me with puzzlement.

“Kurz? That crazy old guy from your memory book?” Sarah asked. At least she had read it.

I nodded.

“The one you always did imitations of?” Sarah added.

I shrugged.

“A cabin? Where?” my father asked. He stood up.

“Up north. Near the Mississippi headwaters. That's where he lived.”

“Is he dead now?” my mother said.

“Yes,” I said. I made sure my voice held steady. It was weird how I choked up when I thought about him. I turned away to dig out my Minnesota map.

“So one of his family probably has the place now,” my mother said.

“I doubt that,” I said with certainty. “He had some brothers and sisters, but they were all city types. His whole family didn't have much to do with one another. They all thought he was crazy.”

“How did he end up in Minneapolis in a rest home?” my mother asked.

I explained about his sister's funeral. How his family trapped Mr. Kurz in the city. Put him in Buena Vista.

“That's sad,” Sarah said.

My parents were silent.

“Well, certainly somebody must live in his cabin now,” my mother said.

“Probably not,” I said.

“Why?”

“There's no road to it. Though he did have a car,” I added.
Didn't run on gasoline, it ran on itself
.

“How can you live in a cabin with no road to it but still have a car?” Sarah said.

I shrugged. “He said his road was the river.”
Where I lived, a good man could jump clear across the Mississippi
.

“Jump across the Mississippi!” Sarah said. “They were right. He was crazy.”