Michael Christie - If I Fall, If I Die

But after a day of watching the prairie rip past from their nook on the highballing train, the man zeroed in closer with a finger in Titus’s face. “I recognize you. The elevators. We worked an unloading crew,” the man said. “I heard you was dead.”

“Things … change,” Titus managed to get out right.

“Sorry I can’t rightly place your name there, fella,” the man said squinting. “But welcome home besides.” Luckily, by the empty closets of his eyes and the way decades of cloudy brandy and sleepless transience had carved from him all glimmers of vitality, Titus could tell this was a man accustomed to ghosts.

After that Titus hopped off in the yard near Pool 6 and considered going to her straightaway, but first he wanted a look at the elevator. He needed to take it slow, as though he were coming up from the deep ocean. Finding the elevator abandoned, he slept overnight there, and despite the sickening sight of the water out front that had swallowed his best friend, he found comfort in its smells: train diesel and the linger of grain dust. From high in the workhouse he’d look up to Thunder Bay and scarcely recognized it after all those years. But it was good to be near where she was. Better even.

Then one morning he shaved and washed up and regarded himself in a rearview mirror he’d pulled from an abandoned truck. With his skin tanned and eyes clear, he looked like something not quite dead, something almost worth forgiveness, even for the worst things, especially by someone as good as she was. He followed the creek up to her house and found it dark. Part of him was proud of her for leaving. He returned each Sunday night for years, watching, until one day the lights were on, and he saw her, twirling a little boy around, dancing together in the lamplight among the furniture, and it was then he realized a wall had been built between him and the world of houses. Between him and the world of calendars and dancing and dinners steaming on tables and children drinking glasses of milk with two hands. He could not track his mess into their house. Into these bright, buoyant lives. He belonged to a different world now. Outside hers.

One October afternoon Will returned from skateboarding to find something pasted to the outside of the picture window in Cairo:

please go back inside for your own good. or else. there will be turmoil .

He rushed out and snatched it down before his mother saw it. The words were crudely formed on a flattened carton, ballpoint pen dug into the waxy cardboard.

“Why the hell would a threatening note say ‘please’?” said Jonah later when Will brought the sign to their crime lab. “Doesn’t make any sense.”

“And does it mean, like, there will be ‘turmoil’ no matter what?” Will wondered. “Or does it mean ‘or else there will be turmoil’ and the period was like an accident?”

“No clue,” Jonah said.

After some further discussion, they brushed the sign for prints and came up empty. The boys returned to Will’s house and searched the soil under the window. There they discovered the same boot prints Will had found the previous winter, same hexagonal imprint, right where Will had watched the blue jay die. This time Will ran Inside to fetch his mother’s old Polaroid camera from behind his boxed masterpieces in Toronto. “I have an idea,” he said.

The boys rolled downtown to a workwear store called Pound’s that they’d often skateboarded behind that summer, which, judging by its mustiness, dated signage, and general disrepair, had been open since well before Will’s mother last breathed fresh air.

“Yup, used to sell those,” said the aged, squinty clerk when Will showed him the photo of the boot print, forgetting all the times he’d shooed the boys from his parking lot. “Not anymore, though. Used to assemble them right here in Thunder Bay. But I sold my last pair years ago.”

“Any idea who wore them?” asked Will.

“Workers mostly,” he said. “A popular choice. Lots of fellas wear them. Miners, boilermakers, grain trimmers, loggers — you name it.”

“Right,” said Jonah once they were back Outside. “So we’re looking for someone who’s insane, can’t breathe, collects garden hoses, has poor grammar, and wears old boots nobody sells anymore. Awesome.”

“Every clue counts, Jonah,” said Will. “But that last word of the note really does seem like something the Wheezing Man might write.”

A week later, while doing laundry in Toronto, Will pinched a pelt of dryer lint from the trap and tossed it in the trash. Remembering that his mother had asked him to fetch her old Bolex for her, he stood on an overturned bucket and retrieved the camera’s dusty case from back near the wall where he’d stashed Marcus’s bloodied shirt. When Will was younger, she’d taught him how to use the Bolex to make a short Claymation movie of a volcano erupting and engulfing a village. Will realized now that he and Jonah could make their own skateboarding movie, like the Californian skateboard videos they worshipped, and resolved to do it once they found Marcus and everything went back to normal. Will yanked aside a box, crashing masterpieces to the floor, and something caught his eye.

“Where did these come from?” he said, setting the pair of work boots down on his mother’s comforter, boots that had sat unremarkably in Toronto for as long as Will could remember, the exact hexagonal pattern he’d been searching for embedded in the tread.

“Oh, those,” she said absentmindedly while writing in a notebook. “They were your grandfather’s.”

“Why do we have his boots?”

“Will, what’s wrong?” she said, putting down her pen, her eyebrows knitted. “Why do you look so worried?”

“I asked a question.”

“And I answered it,” she said. “They were your grandfather Theodore’s. We got them when he died. They were all that was left of him.”

Will was about to let the whole thing drop when he noticed a chalky substance had flaked from the soles onto his mother’s navy bedspread and everything clicked. “Did you write it?” Will said. “Have you been wearing these, Mom? Outside?”

“Will, what’s wrong with you?” she said plaintively, with a snap of her elastic. “Please lower your voice.”

“Well, have you?” he said, picturing her sneaking secretly around the back walk to paste the note to the window, exactly as he’d done when he first met Marcus what seemed like eons ago. And just like her to write a guilt-inducing please on something that was supposed to be threatening.

“You must be kidding,” she said.

“Then why are they dirty?”

“That’s grain dust, Will. Both your grandfather and your uncle worked at the elevators. It coated everything they owned: their clothes, their hair. Your uncle hung his work clothes outside the door and showered before dinner, it was so bad. Want me to show you the hook? It’s still there.”

Will was heartsick with all her lying and acting and faking, and at that moment some part of him turned inside out: all the pity and compassion and responsibility he’d once felt for her had finally compacted into a molten core of disgust. She’d already squandered her own life, and now she wasn’t brave enough to let him live his own. He’d conquered his fears by forcing himself Outside and going to school and skateboarding and making a friend while she cowered in her bed and lied about everything that mattered to him most. The truth was, she could leave anytime she wanted, except she didn’t care to, because she was selfish — and for this more than anything he loathed her.

In a red haze Will dug into his pocket and held up the note he’d found. “Look familiar?” he said. Her eyes flicked over the crudely arranged words — the strange please , the odd turmoil , the contentious period and barely scary TV cliché threat — and her jaw dropped open like a glove compartment. He watched as something in her tipped over and terror flooded in to replace it. Then she shuddered in panic and exploded with a million questions. “Forget it, it was only a prank,” Will said. “Some hockey players at school.” Before fleeing to New York, where he locked his door and yanked on headphones, setting Public Enemy to a teeth-numbing volume.