The Survival Game (15 page)

Gord Weesbach was up north somewhere right now. Sitting in a tree waiting for bear. But only for the week. What choice did Burl have? He had to get out of Intervalle but he didn't have any cash. Bea had seen to that. She'd been generous enough, but as far as she was concerned, Burl wasn't leaving Intervalle unless it was on a bus to Toronto.

He squeezed his eyes tight until they popped and fizzed with red fireworks. He could get up right now and leave. He could step out that door and be on the highway in half an hour. He wasn't a prisoner. He could hitch a ride to somewhere. Anywhere.

And that's when it came to him. A little bit of mercy. The beginning of a plan all his own. He was too tired to give it any real consideration, but the thought of it released him from some of the knots he was tied up in. Allowed him to rescue a little consolation from what was left of the night.

Tomorrow was soon enough. Then the Nobody would work out the details of his own plan.

Natalie Agnew rapped on the warped and weathered door. It took her a minute to think where to knock, half afraid of putting her fist clear through it. There were no signs of anyone at home. No half-starved hunting dog on a chain barking its head off – that's what she had expected to see when she first laid eyes on the Crow residence. There was no smoke coming out of the chimney pipe.

“Hello,” she said. “Mrs. Crow?”

She stepped down from the stoop and walked through the frost-licked grass that grew knee-high around the shack. It had been trodden down in only one mean path from the oil-dead patch of red sand that must serve as a car park.

Natalie listened to hear if a car was coming. Nothing but the screech of blue jays. She peered through a window, squinting, blocking the light out with her hands so that her eyes might sift the shadows inside for signs of life. Nothing.

She had phoned the high school in Vaillancourt, but Burl Crow had not registered for school there. She'd phoned the Catholic school in St. Chrodegang with the same result.

In the school records she'd found that Burl's parents had no phone service. So that was that, for a while. But then a Saturday came along and David had another appointment up at the reservation. So she had tagged along. Not for the weather this time. It was horrible, the ground cold and hard, the trees bleak. Winter in the wings.

Through the window she saw the remains of breakfast on the table: two bowls, a carton of milk, cornflakes, a thick brown mug, an empty Coke can. But from the look of the house, these things might have been sitting there for weeks.

She heard a car backfire up the road. She just barely made it back to the path before a huge old boat of a car squealed into the property, almost side-swiping her Tercel.

The man who climbed out from behind the wheel leered at her as he hitched up his belt under a formidable gut.

“Are you lost?” he said, leaning against the trunk of his car. His eyes were all over her. She folded her arms across her chest.

“I'm sorry,” she said, and was instantly angry at herself for capitulating to this big lout of a man. She wasn't sorry at all. “I'm looking for Burl Crow.”

The man jabbed his key into the trunk lock and turned it, never taking his eyes off her.

“He ain't here,” he said. His thumb pushed the button to release the catch. The trunk opened with a screeching sound.

“Is this where he lives?” she asked.

The man reached into the trunk and pulled out a shotgun. Natalie gasped.

“He ain't here no more,” he said. “Who are you, anyway?”

Natalie took a few steps up the path towards him. There was no other way of getting to her car and, although she knew the gun was just for show, she wanted to be in the Tercel heading out the driveway in case he changed his mind. He cracked the gun open to see if it was loaded. He was toying with her. He had a rude smile on his face, now that he cradled a firearm. As she neared him he stepped forward so that she would have to go around him, detouring into the overgrown grass.

It annoyed her to think that this inflated, vulgar hulk might be Burl's father. “Burl was a gifted student of mine.”

“Gifted!” the man snorted. “That's a good one.”

“We'd lost touch.”

He raised his eyebrows and leered again. “Foolish boy,” he said. “You can bet I wouldn't lose touch.”

Natalie stopped in front of him. He laid the gun across his shoulder and leaned a little out towards her, just in case she wanted to give him a kiss. He was very much closer to getting a slap across the face, but Natalie resisted the urge. He was dangerous. She could see that. And she could see, suddenly, a lot more. Things that had puzzled her about Burl suddenly had something like an explanation. Despite the man's menacing attitude, her rage grew.

