North to Benjamin Read online

  He spoke to the dog, calling it to him. But in his voice was a strange note of fear that frightened the animal. It had never known the man to speak in such a tone before. Something was wrong and it sensed danger. It knew not what danger, but somewhere in its brain arose a fear of the man. It flattened its ears at the sound of the man’s voice; its uneasy movements and the liftings of its feet became more noticeable. But it would not come to the man. He got down on his hands and knees and went toward the dog. But this unusual position again excited fear and the animal moved away.

  Edgar had seen his mother on her knees, in a closet, her face a smear of teary mascara. He had smelled her breath, had cleaned up vomit in the bathroom and the bedroom and on the outside stairs. He had been like the dog in the story. Why shouldn’t he be a dog now?

  He knew what was coming.

  He could smell it in the stillness of this town where they’d landed.

  “How was school today?” his mother asked when he got home. She looked radiant in the kitchen, and for a moment it seemed clear she had forgotten about his barking, and so, too, Edgar almost forgot. He began to say, “All right. I read,” but then just before the first sound, he knew he was still a dog-boy, that she would snap and all the beauty would drain from her face.

  So he mumbled something instead. He pulled out his camera. He would capture her now. She had started singing something, a song about eyes lying. He got her reaching into the cupboard, and then turning to him with a can of soup in her hand. A strand of her hair across her face.

  I see you, he thought. I do see who you are.

  And it was not just her. It was her things—her purse by the stand near the door, with the mark in the leather where her hand always went. Her boots, pointed in odd directions, with their Toronto heels not right for Dawson snow and ice. Her sweater on the couch, still warm from where she’d been wrapped up in the afternoon sun, dreaming of what?

  Of Ceese. Her life with him.

  He could smell the man still, faintly, on her clothing. Could that smell get into a photo, too? Would others know if they saw it?

  She said suddenly, “What are you doing?” when he was pointing his camera at her lipstick on the side table near the big comfy chair. He froze and did not answer. She stared at him as if she knew exactly what he was doing.

  What was he doing? He didn’t know himself. Capturing these little bits of her, like portions of her scent he might read on the road somewhere.

  She stared hard until he thought he’d crack into ice somehow.

  Then finally she broke the spell. “Benjamin is stinking this place out. Could you take him for a walk, please?”

  He would. He would. As far away as he could get.

  KISS

  THE GEORGE BLACK, IT TURNED out, was the ferry used to cross the Yukon River in the warmer weather when the ice was out. Edgar found Caroline, and they brought Benjamin to see it. It was high on the riverbank down the road from the Keno, the big white paddle-wheel boat Edgar had tried to photograph the other day when he and his mother had bought groceries. The George Black was not wood like the Keno, but metal, orangey-red on the bottom and white on top, with room in the middle for cars and trucks.

  Edgar took a picture of Caroline looking at it, as Benjamin sniffed at something strong around her feet. Alcohol, spilled some time ago?

  “In the summer,” Caroline said, “the ferry goes back and forth between here and West Dawson. You can hop on practically anytime. But when the ice breaks up, for a couple of weeks at least, maybe more, the river is too dangerous to cross, it’s so high and full of ice. So there’s no bridge and no ferry. If you live in West Dawson like Victoria, you’re stuck. You need to stock up on groceries and everything.”

  In the late afternoon cold, the wind was slight but still felt raw on Edgar’s cheeks. And Caroline was looking around as she talked, as if maybe the ice might go out right at that moment. From where they were standing, a black triangle of open water stretched even longer than before in the middle of the river. The orange marker with the wire tied to shore looked lonely and cold out on the ice, and not very far at all from the black open stretch.

  “Sometimes families will move to Dawson for the breakup. They’ll stay at the Eldorado or with friends and it’ll be a big party. Victoria normally comes to stay with us, and she gets a friend to look after her dogs. But sometimes breakup happens so fast, you get stuck. There isn’t time to pack and head on over.”

  Benjamin said, “Victoria has the warmest fires.” He was sniffing, sniffing. Then he growled, “Rot crap!”

