North to Benjamin Page 4

  It was hard for anyone to see Edgar while his mother was in the room anyway, so Edgar pulled back his ears and cheeks and disappeared. This house seemed to be made of actual logs—big, rounded ones stripped of their bark and piled on top of one another like in pioneer days.

  Edgar wandered invisibly among the press of adult bodies into the kitchen. The house was on the same side of the street as their new borrowed house, so part of it was on the side of a hill as well. He peered out the kitchen window at the lights of the town below. Was there a shed out back where Benjamin lived?

  In the kitchen a tall woman with a beautifully hooked nose and brown hair tied behind her back was pouring drinks at the counter. Someone said something, and her eyes shone, and then she turned and spied Edgar even though he was pulling his cheeks back. Immediately she said, “Are you Edgar?” and he knew she was Victoria because of the warmth coming from her. What could he say? He knew she was not Caroline’s mother, and yet there was the same sense to her as he got from Caroline, the same feeling—of how he just wanted to look at her and be near.

  “You must be exhausted! I know you’ve had a lot of travel in the last few days.”

  Edgar couldn’t think of what to say.

  “I think Caroline is downstairs with Benjamin. Shall I take you down? Would you like some ginger ale first?”

  The ginger ale was cold and tickled his nose. He liked to look at Victoria’s thick hair and the softness of her skin. She smelled, too, of lemon or something, and wood smoke.

  She brought him down to the lower level of the house, to one of the back bedrooms, where Benjamin was a huge black form lying on a blanket beside a bed. He did not wake up when Victoria opened the door, but he did raise his large head when Edgar knelt beside him and stroked the long hair on his neck.

  “He looks like a bear,” Edgar said.

  “He’s a great big sissy,” Victoria said. “He will stay there all day if you pet him like that, and slobber all over you. He’s fourteen.”

  Edgar had never cared for a dog before, but he knew that fourteen was old. Benjamin’s tongue hung out, pink in the gray light. Drool dripped down the great black edges of his lips.

  “Hello, Benjamin,” Edgar said. “I have come a long way to meet you.”

  Now that they had met, finally, Edgar felt like this was exactly how it was supposed to be.

  “I’ll see if I can find Caroline,” Victoria said. Almost immediately music started upstairs, and Victoria said he should go up again if he wanted a good seat. But Edgar was happy where he was, stroking Benjamin’s unruly fur, so she left him there. The music sounded like a lot of instruments, maybe fiddles and guitars. Sometimes people sang, and sometimes, from the noise on the floor above, it sounded like they were dancing, too.

  Benjamin held his head up for a long time while Edgar scratched between his floppy ears. His head seemed about as big as Edgar’s chest, and it took two hands to really scratch well.

  It was safe here, and dark, and quiet except for the music above. Sometimes he heard his mother’s laughter rising over everything else, and once he heard her exclaim, “Not on your life!” but he didn’t know what she was talking about.

  Benjamin smelled pretty doggy, and it didn’t take long for Edgar’s ginger ale to smell doggy too. He moved it away from Benjamin on the floor to a spot where, he hoped, he would not kick it over in the darkness. He said to the dog, “Do you know where Toronto is?”

  Benjamin leaned, leaned against him.

  “From here you would have to travel for two days at least. Probably more. It’s on the other side of the clouds and the mountains. Some people there, they have subway eyes. Do you know what those are?”

  He turned his eyes ice cold and looked away from the dog at the grayness on the floor.

  “Some of the schools are all right, and some are like prisons. You sit very still so you don’t get in trouble.”

  Benjamin said to him, “What’s school? What’s prison? What’s subway?”

  He asked without moving his lips much. Edgar had never spoken to a dog before, and yet somehow he wasn’t surprised at understanding. Hadn’t he known, ever since first hearing Benjamin’s name, that they would have this unusual connection?

  “All those are things in Toronto,” Edgar said. “Maybe the only one of them here is school. Where the kids go.”

