In the Path of Falling Objects (20 page)

“Everyone’s okay,” Mitch said again.

“How the hell’d you get so far off the road?” The man eyed the
burning car in wonder and then, lifting his hat and pushing his long hair back, looked at Mitch again.

Mitch smiled that grin of his and gave his most reassuring look. “I’m not going to lie. I’ve been drinking.”

“Hell!” the man said, and chuckled, but he watched Simon and Lilly all the while to see if they gave any indication of the truth.

“Can you help us?” Lilly asked. “Do you have a car?”

Mitch jerked his face toward Lilly. Simon could see by the way Mitch clenched his jaw that he didn’t want them talking to the man.

“Aw hell,” the man said. “I don’t drive nowhere. I’m Walker. That’s my honest-to-God name, and I walk everywhere. Even to town. That’s twelve miles from here. Most people think they call me Walker ’cause I only walk everywhere, but it’s my real name.”

“Twelve miles,” Mitch said. “Then I guess we should start walking in the morning.”

“If I was going to walk to town,” Walker said, “which I’ve done enough to know, I wouldn’t wait until daytime, unless you want to die of heat.”

“That’s probably a good idea, Walker,” Mitch said. “We should just start walking now, then. Let’s pack up. We could probably thumb a ride if we’re lucky. Thanks, man.”

Mitch’s tone implied he was giving Walker permission to leave.

“I thought there were four of you,” Walker said. “It looked like four of you in the firelight. Then when I got close I seen that one there is just a statue. And I thought, what the hell? At first it scared the bejesus out of me, and I’m not fooling, I thought I was seeing a spaceman. Like you all came from outer space or somewheres. That’s about the strangest thing I’ve ever seen just standing out in the desert at night. Well, that, and this old car. What kind of car is that? I never seen a car like that. Or a metal man like that, neither one.”

“It was a Lincoln,” Simon said. He glanced at Mitch.

“Hell,” Walker said. He turned his head, lizardlike, eyeing Simon up and down. He looked from Lilly to Simon, Mitch, then back at Simon again. “You two are just kids. What are you doing out here? Are you hippies or something?”

“Yeah,” Simon said. “Hippies, man.” And he looked over at Lilly and tried to wink at her, his eyes reflecting shrunken images of the fire that continued to burn.

“Well, I don’t mind hippies so much, I guess,” Walker said. “I’ve never really talked to any before today, though. You seem okay, though. Sure you don’t need any help or nothing?”

Mitch faked a grin with clenched teeth. “We’re okay. Really. But thanks anyway.”

Simon was afraid that Mitch was going to kill the man if he didn’t leave soon.

“Well, okay then,” Walker decided, and began to limp away from the light of the fire. Before he had faded away entirely, he stopped and looked back at the three lost travelers and said, “You know which way you’re going, then?”

Mitch made a move toward the blankets and their other belongings, pretending to pack up, trying to ignore the strange man.

And Simon called out, “We’re going to town. West.”

“Okay, then.”

And Walker vanished into the dark of night.

Mitch picked up the empty bottle of whiskey, its mouth crusted with sand and ash, and glared at Simon.

“That guy scared me,” Simon lied, making an excuse for letting that bottle fall.

“It’s okay, Mitch,” Lilly said. “Let’s just relax now.”

Mitch threw the empty bottle into the blackened wreckage of the Lincoln, and Simon tensed when he heard it shatter, half expecting a second shard to come firing back at him through the night.
Mitch lifted his shirt and grabbed at his pistol, waving it before him so that it caught the light from the fire.

Simon froze. Mitch pointed the gun directly at his belly, so casually, and Simon could see the one empty chamber in its wheel that had held the bullet Mitch used to kill Chief.

Simon looked at Lilly.

“Oh, come on, Mitch,” she said, carefully.

Mitch exhaled, and nodded at Simon.

“You really think I’d get mad enough to shoot the kid?” he said. He began walking past them, following the shuffling tracks in the sand made by the limping man who had walked into the dark.

