If I Fall, If I Die

by Michael Christie

  Eventually, the twins grew old enough to be on their own at home, and their time at the elevator ended, though Diane still brought Theodore his supper nightly. By then she adored the thunder of trains shunting down in the yard and had learned to distinguish this from the roar of the car dumper as it snatched fully loaded grain cars and emptied them like a child’s sand pail. From the high windows of Pool 6 she watched lakeboats crawl off into the blue horizon, toward the canals and locks of the lesser Great Lakes, down to the Saint Lawrence and eventually the ocean. With everything measured on such a grand metric—the thousands of tons of grain and potash and steel and concrete, the enormous boats and stout men, not to mention Thunder Bay’s outsized hopes for the future (“Canada’s Chicago,” it was foretold then with a straight face)—Diane would return to their house on Machar Avenue and think it better suited for her dolls than a family.

  Their father neither struck them nor singed them with harsh words, and Diane was frightened by her brother’s growing loathing of Theodore, who she always found pleasantly benign, if only because he was so rarely both at home and awake simultaneously. Charlie began to scoff at Theodore’s monotonous descriptions of his work and would sweep up the grain dust that their father tracked in with brisk, agitated strokes with the corn broom. Charlie confessed during a late-night conversation in their room—a time once reserved for surreptitious play: knock-knock jokes, silly drawings, and improvised tales of talking animals told in hushed tones, but now consisted mostly of silent brooding and angry study—that he’d become convinced their father was an embarrassing simpleton and that their only ladder of escape from Thunder Bay would be academics, scholarships in particular, because they’d never have money for higher education. “You should put down your drawing pencils and pick up your grades,” Charlie said. But since her mother’s death, Diane had felt divided from herself, ensconced, drained, mostly brainless, as though her life had become one protracted sigh.

  Though she had no mind for schoolwork, Diane advanced into high school mainly because, she suspected, they wouldn’t dare split the poor twins up. Charlie continued the fervency of his studies, planting his name on the honor roll each year and drilling himself after school with his dictionary and the door-stopping almanacs of trivia and crossword puzzles that he tore through nightly after completing his homework. It was as though he was burning through their collective ambitions himself, and in some way Diane eased the slow-blooming agony and confusion of losing her mother by taking shelter behind him, behind the battering ram of his anger and drive.

  Because Thunder Bay was neither large nor moneyed enough to support a private high school, children from all walks of life were thrown together, and Charlie quickly struck up a friendship with Whalen Agnew, the son of one of the major stakeholders in the grain elevators on the Lakes, including Pool 6—a tall boy with a high, regal forehead and grades almost as good as her brother’s. Soon the two were as inseparable as the twins once were. Charlie would have Whalen over to study, visits for which Diane would spend the week beforehand cleaning, horrified by the thought of grain dust clinging to his finely cut pants as he sat before his potato-mound that she’d tried to enliven with a loaf of fresh-baked bread and a salad.

  Then one summer day Whalen called while Charlie was at the library and asked her over to mend the pocket of a sport coat for him. Heart pounding, she hurried up the hill, terrified and thrilled by the prospect of nurturing a secret from her brother, who already demanded a complex, devoted loyalty from his best friend and would seethe if he found out they’d met without him.

  They sat in Whalen’s lush parlor, and she couldn’t keep herself from running her fingers over the varnished moldings of his stately house, with its scrollworked furniture, leaded glass, and bookshelves loaded with fine editions of Victorian novels she then vowed to read someday. It was the first time she’d seen books in any concentration. But beside the glitter of wealth and knowledge, it was something in Whalen’s face that gripped her. Or rather something that wasn’t. None of her brother’s fury or her father’s skeptical reserve. Just a welcome blankness, like a pristine canvas she could brush her own story upon. After some polite discussion, she sewed his pocket, the stitches of which, thrillingly, seemed more snipped than worn, and as he was thanking her nervously in the foyer while she pulled on her raincoat, she suddenly took her brother’s best friend by the shoulders and kissed him. His lips were dry and fragrant as fresh-sawn fir. This was the first time she’d felt real joy: the helium-filled skull, the thunderous heart, so similar to panic, but in lesser quantities it was pure pleasure. She pressed Whalen into the cashmere coats of the front closet until he shook and whispered that he’d give anything to see her again. She agreed and walked down the hill, flushed, wonderfully guilty of something for the first time in her life.

