The Survival Game (20 page)

“What about school?” said Natalie.

Burl looked from one of them to the other. He hadn't got this far in any of his thinking. A quest didn't have a “then what” that you could explain to anyone. You just did it and what happened next happened next.

“Now we really are prying,” said Natalie. “Sorry.”

Burl didn't want to think about his options. In this spacious, cheery kitchen, his belly full, he knew that it would be a while before he could realistically sort out Ghost Lake. It was no use imagining it would just fall into his lap. So he guessed he would probably head up to Dryden, when he had the money, though he wasn't sure there would be room enough for him there. He was just going to say this when David interrupted him.

“The thing is – what Natalie was getting at before she started throwing things – is that you're welcome here.”

Burl fingered up a mouthful of the sauce still left on his dessert plate.

“Why?” he asked.

David shrugged. “Nat needs someone to nag about homework.”

“No, really,” said Burl.

Natalie looked reflective. “It's a good question. I guess David's right. I just need someone to nag about their homework.”

Burl shook his head. “I don't understand.”

“What's to understand?” said Natalie. “We're greedy people. We've got everything in the world we could possibly want, and we still want more.”

“I don't know what to say,” said Burl.

“We'd like you to stay,” said Natalie. “No strings.”

“Except school,” said David over the sound of the water running. “And dishes,” he added. “Think seriously about it. Come here and you'll be doing dishes one hundred and twenty-one days a year.”

“Leave him be,” said Natalie. Burl got up to help clear. His jaw was clamped shut. To say anything would have meant undoing the muscles on his face, which would have been, right then, like undoing the knot at the end of a balloon.

David drove him to the train station late the next morning. Natalie had already left for school. She'd packed him a lunch for the train and written a note on the brown bag. “Have a good trip.” It was in her best blackboard handwriting. It looked so perfect: the loop of the “g” so generous; the little dimple in the top of the “r” just so. He wondered how long it had taken her to learn to write like that.

He stood on the platform at Presqueville waiting for the northbound Budd car. There was no sun, but the temperature had warmed up. Snow was melting all around them into pond-sized puddles.

Burl was on the look-out for the Turd-mobile. David had been talkative, telling him about his work up at the Leather Belt, but now he was quiet. It was a good kind of quiet. There were no secrets hiding in it. No traps.

The train came chuffing up the track, the air vibrating all around it. David shook hands with Burl, formal all of a sudden.

“Let us know, anyway,” he said. “What happens, I mean.” He held Burl's hand firmly. Burl had to look away, embarrassed by the consternation on the man's face. He wished he had something stupid to throw at him.

“Sure,” he said.

Then they hoisted Burl's stuff up into the baggage compartment, and Burl climbed up the ladder with a hand from the man there.

“If you decide not to take us up on this,” said David, “at least come around and wash the dishes, okay?” Burl laughed. He waved goodbye from the wide baggage doorway while the conductor took his ticket. He waved again from the window in the passenger car, but David was walking back to his car.

When the train started moving, he opened his lunch bag. There was an orange on top with a number written on it in pen. Seven digits. The Agnews' phone number, he guessed. Everything in the bag bore the same number.

Before he'd finished the Hershey bar, he had that number committed to memory.

The train pulled into Pharaoh half an hour later. No one got on board, but the Budd waited while a long freight heading south passed by. Burl scanned the handful of pick-ups and cars parked here and there beside the track. He looked as far down the dirt road as he could, expecting at any moment to see the Turd-mobile sail out of the mists like a Viking ship. It never came.

The train was only a few minutes behind schedule. Burl's trepidation was like a small hard rock in the pit of his stomach. He had left the cabin so quickly, Bea hurrying him up. Surely he had not checked everything. Surely the door was not secure enough to keep away that bear. He let his imagination go wild for a moment, imagining the cabin a zoo of creatures large and small: timber wolves feeding on the carcass of a dead moose; great horned owls on the cross-beams, their droppings turning the floor into a slippery mess; a chipmunk party in the grand piano; Reggie's army of mice in the briefcase snug in the tangled mess of the Revelation.

