If I Fall, If I Die

by Michael Christie

  He waited for the sickness to pass, his back propped against the curved wall of the hold, trying to stabilize the brain in his skull with placid thoughts, thoughts of her, but couldn’t keep the vileness in him now from touching her image, so he punched the steel hull until his mind shut off. With so much vomiting, his thirst had reached a deadliness even he could recognize. You’ll die of thirst on a mountain of food, he thought, and this set him chuckling.

  An uncountable time later, his stomach settled into starvation, and he stewed up spit in his mouth for an hour in order to get some oats down, but they sat in a lump low in his sternum like he’d swallowed an apple whole. After eating, he attempted sleep. Hours in the vacuum of dark had opened his senses wide and his eyes took on another purpose. With nothing to land upon they concocted visions, like old prisoners telling stories to keep sane. Soon his eyelids flared with something near light, and amid these specters he watched himself put his own ear to that cable as though to a shell. He’d known it was weakened and tapped at it with a screwdriver, like he knew what he was listening for, while the Indian crew waited, speaking in low tones next to the half-unloaded grainer. “It’s fine,” he’d assured them, well aware the lake could freeze any minute, holding up their scheme until next year. “What are you boys afraid of anyway, a little grain?” he said to his crew, then told his best friend to fire up the car dumper, which he did because they trusted each other like brothers—and a second later the air broke open with the lung-sucking sound of the frayed cable whipping through his friend, his remaining arm clutching at his crushed chest, trying to unlock it, his face scrambled like a painter’s palette. Then his wrecked flesh dimming to white, the life lifting from the pieces of him like frost from the earth on a warm morning.

  When the visions ceased, he fell through sleep and wakefulness, as though through the floors of a skyscraper made of mist. When he awoke, the storm had passed, the engines silent. He stood, ready for his last swim, and reached upwards for the hatch, yet even when he stretched tall, his fingers discovered only air. He could tell by the way his voice bounced that the ceiling was much higher than before. The oats must’ve settled in the vibration of the storm, he concluded. He pushed some into an incline and managed a mound from which he was able to graze the hatch with his fingertips. But there was no way to open it from the inside.

  Thirst had returned, and he feared it would weaken his capacity to refuse the visions, so he sat telling himself knock-knock jokes he’d shared with her—Lettuce. Lettuce Who? Lettuce in, it’s freezing!—until sleep took him.

  “It was all hands last night. There was no way I could come. Then we must go ashore. This was important. But now I’m returned.” It was night, and Vadim was backlit by a needlepoint of stars. The bright smell of alcohol wafted into the hold. Vadim was drunk, and it made his accent harder to unravel.

  “I thought: But Vadim, he has oats!” he said raggedly. “And then I remembered: the water! So now? I’ve come.”

  He tried to speak but only croaked, dragging his tongue like a dry mop over his lips in a futile attempt to moisten them. Vadim tossed down a jar of water and it landed in the oats with a whump. He couldn’t resist throwing himself upon it but drank conservatively, trying to disguise how pressing his thirst was.

  Next, Vadim took out a flashlight, and it was possible to make out some gaps in his grip. “I lose these in the winch,” Vadim said grinning, wiggling his two remaining fingers like a man giving an obscene gesture. Then Vadim directed the flashlight into the hold, stinging his vision. “Ah,” Vadim said, “there you are. Oh no no … you have bleed on your face. Is this new?”

  He thought he’d washed it all off in the lake. “From before,” he said. He captured a handful of oats and scrubbed his face with them, unwilling to waste any water for this purpose.

  “Well, I’ve heard you with these complex words in your sleep. No doubt you read: Bill Shakespeare?” asked Vadim, sitting.

  “Who?”

  “I studied Englishman’s literature in Odessa. I like him most so I call him Bill. We are familiar this way. Titus Adronic was a man who saw many bloodsheds. He was drenched in this. For his whole play, he’s bloody. It is very hard for him. His family. He kills them. Some of them. No one likes this play, this Adronicus. But I do. This is Ukrainian play. So! I call you: Titus”—he said, rhyming the word with “noose”—“because you remind me of this blood man.”

