In the Path of Falling Objects

by Andrew Smith

  Love,

  Matt

  Piss.

  Piss.

  Piss.

  A tickle of sweat in his hair wakes him. He needs to piss so bad that he clamps a hand over his crotch, but that makes it hurt worse.

  A blanket is wrapped around his head and he trips getting up and almost pisses on himself when he stumbles. The sun beats down so hot.

  He yawns and stretches, and the blanket hangs around his head in sweat-filthy drapes and he fumbles with his pants, peeing without looking, and he hopes he’s pissing on Piss-kid and that whore.

  The blanket stinks like burnt rubber.

  Everything does.

  Feeling sick, Mitch pulls it away from his face, lets it drop to his splattered feet.

  “You should have woke me up,” he says to the blankets where the others should have been sleeping, too.

  Lilly’s gone.

  He spins around, thinking he might catch her being a slut with Piss-kid, but Simon’s not there, either.

  “Hey!”

  “Hey!”

  The tide of his blood makes his head darken in waves of dizziness.

  “What is this?”

  He pivots wildly. Frantic pirouette. Scans emptiness here in this piss-puddle-center of hell.

  “What is this?”

  The Lincoln sits on blackened wheel hubs. Tires split and uncoiled like dried black snakes, crooked and charred fingers all point at him like he’s the object of the joke at the moment.

  Mitch pushes his way through the brush at the head of their dirt beds, tramples in uncoordinated steps. He trips, catches himself. Arms scrape and bleed against the brambles that hid them from the highway.

  “Simon? Lilly!”

  Sweating and panting, he runs a circle around the scattered wreckage, the flotsam of the Lincoln adrift on a sea of dead piss-reeked desert.

  He calls them again and again, counts the times, the names, the letters, the breaths.

  Nothing.

  A crow hops along the ground, flapping its wings.

  Mitch swings his arms in the air, punches at nothing, whimpers.

  “Hey!”

  He crumples to the ground, sits, legs out on the flat, rocky dirt. He hammers a fist down into the grit until his knuckles bleed and he sobs.

  Numbers pour into his head: spines on the brush-weed between his feet, vertical lines on the mesa, stacking, multiplying in rows, tables, orange stitches down the inseam of his jeans, all numbers, whirling, expanding, and condensing again into endless single-digit reductions piling number upon number inside his howling brain.

  “Hey! I’m calling you!”

  He hugs his knees, rocks back, forth, counts the rocking, a metronome, everything is a number. Everything. He shakes, mumbles to himself, quieter, softer now.

  “That whore. That whore.”

  He wipes a bloodied hand across the sweat on his face, smears snot and tears toward his ear.

  “They’re dead. They’re dead. That whore.”

  Ten. Ten. Nine.

  Twenty-nine.

  Eleven.

  Two.

  Numbers.

  He slams his palms into his temples.

  Endless tabulations.

  “What am I going to DO?”

  Mitch stands, crying again. He walks a tight circle, eyes fixed on the ground at the center, the midpoint of its diameter, counts the steps, calculates circumference, then area. It is a prison circle, and the numbers hold him there.

  He pulls the gun from his pants, presses the barrel up inside a nostril until it hurts, begins to tear the flesh. He smells the powder, the residue of the gunshot in the bar. Small bits of Chief’s brain and skull adhere to the thick metal.

  It smells good.

  He waves the gun in front of him until the Lincoln sits black in the grooves of the site, and fires.

  “Simon? Buddy? Are you there?”

  He is calm now. It is a joke.

  Piss-kid.

  He turns, sees Don Quixote standing off in the distance, and fires another shot at the metal man. A small piece of tin rips away from the statue’s head.

  Running as quickly as he can, he follows the course of the bullet, pleading. He stumbles over the brush and rocks.

  “I’m sorry, Don. I’m sorry. Look what they did! Look what they made me do!”

  He puts his face on the tin, rubs a thumb on the jagged hole torn open at the back of the statue’s head.

  “It’s not that bad,” he says. “I can fix you. I’m sorry.”

  The gun slides back into the waist of his pants and Mitch marches over the flat ground where the whore and the Piss-kid had slept last night, walks across their blankets, thinks, takes stock of what had been salvaged from the burning Lincoln. Back and forth. He makes piles of boxes and bags, neat around the foot of the statue. He wedges the box of money under some sagebrush, then moves it, and puts it back again.

  Everything sits perfectly now.

  He kneels in the low shade and drinks a warm beer, looks at the metal man.

  He expects him to answer.

  Mitch opens another beer.

  “Why did they do it? Why did they leave? It had to be that punk Simon. Piss-kid. Whore. After all I did for him. He’s dead, that’s it. I should have never listened to her, never picked them up. But Lilly always gets what she asks for, whatever she wants. Doesn’t she? Well, we left that one drowning back in a river in New Mexico, and we’ll leave the other out here in the desert with a bullet in his face. Whore.”

  Sixteen swallows drain the can.

  He drinks four beers and counts the steps he takes to the Lincoln. The paint on the door peels away from his touch in dry blistering flakes. Greasy soot blackens his open palms. He rubs his hands on his face, blacks them against the car, and smears the black on his skin again.

  He wipes the side mirror, spiderweb cracked, with the tail of his shirt, rubs more and more of the ash-soot grime until his face is completely blacked. The mirror shows Mitch, smiling behind a drape of lightning bolt fractures, the colors, pink lips, yellow teeth, crooked teeth. He soot-smears his forearms, tears the shirt away from his body, and paints himself, the skin on his chest, his belly, his back, all black.

  “Bullets,” he says. “Need bullets.”

