Escape From Norriswood

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

September 1991:

Junior stared at Mia from the top floor of the paper mill, and moved his hand against the rough concrete wall beside the window. He could feel the places where the paint was chipped, and the bits of dried grey sticking to his damp palm. Rosecliff, a bug within his kingdom at the bottom of a pond, moved back and forth through the crowd, the megaphone clutched in his hand.

"The truth or we walk!" the crowd said.

Junior felt the stack of paper that Rosecliff had given him slip from his hand.

"You might want to pick that up, son."

Junior thumped his forehead against the glass of the window before he could turn around, but when he did his dad was there in the doorway. In the swath of sunlight coming through the glass window, Junior could see the purple beneath his father's eyes, the beads of sweat behind his curved glasses.

Junior picked up the paper from the floor, and then moved across the landing toward his father. He could hear the crowd below, calling and playing phrases across the air in unison as his father's arms fell around his shoulders.

"Have you been here all night?" Junior said.

"What have you got there, anyway?"

Junior looked down at the beige folder, now covered in damp stains from his hands. "Oh, its nothing," he said. "Just something I'm working on."

"Want to see my office?"

Junior tried to gaze into the hallway beyond the doorway his father stood in front of, but couldn't see through the door's window. He saw instead the wire mesh woven between the panels of glass.

"Sure," he said.

His father pulled the door outwards, and then stepped into a hallway with Junior that was lit with the yellow glow of fluorescent light panels. The place still stunk like mould, Junior thought. But up here, the place seemed cleaner; the floors reflecting the yellow light back towards the ceiling, the tiles on the ground shimmering, no dirt.

Junior's father walked to the end of the hallway where a space opened up the size of a doorway, and led into a skywalk. The walls on either side of Junior became vast windows as he walked into it, and as he followed his father across the bridge, he could see the mill's scrapyard down below. The spaces between the buildings where gravel splayed out, the brick and metal of the buildings caked in dirt, mud. He saw the places outside the doorways where he imagined the workers came out to take smoke breaks. The salt beef buckets laid out beside the door where they'd flick their butts, the butts that would float atop the rain water once it collected in those bucket. In October, or November, when it would begin to freeze, the cigarettes would fossilize there until the winter thawed off the island in April or May.

Junior wanted to ask his father about the workers outside, about the strike that seemed to be happening. He wanted to ask him if they were really going to burn the mill down.

"That was a poor decision you made," his father said, turning his head to the right as he walked, "bringing that girl in here."

"You knew about that?" Junior's eyes were back onto the salt buckets outside, and then he was nearing the entrance up ahead where the skywalk ended and another building welcomed them in.

His father walked through the entrance, a pace to his walking now that made Junior drag behind a few steps.

"I just did it because Graham was there," he said. "I just came here because Graham and I were joking – we had a plan – "