“As a representative of the school board, I would like to know where he is,” she snapped.

He took a step back, covering his heart with his free hand.

“Well, so do I,” he said. “Why don't you tell me where the boy can get in touch with you when he calls in?”

He pretended to cower again, raising his forearm across his face as though he expected a lashing for being so impertinent.

“Fine,” she said, stepping past him and hurrying towards her own car. She found a piece of paper and wrote her name and the school phone number on it. She handed it to him. With the open car door between them, she dared to speak again.

“If Burl has run away, Mr. Crow, I'll make sure that the police have been alerted. I'm sure you took that step when he first left.”

The little joke he had been having at her expense withered on his face. She saw his fist tighten around the stock of his gun.

“Why don't you mind your own friggin' business,” he said.

“You can bet I will,” she said, sliding into her seat, turning on the ignition and revving the motor high. Then she rolled down the window and yelled, “Burl
is
my business.” She didn't think there was much chance he heard her. She rolled the window up again fast.

He shouted something, too. She revved the motor higher so that the engine squealed. She put the car in gear. He leaned the gun against the rusted-out bumper of his car and, with his hands up, walked towards her.

She took her foot off the pedal and opened her window a crack. She'd already made sure the doors were locked.

He leaned down so that his lips were up against the crack where the window was open.

“He's gone to live with his grandma up in Dryden, since you're so concerned.” His voice was even. “Things weren't working out here.” He tried to sound a little sad, as if it had been a hard decision. Then he stood back. “There. Does that make us friends again?”

“We'll see,” said Natalie, and her foot went down hard on the accelerator. The car flew into reverse; she turned the steering wheel wickedly. Then she screamed out of the garbage dump of a yard. She was out on the road shivering and hugging the wheel close to her chest before it crossed her mind that perhaps she had run over the horrible man's foot.

The bus crawled out of the terminal on Notre Dame in the dark of early morning. Despite the hour, Bea had driven Burl into Sudbury herself. She wanted to give him one last briefing.

He had stared out at the cratered moonscape that surrounded the city as they drove in from Intervalle. The fan in the Bronco was up high, blowing hot air in on the silence. There was no other sound. He saw the lights of the mines, an unexpected stream of traffic – a shift change. Pharaoh, where he had grown up, was only fifty kilometres away, but Sudbury might as well have been the moon for the number of times he'd travelled there. And yet, here he was travelling to Sudbury for the second time in as many days. Bea had brought him in the day before for some spook 'em clothes of his own. How convincing would it be for Gow's lost son to appear on the doorstep looking like a waif? There had been talk of another haircut, but his hair had grown long enough that it fell just like Gow's in the pictures of him as a child genius. So they left Burl's hair as it was, and he wore one of the Maestro's monogrammed shirts.

Bea bought him a round-trip ticket good for any time. Then she grilled him once more. He was to phone as soon as he had seen the lawyers. She explained to him about long distance phone calls. She didn't miss a thing. Finally, when he was at the door, she handed him an envelope. She held it out of his grasp for one last moment.

“I could have arranged with my bank for you to pick this up at a branch in Toronto, but I trust you, Burl.” He could see in her eyes just how far she trusted him: about as far as a man can hurl a moose, as his father liked to say.

When he was on the bus, he counted the money. She had said there would be enough for expenses and a room at the Y for a week. But the cash didn't add up to what he had earned working at Skookum.

Somewhere past Noble, the moon still in the sky, Burl realized that he was glad Bea had short-changed him. He didn't want to feel he owed her anything. It was kind of like freedom.

He drifted off to sleep.

He sat up several hours later, groggy and disoriented, to find himself barrelling down Highway 400 into Toronto. There seemed to be a thousand lanes of speeding traffic stretching out to either side.

Then they were at the Bay Street Terminal, and he was disgorged from the bus like a frog from the belly of a hooked bass. He stood with his spook 'em clothes all wrinkled at the knee in the middle of what appeared to be Chinatown, and stared at his map. He had stashed his duffel bag in a locker at the bus station. It cost him a loonie but he wasn't planning on heading to the Y just yet. Nor was he planning on seeing any lawyers.

