Текст книги "If I Fall, If I Die"

Автор книги: Michael Christie

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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

“What about your work?” he said. “Your next film?”

“I can come back to it,” she said.

After Will was born, Arthur tunneled deeper into himself. Increasingly, he preferred life rendered, sketched, blueprinted—better yet, modeled in balsa wood or viewed from a plane, high above the disappointing actuality of place. He applied the same aerial view to Will, reserving his energies for the greater questions: where he should go to school, in what neighborhood would they live. He spent more and more time away, at his drawing table, off in the stratospheres of theory. In truth, Arthur had never enjoyed people. Even Will he treated like a project he was overseeing, checking in every so often like a foreman in a white hardhat to ensure construction was on schedule. Then came their separation, the subway platform … but here she was rooting around again in the past, and with that her thoughts gained traction in the slapping of her last film in the take-up reel, the projector blasting pure, empty light on the collapsible screen, and for the first time in years Diane was battered with the sense that though the cupboards of her self had been abundantly stocked with determination and some modest store of talent, she’d made so little of these ingredients to set upon the table of her life. These six canisters of celluloid and one marvelous boy were the totality of her life’s output. Her mind writhed with specters of conversations she could’ve participated in, words she might have combined, films she could have cut together, the howling ghosts of ideas she would never have.

But maybe there was still time, she thought, rising to kill the projector. Her panic was lessening each day. Who was to say it wouldn’t continue? Perhaps by spring she could make it to the retrospective, at least the one in Toronto. And just so she’d have something to talk about, she could shoot something new. At home. Nothing grandiose. Maybe some time lapses of the sun swinging through rooms like a pendulum. Plants growing. Dust fuzzing the tops of books. Carpets speckling with lint. Will painting—if he ever did again. And these tapes she’d been recording during Relaxation Times, maybe she could work them in somehow, cut them up, cobble the better snippets into a voice-over. She’d pulled those unwanted filmstrips from the trash to make her first film; who was to say she couldn’t do it again with the trimmings of their life here? That settles it, she thought, dragging the box upstairs to her room. She’d ask Will to fetch her old Bolex from the basement when he got home. She only hoped it still worked.

15

The next Monday, Will asked Jonah to accompany him to the police station downtown. “I won’t let anything slip to MacVicar,” Will said, “But we need to see what he knows about Marcus.”

“Sounds like a solo mission,” Jonah said, flung laterally across the armchair in Cairo, eyes boring into the latest Thrasher. “It’s a fact they have great difficulty letting Indians leave that place.” He then reminded Will how Social Services can steal a kid from their parents any time they please, just uproot you from your house like a brown tooth. “They do it all the time,” he said. “They did it to Marcus. They tried to get me.” Jonah said Social Services nearly took him after Hosea went to jail for hunting deer within city limits. But his other brothers hid Jonah in the basement and said he moved up north. “I stayed down there for a month memorizing medical textbooks and eating tinned salmon.” Since then, Jonah’s little basement tent was the only place in the house he could sleep. “But they don’t only do it to Indians, Will,” Jonah said, lifting his eyes. “They do it to White kids, too, if their parents are messed up enough.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” said Will.

Jonah lowered his voice. “Look dude, I love your mom. I’d quit skateboarding in a second if I could live here and read and paint pictures all day, like forever, but I’m only saying. Be careful what you tell those people.”

“I’d like to see the constable,” said Will in a somber voice to the peevish officer standing at a long counter. “I have important information. Pertaining to a kidnapping …”

“Well, if it isn’t our little Jack London,” said MacVicar jovially when Will was admitted to his office. “How’s the leg, son? Back on the hockey rink yet?” In his coarse uniform MacVicar loomed tall and had a lean, muscular face like an astronaut. Will remembered his mother berating him in their doorway after Will’s wolf attack and now wondered if MacVicar had considered whisking Will away from his transparently deranged home environment.

