If I Fall, If I Die

by Michael Christie

  Once after supper Will asked Jonah if he’d ever tried the Butler’s grain alcohol. “No,” he said, then tapped his temple, “I’m keeping this baby pristine for med school. My brothers don’t touch it either now that they’re working at the call center.” Jonah’s brothers spent their days convincing people to increase their credit limits, and the thought of these powerful men talking all day into tiny headsets gave Will a headache. Jonah said that when they first moved down to Thunder Bay from their reserve, his brothers started a roofing company. They put an ad in the yellow pages, bought a truck, tools, and an air compressor for their nail guns—but their phone sat quiet as a rock. Gideon even took the phone back and demanded another at the store. But the new one didn’t ring either. At the unemployment office the man asked Hosea what they were thinking. He said Indians don’t know the first thing about roofs. “He said homeowners in Thunder Bay knew we haven’t lived under them for long enough,” Jonah said.

  “Why do your brothers call you Doc?” asked Will.

  “Because I’ve always sewn them up with dental floss whenever they came home gashed up,” Jonah said. “Those medical textbooks are how I learned to draw real people. Studying anatomy.” With an image locked in his mind of Jonah with a loop of dental floss in his teeth bending over his grimacing brother’s split eyebrow, for the first time in his life Will wished he’d had siblings.

  “Is that how you’re getting out of Thunder Bay?” Will said.

  At this, Jonah grew shy. “Yeah, maybe. I’m going to fall back on medicine if my pro skateboard career doesn’t work out,” he said with his usual smirk.

  It took only a few days in Jonah’s Inside before Will decided he preferred it to his own. Here nobody was watching you, and the most ghastly horror films elicited only laughter and glee, and the Black Lagoon did not reign. It was during this time Will noticed water-swollen porno magazines nestled beside the upstairs toilet. The hairstyles of the women were huge and souffléd, and upon their orangey faces he found an exact replica of his mother’s Black Lagoon look—as if they’d all been struck by some great, unknowable terror. Will realized then with horror that penises were Outside and vaginas were Inside, and the import of these connections sent him lunging from the bathroom.

  The boys rush-ordered a fingerprinting kit and practiced on themselves, applying latent powder with the impossibly fluffy brush, lifting the print with tape and fixing it to a backing card, pausing only so Jonah could occasionally wipe his mouth with his sleeve after his kiss with Angela. She’d said she would surrender the drawing only if they both French-kissed her in her hospital bed for a count of thirty seconds each. “I want to be fair,” she’d said, which Will hoped was more than evidence of her charitability. Angela removed her feeding tube, and after Will sufficiently coaxed him, Jonah went first, tucking his bangs behind his ears, as he brought his lips to hers, Angela wide-eyed. The sight of his two friends mouth-locked was both unbearable and dazzling for Will to behold. When Will’s turn came, it was like his face ollied down twenty stairs and landed in a tub of warm oil. Jonah had lasted only twenty-five seconds before pulling away, but Will couldn’t venture how long his kiss was. He could still taste the flavor of her mouth, acidic, apricot-like, the best thing the Outside had offered so far.

  One night, they were fingerprinting Marcus’s grid when Enoch came over to their worktable after an hour of grunting beneath his barbells. “Why’re you tools putting makeup on that map?” he said, breathing hard, toweling his face with a shirt.

  “It’s not a …,” Will said, before locking eyes with Jonah.

  “ ’Cept it doesn’t have any fucking street names on it,” Enoch continued. “Some map. But looks like the harborfront, to me. That’s the only part of this shit-pile town built in a grid.”

  14

  September arrived the following week and demanded their begrudging return to school. The boys claimed the rearmost desks, where they whispered about the map they’d yet to decipher and the byzantine skateboard tricks they would someday master. Their new teacher, Mrs. Gustavson, wore a beach-worth of shell jewelry, smiled emptily, and spouted in a sugary voice lots of his mother’s words, like creativity, gifted, and self-esteem. Will trusted her about as far as his mother could go for a jog.

