She thanked him for all his hard work and passed him the sandwiches she’d packed. “You and Whalen better hurry if you want that boat loaded before the freeze” was the last thing she ever said to her brother.
How foolish she’d been to think he would stand as the exception to the Cardiels’ tragic legacy—that he’d escape their oversized helping of accident and woe. So in some sense, she hadn’t lied when she’d offered up Will’s spotty immunization record as proof his heart was malformed. It was a metaphor, truer than any fact she could ever teach him. Because the truth was that every second of every life was lethally dangerous. Especially in Thunder Bay. Especially for the Cardiels. Especially for Will.
And to anyone who would disagree, her only defense would be: What is raising a child except lying? It begins with the first shhhh … everything is going to be … and only gets worse from there.
10
“Want to go for a walk?”
Jonah. Eye-level with the window in New York. The Outside, embodied, peering in.
Will had been up late painting while his mother read mysteries in San Francisco. When he’d heard feet scraping on the shingles, Will’s murmuring heart had spasmed and nearly quit. He’d been convinced it was the Bald Man—his best guess for who’d left the boot prints in his yard—and was about to take a T-ball swing at his face with the fire poker when he recognized the voice.
“Now?” Will said, watching liquid waves of heat flee into the night.
“Sure, now,” said Jonah, eyes darting sidelong, his face caramel-smooth in the low light. “I need your help.”
“I can’t …,” Will said, one hand over his heart, the other setting the poker down discreetly on his desk.
“Why not?”
“I’m … uh … I’m painting,” he stammered. “For an exhibit.”
“Your masterpieces?” asked Jonah with a smirk, nodding at Will’s color-smeared canvases.
Will’s heart nearly drowned. “They’re only paintings,” he mumbled. “My stupid paintings.”
Jonah shrugged. “They’re cool,” he said, almost smiling. “Must be fun to go big like that on real canvases—those things aren’t cheap. Anyway, that’s all right. I thought you were brave from the way you bowled over that wolf. But I guess not. Anyway, I’m meeting Marcus tonight. I heard from that weird girl Angela you were looking for him, and I need someone to watch my back, so …”
Will’s heart knocked. “Marcus? You know where he is? You found him?”
“More like he found me. Anyway, sorry to disturb your creativity. See ya around, Will.”
“Wait,” Will said, more childishly than he’d planned. “Stay right there.”
Will tiptoed from his studio and opened his mother’s door with a soft puff, the air inside San Francisco creamy with her scent. She was plunged in sleep, her Relaxation Headphones on, a rare placid expression spread over her face. Will lifted her headphones, uncovering the distant whoosh of water, like a toilet running somewhere, and set them on her nightstand. Sleeping with them was new, and he didn’t know if this was a good sign or not. He stood watching her, fingering his forehead and kneading the scars on his thigh, his souvenirs of the Outside and now the only evidence he’d ever left the house. And here tonight was the only chance he’d ever get to find his friend. He’d made a promise to stay Inside and be her guardian, but maybe finding Marcus would be the best way to protect her. To prove that the Outside wasn’t nearly as dangerous as she believed. That it couldn’t swallow a boy whole. Besides, he’d never promised to stay home, only that he’d be careful. He’d make tonight a low-impact Adventure. “A walk,” just as Jonah had suggested.
They could’ve snuck out the front door, but Jonah seemed intent on coaxing Will onto the roof. The boys managed to disconnect the screen, then detach the window from its track. Will trailed Jonah along the nut-tighteningly high roofline, to where they could jump to the metal shed where Will had met Marcus and shimmy down. Including ice sliding, it was easily the most dangerous stunt Will had ever performed in his entire life, and surviving it broiled him with joy.
Outside, a set of fast clouds raked the stars. Though nearly spring, cold was still stringent in the air, the dead grass hairbrush-stiff with frost, and dwindling continents of snow lingered on the boulevards that edged the bare street. Somehow the snow made the night not as dark, like a day that had misfired. As they walked recklessly in the center of the empty road, Jonah pressed his skateboard against his hip, making no attempt to ride it. The skull graphics on the underside of the board resembled Jonah’s drawings, and Will lost himself for a moment in the detail.