When Mitch got to the same place where they had last seen Walker, Simon said, “Please, Mitch. Don’t kill that man.”

Mitch stopped, his back turned to Simon and Lilly.

“Please?” Simon asked.

Mitch turned around and looked at them both, the fire now just an annoying stink, small fingerlike flames fluttering up unevenly from beneath the carcass of the car.

“I’ll do whatever you want,” Simon said. “I’m sorry if I made you mad.”

Mitch smiled at Simon, his teeth glowing.

“I knew you were with me all along, Simon.”

And Mitch walked back into the dim light from the dying fire and tucked his gun into his pants.

Simon stared up at the stars from where he lay in the blankets that had been scattered on the ground. The night, moonless, seemed so incredibly bright, so empty. Occasionally, he could hear the whooshing sound of a car on the rough macadam of the distant highway, and he’d tried counting them but had given up after three because it took so long.

He passed his first two fingers over the cut on his neck, still gapped and swollen, aching, and he thought about dying and wondered what that would be like.

He heard Lilly yawn, her body rustling the blankets where she lay.

Mitch sat between them, drinking a Coke and just staring straight ahead at the flat stretch of desert and the black silhouette of the mesa that erased the light of stars that should be there.

“I’m tired,” Lilly said. “I’m going to try to go to sleep.”

“The kid’s asleep,” Mitch said.

Simon almost reacted the way he usually would, by saying, “No I’m not,” but kept his mouth still and remained motionless, listening, closing his eyes. He could hear her stretching out on the blankets, trying to find a comfortable spot.

“Are there any cigarettes?” Mitch asked.

“I think they burned in the car,” Lilly said. She grunted, “Oh, God, this thing hurts.”

Simon felt Mitch moving, standing; could hear his feet against the ground as he walked to the suitcase. He heard Mitch opening the buckles on the bag, the sound of his hands rustling through the contents, and then Mitch came back and sat down between them.

Mitch flicked his lighter. Simon could see the orange flash through his eyelids, then could smell the sweet burning of the joint.

“No, thanks. I don’t feel good,” he heard Lilly say after a moment.

Mitch exhaled.

“Would you really have hurt him?” Lilly asked.

“Who?” Mitch said. “The Indian? Yeah.”

“No. Simon.”

“I almost did. I felt like it,” Mitch said. “I don’t anymore. I like the kid, but he’s pushing it. If it was his brother doing this crap, I’d have killed him a long time ago.”

Simon felt his heart pounding, afraid that it might be visible on his chest. He struggled to control his breathing, to pretend to sleep. The air was cooling, and he wanted a shirt, but his was thrown out, soaked with whiskey and blood, and he couldn’t ask for one from Mitch. He rolled over, turning away from Mitch and Lilly, curling his knees up toward his chest, his face down in the blankets.

He started to cry. He thought about that horse that had died when he left home, and it seemed now like it was all such a long time ago.

Lilly stirred and moved over to where Simon lay.

“He’s cold,” Lilly said. She put her hand down onto Simon’s ribs, and she could tell that he was crying.

“Well, get him a blanket, then. And stay away from him.” Mitch’s voice was a cold warning.

Lilly rubbed Simon’s skin, but he maintained his stillness, stubbornly pretending to sleep, trying to ignore her, trying to ignore Mitch. She got up and went to grab another blanket, saying, “What do you think I am, anyway, Mitch?”

“A whore,” he said plainly. “That’s what you are, aren’t you?”

Lilly didn’t say anything. She draped a blanket over Simon and kneeled down, tucking it snugly around his folded arms. Then she lifted the corner of the blanket and wiped the tears from Simon’s face and stroked his hair once. She left him and went back to her place on the other side of Mitch.

“I remember when I was just a kid in Fort Stockton. It seemed like every time I turned around, I’d see you watching me, or just hanging out, following me,” she said. “Even when I was twelve years old I knew I’d always be able to get anything I wanted from you.”

“So, what do you want now, Lilly?”

“I want to get out of here,” she said.

