If I Fall, If I Die

by Michael Christie

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” said Will.

  Jonah lowered his voice. “Look dude, I love your mom. I’d quit skateboarding in a second if I could live here and read and paint pictures all day, like forever, but I’m only saying. Be careful what you tell those people.”

  “I’d like to see the constable,” said Will in a somber voice to the peevish officer standing at a long counter. “I have important information. Pertaining to a kidnapping …”

  “Well, if it isn’t our little Jack London,” said MacVicar jovially when Will was admitted to his office. “How’s the leg, son? Back on the hockey rink yet?” In his coarse uniform MacVicar loomed tall and had a lean, muscular face like an astronaut. Will remembered his mother berating him in their doorway after Will’s wolf attack and now wondered if MacVicar had considered whisking Will away from his transparently deranged home environment.

  “Constable, I need to know if you have any leads in Marcus’s disappearance.” MacVicar squinted.

  “Marcus? The orphan boy who went missing?” said Will.

  “Right. Right, we’re looking into it,” MacVicar said. “He wasn’t a friend of yours was he?”

  “Yes, he was,” Will said. “And he’s been missing for months. Don’t you have anything yet?”

  “Son, anything related to that case won’t go public before the investigation is concluded,” said MacVicar, his good cheer draining.

  Will was instantly overcome with the tsunami of exasperation that so often accompanied his Outside interactions with adults. “This is bullshit …,” he murmured uncontrollably, crossing his arms, accidentally kicking the side of MacVicar’s steel desk.

  “Look here,” MacVicar said, his face concrete, “Will, the only reason we’re talking right now is because I knew your family. My father worked with your grandfather Theodore and then your uncle Charlie down at those elevators, and I for one know you come from a good, hardworking family, so I’m cutting you some slack. But as I said: these particulars are confidential. And they’re going to remain that way, am I clear?”

  Will sneered and turned his head to the window. He hated how in books children were always undiscovered geniuses or princes who inherited rolling green estates at the end. The Outside had laid bare his mother’s great lie: Will wasn’t even in the neighborhood of genius, and a soaring inventory of questions stonewalled his understanding. Just once Will wanted Outside things to go as smoothly as they always had Inside. This idea closed Will’s throat, and he unleashed a low, flabby sob.

  The constable sighed and pushed forward a box of tissue. “Can I get you anything, son?” he said.

  Will shook his head, unlatching a few more tears that dappled his shirt.

  MacVicar rose and poured himself a cup of coffee from the machine on his filing cabinet.

  “Can I have one of those?” Will said, sniffing.

  The constable paused, cocked his head. Then shrugged. “How do you take it?”

  “Pardon?” said Will.

  “Black?”

  Will nodded, even though he knew coffee was actually dark brown. His mother only drank black tea because coffee “rattled her cage.”

  “Look, Will, I know things haven’t been the smoothest for you and your family,” said MacVicar, handing the cup to Will. “How is your mother? She getting out?”

  “She’s good,” Will lied, remembering Jonah’s warning about Social Services. “We go to the movies every week and on long walks and stuff.”

  “Good, good, Will,” said MacVicar, before they took matching slugs of coffee. Will nearly gagged—the taste was cheap hot chocolate mixed with the moldy soil of a neglected houseplant.

  “And I know how tragedies can unsettle a community,” said MacVicar, easing back into his chair. “I’m sure your mother must have told you about your uncle’s accident and what a blow that was to everyone in Thunder Bay. I was there that morning. A terrible thing to witness. It makes a kind of sense her being leery of things and all.”

  “You were there when my uncle’s heart gave out?” Will said.

  “His heart?” said MacVicar. “That’s an interesting way to put it, son. But I don’t blame her.”

  “For what?” said Will.

