North to Benjamin Read online

  But it was hard to keep the dream like that. It was one thing to start off a dream the way you wanted it, but he could not keep Roger from stealing into the room. He couldn’t keep the door closed. It opened, cold air rushed in, and then the door closed; and he knew from the footsteps that Roger had a knife, and the knife was dripping.

  If there had been a panther, then Roger might have used the knife to defend himself.

  Edgar felt like he needed to get off the bench and hide, maybe in the smelly bush behind the tropical tree. But his hands were folded, he couldn’t move, Roger was getting closer.

  Where was his mother?

  In Dawson. In the cold. She wasn’t going to come in and save him.

  Edgar wanted to turn his head, to look at Roger. He had his camera; he would show Roger the pictures. But Edgar’s hands were folded. He couldn’t seem to be able to make them move. And then Benjamin was there, standing by him, not looking at all at Roger, but somehow Benjamin knew where the knife was, where his teeth would sink best into Roger’s wrist.

  Edgar woke up cold in the dark. Caroline was sleeping beside him. She had covered herself with a blanket but not him. She twitched when she slept. Her mouth was open; she made murderer noises when she breathed. Benjamin was on the floor still on his blanket, but he didn’t smell as bad as before.

  Where was Edgar’s mother?

  Edgar got up, shivering. He needed to pee; his nose felt cold. The window was still open from before, when they were clearing out the Benjamin stink. It was a big window, but Edgar fought it closed. Neither Benjamin nor Caroline stirred. So Edgar crept in the dark up the stairs looking for the bathroom.

  It was strange to be here at this new house that was not even theirs, rather than at the other new house that was not even theirs. All was quiet. His eyes adjusted, and he could see his mother passed out on the sofa in the living room, lying on her front with a blanket over her bottom half, except for her socked feet. No one else was asleep there. A bottle lay on its side on the floor, empty. She was snoring into the sofa cushion.

  He found a closed door and pushed it open slightly, but that was a bedroom, people were sleeping there. The next door he tried was the right one. He turned on the light and immediately closed his eyes. It was so bright, he turned it off again.

  His mother walked in with her eyes half-closed. “Oh, Jesus!” she said when she saw him. Her hair was the way it got in the middle of the night. He could imagine raising his camera and framing the whole picture around the storm of it.

  In a bit Edgar found his jacket and boots and waited in the hallway as his mother stumbled through the darkness toward the door. She knocked into something and swore, loudly. Edgar couldn’t see what it was. But no one else woke up. A good guard dog would be on top of them, Edgar thought, but Benjamin was not a good guard dog, not at his age. He was having dog dreams, no doubt.

  Maybe in his dream he was in the greenhouse in Toronto standing guard there against Roger the so-called murderer.

  What time was it? It didn’t matter. Edgar’s body still thought he was in Toronto somehow. What was it called? Jet lag. In Toronto it was already morning. Maybe that’s why he was awake, and his mother, too, despite all the drink. But here it was black, black. When his mother was ready, they walked out the door quietly and then down the road, Eighth Avenue, which was icy and still. It looked like there was so much more sky here than in Toronto. But then again, Edgar thought, he did not get to see the sky in Toronto at this sort of hour very often.

  They crossed the moat; his mother went through her pockets to find the key. It was cold, but if Edgar stayed very still, the cold forgot about him.

  His mother found the key and then dropped it. If it had fallen off the drawbridge where they were standing, then Edgar would’ve had to somehow climb down and find it in all the snow, in the darkness, at the bottom of the moat (which did not have any water, but still it seemed like a moat) while his mother cursed herself. But it didn’t fall any farther than the boards at their feet. Edgar was able to pick it up quickly and open the door.

  It didn’t feel like home, but it would, he knew. They would be here for a couple of months.

  “Did you have a good time?” his mother asked him as they were taking off their coats and boots.

  “I should’ve brought my camera,” he said.