  Brottinger appeared suddenly, coming down the road from the dog park, with Jason Crumley holding his leash taut.

  “What, you brought a whole audience?” Jason called out to Caroline, who blushed fiercely.

  “I didn’t come here to see you!” she snapped.

  “No, no. You’re just hanging out by the George Black looking at the beautiful snow!”

  Brottinger did not seem to be in a barking mood. He sniffed Benjamin, who stood still, head lowered. Then Brottinger grumbled to Edgar, “You still here, Meat Boy?”

  Benjamin smiled sickly, then said, “Not for long, no. We’re just going. Great to see you!” And he started away, pulling Edgar, who was holding the leash, with him.

  But Caroline stayed where she was. “Don’t know what you think you’re going to do here out in the open where everyone can see,” she said to Jason.

  “If I’d known you were coming, I would’ve brought a bottle,” Jason replied, grinning.

  “You don’t have a bottle, and I wouldn’t drink from it anyway.” Caroline kicked a chunk of ice. Benjamin stood with Edgar some distance off, the dog’s head down still, like a servant who is not supposed to be listening.

  Edgar fingered his camera. He thought, If I were brave or something, I’d catch that look on Jason’s twisted face. But Edgar didn’t move. He didn’t dare.

  “That’s fine.” Jason was standing too close now, too close. Caroline didn’t turn aside, but she wasn’t completely looking at Jason either. Edgar had seen his mother stand just the same way, and pull men in, closer and closer, without seeming to do anything.

  Jason tilted his head toward her.

  Benjamin started to growl, softly at first. Jason didn’t stop. And Caroline wasn’t pulling away either.

  Then something thunderous rumbled from Benjamin’s throat. Brottinger sprang at him, but Benjamin didn’t flinch. The two dogs circled and snarled, Benjamin taller and louder, his teeth suddenly barred like weapons.

  Edgar didn’t know whether to drop the leash or pull hard, so he just stood, frozen.

  “Benjamin, hey! Benjamin!” Caroline yelled, and came to intervene even though the two dogs sounded like the start of World War Three.

  “Brot! Here, boy! Now!” Jason yelled.

  Benjamin’s lips were curled. He’d puffed himself to look twice the size of Brottinger.

  They pulled the dogs apart. No one got bitten or slashed by claws. There was no blood on anyone’s neck.

  “I wasn’t going to kiss him!” Caroline said when they were walking away.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Benjamin huffed.

  “I just wanted to see if he really would show up.” Caroline fondled Benjamin’s ears through her mittens. “But you defended me, my gentle beast!”

  “Uh-huh,” Benjamin groaned. “Why does everybody around here want to smell the bear up close?”

  In Edgar’s room Caroline turned her bright eyes fully upon him. “I’m not crazy about Jason Crumley,” she said. “I’m not that stupid. But how am I supposed to learn about anything, with the boys around here?”

  She was sitting cross-legged on his bed. Benjamin, lying on his mat on the floor, munched some biscuits Caroline had fetched him for defending her.

  “How am I even going to learn how to kiss somebody if the only option in this whole town is Jason Crumley?”

  It was hard to avoid her gaze. In a different way she was doing her sil
ent trick, pulling Edgar in, almost with an invisible string.

  He did like looking at her.

  Did she want to kiss him now?

  Did he—

  “It’s just practice,” she said. “I think you’re practically like my brother. And you’re not as young as you’ve been letting on, are you?” Edgar blinked. Blinked. How had she guessed? “It’s all right. I won’t spill your secret.” She leaned closer to him. “Let’s try this out. So later on we’ll know what we’re supposed to do.”

  The door was closed. Edgar wasn’t trying to move, but somehow he was on the bed now too, sitting opposite her.

  “I think . . . Let’s try immobilizing the target,” she said, and held his face by the cheeks. “Close your eyes maybe. Just . . . tilt.”

  If he relaxed, if he just did what she—

  Her lips were wet. They swiped against his, and then she pulled away.

  “You have to open a little bit. No licking, though,” she said.