“Constable, I need to know if you have any leads in Marcus’s disappearance.” MacVicar squinted.

“Marcus? The orphan boy who went missing?” said Will.

“Right. Right, we’re looking into it,” MacVicar said. “He wasn’t a friend of yours was he?”

“Yes, he was,” Will said. “And he’s been missing for months. Don’t you have anything yet?”

“Son, anything related to that case won’t go public before the investigation is concluded,” said MacVicar, his good cheer draining.

Will was instantly overcome with the tsunami of exasperation that so often accompanied his Outside interactions with adults. “This is bullshit …,” he murmured uncontrollably, crossing his arms, accidentally kicking the side of MacVicar’s steel desk.

“Look here,” MacVicar said, his face concrete, “Will, the only reason we’re talking right now is because I knew your family. My father worked with your grandfather Theodore and then your uncle Charlie down at those elevators, and I for one know you come from a good, hardworking family, so I’m cutting you some slack. But as I said: these particulars are confidential. And they’re going to remain that way, am I clear?”

Will sneered and turned his head to the window. He hated how in books children were always undiscovered geniuses or princes who inherited rolling green estates at the end. The Outside had laid bare his mother’s great lie: Will wasn’t even in the neighborhood of genius, and a soaring inventory of questions stonewalled his understanding. Just once Will wanted Outside things to go as smoothly as they always had Inside. This idea closed Will’s throat, and he unleashed a low, flabby sob.

The constable sighed and pushed forward a box of tissue. “Can I get you anything, son?” he said.

Will shook his head, unlatching a few more tears that dappled his shirt.

MacVicar rose and poured himself a cup of coffee from the machine on his filing cabinet.

“Can I have one of those?” Will said, sniffing.

The constable paused, cocked his head. Then shrugged. “How do you take it?”

“Pardon?” said Will.

“Black?”

Will nodded, even though he knew coffee was actually dark brown. His mother only drank black tea because coffee “rattled her cage.”

“Look, Will, I know things haven’t been the smoothest for you and your family,” said MacVicar, handing the cup to Will. “How is your mother? She getting out?”

“She’s good,” Will lied, remembering Jonah’s warning about Social Services. “We go to the movies every week and on long walks and stuff.”

“Good, good, Will,” said MacVicar, before they took matching slugs of coffee. Will nearly gagged—the taste was cheap hot chocolate mixed with the moldy soil of a neglected houseplant.

“And I know how tragedies can unsettle a community,” said MacVicar, easing back into his chair. “I’m sure your mother must have told you about your uncle’s accident and what a blow that was to everyone in Thunder Bay. I was there that morning. A terrible thing to witness. It makes a kind of sense her being leery of things and all.”

“You were there when my uncle’s heart gave out?” Will said.

“His heart?” said MacVicar. “That’s an interesting way to put it, son. But I don’t blame her.”

“For what?” said Will.

“You’ll have to ask your mother that question, Will. Listen, my point is, nowadays we’ve got boys like Marcus going missing monthly. Mostly they scarf Valiums or oxycodone before getting gunned on their dad’s hooch or their sister’s hair spray and then go winter swimming in the lake is my experience. So pardon me if our top investigative priority isn’t a lazy delinquent whose natural proclivity is for getting himself lost.”

“Marcus wasn’t lazy,” Will said irritatedly. “He built a cabin. Himself.”

“That shack near the highway we found?” said MacVicar. “On Crown land. Which I shouldn’t have to point out is stealing.”

“He was hiding,” Will said.

“From the truant officer,” scoffed MacVicar.

“From the Butler,” said Will, with either his anger or the coffee loosening his tongue. “It was his wolf who bit me. And he’s a bootlegger,” Will added. “I have proof. And I think he kidnapped Marcus.”

