If I Fall, If I Die

by Michael Christie

  Will spent the ensuing weeks dumped to the pavement with demoralizing repetition, flaying the tender flesh of his lower back, knees, and hips like an invisible monster was dismantling him cell by cell. He stymied wave after wave of hot tears. In the mornings when he awoke in his cot in New York, his body was a symphony of aches, he found himself clumsy as an infant, as though during sleep he’d misplaced his ability to walk.

  Sometimes while skateboarding Will spotted his mother’s dark shape in the window of Paris, rereading her page-turners and heating soup in her electric kettle, and the sight of her, shipwrecked there, stabbed him with a pocket knife of guilt. Will knew his mother viewed skateboarding as the worldly equivalent of going snorkeling in the Black Lagoon, but so far she’d only hung his new orange Helmet from a nail near the door, right beside where he kept his skateboard, leaving unmentioned the fact he never touched it. Jonah didn’t need a Helmet, so Will didn’t either.

  After two weeks of flagellation, nearly quitting hundreds of times, Will was able to ambulate somewhat safely on his board without cracking a kneecap, and Jonah agreed to set off on their first investigation.

  “We need to make sure Marcus isn’t back at his foster home, hiding out,” said Will while they rolled toward County Park on the asphalt footpath.

  “Was there anything else you remember about the dude who grabbed you?” Jonah asked.

  “Like I said,” Will replied, “he wheezed like crazy, like he could barely breathe. But he was fast and strong, and didn’t make any sense when he talked. It was like a junk drawer of words. I don’t even remember half of them. But I’m sure I felt hair on his head, so it wasn’t the Bald Man.”

  “And the Butler’s pretty frail,” Jonah added, “so that rules him out. Must’ve been that scavenger who bought their hoses. Marcus said he was hard to understand.”

  “Could be. Oh, and when I got home, my coat was covered in this dust that was really hard to get off,” Will said. “But the Wheezing Man is definitely our prime suspect.”

  The boys kicked up their skateboards (Will’s struck him painfully in the knee) in front of Marcus’s foster home—a box of mildewed stucco with a ratty, slumping tin roof. They heard a miniature wailing and realized it originated from the burgundy minivan angle-parked in the driveway. They peered inside. A little Indian toddler was strapped in a car seat, his mouth a perfect O.

  “Are you my new boys? Where’s your paperwork?” called a woman’s voice from the doorstep.

  “Sorry?” said Will in an embarrassing sonorous voice he used to employ for deliverymen. “No, we’re friends of Marcus, and we have a few questions.”

  She invited them in with a solemn finger wave. They removed their skateboard-chewed shoes and ambled to the living room. Will spotted a few little Indian kids peering shyly from the rooms down a dim hall. The air in this particular Inside was viscous with dust vapor, and small plastic bits of toy paved the moldering carpet like autumn leaves. Sad-eyed collectible Eskimo dolls peered down from high shelves in tiny fur coats with plastic harpoons in their hands. The boys sat on a toy-laden couch, and the woman thrust fruit punch–flavored juice boxes upon them without asking. Marcus’s foster mother was White, with a heavy, pale face, both the hue and shape of an uncooked turkey.

  “Sorry if this is hard for you,” Will said. “The police must’ve asked you lots of questions already.”

  “Police never asked me nothing,” she blurted. “They came and searched his room for drugs and alcohol. Was about it.”

  “Okay,” Will said, extracting his notebook from his kangaroo pocket. But he didn’t know what to write, so he began doodling a skateboard ramp. Jonah watched him and shook his head. “Did Marcus have any enemies?” Will said.

  “Only anybody with ears connected to half a brain,” she said. “That boy’s mouth soured about every last person in town in the few years I had him. Except most didn’t stay ticked. He has a way like that. Mine was the sixth foster home he been through.”

  “Did you say sixth foster home?” Will said, scribbling notes he knew instantly would prove worthless because his cursive was still awful.

