Michael Christie - If I Fall, If I Die

“The harborfront is the only place we didn’t search,” said Jonah.

“Maybe Marcus is hiding in one of those abandoned buildings down there. Or the Wheezing Man.”

“Or maybe the Butler is,” Jonah said sleepily. “But fine, we’ll take a look. We might find a dry place we can skate when winter comes.”

The next morning Will filled a pop bottle with tap water and dropped it into a backpack. Next, he went to Paris and retrieved the secret key from the top of the doorframe that he didn’t know about and unlocked the knife drawer. The selection was limited, but he took the wickedest-looking blade, a long serrated thing with a blunt tip that his mother used to slice her fresh loaves, and stuffed it into his hoodie.

“Is everything still okay, Will?” asked his mother as he was pulling on his skateboard shoes. She was in her bathrobe, her toenails long as teaspoons. Like half-buried jewels, her eyes had fallen deeper in their sockets during the past few days that they hadn’t been talking. “I’m worried about you,” she said.

“Imagine that,” he said, hitching his laces tight.

“You’re always in such a hurry these days. And that note, I just hope you and Jonah aren’t in danger—”

“Everyone’s always in danger,” he interrupted while fixing his pants cuffs. The way they met his shoes had recently assumed great significance to him.

“Sure,” she said, retying the sash of her robe as though trying to cinch herself calm, “but are you in more danger than normal?”

“Are you in danger, Mom?” he said, standing. “Right now?”

She frowned. “That’s not fair,” she said. Her face melted, and she began to drip tears, again.

“Sure it is,” he said, willing himself to stone.

“I don’t know how worried I should be. Can you at least tell me that?” she said.

“I’ve got it under control,” Will said, flinging open the door.

“Being anonymously threatened is under control?”

“Better than you’re doing,” he said. “You don’t know who’s threatening you either.”

She went to say something angry but turned her head slightly to the side and shut her eyes. “You’re just … never home anymore, honey. I miss you. I miss watching you paint. I miss your voice in the house.”

Looking into her eyes that were green and bright as alarm clock digits, her yellow hair over the neat cockles of her ears, he felt the old Inside parts of him soften for a moment and ached suddenly for her to enfold him. “I miss you too,” he conceded.

“You’re growing up so fast,” she said, putting her cool hand on his cheek. “It’s like you don’t need me anymore. We used to take such good care of each other.”

Will felt these words bulldoze his heart, and he shut the door and fell into her arms with a great heaviness, a feeling not unlike when he used to stay in the tub in Venice until all the water had drained out, leaving him heavy, sedated, and blissful, as if he’d narrowly survived a drowning. They lowered themselves to the floor, coming to rest side by side against the wall. He tried to breathe again in the old way, in exact synchronization with her, but because his lungs had grown Outside, matching her breaths didn’t spin his head like it used to. How could he explain now that even though boys could trip and punch you, and wolves could feast upon your flesh, and blood could gush from your body and bounce on the ice, and some kids didn’t even have parents to worry about them, and a boy could disappear from the world and nobody would care, Marcus had been right — the Outside wasn’t all that dangerous. It was worth leaving for, if only to see it up close and to make a friend for a short while.

They sat like that for a spell. Then he rose, kissed the top of her head, threw his backpack over his shoulder, took up his skateboard, and again walked out the door. He was already late.

Will met Jonah in the parking lot of the hockey arena, amid the throngs of fathers shouldering corpse-heavy bags of gear and calling their sons “Buddy” while leading them inside.

“You’re going to roll around with that in your waistband?” Jonah said when Will covertly displayed the serrated knife he’d brought for protection.

“Good point,” Will said. He wrapped the knife in his sweatshirt and stuck the bundle in his backpack along with his amethyst and the Neverclear map.

As they started out, Jonah turned inexplicably angry. “What’re you going to do with that knife anyway? You think Marcus got kidnapped by a loaf of French bread? All kinds of things took Marcus,” he yelled over the cacophony of their wheels as they began bombing a hill. “None of them you can stab.”

Downtown, the fall cold had herded everyone inside the taverns, leaving the sidewalks barren. After kickflipping perfectly up the curb of a closed gas station and then improvising a magnificent ollie over an overturned trashcan, Jonah’s rage seemed to dissipate, or at least resubmerge. “I could see if my brothers could get us a hunting rifle,” Jonah said. Will liked the idea but figured it would be difficult to carry inconspicuously. Will asked Jonah if you could saw a rifle off like a shotgun and Jonah said he didn’t think so. “Maybe we’ll hold off for a while,” Will said.

The waterfront itself was the only section of the city they hadn’t searched by skateboard because it was all condemned industrial land, just broken concrete strewn with junk and rubble, impassable for their wheels. With boards in hand they crossed the tracks and discovered a deer path through a tough thicket of fireweed and brambles. They passed a rusting washer-and-dryer set that stank of putrid water, then followed a tangle of lesser rail tracks that ducked through a fence into a junkyard.

Hidden amid the landscape of discarded trucks and train cars and garbage were a few shacks and lean-tos, less sturdily built than Marcus’s had been, constructed mostly of derelict metal, plastic sheeting, and wood scrap. Two men were sitting near a steaming paint can hung over a smoky fire, one of them armless, the other weeping like a child while holding a tiny radio to his ear. The boys sighted some wolves or dogs — again they weren’t sure which — stalking the doorway of a distant burned-out shed across the yard, and Will’s heart ricocheted around in his chest while he cursed himself for forgetting to apply his deodorant that morning. But the wolves seemed otherwise occupied or at least didn’t catch his scent.

“So you think the Butler hides out down here?” Will asked, hiding his trembling hands in his pockets.

“My brothers said he’s rich, lives in a log mansion near the border. But he comes down to load Neverclear on trains and the occasional boat. So what exactly are we looking for, then? A big cage with Marcus’s name on it?”

“Anything,” said Will, scanning the bleak moonscape. “Everything.”

Soon they arrived at the foot of the largest of the elevators, twelve enormous concrete cylinders stood on end, all fused together like a pipe organ or a clutch of giant shotgun shells. Attached to the cylinders rose a towering structure connected by a bridge, looming two hundred feet overhead, high as the castles of Will’s encyclopedias. Painted on the side of the desolate structure in enormous flaking white lettering: SASKATCHEWAN WHEAT POOL 6.

“Hey!” Will exclaimed, “I think the Wheezing Man said something about ‘swimming in pool six’ when he grabbed me that night.”

“Okay,” Jonah said, craning his neck upwards. “We’ll start here.”

After tracing the perimeter of the elevator, they found an unblocked entrance near a covered area where the tracks spanned over a massive steel grate amid some brutish, disused machinery. “This’s where they unloaded the grain, I think,” Will said.