  “No evidence, no prosecution!” she replied. Edgar looked at her until she explained. “A party like that, people let their hair down. It’s probably good you didn’t take pictures.”

  Her hair was down. It was the way it got when the rest of her was becoming unraveled as well. But maybe there was some other reason.

  He said, “Did Roger try to hurt you?”

  She stopped hanging up her coat. “Oh, baby,” she said, and she held him as she did sometimes, when he felt like he was a raft. “Roger is far, far away. That’s why we’re here. We’re never going to have to deal with him again.”

  She smelled like cigarettes, like wine that has been left in an open bottle.

  She held him at arm’s length. “He never laid a hand on you, did he?”

  Edgar shook his head.

  “I didn’t think so. Here’s the thing about Roger. I didn’t feel I could trust him any farther than I could throw him. But he wouldn’t let me walk away either. That’s why we had to run. That’s why we’re here.”

  In the gloom her hair stood out, black against the gray of the walls.

  “I’m sorry I drank too much. I know that I do it, and yet, I do it. That will change, I promise. I can tell you that I have a new job. I’m starting tomorrow—tonight—at Lola’s. That’s a bar. Everybody who was at the party last night goes there. Including the owner, who hired me all because of Ceese. So it was worth it to go.”

  She hugged him again. He felt her start to cry.

  “So tomorrow—today—we’re going to have to get you started in the new school,” she said.

  “We need to buy groceries first,” he said quickly.

  “Food, yes, then school. First, more sleep. I really can’t drink like that anymore,” she said, as if she meant it, as if, finally, the way ahead was clear.

  RIVER

  MORNING. THE GROCERY STORE WAS down the hill, that much Edgar remembered. From the back of the town where they were, the streets either took you toward the river or along it. The hill itself was steep and slippery. His mother’s boots had a heel. She had to grab him suddenly when she almost fell, and then for a moment Edgar thought they both would go down, his mother on top of him.

  She had a nervous, clutchy strength that shocked through his body.

  But he didn’t fall, and neither did she. They just crept along like a pair of very old people, or like Benjamin on the trail last night, Edgar thought. Careful and afraid.

  They could see their breath, it was so cold. But it wasn’t windy. Maybe it rarely was here? In Toronto the winds could cut through your coat like a pair of chilly scissors and make you feel like you were naked in the refrigerator with a big fan blowing.

  Now, that would make an interesting picture, Edgar thought.

  They reached a flatter part of the road. The streets were wide; nothing else was moving. It was as if the whole town had stayed sensibly in bed. He and his mother were hungry again. She had found some coffee in the cupboard, but it was old, almost worse than having no coffee at all.

  On the flatter part his mother did not clutch at him, and she was not in a talking mood. The morning was just the way it was. Gray smoke curled out of some of the house chimneys, and some were dark and still. Maybe no one was in those houses. Maybe their owners had headed south like the Summerhills?

  Two ravens—together they looked almost as big as Edgar—flew overhead and perched on the telephone pole to bark and mutter at them. Were they the same couple he had seen on the walk in from the airport?

  Edgar saw what they were looking at: on the hill far above the town, partly buried in snow but partly just black, open rock, it looked like some hu
ge hand had scooped away half the mountain. Edgar opened his jacket and took out his camera. He had to pull his mittens off to free the lens, and he had to stop walking to peer through the viewfinder.

  His mother kept on. She was talking to herself.

  Edgar zoomed in and out. The scooped-out part looked much smaller in the viewfinder, where the giant had torn away the rock. Edgar turned his camera sideways, then shifted it back again before clicking the picture.

  “Edgar!” His mother’s lips were pale. She had tied her hair behind her in a big knot and her eyes were as cold as the air.

  “What is it?” He was looking still at the gash in the mountain.

  “We have to get some bloody breakfast!”

