“So if the lines are streets, the Xs must signify something, because there are like thirty of them,” said Will, sitting on a bench, turning the map over and over in an attempt to orient themselves. “But what could be possibly valuable enough for Marcus to use it to leave Thunder Bay forever?”

“Ain’t no buried treasure anywhere down here, Long John Silver,” Jonah said, gesturing to a squalid apartment block with crotch-yellowed underwear hanging from the window like the flags of surrender.

Will had made no mention of the solemn promise to his mother he was breaking by coming to the waterfront. But he’d seen plenty of boys his age walking around, and none of them looked immediately endangered.

“Think we need to worry about the Butler’s wolves?” Will said later, fighting again to keep the image of a fanged snout clamping over his other thigh from his mind. Lately, each time he left the house, he’d been liberally dousing his entire body with deodorant, in the hopes it would mask his scent.

“Bah, we’re small potatoes,” said Jonah. “Plus we can outrun his wolves on our boards.”

They tried penciling various street names onto the lines, but, frustratingly, downtown Thunder Bay was a grid with no defining abnormalities. Each time they thought they’d located an X, what they found was uniformly unremarkable and decrepit: another abandoned building with an old, plateless car parked out front. The boys rifled the glove boxes of the cars and staked out the buildings with no luck. “Some treasure,” Jonah said.

But when riding his skateboard, even the “rusty ruin” of Thunder Bay sparkled with vitality and potential in Will’s eyes. While investigating the map, they happened over perfect skateboard terrain: painted curbs surrounded by smooth concrete and perfect sets of stairs with no cracks at the top, where the boys would return again and again after security guards had shooed them away. Surfers rode waves, which were already beautiful, but skateboarders made things beautiful: the ugly, discarded nooks and leftovers of a place, the abandoned, unused architecture that people preferred to ignore. Beneath their wheels, these dead places became sites of wonder.

At times Will wondered what special genius allowed Jonah to nimbly launch himself from the summit of any stair set without a stitch of Black Lagoon in his body. It had something to do with the possessed gleam he’d get while maniacally attempting a trick for hours until he’d mastered it. Jonah was channeling something, Will figured. An anger, maybe. Equal parts joy and fear. He resembled the skateboard titans of Thrasher more and more each day.

Will couldn’t discern if it was the sight of a White kid and an Indian kid together or the velocity with which they disregarded every traffic bylaw and trespassing ordinance on the books that caused pedestrians to recoil as they zoomed past. As much as it seemed like a suicide attempt to passersby, skateboarding was precisely the opposite: it was about mastery—a seizure of control, not a loss. That the board did their bidding—danced or flipped or spun successfully beneath them—afforded the most sublime pleasures of their short lives. Even after his most crushing falls, Will was learning to greet the pain, to wade out into its eddies and unexpected pools. To feel it pull parallel with another, worse pain inside him—born of the fact that his mother was wasting her life Inside or that his heart could give out any minute. And these pains aligned themselves, matched tempos, a kind of duet. Will would listen to the minor chord of it ring in him and find comfort in the sound.

After spending every weekend downtown, the boys grew well acquainted with Thunder Bay’s maniacs, its miscreants and castaways, those wandering its alleys and vacated streets with nothing better to do, and Will was terrified and fascinated by the harm the Outside could inflict. There were the drunks, some Indian, most not. Many were friendly, overly friendly, and Will would shake their hard, smelly hands while Jonah always kept his distance. Fresh and noxious with Neverclear in the early afternoon—they either came from distant reservations or once worked for the elevators, the railway, the mills, or the lakeboats. They often called to Will and Jonah with equal parts admiration and contempt. “Let’s talk to youse two boys,” they’d slur with dim mustardy eyes, waving them closer. Some would even ask to try their boards, claiming they’d possessed great balance in their day. The boys watched solid, railway tie–driving men drop to the pavement like toddlers. Sometimes they’d ask for change, which Jonah hated most of all. “How about you change your clothes first?” he’d mutter after they’d left.

Then there were the crazies: the man who believed he was a policeman and wrote them fake bylaw infraction tickets for skateboarding on donut shop napkins; fixed to his jacket was a sticker—THIS ACCIDENT HAS BEEN INVESTIGATED BY THE THUNDER BAY POLICE—which he’d push forward like a badge. The woman who only walked backwards, peering over her shoulder with a smudgy makeup mirror. The withered guy who had a voice like a child and strung sentences together like beaded necklaces: “Who are you what are you doing where’s your helmet why are you here you boys are going to kill yourselves.” The carnival-size woman they called Anti–Old Lady because she hated everything. “Do you want a hug?” they’d call to her from safe across the street. “I hate hugs and I hate you!” she’d screech, shutting her eyes with pure loathing. Will listened intently to them all, marveling at their variety, noting their voices and syntaxes, but despite their shared insanity, none bore any resemblance to the Wheezing Man.

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.”