  Benjamin farted. The cloud of stink filled the room, and Edgar waved his hand in front of his nose.

  He heard a noise. “Edgar, are you here?” Caroline asked.

  “We both are!” Edgar said.

  “Oh, God, Benjamin? We’ve got to get you outside!” Caroline flipped on a light, and Benjamin half sat up, awkwardly, dislodging Edgar. Caroline said, “Or is that you who farted?”

  “No.” Edgar picked up his ginger ale so he wouldn’t forget it.

  “So I was just listening to your mother upstairs,” Caroline said. “Were you running away from a murderer or something?”

  What was she talking about? Roger wasn’t very nice sometimes, but he wasn’t a murderer.

  “He’s not going to follow you here, is he? Because I have a rifle if he does.”

  “You have a rifle?”

  “It’s just a .22, for hunting. You wouldn’t use it for a bear. It’ll stop a man, though.”

  “He won’t be coming here,” Edgar said. “And he isn’t a murderer. I don’t think he has a gun. He had a camera, which he gave to me.”

  “I saw Jason Crumley trip you at the airport because of it. Remember?” She pinched him a little. “Are you some kind of boy genius or something?”

  “Did my mom say that?” Edgar asked.

  “She said it to your face back at the airport. I heard it!” Caroline said. “And then she made fun of you.”

  Edgar rubbed Benjamin through his thick fur, and he felt his face baking again. “I took some tests a couple of times,” he said quietly. “Didn’t mean anything.”

  “I hate it when parents are awful like that,” she said. “Just now upstairs your mother said that in Toronto there were bodies on the streets.”

  What could she have meant? He said, “Sometimes you see homeless people downtown.” He thought of them sitting on cardboard boxes, their skin red where it pressed against the cold. They could be frightening.

  “But they’re not, like—dead corpses,” Caroline prompted.

  “No, not dead,” Edgar said. Then he added: “On the news sometimes, there are shootings.”

  Caroline was leaning close to him, and she couldn’t help it, she was stroking Benjamin too. “Your mother shouldn’t come to a new place and just start lying like this,” she said.

  Edgar stayed quiet. Now Benjamin couldn’t seem to decide whether he wanted to lie down or go for a walk. Even so, just halfway up, he was enormous.

  “And,” Caroline said, “you didn’t answer my question.”

  “About the corpses?”

  “What you’re running away from.”

  From Roger, obviously. But she didn’t know Roger, so how would she understand? In a way, though, they were running from the corpses, too, from the homeless people on the cardboard. From his mother’s fear of how quickly she and Edgar might find themselves exactly there, with the same red blisters on their skin.

  It was all too much to say right then.

  So Edgar said instead, “Does Benjamin need a walk?”

  It didn’t take very much for Edgar and Caroline to leave the party, even though it was late and dark and cold outside. The adults were still singing and dancing. Edgar saw his mother in the living room on an old couch sitting quite close to Ceese, and she had a beer in her hand. When she saw Edgar with Caroline and Benjamin, she called out, “Oh, Edgar, is that the dog? God, he’s huge!”

  “He’s a Newfoundland,” Caroline said. “Pretty stinky these days. We won’t be long.”

  Benjamin sniffed, sniffed in the general direction of the party, a roomful of people who might pet him if he stopped long enough. Caroline pul
led at his collar.

  Victoria was on the other side of the room talking to the tall, tall man, William, but she was looking at Edgar’s mother and at Ceese. Edgar glanced back at his mother, but she wasn’t noticing Victoria, or she was pretending not to notice.

  Edgar swallowed. He couldn’t think of what to say. Then Benjamin started forward after all.

  There wasn’t a drawbridge to this house. The road was slippery with ice and snow, and Benjamin walked like he was afraid to fall. They had a leash for him, though Caroline had said they would not need it much. Benjamin didn’t run anymore.

  “What grade are you in?” Caroline asked.

  Edgar kicked a chunk of ice, and it spun down the road until it hit something and broke into several pieces.

