The Survival Game (9 page)

The door did open, finally, but the slumped silhouette at the threshold was well beyond rage.

“Are you in here?”

Burl said nothing.

The Maestro entered carefully, as if he were a blind man feeling his way. This despite the fact that he crossed the room on a path of sunlight. He turned on the lamp at his bedside and, kneeling there, began to pack his clothes.

Burl moved; the floor squeaked. The Maestro looked up and into the corner where Burl sat watching him. With the sunlight directly in his eyes, he could not sort out the boy from the shadows. But Burl could see his face clearly enough. The man looked defeated.

Into the emptiness of Burl's desolation, a new kind of strength coursed like poison. It stirred up something angry in him. A large anger on a barbed hook thrashing inside him wanting out. He clenched his fists tight, felt the sharp message of his fingernails biting into the palms of his hands.

Without getting up, he reached out and flung the door closed. He tucked his angry fists in his armpits.

“I think it's time I was going,” the Maestro said shakily. And he went back to packing, glancing up from time to time. After a while he started humming, but it was a nervous tune.

“The train comes through every other day at five,” he said. “This just happens to be one of those other days.”

Burl cleared his throat, uncertain what to do with his rage.

“I'm sorry,” he shouted.

The Maestro shrugged.

“I told you, I don't know anything.”

The Maestro raised an eyebrow. “You seem to have a treasure trove of talents particularly suited to living in the bush.”

Burl's fingernails dug deeper into the flesh of his palms. “I was trying to help. I want to help.”

The Maestro sighed wearily. “There was no chance – no real chance – I would be able to tolerate it out here for long. It was just a matter of time. I'll have to take my solitude in smaller doses, that's all.”

“What about the things you said last night? About immortality. That stuff. About writing the Revelation.”

The Maestro looked at him with surprise. “Amazing what nonsense a person says when he's just narrowly escaped being eaten by a bear.”

The poisonous anger flared up in Burl. “It wasn't nonsense!”

The Maestro stopped packing, but he did not look Burl's way. “All right, since you insist. It wasn't nonsense. Let's just say I'm tired. Beaten. The wrestling match is over. Exit – ingloriously – the loser.”

Burl got to his feet, leaned against the door. He noticed the Maestro watching him in sidelong glances, nervously.

“You're not leaving because of the bear. It's me,” said Burl. “What about take two?”

The Maestro sat back on his heels, his hands pressing on his knees.

“From what point in time?” he said. “Where do we knock on that magical door and turn everything around?”

“From where I showed you the fish. How about that?”

“And how could we change things?”

“I would let it go. It would swim away.”

“It wasn't the fish, Burl.”

“The drugs. Can't we take two the drugs?”

The man stared hard at him, fixed him with his eyes. Burl glared back.

“I believe,” said the Maestro, “that you have as active an imagination as I do, Master Burl, but I fear neither of us can reconstitute my medication, no matter how much we might want to.”

Burl abandoned the staring contest. “It was stupid of me. Stupid, stupid, stupid!”

“Please!” said the Maestro. “I loathe attention-getting displays unless I'm the one making them. Yes, it was stupid and thoughtless. However, you were provoked.”

“I don't want you to go.”

The Maestro stuffed another shirt into his suitcase. It was overflowing; it would never close.

“I only wanted to stay here one night.”

“Nonsense. You are running away from some dreadful situation. You need a sanctuary. That's what cleaning the shed and catching the fish were all about. Unfortunately, the monks of the holy order of Nathaniel Gow are a solitary lot. We do not welcome strangers, even when, sorrowfully, they are refugee children.”

He was busy trying to close his bulging suitcase.

“You can't go,” said Burl. “Let me do for you. I'll stay out of your hair.” It all came blurting out, dreams in the nearest shape that words could make of them. “I can sleep in the shed. There's room there, once I've got rid of the garbage. I'm happier outside, I'll –”

“You'll what? Catch me some more fish? What exactly will you do?” The Maestro sat on his suitcase, exhausted from the strain of trying to shut it and shut out Burl. He buried his head in his hands.

