In the Path of Falling Objects

by Smith, Andrew

“Canine meets V-twelve,” he said. “The cruel truth of natural selection.”

  Simon stood up on the backseat and leapt over the door, not waiting for Lilly to even ask if he wanted to get out.

  Mitch and Simon walked back to where the dead animal lay in the road.

  I was alone with her in the car.

  “He did it on purpose,” I said.

  “Of course he did,” Lilly said, smiling at me. “It’s just his way of blowing off some steam. I could tell I made him pretty mad just now.”

  “You did?”

  “Or, maybe you did,” she laughed. “I don’t know. But when Mitch starts talking to himself like that, something weird always happens.”

  “I’ll remember that,” I said.

  “Anyway,” she said, sliding across the seat to Mitch’s side and getting out of the car. “It was just a dog. You coming, Jonah?”

  Lilly touched my arm and tilted the seat forward for me. And she held my hand as I stepped out onto the road. Mitch glanced back at us. Simon was already studying the carcass on the asphalt.

  I caught Lilly’s eye.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “For what?”

  “Helping me out of the car, I guess.”

  She smiled. “Any time.”

  “And ’cause no one ever told me that before, either.”

  “I wasn’t fooling, Jonah,” she said. “I never really met a boy like you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She turned away and began walking toward where Simon and Mitch were standing.

  I swallowed the lump in my throat and thought about what my brother said about her screwing with me.

  The coyote was nearly torn in half at the middle, the two sections turned, ridiculously, in opposite directions, hind paws stretched toward the shining tin statue of Don Quixote, forepaws splayed out on the road, pointing as though offering testimony to which direction the murderer attacked from, the halves connected by a curling pink twist of intestine and nothing more.

  “That’s bitchin’!” Simon repeated.

  Lilly and I stood back.

  A spatter of blood on the macadam, every shade of red imaginable from bright crimson at the head to a rusted burnt oxide at the sprayed edges, like a photograph of fireworks against the night sky, starred forward from the dead dog’s nose, nearly reaching all the way to where I stood. A curled and jagged rake of candy cane rib bones poked upward from the torn flesh and fur, china white fingers curled around the lifeless guts they no longer fully contained.

  “I’m pretty sure he’s dead,” Mitch said, and laughed.

  “Well, he’s not wagging his tail, that’s for sure,” Simon added, leaning over the hind half.

  Mitch smiled his big yellow teeth at my brother.

  “You guys are morbid,” Lilly said.

  “Do either of you boys have a knife?” Mitch asked.

  My stomach knotted tight.

  “No.”

  “You mean you walked out into the desert all alone and you don’t even have a knife with you?” Mitch said.

  Well, I have a gun, creep, I thought.

  “I told you he’s stupid,” Simon said.

  I swallowed. “What do you want a knife for?”

  Mitch smiled broadly and held his hands out, explaining the obvious. “To cut his tail off. I want it.”

  He began walking quickly back toward the car and said, “Lilly’s got a nail file.”

  I felt myself going white.

  Mitch worked at sawing the tail with the flimsy metal file for several minutes while Simon watched him. I stood back, nauseated by the grisly sound of the file grinding against the pavement, the dull metal cracking its way between the bones and cartilage and sinew. Mitch’s hands went black with the clotted blood and he finally gave up, and, bracing a foot against the dog’s rear, tore the length of the tail free with a two-handed tug.

  He smiled and held his trophy up for his audience.

  “That’s nice,” he said.

  “Cool.” Simon added, “Can I hold it?”

  Mitch handed the coyote’s tail to Simon and then wiped his hands off on what remained of the animal’s hind fur.

  “Here,” he said to Lilly, offering the fouled nail file to her.

  “I don’t need that thing anymore, Mitch honey,” Lilly said. “I’ve decided to start biting my nails instead.”

  “Okay, be that way,” Mitch said, smiling, and wedged the file down into his back pocket.

  Simon fanned the tail back and forth in the hot air rising up from the road.

  “What’re we going to do with it?” he asked.

  “Come on,” Mitch said, and led my brother back to the car.

  Mitch wedged the stubby and raw end of the coyote’s tail down into the top of Don Quixote’s helmet so it hung down behind the statue like the cap of a frontiersman.

  “Now that’s pretty cool,” Mitch said.

  He walked around to the front of the Lincoln and kneeled down so he could see beneath the car.

  “It didn’t do anything to the car,” he said. “Just left some hair on the axle is all.”

  “That’s good,” I said.

  Mitch looked at me. I guess he could tell I was being sarcastic. He pulled the file from his back pocket and began scratching the point into the black paint behind the front wheel well. He started drawing a stick-figure dog, digging the file’s point into the thick metal of the car.

  And Simon, Lilly, and I watched him work as he sweat in the growing heat of the day.

  “What’s that for, Mitch?” Simon asked.

  “It’s like what they used to paint on planes and tanks in the war. It keeps score of your kills,” Mitch explained. “But I can’t draw too good.”

  “Jonah can,” Simon said. “He’s a real good artist.”

  Mitch looked at me and held the crusted file up as an offering.

  “You want to finish it?”

  I was repulsed, and at the same time afraid of setting Mitch off again. So I grimaced and held out my hand.

