In the Path of Falling Objects (32 page)

He grasps his pistol, pointing it up at where he can hear the sound of weight sagging the dry plywood.

Gravity.

“Well, is it dark enough now?” I whispered to Dalton.

Dalton glanced at Walker, then up at the sky through the jagged slash in the ceiling.

“I think so,” he said. Then he said to Simon, “Make sure you stay with him. And don’t fall this time. We might only have one chance.”

Simon didn’t answer. He continued to listen.

“Simon?” I grabbed my brother’s shoulder.

“Okay.” His voice was just a breath. “I can do it.”

We stood.

I watched the door, barely seeing it through the dark, not wanting to turn back and look at the bed where Lilly was, not even one last time.

“Help me up,” Walker said, extending an arm and pulling his leg beneath him with the other.

Dalton grabbed the man at his wrist, dropping the truck’s keys to the floor as he did.

Then he felt the jerking impact of the bullets striking Walker’s body as they tore upward through the floor. The Indian fell backwards onto me, and I crashed against the frame of the door as I tried to catch his weight.

He chokes and gasps against the airless poison beneath the trailer. He rolls onto his belly, the pistol held out in front of him, and crawls, feeling his way to the hole by the wheel. Something is on fire, but it’s not the gas line.

He can’t breathe.

In the still silence of the night, the arms squeeze their way out from the breach in the rocks and pull the body forward on a wave of reeking exhaust. Mitch, black, stripped to the waist and smeared in ash and blood, an obscene parturition, stumbles forward and inhales deeply, spiderwebs plastered against his hair, sweating, smiling.

He circles around toward the rear of the trailer.

Simon froze, staring at the thread of smoke curling up from the holes in the floor.

“Hell!” Walker grunted. A slug had lodged in his artificial leg. Small splinters splayed out from the blackened tear where his jeans were creased by the path of the bullet.

My hands braced Walker steady by his armpits; and I leaned over his shoulder to see where the man had been shot.

“Are you okay?” Dalton asked.

Walker rubbed his hand over his leg.

“It’s nothing,” Walker said, his voice hushed. “He’s down there.”

“No he’s not,” Simon said, and he pointed at the twin holes in the floor, now glowing with pulses of amber light as twisting and thickening ropes of black smoke curled upward. “We got to get out of here.”

“What the hell?” Walker said.

“Come on!” Dalton said, picking up the keys.

I pushed Walker upright and turned to open the door. And I hesitated there, thinking about what we would see on the other side.

“We got to get out now!” Simon pleaded, and ran for the back window, stumbling, sightless.

“Hey!” Dalton called out, but Simon had already climbed out into the night.

I yelled, “Simon!”

My lungs convulsed. The fumes from below the trailer were suffocating. Points of flame splattered up from the bullet holes in the floor, and every bit of space inside the trailer filled with smoke in seconds.

“Come on.” Walker pushed me aside and flung open the door.

Simon has come home.

Mitch waits there and watches the boy climb down from the window.

“Welcome home, Simon.” His voice is sandpaper. “I missed you. I love you. Why do you want to hurt me?”

He squats in the rocks behind the trailer, the silver barrel of his gun pointed level at Piss-kid’s belly.

Slashes are scabbed over, the dirt-skeleton tattooed in filth.

The yellow teeth, eyes fixed on the boy.

The kid stands there and stares at Mitch.

“You said he was the bastard,” Mitch says. “Look at what you did to me.”

Jonah is calling his brother from inside the trailer. Smoke coughs from the window.

“Look at what you did to
me
, Mitch,” the kid says. “I hate you.”

“You’re dead, punk.”

The Indian and some other kid come around the corner. Mitch sees something reflecting in that kid’s hand. He swings the pistol over and shoots. The Indian goes down. Half his face is gone. He
brings the pistol right up to the other boy’s head and the boy backs off and ducks behind the trailer.

Now it’s just him and Piss-kid.
Push this button, punk. Just try letting that whore flirt with you again.

Click.

The gun does not fire.

Click.