  “You’ll have to ask your mother that question, Will. Listen, my point is, nowadays we’ve got boys like Marcus going missing monthly. Mostly they scarf Valiums or oxycodone before getting gunned on their dad’s hooch or their sister’s hair spray and then go winter swimming in the lake is my experience. So pardon me if our top investigative priority isn’t a lazy delinquent whose natural proclivity is for getting himself lost.”

  “Marcus wasn’t lazy,” Will said irritatedly. “He built a cabin. Himself.”

  “That shack near the highway we found?” said MacVicar. “On Crown land. Which I shouldn’t have to point out is stealing.”

  “He was hiding,” Will said.

  “From the truant officer,” scoffed MacVicar.

  “From the Butler,” said Will, with either his anger or the coffee loosening his tongue. “It was his wolf who bit me. And he’s a bootlegger,” Will added. “I have proof. And I think he kidnapped Marcus.”

  MacVicar sighed deeply. “So there’s the big fat chunk of information that brought you down here, huh?” He walked over to the window and looked out at the water like the captain of a ship. “Son, there’re some things about Thunder Bay I don’t expect you to understand yet. It’s different than it was in your mother’s day. At that time, things made sense here. We put the bad guys in jail and sent the good guys to work. But once the grain stopped coming on those rails and went east to China, things took a turn. Now we’ve got the highest crime rate on the Lakes, outside Chicago. The only grain people’re interested in is the fermented kind. The pourable version. The kind that helps you forget the better times and hunker down into the new. Will, just because you survived that wolf bite don’t mean you’ll come through whatever else this city can muster up for you. People here aren’t in the habit of minding manners, if you go poking into their affairs.”

  “People like the Butler?” said Will. “That’s what he does, right? Makes grain alcohol? And now Neverclear? And you already know this, but you don’t even stop him?” Only halfway through his coffee, Will already noticed his jaw trembling and thoughts piling in his head, like a thousand people waiting to pass through a narrow exit, and his mouth felt more comfortable moving than at rest. No wonder everyone Outside drinks it, he thought, coffee makes you brave.

  “It may not be pretty,” said MacVicar, “but George Butler keeps order down there among all those hobos and miscreants. Man hops off a train or a lakeboat, perpetrates something wicked, hops right back on. How do I trace that? Then there’s our Indian troubles to complicate things, with more and more coming down from the reserves for opportunities we can’t even offer our own sons anymore. So as it stands, George Butler performs a vital function here. Keeps a lid on things. You don’t know this yet, but there is nothing more dangerous than a person with nothing to do.”

  “If you won’t find Marcus, then I will,” Will said defiantly. “For starters, I want to make a formal request for a list of all escaped mental patients within a hundred-mile radius.”

  “And what are you going to do with that?” asked MacVicar.

  “Investigate.”

  He let out a long breath. “Careful, Will. I suspect the first name on that list would be yours.” Will threw himself to his feet and started off. “Look,” MacVicar said. “For years I’ve turned a blind eye to what’s been going on over at your place, the irregularity of it, so don’t try my patience. But what worries me most is how boys, even good boys like yourself, can end up in the same places as our society’s less exemplary members.”

  “Kinda like my being here?” Will said.

  “You know why that is?” MacVicar said, ignoring Will’s jab. “Because kids and bad people have one thing in common: they both prefer to be alone.” With that, MacVicar stood and opened h
is door. “It’s been a hoot, Will,” he said, “but I have an appointment at two.”

  Will looked at the wall clock, which was also a stuffed walleye. “But it’s not even ten?”

  The constable took a sip and nodded as he swallowed.

  “Oh, and Will,” the constable called out across the reception area. “What about your safety equipment?”

  “I don’t wear Helmets anymore,” Will said, clutching his skateboard to his hip. “You can write me a ticket if you want.”

  His new life commenced where another had ended.

  With the bang of the cable still knitted in his ears, he told the Indian crew to leave or there’d be trouble for them and watched as they walked mutely back to their tents and their vans and their wives and their babies—all woken and set wailing by the sound—where they packed up camp and made off.

