“What do you need me to do?”
With a twitch, Titus turned to the window to regard the sun-dazzled water. “There are ocean salmon in there. How they established is nobody’s purview. Stowaways likely. Salties suck ’em up as ballast and dump ’em here. When I was a youngster you could catch whitefish right off the piers. Baitless. Clean as a whistle. Fish lined up and bought tickets to get a hook in their lip, like it was fashionable. Now this juncture is so chocked with heavy metal and sick outflow, you’re better off snacking on your chemistry set than some fresh-pulled whitefish.” Behind everything Titus said was a monologue of murmur, a faint whistle, like the ghostly scrapings of his mother’s fingers on the strings of her guitar.
“Is that why you won’t drink the water? Because it’s polluted?” Will asked, but from there Titus tipped into nonsense, every so often pausing to lurch at something, like a dog snapping at an invisible fly. He cleared his throat for long periods while mumbling, just angry syllables hissed under his breath.
In the pocket of his hooded sweatshirt, Will gripped the handles of the garrote he’d constructed that morning. He’d removed a string from his mother’s guitar and tied it between two pieces of dowel he’d once made nunchucks with. On his walk to the harbor, Will tried to buttress his courage with the image of Titus pinning Marcus down near the creek and inflicting him with more scars, like that pastor and his wife had done, but it wouldn’t resolve. So Will settled on picturing Titus Inside, rooting through their drawers, perusing Will’s masterpieces, thumbing his mother’s page-turners, watching her sleep in San Francisco, poised to smother her with one of her malodorous pillows.
Then a rustling came from Titus’s coat pockets, and this seemed to evict him from whatever reverie he’d been lost in. “Let’s flitter,” said Titus.
They descended the stairs to the water’s edge, where Titus, breathing desperately, tugged a sheet of tattered canvas away to reveal a wooden skiff lodged in some reedy mud near a clutch of unidentifiable rubble. Titus lifted a pair of boots from the hull, stepped out of his foul shoes and put them on. Will didn’t even need to examine his footprints for the hexagon shape to be certain they matched, same as his grandfather’s.
“We’ll load her trim and even, so she doesn’t capsize or go to toothpicks,” Titus said, tugging the massive hose that Will and Jonah had assembled out from a thicket of goldenrod nearby. As they worked, coiling the hose into the small skiff like a noodle onto a plate, Will saw a fish carcass bob near the shore in a blizzard of flies. Titus also tossed into the boat several grocery bags full of stones. Soon Will began to sweat, and he scratched at his hair, itchy under his tight Helmet.
“Hop in, Icarus Number One,” Titus said after everything was loaded, pointing to the small area they’d managed to leave clear at the front of the vessel. “We’ll chatter while we venture.”
Pure terror riveted Will in place.
“ ’Course you’re not impelled to,” Titus said. “Not everyone’s chopped up for seamanship. Marcus quivered at the outset.”
“You took Marcus out on the lake?”
“Taught him the rigging I know. He rightly flourished. But sailing wasn’t my teacup. Mine were lakers. Salties mostly. But we need to endeavor this quick before the cove ices to the breakwater,” he said. “Won’t have another swing this year.” Will thought it best not to remind Titus it was spring, in case it agitated him.
Will knew this was his last chance to get answers from Titus, and his stomach felt like a swimming pool with a thousand maniacal kids in there, all splashing and screaming. Titus cleared his wrecked throat as the skiff bobbed at Will’s shins. A song his mother used to sing with her guitar came into his head: “Lord I can’t go a-home, this a-way …,” meaning poor and naked and destroyed, and Will felt the same way. His real life Outside had been short, but he’d already managed to lose everything dear to him—Marcus, Jonah, Angela, skateboarding—and if he didn’t confront Titus, how long would it take for his mother to fall deeper into herself, until she was not much more than a shadow, a wraith? How long after would MacVicar call Social Services, who’d whisk him to some foster home, perhaps even the one where Marcus had lived, where Will would share a room with four other sad, abandoned boys? But if he could force answers from Titus, nobody would need to be afraid, not Jonah, not his mother, not Will. The Butler would call off his wolves. Maybe even Marcus would return. The Outside would go back to how it was, before Will had ruined it. Who better than Will understood that those who were not brave, who didn’t perform dangerous feats, wound up imprisoned in a bedroom somewhere, staring at the wall, terrified to breathe.
“It’s a good thing I told everyone I know where I was going today,” Will belted out confidently, even though he didn’t have anyone left he could tell. “Otherwise, they might be worried.”
“Sturdy hypothesis, Icarus Number One,” Titus said with an undisturbed face. “Can’t be over thoughtful, specially bobbing on the water.”
Will climbed into the seat, and Titus pushed off and pointed the skiff at the gap in the breakwater a mile out, the skiff’s bow clicking against the meager waves. The water looked frigid, and Will wished he’d worn his lightbulb-changing wetsuit. Titus lowered the outboard and began yanking the starter ferociously. When it caught, he blared the engine, and the roar buried the ambient hush of the harbor.
As they plowed away from shore, the skiff low in the water with the weight of the hose, the air whisked with impossible freshness across Will’s face, recalling to him that first walk along the creek, when everything was still amazing and shot with wonder. He watched the water darken from blue to black beneath them like a bruise. Aside from that time his mother said he’d once smacked his head on a pool deck, Will had never been immersed in water deeper than their bathtub. Swimming was an activity he couldn’t even consider. He only hoped the protective foam in his Helmet would keep him afloat if it came to that.
Looking back at Thunder Bay, Will recalled a painting his mother showed him in an art book she said had belonged to his grandfather. Ships in a harbor, some carts going alongside a cliff. “See anything?” she’d said. When Will replied no, she pointed to legs sprouting from a tiny splash in the corner like a flower. “I don’t get it,” Will said. “Icarus,” she said, indicating the splash. “He flew so high the sun melted his waxen wings and he fell to Earth. Except nobody noticed. Nobody cared. The world’s like that sometimes, Will. It’s too heartbreaking to look at.”
As they cruised farther out into the bay, Titus began rummaging in the pockets of his parka. He produced something, seemed to reject it, then placed it beside him on the bench seat. Will recognized it as a chickadee, except it wasn’t moving. Then Titus took out a wicked-looking fish knife and set it beside the bird. Will tried again to force himself to imagine Titus slicing Marcus, his throat, his chest, but he still couldn’t stitch the vision together in his mind. “Those elevators’re the tallest strivers for hundreds of miles!” Titus yelled over the motor’s white roar, pointing back at the harbor. “In my era, men came from all over, either to toil in them, or to toss themselves from the top! Some sad souls secured jobs only to perform that!”
“Why are your fingerprints in my house?” Will heard himself yell. And when Titus didn’t react, Will knew he’d only whispered it into the snoring of the motor. Soon the skiff passed through the southernmost gap in the breakwater—a giant’s version of a stone garden wall, car-size chunks of granite fitted together, all of it submerged hundreds of feet below—and Will knew that this passage had altered something fundamental inside him, that he was finally something different from a boy. Titus yelled about the millions of pounds of stone that went into the breakwater, the equivalent of five pyramids sunk beneath the lake. “Indian labor built it, mostly!” he said. “They put up a hefty chunk of Thunder Bay, but nobody honors their exertions!”