In the Path of Falling Objects (3 page)

I found Matthew’s letters stacked on the bed where I had slept, where I had left them. The cut stopped bleeding. Frustrated and sweating again, I picked up the letters and went to the window to hand them out to Simon and just then the door swung open behind me, spilling the brightness of the sun and a few dirt-stained drops of water into the trailer.

Simon had gone around and, smiling, effortlessly, pushed the door open.

Simon loved pushing buttons.

And I felt so stupid and mad I just closed my eyes tight and said, “I swear to God I’m going to kill you today, Simon.”

And Simon just stood there in the doorway, a crooked smile on his lips, watching me clutching those papers, sweating in the steaming heat of that crooked trailer, blood smeared like crusted paint across my tightening belly.

“Are those mountains Arizona?”

“No.”

We had been walking on that dirt road away from the trailer for two hours. Shirtless in the heat, I tied my torn flannel around my head, draping the sleeves and tails over my burning shoulders. Our clothes, dry now, were stuffed into the pack again, and I stopped, looking back at Simon, who held a hand out like a baseball cap shading his eyes, dressed in jeans that were a good two inches too short and a graying tee shirt that was beginning to show small holes beneath the arms, dragging his feet in the dirt. I removed the canteen and took a mouthful of the summer-warm swill.

“Here.”

I held the canteen out.

Simon tilted his head back and drank.

“That’s the dirt track to Glenrio out there,” I said. “It goes just about all the way to Texas.”

“How far is it?”

“I don’t know. Do you want to sit down?”

Simon corked the canteen and handed it back to me.

I kicked my shoes off, pushing my feet around in the warm sandy dirt of the road. It felt good, dry. I sat, legs crossed in front of me, and opened the pack. As Simon lowered himself to the ground to sit in the small shade I cast, I took a pencil and my comp book from the pack and began making my marks, scrawling my words.

“What’s that?” Simon asked.

“I’m making a map.”

“Of how to get to Arizona?”

“No.” I said, “Of where we came from.”

I kept drawing, writing notes beside certain marks: where the horse died, the trailer, the streambed. “In case we die out here and someone finds us.”

Simon stretched a leg out, kicking up dirt.

“I’m not going to die.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’m not planning on it either.”

“Then why are you making the map?”

I squeezed the pencil in my sweating grip. I almost wanted to break it.

“Did you mean it, Jonah?”

“What?” I said.

“When you said you wanted to kill me.” He sounded scared, but I knew he was just testing me.

I stopped writing.

“I’m sorry, Simon. Sometimes you just make me so mad. You make me feel so stupid.”

“You don’t have to get so mad at all those things,” Simon said. “About Matt. About Mother. Dad. There’s nothing we can do.”

Simon shrugged.

I sighed. “Well, if there was something, we sure didn’t do it. Anyway, you said you hated me yesterday.”

“That was yesterday. I don’t hate you yet today.”

“None of this is my fault.”

“Do you think I don’t know that?” And Simon leaned back, propping his loose shoulders up with his arms locked behind him, fingers scooping dirt beneath his palms. “Jonah, I’m really hungry.”

He broke the first rule.

I sighed and waved my arm out at the road in front of us. “We have ten dollars, Simon. Pick any restaurant you see. And you broke your own stupid rule.”

And I thought Simon would start crying, but he just looked up and pointed away in the distance and said, “I pick that one there,” pointing nowhere, really, but when I looked down the road to where he was pointing, I could see the dust kicking up in the distance behind us, trailing like smoke, a reversed wave like the tail on a scorpion from a black car that was following the same road we were sitting on.

Just our luck.

Mister Jones
,

I’m finally here. It took 18 hours. It rained last night. All it did was thunder once and before you could blink everything was soaked, it’s really weird. It’s really hot here, and it’s wintertime. I don’t think Hell is as hot as it is here. Right after I ate chow I went outside and in five minutes I was soaked.

About a week ago they mortared the airstrip here and killed 6 guys and wounded 14, but that doesn’t happen often. Not every day or nothing.

Last night I went to a spa. I went in the steam room and it was so hot I could barely breathe. Then I went in the cold sauna bath then the hot sauna bath, then I took a cool shower and got a massage by a good-looking Vietnamese girl.

