If I Fall, If I Die

by Michael Christie

  But he said nothing, and soon sleep wafted over from her body into his, sharing it.

  Relaxation Time

  That morning she woke, marooned in bed—her only lifeboat now in a sea of panic. Will was gone, his imprint still rumpled in the sheets beside her, the doorbell ringing, had been ringing for some time. She knew instantly that to set foot on the floor today would mean risking everything.

  It rang again. Deliverymen were rarely this persistent. Will had locked himself out. Or it was Jonah, wanting to make up after their fight. Or some official, here because something had … she threw the sheets from her body, reached and guzzled an entire bottle of codeine syrup, then snapped her elastic twenty-five times and drew six deep breaths. Just as the codeine slid into her bloodstream like liquid lead, she dropped to the floor fast enough to keep the panic from grabbing her ankles and darted through the towers of paperbacks and trash and unopened packages and mail to the door. She threw it open and before her stood an older man, in a suit and topcoat, with a tempest of white hair and an apologetic smile.

  “Sorry to trouble you, Ms. Cardiel,” the man said warmly, “but I went by the school today, and the principal informed me that your son, Will, hadn’t been there for some time. So I thought I’d stop by to chat with him here.”

  “He’s out,” she said, the codeine a cold smolder in her now. Was she swaying or was it the wind in the trees?

  “Oh. Out?” the man said. “Any idea where?”

  “No, I don’t,” she said, bracing her hand on the doorframe, fighting to keep her eyes focused upon his, and not the pure disorientation and terror that lay beyond him.

  “You don’t know where your son is?” he said, surprised.

  Her mind gluey, she nearly told him that she’d begged Will to stay, but he just wouldn’t listen, then stopped herself. Who did he say he was? Had he?

  “You don’t look well, Ms. Cardiel,” he said. “Are you feeling ill? Perhaps I should come in?”

  “Wait,” she said, resetting, trying not to sway. The codeine made the floor impossibly soft beneath her feet, like turned earth. But he was familiar somehow, with his theatrical face, like someone from a Fellini film. “Who are you? And why are you looking for my son?”

  “Oh, my apologies,” he said with a wide smile. “My name is George Butler. And, come to think of it, I remember you and your brother as children, down at the elevator in the old days, bringing your father’s supper.”

  She placed him now. He was the grain inspector at the harbor, who Theodore called “the bug man.” In snow-white coveralls he’d go around checking lakeboats for pests, weevils and worms, before giving the okay to ship them out. He was educated and knew grain as well as Theodore. He was also the one selling Charlie those pills for his asthma that kept him up every night.

  “It was truly a shame what happened to your brother. But I have a feeling that wherever he is, it’s a much better place,” he said. “You were living away, I remember? Of course I’m in a different line of work now,” he went on. “You wouldn’t recognize very much on the harbor these days, I’m afraid, Ms. Cardiel. Unfortunately, child apprehension is currently the only growth industry in Thunder Bay.”

  “Wait, did you say child—”

  “Oh, no,” he said, putting his hand to his heart, “that’s certainly not why I’m here, Ms. Cardiel. But I am afraid your son has found himself mixed up with some boys who are currently on my caseload. Will’s got a bit of his uncle’s—shall we say—moxie? But I’m here to ensure his safety.”

  Everything was going too fast for her. She’d expected a deliveryman, a quick exchange. Her mind was sliding. This man’s mouth didn’t match his words.

  “Are you sure you don’t know where your son is?”

  “He said he had something important to do today,” she said thinly, shutting her eyes to keep the light out.

  “Did he, Ms. Cardiel?” he said, leaning closer. “Like what?”

  “He said …” She felt a great itchiness under her scalp; the codeine was already waning. She wasn’t sure how much more of the blinding doorway she could stand. “He said he’d left something behind, and he had to go get it.”

  “Maybe he was referring to this?” From behind his back he raised Will’s old helmet, dangling from his finger by the chin strap. “We found it in an abandoned shack frequented by criminals. It has your last name written in it, Ms. Cardiel. At first I thought it belonged to another boy in town, but now based on what you’re saying, I’m convinced that your son is in grave danger. Think hard for me, please: do you have any idea where your son went today?”

