The Survival Game (7 page)

“You don't have to stop playing for me,” said Burl.

“No,” said the Maestro. “But I do have to stop playing if I'm to begin working.” He yawned, but his movements, fast and jerky, showed no signs of drowsiness. He had taken more pills. He put on his glasses and started writing by candlelight. He leaned down close to the surface of the table.

“This bit at the beginning is all flies and heat,” he said. He was talking to the music. “Flies and heat and visions. Here I am in the freezing northern woods writing about visions in the Greek Islands.”

He mumbled on like this in sporadic bursts. His voice was slurred. This was the drugs, Burl was sure. He had heard his mother's voice grow lazy like this.

Burl began to drift off, then awoke again, for the Maestro's voice had risen.

“I've been farther north than this, you know. Right up to James Bay. It's impossibly beautiful. No trees to get in the way. Vast. Scary as sin. And that was only in summer. I still have not experienced the
dark
of a winter in the north. I don't think I'm ready for it. This lake is my compromise. A glimpse of the Big Dark, as it were, if not the whole thing.” He picked up his pen again.

Burl remembered catching the morning school bus in Pharaoh in the pitch-black dead of winter. He left school in the same darkness.

“It gets very dark here,” he said.

The Maestro bent to his writing with renewed attention, his hand curling awkwardly.

We're both left-handed, thought Burl. He turned on his side so that he could see out the huge sail of a window. It was alive with stars.

Burl dreamed of the rainbow trout he had caught at his father's secret place. It would have been nice to mount that trout on some lacquered plank of wood, arching with the lure still in its mouth, still fighting.

“This was the fish I was catching,” he imagined saying to someone. The phrase hung in the dream air, the middle of a conversation. What was he talking about? To whom?

Suddenly it was his father looking up at the mounted fish above the mantel. “I seen that fish before. That fish is mine!” he said, grabbing Burl by the collar. “You stole that from me.” He shook his son and though it was only a dream, Burl felt the room shake around him.

Thwack!

The old man was hitting him.

Thwack!

And a third time. Burl twisted and turned. He had to wake up, get away. He bumped into something hard and woke up wrapped around the leg of the piano. Then he heard a whimpering sound that wasn't him or his dream father. It came from the other side of sleep. He sat up.

The Maestro was standing behind his writing desk, his face underlit by the low candles. Horror-struck. From behind Burl there was a creaking sound followed by a blast against the cabin wall. Something at the door.

Burl was on his knees in a flash. It was his father – that was his first thought – breaking down the door with an axe. Then there was another blast, and though the Maestro whimpered again, this time Burl was awake enough to recognize the sound for what it was. He scrambled out from under the piano. He approached the door. There it was again. A thump that rattled the doorknob, followed by a scratching sound. A grunt. With the heels of both hands, Burl pounded on the door, shouting a loud curse.

The creature on the other side backed away, moved across the deck. Burl rushed to the lakeside window and there it was, a deeper blackness than the night, a bear. The Maestro saw it, too. It was sniffing at the glass, rising on its hind legs, poking at the glass with its long claws.

“Oh, Christ!” The Maestro sat down with a thud, his arms wrapped around his chest as if to hold himself together.

Turning towards him, Burl saw the paperweight rocks on the desk. He raced across the room, grabbing the two largest. He headed towards the door.

“No!” he heard the Maestro say, but by then he had flung open the door and stepped outside.

“Shoo!” he cried. “Shoo!”

The bear turned, stepped towards the noise, squinting nearsightedly, sniffing the air. Burl hurled one of the rocks. It missed the bear and clattered across the deck. The bear ran off a couple of paces and warily circled the lone deck chair.

“Get out of here!” Burl yelled. He moved towards it, stamping his foot. He heard a voice behind him, pleading with him to close the door.

The deck was cold on Burl's bare feet. The bear stepped out from behind the chair. Burl heaved the second rock. It hit the bear in the side.

In two strides the animal took to the railing, and with a speed that seemed improbable for such a lumbering huge creature, it tore off, only stopping when it was on the beach.