  “You did go to school in Toronto, didn’t you?” she said.

  Benjamin farted with every step. It was good that they were outside in a lot of air.

  “Sometimes,” Edgar said.

  “How could you only go to school sometimes?”

  It was a complicated question. Sometimes Edgar stayed home and read books, and sometimes he and his mother were moving and didn’t know how long they would be able to stay on someone’s couch or in their basement, and it would have been a bother starting in a new school when they really weren’t sure how long the arrangement would last.

  Sometimes Edgar went to school and pulled his cheeks back and the people didn’t really know he was there.

  “What’s school like here?” Edgar asked.

  Caroline said, “It’s just school. Probably like anywhere!”

  Benjamin took a big poop on the road in front of a very old log cabin that Caroline said used to belong to Robert Service, a poet who got rich writing about the Klondike. But the cabin did not look like a rich man’s house at all. There was still bark on the logs and the house itself seemed tiny and dark and cold. It did have a big veranda, though. Caroline worked a plastic bag so that she could pick up the poop without getting her hand dirty. Then she tied it closed and handed it to Edgar.

  Edgar spied another old log cabin down the road, and Caroline said it had belonged to Jack London.

  “Really?” Edgar said. Jack London had written the story Edgar had been thinking about on the road from the airport, about the freezing man and the dog and the fire.

  “What people say about Jack London around here,” Caroline told him, “is that he got stranded on an island upriver when winter came on. He holed up in a cabin, probably a lot like that one, with a whole bunch of others, and all they could do for months was tell stories. That was his gold rush! He went back to San Francisco and wrote them up.”

  Edgar asked, and Caroline said she did know the story of the freezing man, she’d read it in school. Edgar spat, but it didn’t crackle and freeze in midair.

  “Pretty balmy tonight, actually,” Caroline said, but she spat too.

  The sky was a brilliant darkness above them. Caroline turned them off the street and up the hill farther into the woods along a trail Edgar would not have noticed on his own. In just a couple of minutes it felt like they were far away from everything, were in the middle of frozen trees. Benjamin was happier with the footing, and he seemed to like stopping and sniffing.

  Caroline said, “Listen. Just listen.”

  So they stood still. Benjamin snorted and huffed, and Edgar felt he could even hear the dog’s drool dripping onto the snow and freezing there, slowly. He could hear his own breathing, because he was puffing still from climbing the hill. As he listened further, he could hear the sounds of the party, the music, laughter, a song about a man riding a motorcycle. And, even farther away, he could hear the sound of an engine, a car or truck coughing into life.

  A dog howled; Benjamin pricked up his ears. It was a lonely sound from far away. Other dogs began to bark, and the barking echoed off the hills, a chorus of dogs, some now howling. Benjamin stayed quiet, but he was listening.

  “Dog radio,” Caroline said. “Who knows what they’re talking about?”

  It was cold as they stood on the trail, their breath coming out in clouds. Was this balmy? Edgar felt like his cheeks were becoming thicker, maybe even freezing. But it didn’t hurt. There was no wind at all. The plastic bag in his hand, Benjamin’s poop, was solidifying. He heard a clanking sound from far away, and then he could hear someone chopping wood.

  She was fine to just stand still, this girl Caroline. She didn’t need to be talking all the time. And neither did Benjamin. But there would be things to say. He and Benjamin, and maybe even Caroline, were going to be great, great friends.

  Finally Caroline said, “So, who’s your father?”

  More chopping in the distance. Edgar imagined a big man in a lumberjack shirt with one of those double-edged axes from old pictures. But that couldn’t be right. An axe like that would’ve been for cutting down a tree, not splitting wood for the fire.

  “Don’t answer that if you don’t want to,” Caroline said finally. “Lots of families here don’t follow any traditional pattern. As you see from my family!” She shrugged. Benjamin sniffed at Edgar’s boot for a moment, then nuzzled him gently, but it was almost enough to knock Edgar back a step.