  She braced herself against the door, everything churning, the subway platform finally closing over her, and into her tumbling head came all the smells she’d been finding on Will’s clothes when he returned home from school: grease, sweat, blood, sawn lumber.

  Grain.

  23

  Will found him sitting in a straight-backed chair in the workhouse, the woodstove roaring like a cast-iron dragon. Titus had shaved, his half-grayed hair dangling at his unlined cheeks like slips of smoke. Beardless, his face was even more fearsome, all diamond-cut angles and the scars of hard Outside living, but younger than Will had expected. Closer to his mother’s age. Titus sat with eyes glazed and fixed, sweat sheening his brow, both hands plunged in the pockets of his parka with large coils of wire wound around the sleeves.

  “It’s you, Icarus Number One,” he said, clearing his throat and twisting his head with a queer surprise. His voice was hoarse, and Will pictured him awake all night, yelling at ghosts, Marcus’s included. “Sturdy choice of headgear,” he said.

  Will tugged at the strap under his chin. It was tight, but his orange Helmet still fit, though the cranial pressure had him feeling a touch dazed. Perhaps all that he’d learned Outside had made his head bigger. “Felt like I needed a little extra protection today,” he said.

  “And your compatriot?” said Titus.

  “Don’t know,” Will said. “He won’t be coming down here anymore.”

  Titus’s face fell and he shook his head. “I wasn’t ever in much danger of triumphing as his favorite citizen, but that Icarus could piss his name in a sheet of plywood,” he said. “You two should congeal together. Especially if you insist on perpetuating more ventures to this jurisdiction.”

  “Well, this is my last time coming down here. I came to ask you some questions.”

  “Allow me one last suffrage,” Titus added, standing. “If you’re capable. Plenty of time for exchanges as we venture.”

  “What do you need me to do?”

  With a twitch, Titus turned to the window to regard the sun-dazzled water. “There are ocean salmon in there. How they established is nobody’s purview. Stowaways likely. Salties suck ’em up as ballast and dump ’em here. When I was a youngster you could catch whitefish right off the piers. Baitless. Clean as a whistle. Fish lined up and bought tickets to get a hook in their lip, like it was fashionable. Now this juncture is so chocked with heavy metal and sick outflow, you’re better off snacking on your chemistry set than some fresh-pulled whitefish.” Behind everything Titus said was a monologue of murmur, a faint whistle, like the ghostly scrapings of his mother’s fingers on the strings of her guitar.

  “Is that why you won’t drink the water? Because it’s polluted?” Will asked, but from there Titus tipped into nonsense, every so often pausing to lurch at something, like a dog snapping at an invisible fly. He cleared his throat for long periods while mumbling, just angry syllables hissed under his breath.

  In the pocket of his hooded sweatshirt, Will gripped the handles of the garrote he’d constructed that morning. He’d removed a string from his mother’s guitar and tied it between two pieces of dowel he’d once made nunchucks with. On his walk to the harbor, Will tried to buttress his courage with the image of Titus pinning Marcus down near the creek and inflicting him with more scars, like that pastor and his wife had done, but it wouldn’t resolve. So Will settled on pic
turing Titus Inside, rooting through their drawers, perusing Will’s masterpieces, thumbing his mother’s page-turners, watching her sleep in San Francisco, poised to smother her with one of her malodorous pillows.

  Then a rustling came from Titus’s coat pockets, and this seemed to evict him from whatever reverie he’d been lost in. “Let’s flitter,” said Titus.

  They descended the stairs to the water’s edge, where Titus, breathing desperately, tugged a sheet of tattered canvas away to reveal a wooden skiff lodged in some reedy mud near a clutch of unidentifiable rubble. Titus lifted a pair of boots from the hull, stepped out of his foul shoes and put them on. Will didn’t even need to examine his footprints for the hexagon shape to be certain they matched, same as his grandfather’s.

  “We’ll load her trim and even, so she doesn’t capsize or go to toothpicks,” Titus said, tugging the massive hose that Will and Jonah had assembled out from a thicket of goldenrod nearby. As they worked, coiling the hose into the small skiff like a noodle onto a plate, Will saw a fish carcass bob near the shore in a blizzard of flies. Titus also tossed into the boat several grocery bags full of stones. Soon Will began to sweat, and he scratched at his hair, itchy under his tight Helmet.