Burl clapped his hands loudly, but the bear stood its ground.

The Maestro was at the door. He handed Burl a third stone as big as an orange. Burl stealthily made his way down the steps to the shore, his eyes never leaving his adversary, ready to run back at any moment. His toes gripped the wet earth. He felt every root and pebble.

The bear lifted its nose in the air. It made as if to return, took a step up the shore. A second step. Reconsidered, turned away. It was then, with the bear's flank as a target, that Burl summoned all his strength and launched the third stone. It hit the animal in the head.

With a dreadful grunt the bear turned on its heels towards the water. In great loping strides it plunged into the lake until it was swimming across the bay. Burl watched it regain the land at the beaver lodge and tear off into the bush. He waited a full minute until the crashing progress through the underbrush had faded to nothing, and the only sound left was the song of a wood thrush. Morning was coming.

He marched back to the cabin, shaking. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a trail of empty cans and crusts, a jam jar, a chocolate bar wrapper. The trail stretched back into the woods in the direction of the shed.

He would have to deal with that soon, he thought, but not now. Not yet.

“What am I doing here?” The Maestro had collapsed on his mattress. Burl, wearing one of his host's heavy overcoats, was busy making coffee. “This is utterly ridiculous, insane. Do you think I'm insane, Master Burl?”

Burl brought him a cup of coffee. The man sat up, looked at him through eyes that brimmed more with outrage than with fear.

“I don't know how you take it,” said Burl.

“I don't know, either.”

“I mean the coffee,” said Burl.

The Maestro took the coffee black. He wrapped his fingers tightly around it as if to squeeze the warmth right out of it.

Already the sun was poking its own long translucent fingers through the trees on the eastern rim of the lake.

“Do you need one of your pills?” Burl asked.

The Maestro stared at him. “
One
of them?” He laughed a little hysterically, coughed and nodded.

Burl crawled across the unslept-in bed to the shoulder bag. The inside was like a medicine cabinet. He had never seen so many drugs. He read them out by the grey light seeping in the window.

“The Fiorinal,” said the Maestro. Burl took out the Fiorinal. “And the Valium.” Burl found the Valium.

The Maestro took a couple of each, swallowed some of his coffee, stood up and made his way to the work table. The candles had guttered while the door was open. He switched on the table lamp and sat at the mess on his desk.

“I'm a lunatic, Burl.”

“Maybe.” Burl sat at the piano. “My mother eats those Valium ones like candy.”

The Maestro scowled. “I gather by that, that your mother is trying to escape this weary world.”

“I guess so,” said Burl.

“Then we do not share much in common, your mother and I. For I am merely trying, against all the odds, to
stay
in this weary world.”

Burl looked down. He hadn't meant to be rude.

“Bears are more afraid of us than we are of them,” he said.

“Don't be so sure,” said the Maestro. He had been looking through a fat briefcase on the floor and now he drew from it a weird piece of rubbery equipment that Burl at first thought might be an instrument but then realized was the little sleeve and pump that a doctor used to check blood pressure.

The Maestro strapped the sleeve to his arm and pumped it up. With a watch he recorded the change in his heart rate as he let out the air.

“I'm a very sick man,” he said.

“Mostly,” said Burl, “my mother's just sick and tired.”

“Well, yes…there is that.”

Burl tried to imagine his mother. Asleep? Alone? He didn't want to think about it.

A moment passed. Burl drank some coffee. A white-throated sparrow sang. Somewhere across the lake a loon called.

“It was my fault,” said Burl. “I should have been more careful with the garbage.”

“No,” said the Maestro. “You are not to blame. In truth, I'm completely out of my element. A boy-of-the-woods like you must think me a complete nincompoop living here like this. And you'd be right. I am a shrewd businessman, Burl. A canny Scot by birth and inclination. I do not throw money away, though I have a great deal of it. This cabin – this rustic temple – is my folly. Do you know what a folly is? It's a building meant to satisfy an elaborate fantasy. It is, in short, the work of a fool. I am no more equipped to live here than that beast out there would be equipped to live in Toronto. He, at least, would be able to find himself some dinner. I would starve in a minute if it weren't for my monthly airlift. And I have a man come up by train every other week to hook up the next drum of diesel fuel and generally do for me whatever needs to be done.”