“You got a thumb. The road’s that way.”

“You’d just let me go?”

“You know better than that,” Mitch said. His voice was a gravelly whisper. “Not after what we did in Texas. Not after what we did in Mexico. And not after what you did in that bed with that kid. You know better than that, Lil. So you might as well get used to it and start liking me. ’Cause you’re stuck, as far as I can see.”

“Leave me alone.”

Mitch laughed and blew a cloud of smoke. “I’ll leave you. I’ll leave you on the corner and drive around the block with a five-dollar bill in my hand and you’ll think I’m someone new.”

“I don’t know why you have to be so nasty,” she said. “You weren’t like this before.”

“Before what?”

“I don’t know,” Lilly said. “Before you saw me and Jonah in the room that morning? Before we picked up the boys?”

“You tell me.”

“I just did, Mitch.”

“Groovy, Lilly.”

The Lincoln ticked and hissed as it cooled in the night. Simon lay under his blanket, his eyes open and staring straight forward along the flat of the ground, looking at nothing, only listening, thinking.

He waited.

Later, he pushed the blanket away and quietly sat up. Mitch and Lilly were sleeping, three empty beer cans tipped over between them on their blankets. Simon walked off into the bushes to pee. He could see Walker’s tracks. He stood still, just watching and making sure
Mitch was still asleep, just watching. He pulled his meteorite from his pocket and looked at it, then put it away. He went over to the piles of debris they’d salvaged from the Lincoln.

Simon held his breath while he moved.

Those moccasins made his feet so quiet.

He took a can of Coke that was lying in the dirt beside Mitch’s grocery sacks and put it in his back pocket, then he circled around on the outside of the brush to where Lilly was sleeping.

He crouched to his hands and knees beside her.

He looked at her, just waiting to see if she might wake up. Simon hooked her blond hair in his fingers and pulled it back away from her face and curled it behind her ear.

Lilly opened her eyes, but did not move.

Simon put his mouth down against her ear. He stayed there frozen, because she smelled so good to him, felt so warm.

His heart pounded.

He whispered, “Let’s leave.”

She turned her face and looked up at him. For a moment, he thought she looked terrified. He could tell she was calculating, adding things up, but not how Mitch did. No one did things like that.

Then she sat up, so quietly, and looked once at Mitch, and then back at Simon, and nodded her head.

Lilly followed Simon through the brush past the sentinel-statue of Don Quixote, his face masked behind the grainy photograph of a soldier. She followed him away from the place where Mitch lay sleeping beside the ruins of the Lincoln. Neither one of them spoke as they crept farther into the night.

Simon watched the ground, following Walker’s tracks, assuming that the man had made his way back to the road, but when he realized that Walker had not gone toward the highway, he knew they were lost.

He felt panic rising.

In the distance, off in the dark, a dog began barking.

Lilly froze and clutched Simon’s arm.

“It’s a coyote,” Simon said. “Don’t be scared.”

“Okay.”

“I don’t know where we’re going,” Simon said. “I was following Walker, but he didn’t go back to the road, so I don’t know where we are. I can’t see his tracks anymore.”

Simon rubbed his hair and looked around, no longer able to see any sign of where they had been; everything blended into a dark sameness in the warm and moonless night.

“Do you think we’re far enough away from Mitch?”

“Far enough for what?”

“Maybe we could just wait here until morning. Then we might be able to see something. To see where we are,” Lilly said.

Simon kept moving forward. “I don’t know.”

“Maybe we should just go back, then.”

“I thought about that, too,” Simon said. “But I don’t know which way back is. And Mitch would be so mad at us now.”

“Yeah.”

Simon stopped walking, his foot pressed down onto a twig of sage.

“Do you think he’ll come after us?”

Lilly laughed softly. “Mitch? I never know what he’ll do. But he’s so jealous of his stuff. I don’t think he’d leave all those things of his just sitting there in the desert. He goes crazy if someone takes something of his. Crazy.”

“Like me taking you away right now? Like what you and Jonah did?”