MacVicar sighed deeply. “So there’s the big fat chunk of information that brought you down here, huh?” He walked over to the window and looked out at the water like the captain of a ship. “Son, there’re some things about Thunder Bay I don’t expect you to understand yet. It’s different than it was in your mother’s day. At that time, things made sense here. We put the bad guys in jail and sent the good guys to work. But once the grain stopped coming on those rails and went east to China, things took a turn. Now we’ve got the highest crime rate on the Lakes, outside Chicago. The only grain people’re interested in is the fermented kind. The pourable version. The kind that helps you forget the better times and hunker down into the new. Will, just because you survived that wolf bite don’t mean you’ll come through whatever else this city can muster up for you. People here aren’t in the habit of minding manners, if you go poking into their affairs.”

“People like the Butler?” said Will. “That’s what he does, right? Makes grain alcohol? And now Neverclear? And you already know this, but you don’t even stop him?” Only halfway through his coffee, Will already noticed his jaw trembling and thoughts piling in his head, like a thousand people waiting to pass through a narrow exit, and his mouth felt more comfortable moving than at rest. No wonder everyone Outside drinks it, he thought, coffee makes you brave.

“It may not be pretty,” said MacVicar, “but George Butler keeps order down there among all those hobos and miscreants. Man hops off a train or a lakeboat, perpetrates something wicked, hops right back on. How do I trace that? Then there’s our Indian troubles to complicate things, with more and more coming down from the reserves for opportunities we can’t even offer our own sons anymore. So as it stands, George Butler performs a vital function here. Keeps a lid on things. You don’t know this yet, but there is nothing more dangerous than a person with nothing to do.”

“If you won’t find Marcus, then I will,” Will said defiantly. “For starters, I want to make a formal request for a list of all escaped mental patients within a hundred-mile radius.”

“And what are you going to do with that?” asked MacVicar.

“Investigate.”

He let out a long breath. “Careful, Will. I suspect the first name on that list would be yours.” Will threw himself to his feet and started off. “Look,” MacVicar said. “For years I’ve turned a blind eye to what’s been going on over at your place, the irregularity of it, so don’t try my patience. But what worries me most is how boys, even good boys like yourself, can end up in the same places as our society’s less exemplary members.”

“Kinda like my being here?” Will said.

“You know why that is?” MacVicar said, ignoring Will’s jab. “Because kids and bad people have one thing in common: they both prefer to be alone.” With that, MacVicar stood and opened his door. “It’s been a hoot, Will,” he said, “but I have an appointment at two.”

Will looked at the wall clock, which was also a stuffed walleye. “But it’s not even ten?”

The constable took a sip and nodded as he swallowed.

“Oh, and Will,” the constable called out across the reception area. “What about your safety equipment?”

“I don’t wear Helmets anymore,” Will said, clutching his skateboard to his hip. “You can write me a ticket if you want.”

 

His new life commenced where another had ended.

With the bang of the cable still knitted in his ears, he told the Indian crew to leave or there’d be trouble for them and watched as they walked mutely back to their tents and their vans and their wives and their babies—all woken and set wailing by the sound—where they packed up camp and made off.

Alone now, he knew she’d heard the cable snap. The whole town must’ve. This was a sight she couldn’t withstand, so he carefully shoveled his best friend into a plywood handcart and rolled it from the loading bay to the slip and pitched him over. Afterwards he scrubbed his hands and arms with reeds at the lakeside and carried on, dazed, with an empty and ringing head, down the waterline away from the elevator, while trucks bounced over the tracks in the distance, careening toward Pool 6.