  She nodded gravely. “The second wasn’t kind to him. Some pastor and his wife, his worker told me. Kept him in homemade chicken-wire shackles at night. Took a curling iron to him. A cordless drill. Worse things best not said.” Will remembered the lacework of scars on Marcus’s hands and torso when he’d offered his shirt that first day Outside. “ ’Course he didn’t want to talk to nobody about it, certainly not me.”

  “Do you have any idea where he is now?” Will said, as Jonah turned away to peekaboo with a little girl with huge eyes and dancing pigtails who’d crept to the edge of the room in a filthy purple leotard.

  The woman shook her head. “He was always staying out, sleeping outside in forts he’d built all over. He brung things back for the other children here: toys and candies and such, roasts and potatoes for me to cook. I pitched most of it ’cause I knew he didn’t have no money.” Suddenly her breathing thickened. She touched her tear duct with her finger as though to manually press it closed but a tear slipped past.

  “At first I thought he’d gone up north to look for his mother,” the woman continued in a sputter, “he always claimed she was alive, said he saw her in visions. Used to draw these pictures of her, all these colors swirling around her—you know how the Indians draw, with those energy lines? Except his worker was certain she was killed hitchhiking just after he was born. Still, that boy could see to himself. That’s a true fact. His uncle taught him to hunt and fish before he was murdered by his best friend—one of those liquored fights over some misunderstanding. I know one thing: Indian boys go sideways staying inside. Marcus was the same. Gets worse as they grow. They don’t care for the indoors the way the White ones do.”

  “Don’t they?” Jonah said, annoyed. “Is that why you made Marcus stay out of the house from nine to five every day? Even if he was sick?”

  Will shot Jonah a wide-eyed, imploring look.

  She was sobbing openly now in her pouchy armchair, and Will’s mind flashed to his own mother. “He was driving this house half-crazy,” she wept. “Teaching the young ones to light campfires and carve little wood sculptures with knives. They worshipped him. I needed to protect them.” Then her voice sharpened. “Maybe you’ll have kids yourself someday and find out how there’s no way to keep certain boys from jumping off cliffs.”

  Ignoring her, Jonah plucked an Etch A Sketch from the toy-drecked floor and after a quick flurry of knob twisting, showed the little girl a delicately rendered horse in full gallop. She squealed and clapped with delight.

  Will leaned toward the woman and spoke calmly, realizing that if his time Inside had taught him anything, it was how to soothe. “Ma’am, did Marcus leave anything suspicious behind? Phone numbers? Papers?”

  “Why, did he swipe something of yours?” she said, dabbing her sludgy mascara.

  “No, I don’t mean—”

  “—Alls he came to me with was an old shopping bag of hyperactive pills he refused to take and a chocolate bar his social worker had bought him because she was done with him. That was it. Not even pictures of his kin. Plus, I mean he shared a room here with three other boys, sometimes four, and to tell you outright, I’m not sure what’s his and what ain’t. Mostly a slew of boy things in there: bits of slate and amethyst, wood swords and slingshots, skateboards, and dead things they find. Broken things they keep and want to fix but don’t know how.”

  After draining his juice box with a gurgle, Will thanked her and stood. Out front they found the child in the minivan fast asleep, its little eyes smashed shut in the seat as if it were preparing for some kind of impact.

  “One more thing,” she said, taking Will aside while Jonah practiced kickflips on the sidewalk. “An old, white-haired fella came by a while back asking about Marcus. Said he was a social worker. Seemed real official. A right good talker. But he was lying.”

  “How do you know?” as
ked Will.

  “He had an old hockey helmet he said he wanted to return to Marcus. That boy never wore one of those things in his life.”

  “So we know Marcus has either been kidnapped or he’s back hiding out,” Will said, pacing New York with his hands behind his back like a lawyer. “But where? Another shack? Or if the Butler or his henchmen did get him, where’re they keeping him? And why?”

  “I asked Ritchie, and he doesn’t know anything. And Gideon said the Belcourt Twins dropped out of school and went north,” said Jonah. “So we’re out of luck there. But he did say the word is the Butler is offering a drum of Neverclear to anyone who finds Marcus, which might mean they don’t have him yet.”

  “What’s that?” asked Will.

