In the Path of Falling Objects (21 page)

“Let’s not talk about that, Simon.”

“Okay.”

“And I don’t belong to Mitch.”

“He thinks you do, Lilly.”

They began walking again. Lilly just kept her head down and watched Simon’s feet, following his path as he made his way farther and farther into the dark nowhere.

“Do you have any idea where we’re going?” Lilly asked.

“No,” Simon said. “I’m not the one with the map.”

“What if we get lost?”

“We already are.”

“I mean, what if we get stuck out here or something?” Lilly continued.

“I have a can of Coke,” Simon said.

“Groovy.”

“And my meteor.”

Lilly sighed. “Can we sit down?”

There was no hint of the dawn anywhere around the horizon. Coyotes yelped like panicked ghosts, invisible in the distance.

“Sure,” Simon said. “You want to split my Coke?”

“Yeah.”

Simon pulled the Coke from his back pocket and they sat facing each other on the red, dry dirt. When he pulled the tab from the can, the warm soda spit geysers of sticky foam at them. He threw the ring away and held the can out to Lilly. She drank and handed it back and he held it to his tongue for the longest time, not drinking, just tasting the spot where her mouth had been.

“I’m sorry I got you and Jonah into all this,” Lilly said. “I should’ve just let Mitch keep driving by you that day. He wanted to.”

“He did?”

“I got mad at him for driving by,” she said. “He said the last thing we need is a couple of hippie freeloaders. And I told him that’s exactly what I didn’t like about him, that he wasn’t nice. So he stopped the car.”

“I had my thumb out,” Simon said. “I was asking for it.”

He handed the can back to Lilly.

“Yeah, but there was something else,” she said. “I can’t really explain it. I just had to stop. I couldn’t do anything about it.”

“It was Jonah,” Simon sighed. “I saw you looking at him the moment you got out of the car. I saw you take your sunglasses off and smile at him.”

“You did?”

“Yeah.”

Lilly drank. “Well, I’m sorry for all this.”

“I had my thumb out.”

Simon folded his legs and brushed the sand and dirt away from his moccasins.

“Why were you crying, Simon? When I covered you with the blanket?”

Simon shifted uncomfortably and took a swallow of Coke, then cleared his throat.

“I don’t know. I guess I was thinking about sad stuff.”

“Like what?”

“Nothing.”

Simon drew a circle with his finger in the dirt.

“My brother never had a girlfriend,” he said.

“How do you know?” Lilly asked. “He could have. Maybe he just never told you.”

“No,” he said. “I know everything about Jonah. Everything. We’ve never even been apart one day since I was born until yesterday. We even sleep in the same bed, most of the times. It’s the only bed we got, the only one we ever had. When Matthew was home, we’d all three sleep in the same bed, or he’d kick us out and me and Jonah would sleep on the floor. And when we were little, we’d get so cold sometimes we just had to hold on to each other.”

“Matthew’s your other brother?”

“Yeah. The one in Vietnam.”

“Well, you and Jonah should try to get along better.”

“He thinks I hate him.”

“You told him you do.”

“Yeah.” Simon cleared his throat. “It’s not about you, though. It’s about him turning his back on me. I don’t have anyone else. There’s no one.”

“Then why’d you knock him off the bridge?”

Simon almost started to cry. He put his face down so she wouldn’t see.

“I’ll tell you the truth. I wanted to knock him so far. Just ’cause I hate seeing him all over you like he doesn’t care about anything else. And ’cause he beat the crap out of me and I needed to get even. But I wouldn’t have the guts to do it. Then I saw Mitch had a gun out. And Mitch was going to shoot him. And as mad as I ever was at Jonah, I had to help him.”

“Your eye looks better now,” Lilly said.

“How can you tell? It’s dark.”

“I can tell,” she said. She reached across to Simon and lightly touched his collarbone. “And your neck?”

Simon slightly recoiled at Lilly’s hand on his bare skin, and then he relaxed and took a breath, lifted his chin, and said, “How’s that look?”

“I think it’ll be okay. A doctor might put some stitches in it.”

“Oh.” Simon swallowed. “Lilly?”

“What?”

“Mitch keeps calling you a dirty word. I don’t care about it, if it’s true or anything.”

She sat for a minute, not saying anything.

