Michael Christie - If I Fall, If I Die

“Come on, Will,” Jonah beckoned from the woods when he emerged. After he walked through a stand of pine, five flashlights snapped, and Will found himself surrounded by a Stonehenge of boys.

“You again,” said Marcus, his eyes incandescent with mischief and bravery. “Couldn’t resist coming out for another taste of the world, huh, Will?”

Will slyly watched Jonah’s reaction to see if his household’s situation was common neighborhood knowledge, but found no confirmation on his new friend’s face. Marcus’s hair was longer than before, now well past his eyes, greasy and matted with leaves. He wore a filthy one-piece snowsuit — a cross between caveman and spaceman. On his feet were snowmobile boots, much smaller than the hexagonal tracks in Will’s yard.

“I’ve been looking for you, Marcus,” Will said, speaking quickly. “I’m going to school now. And I’d got really good at ice sliding until a wolf—”

“—Too much talking,” the biggest Belcourt Twin said, the light of a calculator watch flaring on his wrist. “Time is nigh,” he added.

Marcus rapped Jonah’s skateboard deck with his knuckle. “Are the Home Ranger and the Rolling Indian up for a little visit?”

Will and Jonah followed the boys, romping deeper into the woods, the only sound a faint rustle of highway. After a while, their amber beams reached out to define a structure in the scrub, a shack, crafted of corrugated metal rusted oxide-red, a few wood scraps, and a tarp worked in somehow. One wall was comprised of a huge green road sign — TORONTO: 1376 KM — which reminded Will momentarily of his basement.

“Like my place?” Marcus said, unhitching a padlock with his scarred hands and ushering them inside. “Built it myself,” he said, swiveling his light and their collective attention around the interior. Will had expected the trappings of delinquent boys — discount sodas, firecrackers, various Destructivity Experiment material — but it was surprisingly neat. There was a camping stove, a few chairs, a bedroll, and a single book, titled Great Lake Navigation . Nearly fifty garden hoses hung from nails everywhere, green, black, and orange. Stacked on a shelf were hundreds of tins of sardines and many pint boxes of blueberries. Struggling to disguise his envy, Will was thrilled his theory had proven correct: Marcus had been living Outside. In an Inside entirely of his own making. Wonderfully alone. Beyond the reach of adults, with nobody to worry over him or bombard him with guilt — it seemed to Will a tremendous luxury.

“You approve, Will?” said Marcus. “I already heard about your little tangle with that wolf. Impressive. Thanks for helping to keep my stuff safe.” Will resisted the sudden urge to embrace Marcus and tell him everything that had happened since they first met in one great typhoon of description: his Destructivity Experiments, the taste of the leaf he’d chewed, the boring excitement of school, his blood bouncing on the ice, his dead uncle Charlie, Jonah’s miraculous ollie. “Oh, and the Twins saved this for you,” Marcus said, pointing to the old Helmet he’d left by the creek. Will didn’t know if it would be worse if he ignored or acknowledged it, so he settled on a meaningful nod.

“You’ve got a ton of hoses in here,” said Jonah. “You still selling them?”

“Haven’t seen him in a bit,” replied Marcus. “We’ve built up a surplus. But hoses don’t matter anymore.”

“Haven’t seen who?” asked Will.

Marcus looked at the Twins. They nodded.

“He used to work for the Butler,” Marcus said. “But not anymore. Nobody knows his name. He mumbles and never really makes sense. He salvages metal downtown. Tears out the guts of all this city’s old industrial pigeontraps. That’s where I met him. We leave him hoses, and he leaves money in grocery bags.”

“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.”