The Survival Game (2 page)

But the grandest bead of all was the piano. Burl fingered that bead more than any other. It was a warm, smooth black nugget in his mind.

By the time he was fourteen, Burl was almost as tall as Cal but without Cal's coiled mass of shoulder and gut, and without Cal's axe-handle wrists. Burl next to Cal was like a sapling birch in winter.

Fourteen.

Cal said he must be counting in fairy years. “This boy ain't a day over six, Dolly,” he said. Dolly wasn't listening; by then she was all listened out. For his part, Burl curled his shoulders in and stooped low. He made himself small. And he made sure never to stand close enough for the man to notice he was growing up. Burl kept his size a secret.

Burl was a good secret-keeper. If at night he lay awake listening to a train heading somewhere, and if his mind rushed along the track with that train imagining himself going somewhere, too, he kept the secret to himself. You could shake him up and down the next morning and no train would fall out. What train?

It was the same at school. Knowledge was a thing to keep well hidden. Something to make sure Cal never found on you. He'd want it for sure, and he wouldn't think twice about taking it.

So Burl hid his knowledge away where it might be safe. He built walls around it. Stories.

“What'd you learn at your school today, boy?”

“We learned about the war in Quasiland.”

“Where in hell is Quasiland?”

“In Africa. There's a war there.”

There was no Quasiland. No war. It was imaginary. If Burl had to – if he was cornered – he could scare up a story in the twinkling of an eye. It saved the truth from getting trampled on by his father. What Cal didn't know, he couldn't hurt.

Burl didn't make stuff up at school. His imagination was something between him and Cal. But then Mrs. Natalie Agnew came along. She was grade eight, Burl's last year at Presqueville Elementary. She was new in town and hadn't heard about how Burl kept things to himself. Early in the year she got him in after school for a chat.

“I'll write the test again,” he said. “Right now, if you want.” He stood there, slumping, his arms crossed on his narrow chest. “I know the stuff.”

Finally she spoke. “Tell me something I don't already know.”

“About what?”

She laughed. “If I knew that, then it wouldn't be something I don't already know.”

Burl was on guard. Her face was kind – as far as he could tell – but he wasn't any expert on kindness. Kindness might be a trap. He shut down, waited some more.

“Listen,” she said. “Let's talk.”

“Then what?”

Mrs. Agnew looked puzzled.

“After I tell you something you don't already know, then what?”

She thought for a moment. “Well, then maybe I'll tell you something you don't know and you'll tell me something else and we'll end up having a conversation.”

Burl looked out the window. “Why?” he asked.

They didn't have a conversation that day. So she called him in again. This time she told him it
was
a test. And if he failed it, she'd keep him after school every day until he got it right.

So he thought a bit. And then he told her about his mother's country and western band. He told her that his mother was the singer and that the band was called Dolly and the Swing Set, and that she wasn't home often, but when she was it was a lot of fun. It was all a lie. Mrs. Natalie Agnew had cornered him.

Then she told him a little about herself. About moving north with her husband and building a house together. She went on a bit and then stopped. “I always wished I could sing,” she said. “You must be very proud.”

There was a long silence. It was painful for Burl. Mrs. Agnew had shiny hair. She smelled pretty. He liked sitting by her desk while she cleared up her papers. But he hated this conversation thing. Hated it.

She must have known. She got up and walked over to a shelf where she kept some books that the students were allowed to borrow. She chose one and handed it to Burl.

“I've got a map I have to draw,” she said. “How about you pick a story in here and read to me while I work?”

Burl looked at the cover.
The Red Fairy Book
.

“Out loud?” he asked. Was she serious? She seemed to be. He looked at the table of contents. “Koschei the Deathless,” he read.

She didn't look up. She was tracing the outline of the Great Lakes, twirling the pencil point to keep it sharp. “Now that sounds really scary,” she said.

“It sounds like my father,” said Burl.

There was a bus from the high school in Vaillancourt which passed through Presqueville at five on its way to Pharaoh. Mrs. Agnew arranged things so Burl could catch it on those days when he stayed after class.