With an effort he shook the vision from his head. He hugged himself tight. The brush along the track was clogged with snow. Burl began to think about the trek in. Thank God he'd picked up the snowshoes. He told himself the wind would not be so bad in the bush.

He got to his feet three miles shy of Mile 29 and made his way to the baggage compartment, where a couple of railmen stood jawing and smoking with a couple of hunters.

“Almost there,” said the conductor.

“Yes, sir,” said Burl.

Then they were slowing down for what seemed an interminable time, the honker going again and again.

“Be back through at around 1700 hours tomorrow,” said the conductor, as Burl climbed down the ladder to the ground. “We may be a little late, eh, on account of the snow.” He winked. Burl nodded. He was hoisting on his backpack.

“I'll be waiting,” he said. He stepped back from the track as the train started moving out. With one last wave, the big door slid shut.

Burl slipped into his snowshoes. It had been a while. The tips crossed and he fell down. There was snow on the siding but not enough to cushion the fall. As the train pulled out of sight around the next bend, Burl clambered to his feet, ready, at last, to go.

The steepest hill was the one that led up from the tracks. The hill where the liquorice grew, though it was well covered now. Burl was pretty good on snowshoes, but a hill was always a struggle.

It was the second time he took a nose dive that he heard the laughter.

“Hee-haw! But you're a sorry sight.”

Burl swung around on his backside. There at the base of the hill stood Cal.

“Lucky it's not open season on ass-wipes,” said Cal.

He was cradling his Marlin .30-.30 loosely in one arm. He held his snowshoes in the other. His hands were gloveless. Gloves were for sissies, Cal liked to say. Burl curled his own hands into fists inside his wet mitts.

“So this is the way to your real good thing?” said Cal.

Burl didn't move. Didn't speak. He wondered if he were hallucinating.

“Guess you're just dumbstruck with happiness to see your old man,” said Cal.

It was twenty-nine miles to Pharaoh. If Cal let him by, if night didn't fall too hard or too dark, he could make it back in a few hours. Better than leading Cal to Ghost Lake. He began to slither back down the hill.

“Where you goin', scat-for-brains? Changed your plans? Ahhh, just when I was thinkin' we could have a little father-son time together. Like the good ole days.”

Burl stopped and turned to look at his father.

He was already halfway up the hill, climbing towards the path.

“No!” said Burl, heading back after him.

Cal laughed. “Well, well. This must be some kinda special place.” He clambered easily up the incline on all fours. “What're the bets there's a trail here as clear as a friggin' highway?”

Huffing from the climb, Burl reached the top to find the old man already at the head of the trail, puffing on a cigarette.

“You wanna hear how I done this?” he said. “You wanna hear how smart your undereducated old spit and blood is?”

He took a long drag. Burl rearranged the weight on his back. He knew that what he had to do now was not get Cal mad. Not getting Cal mad meant treating him as if he was God.

“I can't believe I didn't see you,” said Burl.

It was the right thing to say. Gave the man a chance to make himself a little bit taller, and make the boy just that much smaller.

“I show up at the station in P'Ville,” he said. “I say, ‘Pardon me, my good man, but I gotta buy a ticket for me and my boy. I'm meeting him here, but I got the funny feelin' he mighta already made the purchase in advance.' Sure enough. Return ticket to Metagama. ‘Smart boy,' says I, and buys myself a ticket.

“Tanya drops me off good and early this morning down at P'Ville and I make myself scarce. Build myself a little blind and sit waiting for the ducks to light.”

Cal raised his rifle as if it were a shotgun. “Boom!” He picked off an imaginary bird and watched it fall.

“So who drives up in a Jap fancy mobile – a car I seen before. And who gets all smoochy with some long-hair?”

Burl just shrugged. To his surprise, he found he was listening to Cal in a new way. He heard how the man had to put everything down. Not only Burl, but everyone. Natalie and David – anyone who crossed his path.