  After that she and Whalen met secretly, mostly in his family’s second car, parked in one of his father’s disused industrial yards down near the elevators. They’d toss around in the car’s mahogany-trimmed interior and scooped-out leather seats, then share American cigarettes afterwards, watching the lights of the moored lakeboats sizzle through the dark. How much of the thrill was sparked by that first betrayal of her brother and how much was her true affection for Whalen, she could not say today, but sitting in his car on those nights, it was as though the long-rusted gears of her own life had finally begun to turn.

  Then at dinner one night, just a few weeks shy of their sixteenth birthday, Theodore suggested that upon their graduation the following spring, there would be a spot for Charlie at Pool 6. “The grain trade is slowing,” Theodore said, “but there’re still more than a few good years left down there, son. It’s a right good living.” Charlie excused himself, every little muscle in his face squirming with rage. Diane had watched Charlie send off early applications to the English Departments of the Universities of Toronto and British Columbia—his most sure-footed approaches to law school—and figured his acceptance was guaranteed. “I want you to have options I didn’t,” Theodore called to Charlie as he climbed the stairs.

  Her brother may have viewed Thunder Bay as a trap to escape after their mother’s death, but Diane had no such ambitions. Whalen would be taking over one of his father’s businesses, and though they’d yet to meet publicly, she believed there was a future for them, especially once Charlie was off at university. How strange it was, she’d often thought since, that she’d be the one to make it out of this place in the end, the one to accomplish things and see the world—only to fall back again, into a place even more dangerous and hopeless than the one they’d known.

  Now with her mouth dry and rubbery from what must have been an hour of talking, Diane removed the goggles and clicked off the recorder, ending her Session early. But in the dance of light lingering in her eyes she found the phantom of Breughel’s Hunters in the Snow—Theodore’s favorite painting—a work she and Arthur once saw on a trip to New York: hunters returning to a village with their kill, one measly fox strung up, the rough men either pleased with their catch or gravely disappointed. Either proudly providing for their people or preparing to hunt them, one couldn’t be sure.

  She went downstairs, made tea, and sat in the chair with a good vantage of the front sidewalk. Will’s class ended at 3:25. His walk usually took nine minutes. And it was already 3:46, which could mean anything, really, and she tried to pry her eyes from the clock as her mind was already spinning to the creek out back, him in it, wallowing among the rocks, then a flash of him lifeless and pale on the mucky bank, limp weeds and slugs crowding his mouth. She stood, took a long breath, pulled out her wrist elastic good and far, let it go, and assembled some calm in the sting.

  Since she’d been scouring the paper for news of that orphan who’d gone missing, Thunder Bay had assumed an even more sinister timbre. Trucks slowing out front for children to pass now seemed menacing, carnivorous, and the woods behind their house, with its dismal, soldierly birches, seemed ever more ready to conscript her son and order h
im out into the trees. Of course, children went missing all the time in Toronto—yet somehow these tragedies blended into the noise of the city. Here it was close, intimate, like a terrible chime struck in your bedroom.

  She walked again to the sink, poured out her tea, rinsed the cup, set it in the dish rack, after this realizing that she’d actually wanted it, so she flipped on the kettle again—for a moment terrified it would shock her—and stood with her hands on the counter, listening to it heat up like a jet fighter approaching from far off.

