If I Fall, If I Die

by Michael Christie

  Worried the Bald Man would recognize him from his encounter with the wolf, Will tucked in his chin, taking the opportunity to note nothing boot-like on either of their feet: the Butler in dress shoes and the Bald Man in trashed sneakers. “We’re fine, thanks,” said Will. When he made to take another step around their group, one of the wolves growled with the same lawnmower chugging as the one that bit him, electrifying Will’s scalp.

  “Sss … tas … stas … niabo … bo … vich,” a voice from the wheelbarrow murmured, a leg hanging out from beneath the tarp. It sounded like the deliveryman who used to come to Will’s house who was from a country that ended in ia.

  “Sorry you have to see this, boys,” the Butler said. “I don’t want to judge … however, I’m afraid this particular fella has overdone his schnapps. But gosh, it sure is good to see some fresh young men down here, isn’t it Claymore?” said the Butler. “Hard at work. Just like the old Thunder Bay.” He stuck his long owlish nose, stiff with cartilage, into Will’s face. His gaze sharp and fearsome, and the high smell of Neverclear seeped through his teeth. Then the Butler raised a long, parsnip-white finger. “Say,” he said, “you wouldn’t happen to know a fella, lives down here somewhere—can’t breathe too well, unfortunately—was having a little trouble with his legs?”

  Will swallowed the acorn in his throat. “No, we wouldn’t,” he said, his eyes on the wolves, who seemed to be inching closer though their feet weren’t moving.

  “Thing is, he was supposed to contact me, and we’re a bit concerned about him, this particular man,” said the Butler. “We’re worried he might’ve gone somewhat misguided in the head.”

  “He said we don’t know who you’re talking about,” said Jonah with that snarl that often arose without warning whenever he spoke to adults.

  “I know you, don’t I?” the Butler said to Jonah, creepily delighted, as though they were old friends reconnecting. “Ah yes, you’re one of the Turtle Boys. The youngest, I assume. Good to see MacVicar hasn’t quite yet locked all of you up. And how about you, son?” the Butler said, turning to Will. “You don’t look quite as hardened as your friend. Do I know your family?”

  “The girls are interested in him,” Claymore said, as the wolves began sniffing Will’s shoes. “What’s the matter, kid?” Claymore said gruffly. “You don’t like puppies?” Claymore was like a cannonball that had sprouted limbs, with knuckly ears stuck perpendicularly in his head like fleshy rivets. Though he’d run out of deodorant, all Will could do was pray that the smell of Inside Will on the Helmet they’d found at Marcus’s shack was vastly different from the Outside Will he’d become since he’d removed it. “Maybe you’d like a little Neverclear to settle your nerves,” Claymore said. “Or maybe your friend would?” he said to Jonah.

  “We don’t drink,” Will managed to say.

  “That right?” Claymore chuckled, still staring at Jonah, sharing some joke with the one pushing the wheelbarrow. “Well, he’s got a whole lifetime to change his mind.”

  “Let’s go,” Jonah said, pulling Will by the arm.

  The wolves growled, and there came an increasing wail from beneath the tarp. Claymore reared and whapped the highest point of the plastic with the flat of his shovel, as one would firmly tamp down the dirt of a hole they’d just filled. When the tarp kept stirring, Claymore struck again, harder this time, sounding like an aluminum bat hitting a base hit with a lemon.

  “Where was I?” said the Butler, patting the breast pockets of his shirt as though he’d misplaced his glasses.

  Sand filled Will’s throat and his head felt like it had been microwaved. Including scraps on the schoolyard and their most hideous skateboard spills, Claymore’s shovel strike was the most violence he’d ever seen a person endure.

  “Yes, well this man,” the Butler continued, “this friend of ours, has been hiring boys to do his work for him. Dangerous, dirty work. Boys close to your age, in fact. And well, they aren’t always safe around him, I’m afraid. So I’d suggest, for your own safety of course, that you two steer clear of this man.” Then he turned to Jonah. “And as for you, since your brothers are no longer in my employ, don’t think anything could keep my wolves from paying a midnight visit to that squalid little duplex of yours in County Park. Just to ensure you and your brothers are keeping well. Understand?” he said.

