If I Fall, If I Die

by Michael Christie

  The Panamanian couldn’t hear Titus when he called, so Titus touched him kindly on the shoulder. The man spun and his eyes cracked open and popped with panic and he started yelling in a guttural tongue that Titus had no acquaintance with. The words came faster the more he spoke, the way an avalanche gathers speed. He was something closer to black, light-skinned, but black. Tranquillo, Titus repeated a few times, until the man clenched his fist over his cigarette with a hiss and swung. Titus half-ducked and took it hard on the ear. They grappled. Perhaps it was his time in the hold, or the lack of oxygen, or his oat diet, but Titus did not find the strength he’d expected. They scuffled for some duration, each trying to upend the other, slipping wildly on the slick deck. When exhaustion took them, they spent some time in a clinch. Each instance the man made to cry out, Titus squeezed his chest and killed his breath. Titus tried every word in every language he knew of to reach him, even making some up, as the man breathed in his ear like a dog, but none of it registered inside him. After a period of rest, the man commenced thrashing in earnest and wailing his fists. Blows landed on Titus’s chin and face and neck. The man was strong and pinned Titus to the rail. Titus grabbed the seat of his rubber pants and desperately hoisted upward. Upended, the man clutched at the air and caught hold of the railing with a leg and an arm on his way over. Clinging there, he started calling in his inscrutable language toward the rear of the ship where the wheelhouse was. People’s names, sounded like, and Titus wondered momentarily if they corresponded to his parents, or friends, or crewmates. Panicked, blood and voices howling in him, Titus struck once at the man’s bulging throat and it yielded and instantly he lost all wherewithal to breathe. He choked like he’d swallowed a box of fishhooks, dangling there, before strength abandoned him and he dropped into the dark roar.

  The next day Vadim came to the hatch with a grin. He lowered down a bucket on some twine. In it was cabbage, fried beef, potatoes, aromatic as anything ever put before him. “You have saved me, my friend,” Vadim said.

  Titus sat looking at the bucket but did not touch it.

  “But I must tell you. Visser is not happy about the losing crewman. He said he was sure-footed. Seasoned. And that he does not believe in falling accidents. So, Titus, they are searching the ship. And it won’t be long before they see the holds.”

  “I’ll entomb myself here,” Titus said. Sculpting an old word in the air with his tongue comforted him.

  “Don’t be stupid. There is weeks of your shit down here. They’ll find your traces.”

  Titus looked beside him. Blood from his nose and face from when the Panamanian had struck him had left clumps in the oats like cat litter. “I knew this would transpire,” he said, unable to believe Vadim couldn’t tell he was already dead.

  “Come, Titus. I’ve found you a new place.”

  A great weariness came over each of his muscles. “I need to wash,” Titus said with a sudden distaste for his hands, the blood that had been on them.

  “No, no, no—” Vadim began.

  “Either that or I ring Visser,” Titus interrupted.

  Grumbling, Vadim led him to the lockers at the base of the wheelhouse. Titus stripped, set the shower as hot as it would go and kept his head down, water hammering his neck as he hissed every word he’d ever known into the steam. He put his clothes at his feet, letting his own steps and the runoff clean them. He shaved with a razor he found hanging from a screw in the scummy tile. After, he wrung his clothes over the drain and pulled them on wet before returning to the hatch. He lay down, the oats coating him like batter.

  Back in the dark, finally clean, Titus turned his soothed mind toward the walks he used to take with her to find the blue and yellow prairie wildflowers that grew all along the tracks that snaked their way east to the elevator. Sown by seeds that the threshers inadvertently swept up along with the grain, the flowers were found all the way down the line in high summer. The thought of this set him weeping.

  Vadim returned that evening and helped Titus climb up onto the deck. He threw a line and looped it over a lifeboat hanging from some rigging high above. “They’ve already searched these, so they should be safe. And here,” Vadim said, handing Titus a laundry sack filled with oats and three jars of clear water. “I found some more vessels,” he said quickly.