He soon came to a pier where a foreign lakeboat lay at anchor. He climbed the gangway onto the high deck. The boat was a long, flat bulker—a twenty-story building out for a swim—and its posted signs and safety warnings were presented in some overwrought alphabet he couldn’t deign to read. It was nearing morning and pale pink had exploded beneath the horizon, underlighting the clouds that night had stranded over the lake. He made his way to the bow, where for some time he stood, his pained chest against the rail, eyes cast into the ice-strewn harbor, contemplating his quick plunge over, how the water would vacuum his life in a welcome instant. But he figured this was still too close to his best friend’s remains—the state of which he held himself responsible—so he pulled at a nearby hatch in the deck, and when it came open he dropped himself into the dark, equally prepared to accept a fifty-foot plummet to the iron hull as he was what he did receive: a shallow landing in a soft puff. He rose, brushing something from his trousers, then pulled the hatch closed with a neat bang, unable to fasten it down from the inside, leaving in the sky of his crypt a crescent moon of dawn.

He lay himself down on what he knew were oats, from the nutty smell and tender feel. There was a deep warmth rising up from within them, and he scooped some over himself into a kind of blanket. He recalled how, at the elevator, cars would arrive on the receiving tracks from the prairies frozen shut and how they had to blowtorch them open, how the grain was always still warm at the center when they unloaded it. Oftentimes they’d find animals mixed in, like coins in a child’s cake—prairie dogs, deer, barn cats, beasts large and small swept up by threshers or trapped by bins—and human parts, too, the lopped fingers, arms, and legs of farmhands. He soon lost touch with himself and woke into another time, amid a cataclysm of engine sound. His overworked body was somewhat replenished, so it must’ve been more than a few hours later. The boat shuddered and began to move. He could catch the occasional hoarse bark from men above. A horn blasted intermittently, the sharp sound blunted by the deck, before the engines ramped up. He’d let this boat carry him out to where he’d cast himself into the deep of the lake, because he didn’t deserve to drown anywhere near his home.

He guessed they’d sailed beyond the breakwater when the boat listed and the oats drifted over themselves with a hush like driven snow. After an hour of rocking, sleep took him again, this time more delirium than rest. He yelled soundlessly at a misty replica of his own face for some duration, before he was troubled by a vision of himself as a boy, running on a hot dirt road, but only the back of his head, never turning. He followed the boy to where he came upon all the people he’d known gathered together in a green field, dead but standing, mute but singing low in broken voices. The boy went unnoticed, though he shouted for a while before he started picking up stones from the gravel and throwing them. A stone struck his own father beneath his hatband, but he remained indifferent, a lisp of blood spitting to his collar. Another struck her arm but left no mark. The boy threw stones like that for a while, shattering cups of lemonade and pinging off the eyeglasses of the pastor, until his arm tired and he lay out in the grass to count clouds.

“I thought these are ghosts” came a voice from within an eye-piercing circle of light above him. “I’m the watching on the deck at night. I heard this wailing and find this hatch open. I’m thinking grain was wailing. Or ghost in grain. I am happy because it was you and not this cargo. That would not be appropriate. But I have the best hearing. For my hearing you are lucky. And you are lucky we weren’t full steam. No hearing would hear then. Not even me. Very unlucky.”

As his corneas adjusted with dual unscrewing sensations, there resolved a man squatting over the hatch, a boot on either side, a sparse yellow fuzz clinging to his head.

“I am fifth mate, Vadim,” he said. “What is your?”

Heaving the inert clumps of sleep from his mind, he couldn’t understand how this man could be so completely unaware he was a dream.

“Never mind this,” said Vadim. “Here, you’re hurt. I will lift.” He stretched his hand down into the hold. “If this was wheat, the dust would have suffocate you by now. This oats is another luckiness.”

Still he did not move.

“Come,” Vadim said, extending his hand deeper, “except know that Visser will not turn the boat around for a clumsy trimmer. He is crazy to escape the Lakes before the freeze. But our next call is Sault Sainte Marie. There you depart.”

Fully awake now, he shook his head and made a shooing motion.

Confusion took Vadim as he retracted his arm. His face was thickly creased and featured a handful of lumpy moles, though rather than dark, they were the same color as his flesh. It was an untroubled face, a boy’s face, except for his nose, which was like a stepped-on cherry.

