by Andrew Smith
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.
river
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 t
rouble 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.
“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.
(simon)
roadhouse
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.