  In the first week, when Will was picking up an exercise he’d narrowly passed from her desk, he said, “Thanks Mom,” instantly scorching himself with embarrassment.

  At recess, Mrs. Gustavson asked him to stay behind. “I couldn’t help but notice what you said there,” she said.

  “Yeah, sorry,” said Will. “Old habit.”

  “Oh, I don’t mind. In fact, I’m quite flattered,” she said, pausing as if something was sinking in other than the death knell of boredom and the senseless squander of recess time.

  “You know, Will,” she continued, “I must confess something to you. I’m a great admirer of your mother’s work. And your father’s, of course. But I saw The Sky in Here when I was in university, and it made an indelible impression on me,” she said, as though they were sharing some great secret.

  “I’ve never seen it.”

  “Really?” she said, shocked. “But you must be very close?”

  “You could say that.”

  “Well, she’s modest, I’m sure. But I know some people who will be very pleased to hear Diane Cardiel is safe and sound and back living in Thunder Bay. She must love having a bright, creative fellow like you around the house,” she said, smiling falsely, and Will bristled. Jonah had more creativity in his right leg than all the students at his school combined, and though she was brand new, Mrs. Gustavson already acted as if he wasn’t there.

  “Is this over yet?” Will said, wounding her visibly, before racing outside to find Jonah.

  Now that they were in the seventh grade, their classmates talked of group trips to the roller rink and declared doomed loves in bubble-lettered notes and three-party phone calls. None mentioned how last year’s grade eights had disappeared like planes into the clouds of high school, an ascendancy death-like in its impenetrability. Happily, the mysteries of what to wear and say and when to put your arm around a girl and how to properly manage a vagina were of zero relevance to Will and Jonah, who were content with the mystery of Marcus and how, exactly, one could possibly ollie over a fire hydrant.

  To endure the flavorless hours, the boys reacquired the necessary talent of kill-switching their minds, slowing their pulses, holing up in private mental dens. They perfected a communication exclusive to their eyebrows, while lazily doodling skateboard graphics and complex ramp arrangements on their velcro-flapped binders. In class they were cheetahs napping, borderline catatonic, preparing for the bell’s merciful peal.

  At lunch they shunned the cafeteria to go skateboarding off school property. These days Will could manage the occasional weak ollie—the trick’s true alchemy still outpacing his understanding. There in the parking lot of the grocery store that still delivered his mother’s food, Will drank a throat-searing two-liter carton of iced tea while Jonah practiced heelflips, landing again and again on his sideways board, folding his feet in half and pouring himself to the oily ground.

  “You always get the same thing,” said Jonah, “ice tea and salt-and-vinegar chips.”

  “I know what I like,” said Will, though the truth was the towering neon of the grocery shelves and the sheer glut of choice they presented baffled him. While they ate, some high-school-age hockey players shouted “Skater fags!” from a gunning pickup truck, almost obligatorily, kept at bay only by the fearsome legend of the Turtle Brothers. Rather than the designer sweatshirts and safety pin–tapered jeans of their peers, the boys donned the flannel button-ups and work pants that abounded in Thunder Bay’s thrift stores. The pants were constructed with thick polyester that survived their worst spills and were cheap to replace when they didn’t. At school, hockey players had started to sneak up behind Will to yank his pants down, so they both wore webbed belts cinched tight around their bruised hip
s, even though Jonah was never subjected to the indignity.

  After school, with the map folded deep in Jonah’s backpack, the two ventured downtown, into the crannies of the city that no upright citizen had reason to frequent: loading bays, alleys, abandoned industrial buildings, check-cashing places, the parking lots of windowless strip clubs, closed gas stations, and listless strip malls. The concrete and the bustle brought forth new memories of days spent careening around Toronto with his mother, the glint of subways, the towering buildings, his hand caught warm in hers.

  “So if the lines are streets, the Xs must signify something, because there are like thirty of them,” said Will, sitting on a bench, turning the map over and over in an attempt to orient themselves. “But what could be possibly valuable enough for Marcus to use it to leave Thunder Bay forever?”