  Alone now, he knew she’d heard the cable snap. The whole town must’ve. This was a sight she couldn’t withstand, so he carefully shoveled his best friend into a plywood handcart and rolled it from the loading bay to the slip and pitched him over. Afterwards he scrubbed his hands and arms with reeds at the lakeside and carried on, dazed, with an empty and ringing head, down the waterline away from the elevator, while trucks bounced over the tracks in the distance, careening toward Pool 6.

  He soon came to a pier where a foreign lakeboat lay at anchor. He climbed the gangway onto the high deck. The boat was a long, flat bulker—a twenty-story building out for a swim—and its posted signs and safety warnings were presented in some overwrought alphabet he couldn’t deign to read. It was nearing morning and pale pink had exploded beneath the horizon, underlighting the clouds that night had stranded over the lake. He made his way to the bow, where for some time he stood, his pained chest against the rail, eyes cast into the ice-strewn harbor, contemplating his quick plunge over, how the water would vacuum his life in a welcome instant. But he figured this was still too close to his best friend’s remains—the state of which he held himself responsible—so he pulled at a nearby hatch in the deck, and when it came open he dropped himself into the dark, equally prepared to accept a fifty-foot plummet to the iron hull as he was what he did receive: a shallow landing in a soft puff. He rose, brushing something from his trousers, then pulled the hatch closed with a neat bang, unable to fasten it down from the inside, leaving in the sky of his crypt a crescent moon of dawn.

  He lay himself down on what he knew were oats, from the nutty smell and tender feel. There was a deep warmth rising up from within them, and he scooped some over himself into a kind of blanket. He recalled how, at the elevator, cars would arrive on the receiving tracks from the prairies frozen shut and how they had to blowtorch them open, how the grain was always still warm at the center when they unloaded it. Oftentimes they’d find animals mixed in, like coins in a child’s cake—prairie dogs, deer, barn cats, beasts large and small swept up by threshers or trapped by bins—and human parts, too, the lopped fingers, arms, and legs of farmhands. He soon lost touch with himself and woke into another time, amid a cataclysm of engine sound. His overworked body was somewhat replenished, so it must’ve been more than a few hours later. The boat shuddered and began to move. He could catch the occasional hoarse bark from men above. A horn blasted intermittently, the sharp sound blunted by the deck, before the engines ramped up. He’d let this boat carry him out to where he’d cast himself into the deep of the lake, because he didn’t deserve to drown anywhere near his home.

  He guessed they’d sailed beyond the breakwater when the boat listed and the oats drifted over themselves with a hush like driven snow. After an hour of rocking, sleep took him again, this time more delirium than rest. He yelled soundlessly at a misty replica of his own face for some duration, before he was troubled by a vision of himself as a boy, running on a hot dirt road, but only the back of his head, never turning. He followed the boy to where he came upon all the people he’d known gathered together in a green field, dead but standing, mute but singing low in broken voices. The boy went unnoticed, though he shouted for a while before he started picking up stones from the gravel and throwing them. A stone struck his own father beneath his hatband, but he remained indifferent, a lisp of blood spitting to his collar. Another struck her arm but left no mark. The boy threw stones like that for a while, shattering cups of lemonade and pinging off the eyeglasses of the pastor, until his arm tired and he lay out in the grass to count clouds.

  “I thought these are ghosts” came a voice from within an eye-piercing circle of light above him. “I’m the watching on the deck at night. I heard this wailing and find this hatch open. I’m thinking grain was wailing. Or ghost in grain. I am happy because it was you and not this cargo. That would not be appropriate. But I have the best hearing. For my hearing you are lucky. And you are lucky we weren’t full steam. No hearing would hear then. Not even me. Very unlucky.”

  As his corneas adjusted with dual unscrewing sensations, there resolved a man squatting over the hatch, a boot on either side, a sparse yellow fuzz clinging to his head.

  “I am fifth mate, Vadim,” he said. “What is your?”