  Now he was just trying to keep up with her. When she had to, she could hurry ferociously. Of course this was not Toronto, so he didn’t have to be careful about the traffic. He wasn’t going to disappear in a subway crowd. Even as she pulled away from him, he could see her.

  Were they going to buy breakfast again at the Eldorado? There it was, a big gray building with purple trim surrounded by wooden sidewalks. A red pickup truck was parked nearby. Not Ceese’s—that was silver. A man in tired clothes, one of the men from breakfast yesterday, stood on the veranda of the hotel smoking a cigarette and staring at them as they approached.

  Staring again at Edgar’s mother.

  “Morning,” he said when they were close enough. As if announcing the bare fact of it.

  “Yes, hello,” his mother said.

  They walked past breakfast. The grocery store was closer to the water, Edgar remembered from Ceese and Caroline’s directions. At the front of the town.

  The General Store. It was opposite the exhausted building Edgar also remembered from yesterday, with peeling yellow paint and boarded-up windows, that looked like it had been left there—abandoned?—like a ship no longer in the water. In fact there was a big ship quite close to it. How had he missed it yesterday? A white boat with snow on it, old-fashioned, with a contraption at the back, maybe a paddle wheel?

  Was this the Paddlewheel Graveyard that Caroline had mentioned? It didn’t look like a place to hide from a murdering Roger, or anybody, for long. True, both the peeling building and the abandoned ship looked empty. There would be places to creep around in, disappear. But the General Store—and other buildings—were right here. Everybody would see you when you showed your face.

  Edgar took out his camera again. His mother had gone into the store. The air was cold on his fingers, but at least the day was bright, perfect for pictures. He wanted the peeling building and the old ship both to fit into one frame. He could see them at the same time with his eyes, but he could not see them both with the camera . . . with the camera’s eye. So he took pictures of one after the other, and he wondered for a moment, if you were an ant, or some other small insect, what would the giant world look like all around you? How much of it would you see?

  Flies had many eyes. Maybe they saw many worlds?

  Where was his lens cap? In his pocket. He didn’t want to leave the camera on for long. The battery would run out in the cold. That was another thing Roger had told him. Did that mean, Edgar wondered now, that Roger had known that he and his mother were traveling farther and farther into winter? Or had he just been talking about Toronto cold when he’d talked about the battery? It was still chilly there, but not with snow lining the streets, not like this.

  Edgar climbed the stairs and opened the door. The store was small, not a Super anything. Anyone pushing a cart around was going to bump into other people.

  His mother had a cart, and she was bending down to look at tomatoes. It was hard to see what was so interesting about them. They looked small, pale, hard. Maybe not something to eat right away, but they would ripen on a windowsill or kitchen counter. His mother said to him, “Look how expensive these are!”

  Of course she would know if six dollars was expensive or not for food you wouldn’t be able to eat right away even though you were hungry.

  “Do you want me to get anything?” he asked. Sometimes in a grocery store she sent him up the aisle for oatmeal, for biscuits, and other things.

  “I have to keep track of how much we’re racking up,” she said. She put the tomatoes into the cart despite the six dollars. “But I will be working tonight. That’s already good luck.”

  It was lucky, Edgar could see that. He was lucky to have a camera. They were lucky to have a house for free, to be here in the store shopping for food even if it was too expensive.

  They were hungry, but soon they would be back in the kitchen making breakfast.

  “Oh my God, the cheese!” his mother said. She had pulled a big white chunk of it off the cold shelf. “Fifty-five dollars!”

  She said the words, but in her eyes she was laughing, it was not a disaster. They were here now. The tomatoes would ripen. They didn’t have to buy cheese.

  His mother would have her real coffee soon.

  “Let’s have a look at the river!” his mother said when they were outside, carrying the grocery bags. Even though the river was just across the street, they couldn’t see it. A big mound ran all along, hiding it from view. What was it called? A dike? They crossed Front Street—no traffic anywhere, even though this was as downtown as Dawson got. Edgar could see that already. Then they walked past the flaking old yellow building. Maybe when it had been new, it had looked like gold, Edgar thought.