“It was true. Not anymore. Sometimes the truth is a dirty word, I guess.”

“Oh.”

“Will you tell it to your brother?”

“Do you want me to?”

“I don’t know.”

“I won’t say it again.”

She pulled her hand away and Simon let his chin drop, just staring down at the diamond of dirt formed inside his crossed legs.

“But, Lilly?” he said. “If we get out of this, you’re not going to hurt Jonah, are you? You’re not lying to him, are you?”

She didn’t say anything. Simon watched her.

Something moved, and Simon jolted.

“This is a hell of a way to get to town.” Walker stood about five feet from where they were resting. “A hell of a way. Unless you were planning on walking all the way around the world first! Unless you were planning on killing yourselves out here in the desert. Hell! Damn hippies.”

Walker moved stiffly out from the darkness, staring at them and shaking his head as though scolding reckless children.

Hey Jones
,

I’m in the hospital. It’s hard to write because my arms are stitched up. I thought I might get to come home, but it’s not too bad and they’re only going to keep me here for a couple days, so don’t worry. It was a stupid thing, anyway. I cut myself with a machete and then the cuts got really infected ’cause I was embarrassed about seeing a medic about it, and I was drunk anyway, so don’t tell Mother or Simon. I was stupid, but it’s not like that was the first stupid thing I ever did.

I didn’t even tell you but I got a tattoo before I left Fort Bliss. That was stupid. “Bliss” . . . that’s a great name for a place they send boys to before they go off to die. Sounds more like a whorehouse than death row.

I got a tattoo of the Pink Panther on my arm from a Mexican. I always liked that cartoon. He’s cool and things always luck out for him, even when he’s stupid. But I don’t think he ever cut his wrists with a machete either.

The cuts don’t hurt anymore. It just feels tight. The tattoo hurt for a few days, though.

Most guys here spend their money on drugs and prostitutes and stuff. I’m not that stupid, though. I’ve been saving all my money so when I get home I’m going to buy a car. Then I’m going to take you
and Simon on a road trip across the country. That would be cool. Maybe we’d never come back to Los Rogues. We could go see Dad. Do you write letters to him like the ones you write to me? If you do, I bet that makes him feel really good. I know, because I’m in the same kind of situation he’s in. And I love the way you say things when you write. Sometimes they probably make him cry, too.

Anyway, I’m not going to say anything else right now. The way my arm is I can’t fold this letter up and put it in the envelope so I have to give it to someone else and trust them to do it. I’m practically handcuffed. I’ll be all right, trust me. We’ll all see each other soon.

Love
,

Matt

Piss.

Piss.

Piss.

A tickle of sweat in his hair wakes him. He needs to piss so bad that he clamps a hand over his crotch, but that makes it hurt worse.

A blanket is wrapped around his head and he trips getting up and almost pisses on himself when he stumbles. The sun beats down so hot.

He yawns and stretches, and the blanket hangs around his head in sweat-filthy drapes and he fumbles with his pants, peeing without looking, and he hopes he’s pissing on Piss-kid and that whore.

The blanket stinks like burnt rubber.

Everything does.

Feeling sick, Mitch pulls it away from his face, lets it drop to his splattered feet.

“You should have woke me up,” he says to the blankets where the others should have been sleeping, too.

Lilly’s gone.

He spins around, thinking he might catch her being a slut with Piss-kid, but Simon’s not there, either.

“Hey!”

“Hey!”

The tide of his blood makes his head darken in waves of dizziness.

“What is this?”

He pivots wildly. Frantic pirouette. Scans emptiness here in this piss-puddle-center of hell.

“What is this?”

The Lincoln sits on blackened wheel hubs. Tires split and uncoiled like dried black snakes, crooked and charred fingers all point at him like he’s the object of the joke at the moment.

Mitch pushes his way through the brush at the head of their dirt beds, tramples in uncoordinated steps. He trips, catches himself. Arms scrape and bleed against the brambles that hid them from the highway.

“Simon? Lilly!”

Sweating and panting, he runs a circle around the scattered wreckage, the flotsam of the Lincoln adrift on a sea of dead piss-reeked desert.

He calls them again and again, counts the times, the names, the letters, the breaths.

Nothing.