  “Hop in, Icarus Number One,” Titus said after everything was loaded, pointing to the small area they’d managed to leave clear at the front of the vessel. “We’ll chatter while we venture.”

  Pure terror riveted Will in place.

  “ ’Course you’re not impelled to,” Titus said. “Not everyone’s chopped up for seamanship. Marcus quivered at the outset.”

  “You took Marcus out on the lake?”

  “Taught him the rigging I know. He rightly flourished. But sailing wasn’t my teacup. Mine were lakers. Salties mostly. But we need to endeavor this quick before the cove ices to the breakwater,” he said. “Won’t have another swing this year.” Will thought it best not to remind Titus it was spring, in case it agitated him.

  Will knew this was his last chance to get answers from Titus, and his stomach felt like a swimming pool with a thousand maniacal kids in there, all splashing and screaming. Titus cleared his wrecked throat as the skiff bobbed at Will’s shins. A song his mother used to sing with her guitar came into his head: “Lord I can’t go a-home, this a-way …,” meaning poor and naked and destroyed, and Will felt the same way. His real life Outside had been short, but he’d already managed to lose everything dear to him—Marcus, Jonah, Angela, skateboarding—and if he didn’t confront Titus, how long would it take for his mother to fall deeper into herself, until she was not much more than a shadow, a wraith? How long after would MacVicar call Social Services, who’d whisk him to some foster home, perhaps even the one where Marcus had lived, where Will would share a room with four other sad, abandoned boys? But if he could force answers from Titus, nobody would need to be afraid, not Jonah, not his mother, not Will. The Butler would call off his wolves. Maybe even Marcus would return. The Outside would go back to how it was, before Will had ruined it. Who better than Will understood that those who were not brave, who didn’t perform dangerous feats, wound up imprisoned in a bedroom somewhere, staring at the wall, terrified to breathe.

  “It’s a good thing I told everyone I know where I was going today,” Will belted out confidently, even though he didn’t have anyone left he could tell. “Otherwise, they might be worried.”

  “Sturdy hypothesis, Icarus Number One,” Titus said with an undisturbed face. “Can’t be over thoughtful, specially bobbing on the water.”

  Will climbed into the seat, and Titus pushed off and pointed the skiff at the gap in the breakwater a mile out, the skiff’s bow clicking against the meager waves. The water looked frigid, and Will wished he’d worn his lightbulb-changing wetsuit. Titus lowered the outboard and began yanking the starter ferociously. When it caught, he blared the engine, and the roar buried the ambient hush of the harbor.

  As they plowed away from shore, the skiff low in the water with the weight of the hose, the air whisked with impossible freshness across Will’s face, recalling to him that first walk along the creek, when everything was still amazing and shot with wonder. He watched the water darken from blue to black beneath them like a bruise. Aside from that time his mother said he’d once smacked his head on a pool deck, Will had never been immersed in water deeper than their bathtub. Swimming was an activity he couldn’t even consider. He only hoped the protective foam in his Helmet would keep him afloat if it came to that.

  Looking back at Thunder Bay, Will recalled a painting his mother showed him in an art book she said had belonged to his grandfather. Ships in a harbor, some carts going alongside a cliff. “See anything?” she’d said. When Will replied no, she pointed to legs sprouting from a tiny splash in the corner like a flower. “I don’t get it,” Will said. “Icarus,” she said, indicating the splash. “He flew so high the sun melted his waxen wings and he fell to Earth. Except nobody noticed. Nobody cared. The world’s like that sometimes, Will. It’s too heartbreaking to look at.”

  As they cruised farther out into the bay, Titus began rummaging in the pockets of his parka. He produced something, seemed to reject it, then placed it beside him on the bench seat. Will recognized it as a chickadee, except it wasn’t moving. Then Titus took out a wicked-looking fish knife and set it beside the bird. Will tried again to force himself to imagine Titus slicing Marcus, his throat, his chest, but he still couldn’t stitch the vision together in his mind. “Those elevators’re the tallest strivers for hundreds of miles!” Titus yelled over the motor’s white roar, pointing back at the harbor. “In my era, men came from all over, either to toil in them, or to toss themselves from the top! Some sad souls secured jobs only to perform that!”

