Michael Christie - If I Fall, If I Die

“Oh, so that’s the differential, is it? Well, what’s my address?” the man hissed. “Quick!”

“I … don’t—”

“Okay smarty-pepper, what’s yourself?”

“My address?”

“And don’t conjure me that swimming in pool six.”

Will whimpered the name of his street as he released a painful zap of urine into the brush, squeezing it to a halt.

“Your name, pipsqwuak!” he panted. “Put your groundhogs behind it.”

“My name is Will …,” he said, straining.

The man emitted a little gasp, loosening his grip momentarily. He drew close to Will’s ear, and his tone softened. “You’ll operate best by vacating here, chummy. This venue is the worst refuge. He’s imminent .” Then the man ratcheted his arms again and began to drag Will into the woods. For a moment, Will felt nearly calmed by the man’s force, as he sometimes did when his mother Black Lagooned so bad that her before-bed cuddles bruised him. And it was amid the sanctum of this thought that release arrived, full-steam and warm, deflecting off the man’s coat and whooshing over Will’s legs, splashing into his dropped jeans and trickling through his cuffs like downspouts.

“Orchard fire!” the man bellowed, releasing him, and Will landed in a flat-out sprint, hoisting his pants as he crashed through a barbed wire of branches, the moon swinging overhead in the night sky like a scythe blade loosed from its stick.

He soon dashed into the culvert with sweat scorching his face, his still-healing thigh tearing away from the bone. He dropped his arms to pump at his sides through the tunnel. When he was two doors from his house, the air snapped with a new injection of cold, and tiny flakes were sent to spiral into the air, almost not falling at all.

Bursting through the window into New York, he shucked the urine-soaked pants from his legs and camped under the covers of his cot, his chest thudding like a speed bag, on the brink of going Black Lagoon supernova. He lay awake for what felt like hours, waiting for his eyeballs to pop and his heart to perform its last kick and his life to ebb. But soon Will grew leaden, and before long he crashed headfirst through the plate-glass window of sleep.

Will lay low until the following Monday, when he woke early and departed for school before his mother emerged from San Francisco.

“Happy to have you back, Mr. Cardiel,” said Mr. Miller glumly, wiping his glasses on the hem of his golf shirt before draining the noxious contents of his mug. When the bell rang, Jonah wasn’t at his desk; neither was Angela. Will approached Wendy, Angela’s next-closest friend, and learned that Angela had been sent to Toronto for special treatments. “They don’t have the right machines in Thunder Bay,” Wendy said grimly, revealing a glimmering briar of braces when she spoke.

With the school bell still in his ears Will jogged back through the dripping catacomb of the culvert, this time with only a tickle of fear, and plunged into the woods on the other side. After some searching he found Marcus’s shack between two wooded hummocks. It was half-dismantled, the corrugated metal and chip wood splayed outward on two sides. The garden hoses had vanished, as had the sardines and blueberries and camp stove and bedroll. Will failed to find any boot prints in the hard dirt around the shack, which was crisscrossed with roots, but he did turn up a few lifeless chickadees and grackles on the cabin’s perimeter.

The streets of County Park were narrower and less treed than those of Grandview Gardens. The driveways harbored pickup trucks, mostly, all with tool-bearing racks and locking containers. Curiously, there were no power lines overhead, and every third house had a green box out front that read DANGER! BURIED CABLE! aside the image of an electrocuted man, twisted in rapture.

Will located the address Mr. Miller gave him in a battery of brick townhouses. After a spell of complex unlocking issued from behind the door, it was opened by an enormous shirtless man with the same handsome gauntness and precise athleticism as Jonah, though he was stouter, with thick crow-black hair to his shoulders and the voice of a giant, as if his chest doubled as a furnace. A tattoo of two black, red, and yellow eagle feathers strung with barbed wire curled around his thickly muscled ribs. He rumbled that his name was Gideon and showed Will Inside.

Will watched the big man relock the sheet metal — reinforced door, further bolstered by three deadbolts and an iron crossbar. Inside, the house was nearly empty, all linoleum floors with no carpet and minimal furniture, scant artwork on the walls other than a large photograph of a black bear standing on the hood of a car at a dump. Perhaps because no mother lived there to decorate, Gideon’s tattoos and some beaded moccasins lying abandoned by the door, yellowed and stiff as stale bread, were the only ornamental things around. They must’ve lost everything in the fire, Will thought, but even so, it seemed so temporary, as though they could pack up and leave at any moment — a stark contrast to how his mother crammed their place with books and furniture and wallpapered it with Will’s boring paintings so that they could never leave, even if they tried.

“The Doc’s in his office,” Gideon said, directing Will down the back stairs into a barren unfinished basement. At its center hung four pieces of fabric from the ceiling, establishing a tent-like rectangle.

“Why weren’t you in school? I was worried about you,” Will said, drawing back the fabric to find Jonah reclined on a neatly made mattress, reading. Will tossed some paper-clipped sheets onto Jonah’s bed. “Here, I brought your homework.”

Jonah looked up from a large hardback book and smiled, black bangs cast over one eye. “I was worried about you, too, Will. I mean more than usual,” he said. “I got my brother Enoch to call the school this morning so I could sleep in. Last time it was the house fire, this time I have scoliosis.”

“You never had a fire?”

“No. I just wanted to stay home for a while to study and draw. I learn twice as fast when I’m not in that classroom. But I was, like, ‘Enoch, you could’ve just said I had mono, dumbass.’ ”

“Sorry about leaving you. I was supposed to have your back,” said Will, before launching into an account of his puzzling and frightful encounter with the Wheezing Man, playing up the adventurous drama of his escape, omitting the pant wetting.

Jonah said that after Will left they were waiting in the cabin when there was a knock at the door. “Marcus thought it was the hose guy, but then there was some growling outside, and he freaked and kicked a hole in the opposite wall and told us to scatter into the trees. I was running with him for a while until we hit the creek and he yelled for me to run through the water to put off the wolves and he’d lead them the other way,” Jonah said, lowering his eyes. “That was the last I saw of him.”

Will slowly unzipped his backpack and handed Jonah his drawings. “The important one is missing, isn’t it?” Will said, his throat tightening. “I took them from your desk for Angela. But now that she’s in Toronto,” he added, “there’s no way we can get Marcus’s paper back.”

“So that’s how you saw my masterpieces,” Jonah said, shaking his head. “I’m not mad. I never should’ve held Marcus’s stuff for him. I always told him that Thunder Bay was just itching for a reason to see us dead or in jail. But he couldn’t stand school. Said being inside for that long made his legs shake and his head hurt. Anyway, it was his mistake for crossing the Butler like that. Now he’s on his own.”

“But why does the Butler want it so much? It was only a grid with some X s on it.”