Sometimes she would get him to read to her, or she would read to him while he did some classroom chore. And now and then they would have a conversation. Burl would try to think of something worth talking about.

Some of the things he told her were true.

He told her about Laura, his sister who had died.

He told her about the dugout canoe his father had made him when he was little.

Then one sunny Monday morning in May, Burl came to school in a state of rare agitation. The others might not have noticed it, but Mrs. Agnew did. His face glowed. His eyes were brimming over with some extraordinary news.

“What is it?” she said. “What are you hiding on me?”

But he didn't dare tell her. Not even about the piano. He couldn't tear the incident at the secret place into separate parts. It was like a rosary. He couldn't show her some of the beads and not others. So he kept it all to himself.

And then school was over and so were his meetings with Mrs. Agnew. She was going to be back south all summer long, but asked him if he would come and visit her in the fall. He said he would.

She gave him
The Red Fairy Book
. He thanked her, but when she wasn't looking, he left it behind in his desk. He was afraid of what Cal might do if he took it home. The only stories that were safe were the ones in his head, wrapped in silence, where Cal couldn't find them.

Summer comes to the north like a radiant visitor, a fair-weather friend liable to leave in the middle of the night without warning. There weren't many visitors to Pharaoh. Certainly no one came to the Crow house. Cal Crow valued his privacy. But summer came there just the same, even if she never unpacked her bags.

The house was built of scraps of timber, greying chipboard and peeling tarpaper – stuff that Cal had begged, borrowed or, more likely, stolen. He had built his shack far from prying eyes, up a rutted, overgrown trail that scraped the bottom of his old Plymouth. Burl called the Plymouth the Turd-mobile. But he only called it that out loud once.

Pharaoh, such as it was – a few houses along the rail line, a diner and a garage with one pump – was not within wailing distance of the Crow place. It was a town of a hundred or so railway workers and foresters and mill hands on a dirt road built to service the CPR track. It was twenty minutes by car down that dirt road to Presqueville, where there were shops Burl's mother couldn't afford to shop in and where Burl had gone to school up until now. In the fall he would be bussed to Vaillancourt, another half hour away.

There were a handful of kids his own age in town, a bunch more at the reservation over by Leather Belt, but no one that Burl knew well enough to visit, despite having lived in Pharaoh or near it all his life.

So he spent most of his fourteenth summer fishing, and he did a lot of his fishing up at his father's secret spot.

Cal had his job back at the mill, and Doloris was almost happy, sometimes. Happy to have a few dollars to rub together. Happy to see Cal off early in the morning and coming home late – drunk, most likely, but too tired to do much damage. Burl and his mother shared this almost-happiness, but they did not talk about it. They snuck around the edges of it, afraid Cal might notice and break it.

Burl's mother had some drugs she got from heaven-knows-where. Her “little helpers” she called them. At first Burl liked the idea of her having some kind of help. Then the little helpers seemed to take over, so that Doloris didn't do anything any more but just sit looking out the window at the bush, which crept a little closer to the cabin every day.

It was dangerous to go to the secret spot – there was no telling how long Cal would keep his job – but Burl went anyway. He enjoyed the thrill of snitching something off his old man. Granny Robichaud once sent Burl some Easter candies when he was little, and Cal ate them all while Burl hopped around like a dancing dog trying to grab some of what was his. So he would help himself to his father's secrets. That was all he would ever get from him.

The fishing was good. So good that Burl was afraid the old man might recognize the catch he brought home.

“This is some fish,” he imagined his father saying over dinner. “I swear I've seen this fellah before…”

But his father never did. Cal noticed less and less that summer. He seemed a long way off.

Then one day late in August, all that changed. The day started out well enough: a gorgeous hot morning. A morning this deep into the season could turn to a freak snowstorm in a snap, but the heat just piled up on the day like so many hot bricks. The secret place, cool and shaded, called out to Burl.

