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 dreamt 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 frig-gin blockhead.”
Outside, Burl turned back to see her staring hard at him out the window. He waved good-bye. 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 knelt 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.
Burl’s first instinct was to warn the girl. He was afraid of what might happen if Cal found her in this of all places. Then Cal arrived at the end of the path. He stood with his hands on his hips, looking at her. Burl held his breath. Cal tipped his cap at Tanya and moved in on the bank beside her. She took a cigarette from her bag and, lighting it with her own, she placed it between Cal’s lips. He took a long drag.
Burl laid his face down hard against the stone shore and fought to breathe, his mouth wide open.
He craned his head to s
ee them. His father was laughing. Burl couldn’t hear what they were saying. And now Tanya was holding something out of his father’s reach and his father was grabbing for it, but it was all in play.
Something rose in Burl. It was hot like vomit in his throat, but it rose until it filled up his head, straining against his skull. Like a hot-air balloon, it carried him shakily to his feet.
Cal did not see Burl rise from behind the driftwood. He was still trying to grab whatever it was Tanya was keeping from him. Tanya saw Burl; Cal followed her gaze. He shook his head, swore under his breath, climbed to his feet. Tanya stood up, too, using Cal’s arm for support.
That’s when Burl’s head blew up.
“YOU STEAL EVERYTHING!” he screamed, and he charged across the gravel spit towards them. “EVERYTHING.”
His voice fell apart at the seams—nothing but a boy’s high-pitched squeal. He slipped and fell and got up again and scrabbled up the hill with his knife out before him like a tiny lance.
“Cal, do something,” said Tanya nervously, taking a step behind him. But Cal just threw back his head and laughed.
“This oughta be good,” he said.
His father waited for him, cocky with someone to impress. He stood in a brawler’s wide-legged stance, knees bent, rolling his shoulders, his hands loose.
Burl only had one chance, and it wasn’t his pipsqueak knife. He veered suddenly and sharply like a jet fighter peeling out of a tight formation and shot up the path towards the road. By the time Cal regrouped, Burl’s legs had put fifty long strides of bush between the two of them.
“You’ll pay for this!” Cal shouted.
“Not this time,” said Burl. The words were salty with sweat, but they tasted sweet in his mouth. “Not ever.”
3
North by Northwest
WHEN BURL WAS FIVE HE GOT LOST. THEY WERE travelling west to Dryden to visit Granny Robichaud. It was before Laura died. They camped along the way and at every campsite his father told him and Laura—she was eight—not to wander off.
“If you get lost, find a stump and park your backside on it.”
But Burl wandered off. Way off. It took a search party to find him. Cal shook him hard.
“What’d I tell you, boy?” he said. “Why’d ya keep goin’?”
“I was looking for a stump,” Burl told him.
You don’t need to find a stump if you have no intention of being found. Burl wasn’t five any more. He was fourteen and growing up with every step. By the time he hit the CPR rail bed he was a little older than he had been back at the secret place. He ran along the rails a way, breathing in hot creosote, putting a thousand railway ties between himself and his father. By the time he hit the service road to Pharaoh, he was older still. And by the time he passed the abandoned hotel, the turn into the mill, the back way to the reservation at Leather Lake, he was really getting on in age. Childhood dripped off him in great huge gobs of sweat.
He turned down a logging trail he knew and finally stopped. His mouth hung open, gulping in air. It was cooling down. The sun was low over the forest. He had a stitch in his side. In the trees he heard a woodpecker.
Burl’s best bet out of Pharaoh would have been to hop a freight train. He’d seen a guy do it. The trains slowed down and you ran along and jumped at the ladder. Always the ladder at the front of the car. That way, if you missed, you’d just bounce off the side. If you missed the ladder at the end, you’d fall into the space between the cars. And that was that.
But if you caught that first ladder, you could lie low on the roof and sleep under the stars all the way to White River. At White River you could hop off and hitch a ride up the Trans-Canada. The brother of a kid at school did that once. He broke his ankle when he jumped off, but he still made it all the way to Winnipeg.
Then there was the highway. The new 144 up to Timmins, which crossed the railroad a few kilometres north of Pharaoh. Or, if you could get down to Presqueville, you could take the 505 out to 17. If you wanted to avoid the police you had to be flexible. That is, assuming someone was looking for you. Burl wondered how many days his folks would wait for him to come back. They didn’t have a phone. And try as he may, Burl couldn’t imagine Doloris making it into Pharaoh to alert the authorities.
When Laura died, Doloris kept setting a place at the table for her for weeks before the old man hurled the plate against the wall, smashed it to bits. Burl wondered if she would keep setting a place for him.
The truth was, Burl knew all sorts of ways of getting away from Pharaoh. When you lived under the same roof as a man like Cal, you had to be ready to run and hide at a moment’s notice. You learned to recognize the signs of a foul mood. The old Turd-mobile arriving in the yard too noisy, the engine revving too high, the car door slamming, footsteps too heavy on the porch. Then you had to be quick. Into the closet—the one Cal never finished—where you could squeeze way back out of sight and out of reach in between the studs of the wall. A place too small for a big man like Cal.
