If I Fall, If I Die

by Michael Christie

  “I’m not worried,” he said in his most reassuring voice, smoothing the nest of her hair, struck by the strange sensation that he was at this moment not her son, but her father. “I’m going to be okay. I may not be a genius, but I’m getting stronger Outside. Nothing can really hurt me,” he said, quoting Marcus. “Not even that wolf.”

  She pulled away, wiped her eyes, snapped her elastic, and shuddered. “Will,” she said, “come with me.”

  He followed her to San Francisco, where she sat him on the bed. She reached to a high shelf in her closet, producing a yellow envelope, from which she extracted a few papers. Letters from a doctor, she said. “You were tested when you were a baby, honey, and there is something not quite right about your heart. The valves. Like a murmur, but worse. I didn’t want to scare you. That’s why I kept it from you all this time. I know I haven’t told you much about our family … but we aren’t the luckiest people.”

  Will drew his hand between the lapels of his pajamas and palmed his sternum. “Is that how Charlie …”

  She shut her eyes and nodded.

  “Could I … die of it?”

  Her eyes got pained, and she lifted her chin up slow, then let it down even slower with her lips pursed.

  “How easy?”

  She dropped her head. “They didn’t say.”

  “What do you mean they didn’t say?”

  Her face darkened, and she began to shake, a fresh tide of Black Lagoon cresting in her, shoving her nearer to the shoals of permanent breakdown. “You’ll be fine,” she said. “I always knew you’d leave someday. Just be careful out there. That’s all I ask.”

  “I will, Mom,” he said. “I promise.”

  That night after she dropped asleep in his arms in San Francisco, he got up and stashed the fire poker under his cot in New York. One thing he’d learned thus far was that the border between the Inside and the Outside wasn’t as impermeable as she liked to believe. He knew that sooner or later, the Outside would want in.

  When Christmas break was over, his mother called the school secretary and said Will was going to need more time to recuperate, months, years—the doctors weren’t sure. After that they slipped back into the old routine. She ordered fresh art supplies, Will rolling in the desk chair to meet deliverymen at the door, the acrylic tubes still cold in their hands. She ordered Will any food he wanted, even tortilla chips, the choke equivalent of the A-bomb.

  She lowered his easel, and he painted while seated with his Helmet on, cranking out a series in the old style—abstract whirls and smears of gold and purple—more to soothe her nerves. He spent more time titling his works than painting them:

  • Sailing a Sea of Wolves

  • The Surprising Nutritiousness of Jam

  • Canadian Ninja I: Strikeforce Cobra

  • Canadian Ninja II: Sais Extra Large

  • Zeus vs. Jesus: Thunderbolt Rotisserie

  • Boy, Eleven, Riddled with Spears, Survives Unscathed

  He watched his hunched schoolmates with pity as they passed his house in the dark mornings. The only Outside people he missed were Jonah, Angela, and of course Marcus. But even after their ice sliding and fight with the wolf, Jonah still wouldn’t talk to him. One night Will located Angela’s number in the phone book, fantasizing about having her over for smoothies and playing her some of his Sound Collages or his Philip Glass–style compositions on the organ (repeating three-note motifs that went on for as long as his fingers could manage) before they’d retreat for some cuddling in New York. But he never called.

  Soon his leg grew unbearably itchy, but strong enough to perform his old duties: laundry in Toronto, changing bulbs, writing checks for deliverymen—filling the gaps left by the Black Lagoon. He found his mother weeping less, no longer distracted by a sound he could not hear, like a dog whistle or what was good about jazz music.

  He retained his limp past the point he needed, and when he finally allowed it to fall away like training wheels unbolted from a bicycle, he felt her grow tense. But still he made no attempt to leave. Overall, his life Outside had mostly been a disappointment. He hadn’t found Marcus or joined any boy gangs or used his genius to solve any mysteries. He’d found only questions piled upon questions, with no connections or sense to it—just Black Lagooned people fumbling around in the dark, alone.