“You were loading boat, yes? You are grain trimmer? Thunder Bay? You fell?”

“Not exactly,” he said.

“Good! You talk! I was worried you hit this head or were too stupid. Still, you go ashore at the Sault. Otherwise, you go farther than you want.” Vadim extended his hand again into the hold.

“I’m comfortable here,” he said, patting the heaped edges of his nest. They still weren’t far enough out for him to jump.

“But this is salted,” Vadim said.

“This is what?”

“I thought you worked the Lake?”

He didn’t answer.

“I’m meaning this is ocean vessel.”

“Look, don’t fuss over me,” he said, “I’ll find my own way off soon enough.”

“In North Atlantic? Don’t you care to know your heading?”

“No.”

He laughed. “A fatalist.”

“How do you mean?”

“It means you are someone who does not worry forward. Look, I am from Ukraine, Odessa, but this is Dutch boat. This oats is a backhaul to Africa. Then our last port of call is Delfzijl. Trust me, fatalist, you do not want to make vacations there.”

“No difference to me,” he said. “Best way to help me is to forget me.”

Vadim’s face darkened. “It is no good for you to do this stowing. You do not want to be discovered by Visser.” Then Vadim lowered himself to sit on the edge of the hatch and related a story of Visser, the ship’s chief mate, a Dutchman who once found a stowaway on a saltie outbound from Singapore and kicked each of the man’s teeth out, including molars, before pitching him into the water with his clothes in shreds. “You don’t want to know what he would do to yourself. On the ocean there is no law. And Visser is worse than nothing.”

Someone called to Vadim from up on the deck, and he leapt up and answered in a language that was different still from his accent.

“Oh well,” said Vadim squatting again. “Even fatalist ghosts require water. I bring water.”

“I’m fine.”

“No, no, you’ll be murdered by thirst. Say no to refusing. This I will do for you.” He took the hatch in his hands and swung it half closed. “Sorry, it must be locked for the grain is kept dry. If not, I will become in troubled. But I won’t linger.”

“Dark suits me fine,” he said.

“And sir?” Vadim added. “Don’t sink.”

“Isn’t that your job?”

“No, no. In there. Stay flat! Like ah, how do you say … snowshoe? Don’t flip around too much,” he said and shut the hatch.

He spent that night spread-eagled on the surface of the oats, allowing himself only a thin layer to banish the chill, not because he wanted to live, but because he’d been buried in grain many times before and didn’t want to die with oats stopping his nose and throat. He was certain he deserved something much, much worse.

The storm started as a hungry wind drumming the hull. He’d heard sailors oftentimes declare November on Superior a war of wave and fog and sleet, home to a cold that could freeze eyes into cubes. Next came hail on the deck above like buckets of ball bearings dumped out to be sorted. He stuffed oats in his ears to dampen the racket.

After a few hours of pitching, nausea arrived, hot and delirious. Despite his time at the harbor, he’d never been on a boat other than weekend fishing jaunts on small, tepid lakes. When his mouth flooded with saliva he crawled away from the hatch into the deeper dark and emptied his stomach into a hole he’d dug in the oats.

He waited for the sickness to pass, his back propped against the curved wall of the hold, trying to stabilize the brain in his skull with placid thoughts, thoughts of her, but couldn’t keep the vileness in him now from touching her image, so he punched the steel hull until his mind shut off. With so much vomiting, his thirst had reached a deadliness even he could recognize. You’ll die of thirst on a mountain of food, he thought, and this set him chuckling.

