In the Path of Falling Objects (7 page)

A waitress came and brought us glasses of ice water and poured coffee for everyone without even asking if we wanted any. I squeezed into the end of the booth, sitting next to Lilly, across from Mitch.

I wiped my sleeve across the ring of water on the table in front of me and put my book there, starting with just a thin path away from that coffin of a trailer and a sketch of the 1940 Lincoln with its top down, a snake of a line to Drinkwater Flats, Tucumcari, Mitch, Lilly. Then I began writing words on my map.

“What’s that you’re making, Jonah?” Lilly asked.

“It’s his map,” Simon said.

“I like that!” She leaned over so her shoulder pressed into mine. “Are you going to draw a picture of me on it, too?”

And she dropped a hand down on my leg and rubbed. It made me so dizzy I had to squeeze my eyes shut.

“This is you right here,” I gulped and nodded at the picture. I wanted to take a drink of water but I didn’t want to move.

“What happens when we get to the edge of the page there?” she laughed, pointing at the book with her other hand. “Do we just fall off the edge of the world?”

“There’s lots of pages,” I said. I showed her how behind my drawings I’d scrawled line upon line of my writing.

“Let me see that,” Mitch said, and reached across the table and pulled the book right out from under the point of my pencil. I never thought that anyone would do something like that. And I didn’t realize how much what I’d written down even mattered.

Lilly beamed a smile at me, and then at Mitch. And I thought she really liked what I’d drawn, that maybe she liked me, too.
I couldn’t know. I don’t remember ever thinking much about girls at all until that day I saw Lilly driving past us.

But Mitch had a different look on his face as he studied my map. It made me feel sick, like I felt when he was cutting at the coyote’s tail. And I figured later, after everything was done, that sitting there in Flora’s Diner was when Mitch realized that he could never just let me and my brother walk away from him.

Simon and I ate more food in that one sitting than we had eaten throughout the week of days before, and when we were finished, Mitch left a dollar on the table and told us all he would pay the bill. He pulled a fold of cash from his front pocket and took a five-dollar bill out and handed it to Simon.

“Here,” he said. “Go get some change at the register and get a few packs of cigarettes from the machine in there.”

Simon said, “Bitchin’.”

“You sure have a lot of money there,” I said.

“That’s why she likes me,” Mitch said, and Lilly waved a hand at him and rolled her eyes. She put her sunglasses on and Mitch slid himself out to let Simon go for the cigarettes. When my brother walked away, we could hear the
clop clop
of his loose shoes on the tiles of the floor.

“That boy needs some shoes,” Mitch said.

“He’s always walked like that,” I said.

“That would drive me crazy,” Lilly smiled, pushing herself out against my side as I struggled to stand; I was so full of food, so flustered by the girl.

“He does.”

Simon stood, waiting for us at the cashier’s, clutching four packs of Kool cigarettes and books of matches.

Mitch paid the bill, even though I half expected he would skip out on it. As we made our way out through the cavern of the curio shop, Mitch stopped suddenly, grabbed Simon by the shoulder, and said, “Hey, foot scooter, what size shoe do you wear?”

“Huh?” Simon answered.

“Shoes. What size?” Mitch repeated.

“Whatever size Jonah grows out of,” Simon said.

“Ten-and-a-half,” I answered.

“Let’s get the kid some moccasins,” Mitch said. “That way no one will hear you if we have to sneak up on someone and kill them.”

Mitch winked at Simon.

“Cool,” Simon said.

“Mitch is so nice,” Lilly said. I grimaced at that.

“How about you, Jonah?” Mitch asked.

“I don’t want any.”

“Your shoes look like they’re going to fall apart pretty soon,” Mitch said. But he sounded so empty when he said it. He watched me, like he was waiting for something to happen.

“I don’t care. Really. Thanks anyway,” I said. “And thanks for Simon.”

So Mitch paid for some moccasins, and he bought a cheap headdress that he tied on top of Don Quixote’s helmet while Simon and I climbed into the backseat of the Lincoln, Simon admiring his new quiet shoes, carefully brushing the dirt from them, placing the cigarette packs down in a line beside him as though they were some kind of barrier between us, picking up the meteorite and passing it between his hands like he was playing his own private game.

When we pulled away from Flora’s Diner and Curios, Mitch said, “We gotta get some gas.” And then, over his shoulder to Simon, he added, “Where are they?”

