“But why does he want hoses?” said Will. “Is he a gardener?”
“Who cares?” the big Twin said.
“Does he wear boots?” said Will.
“Question time’s over,” said Marcus. “Look, it doesn’t matter, because now that Jonah’s got my bag for me, I’ll be leaving rotten old Thunder Bay forever and won’t need to touch another garden hose again in my life,” he said, rubbing his hands together like a cartoon villain.
“But where are you going?” Will said, his eyes misting at the notion of Marcus leaving forever, “What about this place you built? And—”
“—Yeah, Marcus, the thing is,” Jonah began. “I still have the backpack, but I don’t exactly know where your paper is. I had it stashed with my drawings, and then they all just … disappeared.”
Marcus’s eyes sunk into black pits, and he sat down on a crude wooden bench and pressed his palms to his cheeks, pushing back his bangs into a kind of crown. The scars on his neck grew red as stoplights. The Twins inched to the edges of the cabin. “It’s okay,” said Marcus in an ineffective, self-consoling way that reminded Will of his mother. “The Butler still can’t find me here. Neither can his wolves.”
“But Marc,” one of the Twins said, “he knows it’s you who took it.”
“You could give it back,” said the other Twin nervously.
“It’s too late for that,” said Marcus grimly, setting his forehead on the table.
“Look,” interjected Jonah. “Maybe Mr. Miller snatched it from my desk. I could ask him?”
At the mention of Jonah’s desk, Will’s stomach dropped and a milkshake of bile rose in his throat. Thrust before him was his first Outside crime: the drawing he’d stolen and given to Angela on his first day of school. How could he now risk his only chance at friendship by telling Jonah he’d taken it? He had to get it back from Angela. He could only hope she still had it and hadn’t boiled it down to make a Jonah-scented perfume or something.
Perhaps it was the thrill of finding Marcus, or the bulge of guilt in him, but by this point Will’s bladder was on the cusp of detonation. Any second he’d shower everyone in Marcus’s cabin with a boiling brew of blood and urine. Afterwards, surgeons would have to fashion Will an artificial one out of something gross like a sheep’s stomach or a gall bladder—whatever that was.
“Marcus, where’s the bathroom?” Will said.
Marcus lifted his face and cast his eyes around the cabin theatrically. “Now where did I install that lavatory …,” he said, hand on elbow, two fingers to his chin.
“Are you fucking kidding?” the big Twin said.
Jonah leaned into Will. “Just go outside, Will,” he whispered.
Will exited through the rickety corrugated door, listening to the Twins’ snickering wane as he plunged into the brush. He walked until he found a stump that was vaguely toilet-like—hollow with one section risen up at the back. He fished out his penis and brandished it, but nothing ensued. He’d never peed anywhere other than Venice or the strange urinals at his school that reminded him of children’s coffins made of porcelain, all tipped up on end. He was thinking about how reckless and unlawful it was to deface the forest this way, especially since lately he’d started liking trees, when a thick arm tightened across his neck.
“Stay still, prawn,” a wheezy voice said. “I’ll twinkle your throat like a stripe. Don’t entertain whimsies about it.” Another arm grappled his waist, squeezing the effervescent jellyfish of his bladder, which was now crawling electric up his back.
“Who’re those zygotes in utero?” he said, nudging Will to the shack.
“Who?”
“The mini-titans, rooting through the groundswell!” the man yell-whispered, his breathing textured with tiny pops and wheezes like the embers of a dying fire.
Will managed to rotate his head but the face was sallow and scooped out by darkness. “Just boys. One of them lives there.”
“Oh, so that’s the differential, is it? Well, what’s my address?” the man hissed. “Quick!”
“I … don’t—”
“Okay smarty-pepper, what’s yourself?”
“My address?”
“And don’t conjure me that swimming in pool six.”
Will whimpered the name of his street as he released a painful zap of urine into the brush, squeezing it to a halt.
“Your name, pipsqwuak!” he panted. “Put your groundhogs behind it.”
“My name is Will …,” he said, straining.