I like the Army a lot better here than in the States. They told me to tell you about hoax telephone calls and letters about my dying or deserting or something. A lot of people get stuff like that I guess.

But don’t be scared. I don’t think I am. I haven’t seen or heard anything yet other than the strangeness of this place. It even smells weird. I bet you can even smell it on this letter. It smells like a funeral home.

It took me 18 hours to get here. It will take the mail 8 days to get to you.

Well I don’t have anything else to say, so bye for now.

Love
,

Matt

The car rolled toward us.

Thunderclouds balled black in the sky above.

“The monsoon rains are going to come again today, I think.”

The car was a 1940 Lincoln Cabriolet, black and white with broad whitewall tires. Its top was down, and, as it neared, crunching and kicking back the dirt of the road, I saw a man at the wheel and a pretty yellow-haired girl sitting in the front, and there was also what appeared to be a third person sitting bolt-upright in the backseat.

It was as out of place in that desert as a sailboat would have been, and it was the kind of car you knew had to carry stories with it, but I had no intention of finding out what those stories told.

“Let’s start walking,” I said. “Just don’t even look at them.”

“We should ask them for a ride.”

“No.” I put my head down like I didn’t even know or care about that car coming up alongside us. I began walking forward, just looking at the ground, listening to our feet, the scattering sounds of tires on the gravel and dirt of the road.

I warned Simon again, “Don’t even look at them.”

So I just concentrated on not paying that car any attention. I could hear Simon following along, scooting his feet in the rocks and dirt. And it wasn’t until later, until it was too late for both of us, that I found out Simon was sticking a thumb out to beg a ride.

The car swerved out, passing us, giving us a wide share of the road. The driver never turned to look at us, but my eyes were drawn
to the girl. I don’t know why, but I couldn’t stop myself from looking across at her as she sailed by us on that road, her hair swirling wildly in the wind, eyes shaded behind black glasses. And I could see she was watching us, her head turning farther around so she could look at us through the haze of rising dust as she passed. And as the car receded before me, the girl waved her open hands imploringly, saying something to the driver, and twisted around back over the seat and smiled at me and my brother before the car came to a stop a hundred yards in front of us.

Simon slid his hand in his pocket.

I stopped walking and watched.

The car’s doors swung open, and both riders stood in the road, looking back at us standing there, watching them.

“They look like hippies,” Simon whispered.

“They probably think we do, too.”

I looked at my brother, but he kept his eyes fixed down the road.

Simon straightened himself, flicking his hair back over his shoulders with both hands.

The driver was thin, shorter than me, and had long and wavy black-brown hair that nearly reflected the sunlight. His face was covered with hair, beard untrimmed, and he wore low-cut bell-bottoms and an unbuttoned patchwork vest with no shirt beneath it, a fishing-line string of beads hanging down into the black hairs on his chest. Except for the uneven beard, he didn’t look too old, maybe eighteen, maybe twenty. I guessed the girl was even younger than that.

She was taller than the driver, hair windblown and light, wearing jeans torn at each knee, and the sunglasses, and a tight pink tee shirt with three buttons on top, all unfastened.

They were walking toward us; Simon, squinting in the glare and dust at the driver, the car, the strange metal thing sticking up from
the backseat, and me, dumbly mesmerized by the glint of light from the black lenses on the girl’s glasses in the hazy fog above the roadway, the way she moved inside that pink shirt.

“Hey, Tom and Huck, aren’t you a long ways from home?” the driver said, showing yellowed teeth and pivoting his head, birdlike, from me to Simon and back to me.

“Not that far,” I said.

“Where are you boys going?” the girl asked.

“Nowhere.”

“Arizona,” Simon said.

“Either way,” the driver said, punctuating his speech with the clink of a Zippo lighter he flicked open and shut with his thumb, “Arizona. Nowhere. They’re both pretty far.”

“Mitch,” the girl said, “we could give them a ride.”

I pulled the shirt away from my head. I was sweating, my shoulders and back were sunburned, and the air felt cool in my damp hair.

The driver looked right at me and said, “Do you want a ride?”