  “He likes you,” Caroline said.

  “My father is a musician somewhere,” Edgar said. “I don’t know him. He and my mom were just friends. She has a lot of those.”

  “Victoria’s a singer!” Caroline said. “And my dad is a killer drummer. You should hear them together.”

  “My mother is a singer too,” Edgar said. “Sometimes.”

  “Yeah, well, Victoria’s really good!” Caroline said.

  Yes, he could imagine it. He could imagine it all coming to a great deal of trouble.

  They listened some more. Then they headed back down the trail.

  If anything, there were more boots in the hall than before. The party was not winding down. Edgar’s mother had moved to the kitchen. She had her back to the counter, was holding a nearly empty glass of red wine now, and a different man—younger than her possibly, but with very little hair on his head—was pressing close while they talked.

  Edgar and Caroline brought Benjamin back down to the bedroom on the lower level. Edgar put the frozen plastic bag with Benjamin’s poop into a special container with a lid that closed tight.

  “Why would your mother say her boyfriend tried to kill her in Toronto?” Caroline asked. She was lying back on the bed with her legs crossed at the ankles. She had opened a window to clear out the smell of Benjamin’s farts, and cold air was pouring in.

  Edgar set his eyes to somewhere above her head. A steering-wheel lamp burned dully.

  “Are you sure he didn’t have a knife?” Caroline said. “He wasn’t screaming?”

  What had his mother said to these people?

  “Roger did get loud when he was angry,” Edgar said.

  “But you left, like, in the middle of the night. When he was drunk on the floor?”

  His mother had told them what she needed to say to get a free house for a while, he realized.

  “We did leave quickly,” Edgar said.

  “But you don’t think he’ll come here? What if he finds out where you are?” Her eyes had a gleamy look, like she wanted it all to be true. She wanted to see Roger with his knife dripping blood.

  “I should have brought my camera,” Edgar said. He wanted to take Caroline’s picture right now, lying back, with her hands over her head, hoping for gore.

  She had a sneaky smile that he liked to look at.

  “If the murderer does come here,” she said, “we’ll sic Benjamin on him, won’t we?” She reached down to pet the dog’s long body. Benjamin did not respond. He had fallen asleep as soon as he’d settled on the smelly rug.

  “There are places I can take you if he comes back,” Caroline said. “I know exactly where to hide out.”

  Edgar imagined Roger, right here in the house, sitting in the living room, crying.

  “We could start in the back
room of the old brothel,” she said. “And there’s an attic in the commissioner’s residence. I know the way in. If the guy is really dangerous, we’ll head to the Paddlewheel Graveyard, set up a tent.” She just seemed to like to talk about it. “You’d like it—it’s where they dumped all the old wooden paddle-wheelers when the road finally got built. It’s like a boat cemetery. I’ll bring my rifle.”

  Someone was playing music again above their heads. Edgar thought about going back upstairs and asking his mother for the key, returning to his new bedroom in his new house on his own. But he would have to stand in front of whatever man she was talking to now so closely. And it was warm and dark here with Caroline and Benjamin. Despite what she was saying, he enjoyed the sound of her voice. If she needed to keep talking now, that was fine. He lay on the bed beside her and crossed his ankles, and felt the soft embrace of the pillow.

  DREAM

  EDGAR TRIED TO STAY AWAKE in his dream for a while, just to look around. It was one thing to be here in Dawson, so far from everything else, but he also knew that part of everything else was still in his head and he could go visit it. He thought about the glass house in the park in Toronto, where the green plants were and it was warm and fragrant even in the winter. He would go sometimes just to sit and smell and pretend that he was in the jungle even though there was snow outside. He had a favorite bench. He went there now in his dream. He sat down and folded his hands and looked at the tall tropical plant with the big leaves. Probably it was a tree. There were no flowers, but the whole room smelled like flowers anyway, and though it felt like a jungle, there were no panthers. You could just breathe.