The man emitted a little gasp, loosening his grip momentarily. He drew close to Will’s ear, and his tone softened. “You’ll operate best by vacating here, chummy. This venue is the worst refuge. He’s imminent.” Then the man ratcheted his arms again and began to drag Will into the woods. For a moment, Will felt nearly calmed by the man’s force, as he sometimes did when his mother Black Lagooned so bad that her before-bed cuddles bruised him. And it was amid the sanctum of this thought that release arrived, full-steam and warm, deflecting off the man’s coat and whooshing over Will’s legs, splashing into his dropped jeans and trickling through his cuffs like downspouts.
“Orchard fire!” the man bellowed, releasing him, and Will landed in a flat-out sprint, hoisting his pants as he crashed through a barbed wire of branches, the moon swinging overhead in the night sky like a scythe blade loosed from its stick.
He soon dashed into the culvert with sweat scorching his face, his still-healing thigh tearing away from the bone. He dropped his arms to pump at his sides through the tunnel. When he was two doors from his house, the air snapped with a new injection of cold, and tiny flakes were sent to spiral into the air, almost not falling at all.
Bursting through the window into New York, he shucked the urine-soaked pants from his legs and camped under the covers of his cot, his chest thudding like a speed bag, on the brink of going Black Lagoon supernova. He lay awake for what felt like hours, waiting for his eyeballs to pop and his heart to perform its last kick and his life to ebb. But soon Will grew leaden, and before long he crashed headfirst through the plate-glass window of sleep.
11
Will lay low until the following Monday, when he woke early and departed for school before his mother emerged from San Francisco.
“Happy to have you back, Mr. Cardiel,” said Mr. Miller glumly, wiping his glasses on the hem of his golf shirt before draining the noxious contents of his mug. When the bell rang, Jonah wasn’t at his desk; neither was Angela. Will approached Wendy, Angela’s next-closest friend, and learned that Angela had been sent to Toronto for special treatments. “They don’t have the right machines in Thunder Bay,” Wendy said grimly, revealing a glimmering briar of braces when she spoke.
With the school bell still in his ears Will jogged back through the dripping catacomb of the culvert, this time with only a tickle of fear, and plunged into the woods on the other side. After some searching he found Marcus’s shack between two wooded hummocks. It was half-dismantled, the corrugated metal and chip wood splayed outward on two sides. The garden hoses had vanished, as had the sardines and blueberries and camp stove and bedroll. Will failed to find any boot prints in the hard dirt around the shack, which was crisscrossed with roots, but he did turn up a few lifeless chickadees and grackles on the cabin’s perimeter.
The streets of County Park were narrower and less treed than those of Grandview Gardens. The driveways harbored pickup trucks, mostly, all with tool-bearing racks and locking containers. Curiously, there were no power lines overhead, and every third house had a green box out front that read DANGER! BURIED CABLE! aside the image of an electrocuted man, twisted in rapture.
Will located the address Mr. Miller gave him in a battery of brick townhouses. After a spell of complex unlocking issued from behind the door, it was opened by an enormous shirtless man with the same handsome gauntness and precise athleticism as Jonah, though he was stouter, with thick crow-black hair to his shoulders and the voice of a giant, as if his chest doubled as a furnace
. A tattoo of two black, red, and yellow eagle feathers strung with barbed wire curled around his thickly muscled ribs. He rumbled that his name was Gideon and showed Will Inside.
Will watched the big man relock the sheet metal–reinforced door, further bolstered by three deadbolts and an iron crossbar. Inside, the house was nearly empty, all linoleum floors with no carpet and minimal furniture, scant artwork on the walls other than a large photograph of a black bear standing on the hood of a car at a dump. Perhaps because no mother lived there to decorate, Gideon’s tattoos and some beaded moccasins lying abandoned by the door, yellowed and stiff as stale bread, were the only ornamental things around. They must’ve lost everything in the fire, Will thought, but even so, it seemed so temporary, as though they could pack up and leave at any moment—a stark contrast to how his mother crammed their place with books and furniture and wallpapered it with Will’s boring paintings so that they could never leave, even if they tried.
“The Doc’s in his office,” Gideon said, directing Will down the back stairs into a barren unfinished basement. At its center hung four pieces of fabric from the ceiling, establishing a tent-like rectangle.
