The Survival Game (19 page)

“He's got the others in the car,” said Tanya. He dug a box of shells off the top shelf, carried them out to the table with the rifle.

Tanya followed him, but she had dropped her arm with the knife in it. He went on about his work.

It was strange. The house was slipping away on him. It was less his home now than it had been when he'd walked in half an hour earlier. Now with every passing minute, he felt more and more that he was the one who was trespassing. He would phone Granny Robichaud when he got a chance, to make sure his mother really was there. But it seemed likely. And as he thought about it, Burl couldn't figure why she hadn't gone years ago. There might even be a chance for her to kick the drugs up in Dryden, start a new life.

“You almost done?” Tanya asked. She had put her weapon away.

“Yes,” he said. He packed his things carefully now. The woodstove was pumping out BTUs. Cal wouldn't like that. The house used a lot of wood anyway. Maybe he'd let her waste wood for a while – maybe he liked her a lot – but he'd crack down eventually. For a second, Burl actually felt sorry for Tanya.

“I thought you was with her,” she said, maybe trying to make some kind of peace.

He didn't answer. Then he take-twoed it, cut her a little slack. “I'm sorry I was so angry. I was surprised, that's all.”

“What do I tell him?” she said.

Now that they were more or less talking, he realized that she was more his age than Cal's. He shrugged, not looking at her.

“Tell him I've found a really good thing,” he said. “Make sure he knows things are going really well for me and that I wanted him to know that.”

She clamped her mouth shut. He didn't think she'd say anything to Cal. Not unless she wanted a split lip.

It was late in the afternoon by the time Burl reached Presqueville. He had walked almost halfway from Pharoah before finally being picked up by a native guy in a pick-up. He shared the bench seat with the whole family and a dog. The truck was badly in need of springs, but the cab was warm and the kids shared a bag of popcorn with him.

There was no room for Burl at the hotel. There was some major repair work being done on the line, and residence at the CPR barracks had overflowed into every available space in town.

He walked around with very little idea of what to do. Presqueville was long and skinny north and south, stretching along the railroad line. No crossroads went more than a couple of blocks east or west except for the main intersection which was the road out to the Trans-Canada. There wasn't much of a downtown. The Woolworth's, a Safeway, the drugstore, a beer store at the end of a muddy side road, a couple of churches, the hotel and a handful of other small businesses. In the Bide-A-Wee café Burl ordered some chips and gravy. He looked out the window into the gathering dark, looking for familiar faces.

At six Burl headed back down the main street towards the train station. He asked if he could leave his stuff there until the northbound train the day after tomorrow. Grudgingly, the attendant agreed. There were no lockers; Burl hauled his stuff out of the way into a corner of the office. Then he used the washroom, not sure when he'd see another, for the café had closed and he wasn't sure he wanted to risk going into the bar.

As he washed his hands, he read a sign for the benefit of the rail workers printed on the mirror above the sink.

You are looking at the person most responsible for your safety.

He had to smile at that.

The wind picked up, blowing the snow down Main Street and pushing him along like a piece of rubbish. He'd changed into some longjohns he'd picked up at home. He'd also picked up his winter boots, but they felt a size too small now. He couldn't remember an October like this, so full of itself and acting like January.

Cal would be home by now. Would Tanya tell him about her afternoon visitor? Doloris and Burl had learned not to pass on bad news to Cal. But Tanya would have had some explaining to do. Cal would notice the .22 was gone. He had a nose for things of his that went missing.

The hotel was hopping, fatted up with extra workmen cold from a day on the line. Teenagers were hanging around on the street outside, waiting for a good fight, or something. Burl was hanging around, too. That's when he saw the Turd-mobile. It glided by, decorated for a moment by the neon of a beer sign. Cal was alone in the car. He didn't see Burl. Burl pulled back into the shadows beside the hotel.

Cal was looking for him, and he had only himself to blame. “Tell him I've found a really good thing.” It didn't do to be boastful around a man like Cal.

