by Andrew Smith
And Walker vanished into the dark of night.
Mitch picked up the empty bottle of whiskey, its mouth crusted with sand and ash, and glared at Simon.
“That guy scared me,” Simon lied, making an excuse for letting that bottle fall.
“It’s okay, Mitch,” Lilly said. “Let’s just relax now.”
Mitch threw the empty bottle into the blackened wreckage of the Lincoln, and Simon tensed when he heard it shatter, half expecting a second shard to come firing back at him through the night. Mitch lifted his shirt and grabbed at his pistol, waving it before him so that it caught the light from the fire.
Simon froze. Mitch pointed the gun directly at his belly, so casually, and Simon could see the one empty chamber in its wheel that had held the bullet Mitch used to kill Chief.
Simon looked at Lilly.
“Oh, come on, Mitch,” she said, carefully.
Mitch exhaled, and nodded at Simon.
“You really think I’d get mad enough to shoot the kid?” he said. He began walking past them, following the shuffling tracks in the sand made by the limping man who had walked into the dark.
When Mitch got to the same place where they had last seen Walker, Simon said, “Please, Mitch. Don’t kill that man.”
Mitch stopped, his back turned to Simon and Lilly.
“Please?” Simon asked.
Mitch turned around and looked at them both, the fire now just an annoying stink, small fingerlike flames fluttering up unevenly from beneath the carcass of the car.
“I’ll do whatever you want,” Simon said. “I’m sorry if I made you mad.”
Mitch smiled at Simon, his teeth glowing.
“I knew you were with me all along, Simon.”
And Mitch walked back into the dim light from the dying fire and tucked his gun into his pants.
Simon stared up at the stars from where he lay in the blankets that had been scattered on the ground. The night, moonless, seemed so incredibly bright, so empty. Occasionally, he could hear the whooshing sound of a car on the rough macadam of the distant highway, and he’d tried counting them but had given up after three because it took so long.
He passed his first two fingers over the cut on his neck, still gapped and swollen, aching, and he thought about dying and wondered what that would be like.
He heard Lilly yawn, her body rustling the blankets where she lay.
Mitch sat between them, drinking a Coke and just staring straight ahead at the flat stretch of desert and the black silhouette of the mesa that erased the light of stars that should be there.
“I’m tired,” Lilly said. “I’m going to try to go to sleep.”
“The kid’s asleep,” Mitch said.
Simon almost reacted the way he usually would, by saying, “No I’m not,” but kept his mouth still and remained motionless, listening, closing his eyes. He could hear her stretching out on the blankets, trying to find a comfortable spot.
“Are there any cigarettes?” Mitch asked.
“I think they burned in the car,” Lilly said. She grunted, “Oh, God, this thing hurts.”
Simon felt Mitch moving, standing; could hear his feet against the ground as he walked to the suitcase. He heard Mitch opening the buckles on the bag, the sound of his hands rustling through the contents, and then Mitch came back and sat down between them.
Mitch flicked his lighter. Simon could see the orange flash through his eyelids, then could smell the sweet burning of the joint.
“No, thanks. I don’t feel good,” he heard Lilly say after a moment.
Mitch exhaled.
“Would you really have hurt him?” Lilly asked.
“Who?” Mitch said. “The Indian? Yeah.”
“No. Simon.”
“I almost did. I felt like it,” Mitch said. “I don’t anymore. I like the kid, but he’s pushing it. If it was his brother doing this crap, I’d have killed him a long time ago.”
Simon felt his heart pounding, afraid that it might be visible on his chest. He struggled to control his breathing, to pretend to sleep. The air was cooling, and he wanted a shirt, but his was thrown out, soaked with whiskey and blood, and he couldn’t ask for one from Mitch. He rolled over, turning away from Mitch and Lilly, curling his knees up toward his chest, his face down in the blankets.
He started to cry. He thought about that horse that had died when he left home, and it seemed now like it was all such a long time ago.
Lilly stirred and moved over to where Simon lay.