“Why weren’t you in school? I was worried about you,” Will said, drawing back the fabric to find Jonah reclined on a neatly made mattress, reading. Will tossed some paper-clipped sheets onto Jonah’s bed. “Here, I brought your homework.”
Jonah looked up from a large hardback book and smiled, black bangs cast over one eye. “I was worried about you, too, Will. I mean more than usual,” he said. “I got my brother Enoch to call the school this morning so I could sleep in. Last time it was the house fire, this time I have scoliosis.”
“You never had a fire?”
“No. I just wanted to stay home for a while to study and draw. I learn twice as fast when I’m not in that classroom. But I was, like, ‘Enoch, you could’ve just said I had mono, dumbass.’ ”
“Sorry about leaving you. I was supposed to have your back,” said Will, before launching into an account of his puzzling and frightful encounter with the Wheezing Man, playing up the adventurous drama of his escape, omitting the pant wetting.
Jonah said that after Will left they were waiting in the cabin when there was a knock at the door. “Marcus thought it was the hose guy, but then there was some growling outside, and he freaked and kicked a hole in the opposite wall and told us to scatter into the trees. I was running with him for a while until we hit the creek and he yelled for me to run through the water to put off the wolves and he’d lead them the other way,” Jonah said, lowering his eyes. “That was the last I saw of him.”
Will slowly unzipped his backpack and handed Jonah his drawings. “The important one is missing, isn’t it?” Will said, his throat tightening. “I took them from your desk for Angela. But now that she’s in Toronto,” he added, “there’s no way we can get Marcus’s paper back.”
“So that’s how you saw my masterpieces,” Jonah said, shaking his head. “I’m not mad. I never should’ve held Marcus’s stuff for him. I always told him that Thunder Bay was just itching for a reason to see us dead or in jail. But he couldn’t stand school. Said being inside for that long made his legs shake and his head hurt. Anyway, it was his mistake for crossing the Butler like that. Now he’s on his own.”
“But why does the Butler want it so much? It was only a grid with some Xs on it.”
“Marcus was going to use it to make money,” Jonah said, shrugging. “Enough for him to leave Thunder Bay forever, which he always talked about.”
“You said you heard growling before everyone ran. Do you think the Butler and his wolves got him?”
Jonah lowered his head. “I don’t know. It was dark … Marcus is quick. He knows how to disappear. He probably got away …” Then Jonah’s eyes defocused.
Will sat on the bed. “Except what, Jonah? It’s important.”
“Yeah,” Jonah said softly, “well, I heard him call out.”
Will waited.
“But he yells things all the time,” Jonah said. “He’s always faking dead and crying wolf for a joke. And I was still splashing through the creek—but sure, he said something, something I thought I’d never hear him say.” Jonah took a breath. “It was help.”
“We need to find Marcus,” Will said, fighting a sudden storm of tears.
Jonah scoffed. “And how are we going to do that?”
“Ask questions. Search the Outside. Investigate.”
“I don’t know, dude,” sighed Jonah, slumping back on his mattress. “Indian kids go missing all the time. Especially orphans. Nobody in Thunder Bay even blinks.”
Will took a moment to examine the train of burgundy-spined medical books—exactly like the one Jonah had been reading—arranged on a shelf of cinder blocks and boards, the only furniture in his apartment other than his bed. Will recognized them because his mother often consulted theirs whenever the Black Lagoon made her think she had a terminal disease. “You’re not sick, are you?” Will said.
“No, I’m just interested in how people work,” Jonah said. “I’m on the second last one. My brother Hosea stole them from a house he broke into because he did some yard work for a doctor who refused to pay him. Hosea thought there’d be one of those money stashes cut into them. Lucky for me there wasn’t.”
Will was astonished Jonah had somehow mustered the energy to read all those books himself, with no mother to do it for him. Then he leaned close. “Doctors are supposed to save people, right?” Will said. “And Marcus helped you that night. Now he needs us.”
Jonah picked up a green urethane skateboard wheel, pinched its bearings, and swiped it into a blurry spin, watching it for a while. “How about this?” he said when the wheel slowed. “Since Marcus quit, I’ve been skateboarding alone. And after witnessing your ice-sliding skills, I’ve been meaning to tell you to get a board.”