And Simon answered, “Under your seat, Mitch.”

I looked at Simon, who gave no clue to what they were talking about. He just ignored me and focused his attention on unwrapping a pack of cigarettes.

Near Highway 66, Mitch pulled the Lincoln into a service station, and while the attendant there gassed the tank and checked the engine, Mitch got out and walked across the driveway to a truck stop liquor store.

“This sure is a nice car,” the attendant said, and grinned at Lilly. He was missing a tooth. “A V-twelve like this one sure wants to burn the oil, though. You’re down some.”

“Go ahead and put some in,” Lilly said.

The attendant wiped his hands on his blue coveralls, two stripes of black grease down his chest and belly on either side of the front buttons with darkened handprints at the bottom of each smear, a red-and-white embroidered patch over his heart that spelled out “Ray” in cursive thread.

As Ray worked at the can of oil from Lilly’s side of the propped-up hood, he leered at her and said, “Where are you heading?”

Lilly looked over to the store where Mitch had gone. An Indian sat with his knees bent, leaning his back against the store between the front door and a trash can.

“California,” Lilly said.

At the same time, Simon said, “Arizona.”

“Well, that’s on the way to California,” Ray said, smiling at me and my brother in the backseat. He pointed a thumb at Don Quixote. “You boys caught yourself an Indian there?”

“And a meteor.” Simon held the glossy black shape up so Ray, uninterested, could look at it.

“It’s not an Indian, anyway,” I said. “It’s Don Quixote.”

“Oh.”

Ray wiped his hands down his chest again and tossed the empty oilcan away, resting his hands down on the top of Lilly’s door.

“Going all the way to California. Nice vacation. I guess you’re brothers and sister,” Ray said.

“And it’s our uncle driving,” Simon said. “And if he catches you flirting with our sister while he’s gone, he’ll probably stab you. Ray.”

Ray frowned. “My name’s Mike. These aren’t my clothes. And you’re a little young for cigarettes, aren’t you, boy?”

Mitch appeared, walking across the gravel lot, a brown grocery sack held in his arms. Simon dragged from his cigarette and stared at the attendant. Ray watched Mitch as he stepped beneath the shade of the station’s awning.

“Nine dollars,” Ray said.

Lilly was sick. She needed to get out of the car, so Mitch pulled off into a rest stop outside of Santa Rosa, saying, “I need to take care of some stuff now, anyway. We could all take a break.”

There were no other cars at the rest stop, a flattened patch of crumbling asphalt that fronted a flat-roofed men’s and women’s room, split down the middle; and two picnic tables and galvanized steel trash cans beneath some thin locust trees. As soon as Mitch parked the car, Lilly opened her door and ran out into the dirt and began vomiting, one hand bracing herself on her knee and the other holding her hair back behind her neck.

“What’s wrong with her?” Simon asked.

“She’s pregnant,” Mitch said.

Simon and I got out of the car. Simon scratched his head and admired his moccasins. I looked at Mitch to see if there was some sign in his expression about whether we could do anything for Lilly, but he just lifted the trunk of the car and pulled out a black cloth suitcase,
opening it on the ground and gathering up a new set of clothes. I looked back at Lilly. Mitch left the suitcase lying there and then took some things from the grocery sack and went toward the restrooms.

Lilly stayed there in the dirt field, bent over, coughing and spitting.

I brought my canteen to her.

“Here,” I said. “Wash your mouth out.”

She took the canteen from my hand.

“Are you all right?”

Lilly nodded her head and spit a mouthful of water onto the ground. She was pale and sweating.

“I’ve been getting like this for a week or so now. I’ll be okay.”

“You really are pregnant?”

“Yeah.”

“Dang.” I took the canteen back from her. “How old are you, anyway?”

“Sixteen.”

“Dang.”

Simon was standing by the open suitcase, smoking, watching us. He flicked away ashes with his middle finger when I looked over at him.

“How long have you been with Mitch?”

“I’m not with him,” she said. “Not like you think. I’ve just been riding with him for . . .” and she stopped. I think she was trying to figure out how long it really had been.

“Since about a week,” she said.

“You both from Texas?”

“Yeah.”

