Michael Christie - If I Fall, If I Die

“Why don’t you talk to him?” said Will.

“All I’ve ever had him do was hiss at me. It was the sexiest .” Angela then said Jonah lived in County Park, too, though he didn’t take the bus. He skateboarded brazenly through the culvert, which was dangerous because of the hobos and vagrants often lurking there. Jonah didn’t have parents and was the youngest of five brothers, who were thieves, thugs, and bootleggers, either in prison, going to prison, or recently released. Angela said a hockey player from the other side of town once whipped Jonah’s face with a birch switch. The next morning the eldest Turtle Brother showed up at the kid’s house and asked the boy’s father to have his son write a letter of apology. When the man refused, Jonah’s brother broke the man’s cheekbones, as well as those of two neighbors who came to help, then sat on the curb and waited for the police. On the schoolyard Jonah was untouchable, like a hockey referee who never blew his whistle.

“But why would he talk to me ?” said Will.

“Maybe he’ll recognize a fellow artist,” she said.

“Okay,” said Will, already walking.

“Really?” she called after him. “Don’t say anything about me!” she crowed, wringing her hands.

“Thanks for telling me to walk away that day by the creek,” Will said when he reached him. “You saved my life.”

Jonah’s leg stopped bouncing, and his large liquid eyes rose from his sketchbook and fastened calmly on Will’s. He had an angular face, as though his features were constructed entirely of wedges.

Waiting for some reaction, Will began to feel even more lost and unprepared for conversation than usual. He already preferred kids like Angela, who commandeered airtime like a seasoned radio host. Jonah blinked slowly, then returned to sketching.

“So why don’t you talk?” Will said.

Jonah pumped his shoulders once, leaning into his masterpiece.

“You talk at home?”

Jonah nodded, pencil wiggling.

“You just don’t talk at school?”

He shook his head and brought the pencil parallel to the page and began shading. The Indian kids at Will’s school all rarely spoke, and when they did it was in voices barely audible and with downcast, skeptical eyes, as though the Outside was one big courtroom in which they were on trial. Will stood marveling at the evenness of Jonah’s shadows, their texture, how he knew exactly where light wasn’t.

“I like your masterpieces,” Will said.

Jonah looked up again. His face crinkled. He took a breath, then held it and squinted harder. “My what?” he said. His voice was soft and fast, built entirely of smooth tones like the high notes on a bass.

“Your masterpieces,” said Will. “I saw some when I was sitting in your desk. They’re amazing.”

“Leave me alone, kid,” Jonah said dispassionately, shaking his head as though they’d been conversing for hours, trying to untangle some tricky problem, and Jonah had finally reached his limit. He retreated again to his sketchbook.

Will watched him for a defeated moment before making his way back to Angela.

That night at home, Will let his slow-cooked butternut squash enchiladas cool untouched before him. He saw his mother quake at the sight of his uneaten food, almost savoring this new power of refusal he wielded over her.

“Why did you tell me that pictures are called ‘masterpieces’?” he said.

“Oh,” she said, setting her fork down. “That.” She snapped her elastic, and he resisted the urge to ask why the hell was that question scary. “Well, because that’s what they really are.”

“No, they’re not,” he said sharply. Since he’d been going to school, there arrived inexplicable moments when just the timbre of her voice was enough to irrigate him with rage, moments that passed as quickly as they came.

“To me they are.”

“Well, to other people they aren’t, like people who are actually good artists,” he said, throwing his napkin at his plate. “And there’s more of them than us, Mom.”

Snow fell every day after Halloween, as though the lake had picked itself up and thrown itself inland, snuffing instantly the vivid bonfire of fall. Inside, Will had only felt the cold of the freezer in Toronto, but now immersed in it, he adored the completeness winter brought. Snow made the Outside more like the Inside, a white sheet put over the world, one enormous blanket fort.

Will whiled away hours in his yard, investigating snowbanks, testing their crusts and consistencies, reconnoitering their cliffs and drifts. He discovered snow wasn’t tasteless — it tasted like club soda, but not as gross. And slush was so named because of the sound it made. And the sand that plows threw on the road yielded a substance that was half earth, half ice and the deceptively inviting consistency of brown sugar.

His mother had forbidden tunnel forts, so he left his open to the sky. While she peered out from the window in Paris, Will would recline in his burrow, watching frizzy clouds saunter past, wondering if his friend Marcus lay somewhere Outside exactly like this, turning his face to the same endless sky, untroubled that no one was there to protect him. Over the years, Will’s mother had read him a thousand stories about orphans torn from their parents and abandoned to the wilds of the Outside. Will had never had that problem. His had been the opposite: too much protection. But like the twelve and the one on a clock’s face, he and Marcus were closer to each other than you’d think—“Other Will,” he’d called him at first. Will had since heard Angela use Marcus’s word, whatever , to express a complete indifference, but Will could still hear the true tenderness with which Marcus had offered it. Nothing can really hurt you, Will , Marcus had said, and Will knew his friend was alive somewhere, Outside, thriving.

Weeks passed. Winter strayed into a truer, purer cold. Will’s morning walks were so frigid the ice chirped underfoot like plastic. The air shocked his chest, and a satanic wind bellowed through the elevators up from the lake, now frozen out to the breakwater.

One day before school, his mother began stuffing some packets into his jacket and snow pants. “What’s this?” he said.

“I ordered a box. Hand warmers. Neat, huh?” she said, bending one until it snapped before shoving it into his armpit as though he were a shoplifting accomplice.

His mother knew nothing of winter. To her, the season rendered the world even more predatory. She’d told him about a book she’d read in film school that claimed that because nature was always trying to kill Canadians it made them different from other people. “In Thunder Bay, you doze off in a snowbank”—she’d say before making a sharp teeth-whistle—“that’s it.” But he’d napped in his snow fort several times and woken unscathed, which meant both she and whoever wrote that book didn’t know what the hell they were talking about. His mother had already exaggerated so many dangers that Will was finding it increasingly difficult to heed her warnings.

On his way to school a hand warmer slipped down into his crotch, yielding the sudden sensation he’d wet himself. Soon he was flushed, dripping with sweat that froze in his bangs like the mousse that had recently materialized in the hair of his classmates. He dumped the warmers along with his gloves, knit cap, and snow pants in the trees before making his way up the path.

At school there was an unspoken contest among boys to see who could brave the frost with the least protective clothing. Their ears went red as stove elements while their cheeks cramped a bloodless white. Jonah — who wouldn’t even look at Will after the masterpiece incident — wore just a hooded sweatshirt and old-man shoes, maybe because he was stylish or maybe because his winter clothing had burned in the house fire. Either way, in the school-wide tournament to be the least appropriately dressed yet still alive, Jonah won.