In the Path of Falling Objects (30 page)

“Not by the book,” he said. “But I’ve got better things to do.”

“I didn’t know there was a book, sir.”

“There’s not.”

The door swung open at the colonel’s nudge and the men just stood there.

“They left it unlocked,” the colonel said.

“I don’t imagine there’s too much to keep in, or too much to keep out, either way.”

“Hello?” the colonel called out. “Mrs. Vickers? Is anyone home?”

Nothing.

“What do you think we should do?” Stevens asked.

The colonel answered by stepping through the doorway and into the dark room. The windows were covered with ragged curtains; the sun, stretching low through the treetops on the hill, stabbed the smallest spears of amber light through the fraying gaps in the draperies.

“Hello?” he called out again.

The colonel walked forward into the center of the small front room, Stevens following behind and flicking at a light switch that produced nothing more than a clicking sound.

Flick.

“No electricity,” Stevens said. “Maybe they’ve moved.”

“Doesn’t seem right. Everything is still here,” the colonel said, moving toward a darkened hallway at the back of the room, while Stevens followed.

The colonel was right, Stevens thought. In the gray light of that cramped small room, he could see the furnishings that meant someone had been living there: an RCA television with bent rabbit ears ribboned at their tips with twisted aluminum foil, a sofa and chair, a scratched dinner table with dirty plates and glasses, one of them with an inch of water in it, and clumps of wadded, discarded clothing balled-up against the corners of the floor, looking like pale sleeping cats in the dimness.

The colonel tried the faucet at the rusted and filthy sink in the kitchen. No water came.

“Nothing’s on in here,” he said. “I think they left, but probably not too long ago. There’s still some water in that glass on the table.”

“I saw that,” Stevens said. “Do you think it would be okay if I had a cigarette, sir?”

“Sure. I’ll have one, too.”

The men smoked in the kitchen, Stevens flicking his ashes into the sink and the colonel just letting his fall to the spotted and blistered linoleum. The colonel bit the inside of his lip. He placed his folder down on the counter, scooting smeared silverware across the tiles as he did, and began opening the cabinet doors.

Stevens watched him while he smoked.

“There’s no food or anything in here,” the colonel said. “It’s like they just ran out of everything.”

Stevens pulled open the latch on the yellowed refrigerator and nearly fell backwards from the damp corpselike stench that exhaled out at him. Gagging, he covered his mouth with his hand, the cigarette pinched between his fingers, and slammed the door shut as he turned away.

He could hear the colonel peeing in the bathroom at the back of the small shack, heard the useless lifting of the valve and the gurgling suction as the colonel flushed but no water came. Stevens walked back through the hallway, peering into the small bathroom, its mirrorless wall, the dingy bathtub without a shower curtain, the colonel’s soggy cigarette butt lying crooked in the yellow fluid that just covered the bottom of the toilet bowl, stained pink with a line where the water level had once been. Stevens wanted the man to just admit that they had done all they could, that they could go home now, but the colonel seemed to enjoy examining this place where a soldier had lived once, and so Stevens kept quiet.

He lit another cigarette.

“Little wonder why they left,” the colonel said.

“Or why the boy enlisted,” Stevens answered. He inhaled, standing behind the colonel where the hallway ended at two opened bedrooms.

“I guess we got off easy today,” the colonel said.

Stevens sighed in relief. It sounded like the colonel was getting ready to admit they were lost, or wrong; either way it meant they could go home soon.

“It never gets easy, telling someone their boy’s dead,” Stevens said.

“He killed himself,” the colonel answered. “That’s even worse.”

“I know.”

The colonel looked down at his hands.

“Where’d I put my folder?”

“You left it in the kitchen.”

“Hanged himself.”

“I know.”

“That’s the tough one.”

“Yeah.”

“ ’Cause no one ever knows why that happens.”

“Yeah.”

“I guess this is the mother’s room.”

Stevens looked past the colonel into the room, dark and square, everything tidy, the bed made up cleanly, not the smallest wrinkle on its covers. A rack of clothes hung in an open closet.