  With a fresh cup steeping, she walked back to the window—3:51—her eyes scouring the street, the neighborhood’s most attentive husbands already pulling into driveways to help out with dinner, but her son was still out there, and her breaths were coming sharp now, white bolts of fear zapping through her, scalding tea splashing on her shaky hand. She sat again in her chair. What she couldn’t seem to evict from her mind, no matter how many Sessions she did, was the vestige of her brother Charlie she saw on her son’s face that first afternoon he’d put on his slippers and stepped out the front door: a mere hint of his slanting grin—the slight angle of a pinball machine—and the stubborn resolve and angry ambition that in the end was his ruin—and with that her vision darkened, and her heart was a fist driving her repeatedly square in the chest, and she’d just reached to snap her elastic again when she heard the door come open and her son call out like any normal boy returning from school. Next came the thump of his backpack and the jangle of coat hangers in the hall closet, and she applied these comforting sounds to her black thoughts like a sonic brake pad, which allowed her to see his bright face swing around the corner, his hair so long now, swooping into his eyes, the color of wood grain, of wheat, and then he spoke, this small miracle of biology that for so long was only hers to witness: “How’s it going, Mom?”

  7

  A month passed, and the fall days chilled at their edges, warm only for a moment at noon. Each morning his mother would press the back of her lotioned hand to his cheek. “You seem peakish,” she’d say. “Why not stay home today—your immune system needs time to adapt.” Then she’d hurry off to Venice to fetch the thermometer. Yet despite her best efforts—she ordered once-illicit choke-prone foods like hot dogs and enticing films and art supplies, and even offered to get cable, including the movie channel—he never missed a day.

  School itself was numbing, but not unpleasurably so. The building housed and sustained a great oceanic boredom, a boredom so vast it could be tasted. During the most tedious moments, he daydreamed of the freedoms he’d surrendered: languid afternoons of masterpiece painting in New York, his mother dropping a bowl of slow-cooked chicken stew beside his easel; later napping on the sun-warmed carpet in Cairo, the light pouring lava through his eyelids as she picked “The House of the Rising Sun” at the table in Paris. Still, he loved how school was something all children were subject to, a plague to endure together. There was freedom in this unity. It rescued him from the worry of what to do next that had constantly tortured him at home.

  His mother had said schools make you a cog in the machine. “Another brick in the wohll,” she’d slur in a low English accent for some reason. But he liked the idea of being a brick in a wohll. It sounded cozy. Better that than being a brick sitting down in Toronto all by itself.

  He enjoyed his morning walk and the din of his classmates, though they seldom addressed him and always scampered off before he’d completed a question. Homework consisted of blanks to put words and numbers in, like writing checks for deliverymen, but easier because you didn’t lose money if you botched it. The tests kicked up tiny Black Lagoons that redlined his heart and flooded his mouth with the taste of sour aluminum. So far, As had evaded him because he couldn’t scrape all the correct morsels from his mind before Mr. Miller snatched their tests away as though he rightly owned them.

  Overall, the Outside was utterly boring and utterly astonishing at once and often exceeded Will’s capacity to investigate it. At least once a week his heart bubbled over with beauty and fear, and he’d ask to go to the bathroom, where he’d weep mutely into wads of harsh, abrasive toilet paper. To mask his gaping deficits of understanding, Will’s policy was to feign knowledge, to play the part of a normal boy, and nobody seemed to notice otherwise. Still, at times he was hit with a plummet of terror when he remembered he wasn’t wearing a Helmet or that his classroom was neither New York nor San Francisco, but these instances diminished with each passing week, so he paid them less and less mind.

  His mother was weathering his going to school better than he’d expected. Even so, he’d often return home to find her in Cairo staring blankly from the window out into the backyard, a full mug of forgotten tea steeping eternally beside her.

  Marcus still hadn’t turned up, and Will continually checked the paper, as well as the woods on his walk home, but came up empty. One Friday after school, Will built the courage to knock on some doors on his street to ask about the stolen hoses. As weird smells wafted from their Insides, several neighbors said the theft occurred around the same time a firecracker exploded on their doorstep. A diversion tactic, Will ingeniously deduced, but what did it have to do with Marcus’s disappearance? Did he get caught? By who? Had he ignited himself with a match bomb? And what did such daring boys need with garden hoses anyway?

