The Survival Game (16 page)

When the postman had gone, Burl held the package in his hand, wanting to open it, wanting to know something – anything – about this man who was Nog's friend. Then he placed it back on the ledge and pushed through the door.

Night was already falling. In the park there was a sign showing a little dog with a pile of poop behind it on the ground. The picture showed a shovel and a wastebasket. Burl looked around. The sign worked. There was no dog poop anywhere.

He sat on a bench. A gust of wind blew a placard against his leg. It was another sign: “Pesticides in Use. Please Keep Off.” He didn't know where this new sign had come from. What was he supposed to keep off? He decided it didn't really matter. There were too many signs in the city as far as he could tell. If you paid attention to all of them you'd go crazy.

After another cold hour, only one person had entered the Columbine, a fancy-looking lady in furs with a small dog under her arm. Then an elderly man arrived from around the side of the building, stuffing his car keys in his pocket. He had nice silver hair. Burl thought he would make a good friend for the Maestro. Burl skittered across the street to watch him claim his mail. Mr. Coffee, Number Three.

Soon all but Number One and Number Five were safely home for the evening. Burl caught glimpses of the other tenants in their windows: T. Pollack was having a glass of beer. S. Braithwaite was watching television and eating something from a bowl. And F. Lonsdale seemed to be lighting a fire. All the Columbine dwellers were settling in for the night, while the night itself settled in, cold and damp.

At seven thirty, Burl wandered back down to Forest Hill Village and found somewhere that wasn't a ristorante where he could sit and have a coffee and something to eat. He killed almost an hour, then ventured up the road to the Columbine, his heart pounding. There was still nobody in Number Five.

He stepped outside again. The wind had picked up. He dug his hands deep into his pockets.The woman in the furs was walking her little white dog in the park. The dog had a dump and the woman, with a great effort, bent down to scoop it up. She used a plastic bag. When she crossed the street dragging the dog with her, she glared at Burl.

There was no way he could sit in the park now – it was too cold – so Burl set off south to St. Clair. He walked west along St. Clair until he found a fast-food joint. He went in. There were black people there. He'd never seen one in the flesh.

Ten o'clock was the very latest he dared try Number Five. But when he got back to the Columbine, he could see that the lights were not on and the package was still sitting on the ledge in the hall.

There was, by then, no place open in the village so Burl set off to see the city. He had slept several hours on the bus that morning, but he was quite tired. Still, he had no intention of spending any of his money staying at the Y. He thought of Bea waiting by the phone back in Intervalle.

There were lots of places open. He had heard that about cities, but it shocked him. And as he journeyed on into the night, he found that he liked it better than the day. So many other people looked as if they were out of place. He didn't stand out so much. He wondered if these night people had all just arrived in Toronto that day and had no place to stay.

It snowed a bit around 4.30 a.m. The snow seemed to warm things up a bit. He caught a night bus to St. Clair West and – twenty-four hours after boarding the bus in Sudbury – he arrived again at the Columbine. Nobody's lights were on. He didn't go in. He found a retaining wall in the alley entrance to the parking lot, where he could see the windows of Reggie Corngold's apartment. A raccoon came by looking for garbage. It didn't seem to mind Burl being there. With fascination Burl watched the hooded burglar tip the top of a garbage can and mess around inside, then sit there munching, its eye on Burl, while Burl sat shivering. It was fatter than any coon he'd seen in the bush. Probably lived on junk food.

They were still sitting there like that, although Burl was slumping by then, when the first hint of morning snuck down the narrow alley. Numbly Burl watched the dark begin to seep out of things, leaving them grey and lifeless, sucked dry.

Suddenly the raccoon startled and waddled off through a gap in the fence. It took Burl's dim brain longer to hear the car. He curled up small in the bushes. The car passed down the alley and turned into the parking lot behind the Columbine. Burl watched through the snarl of shrubbery. It was the woman he had seen leaving the building when he had first arrived. He had opened the door for her. She passed by, not seeing him in the shadows. He followed her. When the front door closed behind her, he ventured up to watch her through the window. She stood in the front hallway and took off her black gloves. She opened mailbox Number Five. Burl was paralysed. The woman picked up the envelope off the ledge and started tearing it open as she headed for the stairs.