  He knew now how selfish it was to leave. His body wasn’t only his. Because they were twins, his uncle Charlie’s body had been partly his mother’s too. And Will couldn’t wound her like that again. To be her guardian he would need to protect his body and his heart. As much as it pained him, he would have to leave all the tantalizing mysteries of the Outside unsolved.

  Marcus would have to find himself.

  Relaxation Time

  Charlie. At once a dreadful curse and a holy utterance. Unfortunately for Diane, saying it to Will for the first time, coupled with the sight of his little thigh splayed open, had unbolted a door in her mind.

  Yes, she’d lied. But how else could she explain to Will that the reason he had no extended family—no cousins, uncles, or grandparents—was that he descended from a long line of people who died tragically, usually absurdly, with no sense to be made of any of it? That their family tree was one of misshapen branches, bare, leggy—“Good for climbing,” her father often joked. That historically, the Cardiels were God’s crash-test dummies, extras in the action film of history, a people destroyed by what they did. They expired in mine collapses, boat capsizements, log-boom mishaps. They took absurd, Looney Tunes–style falls from the buildings, scaffolds, granaries, and bridges that they’d just constructed. Their sons were the first shot out of the landing boats, the ones collapsed at the lip of the trench, the ones who died in a hail of soil from a shell landing twenty feet from the group of soldiers charging their way to glory. A people terminated in tragedies so senseless they got their own newspaper stories simply because others needed to be reminded that life was only loaned.

  Perhaps it was all due to some doomed combination of recklessness, fragility, and rotten luck, or perhaps there was a self-destruct mechanism embedded in the Cardiel line, a kind of discontinuation of the species strategy—she couldn’t say—but Will’s grandfather Theodore had managed to last longer than most.

  He grew up on a barley farm outside Burlington, and after his parents were simultaneously cut to ribbons by the diesel-powered thresher they’d borrowed riskily to purchase, his family fell destitute. Theodore enlisted as a pilot in the Royal Navy when he was eighteen, and only in the last week of flight school was it discovered he couldn’t discern red from green. Because the cockpit buttons were color coded, he was hastily taught to cook and dropped in the galley of a transport ship, where his duties entailed frying breakfasts and pumping up each sailor’s daily rum ration from oak casks below. Shortly after, Theodore’s ship collided with a friendly destroyer in a fog north of the Isle of Man. As black water poured into the galley, Theodore stripped his uniform and smeared himself head-to-toe with sausage grease. He bobbed in the North Atlantic for six hours, praying the ship diesel splayed on the surface wouldn’t ignite, before some Norwegian mackerel fishermen hoisted him out and wrapped him in a red woolen blanket ruined instantly by the grease.

  After the war, a shipmate found Theodore work on the docks in Oakland, loading grain boats with willow shovels in order to prevent sparks that could ignite the gases from the grain and blow the entire elevator to the Midwest. Theodore never spoke of it, but Diane knew her father had been to prison around this time: an assault—some said serious, and some said a drunken punch he’d landed with more calamity than he intended—but shortly after his release he met their mother, Iola, who’d worked in the courthouse.

  The couple married and moved to Canada, where Theodore secured better employment on the Lakes in Thunder Bay. On principle he chose the largest grain elevator, the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool 6, where he unblocked clogged conveyance chutes and hoppers. “Walking down the grain,” as it was known—the riskies
t job on the harbor, because of the constant threat of live burial. Before he lowered himself into the bins, Theodore would empty his pockets into a tin can—wallet, keys, snapshot of his wife—because if things shifted, if moisture or air pockets were hidden in the grain, a man could be swallowed instantly, his safety cable snapping like a string of spit. “Grain is neither solid nor liquid,” her father often said, “so there’s your problem.”

  After three years, during which frantic coworkers had thrice dug out Theodore’s buried and nearly asphyxiated body, each time cutting him nastily with their spades, he was hired as the foreman of an unloading crew. From then on, he minded and coaxed the enormous hydraulic rig that grasped railcars and flipped them over to evacuate them of grain, as many as eight per shift. Theodore was fair and well regarded and men drew straws to work beneath him. If ever the mechanism seized, he did not send the youngest man, as was custom, but climbed into the hydraulics himself, which were, as the saying went, “enough to turn a boy to a man, and a man to a sausage.”