But Burl had grown too big for rabbiting himself away in cubbyholes. So he kept his ears open for bigger hiding places: Winnipeg, Toronto, Dryden. Dryden was big compared to Pharaoh or even Presqueville but it wasn’t big enough. Cal would stomp into a town like Dryden and pluck the roofs off every house until he found Burl.
North by northwest. The bush he knew, at least a bit. He was too busy running away to worry yet about where he was going. And it didn’t occur to him, not on that first blood-hammering-in-the-head afternoon, that he was actually heading somewhere.
There are paths in the forest. There are privately owned logging roads and way older overgrown trails from the days when logging was done in winter and horse-drawn sleighs dragged the lumber to the edge of a lake or river. Even older than the sleigh roads are the native portage trails. Then there are trap lines and survey lines. Burl knew something about paths.
And there are signposts: a rocky outcrop the shape of a head; a giant jack pine split by lightning; a burn area, the enormous black thumbprint of a forest fire. Burl knew something about signposts.
Cal was a hunter, and for a while when Burl was younger, the old man had taken him along. By the time he was six, Burl had learned how to clean a rifle and oil up the barrel. He could pluck a mallard or gut a pike or follow blazes cut into trees. Burl remembered playing soldiers with shotgun shells while waiting out a drizzle under a tarp slung between dripping spruce trees. He remembered men joking and smoking. His dad hadn’t been so bad in those days, not when he was out in the woods.
But then Cal’s fortunes changed. His friends changed.
Hunting and fishing expeditions got longer with less game to show for it. And Burl didn’t get to go along any more.
But he had a sense of this part of the wilderness. There were still paths and signs to follow and beyond that, he had a pretty good store of wilderness knowledge. Cal had given him that much.
“You steal everything!”
Over and over he replayed the scene at the secret place. Sometimes he killed Cal—drilled his little pocket knife right into Cal’s heart. Then Tanya, released from her evil spell, would fall at his knees and beg his forgiveness. Sometimes he would forgive her. Sometimes Mrs. Agnew showed up and stood with him over the dead body of his father.
“So this is Koschei the Deathless,” she would say.
“Not any more,” Burl would answer.
He imagined going home. He imagined saying brave things and doing brave deeds. But he didn’t slow down.
It got dark about nine or so. And just as the shadows were getting thick and the birds were having their mad half hour before the world ended, and just as the mosquitoes came out looking for blood, Burl came across an old trapper’s shack. He hadn’t known it would be there but he took it as a sign. Somebody was looking out for him. That’s what he told himself.
Not that it was much of a sign. The door had been torn most of the way off its hinges. Deep gouges in the weathered slabs indicated a bear’s work
. There was garbage scattered around the cabin’s single room and a huge dried-up bear turd sitting prominently in the centre of the floor. Weeds grew through the floorboards. Porcupines had eaten away a part of the roof. The forest was reclaiming this place as its own.
But there was a rust-stained mattress on the floor, which was more than he had hoped for. And as far as he could tell, nothing had been living there recently. There were no bowls of porridge cooling on the table.
He found a can without a label. It had rolled into a corner. There were bear-sized tooth marks in it. He pried up the top with his knife blade. Baked beans. He drank the contents cold. He had no matches.
He sat on the mattress, mosquitoes buzzing around his ears. He found himself hoping it would be cold that night so that he might sleep in peace. But then, if it were cold, what peace would he find with no coat, no cover, and only half a roof over his head.
There was a cup sitting on the floor beside the bed. In it was a harmonica. He picked it up, looked it over. He rubbed it as clean as he could with the tails of his shirt. He took a tentative blow. No sound. It was full of dust and pollen. He banged it hard against the palm of his hand. Blew again. The notes came out dry and lifeless. He blew harder into the little chambers from both sides, until finally he was able to clear enough guck out to blow a few good ringing notes.
Burl pulled his feet up onto the mattress and curled them under him. Leaning his back against the wall, he tried to think of a tune to play, a tune with just a few notes. He closed his eyes.
Rain beat down on the cabin. It moved in with him but was not content to share the space. As the wind gusted, the rain, like a predator, stalked Burl across the mattress, cornering him.
Something gouged him sharply in the thigh. He dug his father’s stolen lure from his pocket. One hook had poked through the carton, sweaty and rain-soaked; the barb was caught in the lining of his pocket.
He sat up, shivering with cold, and tried to work the hook out in the darkness. From his other pocket he took out his knife and cut the hook free. Then he rolled himself up as tight as a millipede in a dead log. Someone watching over him? Not likely. He lay his hands protectively over the lure and the knife and the harmonica. They were all his worldly possessions.
The Maestro Page 2
