“You guys can stay,” Angela said, leaning forward for the nurse. “I do this every day. It loosens the mucus.”
“Angela, I have something I need to ask,” Will said as the nurse velcroed her into a vest that reminded Will of a flak jacket. Angela coughed a few more hoarse seal barks and spit some blobs into a cup.
“Sorry,” she said, an embarrassed look directed at Jonah.
The nurse hooked two tubes from the machine to the jacket, and as Will was about to speak, the machine roared and the jacket inflated like an airplane life vest. Angela began to shake. The nurse checked her watch then left the room.
“Angela,” Will began nervously, speaking loudly as he did on his first day of school. “You know that drawing of Jonah’s I gave you? Well, he needs it back.”
She frowned while her bottom lip wobbled with the shaking.
“He said he’d draw another one for you?” Will added, turning to Jonah, who nodded.
“But I love that drawing,” she said, her voice warbly like a sheep saying baa. “I see it when I wake up. It keeps me going.”
“We … need it, Angela. It’s important.”
“Yeah,” Jonah said. “That one’s not even good. I’ll draw you anything you want.”
“So …,” Angela said, “you wouldn’t have come if it wasn’t for this thing—”
“—No, that’s not it!” said Will.
Suddenly the machine stopped, and it felt like the whole Outside had never been so quiet before. Even the distant beeping and institutional hush of the hospital was lessened.
Angela thought for a moment before horking brazenly into a cup. “Okay, boys, I have an idea,” she said.
Will and Jonah spent the next day setting up an ersatz crime lab in Jonah’s basement, opposite to where Enoch kept his weight set. They’d considered setting up in Will’s house (better art supplies and lighting), but Will knew their investigation would unsettle his mother, plus Marcus’s grid was safer here. Despite their fearsome exterior, the Turtle Brothers spoke softly and made a point to eat together every Friday night, the boys all sitting down to either a big stack of ordered-in pizzas or some fried whitefish that Gideon pulled sizzling from a cast-iron pot with a wire scooper. They always waited for Will to take his share first.
Once after supper Will asked Jonah if he’d ever tried the Butler’s grain alcohol. “No,” he said, then tapped his temple, “I’m keeping this baby pristine for med school. My brothers don’t touch it either now that they’re working at the call center.” Jonah’s brothers spent their days convincing people to increase their credit limits, and the thought of these powerful men talking all day into tiny headsets gave Will a headache. Jonah said that when they first moved down to Thunder Bay from their reserve, his brothers started a roofing company. They put an ad in the yellow pages, bought a truck, tools, and an air compressor for their nail guns—but their phone sat quiet as a rock. Gideon even took the phone back and demanded another at the store. But the new one didn’t ring either. At the unemployment office the man asked Hosea what they were thinking. He said Indians don’t know the first thing about roofs. “He said homeowners in Thunder Bay knew we haven’t lived under them for long enough,” Jonah said.
“Why do your brothers call you Doc?” asked Will.
“Because I’ve always sewn them up with dental floss whenever they came home gashed up,” Jonah said. “Those medical textbooks are how I learned to draw real people. Studying anatomy.” With an image locked in his mind of Jonah with a loop of dental floss in his teeth bending over his grimacing brother’s split eyebrow, for the first time in his life Will wished he’d had siblings.
“Is that how you’re getting out of Thunder Bay?” Will said.
At this, Jonah grew shy. “Yeah, maybe. I’m going to fall back on medicine if my pro skateboard career doesn’t work out,” he said with his usual smirk.
It took only a few days in Jonah’s Inside before Will decided he preferred it to his own. Here nobody was watching you, and the most ghastly horror films elicited only laughter and glee, and the Black Lagoon did not reign. It was during this time Will noticed water-swollen porno magazines nestled beside the upstairs toilet. The hairstyles of the women were huge and souffléd, and upon their orangey faces he found an exact replica of his mother’s Black Lagoon look—as if they’d all been struck by some great, unknowable terror. Will realized then with horror that penises were Outside and vaginas were Inside, and the import of these connections sent him lunging from the bathroom.
The boys rush-ordered a fingerprinting kit and practiced on themselves, applying latent powder with the impossibly fluffy brush, lifting the print with tape and fixing it to a backing card, pausing only so Jonah could occasionally wipe his mouth with his sleeve after his kiss with Angela. She’d said she would surrender the drawing only if they both French-kissed her in her hospital bed for a count of thirty seconds each. “I want to be fair,” she’d said, which Will hoped was more than evidence of her charitability. Angela removed her feeding tube, and after Will sufficiently coaxed him, Jonah went first, tucking his bangs behind his ears, as he brought his lips to hers, Angela wide-eyed. The sight of his two friends mouth-locked was both unbearable and dazzling for Will to behold. When Will’s turn came, it was like his face ollied down twenty stairs and landed in a tub of warm oil. Jonah had lasted only twenty-five seconds before pulling away, but Will couldn’t venture how long his kiss was. He could still taste the flavor of her mouth, acidic, apricot-like, the best thing the Outside had offered so far.
One night, they were fingerprinting Marcus’s grid when Enoch came over to their worktable after an hour of grunting beneath his barbells. “Why’re you tools putting makeup on that map?” he said, breathing hard, toweling his face with a shirt.
“It’s not a …,” Will said, before locking eyes with Jonah.
“ ’Cept it doesn’t have any fucking street names on it,” Enoch continued. “Some map. But looks like the harborfront, to me. That’s the only part of this shit-pile town built in a grid.”
14
September arrived the following week and demanded their begrudging return to school. The boys claimed the rearmost desks, where they whispered about the map they’d yet to decipher and the byzantine skateboard tricks they would someday master. Their new teacher, Mrs. Gustavson, wore a beach-worth of shell jewelry, smiled emptily, and spouted in a sugary voice lots of his mother’s words, like creativity, gifted, and self-esteem. Will trusted her about as far as his mother could go for a jog.
In the first week, when Will was picking up an exercise he’d narrowly passed from her desk, he said, “Thanks Mom,” instantly scorching himself with embarrassment.
At recess, Mrs. Gustavson asked him to stay behind. “I couldn’t help but notice what you said there,” she said.
“Yeah, sorry,” said Will. “Old habit.”
“Oh, I don’t mind. In fact, I’m quite flattered,” she said, pausing as if something was sinking in other than the death knell of boredom and the senseless squander of recess time.
“You know, Will,” she continued, “I must confess something to you. I’m a great admirer of your mother’s work. And your father’s, of course. But I saw The Sky in Here when I was in university, and it made an indelible impression on me,” she said, as though they were sharing some great secret.
“I’ve never seen it.”
“Really?” she said, shocked. “But you must be very close?”
“You could say that.”
“Well, she’s modest, I’m sure. But I know some people who will be very pleased to hear Diane Cardiel is safe and sound and back living in Thunder Bay. She must love having a bright, creative fellow like you around the house,” she said, smiling falsely, and Will bristled. Jonah had more creativity in his right leg than all the students at his school combined, and though she was brand new, Mrs. Gustavson already acted as if he wasn’t there.