  By this time he and Iola remained childless, and fellow workers left bottles of rye and foul herbal mixtures on their steps, along with cryptic incantations regarding their combination. Iola wrote home to learn that sterility ran in her family and was mutely devastated.

  Then one Saturday morning, while doing her shopping, Iola fell down some concrete steps outside Eaton’s and spent a month in traction with a snapped pelvis—her “wishbone,” she later called it. The story went that shortly after her release, Theodore took her on a weekend trip to Onion Lake, where that night in September, after a blistering hour in the sauna, Theodore carried Iola, who still could not bear her own weight, and set her in the frigid water. Iola then declared her intent to swim across the small lake and back. Upon her return, he waded out to meet her in the water.

  After the twins arrived and Theodore returned to work, the men on his crew quipped: “Finally got the cork out, that right, Theodore?” But any linger of needling about his wife ceased eight years later when Iola, distracted by a crying boy who’d been left outside a tavern by his father, was struck by a right-turning delivery truck that had lost its footing on the ice.

  Then, when the twins were sixteen, just a month after Charlie had rejected Theodore’s offer of a position at Pool 6, their father fainted—the elevator management claimed it was a bad heart; the union claimed it was overwork; Theodore’s close friends blamed the grain dust—and fell into the space between the wharf and a docked lakeboat he’d been trimming. The boat was to capacity with rye and sitting low in the water, so when the gentle waves eased the boat to the wall, Theodore, a man who had survived the North Atlantic, numerous burials in grain, and ten lives’ worth of peril, died in a smudge, like nothing at all.

  The morning after the funeral, Charlie woke early, took up his father’s work clothes, cinching them with twine and rolling the cuffs. “There’s no other way to earn good money in this damn place,” he said, the wrathful resolve he’d gathered after Iola’s death now doubled. “We’ll put you through university first. Then I’ll follow.” Diane couldn’t bear to tell him then that, aside from a vague longing to be an illustrator or an artist of some sort, she had no inclination to attend university and pictured herself staying in Thunder Bay, with Whalen, perhaps working in his office. “Trust me, I know how this works,” Charlie said as he left that day. “If we have money, this place can’t keep us.” When he reported at Pool 6, his father’s men let him stay, purely out of uneasy pity.

  After school Diane brought Charlie’s supper, as she had her father’s, staying long enough to watch him—an oiled bandanna over his nose and mouth like a train robber—descend into the dark grain bins, dangling from his safety line like human bait. She would watch the hole, counting softly to herself with held breath, until he emerged in a blast of coughing and, after that subsided, a whoop. Over the next few weeks, thick envelopes arrived from the universities to which Charlie had applied, but he dropped each in the trash, unopened.

  Though everyone said her reckless brother excelled at the job, soon he was hacking late into the night, often to the point of retching, his face a withered sky-blue. Their doctor formally diagnosed his asthma and recommended another line of work, a recommendation that Charlie curtly returned to the doctor. Charlie soaked his bandanna with liquids of all kinds: soapy water, vinegar, herbal tinctures, and, for a time, gasoline. He took pills he bought from a grain inspector on the harbor named George Butler and drank three pots of strong coffee every day from his father’s thermos and got some relief.

  A year blinked past. Diane continued to see Whalen at night, and after narrowly graduating from high school, she was secretly delighted to be denied by all the universities Charlie had urged her to apply to. Mostly because Charlie was so concerned about money, she took a job at a store near the lake called Pound’s that supplied work clothing and boots. She missed the elevator and nearly perished of boredom behind the long rough-planked counter, sick with worry about Charlie’s safety. “Remember,” she warned in their shared Theodore imitation, “the grain is both like water and like a wall, and you never know what it’s going to decide today.”