Burl shifted uneasily in his seat. “Why don't you go back to Toronto? Are you are in trouble there?”

The Maestro smiled at him, and it was perhaps the sweetest smile Burl had seen yet. There hadn't been all that many.

“I am only in whatever trouble I cook up for myself,” he said. “And, as you have experienced, I am not much of a cook.”

“Supper was great,” said Burl.

“Nonsense. Let's call a scrambled egg a scrambled egg. Besides, I wasn't really talking about that kind of cooking.”

The Maestro picked up the sheet of music he had been working on. “This is my crack at immortality,” he said.

Burl crossed the room to look at the music. “Song of Victory” was scrawled in capitals across the top. “Is this the oratorio?”

“Part of it.”

It looked to Burl like a bunch of dots and lines flying all over the page. “Couldn't you do this in Toronto?”

The Maestro took the sheet of music from him. “I left Toronto to escape the Shadow. The Shadow is phone calls and luncheon meetings and people still wanting me to come out of retirement and perform in Santiago or teach in New York or lecture in Moscow or just show up at a party and look like a composer. The Shadow is
disturbance
. It is the beast that keeps me away from writing this. And it's far more persistent than our visitor tonight.”

He replaced the sheets of music on one of the piles on his desk. He neatened the sides.

“You'll need some new rocks,” said Burl.

The Maestro chuckled. “I've got enough up here,” he said, tapping himself on the skull. He looked past Burl out at the gathering dawn. His eyes squinted.

“A man on a train told me about this lake,” he said, leaning forward in his chair now, the fires in his eyes relit. “He heard about it from an archaeologist. This spot was on a native portage route. This very beach was a campsite ten thousand years ago. Think of it. They have found arrowheads and flint tools right here.

“The man on the train was a prospector. He had staked a mining claim here, but he didn't really expect to find anything. Not gold or silver or anything more precious than he could see with his naked eye. He just fell in love with the natural beauty of the place. When he told me it was on the CPR train route, just a good healthy half-hour walk in – Mile 29, he called it – well, I knew I had to see it. But when I actually came here, I knew what I needed more than health, more even than the quiet, was the solitude. I was sure that only in utter isolation would I be able to see what St. John saw, though I dare say this is a far cry from his hot little Greek Island.”

The Maestro dug out a book from the litter before him. It was the Bible.

“Do you know your Bible?”

Burl shook his head.

“The Book of Revelation. Wild stuff,” said the Maestro enthusiastically. “Last book in the New Testament. As if anything could follow it. It's written by someone named John, who may or may not be John the Apostle – there are far too many Johns in the Bible. He was exiled for being a Christian to a small island called Patmos. I love that name. I'm thinking of calling the opening movement ‘Patmospheres'. Do you get it?”

Burl wasn't sure. The Maestro frowned.

“Anyway, back to the exiled John. Are you a Christian, Burl?”

“My grandmother is.”

“How clever of her. It's quite a juggling act. All those truths you have to hold onto at once. I'm not sure I'm up to it, but it makes for a fabulous story.”

“A revelation,” said Burl. “Is that like when you see into the future?”

“Yes, prophecy. The Greek word is apocalypse. John's apocalypse is a fabulous dream about the end of the world. Armageddon, the battlefield where the kings of the lower world are gathered together by the beast and the dragon and the antichrist – I use a lot of trombones for them – to do battle on Christ. So there's this war in heaven, and a lament after the fall of Babylon and then a Song of Victory as all the good guys get to go to the New Jerusalem in heaven. It's got everything.”

Burl went to the piano and played the progression of chords he had learned. “And this is in it?”

The Maestro looked over the top of his glasses, which had slipped down his nose. He seemed almost to have forgotten teaching the boy the chords.