  “Ain’t no buried treasure anywhere down here, Long John Silver,” Jonah said, gesturing to a squalid apartment block with crotch-yellowed underwear hanging from the window like the flags of surrender.

  Will had made no mention of the solemn promise to his mother he was breaking by coming to the waterfront. But he’d seen plenty of boys his age walking around, and none of them looked immediately endangered.

  “Think we need to worry about the Butler’s wolves?” Will said later, fighting again to keep the image of a fanged snout clamping over his other thigh from his mind. Lately, each time he left the house, he’d been liberally dousing his entire body with deodorant, in the hopes it would mask his scent.

  “Bah, we’re small potatoes,” said Jonah. “Plus we can outrun his wolves on our boards.”

  They tried penciling various street names onto the lines, but, frustratingly, downtown Thunder Bay was a grid with no defining abnormalities. Each time they thought they’d located an X, what they found was uniformly unremarkable and decrepit: another abandoned building with an old, plateless car parked out front. The boys rifled the glove boxes of the cars and staked out the buildings with no luck. “Some treasure,” Jonah said.

  But when riding his skateboard, even the “rusty ruin” of Thunder Bay sparkled with vitality and potential in Will’s eyes. While investigating the map, they happened over perfect skateboard terrain: painted curbs surrounded by smooth concrete and perfect sets of stairs with no cracks at the top, where the boys would return again and again after security guards had shooed them away. Surfers rode waves, which were already beautiful, but skateboarders made things beautiful: the ugly, discarded nooks and leftovers of a place, the abandoned, unused architecture that people preferred to ignore. Beneath their wheels, these dead places became sites of wonder.

  At times Will wondered what special genius allowed Jonah to nimbly launch himself from the summit of any stair set without a stitch of Black Lagoon in his body. It had something to do with the possessed gleam he’d get while maniacally attempting a trick for hours until he’d mastered it. Jonah was channeling something, Will figured. An anger, maybe. Equal parts joy and fear. He resembled the skateboard titans of Thrasher more and more each day.

  Will couldn’t discern if it was the sight of a White kid and an Indian kid together or the velocity with which they disregarded every traffic bylaw and trespassing ordinance on the books that caused pedestrians to recoil as they zoomed past. As much as it seemed like a suicide attempt to passersby, skateboarding was precisely the opposite: it was about mastery—a seizure of control, not a loss. That the board did their bidding—danced or flipped or spun successfully beneath them—afforded the most sublime pleasures of their short lives. Even after his most crushing falls, Will was learning to greet the pain, to wade out into its eddies and unexpected pools. To feel it pull parallel with another, worse pain inside him—born of the fact that his mother was wasting her life Inside or that his heart could give out any minute. And these pains aligned themselves, matched tempos, a kind of duet. Will would listen to the minor chord of it ring in him and find comfort in the sound.

  After spending every weekend downtown, the boys grew well acquainted with Thunder Bay’s maniacs, its miscreants and castaways, those wandering its alleys and vacated streets with nothing better to do, and Will was terrified and fascinated by the harm the Outside could inflict. There were the drunks, some Indian, most not. Many were friendly, overly friendly, and Will would shake their hard, smelly hands while Jonah always kept his distance. Fresh and noxious with Neverclear in the early afternoon—they either came from distant reservations or once worked for the elevators, the railway, the mills, or the lakeboats. They often called to Will and Jonah with equal parts admiration and contempt. “Let’s talk to youse two boys,” they’d slur with dim mustardy eyes, waving them closer. Some would even ask to try their boards, claiming they’d possessed great balance in their day. The boys watched solid, railway tie–driving men drop to the pavement like toddlers. Sometimes they’d ask for change, which Jonah hated most of all. “How about you change your clothes first?” he’d mutter after they’d left.