“It looks like they mean to come back. Or, at least, she does,” Stevens said.

The colonel turned around and entered the other bedroom. The floor was scattered, strewn with clothes and paper. The one small bed sat low against the wall, its covers trailing off onto the floor, two sweat-yellowed pillows, still indented from the heads that had slept on them, flattened, at opposite ends of the mattress.

In the middle of the bed lay a wadded pile of clothes. The colonel guessed they were the older boy’s. The clothes sat as though they were ready to be packed, but had been forgotten there.

“Looks like the boys lived in here,” Stevens said.

The colonel lifted one of the tee shirts from the pile of clothes. He looked at the tag in the collar, turning the shirt over in his hands, smelling it.

“It’s clean,” he said. “I bet the boys ran off. Maybe she doesn’t even know it. That’s what I think happened.”

The colonel placed the shirt back on the pile and pushed the clothes aside to make a place to sit. Then he saw the yellow sheets of paper left there on the bed.

“Here we go,” he said, looking at the pencil scrawl of a boy’s writing. He stuttered along, squinting to decipher some of the smeared words, as he read the letter to Stevens.

Dear Matthew
,

Something is happening here, but I don’t know what it is. Ha ha, I thought you would like that.

Simon and me are leaving today. I didn’t tell him yet, but I am going to after I finish this letter. We are taking the horse and going to Arizona, to Scotty’s mother’s house, where you said you’d be. Maybe we will run into Dad, I don’t know. We ran out of food and we are pretty hungry. Also, the electricity was shut off two days ago. Mother’s been gone for a long time now, and I really don’t care anymore. I just know we have to get out of here. It will be better for everyone if we just leave.

I’ve been trying to listen to what you keep telling me about Simon. So I stopped talking to him. It doesn’t help, really, because I still get so mad at him I feel like I could kill him. But what can I do, Matt? I promise I will try my hardest. And I promise I will take good care of him. And when you come back and we see each other again, we will all do something crazy like brothers are supposed to, like you said. So if you get a car, maybe you could drive us to the ocean. I’d like to see that.

I have ten dollars. We can eat for a few days on that, I guess. I am bringing the gun, too, but I’m not going to tell Simon because it will scare him. And, like you said, I need to take care of him so I will do what you ask.

Matt, I am sorry for all the bad things that happened to you over there, especially for what happened with Scotty. And I am sorry for what our life is like here, too. It makes me feel so scared and alone sometimes, like I’m a little baby crying out for mommy or daddy, but that’s really not what I want. They can keep ours, you know, because we’re better off without them but it still hurts to say it.

So I know all we got is each other, but there’s too many things that want to keep us apart, like you said. If I could wish you back and make it real, I wouldn’t be writing this letter right now. And me and Simon are another thing. I know we look for ways to convince ourselves that we are not as close as we are, and that both of us like fighting with each other, even if it always makes us both feel sorry. I’m pretty tired of that.

At night, when it’s quiet, I hear your voice, like you said I would. I close my eyes and try to rub them so hard so I will forget what Mother and Father look like. I am carrying your letters. They are stained and smell like the place you are at.

I hope we make it.

I am going to keep track of where we go. We are going to head north to Tucumcari, because I figure that’s the easiest way to maybe get a ride west to Flagstaff.

Maybe someone will feel sorry for two boys in torn hand-me-downs and offer to help us out, but I doubt it ’cause we look too much like hippies. Neither one of us has had a haircut since before winter.

We will see each other again.

Simon knows you love him.

Love
,

J. (Mister Jones)

The colonel put the letter back on the bed where he’d found it. He looked at Stevens.

“Are we done?” Stevens asked.

“Looks like we got off easy,” the colonel said.

“It’s a long way to Arizona.”

“Those boys are crazy,” the colonel said. “They’ll make it. Someone’ll find them.”

“Yeah.”

The colonel lit another cigarette, and said, “I’m tired. We did our job. Let’s get out of here.”

“What about the box of Vickers’ personals?”

“Leave it on the floor.”

Drum drum.

I opened my eyes and sat up.

I covered Lilly’s face.

