In the Path of Falling Objects (11 page)

Mitch popped open another beer and drank the entire can without stopping. Then he opened another and said, “You want a beer, Prude-boy?”

“No.”

Then Mitch stretched his legs out on the bed, kicking our clothes and pack down onto the floor.

I sat down on the bed next to Lilly.

Mitch began snoring beside Simon.

I remember her pressing her lips to my ear, saying, “Jonah, turn out the light.”

I did.

And I knew I should have gotten myself up and gone in there and grabbed my pistol right then; should have. And Simon and I could get out of that trap. But I was so tired, and I was shaking.

I listened to the rain, so constant, so loud against the roof.

And, in the dark, she whispered, so faintly, barely a breath, “Jonah. We have to be quiet.”

The first gray-yellow light of the morning, the color of Mitch’s teeth, fogged its way through the uneven blinds covering the window of the room where we slept at the Palms.

And I don’t know if I woke up first, but I know my eyes opened when Mitch was standing over me, bellowing, “Well, isn’t this romantic?”

Simon shot up in his bed and looked across at me.

I’d been sleeping, completely naked and uncovered, with my face down in the pillow, and Lilly was lying across me, her bare breasts
pressed into my back, her fingers coiled into my hair, the tangled bedsheet wrapped around her hips. Our clothes were scattered everywhere, the orange bedspread thrown down to the floor at the foot of the bed.

I cracked my eyes open at Mitch’s hollering, and, realizing where I was, seeing Mitch standing over us, feeling the burn of Simon’s stare, reached down, digging between the sheets to the bottom of the bed, and hurriedly, crookedly, pulled my briefs up to cover my nakedness. Lilly sat up and wrapped herself in the dingy sheet, yawning.

She smiled at Mitch.

“Good morning,” she said, stretching.

Simon glared at me as Lilly stroked my back so softly with her trailing fingers, drawing slow, small circles between my shoulder blades. I thought about gathering up my cast-off clothes, but I was too afraid to speak or move, afraid to even look at Lilly. And I was terrified of Mitch.

“This is why the people can’t trust Jonah,” Mitch announced, pacing a tight back-and-forth pathway between the beds. “This is why!”

Simon leaned forward on his bed, the swelling on his face reduced, the flesh around his eye smudged into a darkened purple.

“Now who’s acting like a hippie communist,
Jonah
?” Simon blurted.

“Well, at least you don’t have to worry about dying a virgin now,” Mitch said flatly, and Simon just shook his head in obvious agreement and disgust.

Then Mitch turned to Lilly and said, “And how did you sleep?”

But there was an edge in his voice. He sounded like someone else. I knew he was mad, and I wasn’t sure just how mad he was.

Lilly laughed softly and stood, holding the sheet pocked with holes and cigarette burns, letting her other hand brush softly across my bare shoulder. I wondered what Mitch was feeling, watching her
touch me like that. But I wouldn’t tell her to stop it, even though it terrified me.

“I dug it, Mitch,” she said.

I was so scared and sick I just stared at my feet, certain that Mitch was going to kill us all on the spot. I was so stupid. How could I be so stupid? What was I thinking?

I wasn’t thinking.

I couldn’t stop it.

And I knew that Mitch had a thing for the girl, that he must have been seething inside at the thought of us all tangled up there in that dirty bed just inches away from him while he slept off his booze and pot.

I thought I was going to throw up.

And I wished, hopelessly, that Simon would say something to let me know he was still my brother and that we weren’t going to break any more rules and let each other down, but I could see how he’d been looking at Lilly ever since we got into that car, too.

She trailed the stained sheet behind her as she made her way into the bathroom, picking her clothes from the floor as she swept past the stares of Mitch and Simon.

I scrambled to pull my cuffed and twisted jeans up over my legs. I could feel the wad of cash in the pocket, and replayed in my mind what had happened the night before, remembered the gun hidden in the shower stall, Lilly’s body pressing madly into mine, completely undressing me as I lay there feeling my heart crawling up through my throat, falling upon me as Mitch and Simon slept soundly just across from us, in the same room as us, her moist lips pressed to my ear, the soundless whispering, “We have to be quiet. We have to be quiet.”