  Titus took the line and shimmied up to the boat. He snapped away the vinyl cover and crawled beneath it. The bench seats of the boat made it so there was nowhere to lie flat, and the wind rattled the craft as though it was airborne. He shivered when night came, piling the oats in the driest corner and wrapping himself in the laundry bag, missing the muffled gloom of the hold, the warmth of his nest like the afterglow of a lover.

  The next day, he discreetly opened the part of the cover that faced outward and bathed various parts of his body in a triangle of sunlight. He tossed a few oats to the seabirds that followed in the ship’s wind, listening to their gorgeous shrieks, until a crowd began to form around his hiding place and that was the end of that.

  It was the following day that Titus sighted the green shoulder of land. He tried releasing the lifeboat, but the mechanism was padlocked. Hurriedly, he drank all the water and sealed air in the jars as tight as he could manage and tied them up with his money and boots in the laundry bag. He drew back the vinyl cover and jumped as far out from the ship as he could manage to clear the engines. He bobbed for hours in the high waves, clutching the jars, which weren’t enough to buoy him completely but lessened his labors.

  When he emerged from the seawater onto a mucky rise he was met by black men on rafts preparing some cylindrical traps. After he’d finished vomiting from exhaustion, one of the men prodded his chest with a fishing rod, probably to see if he was a ghost. But Titus could find no handhold in the sounds they made, could make no order of their faces. He walked inland from the dock and followed a baking dirt road for hours until he reached a disorienting city. There he found a bank. He handed them the money from his wallet and the smiling woman handed back colorful bills in a wad so enormous he had to distribute them among the pockets of his trousers.

  He bought half of a barbecued goat and some yellowish fruit chunks in a plastic bag and brought it to a public sitting area. As he ate, garbage burned in a wire incinerator nearby, and the smell pleased him. He rented a room in a squalid hotel he felt he deserved and walked for hours each day, finding the Panamanian’s face in the crowds, as well as his best friend’s, speaking out loud to himself, happy at the incomprehensive looks he received in return. After a week of wandering, he asked for directions to a port where he contracted on a ship carrying chemicals out of Liberia.

  After that he signed with other boats. Years passed at sea, quick as a shudder. Aughinish. Hamburg. Latvia. Antwerp. Murmansk. Vancouver. Shanghai. Rotterdam. New Orleans. Nagoya. Amsterdam. Hay Point. After all his time on the water, both stowed away and now as crew, he attuned himself to loneliness, to the captivity of oceangoing, to a life spent between ports. Visions rarely troubled him. Though he still disliked the talking required with the other crew, minimal as it was, and frequently retreated to his cabin to read and whisper into his pillow.

  But over the years, his whispering became harder to contain, and he managed to offend a Polish first officer and was let go. Sitting beside an American in a beachfront drinking establishment in Shanghai, just a long table under a bale of thatch, he overheard the man say he’d signed a contract on a bulker to the Great Lakes. Titus followed him to the wharf and signed his name.

  He rode again through the locks, this time climbing them like a long staircase. But he learned from a crewmate that Thunder Bay got very little grain traffic these days. So he hopped off and caught freights back and forth across Canada, east and west, each time sailing through Thunder Bay, unable to locate the courage to jump off. In his new life he could pass days like a blink and months in an afternoon. He found he preferred rail travel to shipping. On trains he met every manner of low creature, tucked away in all the nooks and crannies tha
t railcars accidentally provide. A man who injected grain alcohol into his veins with a hypodermic needle, who could attain pure, shambling drunkenness with a capful of cheap vodka. Another man who snorted brown powder from a baby food jar and slept twenty hours of twenty-four. People missing half their heads, half their hearts; people who’d stabbed their families, and who’d been stabbed—by their families and otherwise; people who’d been raped and had raped, not necessarily in that order. There existed a crude system of exchange between American and Canadian currency, cigarettes and jugs, the rates for which were maintained collectively in their heads. They passed around the ugliest money he ever laid eyes upon. Bills soaked in blood, urine, semen—animal and human. Money begged for, killed for, hidden and squandered and stolen a thousand times over. He never raised a finger toward any of them, because none was worth helping or hurting, and he received the same indifference in return.