  “Okay,” said Titus, after surfacing from a long pull of water. “Call me whatever the hell you want.” Anything that would toss an extra shovelful over the grave of everything he’d left behind was fine with him.

  “Oh, it is too bad you cannot see the world with me, Titus. So much ports! Shanghai the girls are burning hot but expensive. Bangkok the girls are burning hot but cheap. The problem with cheap is dick remembers how much pockets pay! Do you understand this?” He laughed until it degraded into a cough.

  “So, Titus,” he said, wiping his pink eyes, “if you were no grain trimmer, who then?”

  “I worked. Inside the elevator,” Titus said, holding a small sip in his mouth to soak it. “Pool Six. Unloading grain cars. At night.”

  “Ah,” he said. “Dangerous work this.”

  “What isn’t.”

  “Yes, yes. This is a yes thing. Well, we are moored here tonight. Then tomorrow we go through locks. Tonight you would like drink that is not water? This is dry boat but there is much grain alcohol. If you have money. Maybe you want girl down there in your bed of roses, Titus?”

  “I’m busted,” he said, though he had a thousand dollars of the Native crew’s pay in his wallet. “But maybe you can get me a bigger container of water?” He’d had his heart set on drowning, not expiring of thirst, and jumping while still in a harbor would guarantee he’d be found. He would spare her that sight too.

  “Ah! Now you’re caring about your well-being self!” Vadim declared drunkenly. Then he seemed to fatigue and rubbed the back of his neck with his palm. “But I’m sorry, Titus, I cannot. This jar is already so much. There would be people noticing. There is not much vessels to go around on this ship. It is best way.”

  “Why are you doing this?” Titus said, trying to keep the hatch open a little longer, if only for the starlight.

  “What?” said Vadim, momentarily affronted.

  “Helping me.”

  “Oh! Well, Titus my friend, there is a beautiful, beautiful Ukrainian proverb: ‘He is guilty who is not at home.’ ”

  “That makes two of us.”

  “Yes! This makes all sailors guilty. Which is true. And maybe everyone is guilty who lives with their matinka no longer,” Vadim said mirthfully.

  “Suppose so,” said Titus, half-smiling, the other half of him dedicated to preventing a treacherous idea like home from finding purchase in his heart.

  “Oh, who is this Diane?” Vadim said as an afterthought when he was about to shut the hatch, and Titus’s breath stopped, as it does whenever another man reads your mind.

  “You cried name Diane in your sleep,” said Vadim. “Is it goddess? Girlfriend? Dream?”

  “Yes,” said Titus, fighting to blockade her from his mind, “a dream.”

  After another formless interval of sleep Titus became aware of the ship’s brush against steel, scraping its way into the locks. This continued until a rumbling began, and he knew the boat was being lowered. Titus tried to feel the descent but could not. He’d heard crews discuss these locks, a freshwater staircase that carried ships from the Great Lakes down to the Saint Lawrence as gently as a child putting a boat in a slip of rainwater.

  The hold grew stale and drowsy. His thoughts mixed and wandered. After years in the elevator, he knew grain released gases, carbon dioxide, mostly, but also others over time, and he worried the oats were deranging him in some manner. He closed his eyes and looked again upon the Indian crew in their ragtag clothes, overalls and perma-pressed shirts worn alongside garments of fur and hide, most of them in steel toes—or soled boots for t
hat matter—for the very first time in their lives. They walked tentatively, as though the cement was soggy spring ice on the lake. They’d brought them down from a remote reserve, Ojibwes—or Ahnisnabae was their word for themselves. Many couldn’t manage a proper English hello. The elevator’s regular crews had long refused to work nights, so no trouble there, but what irked the men most was how the Indians had brought their families along, how their women were camped in a lot near the railroad tracks in the harbor, babies strapped to them in beaded carriers, sage and sweet grass burning most of the time, laundry all hung up like flags of an invading army—a disgrace, some called it. In their eyes, some crucial separation was not being observed, and they revved their trucks near the camp during the day to disturb the night crew’s sleep. When one got his hand sliced by a shovel, an elder came and sewed him up with some animal gut. Titus and his best friend were relieved not to require a doctor. But overall the Indians were cautious, methodical workers, unlike the daytime regulars, drinking and fighting and carrying on. Altogether the Indian crew managed ten cars a night. Every night. “Those ones are industrious,” a grain inspector named Butler had remarked at shift change, “despite their lazy heritage.” Titus wasn’t proud of paying them so little, but they were poor, desperate for work, and his partner had convinced him they were doing them a favor.