An uncountable time later, his stomach settled into starvation, and he stewed up spit in his mouth for an hour in order to get some oats down, but they sat in a lump low in his sternum like he’d swallowed an apple whole. After eating, he attempted sleep. Hours in the vacuum of dark had opened his senses wide and his eyes took on another purpose. With nothing to land upon they concocted visions, like old prisoners telling stories to keep sane. Soon his eyelids flared with something near light, and amid these specters he watched himself put his own ear to that cable as though to a shell. He’d known it was weakened and tapped at it with a screwdriver, like he knew what he was listening for, while the Indian crew waited, speaking in low tones next to the half-unloaded grainer. “It’s fine,” he’d assured them, well aware the lake could freeze any minute, holding up their scheme until next year. “What are you boys afraid of anyway, a little grain?” he said to his crew, then told his best friend to fire up the car dumper, which he did because they trusted each other like brothers—and a second later the air broke open with the lung-sucking sound of the frayed cable whipping through his friend, his remaining arm clutching at his crushed chest, trying to unlock it, his face scrambled like a painter’s palette. Then his wrecked flesh dimming to white, the life lifting from the pieces of him like frost from the earth on a warm morning.

When the visions ceased, he fell through sleep and wakefulness, as though through the floors of a skyscraper made of mist. When he awoke, the storm had passed, the engines silent. He stood, ready for his last swim, and reached upwards for the hatch, yet even when he stretched tall, his fingers discovered only air. He could tell by the way his voice bounced that the ceiling was much higher than before. The oats must’ve settled in the vibration of the storm, he concluded. He pushed some into an incline and managed a mound from which he was able to graze the hatch with his fingertips. But there was no way to open it from the inside.

Thirst had returned, and he feared it would weaken his capacity to refuse the visions, so he sat telling himself knock-knock jokes he’d shared with her—Lettuce. Lettuce Who? Lettuce in, it’s freezing!—until sleep took him.

“It was all hands last night. There was no way I could come. Then we must go ashore. This was important. But now I’m returned.” It was night, and Vadim was backlit by a needlepoint of stars. The bright smell of alcohol wafted into the hold. Vadim was drunk, and it made his accent harder to unravel.

“I thought: But Vadim, he has oats!” he said raggedly. “And then I remembered: the water! So now? I’ve come.”

He tried to speak but only croaked, dragging his tongue like a dry mop over his lips in a futile attempt to moisten them. Vadim tossed down a jar of water and it landed in the oats with a whump. He couldn’t resist throwing himself upon it but drank conservatively, trying to disguise how pressing his thirst was.

Next, Vadim took out a flashlight, and it was possible to make out some gaps in his grip. “I lose these in the winch,” Vadim said grinning, wiggling his two remaining fingers like a man giving an obscene gesture. Then Vadim directed the flashlight into the hold, stinging his vision. “Ah,” Vadim said, “there you are. Oh no no … you have bleed on your face. Is this new?”

He thought he’d washed it all off in the lake. “From before,” he said. He captured a handful of oats and scrubbed his face with them, unwilling to waste any water for this purpose.

“Well, I’ve heard you with these complex words in your sleep. No doubt you read: Bill Shakespeare?” asked Vadim, sitting.

“Who?”

“I studied Englishman’s literature in Odessa. I like him most so I call him Bill. We are familiar this way. Titus Adronic was a man who saw many bloodsheds. He was drenched in this. For his whole play, he’s bloody. It is very hard for him. His family. He kills them. Some of them. No one likes this play, this Adronicus. But I do. This is Ukrainian play. So! I call you: Titus”—he said, rhyming the word with “noose”—“because you remind me of this blood man.”

“Okay,” said Titus, after surfacing from a long pull of water. “Call me whatever the hell you want.” Anything that would toss an extra shovelful over the grave of everything he’d left behind was fine with him.

“Oh, it is too bad you cannot see the world with me, Titus. So much ports! Shanghai the girls are burning hot but expensive. Bangkok the girls are burning hot but cheap. The problem with cheap is dick remembers how much pockets pay! Do you understand this?” He laughed until it degraded into a cough.

“So, Titus,” he said, wiping his pink eyes, “if you were no grain trimmer, who then?”

