In the Path of Falling Objects (12 page)

“I’m sorry, Mitch,” Lilly said.

“Sure you are. And what are you now, Lilly?” Mitch looked at her in the rearview mirror. I raised my eyes and saw him watching me, too. “Your feelings usually come and go every few seconds. Except maybe with that kid. How you feeling about him now, Lil?”

She didn’t answer.

I closed my eyes.

It would have to happen.

Mitch said, “We’ll be there today. Arizona. And you can say bye-bye to your boy. That’ll be good for us.”

I swallowed and looked at Simon. Mitch was going to do something bad, and it seemed like Simon hadn’t caught on at all. He just sat there, watching the road, playing with his meteorite. Then he placed it on the dashboard as though it might offer some direction for us, but I thought, the only way it knows to go is down.

Simon trusted Mitch.

I knew there was something about Mitch that attracted Simon. Maybe it was just another way of pushing my buttons, because Simon had to sense I didn’t like Mitch from the start. So his emulating Mitch, smoking cigarettes, stealing for him, riding naked in the backseat of the convertible to show off, was all just a way, I think, for him to let me know he was his own boss. And I wasn’t his father.

He’d said it once, when we walked on that dusty road away from the trailer on that first morning.

He’d said, “You’re not my father, Jonah. So you can stop acting like it.”

And I said, “You don’t have a father, Simon. You never did. Someone’s got to look out for you and make you do what’s right.”

“Well, not you.”

And after what I’d done to him, and what I’d done with Lilly in that room, forgetting all about my promise to take care of him, I knew Simon was probably right.

Mitch filled the Lincoln’s tank with gas, grumbling to himself or to anyone who would listen about being gouged the 45-cents-per-gallon price in a do-nothing town full of bums, and how next time it happened he’d just hold the place up as soon as get robbed like that, and then he paid for donuts and coffee that he made Simon retrieve while we waited. Simon and Lilly ate in the car as Mitch drove north on the small road following the Río Cruces, as I silently looked out at the quiet landscape, refusing to eat, refusing to listen to what the others were saying, sometimes closing my eyes and pretending to sleep.

I didn’t want to say anything.

It would have to happen today.

And I wanted to hurl that damned metal man as far as I could into the air behind the car and just fall on Lilly, to smother her with my body, and beg her to help us get away from Mitch, to come with me, tell her I was sorry—but I didn’t know why—and I couldn’t decide on what it was, exactly, that was the worst thing I’d done to feel so sorry for, but I still felt like shooting myself, anyway.

She had to know what she was doing, to Mitch, and Simon. To me.

I thought she must have felt like she was on some out-of-control plane, crashing down toward the earth, and it was like she wanted to keep her eyes open the whole way just so she could see everything right up to the end. And I wasn’t going to let her do it.

We had to get away.

It was a perfect day, a terrible morning.

The sky hung so blue with the faintest feather-whisks of clouds above the open car, over the jagged and blood-hued volcanic mountains to the right and the lower, rounded hills dotted with green and rusted popcorn balls of shrubs, the sparse cottonwoods already going yellow on the opposite bank of the narrow river, their trunks shooting straight up among the flaming orange grasses along the rock-strewn banks of the water.

Simon and Mitch smoked cigarettes.

Mitch turned on the radio, but there was nothing to listen to, and he began talking to himself. I couldn’t understand what he was saying.

“What?” Simon asked.

“We have to be quiet,” Lilly said.

Feeling myself redden, I opened my eyes and looked across at her.

She smiled the faintest smile back at me, and I could tell she winked behind the black of her sunglasses, her brilliant hair tied neatly down to her head beneath the silk of a red scarf.

“What?” Simon repeated.

“When he gets like this,” she said, and slid her hand along the seat behind the gleaming Don Quixote, letting it come to rest just before touching me, so I could feel the warmth of her skin, and know she was there, whispering, “We have to be quiet.”

