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 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.
28
No Strings
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 roundedged 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 th
rough, 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 footloose 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.”
“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 good-bye 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.
29
The Secret Drawer
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 crossbeams, 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 licorice 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.
The Maestro Page 15