  But Will made other discoveries and had to quell a thousand urges to report to his mother everything he learned. That the cleaning powder the janitors scoured onto their desks was called Comet, which for hours after emitted eye-stinging fumes and left other kids strangely unbothered. That the kids from Will’s side of the highway, Grandview Gardens, had full pencil cases, new backpacks, and bright clothes; and kids from County Park, where most Indian kids lived, had pilly sweat suits and markers that dried up in a few days, even if capped religiously. That, in general, teachers were warmer and more attentive to kids from Will’s side, though this warmth didn’t yet extend to him. That the many hockey players in his class were all named Tyler or Ryan or Chris, and they sat reeking lightly of sweat because of 6:00 a.m. practices. (Will had yet to detect his own odor, though his mother ordered him a deodorant spray that made him shudder when he tried it.) The hockey players walked stiff and upright, almost daintily, as though still wearing skates. They addressed everyone by last name exclusively and were forever administering a gauntlet of charley horses, punches to the triceps, and trips. They called a fight a “scrap” and punches “shots”—as though they were somehow medicinal.

  Scraps happened in secret down near the culvert. It was the perfect place to bleed, Will figured, outside the Outside, because a kid’s blood was something that all adults, not only his mother, couldn’t bear. There after school Will witnessed his first real scrap when a blond hockey player named Tyler took a shot at Ritchie, the same boy who’d handed Will the match bomb by the creek. Even though none of the Indian kids at his school played hockey because the Kevlar pads cost a small fortune, both threw their mitts to the ground like on Hockey Night in Canada before grabbing collars and wailing. They were left red faced, gulping tears, mustached with blood, yet somehow they survived. After the fight, Will happened upon Ritchie in the school bathroom, spitting into the sink. “I think I swallowed some teeth,” he said. “How many?” Will said, amazed that Ritchie didn’t remember him, but too afraid to ask about Marcus. “You tell me,” Ritchie said and grinned his big, dripping space. “I don’t know,” Will said, leaning in, “maybe two? Three at the most.” “Oh,” said Ritchie tonguing the gap, stringy like a carved pumpkin, “that’s not too bad.”

  Will had also learned that a gift was a trap, like the match bomb. That “Up there!” was mere precursor to a finger-thwack to the throat. After his first spritzing with Tahiti Treat offered by a popular hockey player, Will knew free sodas were definitely shaken. That to take bait demonstrated gullibility—the most childish, despicable sin there was.

  Angela rallied with Will each morning at the base of the stairs. Since he’d turned over Jonah’
s least interesting drawing, the one of the grid, she was his sole friend, at least while at school. Best of all, she never asked questions about his mother, questions he couldn’t answer without sounding freakish. Despite her low social perch, or perhaps because of it, Angela proved an invaluable informant. She identified the Twins he’d met by the creek as the Belcourt Twins, who were already in a special high school. “The one for kids who are probably graduating to Stony Mountain,” she said, which was a federal prison in Manitoba and not the mountain-dwarf fortress Will had invented when he was young.

  “Why do you care so much about that kid?” she said when Will inquired again about Marcus. She squinted: “Are you a flamer?”

  “No, I didn’t touch any of their matches, I swear,” Will said. “Look, we’re, like, friends.”

  She scoffed and pushed her eyebrows up near her glossy hairline. “Doubt it,” she said, then leaned in and whispered: “But I asked my brother and he said your little friend has got himself mixed up with criminals, like adult ones? He pissed somebody off, bad.”

  “How?” Will said, remembering the way Marcus had defended himself so fiercely with his slingshot when they first met. “By stealing their garden hose?”

  Angela drove up her eyebrows again, crinkling her forehead, which she did whenever she thought he’d said something weird, which was most of the time. “Anyway. Kids say he’s not missing. He just hates his foster home. They see him all over. In parks at night and abandoned buildings and under bridges. They say he’s living somewhere in the woods and eats berries and drinks deer blood for breakfast.”

  “Hiding? Like Outside? Where?” Will asked, fascinated by the notion that the Outside could actually be inhabited for any sustained duration.