There was another reason to go there: a new lure, the Brazen Wiggler. That's what his father called it. Actually it wasn't new at all, it was an antique. Cal brought it home from work, said he'd borrowed it from the locker of his smart-ass saw-boss who bragged a bit too much about tackle auctions and his fancy collection of antique fishing gear.

The Brazen Wiggler was in a little box that Cal opened at the dinner table the way someone else might open a jewellery box. He made a big deal of dangling the antique lure in front of Doloris's mouth, calling her a bigmouth bass, calling her a ling – “Ain't she a ling, Burl? The ugliest fish you'd ever care to snag.” He jiggled it in front of her face, hoping she'd lunge for it, take the bait. Doloris stared straight ahead. Cal brought the lure with its wicked three-pronged hook right up close to her lip. “What a catch,” he said. Then, laughing, he put the Brazen Wiggler in his tackle box. He loved sport.

That night Burl dreamed of his mother snagged, hauled in, netted and dragged up onto the gunwale of a boat, unable to breathe the air, her eyes scared as she tried to flip back into the water. When he woke up the next morning, he decided to take the Brazen Wiggler himself, since it was already once stolen. He would catch something big. Then he would polish up that new-old lure and replace it before the old man got home.

Burl's mother looked at him from her chair by the window as he took the lure from his father's tackle box.

“You're a blockhead, Burl Crow,” she said.

Burl dropped the lure into its little box and slipped it into his pocket. He made sure she saw him do it.

“Your father's right about you,” she said. “You're a friggin' blockhead.”

Outside, Burl turned back to see her staring hard at him out the window. He waved goodbye. She just stared. Then he moved on, the light shifted, the window went black and his mother's face vanished.

One of the marvels of the secret clearing on the Skat was that there was nearly always something of a breeze, even when the way that led there was dusty-going and gun-metal hot. On the gravel spit that poked its crooked finger out into the river, Burl cast out his line.

The sun was dazzling, the wind clean on his face and bare arms. He saw a straggly line of geese heading south.

He was reeling in his line thinking about a swim when something hit the Wiggler. A trout, but not one he'd seen before: a rainbow. It jumped and slapped back down, dragging him this way and that up and down the gravel shore and out into the stream where the water cut at his ankles like little razors. A rainbow trout escaped from some hatchery or stocked stream, perhaps, and now his, if he could only reel it in. At last he pulled it up onto the shingle at his feet, where it danced its death dance and shone in the sun, an arm's length of mottled, muscled silver.

He kneeled beside it and with his penknife cut the Wiggler free, for the fish was gut-hooked. And that is when the girl arrived.

She didn't see Burl. At least, he didn't think she did. He was on his knees when something made him look up, and there she was on the bank. Instinctively, he crouched lower. Her eyes did not turn his way. He slithered lower still until the grey bulk of a driftwood log came between them.

It was not the blonde in the fringed jacket. This one was the brown-haired girl who worked at the diner in Pharaoh. She was still in her white blouse and short black waitress skirt. She looked out of place. There was no one here to take orders from. She undid her hair. It caught the sun in a coppery flare. She undid the top two buttons of her blouse.

Burl didn't know where to look any more. The rainbow slapped hopelessly at his knee. He lay down slowly on the gravel beside the dying fish. He placed the Brazen Wiggler back in its box and slipped it into his pocket. He lay his head down on the hot stones.

When he dared to look again, the girl was leaning back on her elbows in the grass. What was her name? His father sometimes sent him to the diner for cigarettes. Burl tried to recall the name tag she wore on her breast. Tanya. That was it. As he watched, Tanya sat up again and took a cigarette from her handbag.

She checked her watch. She smoked. She looked back from time to time up the path, but she never looked his way.

The trout twitched its last. Burl squirmed himself lower into the stone bed like a spawning fish, wishing he could bury himself on this warm shore. Scales glittered on his knife blade. He cleaned it off on his shirt-tail.

When he looked again, Tanya was sitting up. He watched her find a compact and check her face in the mirror. She fluffed out her hair, chucked the compact back in her bag. A sound sifted down to Burl. Someone whistling.