The Survival Game (23 page)

His father called to him from the campfire.

“You expect me to look after this fire while you play games?” he said.

Burl found three more cans of food, some cutlery. He found the spring remainder of the mattress and under it the buckles of his pack. The score was there, too. It was stacked in a neat brown pile held in place by filthy strips of charred canvas. The manuscript teased him. He could actually read the writing on the title page –
The Revelation
– but when he reached down to try to pick it up, it fell away to nothing in his hand.

With his stomach rumbling and the cans of food luring him away, he was about to give up his search when he saw a glint of something. His battered harmonica. It was too hot to touch. He launched it with his scooper out into the snow. When he recovered it and put it in his pocket, there was something else there. Gow's letter to Reggie. Regina.

Cal was in bad shape. His face was pale. His injured leg looked raw. There was some kind of viscous yellow pus dribbling down it.

“You gotta get me outa here,” said Cal. There was no bluster left in him. “S. & R. comes here, they're gonna blame me for that stinkin' mess.” His finger was shaking as he pointed at the ruin. He seemed old.

“Then they'll be right,” said Burl. He was busying himself opening one of the cans with his pocket knife.

“So it's my fault,” said Cal. “It's my fault that you go running off and find yourself all kinds of fancy friends.”

Burl looked at him across the campfire for just a brief glance. It was a lot easier to deal with Cal when he couldn't stroll over and give you a cuff. He didn't need to say anything.

“Yeah, you keep an eye on me,” said Cal. “Leaving us like that. Leaving your mother. Broke her heart. You ever think about that?”

Burl spooned himself some warm stew from the can. It tasted good. He took a second mouthful.

“You want some?” he asked.

Cal spat into the fire.

Burl ate in silence. Irish stew. Ravioli. Hot evaporated milk.

“Gimme some of that,” said Cal. He drank the Carnation down to the bottom and threw the can into the fire.

Burl was up again, ready to work. With his father yelling after him, he went to where he'd stockpiled the odds and ends from the fire. A sled. How was it to be done? He had found his raft pulled up under the deck. When he flipped it over, there was a rounded bottom of ice that made it move smoothly along the snow, but also made it way too heavy.

Burl sat on the deck under the noonday sun, trying not to panic. The snow was melting. He was glad for the warmer temperature, but without snow, there was no way he could get Cal back to the track.

The train wasn't due until five. He would have to give himself lots of time.

He looked over at his father. Cal had found himself a sharp stick and was stabbing at the ground again and again. Why had he no advice to offer, only insults? What would he do in Burl's place?

A vision jolted Burl out of his stupor. A hunting trip with his father. His dad had bagged a buck far from camp. No four-wheel could get to where they were. No problemo. Cal sat Burl on a rock out of the way. Watch, he said. He picked two trees – young poplars each the same thickness through. He took them down with his hatchet, limbed the branches off until he had two good long poles. He took some rope from his pack and, crossing the poles two-thirds of the way along, he lashed them together. Then he lashed the deer to the wide end of the contraption. Next Cal harnessed himself in at the place where the two poles crossed, so that a pole was under each arm. A travois. The Indians of the Plains used them harnessed to dogs or horses.

“I ain't getting in that thing,” his father said. He had to rouse himself from a pained and jittery slumber to say it. He was in bad shape. He was hot, and his leg looked dead as slag.

Burl waited until Cal had stopped struggling, then, without a word, lifted him again. The curses flowed, and his arms flailed, but Burl got him on the ladder. He'd dug it out from the debris under the cabin. He'd made Cal a kind of seat at one end. It wasn't comfortable, but at least the patient wasn't going to be dragged along the ground, either. It was a lot lighter than poplars, and there was a lot of spring in it. There wasn't much spring left in his old man.

At the other end, Burl fitted himself between two rungs and gathered up the rails under his arms. He had padded the rung the best he could. Now he pressed his chest into it and pulled. His father yowled at the sudden jerky movement.

The travois moved a pace or two. Burl stopped, breathing heavily. He took a few more steps and stopped again. He went to look at his father.