  He let her move his face this way and that.

  “Did you brush your teeth at lunchtime?” Caroline asked. Edgar nodded, he had. “Me too,” she said, and they practiced some more.

  “Close your eyes. Pretend you’re enjoying it,” she said after a time.

  He was, somewhat. Her lips were warm. Her cheek felt very soft against his, and when she bit his lip, it was only a little, nothing terrible.

  Finally she pulled back. “You’re all hot in the face,” she said.

  So was she. Her ears, especially, seemed to be burning.

  “We don’t need to tell anybody about all this. Especially not Jason Crumley. This is just for practice, understand?”

  Edgar nodded as if he did.

  Caroline hopped off the bed. It had been easy to forget, for a while, about the trouble brewing with Edgar’s mother and Ceese, who probably weren’t just practicing, not at all.

  Edgar opened his mouth to tell her. “I’m worried—” he began to say, but even he could hear the whiny sharp barks that continued to capture his voice.

  “Guess there’s no fear of you telling anyone but Benjamin!” Caroline said on her way out.

  That night, in Edgar’s dreams a bear thundered out of the woods on the trail by the bench where Edgar was sitting, trying to stay quiet. He was a greasy black bundle of spiky fur, and Edgar couldn’t move because there was so little room on the bench. As the bear crowded in, Edgar shrank and shrank, but where else to go? He was already on the edge, deep inside the woods.

  The bear snuffled at him, pressed; the bear’s snout was hot and wet and smelled like sulfur matches just as they are lighting. Edgar wanted to hit back, to call out, to run, but he was so small. What could he do? The bear was at his neck, on his face, his lips, licking hard, slobbering.

  “Just get off! Get off! Get, get!” Edgar said, but not in his voice. He sounded as if a gerbil or chipmunk were inside him doing the talking.

  Edgar turned his back. He held his head and scrunched down, but where could he go—where?

  He awoke in a sweat, and the stink of Benjamin lying on the mat beside his bed made him hold his nose as he got up and walked along the cold floor to the bathroom. He left the lights off. After a minute it wasn’t so black. He could see himself in shades of gray in the mirror. His pajamas were rumpled. His hair looked like a bear had been licking and flattening it.

  He walked into the kitchen. By the dull light of the stove clock, he looked again at the old map of Dawson taped up on the fridge. There was the squiggle of the Yukon River, and there was West Dawson, and there was the word: “Abandoned.”

  Maybe it had been abandoned long ago, but Victoria was there now, and she had dogs. Hadn’t Ceese told him the story of Rupert and how the wolves had tried to lure him out of his little shed?

  Looking out the back window, squinting into the darkness, Edgar felt sure he could see the smudge in the hills where West Dawson must be. And he could feel it, just a bit, that some of those kisses from Caroline had not been just practice. They’d done something to his scared and worried parts down in the blood of his quietest insides.

  ISAAC

  BREAKFAST. EDGAR GOT UP ALONE as usual and fixed the porridge. His mother had left him a note with twenty-five dollars to buy milk and bread and boxed macaroni with powdered cheese on his way home for lunch. She was sleeping now, of course. Edgar had no idea what might or might not have happened in the night. A cupboard was open; there were crumbs on the counter where she had had toast after her shift. Yet another beer bottle. By the front door her boots were splayed as usual, and her coat sat on the floor where she had dropped it from her body upon entering. Edgar had seen her do it a hundred times, how she got through the door at home—wherever home was lately—and started shedding layers as if getting rid of the day or night left behind.

  He found his camera. He knew he shouldn’t, but he took more pictures. He could smell something strong on her things, something of what had happened when she’d been out there in the world.

  It was harder than usual to rouse Benjamin for his walk, and he seemed reluctant to climb the hill leading to the trail behind Robert Service’s log cabin. When they got to the lookout, Edgar said, “Are you sick, Benjamin?”

  He seemed even stinkier than usual and was moving stiffly.

  Benjamin said, “Mornings are hard when you’re big and old as me.”