And we had fallen to the floor beneath the window when the rain stopped drumming to quiet the creak of our bed, and later, exhausted, we both climbed back up and went to sleep.

It must have been only fifteen minutes before Mitch woke us up with his ranting.

And I never thought at all about getting away, about the gun I’d hidden in the shower, about Mitch, about protecting my brother.

I never thought at all.

I was so stupid.

I stood on shaking legs, trying and failing to get my jeans buttoned up, looking around on the floor for where my shirt and socks had fallen, kicking at the discarded bedcovers and finding nothing.

“And what about you?” Mitch prodded me, poked my chest with a nicotine finger.

I felt the rising heat of redness in my face. I said nothing.

I couldn’t make my throat relax.

“Cat got your tongue, man?” Mitch laughed. “Or maybe you left it in Lilly’s mouth.”

“You’re disgusting, Jonah,” Simon said, and swung his legs out over the edge of his bed. “I hate you.”

And I started to mouth a reply, but stopped myself before anything could come out. I saw my brother looking at me. I must have looked so pitiful. I wished I could tell him I was sorry, that I was crazy, that I wasn’t going to do anything bad anymore, and I would take care of him like I promised I would.

Mitch zipped his suitcase shut.

Simon tapped down the pack of cigarettes beside his bed.

Water ran in the bathroom, and all the smells and sounds of that room in the morning made me feel nauseous. And in my swirling confusion, frustrated, silent, I could not find the rest of my clothes, and grabbed my hair in near-panic, already sweating, standing there like an idiot with my fly hanging open in jeans I couldn’t steady my hands enough to button. Lilly emerged from the bathroom, her face wet and cleaned, smiling as she bent down and picked up my socks
and shirt where she had thrown them, behind a corner chair, the cracks in its vinyl slitting open like sneering smiles.

I inhaled, trying to calm myself down, avoiding Lilly’s eyes when she handed the clothes to me, breathing in the smell of Simon’s menthol cigarette, and momentarily wondering if I shouldn’t smoke one, too.

“You’re a pig,” Simon said to me.

“Don’t be like that, sweetie,” Lilly said, pouting her lips at Simon and holding out her hand. “Can I have one?”

I finished dressing, and began gathering the contents of our pack while Simon sat exhaling clouds of smoke in my direction, watching me, watching Lilly light her cigarette.

Mitch opened the door to the room, and, bracing his suitcase along the outside of his leg, stepped out into the light of the morning. He left the door wide open. When I was certain he had gone to the car, I ran for the bathroom.

“Are you okay, Jonah?” Lilly asked.

I quietly pressed the door shut behind me.

“I need to pee.”

I flushed the whining toilet.

I reached into the shower stall, lifting the wet pistol nervously, stuffing it down into the front of my jeans, letting the long flannel shirt hang over. I was back in the room before Mitch was.

I finished filling our pack and tied it shut. Lilly watched me without a word. I could tell she wanted me to say something, but I was so confused and tense I didn’t want to look at her, even if I couldn’t think of anything else without seeing her, feeling her, in my mind.

She put her hand to the side of my face.

“Hey,” she said.

I raised my eyes to hers.

Simon stood and went into the bathroom, exhaling an angry
sigh. As he passed by, he pushed me hard on my shoulder and said, “Yeah, I want to hit you back now. It’s sickening what you did. In the same room as me. You stay the hell away from her, Jonah.”

“It’s a little late for that, Simon,” Lilly said, and smiled as he turned away from her, taking a last drag from his cigarette, letting it fall from his lips into the toilet with a protesting hiss as he unbuttoned his fly and stood there, peeing with the door wide open.

The room darkened as Mitch’s shadow blocked the doorway.

Lilly stood just inches from me, our bodies nearly touching, her hand on my face.

“This,” Mitch said, “is likely to become a serious complication.” And he laughed, exaggerating his slight Southern accent. “A matter of the utmost gravity.”