He was looking for Spadina Road.

Toronto was nothing like the postcards. Or maybe it was the parts of it you couldn't show in a picture that got to Burl: the high-pitched bleep of a truck backing down an alley, the air brakes of a bus, people squabbling in foreign languages, a panhandler sobbing in no fixed language at all. The urgent wail of an ambulance threading its way through the river of traffic.

Gow had called the city the Shadow. And that was how Burl saw it, in all its darkness and unfamiliarity.

A girl with a shaven head and nose rings played the violin on a street corner. Burl stopped to watch her. She was beautiful in her short black dress and her legs pale as birchbark. She played feverishly. She saw nothing, her eyes rolled into her head as if reading some music there. Then she stopped, and she looked like someone who had just woken up. In a daze she stooped and counted the change people had thrown into her case. She stowed her instrument and headed up the street, her clogs clapping. She carried the case under her arm, and a cigarette flapped from her black-pencilled lips. She looked back furtively a couple of times.

She yelled at Burl; told him to stop following her. He let her pull ahead.

Smells pressed in on him. Exhaust and cooking fat and dusty dry goods for sale, piled in toppling heaps on the sidewalk, and fresh tar and last night's vomit frozen, now melting.

Burl saw in an hour more people than he had seen in his whole life. His eyes smarted with the strain of seeing and the stinging stench of the yellow air. His head ached with the blare and discord. His feet ached with the unrelenting hardness of concrete.

He bought a sausage on a bun from a street vendor. He sat on the sill of a bank window until the pigeons got too pushy. He had never seen a pigeon before. He had never seen a bird with so little self-respect.

In the doorway of an out-of-business store with its windows newspapered over, a woman slept in a blanket.

Spadina Avenue was only a few blocks from the bus terminal. But that wasn't Spadina Road, and there was a lot of the avenue before he got to the road and then a lot of the road before he reached his destination. The road climbed upwards from the hullabaloo of outdoor markets. There were apartments and then houses and trees, fenced in like huge tired animals to protect them from lumbering out into the traffic. Burl walked until there was hardly anyone on the street. Then, near the peak of the hill, Spadina made a graceful curve and there sat a castle. Casa Loma. Exactly like a postcard. There was something reassuring in that.

It was three before Burl finally crossed St. Clair and saw that the numbers were getting closer to the building he was looking for. He found it at last in a part of town called Forest Hill Village.

There were people here, shopping with baskets on their arms. In a single block there were four bakeries featuring elaborately braided loaves and cakes topped with glazed fruit. There was a market store in which the apples appeared to have been individually polished. There was a restaurant called a ristorante. The waiters in the ristorante were all thin with black hair.

Finally he reached the Columbine. That was the name on the return address of Reggie Corngold's letter.

The Columbine sat across the street from a little park. The apartment was four floors high, brown brick, ivy-covered. The doorway was impressive with the name carved above solid wooden doors painted black like the entrance to a church. There were six windows set in each door. There was a sign warning tradesmen to use the rear entrance.

Burl stepped into the hallway not knowing what to do. There were eight tiny mailboxes there. He checked the names. Corngold was Number Five. There was no mail in the box.

Burl was just about to start up the stairs when he heard footsteps descending. He backed up and waited. A woman, her high heels clicking resoundingly, passed him by and pushed at the heavy door with her briefcase. Burl helped. She smiled in a frowny kind of way, as if she was annoyed at herself for not paying enough attention to what she was doing. “Thanks,” she said without looking at him, then clicked down the stairs to the street.

Feeling a little more reassured, Burl mounted the staircase in search of Number Five. No one home. But it was almost four by then. People would be off work soon. He decided to wait outside in the park, where he could see the residents arriving home. As he descended the staircase, the front door opened and his heart leaped, but it was only a postman. Watching from the stairs, he saw the postman open the whole panel of mailboxes with a key. There was a package for Reggie Corngold that he could not jam into the box, so he left it on the ledge below.