“Aren’t you supposed to be ‘relaxing’ right now?”
“I asked you a question, Will. Did you hear me?”
“I’m going out,” he said, swinging his upturned palm at the door as though to indicate the whole world.
She started shaking, then stiffened, and drew her hands to her hips. “Will, I forbid you to leave this house.”
“Okay sure, Mom. And I forbid you to stay home.”
“I’m serious.”
“Or what?” he said, stepping backwards through the open doorway.
Her anger opened into a pleading look like a flower blooming. “I don’t know what will happen to me if you go,” she said pitifully.
“You’ll be fine,” he said, taking another step back.
She started walking toward him, arms outstretched, stepping onto the tile landing. “Don’t go, Will.”
“You’re going to have to come get me,” Will said with another backwards step down the stairs, which he knew she thought was dangerous but actually wasn’t at all.
She minced forward, slippers shushing on the tile, unsteady as a woman with no handhold on a speeding train. For a moment Will cheered her on, promising himself that if she could only step Outside now, he wouldn’t need to go back to Pool 6. She would fix everything. The same way she berated store managers on the phone. He pictured a whole new life beginning for them: sitting in those white-tableclothed restaurants he’d whizzed past downtown, watching the rain hit her coat as they walked under trees, him reassuring her that lightning never hits you, even if you dare it to. But as he watched, her face constricted as though she’d received devastating news, and she quivered and slowed before stopping, still two feet back from the opening. When tears flashed in her eyes and her body shook, conquered, Will turned and walked away. Because nothing would ever change. She’d always be this way, and it was a waste of precious Outside time to wait for her.
Tears are salty water, he thought as his skateboard roared over the sidewalk beneath him like an entire pack of wolves growling at once. Like sweat. And who ever heard of a person sweating too much. It was good for you. Natural. Maybe people were born with a finite amount of tears Inside them, and all a person had to do was let them all fall, and then they’d be free.
He found the Wheezing Man sitting up in his pallet bed with an enormous book split in his lap.
“You want me to spritz us with a passage?”
“Okay,” said Will, unshouldering his bag. Despite the man’s limited mobility, Will remained leery of getting too close.
The Wheezing Man began to read, but the words and sentences he produced seemed too confused and unrelated to one another to be published in any book. From the spine, Will noted that this volume was supposed to be about shipbuilding and various lakeboats, yet the man talked mostly of dark clouds and steel cables, about people weeping for years and animals giving birth in a river. After a while he switched to another book that was supposed to be about the Napoleonic Wars, except he held it upside down. He managed to say the word blood ten times in one sentence, pausing only to recapture his wheezy breath or to draw slow, careful slugs of water from a tall glass that he sat down carefully like a fine jewel.
“Where did you get all this stuff?” Will said after the Wheezing Man stopped, gesturing to his bookshelves and the room’s lavish furnishings.
“Happened over the bulk of it in the garbage,” he said. “Procured some of it. Fashioned the rest. You wouldn’t fathom what citizens turf nowadays.”
Will pulled a can of coconut milk and another of beets from his bag and set them beside the bed, vaguely regretting that it was food he wouldn’t dream of eating himself. He placed the bag of dry oatmeal on a nearby table.
“How salubrious,” the Wheezing Man said, leaning over to tuck the oatmeal into a drawer, shutting it carefully.
Will passed him a hunk of his mother’s bread, which, even though it was stale, Will hoped was his most appetizing offering. The Wheezing Man took a bite and shut his eyes. A look of contentment overcame him, and Will worried he’d dropped to sleep.
Will took a deep breath. “It was you who grabbed me that night in the woods, wasn’t it?”
His breathing quieted down. “I was fixed to warn Aurelius, but I couldn’t pinpoint him,” he said after a while. “Luckily the old man’s wolves missed too.”
“Why’s he called the Butler?” Will asked.
“He’s the worst version,” he said, chewing. “Only assists himself. But he used to be a bona fide man. University man. Escaped Thunder Bay for two years at Queen’s but had to boomerang back to care for his simpleton sister. Came back quoting Wordsworth and all things. Worked in a white coat checking grain boats for weevils and worms. Until he took a loading boom to his head and surrendered half of himself.”
“What half?” Will said.
“The good one,” he said.
“I once perpetrated for him,” he added, finishing his bread. “Squirreling out good grain from this old hulk for his Neverclear.”
“And you and Marcus were getting hoses for him, right? For his gas tanks?”
“Principally,” he said. “Then young Aurelius went and nosedived into a volcano.”
“He stole the Butler’s map, right? To make money? But what if I can get it back? Would the Butler leave him alone?”
Dismay crossed the man’s face. “Wouldn’t account much,” he said. “The Butler’s already brewing up more of that coffin varnish to satiate his clientele.”
“What was Marcus planning to do with the money?”
“He was itching to flee this latitude. Dreamt of a little sloop. A one-hander he could wind himself.”
“You mean a boat?”
“A cabin. A little outboard. Said it was a habitat he could cart with him. Like a turtle. Never again get lodged anyplace he didn’t care for.”
“Do you think he did it?” Will asked. “Made it out?”
“Not yet,” he said, pulling at his beard.
Every day that week, Jonah and Will ditched school to trudge through the fresh-fallen snow to the harbor with cans and food scraps for the man, who said his name was Titus. Will was astonished by how much it took to sustain him, the sheer weight of it. Jonah contributed some sausages that his brothers had made from a bull moose they’d brought down last spring, and the boys had to convince Titus not to eat them raw.
After all those years caring for his mother Inside, Will slipped effortlessly into the caretaker role—fetching food and “unblighted” water, filling the voids in his faltered abilities—and was warmed by that old thrill of domestic usefulness that sustained him for so long Inside. Will felt oddly at ease with Titus, despite everything. He was more like his mother than anyone he’d met Outside, probably attributable to their mutual craziness.
That Saturday Will coaxed Jonah into redressing Titus’s legs, which now bore long scabs, black as slugs. More worrisome, though, was how both his calves were hot to the touch, swollen tight as Jonah’s moose sausages.
“Erythromycin,” Jonah said, tossing onto the table the rattling vial he’d fetched, his cheeks pulsing after a breathless run up to County Park in the frigid air. “Two times daily with food. My brother Gideon got them after a tattoo of his got infected. Expired two years ago, but they’ll have some fight left in them.”
Apart from the possibility that Marcus would reappear at Pool 6 and the opportunity for Jonah to practice his medical skills, the snowfall was how Will had convinced Jonah to frequent the elevator. Will’s second winter Outside had been nothing like his first. Gone were the thrills of exploration and novelty. This time it was all drab light and frozen-footed walks down to the harbor. Because skateboards required dry pavement, winter for an obsessed skateboarder was a time of despair and unimaginable yearning. Will secured Titus’s blessing to build some skateboard ramps in the large room where they’d found him beaten, the Distribution Floor, he called it. They extrapolated the design from Thrasher: ribs placed laterally, curving upward on a template, bent plywood surfaces screwed down over those. The wood they found in abundance around the harbor, two-by-fours used as concrete forms, tool sheds, and old beached dories they busted up. It took them a week to sweep up the bird droppings, and Jonah launched ten sagging garbage bags’ worth out onto the lake ice, where they sat like periods.