“He’s cold,” Lilly said. She put her hand down onto Simon’s ribs, and she could tell that he was crying.
“Well, get him a blanket, then. And stay away from him.” Mitch’s voice was a cold warning.
Lilly rubbed Simon’s skin, but he maintained his stillness, stubbornly pretending to sleep, trying to ignore her, trying to ignore Mitch. She got up and went to grab another blanket, saying, “What do you think I am, anyway, Mitch?”
“A whore,” he said plainly. “That’s what you are, aren’t you?”
Lilly didn’t say anything. She draped a blanket over Simon and kneeled down, tucking it snugly around his folded arms. Then she lifted the corner of the blanket and wiped the tears from Simon’s face and stroked his hair once. She left him and went back to her place on the other side of Mitch.
“I remember when I was just a kid in Fort Stockton. It seemed like every time I turned around, I’d see you watching me, or just hanging out, following me,” she said. “Even when I was twelve years old I knew I’d always be able to get anything I wanted from you.”
“So, what do you want now, Lilly?”
“I want to get out of here,” she said.
“You got a thumb. The road’s that way.”
“You’d just let me go?”
“You know better than that,” Mitch said. His voice was a gravelly whisper. “Not after what we did in Texas. Not after what we did in Mexico. And not after what you did in that bed with that kid. You know better than that, Lil. So you might as well get used to it and start liking me. ’Cause you’re stuck, as far as I can see.”
“Leave me alone.”
Mitch laughed and blew a cloud of smoke. “I’ll leave you. I’ll leave you on the corner and drive around the block with a five-dollar bill in my hand and you’ll think I’m someone new.”
“I don’t know why you have to be so nasty,” she said. “You weren’t like this before.”
“Before what?”
“I don’t know,” Lilly said. “Before you saw me and Jonah in the room that morning? Before we picked up the boys?”
“You tell me.”
“I just did, Mitch.”
“Groovy, Lilly.”
The Lincoln ticked and hissed as it cooled in the night. Simon lay under his blanket, his eyes open and staring straight forward along the flat of the ground, looking at nothing, only listening, thinking.
He waited.
Later, he pushed the blanket away and quietly sat up. Mitch and Lilly were sleeping, three empty beer cans tipped over between them on their blankets. Simon walked off into the bushes to pee. He could see Walker’s tracks. He stood still, just watching and making sure Mitch was still asleep, just watching. He pulled his meteorite from his pocket and looked at it, then put it away. He went over to the piles of debris they’d salvaged from the Lincoln.
Simon held his breath while he moved.
Those moccasins made his feet so quiet.
He took a can of Coke that was lying in the dirt beside Mitch’s grocery sacks and put it in his back pocket, then he circled around on the outside of the brush to where Lilly was sleeping.
He crouched to his hands and knees beside her.
He looked at her, just waiting to see if she might wake up. Simon hooked her blond hair in his fingers and pulled it back away from her face and curled it behind her ear.
Lilly opened her eyes, but did not move.
Simon put his mouth down against her ear. He stayed there frozen,
because she smelled so good to him, felt so warm.
His heart pounded.
He whispered, “Let’s leave.”
She turned her face and looked up at him. For a moment, he thought she looked terrified. He could tell she was calculating, adding things up, but not how Mitch did. No one did things like that.
Then she sat up, so quietly, and looked once at Mitch, and then back at Simon, and nodded her head.
Lilly followed Simon through the brush past the sentinel-statue of Don Quixote, his face masked behind the grainy photograph of a soldier. She followed him away from the place where Mitch lay sleeping beside the ruins of the Lincoln. Neither one of them spoke as they crept farther into the night.
Simon watched the ground, following Walker’s tracks, assuming that the man had made his way back to the road, but when he realized that Walker had not gone toward the highway, he knew they were lost.
He felt panic rising.
In the distance, off in the dark, a dog began barking.
Lilly froze and clutched Simon’s arm.