Burl's first thought was that she was stealing Reggie's mail. Then it occurred to him that maybe she was Reggie's wife. And then like a jolt of electricity passing through him he knew without knowing why that
she
was Reggie. Reggie was a she. The letter, which he knew almost by heart now, shifted in his brain, as if each word were suddenly a different colour than before, and made a different kind of sense.

By the time he recovered from this surprising turn of events, Reggie Corngold was halfway up the stairs. Unable to wait another moment, Burl swung open the heavy black door. She had already reached the first landing, her briefcase tucked under her arm, reading whatever had been in the oversized envelope. Startled by the sudden noise, she swung around.

“It's all right!” said Burl. His voice sounded too loud, husky from a night without talking.

Gathering her briefcase to her chest, she stepped down a single step. It squeaked noisily in the sleeping building.

Burl cleared his throat. “I'm looking for Reggie Corngold,” he said. His voice echoed.

She spoke cautiously. “What do you want?”

Burl leaned against the door, his hand on his chest, his mouth gaping open like a man who had run a marathon.

“I'm…I'm a friend of Nog's.”

“Who?”

“Nathaniel Gow.”

She stepped down another step. Her eyes were wide. “You called him Nog.” She was staring at him in an almost frightened way. Her face was thin, her eyes seemed far too large in such a slim face. Burl wished that he could say something to ease her mind.

“I don't know you,” she said.

“I need to talk to you about him.”

She stepped another step closer. “Nathaniel Gow is dead,” she said. “I'm not going to stand talking to a complete stranger about him or anything else at this hour of the morning.” Then, with a firm grasp of the banister, she turned and began again to climb the stairs.

“Please don't go,” said Burl.

“Shhh!”

“I'm sorry,” he whispered. “I've been waiting for you all night.”

It was not the right thing to say. Without taking her eyes off him, Reggie backed up the stairs until her face was lost in shadows.

“I can explain,” said Burl.

“Then phone me,” she whispered, leaning over the banister. “I'm listed.”

Burl moved to the foot of the stairs just as she rounded the corner above. “When?” he demanded.

She sighed. “Noon.” She sounded exasperated.

The stuffy heat of the little lobby sapped the last bit of strength from Burl as Reggie tiptoed out of sight. Burl waited. After a long five minutes, he gave up, opened the front door and stepped out into the cold.

He made his way around back to the service entrance. There was a stairway there to the basement. As quietly as he could he went down, not daring to turn on the light. He bumped into walls wherever he turned. It was like a maze, but even if there had been a monster at the heart of it, he would not have turned back. He tripped over some boxes and landed on something soft – old clothes. Sleep, like a heavy door, closed down on top of him.

A heavy door nudged open. Someone was playing the piano. The Maestro.

“What are you doing here?” Burl asked with a snarl. The Maestro only mumbled. Burl re-slung his hammer in his work-belt. “I can't strap in this insulation while you're playing,” he said. But Gow didn't stop, just hunkered down into a difficult passage, as if he were a race-car driver heading into a series of hairpin turns. “You're just plain inconsiderate,” Burl said. “After all, I'm the one going to all the work winterizing this place. Take that thing outside, before I swat you.” Gow laughed. The threat only made him run farther into the music, like a toddler escaping its mother by running deeper into the playground.

So Burl had to push him out, piano and all. Then he went back in and started to work again. He felt bad, though. The snow was thick on the deck. He mustn't leave him there for very long. Must get the insulation done soon. Then he thought, Reggie will look after the Maestro. And sure enough, when he looked out the window, she was with him and had wrapped a large blanket around his shoulders. There was a cap of snow on his head. Reggie's hair was pale blonde now. Which is the colour her hair should be, thought Burl. With a name like Corngold.