“I never got the chance to say thanks for saving me. Again,” Will said. “I can’t believe you killed it. A wolf.”
Jonah nodded. “Felt bad when I stomped him, but he was done the second he bit you. Were you scared?”
Will kept his eyes forward and weighed his answer. He was unsure if Jonah knew about the Black Lagoon, or if he’d ever faced anything like it himself. Will doubted it. Like Marcus, Jonah seemed perfectly tuned for fearlessness. “Yes,” Will said carefully.
Jonah spit plentifully on the ground. “That’s a good thing,” he said.
“Were you?” Will said, still unsure if he’d said the right thing.
“Sure, but I just hate wolves more than I like you,” Jonah said, a smile breaching on his lips. After some walking and mental arithmetic, Will concluded that this also added up to Jonah liking him in some measure. Who knew, thought Will, with the warmest gutsensation he’d had so far Outside, all he had to do was get mauled by a wolf to make another friend.
“Why don’t you like wolves?” Will asked after a while.
“They don’t think,” said Jonah. “Plus they steal from my brothers’ traps. Plus they run together and attack weak things. They’re as bad as men.”
“Your brothers trap? Like animals?”
“Muskrat, beaver, marten—little stuff like that.”
“Do you go with them?” Will asked, floored by the idea.
“No. I’m allergic to fur,” Jonah said. “And I like the city better. More concrete,” he said, patting his skateboard.
“All I have is my mom,” Will said with a sudden vision of her throwing back the covers of his cot to find the unwashed clothes he’d bundled there and dying of fright. “I used to have an uncle,” he added proudly. “But he’s dead.”
Jonah nodded again and tucked his chin to his chest. “Look, another reason I came to get you is because I need to say sorry. Remember how that wolf went after this backpack?” Jonah said, pulling at the straps with his thumbs. “Well, it was Marcus who gave it to me to watch over.”
“Angela said you guys used to be friends?”
“Yeah, he taught me to skateboard when he first came to Thunder Bay. He was the best skateboarder I’ve ever seen outside of Thrasher. Smooth as water flowing. But he quit because he broke his board and couldn’t afford another one. Then he got into what he called exploring. Which meant going into all the places he wasn’t supposed to. Abandoned buildings. Culverts. Old mines. He’d find all sorts of things.
“Then a while back he showed up at my house really late. He was shaking, and his face was white. First time that kid actually looked scared. Said he wanted me to hold on to his backpack. He had something important in there. A piece of paper. Figured it would be safe with me because of my brothers. I didn’t want to do it, but his being scared scared me. So I said okay.”
“Who was he hiding the paper from?” Will said, remembering again how Marcus hid that day in his yard, and maybe not just because he was stealing garden hoses.
Jonah stopped, squared off, and leaned into Will, his close breath dragging a carbonated tingle up Will’s spine. “I think it was Butler,” hushed Jonah, “the Butler. My brothers used to run booze from his stills up to the dry reserves up north. They quit because an old lady, an elder, got struck blind drinking it, and no money was worth poisoning our people like that. But even my bro
thers are scared of the Butler. After the elevators shut down, he hired every desperate dockworker and hard-ass former railway man down there. Plus he breeds wolves. Keeps them with him always. Kids around here say you should never forget anything in the woods. Once the Butler’s wolves get your scent, they’ll follow you all the way into your bedroom.” For a moment Will’s mind flashed to the Helmet he’d left behind beside the creek. “The thing is,” Jonah said, “I think he sent that wolf to get Marcus, and it picked up his scent on this backpack. Would’ve got me if you hadn’t body-checked it like a true Canadian hero.”
“Jonah,” Will said. “I saw someone when that wolf was on top of me. A bald guy. In the woods. Short and stocky.”
“Hmm,” Jonah said. “Not the Butler. He’s got a full head of hair, all electrocuted and snow white. Probably one of his men.”
Will inflated with pride at his genius contribution and fought to contain his beaming as they scuffed their feet into the hushed night. After the wolf attack, his mother had ordered him new boots with grips like dirt-bike treads, even more acutely embarrassing now with the snow essentially gone. Will was suddenly aware he had to pee. To his horror there were no bathrooms Outside at night. Anywhere. He hoped dearly there would be one wherever Marcus was.