  The boys managed to shake their heads affirmatively, Jonah’s breathing gone pure Black Lagoon at the mention of his house.

  “Good,” the Butler said. “But if you do have the misfortune of encountering this poor, beleaguered fellow again, I’d like you to pass along some information for me.”

  The boys nodded robotically.

  “You tell him that things will be much safer for him when he brings me my proof.”

  “Got it?” said Claymore, pitching his shovel over his shoulder, the wheelbarrow dead silent beside him.

  21

  “Here,” said Jonah at Will’s front door, holding up a sealed plastic baggie of fingerprints pressed neatly onto squares of cardstock, “I lifted these from your water bottle that first night we met Titus.”

  Will removed the cards and examined the prints. Good definition on the whorls and crisp detail for each digit. “Looks like you managed some really good pulls.”

  “I wanted you to have them because I’m finished,” said Jonah.

  “But we’re getting so close!” said Will. “We’ll go down to the elevator tomorrow, tell Titus what the Butler said and see if he talks. Don’t you want to know what this proof is the Butler is looking for?”

  “Will, last night after we met the Butler I got scared and told my brothers what happened and they freaked. They’re talking about leaving Thunder Bay, moving us to some little lake up north where our auntie lives. I had to promise them I wouldn’t go back down there to keep them from packing the van.”

  “That’s easy. You’ll sneak out when they go to work. They can’t—”

  “Will!” Jonah yelled, his face hard with disbelief. “He knows who I am! And from the way those wolves were sniffing at you, they’ve probably already figured out who you are too. Something bad is going to happen. I know it. I’ve had dreams about it. I just can’t risk it anymore.”

  “Something bad is always going to happen,” said Will, stepping Outside and shutting the door so his mother wouldn’t hear. “No matter where you are or what you’re doing. You’re starting to sound like my mom.”

  Jonah shook his head somberly. “You know what Indians do best in movies?” he said. “We die. It’s like our job. We look pretty, then scream and get shot from a brown-spotted horse with no saddle. I watched all those movies growing up and I thought dying in a hail of rifle bullets seemed … I don’t know, like … natural. Something I’d do one day, same as having a kid or leaving Thunder Bay.

  “But you know why I really stopped being friends with Marcus?” Jonah continued. “It wasn’t because he broke his skateboard. He could’ve bought ten more with the money he was making from the Butler. It was because I was sick of worrying about him. Sick of lying awake all night while he slept somewhere outside, sick of watching him set bombs or taunt the biggest hockey players or skate out in front of cars just to see if they’d stop. I already worry about my brothers enough.

  “That’s why I started talking to you,” Jonah continued, “because you were different. Cautious. Safe. Even when you did dangerous things, I never worried about you. Until lately.”

  “But he’s still our friend,” Will said. “He should be here. Like we are.”

  Jonah shook his head. “There’s no such thing in the world as ‘should,’ Will. Haven’t you figured that out yet? There is only whatever happens.”

  “But maybe you’re wrong. Maybe we can still help him leave. We owe that to him.”

  “You know I’ve always meant to ask you this,” Jonah said, his voice rising. “You think Marcus was your friend, but he shot you in the head with a rock, then stole your garden hose the first time you met him
.”

  “He didn’t mean to hurt me. He was … afraid. Just like you are now. It’s not good for us to be afraid. Trust me. Marcus taught me that. And finding him is the only way I can prove that everything Outside is actually safe.”

  “Prove to who? Your mom?”

  “To everyone.”

  “Well, brace yourself for it, Will: it’s not.”

  They stood in silence for a moment.

  “You actually want me to say it?” Jonah continued, his voice quiet now. “Okay. You’re right. I’m scared. For you. For me. It’s hard enough for an Indian to make it to eighteen in this place and still have a pulse. Even if you’re doing everything right. But I refuse to vanish like Marcus. Or end up like that guy in the wheelbarrow. Call me a megapussy all you want. But skateboarding is as close to danger as I need to get.”