A crow hops along the ground, flapping its wings.

Mitch swings his arms in the air, punches at nothing, whimpers.

“Hey!”

He crumples to the ground, sits, legs out on the flat, rocky dirt. He hammers a fist down into the grit until his knuckles bleed and he sobs.

Numbers pour into his head: spines on the brush-weed between
his feet, vertical lines on the mesa, stacking, multiplying in rows, tables, orange stitches down the inseam of his jeans, all numbers, whirling, expanding, and condensing again into endless single-digit reductions piling number upon number inside his howling brain.

“Hey! I’m calling you!”

He hugs his knees, rocks back, forth, counts the rocking, a metronome, everything is a number. Everything. He shakes, mumbles to himself, quieter, softer now.

“That whore. That whore.”

He wipes a bloodied hand across the sweat on his face, smears snot and tears toward his ear.

“They’re dead. They’re dead. That whore.”

Ten. Ten. Nine.

Twenty-nine.

Eleven.

Two.

Numbers.

He slams his palms into his temples.

Endless tabulations.

“What am I going to DO?”

Mitch stands, crying again. He walks a tight circle, eyes fixed on the ground at the center, the midpoint of its diameter, counts the steps, calculates circumference, then area. It is a prison circle, and the numbers hold him there.

He pulls the gun from his pants, presses the barrel up inside a nostril until it hurts, begins to tear the flesh. He smells the powder, the residue of the gunshot in the bar. Small bits of Chief’s brain and skull adhere to the thick metal.

It smells good.

He waves the gun in front of him until the Lincoln sits black in the grooves of the site, and fires.

“Simon? Buddy? Are you there?”

He is calm now. It is a joke.

Piss-kid.

He turns, sees Don Quixote standing off in the distance, and fires another shot at the metal man. A small piece of tin rips away from the statue’s head.

Running as quickly as he can, he follows the course of the bullet, pleading. He stumbles over the brush and rocks.

“I’m sorry, Don. I’m sorry. Look what they did! Look what they made me do!”

He puts his face on the tin, rubs a thumb on the jagged hole torn open at the back of the statue’s head.

“It’s not that bad,” he says. “I can fix you. I’m sorry.”

The gun slides back into the waist of his pants and Mitch marches over the flat ground where the whore and the Piss-kid had slept last night, walks across their blankets, thinks, takes stock of what had been salvaged from the burning Lincoln. Back and forth. He makes piles of boxes and bags, neat around the foot of the statue. He wedges the box of money under some sagebrush, then moves it, and puts it back again.

Everything sits perfectly now.

He kneels in the low shade and drinks a warm beer, looks at the metal man.

He expects him to answer.

Mitch opens another beer.

“Why did they do it? Why did they leave? It had to be that punk Simon. Piss-kid. Whore. After all I did for him. He’s dead, that’s it. I should have never listened to her, never picked them up. But Lilly always gets what she asks for, whatever she wants. Doesn’t she? Well, we left that one drowning back in a river in New Mexico, and we’ll leave the other out here in the desert with a bullet in his face. Whore.”

Sixteen swallows drain the can.

He drinks four beers and counts the steps he takes to the Lincoln. The paint on the door peels away from his touch in dry blistering flakes. Greasy soot blackens his open palms. He rubs his hands on his face, blacks them against the car, and smears the black on his skin again.

He wipes the side mirror, spiderweb cracked, with the tail of his shirt, rubs more and more of the ash-soot grime until his face is completely blacked. The mirror shows Mitch, smiling behind a drape of lightning bolt fractures, the colors, pink lips, yellow teeth, crooked teeth. He soot-smears his forearms, tears the shirt away from his body, and paints himself, the skin on his chest, his belly, his back, all black.

“Bullets,” he says. “Need bullets.”

Mitch returns to his pile of possessions and opens the suitcase. He touches Don Quixote on the knee and offers him another “I’m sorry.” Black hands snake through the womb of the case. He dangles Lilly’s purple shirt, pendulumlike, between two fingers, stares at it, disgusted.

Mitch spits on the blouse and tosses it away.

“Whore.”

The bullets to the .357 sit at the bottom of the small bag containing the razor and scissors he used to shave his beard and cut his hair. He looks at his hands. He doesn’t want the black to rub away.