Jonah clattered his skateboard to the ground and hopped upon it, all regal grace and fluidity, zipping ahead under the propulsion of his left leg. He rolled through a temple of yellow streetlight, his hands open and searching, as though feeling the pavement’s texture as it passed. Then he crouched, frozen like a cat stalking a robin, before cracking the rear of the board down, rocketing himself upward with the apparatus clinging impossibly to his feet like a burr. After this, the silence of flight but for the sibilance of wheels spinning, then a growling return to the asphalt and his lackadaisical ride-away.
This tidy morsel of magic that Jonah had performed seemed almost another trap to test Will’s gullibility, another shaken pop can or match bomb, but Will couldn’t resist.
“What was that?” he said reverently, when Jonah button-hooked back.
“What?” said Jonah.
“What you just did.”
“That? It’s called an ollie.”
“But how do you make it jump like that?”
“I don’t really know,” he said, smoothing back his bangs. Will wondered if his brothers cut his hair like that, or if he did it himself. “It just works. I taught myself by reading Thrasher and watching Marcus. You jump and slide your front foot and it happens. I don’t even understand it. It’s better that way.”
“Do it again.”
As Jonah cracked off a series of identically lofty hops over manholes and storm drains, equal measures of recognition and rapture struck Will like sheet lightning. It was an act of such miraculousness that Will felt unworthy of it. Every dance performance and action movie and Destructivity Experiment he’d ever known seemed to be contained in this one gesture, this ollie. Will’s legs itched to try, but somehow he understood the sacrilege of asking for a turn on Jonah’s board. Plus, he had to take it easy on his heart.
“How long have you been … doing that?” Will asked.
“A few years. My brothers pitched in and bought me a board. Believe me, I’m not that good.”
“Looks like you were born on it.”
Jonah let go a rare laugh. His teeth were crooked, cool crooked. “My brothers were always shoulder-checking me, tripping me down, shoving snow in my face. You get good at staying on your feet.”
Then, as though to contradict him, a grinding sounded from beneath him, and Jonah was hurled to the half-frozen pavement with a naked thwack of palm and hip.
“Jonah!” Will said rushing to his side. “Can you hear me? Are you okay? Do you want an ambulance?”
“I’m fine, Will,” Jonah said through pain-gritted teeth while rolling over, then lifting himself incredibly into a sitting position on the ground. He kicked away the small pink stone that had thwarted his wheel.
“Don’t get up,” cautioned Will. “You may have a spinal. Or a concussion.”
“Chill out,” Jonah said, laughing, as Will was casting about for a phone booth.
Will fell silent as Jonah rose and they resumed walking, quietly loathing his mother and the Black Lagoon for so thoroughly screwing his understanding of what constituted a catastrophe.
“Why don’t you talk at school?” said Will, hoping Jonah wouldn’t stop talking all over again.
“They expect Indians not to,” he said. “So I don’t want to disappoint them. Talking only digs you deeper in that place. They handcuff you with your own words. You ever say anything that brought you good there?” Jonah asked.
Will remembered describing the visualization blueprint he’d drawn on his first day and shook his head.
“I talk all the time,” said Jonah, his limp diluting with every step. “I talk to myself. I talk to my brothers. I’m talking to you. I talk when I want. But when I’m there, I keep my mouth shut, do my schoolwork, and go home.”
Will noted they were nearing the path to the culvert. “So where’s Marcus?”
“He left me a note written in blood on birchbark. Said he wanted to meet. Typical Marcus. I heard he was living on his own in the woods, stealing things for the Butler to make money.”
“Garden hoses, right? You guys use the match bombs as a diversion while Marcus steals the hoses from the backyard.”