  Edgar thought, If he sits down here, I would never be able to move him on my own. I’d have to go get Caroline, and even then we’d still have trouble.

  Benjamin was standing still, head down, not looking at all at the town below them slowly waking.

  Edgar said, “Were they real kisses?” He meant the ones from Caroline. Benjamin had been there after all, on his mat. Maybe he knew?

  “Real enough to pay attention,” Benjamin grunted, and then he started back on his own, pulling Edgar behind him.

  There was a new display now at the library. Edgar was drawn to it as soon as he walked in during the period of free reading Ms. Lajoie allowed him that morning. The first thing he saw was a picture of Chief Isaac on a stand by the window, above a table with books and display cards. Isaac had three white feathers sticking out of a black hat, and a gray mustache, and was wearing beads or at least a colorful band across his chest, and he seemed to be looking at Edgar but also past him too, to something else beyond.

  The display was about the Tr'ondëk Hwëch'in, the Hän-speaking people who had been in the area when all the miners and others had arrived. Edgar remembered how Ceese had called those miners swarming mosquitoes, and here was a black-and-white picture of the main street of Dawson flooded with them, white men crowding even the roofs of the buildings to see something down on the main street. Ceese had said that to survive, Chief Isaac had moved his people down the river to Moosehide to live on their own in their own way.

  Here was a printed card with a quote from Chief Isaac in December 1911: White man come and take all my gold. Take millions, take more hundreds fifty millions, and blow ’em in Seattle. Now Moosehide Injun want Christmas. Game is gone. White man kills all moose and caribou near Dawson, which is owned by Moosehide. Injun everywhere have own hunting grounds. Moosehides hunt up Klondike, up Sixtymile, up Twentymile, but game is all gone. White man kill all.

  Edgar opened a book with Chief Isaac on the cover, Hammerstones, to a page about a powerful dancing stick, the gänhäk, that Chief Isaac brought to Alaskan tribes when he realized the worst was happening to his people. Chief Isaac stayed long enough to teach the dances and songs, knowing his own people could not keep them, with such a mosquito problem back home. But it wasn’t just mosquitoes—his people were starving. The moose and caribou and fish had been food. And those songs and dances were all their history, their stories going back forever.

  Edgar’s fingers were trembling as he read the book. He felt some of the ache of the loss even though it had happened long ago and not to him. The picture of Chief Isaac was a blur of colors, a dance of blues and greens an
d browns in the background, perhaps a forest behind his hat and face, a forest and mountains, and a slashing red on each arm by the bottom of the picture, a white shawl over his shoulders. Edgar took his own picture of it so that he could remember better the strong face and the colors and some of the ache.

  And then Edgar read a little paragraph about how now, generations later, even though the Tr'ondëk Hwëch'in did not live anymore in Moosehide (abandoned), the songs and the dances were coming back to them from the Alaskan tribes who’d kept them, kept their promise. The Tr'ondëk Hwëch'in were relearning their heritage because Chief Isaac had thought and planned ahead and had found a safe place and helpful people.

  He’d known what he was about, Chief Isaac. Edgar could feel that somehow—just looking at the painting, reading these words on paper from years and years ago.

  PEABODY’S

  AT LUNCHTIME EDGAR REMEMBERED HIS mother’s money and the instructions to buy bread and milk and boxed macaroni. But on the way home his feet did not take him directly to the General Store. He went instead to Peabody’s Photo Parlour and stood outside the window fingering his camera. There were old-time photographs of miners and fancy ladies. Or maybe they were modern people dressed up to be old-time. He knew he could buy nothing there—and anyway the money in his pocket was for food, not anything to do with pictures.

  It was cold standing outside, so he pulled open the door and walked into an empty shop—or at least no one was behind the counter. A rack had pictures and cards of ravens and Klondike miners, steamboats and Mounties and ladies in full dresses standing outside log shacks on muddy paths instead of roads.

  “Edgar!” came a voice, and Victoria walked out from behind a curtain in the back. She was wearing a warm red scarf and a dark green sweater, and her eyes drank him in tenderly. “What are you doing here?”