  “This used to be the bank,” his mother said. “That’s where Robert Service worked. The poet.”

  Edgar remembered the old log hut from the night before, and his mother recited: “There are strange things done in the midnight sun / By the men who moil for gold . . .”

  She ran out after a couple of lines. “We’ll look it up!” she said, too brightly. Her face seemed to say it was all good, good, maybe too good. Everything was going to be gold.

  They climbed the bank of the mound, the dike, whatever it was. The white flatness of the snow and ice was hedged in by the steep slopes of snow- and tree-clad hills across the way. Edgar took picture after picture up and down the river. To his right he saw the orange pylon—actually a tall wooden orange pole braced on the ice—with the wire leading to shore. That was how they would know when the ice started to move, he remembered. There was, quite close to it, a sliver of black, open water, before the river turned. So maybe it wouldn’t be too long? And—did they lose the pylon every year, with it sinking into the river? Or would it float?

  Islands in the distance. To his left he could see where some other white flat expanse met this one—the Klondike meeting the Yukon. Which was the big river? He thought of the squiggles on the old map, the one that was probably out of date, the one that said West Dawson and Moosehide and other places were abandoned. The Yukon was the big river.

  Even if the map was out of date, maybe rivers don’t change that much?

  “Let’s just go down. I think there’s a trail,” his mother said.

  Edgar was carrying two plastic bags of groceries, including the eggs, so he had to be careful. If he slipped, everything would be ruined. But the path was not too difficult. Even his mother made it to the bottom safely. She immediately started walking along a smoothed-out part. “It’s a snowmobile trail,” she said, sounding proud of herself for knowing.

  The snow was packed, even, easy to walk on. When Edgar turned back to look at the town, it was gone. All he saw was the high slope of the riverbank and the wall. They were standing in the middle of wilderness surrounded by hills, snow, sky, ice, earth.

  It was quiet, too, except for the crunching of their boots. Sometimes they stepped on hard snow and sometimes on bluish ice that made a hollow, musical sound. There was no wind. The sky was lightening into a bright, bright blue.

  Their breathing. The musical footsteps. The rustle of the grocery bags as they rubbed sometimes against their pants.

  “This is so beautiful!” his mother said.

  It was. In a few minutes they were that much
closer to a dramatic spot where the hills seemed to plunge down into the meeting place of the rivers. So Edgar took out his camera again and captured picture after picture. Then his mother paused to look into a deep crack in the ice. You could lose your foot down there if you stepped the wrong way, Edgar thought.

  “Isn’t this gorgeous?” his mother said again.

  “Be careful!” Edgar said. He was thinking again of that story, of the man falling through the ice.

  “Oh, don’t you worry!” his mother said in her sunny voice, her best one.

  She had forgotten about breakfast. Where were they walking, anyway? Edgar had only a vague sense now of where their house was. Back there, up the bank, on the other side of the town that they seemed to be walking away from.

  “Let’s keep going. Let’s see where this leads,” his mother said. He didn’t say that he was hungry again. It could wait. School could wait too.

  This was all good right now.

  A silver truck crossed the river. It was driving on the ice and stopped just as Edgar and his mother came to it. Ceese again, still in his jean jacket. He looked delighted to see them.

  “Got some groceries, then?” he said.

  And Edgar’s mother cracked open in front of him. She went on and on in her way about how spectacular the scenery was, how friendly everyone had been, especially at the party last night. She thanked him for “everything you did” to get her the job at Lola’s, starting tonight.

  What, what had he done? Edgar wondered.

  Ceese had his door open with the engine running while Edgar and his mother stood below him, on the ice. He seemed to be parked in the middle of the road—an orange sign called it an ice bridge—but no one else was on it, so why not?

  “How about you, young Edgar? How are you enjoying Dawson?” Ceese asked.