Michael Christie - If I Fall, If I Die

“Marcus was going to use it to make money,” Jonah said, shrugging. “Enough for him to leave Thunder Bay forever, which he always talked about.”

“You said you heard growling before everyone ran. Do you think the Butler and his wolves got him?”

Jonah lowered his head. “I don’t know. It was dark … Marcus is quick. He knows how to disappear. He probably got away …” Then Jonah’s eyes defocused.

Will sat on the bed. “Except what, Jonah? It’s important.”

“Yeah,” Jonah said softly, “well, I heard him call out.”

Will waited.

“But he yells things all the time,” Jonah said. “He’s always faking dead and crying wolf for a joke. And I was still splashing through the creek — but sure, he said something, something I thought I’d never hear him say.” Jonah took a breath. “It was help .”

“We need to find Marcus,” Will said, fighting a sudden storm of tears.

Jonah scoffed. “And how are we going to do that?”

“Ask questions. Search the Outside. Investigate.”

“I don’t know, dude,” sighed Jonah, slumping back on his mattress. “Indian kids go missing all the time. Especially orphans. Nobody in Thunder Bay even blinks.”

Will took a moment to examine the train of burgundy-spined medical books — exactly like the one Jonah had been reading — arranged on a shelf of cinder blocks and boards, the only furniture in his apartment other than his bed. Will recognized them because his mother often consulted theirs whenever the Black Lagoon made her think she had a terminal disease. “You’re not sick, are you?” Will said.

“No, I’m just interested in how people work,” Jonah said. “I’m on the second last one. My brother Hosea stole them from a house he broke into because he did some yard work for a doctor who refused to pay him. Hosea thought there’d be one of those money stashes cut into them. Lucky for me there wasn’t.”

Will was astonished Jonah had somehow mustered the energy to read all those books himself , with no mother to do it for him. Then he leaned close. “Doctors are supposed to save people, right?” Will said. “And Marcus helped you that night. Now he needs us.”

Jonah picked up a green urethane skateboard wheel, pinched its bearings, and swiped it into a blurry spin, watching it for a while. “How about this?” he said when the wheel slowed. “Since Marcus quit, I’ve been skateboarding alone. And after witnessing your ice-sliding skills, I’ve been meaning to tell you to get a board.”

Will recalled again the sheer divinity of Jonah’s skateboarding. He’d known desiring a board immediately would speak poorly of him, would degrade the seriousness of the endeavor. But now here was Jonah offering the green light and Will nearly buckled with excitement.

“So before we do anything,” Jonah continued, “you’re learning to skate. Because I’m not rolling around with some White kid speed-walking behind me all summer. And after you become a skateboarder, I’ll become a detective.”

“It will be the perfect cover for our investigation!” Will exclaimed.

Jonah’s face pinched. “How come you’re always so excited about everything? It’s like you’ve never done anything before.”

“Sorry,” Will said, fighting to camouflage his joy.

Jonah laughed and swept his bangs from his eyes. “Deal?” he said, lifting his hand and aiming his fist at Will with his wrist cocked.

“Deal,” said Will, his eyes welling again with gratitude and excitement, resisting a profound urge to tackle and cuddle his friend. After a second Will realized Jonah was waiting on him to do something. Will lifted the same right fist in exact imitation and nodded his head knowingly.

“That’ll work,” said Jonah, dropping his hand.

To his mother’s relief and delight, the next morning Will claimed a fever and stayed home from school. When he heard footsteps on the front porch he ripped open the door. “I want you to stop bringing these, okay?” he said to the teenage carrier about to tuck a bagged newspaper between the doors, as they’d arranged long ago.

The boy pulled out a little notebook. “You’re paid up until the end of the year, Will Cardiel.”

“I’ll give you a hundred dollars if you stop, like forever, no matter what your boss says.” The paperboy’s eyes lit, and Will darted for his mother’s checkbook.

After that Will went to Paris and filled a pitcher with water, which he toted to Cairo and poured in its entirety into the vent in the back of their television. Then he did the same to the kitchen radio. Even though he wouldn’t be able to watch VHS movies anymore, it was a reasonable sacrifice. If any news of Marcus or the Butler or their investigation reached his mother, the Black Lagoon would sweep her over a waterfall of terror. But more than his old familiar fear that she’d be banished somewhere and lost to him forever, Will had something new to worry about, something real. He couldn’t let her interfere with their investigation.

The following weekend, with his mother’s credit card, Will ordered a complete skateboard from the back cover of one of Jonah’s near-holy Thrasher magazines. At first Will fancied a board called the Vision Psycho Stick, until he clued into the dubious connotations it might cast upon his mother, or himself, so he picked a Santa Cruz, Jeff Kendall’s pro model, mostly because he liked the picture, which depicted a ruined, burned-out city, where up from the smashed concrete rose a pumpkin-headed monster borne into the air. Will was struck by a deep, piercing resonance, both with this image and with Jeff Kendall, a man he knew nothing about, other than he lived in California and was a skateboard wizard. Will chose Independent trucks (the metal braces that attach wheels to board, Jonah told him), both because Jonah had them and because when he said it repeatedly, the word sounded like an unstoppable train charging forward.

When the box arrived, the air it released was humid and fragrant of ocean. With Jonah’s help Will assembled his board on the worktable in Toronto, after which they charged berserkly to Will’s front sidewalk. With spring in high gear, the neighborhood drains gushed, the water syrupy with silt, and the sun seemed boosted — as though now properly charged.

It took no more than five seconds for Will to ascertain he would be forever cursed as a pitiful skateboarder. It was nothing like exercise biking or ice sliding or painting or Destructivity Experiments. Constantly he was flung downward, the board tomahawking off in the opposite direction, his knees and elbows quickly bashed and gored by the tyrannical pavement.

“You’re putting too much weight on it,” said Jonah as he executed spritely ollies up the curb near Will’s driveway. Will knew of no possible way to stand on something without putting weight on it and told Jonah so. When he later questioned Jonah on the secrets of the ollie, a feat Will was in no position yet to even attempt, Jonah only offered: “It’s sort of like riding a bike — your body learns the rules, but your head doesn’t.” Will neglected to inform Jonah that the only bike he’d ever ridden only had one wheel, which didn’t touch the ground.

Will spent the ensuing weeks dumped to the pavement with demoralizing repetition, flaying the tender flesh of his lower back, knees, and hips like an invisible monster was dismantling him cell by cell. He stymied wave after wave of hot tears. In the mornings when he awoke in his cot in New York, his body was a symphony of aches, he found himself clumsy as an infant, as though during sleep he’d misplaced his ability to walk.

Sometimes while skateboarding Will spotted his mother’s dark shape in the window of Paris, rereading her page-turners and heating soup in her electric kettle, and the sight of her, shipwrecked there, stabbed him with a pocket knife of guilt. Will knew his mother viewed skateboarding as the worldly equivalent of going snorkeling in the Black Lagoon, but so far she’d only hung his new orange Helmet from a nail near the door, right beside where he kept his skateboard, leaving unmentioned the fact he never touched it. Jonah didn’t need a Helmet, so Will didn’t either.