Through his fever, Cal managed a smile. “Can't do it, can ya,” he said.

Burl looked at where the feet of the ladder at the cargo end had gouged into the ground. He looked at his father.

“I can do it,” he said.

It took him another half hour to make a wooden runner on which the feet of the ladder could sit. The runner had to be pliable enough that its tip could be curved upwards and held in place with rope like the front end of a toboggan. Then Burl reharnessed himself and started to pull. Much smoother. Cal complained, but he soon stopped grousing. Every bit of his strength seemed to be used up just staying alive.

The way was hilly. A lot of up to begin with and more down towards the end. The up was sheer hard work. Burl took each hill one pull at a time. He pretended each hill was the last.

When they had gone what Burl felt sure had to be halfway, he allowed himself a long break. He had saved one can of food. It turned out to be mushroom soup. That was going to have been his lunch. A hot pot of soup sitting out on the deck. Instead he was in the middle of the woods and the soup was cold, and there was no milk or water to mix into it. Still, it was sustenance. Through lidded eyes Cal watched him drinking the contents of the can.

“You gonna offer me any of that?” he asked.

Burl shook his head and kept eating, sucking the lumpy condensed matter into his mouth. He was doing all the work now; he needed the calories. He wasn't going to waste his energy explaining that to Cal.

They reached the track before dark. Burl had been listening for the sound of a train coming. He figured that if he heard it when he was still on the trail, he would leave his father and run to the track. He'd heard nothing. He had to hope it wasn't too late.

At the foot of the liquorice hill he finally fell to his knees. His muscles felt like mushroom soup. He had spun out his strength to the finest filament, and now that snapped. There was nothing left. He had spent the last stretch counting each step. He had got to three hundred or so before he lost count and gave up. By then his father was going through some new stage of suffering, and he began to jerk violently, once so hard that he lifted himself clear off the aluminium travois.

Burl cursed at him as he lifted him back on. He wondered then, for the first time, whether Cal would lose more than a leg. It was hard to believe that a man as powerful as Cal could be brought so low, let alone be finished off.

The train was late. They'd said they might be late, but they'd come eventually. And if there was no southbound, then there would be a northbound tomorrow around noon.

Burl tried to imagine making it through the night camped here in the open by the track. He couldn't make a shelter now; he was too weak, and he had left the axe back at the camp. But when the train still didn't come, he became sure that this would be his fate, so he ransacked his father's pockets for matches. There were none. How could there be so much fire one night and no means for making one the next!

Any minute. Any minute the train would come. He said this to Cal. By then he didn't think that Cal could even hear him. He didn't move from his father's side. Cal was as hot as a furnace, burning up with fever. He was rotting away. But while he was churning out heat, Burl huddled in close to the man.

He felt Cal steal an arm around him, though it had no strength to either hold him or do him any harm.

“You've got to know something,” he said.

“Shhh,” said Burl.

“I di'n' kill Laura.”

Burl wasn't sure he had heard him right. “Shut up,” he said.

“Your mother always blamed me. Always. I di'n' kill her. I di'n'.”

Burl started trembling. He had been eight. Laura had been eleven, and then she wasn't. There had been weeping around the house and a burial. His father and mother had fought. Was it only then that the fighting started? Surely not. Surely they had always fought.

“Doloris said I shouldna took her with me. But I had to keep her with me. She was gonna leave. She was such a pretty little thing and she was gonna leave us unless I kept her right where I could see her. I di'n' wan' her to go.”

Burl looked into the darkness. Up ahead where the track curved, he saw a light turn red. That meant a train was coming from the north, though he couldn't hear a thing yet. He had to flag the train down. He tried to stand; Cal grabbed onto him.

“Doloris di'n' unersan'.” His voice was disintegrating. “She though' I was just gonna show her off to the boys. Jeez! I'd a killed anyone who touched Laura. Doloris never believed me. Never.”

Now it was coming. He could hear it through the rail first and then through the air. Finally he could hear the warning horn. He had to get up, wave the train down. It would rumble right past them.