Jonah did a little palm-clap. “Very good. But I only taught them how to make those bombs. That was it. I don’t need money. My brothers are working at the call center now. Anyway, you can’t buy your way out of Thunder Bay. I’m leaving my own way.” Will was about to ask how when the mouth of the culvert yawned before them, black as deep space, and a force overtook him, denying the obedience of his legs. He watched Jonah plunge into the soupy dark. Will’s heart was double-bumping lethally, but more than his nascent Outside bravery, it was the mounting distress in his bladder—now a stingy jellyfish spreading its tentacles across his pelvis—and the prospect of relief that pressed him into the eeriness of the tunnel. The dark was pure as the linen closet in London with the door shut, and Will’s eyes gulped it greedily, the borders of his body lost to him. He put one foot in front of the other, and the opposite opening approached like an inhospitable planet.
“Come on, Will,” Jonah beckoned from the woods when he emerged. After he walked through a stand of pine, five flashlights snapped, and Will found himself surrounded by a Stonehenge of boys.
“You again,” said Marcus, his eyes incandescent with mischief and bravery. “Couldn’t resist coming out for another taste of the world, huh, Will?”
Will slyly watched Jonah’s reaction to see if his household’s situation was common neighborhood knowledge, but found no confirmation on his new friend’s face. Marcus’s hair was longer than before, now well past his eyes, greasy and matted with leaves. He wore a filthy one-piece snowsuit—a cross between caveman and spaceman. On his feet were snowmobile boots, much smaller than the hexagonal tracks in Will’s yard.
“I’ve been looking for you, Marcus,” Will said, speaking quickly. “I’m going to school now. And I’d got really good at ice sliding until a wolf—”
“—Too much talking,” the biggest Belcourt Twin said, the light of a calculator watch flaring on his wrist. “Time is nigh,” he added.
Marcus rapped Jonah’s skateboard deck with his knuckle. “Are the Home Ranger and the Rolling Indian up for a little visit?”
Will and Jonah followed the boys, romping deeper into the woods, the only sound a faint rustle of highway. After a while, their amber beams reached out to define a structure in the scrub, a shack, crafted of corrugated metal rusted oxide-red, a few wood scraps, and a tarp worked in somehow. One wall was comprised of a huge green road sign—TORONTO: 1376 KM—which reminded Will momentarily of his basement.
“Like my place?” Marcus said, unhitching a padlock with his scarred hands and ushering them inside. “Built it myself,�
� he said, swiveling his light and their collective attention around the interior. Will had expected the trappings of delinquent boys—discount sodas, firecrackers, various Destructivity Experiment material—but it was surprisingly neat. There was a camping stove, a few chairs, a bedroll, and a single book, titled Great Lake Navigation. Nearly fifty garden hoses hung from nails everywhere, green, black, and orange. Stacked on a shelf were hundreds of tins of sardines and many pint boxes of blueberries. Struggling to disguise his envy, Will was thrilled his theory had proven correct: Marcus had been living Outside. In an Inside entirely of his own making. Wonderfully alone. Beyond the reach of adults, with nobody to worry over him or bombard him with guilt—it seemed to Will a tremendous luxury.
“You approve, Will?” said Marcus. “I already heard about your little tangle with that wolf. Impressive. Thanks for helping to keep my stuff safe.” Will resisted the sudden urge to embrace Marcus and tell him everything that had happened since they first met in one great typhoon of description: his Destructivity Experiments, the taste of the leaf he’d chewed, the boring excitement of school, his blood bouncing on the ice, his dead uncle Charlie, Jonah’s miraculous ollie. “Oh, and the Twins saved this for you,” Marcus said, pointing to the old Helmet he’d left by the creek. Will didn’t know if it would be worse if he ignored or acknowledged it, so he settled on a meaningful nod.
“You’ve got a ton of hoses in here,” said Jonah. “You still selling them?”
“Haven’t seen him in a bit,” replied Marcus. “We’ve built up a surplus. But hoses don’t matter anymore.”
“Haven’t seen who?” asked Will.
Marcus looked at the Twins. They nodded.
“He used to work for the Butler,” Marcus said. “But not anymore. Nobody knows his name. He mumbles and never really makes sense. He salvages metal downtown. Tears out the guts of all this city’s old industrial pigeontraps. That’s where I met him. We leave him hoses, and he leaves money in grocery bags.”
If I Fall, If I Die Page 11