Will recalled again the sheer divinity of Jonah’s skateboarding. He’d known desiring a board immediately would speak poorly of him, would degrade the seriousness of the endeavor. But now here was Jonah offering the green light and Will nearly buckled with excitement.
“So before we do anything,” Jonah continued, “you’re learning to skate. Because I’m not rolling around with some White kid speed-walking behind me all summer. And after you become a skateboarder, I’ll become a detective.”
“It will be the perfect cover for our investigation!” Will exclaimed.
Jonah’s face pinched. “How come you’re always so excited about everything? It’s like you’ve never done anything before.”
“Sorry,” Will said, fighting to camouflage his joy.
Jonah laughed and swept his bangs from his eyes. “Deal?” he said, lifting his hand and aiming his fist at Will with his wrist cocked.
“Deal,” said Will, his eyes welling again with gratitude and excitement, resisting a profound urge to tackle and cuddle his friend. After a second Will realized Jonah was waiting on him to do something. Will lifted the same right fist in exact imitation and nodded his head knowingly.
“That’ll work,” said Jonah, dropping his hand.
To his mother’s relief and delight, the next morning Will claimed a fever and stayed home from school. When he heard footsteps on the front porch he ripped open the door. “I want you to stop bringing these, okay?” he said to the teenage carrier about to tuck a bagged newspaper between the doors, as they’d arranged long ago.
The boy pulled out a little notebook. “You’re paid up until the end of the year, Will Cardiel.”
“I’ll give you a hundred dollars if you stop, like forever, no matter what your boss says.” The paperboy’s eyes lit, and Will darted for his mother’s checkbook.
After that Will went to Paris and filled a pitcher with water, which he toted to Cairo and poured in its entirety into the vent in the back of their television. Then he did the same to the kitchen radio. Even though he wouldn’t be able to watch VHS movies anymore, it was a reasonable sacrifice. If any new
s of Marcus or the Butler or their investigation reached his mother, the Black Lagoon would sweep her over a waterfall of terror. But more than his old familiar fear that she’d be banished somewhere and lost to him forever, Will had something new to worry about, something real. He couldn’t let her interfere with their investigation.
12
The following weekend, with his mother’s credit card, Will ordered a complete skateboard from the back cover of one of Jonah’s near-holy Thrasher magazines. At first Will fancied a board called the Vision Psycho Stick, until he clued into the dubious connotations it might cast upon his mother, or himself, so he picked a Santa Cruz, Jeff Kendall’s pro model, mostly because he liked the picture, which depicted a ruined, burned-out city, where up from the smashed concrete rose a pumpkin-headed monster borne into the air. Will was struck by a deep, piercing resonance, both with this image and with Jeff Kendall, a man he knew nothing about, other than he lived in California and was a skateboard wizard. Will chose Independent trucks (the metal braces that attach wheels to board, Jonah told him), both because Jonah had them and because when he said it repeatedly, the word sounded like an unstoppable train charging forward.
When the box arrived, the air it released was humid and fragrant of ocean. With Jonah’s help Will assembled his board on the worktable in Toronto, after which they charged berserkly to Will’s front sidewalk. With spring in high gear, the neighborhood drains gushed, the water syrupy with silt, and the sun seemed boosted—as though now properly charged.
It took no more than five seconds for Will to ascertain he would be forever cursed as a pitiful skateboarder. It was nothing like exercise biking or ice sliding or painting or Destructivity Experiments. Constantly he was flung downward, the board tomahawking off in the opposite direction, his knees and elbows quickly bashed and gored by the tyrannical pavement.
“You’re putting too much weight on it,” said Jonah as he executed spritely ollies up the curb near Will’s driveway. Will knew of no possible way to stand on something without putting weight on it and told Jonah so. When he later questioned Jonah on the secrets of the ollie, a feat Will was in no position yet to even attempt, Jonah only offered: “It’s sort of like riding a bike—your body learns the rules, but your head doesn’t.” Will neglected to inform Jonah that the only bike he’d ever ridden only had one wheel, which didn’t touch the ground.
If I Fall, If I Die Page 12