“It’s a coyote,” Simon said. “Don’t be scared.”
“Okay.”
“I don’t know where we’re going,” Simon said. “I was following Walker, but he didn’t go back to the road, so I don’t know where we are. I can’t see his tracks anymore.”
Simon rubbed his hair and looked around, no longer able to see any sign of where they had been; everything blended into a dark sameness in the warm and moonless night.
“Do you think we’re far enough away from Mitch?”
“Far enough for what?”
“Maybe we could just wait here until morning. Then we might be able to see something. To see where we are,” Lilly said.
Simon kept moving forward. “I don’t know.”
“Maybe we should just go back, then.”
“I thought about that, too,” Simon said. “But I don’t know which way back is. And Mitch would be so mad at us now.”
“Yeah.”
Simon stopped walking, his foot pressed down onto a twig of sage.
“Do you think he’ll come after us?”
Lilly laughed softly. “Mitch? I never know what he’ll do. But he’s so jealous of his stuff. I don’t think he’d leave all those things of his just sitting there in the desert. He goes crazy if someone takes something of his. Crazy.”
“Like me taking you away right now? Like what you and Jonah did?”
“Let’s not talk about that, Simon.”
“Okay.”
“And I don’t belong to Mitch.”
“He thinks you do, Lilly.”
They began walking again. Lilly just kept her head down and watched Simon’s feet, following his path as he made his way farther and farther into the dark nowhere.
“Do you have any idea where we’re going?” Lilly asked.
“No,” Simon said. “I’m not the one with the map.”
“What if we get lost?”
“We already are.”
“I mean, what if we get stuck out here or something?” Lilly continued.
“I have a can of Coke,” Simon said.
“Groovy.”
“And my meteor.”
Lilly sighed. “Can we sit down?”
There was no hint of the dawn anywhere around the horizon. Coyotes yelped like panicked ghosts, invisible in the distance.
“Sure,” Simon said. “You want to split my Coke?”
“Yeah.”
Simon pulled the Coke from his back pocket and they sat facing each other on the red, dry dirt. When he pulled the tab from the can, the warm soda spit geysers of sticky foam at them. He threw the ring away and held the can out to Lilly. She drank and handed it back and he held it to his tongue for the longest time, not drinking, just tasting the spot where her mouth had been.
“I’m sorry I got you and Jonah into all this,” Lilly said. “I should’ve just let Mitch keep driving by you that day. He wanted to.”
“He did?”
“I got mad at him for driving by,” she said. “He said the last thing we need is a couple of hippie freeloaders. And I told him that’s exactly what I didn’t like about him, that he wasn’t nice. So he stopped the car.”
“I had my thumb out,” Simon said. “I was asking for it.”
He handed the can back to Lilly.
“Yeah, but there was something else,” she said. “I can’t really explain it. I just had to stop. I couldn’t do anything about it.”
“It was Jonah,” Simon sighed. “I saw you looking at him the moment you got out of the car. I saw you take your sunglasses off and smile at him.”
“You did?”
“Yeah.”
Lilly drank. “Well, I’m sorry for all this.”
“I had my thumb out.”
Simon folded his legs and brushed the sand and dirt away from his moccasins.
“Why were you crying, Simon? When I covered you with the blanket?”
Simon shifted uncomfortably and took a swallow of Coke, then cleared his throat.
“I don’t know. I guess I was thinking about sad stuff.”
“Like what?”
“Nothing.”
Simon drew a circle with his finger in the dirt.
“My brother never had a girlfriend,” he said.
“How do you know?” Lilly asked. “He could have. Maybe he just never told you.”
“No,” he said. “I know everything about Jonah. Everything. We’ve never even been apart one day since I was born until yesterday. We even sleep in the same bed, most of the times. It’s the only bed we got, the only one we ever had. When Matthew was home, we’d all three sleep in the same bed, or he’d kick us out and me and Jonah would sleep on the floor. And when we were little, we’d get so cold sometimes we just had to hold on to each other.”