  Traversing the locks seemed to take a day, though of course he couldn’t be certain, and Vadim didn’t appear. Titus rationed the water, allowing himself a teaspoon from the jar for every five hundred breaths he took, and before long his water was down to the amount of beer a man would abandon in his glass without thinking a thing of it.

  Luckily, before the nightmares returned, the hatch popped. Night again, starless this time, and the lights on the deck cut sharp angles into the hold. Vadim was sober and seemed hurried, gruffer, as though embarrassed by the camaraderie they’d shared last time. “I’ve come to tell you we pass Montreal in two days,” he said whispering quickly. “You can get off there. This is the last port call before ocean. Okay?”

  Titus said okay. Somewhere in the dark hours alone, he’d lost his conviction to drown. But Montreal seemed as good a place as any to die.

  “We are not docking in Montreal, but I know a tugboat man who hauls there. He brings supplies. Booze and other things. He will return you into the harbor.”

  Titus thanked him. Vadim looked like he was preparing to go. “Any chance of some more water?” Titus said. “Or even something to eat? These oats are twisting me up.”

  Vadim sighed. He put his hands over his face. “You know it is not easy for me to get this water,” he said sharply. “It does not look good carrying jars about. It looks like I am loafing. Or with moonshines.”

  Titus told him he could tie it to a string and dip it in the lake. “I’m not picky,” he said.

  “This is not the point,” said Vadim wearily, shaking his head. The wheedle of gulls could be heard in the air above the hatch, and for a moment Titus thought he would like to climb out, throttle this silly man, then go swimming.

  “Okay,” Vadim said after some consideration, “toss up this jar.”

  Vadim caught it and put it under his arm like a football.

  “This tugboat, in Montreal,” Vadim said before he shut the hatch, “this is not free. He is my friend, but he must make a living.”

  When Titus started digging for his wallet, Vadim shook his head. “There is a man,” Vadim said, shifting his weight and checking over both shoulders. “He is from the center of America somewhere, Ecuador, Panama—who knows. He has a name, but this is not matter to you. It’s a poison on the tongue. He is causing many problems for me. For your friend Vadim. He is a vile man. A nastiness. Like in Bill Shakespeare, or a novel by Charlie Dickens—yes! A man like Sikes.”

  Titus nodded. He couldn’t keep his eyes from the empty jar under Vadim’s forearm.

  “Well, this man has been stealing from me, Titus. He tells me I owe him money when I do not. He tells me we have made bets that no crew has witnessed. At night he comes to me when I sleep. He whispers that he will cut my a killings tendons. You know these?” Vadim made a slashing motion over the back of his leg.

  Again, Titus nodded.

  “So this is this thing I need helping with. You see I am small man. I am watchman. I watch. But you are not, Titus. You are a man who does not only watch. Who has seen much bloodshed. I tell this by your face. You have scars. You are a hardness. So, I’m hoping for this. Help this man fall from the boat. That is it. Like Bill Sikes. Give him what is his own. It would save me from so much …” His gaze fixed on the edge of the hatch as he trailed off.

  Titus took a breath. “I’m sorry, Vadim,” he said. “You’ve been real helpful. And I appreciate it. But I don’t think—”

  “No,” Vadim barked and grabbed the hatch. “I knew this. This is okay. This is my problem. You have your problem and I have mine. These are separations.” He said he would return with the water, then closed the hatch. Later Titus woke to find two jars of water had been tossed down into the hold while he slept. They were murky with green bits spinning in them like tiny meteors.

