If I Fall, If I Die

by Michael Christie

  After the constable pulled on his zippered boots, he set a big hand on Will’s shoulder. “I want you to steer clear of that Indian boy, Jonah. That Turtle family is no good. I know you’ve been riding those boards of yours around downtown, trespassing and damaging property—”

  Will kicked into his best surprised routine, “What do you mean?”

  “Save the act. That boy’s dangerous, son. A magnet for calamity. Most Indians don’t know how to conduct themselves in a city. Jonah and that Marcus are cut from the same cloth. You need to make sure you don’t turn yourself into one of those kids I haven’t much interest in finding.”

  Then he gestured gravely to the kitchen. “That woman in there has had enough distress in her life,” he said. “She doesn’t deserve any more grief from you. Look, I know you lied to me in my office. Your mother hasn’t left this place for years. But if she slips any further down, I’ll have to ask Social Services to step in, Will. And I don’t want that. Which means your job is to prevent me from making that call. Do I make myself clear?”

  Will mumbled something to get him out the door, then retreated to New York. He lay on top of his comforter on his back, his room darkened by blankets he’d plastered over his windows, studying the ghostly pages torn from Thrasher that wallpapered his room as completely as they did his imagination.

  Some time later came a soft knock on his door. With his head buried in the pillow, Will felt the bed cant under her weight. “You don’t have to go to school today,” she said from beside him. “You can stay home with me. I’ll slow-cook us a lasagna.”

  “Sure,” he said, his voice muffled.

  She snapped on his bedside lamp and let out a tiny cluck when she saw the scars on his arms that he’d forgotten to cover with a long-sleeved shirt. “Oh, honey,” she said, turning his elbow, “do they hurt?”

  “They’re fine,” he said. “Scars don’t hurt Mom. They’re healed.”

  “They don’t look fine,” she said.

  Suddenly he couldn’t tolerate her hands on him. He tore away and rolled to his side. “It’s just skateboarding,” he said.

  “But you’ll ruin your career in elbow modeling,” she joked, but Will didn’t laugh, because there was still guilt stashed somewhere in it.

  “My skin is mine to ruin,” he said. “Or did you only loan it to me?” He reached and angrily clicked off his light, wreathing them in near darkness.

  “Will,” she began again after a while, “when you didn’t come home last night, I called Jonah’s place and no one answered.”

  “I told you their phone was broken.”

  She took a deep breath, then drew back her elastic and let it go. “And the constable mentioned you’d been down to visit him at the station? Down at the harbor?” she said, her voice gaining in pitch. “Asking about the boy who had … who had disappeared? Is that true?” She sobbed out the last word.

  Will said nothing.

  She wept then for some time, the bed jiggling like the ride you put coins in at the mini-mall where he and Jonah skateboarded at lunch. He could sense her soggy face hung above him, as dangerous to behold as a solar eclipse.

  “How am I supposed to trust you now that you broke your promise?” she said, regaining some composure. “After you’ve been lying to me about where you and Jonah go all day?”

  “Not nearly as much as you’ve been lying to me, Mom. Like why you’re so afraid of the harbor? But you know what? It’s fun down there. I like it.”

  “It was dangerous then, and it still is, Will,” she said. “Maybe worse.”

  “That’s where Charlie died, right? Of a heart attack? Right? Constable MacVicar told me he died in an accident.”

  She shut her eyes. “Oh, Will,” she said, “I’m so sorry.”

  He scoffed. “And there’s nothing wrong with my heart, is there?”

  He watched her take five slow breaths. “It was a metaphor,” she said.

  “A metaphor for what?”

  “Our family, Will. The Cardiels. Your grandfather, your uncle, me—we don’t have the best luck. I wanted to tell you that you need to be especially careful, but didn’t know how …”

  “My friend Angela,” Will said, “she’s actually going to die, Mom, like for real. There’s nothing anyone can do. And you know what? She’s not even scared. She enjoys the time she’s got left.”

  “Will—”

  “So what. I’ve lied to you like crazy since I’ve been going Outside. I’ve nearly died more times than I can count. And there are going to be more. There. Now we’re even.”