  Often in the evening when the twins were walking home, committed drunks who’d collapsed in hedges or slumped against parked cars made I now pronounce you jabs under their breath. But Charlie had grown into a man still unable to abide ridicule or deflect insult, friendly or otherwise. He’d spit on the ground and square off with anyone, wrapping his legs around a big man while striking at his soft parts and riding him to the ground like a tranquilized animal. And not only those in the switching yard or on the walk home: each week new lakeboats arrived, yielding fresh crews—Norwegians, Danes, Finns, Brazilians, Americans, Portuguese—to misunderstand and swing blindly at. Twice Charlie returned home with his nose again grotesquely broken, nostrils nearly inverted, though it healed each time straight as a rifle sight. But things only worsened when he came of age and took up drinking in earnest. She’d often ask Whalen to pry the pint glass from his hand and drag him from the tavern to start his shift.

  Then early one morning, Diane snuck home from a rare night with Whalen in a hotel to find a pantless man unknown to her slumped unconscious at their kitchen table, snoring obscenely, the ham sandwich he’d made uneaten before him, their good chopping knife loosely clutched in his hand. She put on her pajamas, then woke Charlie, who gently extracted the knife from the man’s hand and, so as not to damage the cupboards, scooped him up like a child, ferrying him onto the lawn, where he proceeded to beat him for some duration. “We’ll get a new house,” Charlie said afterwards, breathing hard. “Up the hill. Away from the taverns. Beyond stumbling distance.”

  The following week, her brother began working nights with Whalen on the car dumper, something Whalen had arranged to help them both earn extra money. On payday Charlie set aside half the hefty wads he’d pull from his canvas coat, then would scamper off for grain alcohol–fueled weekends by the harbor. Between this and the late nights at the elevators, Charlie wasn’t sleeping at all, perhaps because of the pills he was taking for his asthma. He’d slink home days later, unshaven, thin, eyes red as wild strawberries, breathing in gasps with a gray pallor, his shoulders twisted with guilt. Always he fell mute when she questioned where he’d been.

  But over time the money piled in her bureau, and soon they had the down payment for a house up the hill that backed the creek. Before they moved in, she arranged their meager things as best she could, and Charlie couldn’t stop shaking his head when he saw their new home, because it looked so good. But his contentment didn’t last. He started working night shifts on top of his regular days. With no time to spend his wages in taverns, Charlie was quickly paying down their house, with the intention of setting her up comfortably before he left for Queen’s University, where he’d already been accepted for admission the following year. “I’ll be a lawyer before you know it,” he said confidently.

  That week she overheard some workers at
Pound’s grumbling about what Whalen and Charlie were doing at night at Pool 6, how even if he was Theodore’s son, it wasn’t right, yet no one would explain the implication in detail.

  When she asked Whalen about it one night in his car, he said they’d hired a crew to work nights when the elevators sat idle. “How come you’re making so much from it?” she asked, and he dragged a finger down her spine, setting her to shiver, and said, “It’s an Indian crew from a reserve up north. And they’re real good workers too. Charlie’s big idea was to pay them a third of normal wages, while telling my father the crew is white. We pocket the difference ourselves.”

  “Doesn’t sound fair,” she said, doubting Theodore would’ve approved of such a scheme.

  “Oh, come on,” Whalen said. “Those poor people are starving up there on those reserves. They’re grateful for the opportunity. And the extra work is doing Charlie good. When he’s gone, we’ll finally be able to walk down the street together.” Whalen had always been more leery than she had of Charlie discovering their relationship and had always kept a strict policy of using only notes stuffed into her letterbox to set their next meeting. After Whalen disappeared the night Charlie died, Diane often wondered whether the secrecy was more a convenient excuse than it was born of any real concern for her brother.

  The last night she saw her brother alive, she watched him ready himself for work after inhaling his dinner. He said the ice was coming earlier in November than it ever had, and with it came a frantic rush to load the season’s last lakeboat before it was ice-locked until spring. She followed him to the door, thinking how after many years at Pool 6 he still looked so unlike other men his age, already bent and puffy with alcohol saturation, fights, and accidents. Other than his lungs, Charlie remained curiously unmarred by life—his eyes shining like polished copper above his sleek, crooked mouth.