Then he stepped aside and said, “Come on, let’s go.”

The toilet flushed.

Today, I thought. It would be today. I promised.

Today.

If things weren’t already too complicated.

If it wasn’t too late.

Dear Jones
,

I got your letter today. I’m pretty sure I got all your letters now and so I put them in order and read them.

I don’t know what to say, and I don’t feel like writing hardly ever except to you. Even my best friends from home stopped writing to me anyway. I’m sorry, cause I’m pretty down today and maybe I won’t even get this one into the envelope. I don’t know. I did that a couple times, wrote you letters and then threw them away, mostly on days when I felt like this and then didn’t want my little brother to worry about it.

We went out in the field to give some guys a break who had been out there for 8 months. Guys who are in the field for that long have a different look on their face, it’s hard to explain. The first day we were there one of the guys who lives in the same hooch as me and Scotty got shot by a sniper while he was standing right next to me. He got shot in the neck, and there was nothing I could do about it but lay down with him and try to stop the bleeding but he died. He was just standing about a foot away from me, and he was shorter than me, too. I think that sniper was probably aiming at me and missed.

I get my R and R in June now. I’m going to go to Sydney with
Scotty. Jonah, I think we’re going to do what I said, but I don’t want to say anything else about it in a letter, so just know that, and trust me.

The pictures in here I took about a week ago. The first one is of me and Scotty outside a bar. Yeah, believe it or not, that shack is a bar. We have our shirts off ’cause we were seeing who was skinnier. Everything we eat here makes me sick. Most of us can’t keep any weight on at all. At least they give us free cigarettes. Sorry to say it, but I smoke them. Don’t tell Simon or Mother. I’m having one now.

Almost everyone here smokes pot. All the guys who live in our hooch do it, but not me. Whenever I come in it smells like pot and incense. Some of them snort cocaine all day long. That guy who wanted to kill Scotty was shooting coke in his arms.

That second picture is a woman sitting on a box. She was blindfolded because she was a VC spy and got caught. Right after I took that picture the GIs standing around her kicked her face in with their boots and killed her. I took pictures of that too but I’m probably going to throw them away.

So, Dad is supposed to get out of prison this summer? Are you going to try to see him? I would understand if you didn’t want to, but if you do see him and I don’t get a chance to, tell him I love him. I guess I got to see him around a lot more than you and Simon.

Don’t fight with Simon.

You know, of all of us boys Simon is the one who is most likely to turn out like Dad, always getting in trouble and stuff. You know how wild he’s always been, so don’t fight with him.

See? I said I didn’t feel like writing and I ended up writing five pages. I wish I could talk to you, Jones.

Tell Simon I love him.

Take care of him, big brother.

Love
,

Matt

I never wanted to say anything again.

I was so tired.

Today I would keep the promise I’d made to Simon.

The floor of the Lincoln was pooled deep with rainwater, Don Quixote slumped over to one side, as though the rain had exhausted him with its weight. His paper mask sloughed down in gray clots of pulp, the electrical tape peeling away in black curls to reveal the metal man’s bearded face for the first time, his eyes, deathlike, fixed forward, empty, and round. The Indian headdress had been drained of its hues in the storm, the leather now gone the color of rotted meat, the feathers that had been dyed to look like an eagle’s, faded to the dingy white of the turkey they had been pulled from. Mitch pushed the statue upright and tugged the war bonnet away, casting it down into the mud of the Palms lot.

He pushed his seat forward. He looked at Lilly. “Get in the back.”

“Is Jonah driving?” she said.

“Get in the back.”

She slid in behind the driver’s seat.

I watched her, and opened the door on the other side.

“Simon sits up front,” Mitch said.

“Don’t let him sit back there,” Simon said. “After what he did to her?”

“Don’t worry about them,” Mitch said. “I’m sick of both of them and don’t even want to look at them right now.”

I felt myself go pale. I climbed into the backseat. It made my pants wet. The dripping statue stood between us.

Simon slammed his door.

Mitch drove the Lincoln away from the place where we’d slept, heading north.