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 Xs 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.
Relaxation Time
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.”
A retrospective? Weren’t those for the dead, or at least the near dead? It struck her that she was now widely regarded as a relic, an oddity. But had she been away that long? Long enough for the mildew of enigma to grow upon her? Even if she could make it there, somehow, people would ask what she’d been doing all this time, what work she’d done. “Oh, hiding in my house, watching my son paint,” she’d be forced to say. Of course she’d write the director to say she couldn’t go, but as she turned the book in her hands, she couldn’t avoid feeling some blush of pride at the crisp handsomeness of it, and at the care and delicacy the director had exhibited in his letter, which seemed intended for a person much more eccentric, fragile, and important than herself.
While reboxing the canisters to hide them in her closet, Diane noticed that Jonah and Will had left the 16mm projector set up in Cairo. Though it was nearly time for her usual 10:30 Relaxation Session, she found herself threading her first film—The Sky in Here—into the take-up reel. She made tea, snuffed the room’s lamps, drew the curtains, and coaxed the projector into a clatter.
As the film played, Diane sat quietly, her mind not so much absorbing the images as turning inward to reconstruct the person who’d shot this film, who’d synced the sound and spoke the now precious-sounding voice-over, astonished by how foreign to herself she’d become. After the first film ended she loaded another, watching them in the order she’d created them, fascination creeping into her, each film a missive from a dark region of her self she’d left unconsidered for so long.
She had such feeble command of the period after she’d watched them pull the first tatters of her brother’s body from the lake. Oh, how did she ever survive it? In the days following, she’d cried with such force she learned to navigate their house by feel, a grief so fierce and depleting her whole body felt like a turned-out pocket.
When she gathered the strength, she phoned Whalen’s house and spoke to his father for the first time. He said his son hadn’t been home since the accident, and he begged Diane to tell him where he was.