“I worked. Inside the elevator,” Titus said, holding a small sip in his mouth to soak it. “Pool Six. Unloading grain cars. At night.”

“Ah,” he said. “Dangerous work this.”

“What isn’t.”

“Yes, yes. This is a yes thing. Well, we are moored here tonight. Then tomorrow we go through locks. Tonight you would like drink that is not water? This is dry boat but there is much grain alcohol. If you have money. Maybe you want girl down there in your bed of roses, Titus?”

“I’m busted,” he said, though he had a thousand dollars of the Native crew’s pay in his wallet. “But maybe you can get me a bigger container of water?” He’d had his heart set on drowning, not expiring of thirst, and jumping while still in a harbor would guarantee he’d be found. He would spare her that sight too.

“Ah! Now you’re caring about your well-being self!” Vadim declared drunkenly. Then he seemed to fatigue and rubbed the back of his neck with his palm. “But I’m sorry, Titus, I cannot. This jar is already so much. There would be people noticing. There is not much vessels to go around on this ship. It is best way.”

“Why are you doing this?” Titus said, trying to keep the hatch open a little longer, if only for the starlight.

“What?” said Vadim, momentarily affronted.

“Helping me.”

“Oh! Well, Titus my friend, there is a beautiful, beautiful Ukrainian proverb: ‘He is guilty who is not at home.’ ”

“That makes two of us.”

“Yes! This makes all sailors guilty. Which is true. And maybe everyone is guilty who lives with their matinka no longer,” Vadim said mirthfully.

“Suppose so,” said Titus, half-smiling, the other half of him dedicated to preventing a treacherous idea like home from finding purchase in his heart.

“Oh, who is this Diane?” Vadim said as an afterthought when he was about to shut the hatch, and Titus’s breath stopped, as it does whenever another man reads your mind.

“You cried name Diane in your sleep,” said Vadim. “Is it goddess? Girlfriend? Dream?”

“Yes,” said Titus, fighting to blockade her from his mind, “a dream.”

After another formless interval of sleep Titus became aware of the ship’s brush against steel, scraping its way into the locks. This continued until a rumbling began, and he knew the boat was being lowered. Titus tried to feel the descent but could not. He’d heard crews discuss these locks, a freshwater staircase that carried ships from the Great Lakes down to the Saint Lawrence as gently as a child putting a boat in a slip of rainwater.

The hold grew stale and drowsy. His thoughts mixed and wandered. After years in the elevator, he knew grain released gases, carbon dioxide, mostly, but also others over time, and he worried the oats were deranging him in some manner. He closed his eyes and looked again upon the Indian crew in their ragtag clothes, overalls and perma-pressed shirts worn alongside garments of fur and hide, most of them in steel toes—or soled boots for that matter—for the very first time in their lives. They walked tentatively, as though the cement was soggy spring ice on the lake. They’d brought them down from a remote reserve, Ojibwes—or Ahnisnabae was their word for themselves. Many couldn’t manage a proper English hello. The elevator’s regular crews had long refused to work nights, so no trouble there, but what irked the men most was how the Indians had brought their families along, how their women were camped in a lot near the railroad tracks in the harbor, babies strapped to them in beaded carriers, sage and sweet grass burning most of the time, laundry all hung up like flags of an invading army—a disgrace, some called it. In their eyes, some crucial separation was not being observed, and they revved their trucks near the camp during the day to disturb the night crew’s sleep. When one got his hand sliced by a shovel, an elder came and sewed him up with some animal gut. Titus and his best friend were relieved not to require a doctor. But overall the Indians were cautious, methodical workers, unlike the daytime regulars, drinking and fighting and carrying on. Altogether the Indian crew managed ten cars a night. Every night. “Those ones are industrious,” a grain inspector named Butler had remarked at shift change, “despite their lazy heritage.” Titus wasn’t proud of paying them so little, but they were poor, desperate for work, and his partner had convinced him they were doing them a favor.