  “Neverclear? The Butler’s newest gift to Thunder Bay. Gideon said it’s a blend of high-test grain alcohol he mixes some kind of solvent into,” said Jonah. “Apparently it presses the reset button on your head, wipes you clean as a blackboard, something all the old wastoids here are looking for, believe me. Maybe Neverclear is what Marcus interfered with somehow. Tell me again about that sheet you gave Angela?”

  “Like I said, it was just a bunch of Xs on an empty grid, like a big game of tic-tac-toe with only one person playing. And there’s no hope of getting it back with Angela still in real Toronto.”

  “Looks like a dead end,” said Jonah. “Oh well,” he sighed cheerily, lacing his hands behind his head while examining Will’s art supplies, “there’re worse places to be. And why do you always say real Toronto, anyway? Of course it’s real.”

  When the spring rain came, Jonah’s basement filled with water the color of chamomile tea, and the creek behind Will’s roared wrathfully. Unable to skateboard, they whiled away their weekends at Will’s house.

  “No wonder you never left,” Jonah said through a mouthful of grilled cheese they’d made themselves (Jonah had removed the heavy architecture books his mother had stored in the oven, plugged in the stove, and instructed Will on how to turn it on). “This place is unbelievable.” They sat on the couch in Cairo, watching an old Buster Keaton film called Sherlock Jr.

  “It’ll get to you,” Will said pulling a cheese thread from his chin, “like anywhere, believe me.”

  “You know what?” Jonah said later, as Buster Keaton was being pitched around by a hurricane and slammed into walls. “You look like this dude when you skate. I’m serious. You’re like crazy and careful at the same time. You even fall like him. It’s funny.”

  “It doesn’t feel funny,” Will said, struggling to unclench his teeth.

  “Whoa, don’t get mad. It’s a good thing,” he said. “You look invincible. Even when you’re falling. It never looks that bad.”

  Inside, the boys gorged themselves on skateboard magazines and lore, poring over arcane details, savoring every square inch of photography. They memorized Jonah’s skateboard videos, Streets of Fire, Hocus Pokus, Video Days, the way the academics and inmates had memorized his mother’s films. They picked their skate gods— Will’s was Natas Kaupas, and Jonah’s Mark Gonzales, or “The Gonz,” as he was known—and tried to mimic their styles. They learned skateboards were constructed of 7-plys of rock-hard Canadian maple, which left them proud. To think Thunder Bay’s boring trees were trucked off to California to be shaped and screen-printed and returned as magic totems, as myth. The boys painted and drew in New York, covering Will’s walls with renderings of skateboarders and skulls. “You think I could have a go at one of those canvases?” Jonah asked. “I feel a masterpiece coming on.”

  They played the rap and heavy-metal tapes Jonah borrowed from his brothers, which well-articulated the Outside’s menaces, much more than the saccharine Inside songs his mother had sung with her guitar in Cairo. Slayer, N.W.A, and Dinosaur Jr. made The Rite of Spring sound like a lullaby.

  In New York, Jonah talked incessantly, with an almost automatic exuberance. But he again fell dead silent when Will’s mother entered with lunch, watching her with transparent awe. She would clatter forks on Will’s desk and say the same old thing she always did: “Gentlemen, draw your swords.”

  Lately his mother was washing her hair and wearing actual clothes, perhaps because Jonah was around, and seemed insulated from the Black Lagoon. Once she touched Jonah on the back in a half-hug, and he grimaced like she’d sandpapered his sunburn. Will had never seen his friend touch anyone before. Occasionally Will would still break down and indulge in a prolonged before-bed cuddle with his mother, and he envied Jonah his fortitude.

  Before long, spring leapt into summer, liberating the boys from school. After months of daily flagellation, skateboarding grew kinder to Will. Though the pavement still regularly hurtled upward for reasons he couldn’t decode, he was inching toward stability. He could roll without tenseness in his legs, without winging his arms in big hysteric circles.