I sighed deeply and let my head fall back against the canvas top, closing my eyes, and covered Lilly’s hand with mine.

I gave up.

I had to have her.

I wasn’t going to listen to Simon. I wasn’t going to listen to that voice in my head that kept telling me I’d better look out.

“Oh. Okay,” Simon said, and pulled the cigarette away from his lips, blowing smoke into the warm wind.

So Mitch drove on, talking to himself, moving his head and eyes slightly from side to side, offering mumbled questions and answers inside a conversation involving nobody else.

Along the nothingness of the road, Mitch pulled the Lincoln into the driveway of a dark, squat building with a painted sign, the red-and-white lettering peeling in the dry heat of the desert, announcing “Chief’s Roadhouse.” There were no other cars at the stop, and I wondered how Chief himself ever came there.

Mitch played with the cap of the lighter, back and forth, a ringing metronome.

Flick.

“I need a beer,” Mitch grumbled. “Do you want to come with me, Simon?”

“Sure, Mitch.”

I looked at Lilly.

“We’ll only be a few minutes,” Mitch said to us. “Stay with the car. And try to keep your clothes on this time.”

Lilly laughed, “That’s funny coming from you, Mitch.”

Lilly teased too much.

He gave her a look that made her smile vanish immediately. I avoided his eyes entirely, and even though I wished I could somehow stop Simon from going into the bar with Mitch, I was too afraid to say anything.

Maybe all Mitch needed was a beer.

Simon and I had never been apart, not one day in our entire lives. We never even slept one night in different rooms. But our getting into that car with Mitch and Lilly in the first place was what started
to drive an unstoppable wedge between us, and I realized we were drifting helplessly apart after that morning when I woke up to Mitch standing over me at the Palms.

Even our story, our map, started going in separate directions on that day. And I never knew the terrible things that happened to my little brother until he’d told me much later.

But I can fill in the map and tell it now.

Mitch pulled the dark green door on the roadhouse open, thick forest-colored curls of lead paint corkscrewing back from the framing beside the panes of dusty glass. A string of tin bells hung from the inside of the doorway, signaling their entrance as Mitch and Simon pushed through strands of green plastic beads that draped from the ceiling.

“Howdy,” the man behind the bar said.

At first, they didn’t even notice him, he was so short and the barroom so dim. The only light beyond what seeped through the grimy windows came from a flickering yellow fluorescent tube beneath a shelf of bottles lined up neatly behind the bar, and a blue Hamm’s Beer sign, a plastic backlit scene of a waterfall in a forest that somehow seemed to move, hanging on the wall near the pool table. The bartender’s head, his hair, black and greased flat, barely rose up above the surface of the bar, and until he’d said anything, the man was as inconspicuous as any of the bottles tucked into the shelf behind him.

Simon thought the bartender must have been sitting down, but he was not.

“Hey, Chief,” Mitch said, putting his hand on Simon’s shoulder and walking him over to a stool at the bar.

Chief climbed up onto a small footstool behind the bar, so he could reach an ashtray and flick his cigarette clean. He slid another ashtray across the bar toward Mitch, who pulled five dollars from his pocket and asked Chief to give quarters to Simon for the cigarette machine.

“Anything to drink?” Chief asked, and Simon just stared at the little man’s stubby hands in amazement as he handed the change to him.

“Two beers,” Mitch said.

Simon carried his change to the vending machine.

“Two?” Chief asked.

“Yeah.” Mitch cleared his throat. “I’m enlisting tomorrow. I’m going to Nam. Maybe this is the only time I’ll ever be able to have a beer with my little brother. You understand, man.”

Chief just shrugged and began pouring the beers. It was the middle of the week. There was no one in there except for the three of them.

I watched the door close behind them.

And I wondered if my brother would ever come out.

I almost wished they’d both just vanish.