The temperature was dropping, and it was becoming increasingly obvious to Burl that he was going to be spending a night on the street again. But this was not Toronto. There were no all-night establishments to warm up in. What's more, it threatened to be a truly blustery night.

He headed down the alley to the back of the hotel. A dirt road ran between the backs of the stores on Main and the train line. Several trains stood dark and heavy, lit only by occasional beacons along the track. Hugging the shadows, Burl made his way south towards the train yards. Maybe he could find an open boxcar.

The road he was on ended at a chain-link fence. The schoolyard. His old school. He had stood at this fence watching the trains go by.

Laura had once come over to him standing by this fence, just about here. It must have been when he was just starting school. She was already in grade four. She and a friend of hers brought over her friend's little brother who was crying. “Burl'll look after him,” Laura said. She winked at him. He couldn't remember the friend or the little brother. He didn't remember whether he looked after the kid or not. Maybe they watched the tracks together until the bell. He clenched the chain-link. It had been right here.

He followed the fence around to where there was a gateway and then picked his way through the playground to the gym. He tested the doors. Locked. But there were lots of doors in a school, and there were windows.

He was at the west end of the building squatting in a basement window well when he heard the train coming. The whole squat body of the school stood between him and the gathering noise, but the window he was trying trembled in its casement as the train approached, a freight train with maybe a hundred cars.

In a flash he knew what to do. He slipped out of the well, found a rock and beetled back. The train was thundering by now. Burl smashed the glass. He smashed away at it all along the frame, until there wasn't a single jagged piece sticking out. He was in the school before the train had passed.

He found himself in a sweltering hot boiler room. It felt like heaven. At the doorway, leaning against the brick wall, he listened. There were a hundred sounds but none of them, when he listened long enough, seemed human.

Burl searched until he found a room off the gym where mats were piled. He slipped in and pulled the door behind him. In a corner he rolled himself in a mat and lay there. If anyone came, he was trapped, cornered. The room was windowless. But as his heart slowed down to something like a normal rate, he came to the conclusion that being caught in here was not so bad. One thing for sure, Cal roaming the streets in the Turd-mobile wasn't likely to come anywhere near the school.

Natalie had called girls' basketball practice for eight in the morning. It was a recipe for disaster, a gaggle of gangly twelve- and thirteen-year-olds, half awake and tripping over their shoelaces. But no matter how fumble-fingered they were at that early hour, it had seemed better to her than after school, by which time the more mature among them would have fully remembered that all they cared about in the world was boys. Anyway, 8.00 a.m. had seemed a fine time back in early September, when the sun could still be counted upon to have made it up by then. On this dark, freezing morning in October, with snow swirling about outside, all Natalie could think of was that she was glad the tournament was soon.

The scream woke everybody. Two girls had gone to get the balls from the storage room. Now they stood at the doorway immobile with fright but not at all subdued vocally.

“All right, all right,” said Natalie, her voice echoing in the gym. She expected a mouse. She didn't expect a boy.

Natalie was not a woman who prayed, but she would later say of that morning – because it was the easiest way to put it – that finding Burl Crow was like the answer to a prayer. That he was cowering in a corner of the storage room only suggested to her that Providence had one heck of a sense of humour.

The girls at the door had scared him out of his bedroll. By the time Natalie arrived, he was peering out from behind the box-horse, his face still heavy with sleep, but his eyes thoroughly unzipped.

Natalie shooed her girls away and, having flipped on the lights, closed the door behind her.

“Burl?” she said. “Burl Crow. I've been looking everywhere for you.”

David Agnew came by the school. He didn't have an appointment until later that morning. He took Burl back to their home. It was on a road that curved up into the hills just west of town. It was a log house they had built themselves on land they had cleared themselves. David showed Burl to a guest room in the finished basement. He flicked on a space heater. There was a bathroom there with a shower, if he wanted one. David apologized for not having time to make him breakfast, but he showed him where everything was. Then he stoked up the wood fire upstairs and left.