“I'd have never let one of those guys at you, Laura!”

Burl struggled to get up. His father was holding him now with every ounce of his strength, as if Burl was leaving, too, as if Burl was Laura. Burl tugged at the big sweaty hand attached to his shoulder. It was fixed there as though it were part of Burl, a heavy new appendage growing out of his shoulder.

“I've gotta flag the train,” yelled Burl.

“She ran away from the party. How was I supposed to know she'd run away!”

“Let me go!” said Burl. He had stopped tugging at Cal's hand. He was hitting it now with his balled-up fist. But Cal kept talking, his voice all wavery like a station a long way off, coming in and out of reach.

The train was coming.

“She ran out from the card party, out onto the road. It wasn' my fault.”

“Shut up!” screamed Burl in his father's face. He could see the headlight of the train now, lighting up the rail. His father was all over him now, sobbing horribly. And Burl was crying, too, crying at what he had to do. He lifted his arm high and brought his elbow down hard into his father's stomach. Cal doubled over, his grip loosened, and Burl wriggled free. He jumped to his feet and waved his arms for all he was worth.

“Laura,” Cal screamed. “Come back!”

He was still talking like that when the crew hands jumped down out of the streaming light of the baggage compartment with their stretcher ready. “Laura, honey. I'm your daddy…” They strapped him on and lifted him up and laid him down among the baggage, the skis, the mining gear, a caged dog.

Then the crewmen jumped back down onto the siding and picked up Burl, who had collapsed on his aluminium-ladder travois.

Granny Robichaud believed in God. Her God was a big grandfather with long snowy-white hair and a flowing beard and stern eyes that could read your every thought just before you had it.

When Burl was at Granny Robichaud's, she always made him say his prayers. It wasn't something he'd kept up. But now, as his eyes opened, he began to pray – pray that this wasn't God sitting in front of him, inspecting him with such apparent consternation.

His senses woke up one after the other. His eyes to God, then his ears to a murmuring hubbub all around him. The arrival lounge at Heaven Central? Burl blinked. God smiled.

“Looks like he's coming 'round,” he said. Another face poked its way into Burl's consciousness. Not anyone with a halo or wings. A conductor in CPR blue, his tie askew and wearing the same shirt he'd been wearing on the trip up, the collar badly frayed.

Someone else took a look and then from somewhere in the hubbub a hand approached Burl holding the top of a Thermos filled with something steaming. Tomato soup.

Burl shinnied up higher in his seat and found that he was swaddled in blankets.

“Hey, hey, hey,” said God and clapped his hands together. Workers hands, they were, with the ground-in stain that comes from sifting through dirt; the fingernails broken, bruised.

Around them, Burl caught a whiff of a rather ungodly aroma coming from the man directly across from him. Granny Robichaud's God didn't smoke a pipe, but this one did. Even as Burl took his first sip of heavenly soup, God settled back and lit up.

The conductor was not amused. “Japheth – jeez – can't you read the signs?”

Japheth tore his gaze away from Burl just long enough to answer the conductor. “Nope. Never did learn to read, Gabe. What do the sign say?”

A couple of other passengers chuckled. And then the conductor's radio coughed, and the engineer came on speaking train talk. The conductor had to go, but not before he'd checked with Burl if there was anything he needed.

“Nothing,” Burl tried to say. But no words came out. He cleared his throat. “Thanks,” he managed.

“You want me to throw this old codger and his pipe out the window?”

Burl cranked up two or three muscles in his face and got out a bit of a smile. It didn't hurt too much.

This train was not bound for glory. It was the Budd car, worn and unlovely as ever.

The hubbub settled down and people moved back to their seats. All except Japheth, who stayed put smoking his pipe – a white-stemmed pipe, as yellowed with age and handling as the smoker himself. He kept an eye on Burl, but it was not an intrusive eye.

The guy with the soup came back to see if Burl wanted any more. Burl handed him the Thermos cup and the man filled it. Burl squeezed out another thank you. His head felt thick with cold. His torso and arms felt on fire, where he had hugged the ladder rails to his sides.