“Matthew’s your other brother?”
“Yeah. The one in Vietnam.”
“Well, you and Jonah should try to get along better.”
“He thinks I hate him.”
“You told him you do.”
“Yeah.” Simon cleared his throat. “It’s not about you, though. It’s about him turning his back on me. I don’t have anyone else. There’s no one.”
“Then why’d you knock him off the bridge?”
Simon almost started to cry. He put his face down so she wouldn’t see.
“I’ll tell you the truth. I wanted to knock him so far. Just ’cause I hate seeing him all over you like he doesn’t care about anything else. And ’cause he beat the crap out of me and I needed to get even. But I wouldn’t have the guts to do it. Then I saw Mitch had a gun out. And Mitch was going to shoot him. And as mad as I ever was at Jonah, I had to help him.”
“Your eye looks better now,” Lilly said.
“How can you tell? It’s dark.”
“I can tell,” she said. She reached across to Simon and lightly touched his collarbone. “And your neck?”
Simon slightly recoiled at Lilly’s hand on his bare skin, and then he relaxed and took a breath, lifted his chin, and said, “How’s that look?”
“I think it’ll be okay. A doctor might put some stitches in it.”
“Oh.” Simon swallowed. “Lilly?”
“What?”
“Mitch keeps calling you a dirty word. I don’t care about it, if it’s true or anything.”
She sat for a minute, not saying anything.
“It was true. Not anymore. Sometimes the truth is a dirty word, I guess.”
“Oh.”
“Will you tell it to your brother?”
“Do you want me to?”
“I don’t know.”
“I won’t say it again.”
She pulled her hand away and Simon let his chin drop, just staring down at the diamond of dirt formed inside his crossed legs.
“But, Lilly?” he said. “If we get out of this, you’re not going to hurt Jonah, are you? You’re not lying to him, are you?”
&
nbsp; She didn’t say anything. Simon watched her.
Something moved, and Simon jolted.
“This is a hell of a way to get to town.” Walker stood about five feet from where they were resting. “A hell of a way. Unless you were planning on walking all the way around the world first! Unless you were planning on killing yourselves out here in the desert. Hell! Damn hippies.”
Walker moved stiffly out from the darkness, staring at them and shaking his head as though scolding reckless children.
(mitch)
black simon
Hey Jones,
I’m in the hospital. It’s hard to write because my arms are stitched up. I thought I might get to come home, but it’s not too bad and they’re only going to keep me here for a couple days, so don’t worry. It was a stupid thing, anyway. I cut myself with a machete and then the cuts got really infected ’cause I was embarrassed about seeing a medic about it, and I was drunk anyway, so don’t tell Mother or Simon. I was stupid, but it’s not like that was the first stupid thing I ever did.
I didn’t even tell you but I got a tattoo before I left Fort Bliss. That was stupid. “Bliss” . . . that’s a great name for a place they send boys to before they go off to die. Sounds more like a whorehouse than death row.
I got a tattoo of the Pink Panther on my arm from a Mexican. I always liked that cartoon. He’s cool and things always luck out for him, even when he’s stupid. But I don’t think he ever cut his wrists with a machete either.
The cuts don’t hurt anymore. It just feels tight. The tattoo hurt for a few days, though.
Most guys here spend their money on drugs and prostitutes and stuff. I’m not that stupid, though. I’ve been saving all my money so when I get home I’m going to buy a car. Then I’m going to take you and Simon on a road trip across the country. That would be cool. Maybe we’d never come back to Los Rogues. We could go see Dad. Do you write letters to him like the ones you write to me? If you do, I bet that makes him feel really good. I know, because I’m in the same kind of situation he’s in. And I love the way you say things when you write. Sometimes they probably make him cry, too.
Anyway, I’m not going to say anything else right now. The way my arm is I can’t fold this letter up and put it in the envelope so I have to give it to someone else and trust them to do it. I’m practically handcuffed. I’ll be all right, trust me. We’ll all see each other soon.