Burl was still only half awake. The other half of him was afraid that it was all a ridiculous dream brought on by too many nights without a decent sleep. He fried himself two eggs, toasted some toast. Then he showered for about six years, leaning his cheek against the stall and letting the stabbing heat dig out the hard knots of fatigue, which like pebbles and roots had buried themselves under the dirt on his miserable carcass.

Natalie was coming back at lunch, though she couldn't stay. So he thought he would rest until then. David had thrown a pair of clean pyjamas onto the pillow in the basement room. Burl had never owned a pair of pyjamas. They felt good. And the sheets were flannel and felt good, too, once he'd shivered the cold out of them.

Burl awoke and lay in the bed. There were comforting sounds upstairs: a radio, Natalie and David talking, kitchen sounds of food preparation, cupboards opening and closing, footsteps across the floor. Burl was amazed that they went to such trouble for lunch. It was only then that he looked at the clock radio by his bed and found that it was 6.00 p.m. He sat up. His clothes were folded at the end of his bed. Freshly laundered.

“Ah, well,” said David, when Burl appeared at the kitchen doorway. “So there is life after death!”

Burl stepped sheepishly into the room. Natalie smiled at him as if he had just scored a hundred on a test. She dried her hands on a tea towel, came over and put her arms around him.

“Welcome,” she said.

It was that and the smell of spaghetti sauce bubbling on the stove that almost broke Burl. Like a car's windshield hit by a stone, he felt shattered into a million little round-edged bits at her feet. He held onto her tight for just a second, then he let go and put his renewed energy into holding himself together.

Over dinner he talked, if it could be called that. It was more like when you kicked the branches out of a beaver dam, and the stream rushed through, soaking your shoes and threatening to carry you away. He told them where he'd been, where he was going. He didn't hide anything, didn't lie once.

“What happens next?” Natalie asked, when his story was mostly up-to-date.

“Next?”

“You deliver this music to Reggie Corngold in Toronto and then what?”

Then what. Then they give me the camp at Ghost Lake and I live happily ever after, thought Burl, but it sounded like a fairy tale.

“Didn't mean to pry,” said Natalie, when the silence grew too large not to notice.

“You did so,” said David.

“Did not.”

“Did.”

Then Natalie threw her napkin at her husband and he threw it back along with a strawberry that was left on his dessert plate.

“See that?” said Natalie to Burl. “I'm a battered wife.” Then her cheery face suddenly twisted. “Guess that isn't funny, is it.”

“Yes, it is,” said Burl, thinking of the strawberry hitting her in the shoulder.

“I'm sorry,” said Natalie, suddenly deflated.

“About what?”

“Making fun of something as serious as that. I wasn't thinking.”

David leaned towards him. “Nat made a little visit to your place. Had a run-in with your dad.”

“Oh,” said Burl. His face became grave. “What happened?”

“She drove over his foot,” said David.

“I did not!”

“Did so.”

Burl watched this verbal battle shyly.

“It's okay,” he said. “I mean, about Cal's foot. He has a bunch of extras.”

His hosts looked surprised. David started laughing first. Then Natalie. Then Burl.

“Does he keep them in a foot locker?” asked David. They laughed a fair bit more, and the sound warmed Burl and fed him like an extra helping of supper.

Then Natalie asked, trying to keep her voice light, “Where will you go?”

“Not back to Cal,” said Burl.

“Good thinking,” said David. “Best to leave him foot-loose and fancy free.”

Natalie begged David to stop with the jokes. Secretly, Burl hoped he would go on and on. But Natalie wanted answers.

“What about your mother?” she said. “Do you think she really is in Dryden?”

Burl shrugged. “If she is, that's probably the best place for her. Granny Robichaud will look after her.” He imagined his grandmother and Doloris both clicking rosary beads together, saying their little prayers. Over and over.

David started clearing the dishes. “So,” he said, glancing at Natalie. “You could go up to Dryden or take up Bea on her offer and live up at the camp.”