  “We won’t even have to go near the elevators,” Will said. “We can still investigate from a distance, like we said.”

  Jonah sighed and swiped away his bangs. They both sat on the top step. “When I was a kid and we first moved down to Thunder Bay,” Jonah said, “I used to think White people were trying to kill me, not just the social workers who tried to take me away—like all of them. For a while I didn’t leave the house, exactly like your mom. I’d stay in the basement and imagine them coming in the windows like zombies or vampires, trying to suck my blood, eat my brains with teaspoons. I used to concoct ways to defend myself against them. I’d practice judo and draw all these diagrams of explosives and guns and knives. I made traps, snares, and machetes hanging over the windows—that’s how I learned to make those match bombs. It was around that same time I stopped talking because I felt like my words were feeding them, giving them strength.”

  “Nobody’s trying to kill you, Jonah,” Will said after some silence.

  “You sure?” Jonah said, making to leave.

  “You don’t want to help me anymore, that’s fine,” Will said desperately. “But winter’s going to last for three more months. What’re you going to do? Play hockey?”

  Jonah shook his head. “I’m going home where it’s safe, and I’m going to stay there—I’d like to see those two try to come get me. Then I’m going to drink some hot chocolate and read two hundred books and have every known human disease memorized before spring comes. Then in a few years I’m going to get a crappy job like my brothers and save some money and go to med school in California and skateboard every single damn day with a big stupid grin on my face and I won’t ever think about Marcus or Thunder Bay or old Titus, not once.”

  “Wait,” Will implored as Jonah backed down Will’s steps, “I have an idea …”

  But he was out of ideas. Since he’d been Outside, he’d learned that fear was only a default setting, like how the TV always starts at channel 3 when you first turn it on. That everyone is born afraid of everything, but most people build calluses over top of it. His mother didn’t have calluses because she never touched anything, never even tried. Of the things Will was most afraid of—bees, wolves, witches, getting kidnapped, the clunking noise the dryer made when it stopped, calling Angela and telling her he’d liked their kiss, the Butler, the Bald Man, rebar, shovels—he was most afraid that, even after all his bravery and scars and near-death experiences, he still couldn’t survive the Outside without Jonah.

  Jonah set the small vinyl case containing their fingerprinting kit on the bottom stair. “See you around, Will,” he said.

  22

  The following day, Will wrote to his principal as his mother to say there would be no need to send him to Templeton because they were moving back to San Francisco. Then Will spent the morning alternating between practicing fingerprinting, crying into his pillow, doing jumping jacks, and reading the Thrashers Jonah had left behind.

  To cheer himself up he practiced pulling prints from difficult places like the toilet bowl and some trim in London. Then he stood on a chair and pulled one from the light fixture in New York: large prints that weren’t his own, yet looked oddly familiar. He compared them with the small library he’d amassed so far in a photo album, prints belonging to the mailman (doorknob), the grocery deliveryman (milk bottle), his mother (glass of water beside her bed), and now Titus (from the prints Jonah had given him), which matched exactly those he’d pulled from the fixture. Will recompared the prints ten times in tingly disbelief, but there was no question they were the same.

  Titus had been in his room.

  It was concussive, thunderous, his two worlds colliding like brakeless trains—the Inside and the Outside—and in the great crash Will knew that he’d been wrong about everything. Jonah was right, Titus had done something to Marcus in one of his black moods, and concocted that story to cover it up. And Will and his mother were next. Titus had been watching them from the yard for months, maybe longer, peering at them through the windows, writing that note, but now he’d come Inside, and any night he’d creep up on their beds and grip their throats. With horror Will remembered now how Titus always got shifty and red faced whenever the subject of his mother came up. Maybe on some level his mother had sensed his menace all along—maybe Titus always was the real reason for the Black Lagoon, and suddenly an idea parachuted into Will’s head. Though he had settled long ago on not being a genius, he was smart enough to know exactly what measures he had to take to set everything right and keep everyone he held dear safe.