  Heaving the inert clumps of sleep from his mind, he couldn’t understand how this man could be so completely unaware he was a dream.

  “Never mind this,” said Vadim. “Here, you’re hurt. I will lift.” He stretched his hand down into the hold. “If this was wheat, the dust would have suffocate you by now. This oats is another luckiness.”

  Still he did not move.

  “Come,” Vadim said, extending his hand deeper, “except know that Visser will not turn the boat around for a clumsy trimmer. He is crazy to escape the Lakes before the freeze. But our next call is Sault Sainte Marie. There you depart.”

  Fully awake now, he shook his head and made a shooing motion.

  Confusion took Vadim as he retracted his arm. His face was thickly creased and featured a handful of lumpy moles, though rather than dark, they were the same color as his flesh. It was an untroubled face, a boy’s face, except for his nose, which was like a stepped-on cherry.

  “You were loading boat, yes? You are grain trimmer? Thunder Bay? You fell?”

  “Not exactly,” he said.

  “Good! You talk! I was worried you hit this head or were too stupid. Still, you go ashore at the Sault. Otherwise, you go farther than you want.” Vadim extended his hand again into the hold.

  “I’m comfortable here,” he said, patting the heaped edges of his nest. They still weren’t far enough out for him to jump.

  “But this is salted,” Vadim said.

  “This is what?”

  “I thought you worked the Lake?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “I’m meaning this is ocean vessel.”

  “Look, don’t fuss over me,” he said, “I’ll find my own way off soon enough.”

  “In North Atlantic? Don’t you care to know your heading?”

  “No.”

  He laughed. “A fatalist.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “It means you are someone who does not worry forward. Look, I am from Ukraine, Odessa, but this is Dutch boat. This oats is a backhaul to Africa. Then our last port of call is Delfzijl. Trust me, fatalist, you do not want to make vacations there.”

  “No difference to me,” he said. “Best way to help me is to forget me.”

  Vadim’s face darkened. “It is no good for you to do this stowing. You do not want to be discovered by Visser.” Then Vadim lowered himself to sit on the edge of the hatch and related a story of Visser, the ship’s chief mate, a Dutchman who once found a stowaway on a saltie outbound from Singapore and kicked each of the man’s teeth out, including molars, before pitching him into the water with his clothes in shreds. “You don’t want to know what he would do to yourself. On the ocean there is no law. And Visser is worse than nothing.”

  Someone called to Vadim from up on the deck, and he leapt up and answered in a language that was different still from his accent.

 
“Oh well,” said Vadim squatting again. “Even fatalist ghosts require water. I bring water.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “No, no, you’ll be murdered by thirst. Say no to refusing. This I will do for you.” He took the hatch in his hands and swung it half closed. “Sorry, it must be locked for the grain is kept dry. If not, I will become in troubled. But I won’t linger.”

  “Dark suits me fine,” he said.

  “And sir?” Vadim added. “Don’t sink.”

  “Isn’t that your job?”

  “No, no. In there. Stay flat! Like ah, how do you say … snowshoe? Don’t flip around too much,” he said and shut the hatch.

  He spent that night spread-eagled on the surface of the oats, allowing himself only a thin layer to banish the chill, not because he wanted to live, but because he’d been buried in grain many times before and didn’t want to die with oats stopping his nose and throat. He was certain he deserved something much, much worse.

  The storm started as a hungry wind drumming the hull. He’d heard sailors oftentimes declare November on Superior a war of wave and fog and sleet, home to a cold that could freeze eyes into cubes. Next came hail on the deck above like buckets of ball bearings dumped out to be sorted. He stuffed oats in his ears to dampen the racket.

  After a few hours of pitching, nausea arrived, hot and delirious. Despite his time at the harbor, he’d never been on a boat other than weekend fishing jaunts on small, tepid lakes. When his mouth flooded with saliva he crawled away from the hatch into the deeper dark and emptied his stomach into a hole he’d dug in the oats.