A car honked. Tyres squealed. A bus pulled noisily from a stop. Burl woke up. He had made himself a comfortable nest, although his bedding smelled of dust and mildew. He was at the end of a short corridor with chest-high walls. By the light filtering in from a small window at street level, he could see that the basement space was divided into storage spaces. One per tenant.

He had no watch. He wondered if it was anywhere near noon. He wondered if it was even the same day. He sat listening to the creaking building above him, footsteps, the sound of traffic drifting down to him and the unmistakable sound of a piano.

He sat up, stiff from a night of walking. Then he climbed up the back stairs and slipped out into a brisk but sunny day. The sun seemed quite high. He asked a man on the street the time. It was after noon. He didn't phone. He went directly to Number Five. He knocked three times.

“What do you want?” she said through the door. Burl slid her letter to Nog under the door and waited.

She gave him orange juice, freshly squeezed. She had the radio on to a classical station where people wrote in with requests. She made coffee. She made muffins as well. She didn't follow a recipe. She added a bit of this and a bit of that and stirred. She cut up apples with long nimble fingers.

She moved around the kitchen in her bare feet. She was in old jeans, threadbare at the knee, and an extra-large starched blue-and-white striped shirt. Her hair was wet from a shower, combed back straight. Last night she had been all in black: her coat, high-heeled boots, stockings, earrings, what he could see of a turtleneck sweater – all black, her hair the blackest thing of all.

She was pretty, Burl thought. Younger than Gow. He had never seen a woman so exotic. Last night she had seemed older. She had worn dark make-up, a little sorry looking, worn out. Now her face was clean and her eyes were as shiny as a painted turtle's shell. The sunlight coming through her window picked up a reddish tinge in her hair. She had been playing the piano when he knocked at her door.

“Where did you get this?” she asked, as she let him in.

“At his camp. His place up north.”

“Camp?”

“Ghost Lake.”

She looked at him, amazed. “Noggy camping?” She smirked. “You've got to be kidding.”

So he told her about the cabin. That was easy. She carved up apples, listening intently.

She laughed out loud at the thought of Noggy strolling through the bush to the train with his suitcase.

Her laughter and the warmth of her kitchen unwound Burl a bit. He explained about coming down on the bus the day before. He told her about the violinist on Spadina, and how he had never seen so many people walking around in the night and it made him think of how Nog had called it the Shadow. Then he realized he was talking too much and he clammed up.

“Ghost Lake,” she said thoughtfully.

Then she told him why she had been getting home at six in the morning. She was a producer for CBC Radio. She was packaging a show. The night was the best time for that kind of work – no one around. Alone with her tapes. Except when Noggy used to come around. He sometimes worked on his own radio projects at the station. He was a night bird, too. That's how they had met.

She poured the muffin batter into the tins and placed them in the oven.

“When did you last see him?” she said.

He told her.

“How was he?” she asked.

Burl shrugged. “Up and down.”

It was as if he had said something very clever. “Oh,” she said. “I know – believe me, I know.”

So they talked about Baron von Liederhosen conducting an orchestra from the deck, and they talked about the drugs. He didn't tell her what he had done with the drugs.

He told her about the bear. Her eyes grew huge with alarm and then a kind of wild delight and then concern. “It was lucky you were there,” she said. And then, quickly, “Why were you there?”

“I had been…looking for him,” said Burl.

“Why?”

“My mom was sick. She told me about him. She told me…to go to him.”

In this way Burl ventured cautiously into the territory of his story. It was like a creek with a loon-shit bottom giving way under each step.

Reggie washed the cooking things in the sink. The muffins in the oven filled the air with cinnamon.

“I did a double-take when I saw you,” she said. The room grew quiet. Burl played with the salt and pepper shaker. He noticed there was no clink of dishes in the water. He turned to look at Reggie. Her arms were still in the water, locked straight, the muscles standing out. Her back was to Burl, her shoulders clenched tight. He wondered if she was crying.