  They sat again in silence, and Will fought against synchronizing his breathing with hers, waiting to breathe in when she breathed out.

  “I feel so far away from you now,” she said, her voice emptied out.

  “That’s how it’s supposed to be, Mom,” he said.

  “I suppose so,” she said. “Just please let the constable do his job. That’s all I ask. You work on growing up. That’s dangerous enough.”

  Will waited until Relaxation Time to go spelunking into the most neglected cupboards of Paris for dusty-lidded cans that his mother wouldn’t notice missing: beets, herring, coconut milk, water chestnuts (whatever those were), fruit cocktail comprised mostly of soggy, tasteless pears, as well as a bag of uncooked oatmeal and some past-stale hunks of bread she kept for croutons.

  “Are you going back to the harbor?” she said while he was putting on his skateboard shoes, an unimpressive sternness to her voice.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be ‘relaxing’ right now?”

  “I asked you a question, Will. Did you hear me?”

  “I’m going out,” he said, swinging his upturned palm at the door as though to indicate the whole world.

  She started shaking, then stiffened, and drew her hands to her hips. “Will, I forbid you to leave this house.”

  “Okay sure, Mom. And I forbid you to stay home.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “Or what?” he said, stepping backwards through the open doorway.

  Her anger opened into a pleading look like a flower blooming. “I don’t know what will happen to me if you go,” she said pitifully.

  “You’ll be fine,” he said, taking another step back.

  She started walking toward him, arms outstretched, stepping onto the tile landing. “Don’t go, Will.”

  “You’re going to have to come get me,” Will said with another backwards step down the stairs, which he knew she thought was dangerous but actually wasn’t at all.

  She minced forward, slippers shushing on the tile, unsteady as a woman with no handhold on a speeding train. For a moment Will cheered her on, promising himself that if she could only step Outside now, he wouldn’t need to go back to Pool 6. She would fix everything. The same way she berated store managers on the phone. He pictured a whole new life beginning for them: sitting in those white-tableclothed restaurants he’d whizzed past downtown, watching the rain hit her coat as they walked under trees, him reassuring her that lightning never hits you, even if you dare it to. But as he watched, her face constricted as though she’d received devastating news, and she quivered and slowed before stopping, still two feet back from the opening. When tears flashed in her eyes and her body shook, conquered, Will turned and walked away. Because nothing would ever change. She’d always be this way, and it was a waste of precious Outside time to wait for her.

  Tears are salty water, he thought as his skateboard roared over the sidewalk beneath him like an entire pack of wolves growling at once. Like sweat. And who ever heard of a person sweating too much. It was good for you. Natural. Maybe people were born with a finite amount of tears Inside them, and all a person had to do was let them all fall, and then they’d be free.

  He found the Wheezing Man sitting up in his pallet bed with an enormous book split in his lap.

  “You want me to spritz us with a passage?”

  “Okay,” said Will, unshouldering his bag. Despite the man’s limited mobil
ity, Will remained leery of getting too close.

  The Wheezing Man began to read, but the words and sentences he produced seemed too confused and unrelated to one another to be published in any book. From the spine, Will noted that this volume was supposed to be about shipbuilding and various lakeboats, yet the man talked mostly of dark clouds and steel cables, about people weeping for years and animals giving birth in a river. After a while he switched to another book that was supposed to be about the Napoleonic Wars, except he held it upside down. He managed to say the word blood ten times in one sentence, pausing only to recapture his wheezy breath or to draw slow, careful slugs of water from a tall glass that he sat down carefully like a fine jewel.

  “Where did you get all this stuff?” Will said after the Wheezing Man stopped, gesturing to his bookshelves and the room’s lavish furnishings.

  “Happened over the bulk of it in the garbage,” he said. “Procured some of it. Fashioned the rest. You wouldn’t fathom what citizens turf nowadays.”

  Will pulled a can of coconut milk and another of beets from his bag and set them beside the bed, vaguely regretting that it was food he wouldn’t dream of eating himself. He placed the bag of dry oatmeal on a nearby table.