I wiped the back of my hand across my lips. “What’s going on here, Lilly?” My heart was racing so fast, and I thought it was only from what she did to me. But I knew a car like that one carried stories with it.

“You don’t want to know, Jonah.”

“Okay,” I said. “I should change my clothes, too. But I think maybe Simon and me better look for another ride. Or start walking again.”

“Maybe you should.”

And I walked away from her. I was feeling disgusted, not just from the vinegar smell of her vomit in my nose, but because I thought that she’d tell me the truth about what she was doing in that car. Maybe I was hoping for too much. Maybe I had the wrong feeling about her, anyway. So I told myself it was Simon I had to think about, and as much as neither one of us could give up on picking at each other, we were all we had in the world, besides a ten-dollar bill and a sack full of dirty clothes. So I looked up at Simon standing there, watching me, watching the girl, smoking his cigarette and flicking the ashes.

I stood on the other side of the car from Lilly and Simon and changed my clothes. I didn’t really want to be in the small restroom with Mitch, and I wasn’t embarrassed to undress outside anyway. But when I pulled my pants off, I saw Lilly was watching me. I looked away, like I didn’t notice her. I put on the jeans I had worn when it began raining two days before, tighter and stiffer now, and found some clean socks in the pack, Simon’s. Since I didn’t have a clean shirt to wear, I took one of Simon’s tee shirts and pulled it on, even though it hardly reached to the top of my jeans.

“I took a shirt of yours. And some socks,” I said to Simon.

“I don’t care.”

“Do you want to change your clothes?” I called out across the car, across the width of the crumbling lot.

“Not yet,” Simon said.

So I sat down beside the rear wheel, where the others could not see me, my legs folded, and stuffed those dirty clothes back into our pack. I felt my hand down to the bottom, finding the pistol there,
wondering if I should try putting it in my pants; and decided not to. But I did pull it out into the light and made certain it was loaded before burying it back beneath the wads of clothes and the letters from my brother. I took the letters out and flipped through them, felt them in my fingers. Then I took my map out, rested it on my lap, and drew a diagram of the rest stop and a likeness of Lilly and the bearded and long-haired Mitch, the string of beads hanging down his chest, his quilted vest unbuttoned.

I put the map back into the pack and closed it up. I put the pack into the trunk and brushed the dirt from the seat of my pants and sat down with Simon and Lilly at one of the rest area’s splintered tables.

Mitch came out of the bathroom smiling broadly. He had shaved off his beard and cut his hair; and he was wearing a plaid short-sleeved shirt and powder blue bell-bottom corduroys. He looked like a tourist.

“How do you like me now?” he said.

“Crazy,” Lilly, who had recovered and was sitting at a picnic bench having a cigarette, answered.

“It makes you look like a kid,” Simon said.

“How old are you anyway, Mitch?” I asked. I thought he had to be in his twenties.

Mitch flashed serious for an instant, and said, “What? Are you going to put that on your map, too?”

“That map’s stupid. Jonah said he was making it in case we get killed,” Simon added.

Mitch smiled again.

“Hey. I’m just kidding, Jonah,” Mitch said. “It doesn’t matter, does it?”

“Not really.”

Mitch walked over to the car and loaded his suitcase back into
the trunk, then he opened the driver’s door and dropped down to his knees so he could reach under the seat.

“You feeling better, Lil?” he called out.

“Yeah.”

“Then maybe Simon can come help me put these on,” and as he stood, I could see Mitch was holding two red-and-yellow New Mexico license plates.

I stared at my brother, who just sat there looking smug, smoking his cigarette. Now I knew what he’d been doing before we sat down at that diner.

“Did you steal those plates?”

“Yep.”

I slammed my palm down onto the table. It made Lilly jump. Simon dropped his cigarette.

I was so mad I could feel myself getting dizzy. Everything had piled up so high I just couldn’t stand it anymore: our father, Mother, Matthew, and me and Simon being out in the desert, abandoned and lost, swallowed up in the backseat of that black car like we really were swallowed up in the belly of some monster.

We may have had as much of an excuse to as anyone ever did, but Simon and I never stole anything in our lives. And that was all I could stand.

I stood up and walked around the table, and as Simon was attempting to swing his legs out over the bench, I grabbed him. He started squealing and writhing like a pig that was about to get butchered, and I pulled him by the sleeve of his tee shirt and threw him down into the dirt.