  Then one day while catching out of Steinbeck, Manitoba, he climbed onto a gondola car loaded with big packets of lumber that already sheltered a bedraggled man. “Room for two, fella,” the man said, and Titus tucked himself into the space beside him. Titus nodded but didn’t speak. Since he’d been riding trains, the whispering had worsened, and his words were further jumbling in his head, as though someone had taken a sledgehammer to the card catalogues in the library of his mind.

  But after a day of watching the prairie rip past from their nook on the highballing train, the man zeroed in closer with a finger in Titus’s face. “I recognize you. The elevators. We worked an unloading crew,” the man said. “I heard you was dead.”

  “Things … change,” Titus managed to get out right.

  “Sorry I can’t rightly place your name there, fella,” the man said squinting. “But welcome home besides.” Luckily, by the empty closets of his eyes and the way decades of cloudy brandy and sleepless transience had carved from him all glimmers of vitality, Titus could tell this was a man accustomed to ghosts.

  After that Titus hopped off in the yard near Pool 6 and considered going to her straightaway, but first he wanted a look at the elevator. He needed to take it slow, as though he were coming up from the deep ocean. Finding the elevator abandoned, he slept overnight there, and despite the sickening sight of the water out front that had swallowed his best friend, he found comfort in its smells: train diesel and the linger of grain dust. From high in the workhouse he’d look up to Thunder Bay and scarcely recognized it after all those years. But it was good to be near where she was. Better even.

  Then one morning he shaved and washed up and regarded himself in a rearview mirror he’d pulled from an abandoned truck. With his skin tanned and eyes clear, he looked like something not quite dead, something almost worth forgiveness, even for the worst things, especially by someone as good as she was. He followed the creek up to her house and found it dark. Part of him was proud of her for leaving. He returned each Sunday night for years, watching, until one day the lights were on, and he saw her, twirling a little boy around, dancing together in the lamplight among the furniture, and it was then he realized a wall had been built between him and the world of houses. Between him and the world of calendars and dancing and dinners steaming on tables and children drinking glasses of milk with two hands. He could not track his mess into their house. Into these bright, buoyant lives. He belonged to a different world now. Outside hers.

  16

  One October afternoon Will returned from skateboarding to find something pasted to the outside of the picture window in Cairo:

  please go back inside for your own good. or else. there will be turmoil.

  He rushed out and snatched it down before his mother saw it. The words were crudely formed on a flattened carton, ballpoint pen dug into the waxy cardboard.

  “Why the hell would a threatening note say ‘please’?” said Jonah later when Will brought the sign to their crime lab. “Doesn’t make any sense.”

  “And does it mean, like, there will be ‘turmoil’ no matter what?” Will wondered. “Or does it mean ‘or else there will be turmoil’ and the period was like an accident?”

  “No clue,” Jonah said.

  After some further discussion, they brushed the sign for prints and came up empty. The boys returned to Will’s house and searched the soil under the window. There they discovered the same boot prints Will had found the previous winter, same hexagonal imprint, right where Will had watched the blue jay die. This time Will ran Inside to fetch his mother’s old Polaroid camera from behind his boxed masterpieces in Toronto. “I have an idea,” he said.

  The boys rolled downtown to a workwear store called Pound’s that they’d often skateboarded behind that summer, which, judging by its mustiness, dated signage, and general disrepair, had been open since well before Will’s mother last breathed fresh air.

  “Yup, used to sell those,” said the aged, squinty clerk when Will showed him the photo of the boot print, forgetting all the times he’d shooed the boys from his parking lot. “Not anymore, though. Used to assemble them right here in Thunder Bay. But I sold my last pair years ago.”

  “Any idea who wore them?” asked Will.

  “Workers mostly,” he said. “A popular choice. Lots of fellas wear them. Miners, boilermakers, grain trimmers, loggers—you name it.”

