Michael Christie - If I Fall, If I Die

At times Will wondered what special genius allowed Jonah to nimbly launch himself from the summit of any stair set without a stitch of Black Lagoon in his body. It had something to do with the possessed gleam he’d get while maniacally attempting a trick for hours until he’d mastered it. Jonah was channeling something, Will figured. An anger, maybe. Equal parts joy and fear. He resembled the skateboard titans of Thrasher more and more each day.

Will couldn’t discern if it was the sight of a White kid and an Indian kid together or the velocity with which they disregarded every traffic bylaw and trespassing ordinance on the books that caused pedestrians to recoil as they zoomed past. As much as it seemed like a suicide attempt to passersby, skateboarding was precisely the opposite: it was about mastery — a seizure of control, not a loss. That the board did their bidding — danced or flipped or spun successfully beneath them — afforded the most sublime pleasures of their short lives. Even after his most crushing falls, Will was learning to greet the pain, to wade out into its eddies and unexpected pools. To feel it pull parallel with another, worse pain inside him — born of the fact that his mother was wasting her life Inside or that his heart could give out any minute. And these pains aligned themselves, matched tempos, a kind of duet. Will would listen to the minor chord of it ring in him and find comfort in the sound.

After spending every weekend downtown, the boys grew well acquainted with Thunder Bay’s maniacs, its miscreants and castaways, those wandering its alleys and vacated streets with nothing better to do, and Will was terrified and fascinated by the harm the Outside could inflict. There were the drunks, some Indian, most not. Many were friendly, overly friendly, and Will would shake their hard, smelly hands while Jonah always kept his distance. Fresh and noxious with Neverclear in the early afternoon — they either came from distant reservations or once worked for the elevators, the railway, the mills, or the lakeboats. They often called to Will and Jonah with equal parts admiration and contempt. “Let’s talk to youse two boys,” they’d slur with dim mustardy eyes, waving them closer. Some would even ask to try their boards, claiming they’d possessed great balance in their day. The boys watched solid, railway tie — driving men drop to the pavement like toddlers. Sometimes they’d ask for change, which Jonah hated most of all. “How about you change your clothes first?” he’d mutter after they’d left.

Then there were the crazies: the man who believed he was a policeman and wrote them fake bylaw infraction tickets for skateboarding on donut shop napkins; fixed to his jacket was a sticker — THIS ACCIDENT HAS BEEN INVESTIGATED BY THE THUNDER BAY POLICE — which he’d push forward like a badge. The woman who only walked backwards, peering over her shoulder with a smudgy makeup mirror. The withered guy who had a voice like a child and strung sentences together like beaded necklaces: “Who are you what are you doing where’s your helmet why are you here you boys are going to kill yourselves.” The carnival-size woman they called Anti — Old Lady because she hated everything. “Do you want a hug?” they’d call to her from safe across the street. “I hate hugs and I hate you!” she’d screech, shutting her eyes with pure loathing. Will listened intently to them all, marveling at their variety, noting their voices and syntaxes, but despite their shared insanity, none bore any resemblance to the Wheezing Man.

But then their first stroke of luck: Will spotted the Bald Man hurrying along the sidewalk with a rolling dolly, on it a small steel drum. Silently the boys lifted their skateboards and followed at a distance, soon arriving upon a spot on the map they’d investigated previously, where they’d found a sun-faded purple car, the color of diluted wine, out front of a shuttered brick laundromat. The Bald Man pulled his dolly beside the car, taking a quick glance around before levering open the gas tank and feeding the mouth of a section of green hose into the tank. He put the other end to his lips, spat, then stuffed it into the barrel at his feet. He waited like that for a few minutes, glancing around, the boys watching him while tucked behind a used car lot’s sandwich-board sign. Then he capped everything up and pushed the dolly off toward the lake.

When he was gone, the boys approached the car and opened the tank.

“Why all the secrecy for siphoning some gas?” said Jonah, lowering his nose to the opening. “At least now we know what those garden hoses were for.”

“I have an idea,” Will said, searching a garbage-strewn alley, where it didn’t take him long to find some discarded drinking straws. He crumpled the ends and fit three together into one long tube. “One time I made the Eiffel Tower like this,” he said. “My mom loved it.” He stuck the straw in the tank.

“After you,” Jonah said with disbelief.

Will pursed his lips and sucked. Into his mouth flooded a gulp of burning death and antimatter and the purple fumes of a hundred melting G.I. Joe figurines. Will gagged and nearly vomited while a good amount continued to napalm his throat and claw its way down into his belly. “When is this going to stop?” Will said weakly, doubling over, a lingering aftertaste like whatever was in Mr. Miller’s mug.

“Ah, give it a second,” Jonah said pinching the straw from Will’s grip. “You don’t have Indian tastebuds.” He took a sip and smacked his lips. “Whew!” he said. “That right there is grain alcohol like I’ve never tasted. There’s something extra to it”—he clacked his tongue—“A kick. Like nailpolish remover and model glue. Neverclear, I’d bet anything.”

“Butler must be hiding it around the city in the gas tanks of abandoned cars!” Will said hoarsely, now feeling as if his mother had duct taped a few dozen hand warmers to his belly.

“Okay, so Marcus was stealing hoses for the Butler. Then he got the idea to take the map so he could use it to find the Butler’s stashes of Neverclear and sell it himself. Something like that would generate enough money to kiss Thunder Bay good-bye forever.”

“Maybe it worked. Maybe Marcus did it?” Will said, still recovering.

“Then why is the Butler still offering a reward?” said Jonah. “No, the Butler and the Bald Man must’ve remembered where this one was without the map, or we would’ve seen them do this weeks ago.”

“But if all those X s are cars with Neverclear stashed in them—”

“—it means there are gallons and gallons of this stuff out there,” Jonah said. “Which means the Butler still really, really wants it.” Jonah cinched the straps of his backpack.

“Shit,” Will said, swearing credibly for the first time, but still too afraid to enjoy it.

With Will back at school and afterwards riding his skateboard out who-knows-where — she was mentally replaying his promise to avoid the waterfront thirty or forty times per day — Diane had been forced, under threat of starvation, to answer the door herself. While signing for a large, heavy box, she made the mistake of glancing over the courier’s shoulder, out into the white radium glow of the pavement, at the brown delivery truck chuffing in her driveway, and the desolate infinity of it threw up a squall in her chest. But she felt her knees hold, and no icy sweat broke over her like that first time it came while she was shoveling the driveway.

Triumphantly, she dragged the box through the hall into the kitchen. Normally she left packages in the entranceway for Will to open when he returned, but the heft of this one intrigued her. She fetched the key from its hiding place, unlocked the knife drawer, and removed a small paring knife. After carefully splitting the tape, she lifted a stack of film canisters from the box, each entombed painstakingly in foam, all battleship gray or mint green — six in total. Next she unearthed a newly minted hardcover book, published by the National Film Board, entitled Diane Cardiel: A Filmography . Inside were lushly published still images from her films and many essays, including one called “The Constructedness of Public Space in the Age of Anxiety.” Folded into the book was a letter from the director of the NFB, stating that they’d reissued her entire filmography two years ago but had been unable to locate her. Until a former student of his named Penny Gustavson, who was now an elementary school teacher, had recently informed him that Diane was living back in Thunder Bay. Perfect timing, he said, because the NFB was mounting a running retrospective in Toronto and Montreal next spring and would like to invite her to speak. “I understand, however,” he added tactfully toward the end, “that travel may be problematic.”