Michael Christie - If I Fall, If I Die

“Oh, Corpsey,” the Butler said, his palm over his open mouth mockingly, “I’m afraid someone else is about to have a terrible accident at Pool Six …”

“Stop,” Titus barked, his face pained. “I didn’t. Sink. Aurelius. Like I. Told you. I buried. Him. Unbind me and. I’ll unearth. Him.”

“Didn’t want to sully the old harbor any more than you already have, huh Corpsey?” the Butler said, grinning as he leaned over to untie Titus, still holding the shovel at his side, ready to swing. “Show me.” Claymore drew Jonah back upright, cinching his bristling arm around the boy’s throat.

Titus crawled over to a large hopper, fed by pipes that snaked from above like some terrible musical instrument. “Buried him in the grain, did you?” the Butler said. “Isn’t grain marvelous?” he added, addressing Will. “The way it can build a city like Thunder Bay, the way it can earn a man a good living and feed a family? And the way it can aid the forgetting when all that is lost.” Titus rose to grab a wooden lever and dropped it. A spout leapt open and out burst a stream of golden grain that Will couldn’t identify. They watched it quickly build an enormous conical pile in the center of the room. “He’s. In here,” said Titus when the hopper had emptied and the taupe tornadoes of dust had dissipated. “But I’ll need one. Of those shovels.”

“Not likely,” the Butler said, taking a quick swig from his bottle. “Dig with your hands.”

Hacking and blue faced, Titus climbed painfully up the side of the mound and began scooping grain like a dog preparing its bed. “Still champagne wheat in here, isn’t it, Corpsey?” the Butler said, running a handful through his fingers. “Not even sprouted after all these years. Shame nobody wants it. All those starving children in the world. But I’ll find a use for it.”

Titus dug as Will fought a mist of tears and strained against his ropes to no avail. Then Titus uncovered a large, green canvas duffle. He blew the grain dust out of the zipper before grinding it back as the Butler approached, his eyes zapping with delight. Titus reached inside the bag and drew out a large glass jar of water and a stack of paintings that looked curiously like Will’s masterpieces. “He’s gone,” Titus bellowed. “I put him on a lakeboat. A saltie. A favor from. A man I once knew. You’ll never find. Aurelius. He’s safe. Now.”

“That’s unfortunate, Corpsey,” the Butler said and Claymore grabbed Jonah by the shoulders and with wrath in his eyes prepared to send him headfirst into the open hole.

“Will, what’s going on?” said a woman’s voice from behind them.

Everyone turned, and Will saw before him an unsteady figure that was familiar in such an overwhelming manner that it was impossible to grasp completely. Her face was fierce and shining, and she looked afraid in her old nightgown, filthy from the elevator’s walls. The Butler scoffed and started pacing toward this person, this woman, and at that moment Will saw something grand and terrible cross her face. As he drew near, she reached and snapped a bracelet on her wrist, her eyes stewing with fright, but also indignant, furious, her body coiling, about to cry out, either in pain or in fear or in rage — it was impossible to tell. And it was then that Titus exploded from the pile of grain toward them. Since he’d been Outside, Will had seen people grab cats in this way, but only at the back of the neck, never the front, and cats seemed to enjoy it, because there was so much skin back there, or they didn’t have any nerves there, or it reminded them of their mothers. But Will didn’t think the way Titus grabbed the Butler fell into this category — from the front, his fingers closed over the Butler’s windpipe like a bit of garden hose. The Butler dropped his shovel, and his pale hands flew up into the air like twin doves. Titus walked him back toward the opening of a chute. “I’ll make a wonderful. Mess. Out of you,” Titus said through his ruined lungs. “You reconnoiter that?” The Butler’s stricken face was unmoving, but his eyes blinked in agreement. Titus drove him to the ground, pinning him on his back almost gently.

At that moment, Jonah dropped through Claymore’s arms, sidestepping him, then gracefully kicked him with a skateboard-hardened shin in the back of the knees, dumping the man to the ground.

Behind the woman burst in two of the Turtle Brothers, and they charged for Claymore, who cowered backward, away from Jonah as if he were a lit match bomb. “Look, I got no trouble with you Indians,” Claymore said, brandishing his palms.

“Indians?” said Enoch, the one with a black crew cut, short as the lip of a soda can. “I look like Gandhi to you, motherfucker?”

Claymore got to his feet, shaking his head like a chastised boy.

“Because we’re definitely not feeling all that nonviolent right now,” said Gideon, beads tied into tightly drawn pigtails and tattoos twining up his neck. “Get your ass outside, Doc,” he said to Jonah. “We won’t be requiring your services.”

The woman rushed over and untied Will’s hands and took him in her arms. While Titus and Jonah’s brothers bound the Butler and his men, she led the boys out from the elevator to where the Turtle Brothers’ van was parked. Silently, they sat on the torn vinyl seats, the boys rubbing their wrists while they waited. Will wasn’t sure if Jonah was shivering beside him because of fear or cold, and his mother put her arms around them, and they both leaned into her and shut their eyes.

“I can’t believe you’re here,” Will said, still not quite able to look at her.

“I was worried,” she said with disbelief.

“How did you know where we were?”

“That terrible man came, and I told him where you were — for some reason I knew you boys would be in this elevator. But I got a bad feeling afterwards — I mean worse than usual — so I called Jonah’s house. But his phone still wasn’t working, so I walked there to find you. His brothers brought me here.”

“You went through the culvert?”

“Yes,” she said, exhaling, puffing the marigold-colored bangs from her forehead. “I realized that even though I’d already lost you, you could still use my help sometimes.”

Jonah had once told Will that if you drop a penny off a high building, like the ones in real Toronto or New York, it ends up falling so fast it can zip right through a person’s whole body from skull to feet before driving itself six feet into the pavement. Will took this bit of magic to mean that his mother was sort of right: everything was dangerous if it falls for long enough, even the littlest things. Will knew now that the worst calamities that happened Outside were unremarked, things that nobody noticed, like Icarus plunging into the water, or children who went missing without a soul looking for them. Outside was still chock-full of questions Will couldn’t answer, like how his uncle Charlie got the way he did, or his mother, or why Angela was doomed and other girls weren’t, or what had made Marcus push the Butler as brazenly as he did. And even though in the end Will hadn’t solved its mysteries, he still loved the Outside so intensely that he worried he could die of it.

According to the Turtle Brothers, Constable MacVicar never did make it down to the harbor to arrest Butler and Claymore where they’d left them, and nobody ever found all the Butler’s Neverclear. The rumor was that after they were through with him, whatever malevolence that Titus said had overtaken the Butler when he was hit by that loading boom had been reversed, or at least muted. They heard he dismantled his operation, and the following summer Jonah and Will saw him once while skateboarding near the harbor. He was wearing slippers on the sidewalk, staring blankly into the window of a vacant store, now just another of the damaged faces that the boys rocketed past. In Will’s “bullet ballets,” they always caught the criminal boss last, but seeing how the Butler didn’t exactly fall into that category, Will supposed that in the story of him and his mother, the real Outside bad guy was harder to pin down and definitely wasn’t something MacVicar could lock up in jail.