  In the convection of July, a heat that reminded Will of the Destructivity Experiment where he pointed a blowdryer at his face for as long as he could stand, Will and Jonah patrolled the neighborhood, half-searching for Marcus, half not wanting to go home. They memorized every street, parking lot, staircase, curb, storm drain, fire hydrant, and sidewalk square in Grandview Gardens and County Park. They scoured the backyards along the creek for empty swimming pools, like in Thrasher, but those they found were squared with no transition, just abrupt walls lining a deep pit. It was another example of California’s overwhelming superiority—they had the sense to properly construct a swimming pool.

  At first Will was distraught when the pumpkin-head design on his board became scratched. He’d seen advertisements for plastic guards that protected the precious graphics and was preparing to order them when Jonah told him, “You don’t need any of that stuff.”

  “But I’ll lose the picture,” said Will.

  “That’s what it’s for.”

  “For what?”

  “Getting ruined.”

  Nightly, Will drew himself hot baths in Venice to ease his tenderized muscles. By now his skin, especially at the apexes, was crammed with scabs, welts, rainbows of bruises, and the cursive of scars, like collages made from the pages of Jonah’s medical textbooks. Beneath these floated tiny chips of bone that prickled in his flesh.

  There’d been other changes too. Maybe it was the effect of the sultry Outside air, but Will’s voice had burst like an engine run without oil, leaving a warbling parody of a young deliveryman. He’d also begun to notice certain emerging roundnesses evidenced by girls his age, especially Angela, his memory of her anyway, who, he realized with shock, he missed terribly.

  There in the steam of his bath, to keep from tumbling into black, gut-churning thoughts of the Butler’s wolves with their snouts buried in his Helmet, memorizing its vinegary scent, or the Butler finding the name Cardiel markered in it and then dropping by for a visit, Will reread the Thrasher magazines that Jonah had loaned him. He especially liked the interviews with skateboarders, who were always irreverent and brave and strange and always reminded him of Marcus.

  Now the door in Venice came open. “Just a sec,” Will hissed, hurriedly reaching for the bubble bath, squeezing a long ribbon into the water. “Sorry,” he heard her say, shutting the door again, as he swished the water frantically, kicking up a thick flotilla of bubbles that stung his scrapes. “Okay, you can come in,” he said, sinking to his chin to hide his abrasions under the foam. He could only imagine how she’d inspect him like a piece of fruit, her tongue clucking at the roof of her mouth.

  “I’m always going to knock from now on,” she said entering meekly. “You’re older now. You deserve privacy.”

  “Sure,” Will said, with no idea what she was talking about.

  She sat at the edge of the bath. “Jonah go home?”

  Will nodded, blowing bubbles from his bottom lip.

  “He can stay over anytime he wants, you know, I won’t mind. I don’t love the thought of him going through that culvert at night. We could set up another cot.”

 
; “Jonah can’t sleep if he’s not at home,” Will said. “He doesn’t feel safe.”

  “Well, we’ve got that in common,” she said, laughing with her eyes shut. “I really like him,” she added. “He livens this place up. It’s so good you two are friends. It wasn’t always like that in Thunder Bay, Will. Your uncle and I didn’t have Native friends. It just wasn’t something people did. Actually, with those skateboards of yours, in a way you boys both remind me of your uncle.”

  Will fought the urge to sit up. “What was he like?”

  “He was smart. And funny. And daring,” she said. “And angry.” She gave a quick smile.

  “What was he angry about?”

  “Oh,” she said, scooping some bubbles in her palm, “I suppose he was mad about losing our parents, and at the way things were here. And he didn’t know where to put it. He could’ve done so much, gone to university somewhere or created things. He was brilliant, like you. But when our dad died, he had to stay to take care of us. At that time people in Thunder Bay didn’t have options the way people in other places did.”

  “They still don’t, Mom.”

  She shook her head as though to clear it. “But you’re happy out there, aren’t you?”

  Will nodded. “The world is really big,” he said. “It’s hard to believe. It just keeps going and going.”

  “I remember that,” she said.

  “Mom, I heard that people die in their houses way more than anywhere else,” he said, “making this, like, the most dangerous place in the world. At least for us.”

  She put her wrist over her eyes. He could see her body tense like a bow drawn with an arrow. “That’s because people are in their houses more often than other places,” she said. “It’s just statistics, Will.”