So we sat in the back of the Lincoln in silence for the longest time, me just staring at that peeling green door, trying to find what to say first, afraid that as soon as I said anything, Mitch and Simon would come back out again.

“I’m sorry, Lilly.”

Lilly leaned forward, so that she could see me there on the other side of the metal man.

“What for?”

“I don’t know. For what I did last night, I guess.” I sighed. “Simon’s right, you know. I am so stupid.”

Lilly slid her hand back across the seat and put it on my leg.

“I like you, Jonah. Stop being so hard on yourself. You just make it easier for Simon to pick on you like that.”

“Yeah,” I said, almost choking on that one syllable. “I need to ask you some things, Lilly, but I don’t know how to say it.”

“You can ask me anything, Jonah.” She smiled. She looked so sincere.

“I’m embarrassed about what I did last night,” I said, and looked down at my feet, at the floor still wet with rainwater puddles.

“You don’t have to be,” she said. “I’m not.”

“I thought I was going to pass out from holding my breath so much,” I said, and I tried to smile, now turning my eyes to her.

Lilly giggled.

“You were trembling. You were shaking so hard.”

“I was scared.”

“Are you now?”

“Yes.” And I looked away from her for a moment and said, “Who’s the father?”

When I asked it, I could feel her tensing up, as though she would pull her hand away. Then I heard her breathe and she said, “Some old man.”

“From where you live?”

“Yeah.”

“Is he nice?”

“He’s not like you.”

“Oh.” I cleared my throat. “Me and Simon need to get away from Mitch. He’s not giving us the chance to. You know we got to get away from him.”

“Yeah.”

“What did you and Mitch do? Tell me the truth.”

Lilly pulled her hand away from my lap and sat back in the seat so that I couldn’t see her face. When she spoke, it was almost as though the words she spoke were coming from Don Quixote.

“I known Mitch since I was maybe twelve. He lived by me. He knew I was pregnant, and he wanted to help. I guess in his own
way, he always thought there was something between us, but I never liked him back. Maybe I tease too much, I don’t know. He wanted some money from his daddy so he could take me to California, you know? I guess he thought he was saving me somehow. In California, a girl can . . . you know. You can get rid of a baby if you need to. Mitch was on speed. He got into a fight with his daddy, and his daddy was going to throw Mitch out of the house. He’s nineteen, Mitch is. And he killed his own daddy over it. Then he came and got me, and he told me what he did. I guess we were just bored of Texas, I don’t know. That was only about a week ago. No one knows. They lived alone. No one’s going to find out for a long time. And I guess I was so desperate that I’d do anything to get away from where I was heading, even if it meant riding along with Mitch and him drooling all over me all the time and trying to get me into bed with him. I guess I was pretty stupid last night, too, ’cause who knows what he’s thinking now? But it’s my fault, Jonah. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“It’s not your fault, Lilly.”

I closed my eyes, resting my head back so the sun made me see red through my eyelids.

Lilly said, “And Mitch took everything he could find at the house, and the keys to this Lincoln, and we loaded it up and locked the doors when we left, just like we were leaving on a family trip or something. His daddy kept a lot of money in the house. I seen Mitch counting it once, and he just acted like a dog trying to protect a scrap of meat, so I never said anything about it again. We went to Mexico. I didn’t trust the doctors there and I begged Mitch to take me away. And he got mad at me one morning and he stopped at a place and shot a man right in front of me. He made me watch him do it. Then he took this statue from the dead man and we left Mexico. A couple
days after that we saw you and Simon on the road and I pleaded with him to stop.”

“You saw him kill someone?”

I heard her sigh. “I told you. There’s nothing I can do. I got in the car with him, just like you and Simon. I need him to get me to California. Then I can get away from him.”

I rubbed my eyes and leaned forward. Then I sat back again and grabbed the statue of Don Quixote and angrily shoved him forward, pushing the front seat into the steering wheel, the metal man falling until his tin plate hat came to rest just in front of the rearview mirror.