The first rocks he throws down at the trailer are fist-size knots, porous and scab-red. They smash into the roof and it sounds pleasing, like explosions.

Mitch digs his fingers into a sliver of a crevice. He pries at a boulder, loses his footing, arms flail as he slides twelve feet down the wall of the mesa. The rocks that slow his descent scrape flesh from his back and shoulders. He spider-crawls back to his place, hurls the boulder outward, throws himself back against the cliff wall to save himself from following it.

He laughs, watching the boulder sink down into the trailer’s roof. It looks like a fly caught in a bowl of pudding.

He sweats and grunts. Whatever he can lift, he sends down onto the shuddering little trailer.

“Come out, Piss-kid.”

“Come outside, Jonah.”

On the face of the cliff, he counts as he launches the stones skyward.

“Thirty-three. Thirty-four.”

Dalton stood right beneath where the first boulders slammed into the trailer, and he tumbled backwards and fell against the door.

Walker ran from the back of the trailer, pointing the pistol up as though warning whatever thing was above us to go away. He stumbled and dropped the pistol onto the matted floor, just as the largest boulder struck, splintering the thin paneling across the ceiling and opening up a toothy, jagged slash of skylight above us.

We could hear rocks crashing in through the opened window at the back of the trailer. Walker hadn’t replaced the glass, and it would have broken, anyway.

We all rolled to the edge of the floor, looking up at the sag in the ceiling, and Walker, sensing what we were doing, slid against an outer wall as well, alternating his darting, panicked eyes from the quaking ceiling to look at each of our faces.

I felt numb.

“Stop it, Mitch.” Simon spoke barely above a whisper, angry, his fingers twisting into the rug, as the rocks continued to hammer, without rhythm, into the trailer.

Drum drum
.

Walker stared up at the ceiling. I was certain it was going to give way under the barrage.

“What did I do? This is my home. What did I ever do?” Walker said.

Simon pushed himself to his feet and put his arm over his head as he made for the door. The roof vent had given way and collapsed, its plastic door dangling and swinging like a spider on a hair of web. Three more loud
bangs
, and Simon ducked as he twisted at the knob.

“Simon!” I gasped.

“Don’t go out there,” Dalton said.

Simon pulled the door inward and stood outside, fully exposed in the light of the sun, shading his eyes with his flattened hand, framed there by the darkness of the trailer’s interior, looking like he was some kind of ghost.

“Stop it, Mitch! You stupid bastard!” Simon screamed up at the mesa.

Another rock arced downward, thudding into the dirt between Simon and the truck.

“Simon! Get back in here!” I looked over at Walker, who was struggling to get to his feet.

“Mitch!” Simon yelled. “Leave us alone! Lilly’s dead! It’s your fault! She’s dead because of you! Just leave us alone and let us go!”

The rocks stopped falling.

Walker sat motionless, resting a hand on his lifeless leg, his eyes wide and frantic.

I listened to my own breathing.

It was suddenly so still, so quiet.

“Simon!” I whispered.

He didn’t move.

Dalton started to get up. I knew he was going to get my brother, so I held him down with a hand on his shoulder. I launched myself up and ran to the doorway. I reached an arm out the door and grabbed Simon’s shirt, and pulled him back inside the trailer.

Black, filthy, rusted with his own blood, Mitch raises himself up and looks down. Piss-kid, standing outside the door, yelling something. He doesn’t care. It’s a lie. A trick. The kid is looking right at him, but he can’t see Mitch; he fades into the hematitic colors of the mesa.

His hand shakes. Not enough water, tired and sore from this climb, heaving the rocks. His hand shakes when he raises the pistol and points it at the kid.

Mitch pulls back on the trigger.

“Whore! Piss!”

Simon disappears inside.

“Next time,” he says. He smiles. “Time to go down.”

He tucks the pistol away and scoots down the same path he took climbing up.

I kicked the door shut as I pulled Simon inside.

“What were you trying to do?”

And I remembered, in my distraction, how Simon and I had been trapped in that trailer the first night after leaving home. It seemed like such a long time had passed, but it wasn’t even a week before.