  “Why are your fingerprints in my house?” Will heard himself yell. And when Titus didn’t react, Will knew he’d only whispered it into the snoring of the motor. Soon the skiff passed through the southernmost gap in the breakwater—a giant’s version of a stone garden wall, car-size chunks of granite fitted together, all of it submerged hundreds of feet below—and Will knew that this passage had altered something fundamental inside him, that he was finally something different from a boy. Titus yelled about the millions of pounds of stone that went into the breakwater, the equivalent of five pyramids sunk beneath the lake. “Indian labor built it, mostly!” he said. “They put up a hefty chunk of Thunder Bay, but nobody honors their exertions!”

  Out on the unsheltered water, a chop kicked up. No other vessels were on the lake except for a giant lakeboat anchored miles past the breakwater that Titus yelled was from Brazil and carried potash. Then Titus cut the engine and set the skiff to drift, the weight of their cargo dragging them on. The vessel lapped through the waves with the sound of slapping someone’s wet belly. A powerful inevitable feeling stood up in Will and informed him that he had this situation under control: he’d been training for this moment his whole life—all his Destructivity Experiments and brave Outside acts had prepared him well. He’d be as brave as Jonah jumping on that wolf, as brave as Marcus snatching the map from the Butler. He’d overwhelm Titus, not head on, but sneak up, garrote him, and force him to reveal where Marcus was. Already the man could barely breathe, so Will imagined strangling him would be something like popping a balloon with his bare hands or trying a new skateboard trick, scary and unwieldy at first, but easy once you barged through and tried it.

  “You hungry, Icarus Number One?” Titus asked.

  When Will shook his head, Titus lifted the dead chickadee from the bench and neatly stuffed it into his mouth like a pastry. He sat chewing, silhouetted by open lake. Stunned, Will listened to Titus’s soft crunches, his graying hair flying in the wind and eyes somewhere near gone. It occurred to him that Titus was leagues crazier than he or Jonah ever suspected and had suffered damage more titanic than anyone he’d ever met Outside. Titus swallowed, sucked air through his teeth, and stood. The skiff wobbled unsteadily under his weight and that of the hoses and the shopping bags of roc
ks, and a few pints of water splashed over the gunwales. Will tightened his grip on his seat as gulls whirlwinded overhead.

  “Those resemble seagulls, but that’s negatory!” Titus said pointing upwards, too loud, as though the motor was still going. “They’re lake gulls!” He whirled around as they passed over, and the skiff tipped beneath him.

  “Can you please sit down, Titus?” said Will.

  “Gorge themselves on garbage all the livelong day! Riddled with blight, metastatics, and parasites!”

  The skiff teetered worse, and a larger slap of water came over the side. Will saw it pooling beneath the labyrinth of hose. “Titus!” Will said.

  “I took a cruise once,” he said, pointing to the anchored laker. “ ’Course that was another era. Best to leave it in the water.” Then he drew another, larger bird from his pocket and bit it bloodlessly in half, a tuft of down clinging to his lower lip.

  As he gripped its dowels in his pocket, the garrote seemed suddenly ridiculous and toy-like in Will’s hands. Which string had he selected to make it? The highest or lowest? He couldn’t remember. Hadn’t his mother broken these strings while strumming the gentlest of folk songs? So how could this grown, lunatic of a man not be able to do the same? If Titus turned hostile, Will’s only hope would be to shoulder-check him overboard and start the engine before he could climb back in. He’d never make it to the breakwater. He could barely climb stairs.

  Then Titus began to hop up and down at the back of the boat, whooping at the gulls. More water swamped into the skiff, soaking Will’s shoes. “Sit down!” Will yelled. “You’ll sink us!”

  Suddenly Titus produced a sound near shrieking, and it poured slush down Will’s spine. He barked splinters of sentences and incantations as a diabolical force overrode his face, an amalgamation of surprise and sorrow and rage. But it was Titus’s avoidance of Will’s eyes that was most worrisome. Titus’s meeting his gaze seemed to form the last vestige of Will’s safety.