I shot a look at Simon, hoping to stop him from talking, but I knew it was already too late for that and Simon immediately said, “Sure! Thanks!”

And then Simon looked at me, grinning, and nodded in the direction of the girl, and the way she watched me made me feel like I was some kind of captured specimen. And Simon whispered to me, “Now go draw
that
on your stupid map.”

The driver swept his arm in the direction of the open door.

“My name’s Mitch,” he said. “And this is Lilly. And the backseat’s a little small ’cause of Don being with us, but you boys are pretty skinny, I’d say.”

“I’m Simon Vickers. And the one there who doesn’t want to talk is my brother Jonah. How far can you take us?”

“We’re going to California, so I guess anywheres between here and there,” Mitch said.

I didn’t know what to do. I felt like I was being swept along by something that had already gone too far. I knew I didn’t like Mitch from the moment I saw him, but there was something about that girl that just practically dragged me along with my brother’s lead.

So I balled up my shirt and stuffed it down inside the pack, and Simon, acting so comfortable and relaxed, said, “We’re practically starved to death.”

He glanced at me. I guess it wasn’t really breaking the rule to say it to someone else.

Lilly brushed her hair back and pulled her glasses away from her face, just an inch, so I could see her eyes, and said, “You just throw your bag in the trunk.” Then she paused and I could hear her breathe, “Jonah Vickers. I’ll get you boys something to eat.”

I’d heard the stories about sailors who were lured onto jagged rocks by sirens. They must have sounded just like her when she said
Jonah Vickers
, I guess.

And I knew we shouldn’t get into that car, but at the same time I wanted to say something to her, at least to say thanks, but I couldn’t force anything out of my mouth and I just followed Mitch and Lilly as they led Simon and me toward that idling black convertible.

The thing I saw in the backseat was a man, nearly life-size and made from hammered tin, standing upright on a pedestal and holding a lance. He was clad with incongruous armor, an inverted plate of a hat tilted back on his head.

“That’s Don,” Mitch said. “He’s been riding with us ever since we found him in Mexico. I hope you guys don’t mind sharing the backseat with him. He doesn’t say much.”

I knew the statue was supposed to be a version of Don Quixote, and wondered why, across the sculpture’s face, and fixed upon it with bands of black electrical tape, was a photograph, cut from a glossy black-and-white magazine page, a mask, the face of a man with black-rimmed glasses.

Lilly held before us both a feast—a closed box of Nilla cookies and a bag of Fritos.

“How about these?” she said, holding out the food for me, the colors nearly blurring my starved eyes.

My mouth hung open and I reached out for the cookies, fumbling, and dropped the box on the road in front of my feet.

“Ha!” Mitch laughed. “Isn’t gravity a wonderful thing? It makes everything you could ever want drop right at your feet. What could be more convenient than that?”

I looked at him, and then bent over and picked up the box, saying, “Sorry,” and thinking,
Simon, we should get the hell out of here
.

“This is just like
The Wizard of Oz
,” Simon said. “Us being lost and following this road, and along comes the Tin Man.”

Lilly pushed the seat on her side forward and said, “Come on. Get in before we run out of gas again.”

Mitch shut his door and the car’s wheels spun forward in the dirt. Simon and I sat on either side of the metal man with the paper mask, eating vanilla wafers by the handfuls.

Mitch began singing, “We’re off to see the wizard . . .” and then stopped and said, “You boys aren’t going to make me sing alone, are you?”

And he began the song again, this time with Simon joining in, smiling at me, trying to get me to sing, too, as bits of cookie fell out of his mouth and onto his lap.

“Oh brother.” I rolled my eyes.

And neither Simon nor Mitch knew the words to the song, so
they just kept on repeating the first line over and over until I suppose they both got tired of singing it.

Even on that dry dirt road, in the heat of August, I was impressed by a certain remarkable beauty in this land, the slope of the road, the grasses gone almost white in the summer, the unexplainable rocks tilted every direction but flat, the redness of the mountains in the distance rising above the brush and occasional tree, the road so straight and wind-worn, the dry breath of the air cooling my skin, blowing the sweat-damp hair under my arm that lay bent across the rim of that open-top convertible while the car ground its way forward upon the gravel of our path.