  “Okay, Mitch. Sure.”

  “Cool,” Lilly said, and giggled.

  And I didn’t even look as I touched the file, I just winced and took it up in my hand, and I drew the likeness of a skinny and tailless coyote on the side of the black car, the perfect pyramids of its ears pointing upward; and I sat there sweating in the road with my legs cross-folded against the hot and grimy tire, already feeling as though my brother and I had been swallowed up by something we could not escape.

  Mitch laughed, admiring my work, and said, “You should have been with us back in Mexico!”

  “What else do you want me to draw on there, Mitch?” I asked, wondering what he was talking about.

  Mitch laughed. “I’ll keep you boys around for a while, just in case we run the score up. There’s a war on, you know, and we’re fighting against an enemy that looks like regular, plain folk.”

  “And skinny coyotes,” Simon said, and smiled.

  “Let’s go get some breakfast,” Mitch said. “Who’s hungry?”

  “I’m starved,” Simon answered.

  I looked at my dirty hand and groaned quietly to myself.

  “Hey!” Mitch said.

  I could see his eyes in the rearview mirror.

  And I was kind of relieved that the dead coyote’s tail fluttered away when Mitch sped the Lincoln onto the interstate.

  I thought he would stop.

  Lilly turned back over her seat.

  “Just let it go,” she said.

  “There goes the tail,” Simon said, holding a cigarette, turning around in his seat, watching the warm wind fan the orange fire on the tip.

  Lilly smiled at me. I think she knew what I was thinking. I was sorry for that poor animal, that I had helped Mitch in his weird play.

  Mitch turned the radio on and sang.

  Mitch parked the Lincoln at a place called Flora’s Diner and Curios just off Route 66 in Tucumcari. The dirt lot was filled with
dusty cars and trucks, and my back was already sweating against the leather of the seat in the gathering heat of the day.

  And I thought this was far enough, that Simon and I would be fine from here and we’d be able to get from Tucumcari to Arizona without Mitch and Lilly helping us anymore. I knew that somehow my brother and I would have to change just to get beyond the things we kept building up between us, and I thought I could do that; I believed, hoped, Simon would, too. So I felt pretty confident when I crawled out from the backseat. But it was a stupid thing because that day ended up taking us in directions we’d never imagine.

  So I asked Mitch if I could get our pack out of the trunk, and while I dug through it to get my pencil and comp book, I could hear Mitch and Lilly and Simon talking, and laughing about something, but I couldn’t tell what it was. I thought they were probably just making fun of me. When I shut the trunk lid down, Simon and Lilly were gone.

  “Where’d my brother go?”

  “They went in to go to the bathroom,” Mitch said. “Come on, let’s get a table.”

  To get to the diner, we first walked through a cluttered and dark room, filled with glass cases and shelves with Kachina dolls and moccasins; scorpions frozen inside epoxy resin; rock collections; sand paintings in sealed shot glasses; a stuffed rattlesnake coiled on a shelf behind a glass counter, its skin cracking open; headdresses and postcards; and signs everywhere that read: IF YOU DROP IT, YOU BOUGHT IT.

  Gravity, I thought, holding on to my pencil and book and saying nothing as I followed Mitch through the dark maze of Flora’s curios.

  “That top shelf,” I said, “how many dolls are on it?”

  Flick.

  I could hear Mitch flicking the cap of his lighter inside his pocket. He looked at the shelf of feathered and painted dolls just once and said, “Thirty-seven.”

  I stood there and counted, my finger absently tapping at nothing. It seemed impossible, but Mitch was exact. He watched me.

  “Well?” he said.

  “Thirty-seven.”

  Mitch laughed. “Now you see? You can always trust what I say, man.”

  I thought about Mitch talking to himself by the well, when he believed we were all asleep.

  “I guess I can, Mitch,” I said. I swallowed. I chewed on the inside of my lip. “But I wanted to say thank you for me and Simon. But I don’t think you and Lilly want to be stuck with us all the way to Arizona. We’ll be fine if you want to just leave us here. And, sorry if we were any bother.”

  Mitch’s face darkened so fast. It looked like he’d been punched or something. Then he smiled, showing those dirty teeth, and said, “Don’t be ridiculous, Jonah. It’s no problem for us at all. And you weren’t any bother. Besides, Lilly’s kind of fond of the kid, if you can’t tell.”

  Then he put his arm around my shoulders and said, “So just don’t worry about you boys being a bother. I’ll have you where you want to go by tomorrow. I promise.” He pulled me in tight, and I could smell the reek of his armpit. “Besides, I’ll let you know when I want you and Simon to leave.”

  We emerged from the cave of souvenirs into the light and noise of the diner. I wanted to wash that coyote filth from my hands, and told Mitch I needed to go to the men’s room, too. So I turned away from him at the counter where they sold cigarettes and waitresses smiled, chewing gum in their plump aprons.

  And I didn’t see Simon or Lilly back by the toilets, either, but when I came out, they were both sitting with Mitch in a booth that surrounded them in orange tufted vinyl.

  “Where were you, Simon?”

  “Nowhere.”

  I looked around the table at the three of them, and Simon added, “We were sitting here the whole time. What are you talking about?”

  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.