  “Can I get you anything, Mom?” His mother was sitting up in her bed in San Francisco, staring into the darkened wall like it was the grille of a speeding truck.

  “No, thanks, Will. But it’s good to hear your voice,” she said, her breathing quick and shallow, as if her lungs were tiny as walnuts and located right beneath her neck. Will realized he’d never seen his mother take a deep breath in his life. “I’ve missed you,” she said.

  Will sat on her bed. Their bed. He could barely see her in the dimness, except for her eyes, green and crystalline. Most of the bulbs in the house were out now. At night it was like the Middle Ages. He’d thought she would eventually get fed up and change them herself, but she used lamps until they burned out and then ordered flashlights and a headlamp that she wore whenever she forced her way into Venice.

  “Want me to change it?” he said, pointing to her light fixture. “I could, but I’m not wearing the wetsuit.”

  “Would you?” she said, animating slightly. “I didn’t want to ask. Everything I say makes you so mad lately.”

  Will returned with a new bulb, and soon the room jumped into light and she winced and shut her eyes. Sitting on her bed again, turning the dead bulb in his hands, he watched light surf down through her bedraggled hair. She shifted and a smell puffed from her covers like turned milk.

  “Was that Jonah I heard at the door yesterday?”

  “He and I might not be friends anymore,” Will said.

  “That’s a shame,” she said. “I like him.”

  Will nodded, and they sat for a while, her hand on his thigh, as Outside trees sifted the wind. It was the first time in months he’d felt any sympathy for her. Will recalled how he used to find her at the window when he was still Inside, sighing, looking not down at her book but out into the streetlights. He wondered if she had any idea what she’d given up, what she’d wasted all these years Inside, what she had yet to waste. If she had any idea how beautiful she still was, how many people there were Outside for her still to meet.

  “Have they found that boy yet?” she asked after a while, smoothing his hair. “The one who was missing?”

  “Yeah, they did,” Will said, mercifully. “He was camping and didn’t tell anybody.”

  “Oh,” she said, “that’s a relief.” But if she relaxed further, Will couldn’t tell.

  “I remember a time when you were very young, maybe three or four,” she continued, picking at the duvet fabric with her pale fingers. “I pulled you from the bath and stood you on the mat. I stepped out to the linen closet to grab a towel, and I returned to find you looking down at your lit
tle wet body, and you were sobbing. You said, ‘My body is crying.’ It nearly broke my heart. I wasn’t sure I could take something that sweet and sad at the same time.”

  “But it wasn’t,” Will said. “I was wrong.”

  “You’ve always been such a sensitive boy, honey. I never wanted to see you hurt.”

  “Mom,” Will said, “you won’t need to worry about me anymore. There’s just one last thing I need to do tomorrow morning. Something I left behind that I need to get. But after that I’m staying Inside again. Like you said, I’m too sensitive. It’s too much for me Outside.” She brushed his ear with her thumb, and suddenly a sadness overtook him. “I hate Thunder Bay,” he said in a sob. He was so tired of being endangered and watched and confused.

  “Oh, please don’t stay home on my account,” she said. “You were right not to let me hold you back. I’ve been selfish. I needed you too much. I never should’ve brought us here from Toronto. This place is so dangerous for a boy.”

  “Can’t we leave?” Will said into her chest. “We could go tonight. Can’t you just make yourself get on a plane?”

  “I wish it were that simple. Years ago, maybe. Not now.”

  “We could knock you out? I could get you some grain alcohol or give you some drugs and put you in a car, and you’d wake up someplace you weren’t afraid of?”

  She shook her head. “That place doesn’t exist, Will.”

  He could have tried explaining the mess with the Butler and Marcus and Titus. Other mothers would have called the police. Demanded action. Sorted it out. Or left town. But not his. She’d been Inside too long. And it was only getting worse. The truth would destroy her. All that remained was the sick feeling that if only he’d kept painting his stupid masterpiece that day and not been lured out by the bang of Marcus’s match bomb, everything wouldn’t have gone so terribly wrong. The Outside wouldn’t be ruined if he hadn’t been there to ruin it.