  “How salubrious,” the Wheezing Man said, leaning over to tuck the oatmeal into a drawer, shutting it carefully.

  Will passed him a hunk of his mother’s bread, which, even though it was stale, Will hoped was his most appetizing offering. The Wheezing Man took a bite and shut his eyes. A look of contentment overcame him, and Will worried he’d dropped to sleep.

  Will took a deep breath. “It was you who grabbed me that night in the woods, wasn’t it?”

  His breathing quieted down. “I was fixed to warn Aurelius, but I couldn’t pinpoint him,” he said after a while. “Luckily the old man’s wolves missed too.”

  “Why’s he called the Butler?” Will asked.

  “He’s the worst version,” he said, chewing. “Only assists himself. But he used to be a bona fide man. University man. Escaped Thunder Bay for two years at Queen’s but had to boomerang back to care for his simpleton sister. Came back quoting Wordsworth and all things. Worked in a white coat checking grain boats for weevils and worms. Until he took a loading boom to his head and surrendered half of himself.”

  “What half?” Will said.

  “The good one,” he said.

  “I once perpetrated for him,” he added, finishing his bread. “Squirreling out good grain from this old hulk for his Neverclear.”

  “And you and Marcus were getting hoses for him, right? For his gas tanks?”

  “Principally,” he said. “Then young Aurelius went and nosedived into a volcano.”

  “He stole the Butler’s map, right? To make money? But what if I can get it back? Would the Butler leave him alone?”

  Dismay crossed the man’s face. “Wouldn’t account much,” he said. “The Butler’s already brewing up more of that coffin varnish to satiate his clientele.”

  “What was Marcus planning to do with the money?”

  “He was itching to flee this latitude. Dreamt of a little sloop. A one-hander he could wind himself.”

  “You mean a boat?”

  “A cabin. A little outboard. Said it was a habitat he could cart with him. Like a turtle. Never again get lodged anyplace he didn’t care for.”

  “Do you think he did it?” Will asked. “Made it out?”

  “Not yet,” he said, pulling at his beard.

  Every day that week, Jonah and Will ditched school to trudge through the fresh-fallen snow to the harbor with cans and food scraps for the man, who said his name was Titus. Will was astonished by how much it took to sustain him, the sheer weight of it. Jonah contributed some sausages that his brothers had made from a bull moose they’d brought down last spring, and the boys had to convince Titus not to eat them raw.

  After all those years caring for his mother Inside, Will slipped effortlessly into the caretaker role—fetching food and “unblighted” water, filling the voids in his faltered abilities—and was warmed by that old thrill of domestic usefulness that sustained him for so long Inside. Will felt oddly at ease with Titus, despite everything. He was more like his mother than anyone he’d met Outside, probably attributable to their mutual craziness.

  That Saturday Will coaxed Jonah into redressing Titus’s legs, which now bore long scabs, black as slugs. More worrisome, though, was how both his calves were hot to the touch, swollen tight as Jonah’s moose sausages.

  “Erythromycin,” Jonah said, tossing onto the table the rattling vial he’d fetched, his cheeks pulsing after a breathless run up to County Park in the frigid air. “Two times daily with food. My brother Gideon got them after a tattoo of his got infected. Expired two years ago, but they’ll have some fight left in them.”

  Apart from the possibility that Marcus would reappear at Pool 6 and the opportunity for Jonah to practice his medical skills, the snowfall was how Will had convinced Jonah to frequent the elevator. Will’s second winter Outside had been nothing like his first. Gone were the thrills of exploration and novelty. This time it was all drab light and frozen-footed walks down to the harbor. Because skateboards required dry pavement, winter for an obsessed skateboarder was a time of despair and unimaginable yearning. Will secured Titus’s blessing to build some skateboard ramps in the large room where they’d found him beaten, the Distribution Floor, he called it. They extrapolated the design from Thrasher: ribs placed laterally, curving upward on a template, bent plywood surfaces screwed down over those. The wood they found in abundance around the harbor, two-by-fours used as concrete forms, tool sheds, and old beached dories they busted up. It took them a week to sweep up the bird droppings, and Jonah launched ten sagging garbage bags’ worth out onto the lake ice, where they sat like periods.