  Maybe it was the sight of his best friend’s blood dripping from the handcart he’d used to transport him or the limited oxygen or some mysterious fumes, but the texture of Titus’s mind had altered. There in the dark hold he watched time pour time down the drain indifferently, lying for hours, unchafed by boredom or unwanted visions. He played chess with old friends and directed theater productions entirely in his head. He remembered whole texts he’d read as a child, enough to recite them backwards. His time in the hold had nearly turned pleasant—empty spaces like a stack of newspapers printed blank, nothing but dates at the top of every page.

  He ate oats soaked in one of the jars and reserved the other for drinking. Soon from the scuffing sounds he knew the ship was again in a series of locks. Then for a period anchored. With the engines quiet he heard more voices above, some footfalls, then nothing. In the dead quiet he listened to the rustle and snap of himself blinking.

  Then the engines roared again. The ship sounded its foghorn. The boat rocked. After a while he detected a briny scent skulking into the hold. After another day he heard a tapping at the hull. All kinds of clean notes like a glockenspiel: ice, he soon realized. The water in both jars was gone when Vadim came again.

  “I’m sorry, Titus,” said Vadim sorrowfully. He was drunk again, his face rosy with blood.

  “We’re the sea’s music now, aren’t we, Vadim?”

  “This is what I’ve been trying to tell you,” he sobbed. “But you don’t making sense when you speak. It looks like you are taking vacations after all.”

  “What about Montreal?” Titus said, elevating his voice, less concerned with his own well-being than a man’s adherence to his word.

  “I have job here, you know,” said Vadim. “I had to paint winches. Grease chains. Low work, you must think, Titus, beneath you. But it must be done. And my tugboating friend did not come. It is not all easy for Vadim. He does not get to slumber all day in a soft bed.”

  Titus clenched his teeth and once again considered piling up a mound of oats so he could climb out and throttle the man, though now the hatch was even higher. Perhaps Titus was eating his way down.

  “But there is another problem,” Vadim said sheepishly. “This man I told you about. The Panamanian. Titus, I told this man about you when I have been drinking. A mistake. I am a talking friend, Titus, my weakness. And now he is going to Visser about you. He said this with his mouth. About how you have stolen your passage and have been eating the cargo. This is not good. He is also a rapist, this man. He boasted to me last night, as though I would applaud?”

  “Okay,” said Titus, “get to it.”

  “If you don’t deal with him soon, I don’t know if I can come again. Too dangerous for me.”

  Titus understood now his position. That he’d rid himself of his desire to die and attained something near peace in the dark
hold meant nothing. He would not go unpunished for everything he’d left broken behind him. It seemed fitting now that the price for no longer yearning to cast himself overboard would be to further degrade himself, but he’d already constructed the armored vault in which to put all the vile things he had left to do in his life, and its dragging weight meant there would be no more good days for him, no more comfort or kindness.

  “When?” Titus said.

  “He is on watch tonight, before me,” said Vadim, his eyes on fire. “I will fetch you when the time is clear.”

  Later, a knock came and the hatch opened, and rain fluttered in as Titus heard the slap of feet retreating on the wet deck. Titus had hoarded a large pile of oats that allowed him to grasp the lip of the hatch with two hands and hike himself up.

  On the deck, he drew the sweetness of sea air into his body. No stars, only a tin roof of cloud and waves crashing like shunting trains. He removed his work boots and set them beside the hatch, which he closed but did not fasten. He crept in bare feet along the railing in the dark toward the bow of the ship, as rain swept in fizzy sails overhead. He spotted the man: short, but sturdy looking, copper skin like an Indian, smoking, sparing the tiny ember from the spray with a small cave made with his hand. He stood exactly where Titus had weeks before, the morning of the accident, when he nearly plunged himself into Thunder Bay’s harbor, which he’d now left so far behind.

  With the sweet air in his lungs and his head clearing, Titus came to the knowledge he could do this man no harm. He’d picked up some Spanish while gambling with sailors laid up in Thunder Bay and was sure he could piece together enough words to inform the Panamanian of Vadim’s plot. Then Titus would throw himself at the mercy of this Visser. Titus had been beaten plenty in his life, and the thought of it didn’t quicken his pulse in the slightest. At worst he’d be thrown overboard.