All his counting brings him to zero.

And Simon runs for the truck.

Piss.

He stumbles around the opposite side of the trailer, moves painfully, wide enough to avoid the fire that now spears outward from the underside. He sees flames through the covers over the windows.

The universe turns to numbers. Nothing but numbers. Stacking. Falling. Collapsing. Reducing.

He can’t stop it.

He sees an antler of flame with four spikes that flashes into six; debris scattered on a mound of trash, eleven wads of paper and fourteen opened cans; the number one, a rusted pipe the length of his arm; counts his steps, counts his steps.

The smoke thickened inside the trailer as soon as Dalton opened the door. I saw him and Walker go out. I was scared Simon and I wouldn’t see each other again, so I turned and ran back through the burning trailer to follow him.

My eyes ached and pooled with stinging tears; all I could see were my feet and the faintest outline of the window frame, where Simon had gone.

“Simon!”

I tripped, falling to all fours near the back of the trailer. I tried to breathe, but my lungs seized in coughing spasms of rejection. I kept my head down, trying to find some air, and realized I had to force myself up or I would not make it out of the smoke. I felt my way along the floor to the back wall and pulled myself up to the edge of the window, thrusting my head out, blinking to try to clear the blindness from my eyes.

I heaved myself over the sill and lowered my feet to the ground, thinking,
How long ago did me and Simon climb out this way?

I slid along the trailer, edging my way around the back.

The truck’s engine coughed in ignition.

I stepped over Walker’s body on the ground at my feet. I only
looked at him for an instant and had to turn away. It made me sick. I knew he was dead.

When I rounded the corner I saw Mitch, ghostlike and blackened, a metal bar in his hand, swinging an arc downward at Simon’s upraised arms.

Simon dodged the swing and fell backwards onto the steps of the trailer.

“Where’s Lilly?” Mitch demanded; his voice sounded slurred and groggy. He raised the pipe again, the gun hanging limply at his side.

“Mitch!” I screamed.

“Come on!” Dalton called nervously from the truck, revving the rumbling engine.

I ran toward them.

As I pulled the pistol from my waist, the metal bar came down across my head and I dropped to the dirt, the blood already seeping down into my eyes that closed on a red-smeared and flaming image of Mitch panting above me and raising the heavy pipe again.

I knew what was happening, but I could not move. I kicked my feet against the ground, attempting to push myself away and into the dark. My body felt so heavy, like it had melted into the earth. The gun had fallen from my grasp onto the ground behind me.

Dalton sprang from the truck, flashing that shining straight razor low beside his hip. He leapt at Mitch and slashed a line across Mitch’s side before he could swing that pipe a second time at me.

Flames twitched and wriggled from beneath the trailer and smoke vomited out, blacker than the sky, in great billowing coils.

Simon pushed himself up from the steps. In the pulsing copper light from the fire, I tried to raise myself onto hands and knees, blood crawling across my forehead and dripping in warm blobs to the dirt between my hands, the amber glint of the gun barrel in the dirt behind me.

Mitch spun around and pointed his pistol at Dalton.

Simon grabbed my gun from the dirt and swung it across me, leveling it at Mitch.

Mitch held the pipe over his head in one hand, the gun in his other pointed at Dalton, who crouched in the dim light with his razor held in front of him.

“No!” Simon yelled.

“Simon!” I stood behind my brother on unsteady legs, a hand flattened over the gash in my scalp.

Mitch looked at Simon, smiling his gap-toothed yellow grin. He looked over to Dalton, panting, and then back at my brother, who held a gun.

“What are you going to do, Simon?”

“Get away,” he said.

“Simon,” I whispered.

“What are you going to do, Piss-kid?” Mitch repeated.

Mitch began slowly walking toward us.

“Ferris wheel,” Simon whispered.

Then Simon kept shooting until the gun was empty.

We knew it was the only thing to do.

We dragged the corpses into the trailer.

We had to do it fast, before the fire grew too big.