  Jonah had Enoch write him another note, and after years of signing his mother’s checks, Will found forging his own a cinch. While their classmates sat deadened in their desks, the boys rode their ramps each day, high above the lake, threading their way between pillars and hoppers and conveyance vents, back and forth at breakneck speeds, grain dust gummy in their eyes. There they withstood unplanned splits, shinners, debilitating knee whacks, wrist tweaks, bent fingers, hippers, elbow bashings, back scrapes, rolled ankles, and chin abrasions. Despite the injuries, or perhaps because of them, Will’s skateboarding was further improving. His new favorite trick was the “disaster,” which entailed ollieing 180 degrees while on a ramp, then, instead of landing safely back in the curved transition, hooking his rear wheels on the lip. Only through a finicky rocking motion executed immediately could he escape being hurled to the concrete floor. It was like picking a lock, pure joy when it worked, pure mayhem when it didn’t. After trekking back up the creekside, Will would return home, stinking of pigeons and wheat, hacking up dollops of grain dust like little uncooked loaves, spitting them with delight into the sink in Venice.

  “So what are you Icaruses training for? A tournament?” Titus said, after dragging himself from the workhouse over the high bridge to the Distribution Floor for the first time to look on. His antibiotics were nearly done, and his infection was improving. Lately he’d been calling them “Icarus Number One” and “Icarus Number Two,” for reasons they didn’t grasp.

  “No tournament,” said Will.

  “So what’s the schedule then, the import-export?” said Titus.

  “Just to do it,” said Will. “To get good at it.”

  “I can’t help but sustain that you boys should’ve been wagering your necks down here in another epoch: unblocking grain bins, leaping between freights, doing a usefulness, rather than bleeding for no account whatever. But very least you’re putting this old maid to use with your roller toys,” Titus said, patting the bricks. His beard split with a smile. “That’s a sunshine.”

  “They aren’t toys,” Jonah said.

  “What’s their frequency, then, Icarus Number Two?”

  “Skateboards a
re … they’re like … tools,” Will said.

  “For what career description?” Titus replied skeptically.

  Will took a moment to think. Unable to find the right words, he blurted the first thing in his mind. “For falling,” he said.

  “Well,” Titus said, shaking his head. “Every youth needs a war. I found mine. This constitutes yours. But don’t overshoot it. Smashing through those windows will earn you a two-hundred-and-twenty-foot blitzkrieg to the wharf.”

  Later that day, as though on cue, Jonah careened off the edge of the ramp and sunk some ragged metal in his palm. “We’ll see what we can accomplish,” Titus said, holding up a pair of needle-nosed pliers he’d boiled in a pot on the woodstove. Jonah, mute with pain, surrendered his bloody hand to Titus, while Will fetched the serrated knife from his backpack and stood beside them, just to be safe. Titus dug with the pliers, and for a moment it seemed like he was torturing Jonah, and Will was trying to imagine attacking when Titus backed off. “The woodland only hurts you because it loves you,” he said, flicking the shard at the wall.

  “Your ancestors mind you filleting yourselves up like this?” Titus said later when they were heating some cans of beans on the woodstove.

  “Who?” said Jonah.

  Titus shook his head. “Your”—he strained to produce the correct word—“parents,” he said.

  “Father? Is that you?” Jonah said, eyes turned upward with his hands clasped at his neck, scanning the filthy rafters as though communing with angels. “Am I going to be all right?”

  “Roger that,” said Titus. He put his head down. “How about you, Icarus Number One?” he said, almost too quiet for Will to hear.

  “My mom doesn’t like me skateboarding. Or coming down here. But it’s my choice.” These days she was scarcely leaving San Francisco, and the boys had even stayed over at Pool 6 again twice more and she never said anything. Will figured she was too Black Lagooned to check his room at night. “Anyway, that’s her problem,” said Will. “My mother cares too much. About everything. She’s basically psycho.”