“I could take the train down to Presqueville and get your prescriptions filled out for you. I wouldn't steal the money. I'd be back right away.”

The Maestro stood up and stared at Burl. “You are a remarkably persistent lad.” He looked closely at him, as if seeing him for the first time. “You know, I
did
look like you. Your eyes are brown and mine blue but our faces are not all that dissimilar. The same skinny chin, the same fire in the eyes.” He seemed as if he might go on, as if there was a whole trunkful of memories he might spill out, but he caught himself. Then he turned his attention back to the problem of the suitcase. With his toe he opened it again. He began to lift things out. Burl watched hopefully, but soon it became apparent that the Maestro was only emptying out what did not fit. He closed the top again and snapped the locks.

What happened next – the sequence of it – was hard for Burl to make clear in his head. Later when he tried, it was all a blur of confusion.

At some point the Maestro was leaving, draped in overcoats, scarf, hat and gloves as if he was stepping into a February blizzard instead of a windy late summer afternoon. He carried only his suitcase.

There was a path – an Indian trail as old as birchbark canoes – that led from the lake to the train. The CPR twin-coach passenger service – the Budd car, as it was called locally – would pick him up sometime around five.

Were there goodbyes? Did the Maestro tip his hat, wave?

And Burl? Had he actually stood at the door watching the man leave as if he was a departing house guest? At what moment did it dawn on him that he had not merely been left behind – for that is the way he thought of it at the time – but that he had been left the cabin?

He could stay there. He had not been kicked out. The Maestro had just walked off as if for an afternoon stroll. Was that it, then? Would he be back?

Living with his father, Burl had learned not to want too much. He had learned to steal his pleasure. Now suddenly, and without ceremony, a dream seemed to have been dropped in his lap.

It was when he was looking around the cabin, daring to think of what he would do first, how he would make it his, that he noticed the work table with the music on it. The Book of Revelation. At the foot of the chair lay the Maestro's scuffed brown-leather briefcase with straps that looked dog-chewed.

Burl rolled back the curtains, let the light flood in. He looked back at the table. How many pages? Hundreds, it seemed. He looked through one of the piles. On the left side of the score was listed beside each clef the instrument meant to play that line of music. How was it done? When the violin finished the first line, did the viola take over, then the cello and then the bass, one after the other?

He looked through a few pages. No, the bars were numbered. It must be that all these instruments played bar one together. But then how was it possible to hear what it sounded like when you were writing it down? How could anyone hear all these instruments in his head at once?

Burl sat down. He didn't understand much about music, but he grasped one extraordinary fact. It would take incredible concentration to write it. And in the same moment as realizing this, he also understood what the Maestro had been saying about his need for solitude. Now he was heading back to the Shadow. Now he would take his solitude in smaller doses. What did that mean? Weekend visits to the camp?

Burl gritted his teeth. No beating by Cal could have made him feel as terrible as he felt right then.

But it was that discovery that brought him to his senses. In a matter of a few minutes, he deposited all the music and notes and lists and the pencils, too – for perhaps they were special music-writing pencils – into the briefcase until it bulged and the straps strained. Then he tore out the door and up the path the Maestro had taken into the woods. That was the thing, later, that most mystified the boy about his own actions: he was giving the Maestro a second chance to come to his senses.

The way was steep, the load heavy. He imagined catching up to the Maestro and the man smacking his forehead. “My God, what was I thinking. Of course I can't let you stay there.” As he trudged through the forest, Burl take-twoed this unwelcome scenario right out of his head.

“It's yours, Burl. It's no place for the likes of me.” Burl savoured the sound of that.

It was a half-hour walk to the track, and the path was far from smooth going. There was the odd tree down, and in places there was underbrush that needed cutting back. Burl ran, shifting the briefcase from hand to hand, sometimes hugging it to his chest with both arms. It was so heavy.

Skittering down the final steep hill that led to the tracks, he found himself gasping for breath. He had run most of the way.

Mile 29. There was a sign and a light, nothing more. The land fell off steeply on the other side of the track to the river.