Simon was sick. He threw up all over the place after he shot Mitch. So he sat with his legs resting out the passenger side of the truck and watched as Dalton and I pulled those bloody bodies up the stairs and rolled them through the doorway.

Neither of us said anything while we did it. I think we were both in shock at the sickening scene in which we were playing parts. I wouldn’t have blamed Dalton if he just abandoned me and Simon out there in the middle of the desert beside that burning house and tried to forget everything he ever knew about us.

We were covered in blood. It smeared on our hands and shirts, down the front of our pants when we pulled the bodies into the fire, each of us tugging on a leg, trailing the torsos and arms along on the dirt. There was too much blood for us to try to lift either one in any respectable manner.

And as we worked, sweating, pulling the dead as quickly as we could up the stairs and into the smoke of the doorway, I thought
about everything that Matthew had written about his own horrors, and I understood how there really was no coming back from things like this.

When we were finished, we took off our clothes and threw them into the doorway as the flames rose up from beneath Walker’s trailer. Then we dressed ourselves in new clothes from the camper and we both climbed inside the truck’s cab.

I sat in the middle. Simon was beside the door with his head resting outside the window. The flames inside the trailer were curling over the top of the open door, lapping from the windows, rising up into the night sky.

“I’d understand if you just told me and Simon to get out of your truck now,” I said.

Dalton looked at me. “Why would I do that?”

“We got you in trouble.”

“No you didn’t.”

“Well, I’d still understand.”

“Let’s get out of here.”

We drove away from the fire. Dalton kept the headlights turned off, but we could still see the white of the dirt road that led to the highway. There was no one around. Walker was the only person who’d seen the fire from the Lincoln out in that remote place, and now he was dead, so I couldn’t believe anyone would notice what we left behind at the mesa. And, as we bumped down that road, I thought that even if anyone ever did map out the pieces of what had happened with Mitch and Lilly, that Lincoln, and Walker, there were three figures: me, Simon, and Dalton, who would never show up on that map.

“He left his money box,” Simon said. “Why’d he do that?”

“He thought he was going to get away,” I said. “That’s all there is to it. He was going to kill us all. I know that.”

“How long do you think till someone finds out about this?” Simon asked.

“I don’t think anyone’s going to find out for a long time,” Dalton said.

“And, think about it, Simon,” I said. “No one’s ever going to know we ever got in that car in the first place.”

We went back to the Lincoln. We picked up the blankets and threw them in the camper. Then we put that tin man back there, too.

What happened to me and Simon was unfair, but we chose most of our path, too. I know I chose to fool myself into believing things—about Matthew, our father, and, especially, about Lilly—that would never be true. And a certain part of me still wants to believe that there was something special and real between Lilly and me, a passing dream of something that wasn’t Los Rogues that I got to hold on to for just a moment. But there’s also that part of me that knows that someone like Lilly just floats by and does what she has to do to survive. I could still feel sorry for her, though, could still miss her.

And I did.

We were too scared to stop in Kayenta, convinced that someone would notice the three boys who happened to show up there on that bloody morning. I think every one of us felt like we were in some kind of movie or something, that all the eyes of the world were paying attention to us, watching every thing we did or said.

So we didn’t say anything. And Dalton just kept on driving.

Not one of us had any idea where we were heading.

I don’t know how long we had gone like that, just driving, not talking, listening to the whirr of the wheels on the grainy, hot asphalt; but Dalton finally pulled the truck off the highway and turned
down a dirt road that wound its way past a flimsy sign that said
COAL MINE CANYON
.

It scared me to leave the road. I could tell Simon was worried, too, because as long as we were on the road, it was like we were invisible. Anonymous. But when we went out into the dirt of the desert, we had to be us again.

Dalton tapped my shoulder and said, “I want to take a look at that cut on your head.”

I didn’t even realize I’d been pressing my hand down onto my scalp the whole time since we’d left Walker’s.

So I sat on the ground at the back of the camper and Dalton took a needle and thread from inside and put some stitches across the cut to close it. Simon stood over and watched him do it, but then he ran off and threw up in the dirt on the other side of the truck.