His father tossed his cigarette in the snow, dropped his snowshoes and climbed into them.

“Lead the way,” he said. “I wanna keep ya where I can see ya.”

He went on with his tale of how he'd got on at the very front passenger entrance of the train while Burl was climbing on at the tail end, still yacking with long-hair.

Burl found himself wondering what his father expected lay up ahead. He began to brace himself for Cal's disappointment when he saw there was nothing there for him. He found himself bracing for what might be a rough twenty-four hours.

The path was good, good enough that it had become a highway for deer and their pursuers. The leafless aspens trembled, branches clicking. Blue jays screamed.

“You find yourself a gold mine, boy?” Cal asked.

Burl shook his head. “It's just a camp. Nothing special. You're wasting your time.”

The old man caught him up and grabbed him by the collar of his jacket. “We'll see who's wasting whose time.”

Burl flinched but held his tongue.

“Hey,” said Cal. “How can you
say
it ain't special when we're together again?”

Finally they came to the spot where the path led gently down into the clearing by the lake.

“Hee-haw,” said Cal, evidently pleased. “A pyramid. We made it all the way to the friggin' Nile.”

Burl was lost to hearing, lost in the sight before him. He had feared the cabin would not be there. That it would have dissolved like sugar. That his time there had never happened at all.

“This here's one helluva site,” said Cal. “Um, um.”

Cal stepped out of his snowshoes and walked across the deck, while Burl dug the key out of its cubbyhole under the threshold. He didn't try to keep it a secret from Cal. He imagined Cal could smell a key as quick as he could smell live game. Cal took in the expanse of frozen lake with an experienced eye.

“There's good bass fishing in there,” said Burl. He wasn't quite sure why – maybe just to tell the old man something he didn't know. Cal nodded without turning. The wind kicked his thick hair around.

The door was still in place. There were no bear marks. Burl unlocked it and stepped into the fusty darkness. He listened for the scurrying of creatures, but was greeted with no sound at all beyond the creaking of a house settling into the wind.

He felt his father behind him, felt his breath on the back of his neck. Then Cal saw the piano.

“What the jeezly hell!”

He slipped a hunting knife from a sheath on his belt and cut the fishing line that held the blankets in place. With an effort, Burl kept his mouth shut. He took off his pack and stepped back outside. His plan was to take one of the shutters down to let some moonlight or starlight into the closed-up building, but leave the others up for extra insulation. As he pounded at the frozen fasteners, he heard his father hit a note on the piano.
Ding.
The sound filled Burl with fear. Then his father swore loudly, came to the door.

“There's no friggin' woodstove!” His astonishment almost made Burl laugh. “Who the hell would build a camp with no friggin' woodstove?”

Burl wasn't about to try to explain. “It isn't finished yet,” he said.

“Ha!” said Cal, his hands on his hips. By now he'd checked out the electric stove.

“It's run by a generator,” said Burl. “But it's acting up.”

Cal kicked the cabinet. “There's no heat at all. What kind of a camp is this? Don't tell me – the kind of camp a goddamned long-hair and his nosy teacher-lady wife would build.”

He wandered around in the gloom of the failing light, kicking at things. He was obviously disappointed. Burl lit the kerosene lamp with one eye on his father as he neared the spot where the bulging briefcase leaned against the leg of the card table. He watched Cal's toe nudge it, then shove it a little until it fell over on the floor, as if it were a small animal he'd shot but wasn't sure was dead. He bent down to examine the kill.

“It's just a bunch of papers,” said Burl.

His father, squatting now, turned slowly at the hips and stared at his son. A smile started to crack on his face. He tapped the cold leather. “This the little gold mine, is it?”

Burl could have kicked himself, but he knew enough to turn away and busy himself with something else. He set up his tiny propane stove on the counter, stealing glances over his shoulder at his father rifling through the briefcase. After a good hard probing, as if there might be something of real value under the stack of paper, he gave up and left the briefcase where it was. Burl breathed a sigh of relief. Too soon.