  “Right,” said Jonah once they were back Outside. “So we’re looking for someone who’s insane, can’t breathe, collects garden hoses, has poor grammar, and wears old boots nobody sells anymore. Awesome.”

  “Every clue counts, Jonah,” said Will. “But that last word of the note really does seem like something the Wheezing Man might write.”

  A week later, while doing laundry in Toronto, Will pinched a pelt of dryer lint from the trap and tossed it in the trash. Remembering that his mother had asked him to fetch her old Bolex for her, he stood on an overturned bucket and retrieved the camera’s dusty case from back near the wall where he’d stashed Marcus’s bloodied shirt. When Will was younger, she’d taught him how to use the Bolex to make a short Claymation movie of a volcano erupting and engulfing a village. Will realized now that he and Jonah could make their own skateboarding movie, like the Californian skateboard videos they worshipped, and resolved to do it once they found Marcus and everything went back to normal. Will yanked aside a box, crashing masterpieces to the floor, and something caught his eye.

  “Where did these come from?” he said, setting the pair of work boots down on his mother’s comforter, boots that had sat unremarkably in Toronto for as long as Will could remember, the exact hexagonal pattern he’d been searching for embedded in the tread.

  “Oh, those,” she said absentmindedly while writing in a notebook. “They were your grandfather’s.”

  “Why do we have his boots?”

  “Will, what’s wrong?” she said, putting down her pen, her eyebrows knitted. “Why do you look so worried?”

  “I asked a question.”

  “And I answered it,” she said. “They were your grandfather Theodore’s. We got them when he died. They were all that was left of him.”

  Will was about to let the whole thing drop when he noticed a chalky substance had flaked from the soles onto his mother’s navy bedspread and everything clicked. “Did you write it?” Will said. “Have you been wearing these, Mom? Outside?”

  “Will, what’s wrong with you?” she said plaintively, with a snap of her elastic. “Please lower your voice.”

  “Well, have you?” he said, picturing her sneaking secretly around the back walk to paste the note to the window, exactly as he’d done when he first met Marcus what seemed like eons ago. And just like her to write a guilt-inducing please on something that was supposed to be threatening.

  “You must be kidding,” she said.

  “Then why are they dirty?”

  “That’s grain dust, Will. Both your grandfather and your uncle worked at the elevators. It coated everything they owned: their clothes, their hair. Your uncle hung his work clothes outside the door and show
ered before dinner, it was so bad. Want me to show you the hook? It’s still there.”

  Will was heartsick with all her lying and acting and faking, and at that moment some part of him turned inside out: all the pity and compassion and responsibility he’d once felt for her had finally compacted into a molten core of disgust. She’d already squandered her own life, and now she wasn’t brave enough to let him live his own. He’d conquered his fears by forcing himself Outside and going to school and skateboarding and making a friend while she cowered in her bed and lied about everything that mattered to him most. The truth was, she could leave anytime she wanted, except she didn’t care to, because she was selfish—and for this more than anything he loathed her.

  In a red haze Will dug into his pocket and held up the note he’d found. “Look familiar?” he said. Her eyes flicked over the crudely arranged words—the strange please, the odd turmoil, the contentious period and barely scary TV cliché threat—and her jaw dropped open like a glove compartment. He watched as something in her tipped over and terror flooded in to replace it. Then she shuddered in panic and exploded with a million questions. “Forget it, it was only a prank,” Will said. “Some hockey players at school.” Before fleeing to New York, where he locked his door and yanked on headphones, setting Public Enemy to a teeth-numbing volume.

  She might have questions, but he was drowning in them. Questions like how Charlie really died, and where Marcus was hiding, and what the Butler’s wolves would do to him when they finally picked up his scent. Maybe she didn’t write the note. Maybe she hadn’t been wearing the boots. But at least now he had proof. Proof of what, Will couldn’t exactly say. But their investigation must be on the right track.

  He and Jonah had somebody worried. Somebody other than his mother, for once.

  Relaxation Time