  Then there were the crazies: the man who believed he was a policeman and wrote them fake bylaw infraction tickets for skateboarding on donut shop napkins; fixed to his jacket was a sticker—THIS ACCIDENT HAS BEEN INVESTIGATED BY THE THUNDER BAY POLICE—which he’d push forward like a badge. The woman who only walked backwards, peering over her shoulder with a smudgy makeup mirror. The withered guy who had a voice like a child and strung sentences together like beaded necklaces: “Who are you what are you doing where’s your helmet why are you here you boys are going to kill yourselves.” The carnival-size woman they called Anti–Old Lady because she hated everything. “Do you want a hug?” they’d call to her from safe across the street. “I hate hugs and I hate you!” she’d screech, shutting her eyes with pure loathing. Will listened intently to them all, marveling at their variety, noting their voices and syntaxes, but despite their shared insanity, none bore any resemblance to the Wheezing Man.

  But then their first stroke of luck: Will spotted the Bald Man hurrying along the sidewalk with a rolling dolly, on it a small steel drum. Silently the boys lifted their skateboards and followed at a distance, soon arriving upon a spot on the map they’d investigated previously, where they’d found a sun-faded purple car, the color of diluted wine, out front of a shuttered brick laundromat. The Bald Man pulled his dolly beside the car, taking a quick glance around before levering open the gas tank and feeding the mouth of a section of green hose into the tank. He put the other end to his lips, spat, then stuffed it into the barrel at his feet. He waited like that for a few minutes, glancing around, the boys watching him while tucked behind a used car lot’s sandwich-board sign. Then he capped everything up and pushed the dolly off toward the lake.

  When he was gone, the boys approached the car and opened the tank.

  “Why all the secrecy for siphoning some gas?” said Jonah, lowering his nose to the opening. “At least now we know what those garden hoses were for.”

  “I have an idea,” Will said, searching a garbage-strewn alley, where it didn’t take him long to find some discarded drinking straws. He crumpled the ends and fit three together into one long tube. “One time I made the Eiffel Tower like this,” he said. “My mom loved it.” He stuck the straw in the tank.

  “After you,” Jonah said with disbelief.

  Will pursed his lips and sucked. Into his mouth flooded a gulp of burning death and antimatter and the purple fumes of a hundred melting G.I. Joe figurines. Will gagged and nearly vomited while a good amount continued to napalm his throat and claw its way down into his belly. “When is this going to stop?” Will said weakly, doubling over, a lingering aftertaste like whatever was in Mr. Miller’s mug.

  “Ah, give it a second,” Jonah said pinching the straw from Will’s grip. “You don’t have Indian tastebuds.” He took a sip and smacked his lips. “Whew!” he said. “That right there is grain alcohol like I’ve never tasted. There’s something extra to it”—he clacked his tongue—“A kick. Like nailpolish remover and model glue. Neverclear, I’d bet an
ything.”

  “Butler must be hiding it around the city in the gas tanks of abandoned cars!” Will said hoarsely, now feeling as if his mother had duct taped a few dozen hand warmers to his belly.

  “Okay, so Marcus was stealing hoses for the Butler. Then he got the idea to take the map so he could use it to find the Butler’s stashes of Neverclear and sell it himself. Something like that would generate enough money to kiss Thunder Bay good-bye forever.”

  “Maybe it worked. Maybe Marcus did it?” Will said, still recovering.

  “Then why is the Butler still offering a reward?” said Jonah. “No, the Butler and the Bald Man must’ve remembered where this one was without the map, or we would’ve seen them do this weeks ago.”

  “But if all those Xs are cars with Neverclear stashed in them—”

  “—it means there are gallons and gallons of this stuff out there,” Jonah said. “Which means the Butler still really, really wants it.” Jonah cinched the straps of his backpack.

  “Shit,” Will said, swearing credibly for the first time, but still too afraid to enjoy it.

  Relaxation Time

  With Will back at school and afterwards riding his skateboard out who-knows-where—she was mentally replaying his promise to avoid the waterfront thirty or forty times per day—Diane had been forced, under threat of starvation, to answer the door herself. While signing for a large, heavy box, she made the mistake of glancing over the courier’s shoulder, out into the white radium glow of the pavement, at the brown delivery truck chuffing in her driveway, and the desolate infinity of it threw up a squall in her chest. But she felt her knees hold, and no icy sweat broke over her like that first time it came while she was shoveling the driveway.