The Maestro was balancing on the rail, his hands behind his back, humming. His shoddy suitcase sat on the black stone slag upon which the tracks ran. He turned and seemed surprised to see Burl there.

“Your music,” said Burl, approaching him, his heart pounding like a locomotive in his chest.

The Maestro eyed the case strangely, as if it were some alien animal that might bite. He dug his hand into his pocket for a handkerchief and wiped Burl's face clean of sweat.

“Put the infernal bag down,” he said. Obediently Burl lowered it, letting it lean against his feet. “This is the act of a contrite child.”

“I know what I did was wrong,” said Burl.

The Maestro crouched and felt one of the tattered straps of the briefcase. A smile broke out on his face. “A dog did this,” he said. “His name was Pilgrim. He used to rest his snout on the keyboard sometimes when I was practising. When I retired from the concert stage, I had this idea that I was going to build an animal shelter somewhere in the country and take in strays. Oh, it was never a real option, I suppose, but my intention was good. Then out of the blue drops this stray boy – you – and do I extend even a crumb of hospitality? People are harder than animals, I guess.” His eyes cleared. “I'll leave the music,” he said, “until next time.”

Burl picked up the briefcase. “So you'll be back?”

The Maestro looked up the track, looked at his watch. The train was already late. “Of course I shall come up again. There's the piano to see to. I'll have to do something about it before the winter. Like its master, it's sensitive to the cold.”

There was only one thought on Burl's mind. It was now or never. He gathered up his courage. “If I could stay for a while, I'd make sure I left the place tidy and safe, like from bears and stuff.”

“And you'd live on fish and berries, is that it? Make a bow and arrow and shoot yourself a moose?”

“I'd be okay. I wouldn't eat none – any of your food.”

The Maestro shook his head. “Nonsense. Help yourself. I may not have been able to cope with you as a house guest, but I don't begrudge you whatever my meagre larder can provide.”

“Thank you,” said Burl.

The Maestro looked at him, right into Burl's worried heart.

“You aren't likely to chop up the piano for kindling, are you?”

“I'll guard it with my life.”

“And absolutely no cruising on the lake in it.”

Burl smiled. “I promise.”

Tentatively, the Maestro reached out and patted him on the shoulder.

Then a whistle blew. Burl knew what to do. He stepped out onto the track and flagged the Budd car down.

“When are you coming up again?” he asked.

Maybe it was the clanging of the approaching train, the dragon-like wheezing of the brakes, but the Maestro looked suddenly youthful with excitement.

“You mean how long can you stay?” He watched the train drawing to a clamorous stop. He handed up his bag to the man in the door of the freight section. Then he headed towards the passenger entrance farther down the length of the two dirty silver cars.

“I'll keep you posted,” he said.

“How?”

The Maestro smiled. “Smoke signals, perhaps.” He climbed up the steps. And if he said more, it was lost to Burl in the whine of the wheels, steel on steel, as the train started up again.

He made a fire on the beach. He cut up the bass the way his father had shown him. There was no flour in the kitchen so he ground up arrowroot cookies – there were many boxes of them. He ground the cookies to a fine powder to coat the fillets. He found a can of small potatoes, a can of creamed corn.

He had sat on the slope by the railway track for some time after the Budd car had gone. Absently he had plucked at the long grass there thinking, regaining strength for the walk back. In his exploration he had discovered that the hill was covered with wild liquorice. He picked it and carried it back and after supper he made liquorice tea and watched the moon come up. With lots of honey it didn't taste half bad. He let the fire burn down to nothing, let the cold night air steal in on the circle of warmth. Only when there was no warmth left, did he go in.

The cabin was flooded with moonlight. He had turned off the generator as soon as he had returned from the track. He had no idea how much fuel was left, but he planned to use it sparingly. He hoped to stay for as long as he could. He lit a candle and carried it to the piano. He played the chords the Maestro had taught him. He tried to see how quietly he could play the passage. It was the part in the Revelation about the lamb opening something. A silence in heaven – something like that. He got up and carefully removed the music from the briefcase. He thumbed through the pages but, although they were numbered, he had no way of knowing where the silence in heaven might be.