  Mitch returns to his pile of possessions and opens the suitcase. He touches Don Quixote on the knee and offers him another “I’m sorry.” Black hands snake through the womb of the case. He dangles Lilly’s purple shirt, pendulumlike, between two fingers, stares at it, disgusted.

  Mitch spits on the blouse and tosses it away.

  “Whore.”

  The bullets to the .357 sit at the bottom of the small bag containing the razor and scissors he used to shave his beard and cut his hair. He looks at his hands. He doesn’t want the black to rub away.

  He stands and walks back to the Lincoln, wipes more ash-grime on his body, goes back to the open satchel and places the bullets out straight on the ground. He builds an altar there: the gun, the row of bullets that point up from the dirt, a silver rood formed there by the crossing of the scissors and the razor.

  He paces back and forth between the wreckage and the thing he is building, until it is all so perfect in his mind.

  Mitch lifts the razor. The handle twists, makes the faintest sighing sound. The guards across the flat blade yawn open, a mouth. He looks at the paper-thin blade there; its edges are dotted with dried soap and the black specks of hair, dots, like the scabbed bits of Chief’s brain on the snout of his pistol barrel. He pinches the blade between his finger and thumb, lifts it from the cradle of the razor and turns it over, examining both sides. He holds the blade flat against his palm, studies the contrast—the black of his skin and the gray reflection of the metal, the uneven lines of the hand and the perfect and flawless edge at the lip of the blade.

  He carries the blade back to the broken mirror on the Lincoln and lifts his chin, stretches out the skin of his neck, watches all the Mitches in the jagg
ed bits of mirror. He cuts a line on his neck with the corner of the blade. It is in the same spot where Simon had been hit by the shard of glass. Dark cherry blood spills from the gap and he pulls the lips of the wound apart between his fingers, smiles, lets the blood run over his nails, and says, “I am Black Simon.”

  He goes back to the objects arranged in the dirt, kneels there.

  The first cuts are straight, slashing lines, horizontal strokes across his chest that make the pattern of his rib cage. A sternum, the collarbones, the lines of his arm, the arc of the ulna, the radius, all etched in bloody swipes of the blade across his skin. His hand pulses as it tracks the pattern, slowly and carefully, the blade not stinging at all, just cutting so smoothly and lightly, and Mitch’s blood pools and bubbles over the black of his skin, drips down to the black-smeared waist of his jeans. Counting the lines, feeling nothing but the rush, the Ferris wheel spinning, he watches the red and black mix on his skin, watching it flow, whispers, “Gravity.”

  He seats the blade back in the maw of the razor, twists it closed; reassembles the cross with the scissors.

  Mitch loads the gun, pictures each bullet a gaudily painted bucket seat on a Ferris wheel as he spins it around.

  When he stands, he feels the burn of the cuts. Arching his back, he stretches the skin tight on his chest and belly, feels the heat of the sun as the congealing wounds spring open with bright slivers of blood.

  He tucks the gun into the back of his pants and rubs his grimy palms over his skin. His blood becomes a sooty paste mixing with the ash from the car, and he smears it smooth, covers his body, his face, watching the crooked bits of his reflection in the car’s mirror.

  Mitch walks away from the car, past Don Quixote, out into the desert to find Lilly and Simon.

  Quietly, tunelessly, he sings, “We’re off to see the wizard . . .”

  (jonah)

  drum

  Hey Joneser,

  It’s night and for the first time it seems like it’s quiet. I can’t remember it ever being this quiet here. It’s creepy, and I can’t sleep. Usually, you can hear the sounds of the rats, or bugs crawling across the floor, or the bugs outside in the jungle, but tonight it’s like all the sound just got sucked right out of the air.

  I was laying there on my bed, just staring up at nothing. There’s a bit of light coming in and it just catches the gloss on that picture of you and Simon and I was staring at it, but it made you look like ghosts, like you were disappearing, and I couldn’t see it clearly and then I couldn’t even hear myself breathing, and I started to think that this must be what it’s like to be dead. I guess I got myself pretty scared over nothing because I ended up turning a light on and decided to write you a letter, even if I don’t have anything to talk about besides being scared and wondering if I’m even still alive, or maybe if I’m just out of my mind. I was looking at that picture of you guys. You both look so good. I bet all the girls are after you. Oh, I forgot, there are only two girls in Los Rogues and the younger one is about a hundred (ha ha).

  There are lots of girls here. To me, they all seem to think that the GIs are like knights or something, that we’re here to save them and take them away. But if you ask me, there’s not a single one of us here who’s interested in rescue or salvation. I’m not going to lie, I have paid for women more than a few times here. It’s real nice when you’ve been out in the bush for a while and you come back and they’ll give you a bath and whatever a guy wants. And that’s just brother talk, Joneser, between you and me. But you have to be careful, too. Anyway, if they won’t send you home for cutting your wrists, I guess they won’t send you home for getting the clap, either.

  But you and Simon be careful around the girls.

  I bought a tape recorder from a guy who’s getting sent home soon. I’ve never actually used one before, but it’s pretty cool how you can record stuff off the radio and then play it back over and over. I recorded my voice talking on it, but I don’t think it sounds like me. It sounds pretty stupid, actually. I’m going to send my tape recorder home for you and Simon, and then when you listen to my voice you can tell me if it really sounds like me. I don’t think it does, though. When you get it, don’t fight over it. Or if you do fight over it, record yourself and you guys can hear how stupid it makes you sound, too (ha ha).

  Today a general came out here and visited us. All he did was walk around for about 10 minutes, all clean, and then he got in his chopper and left. He said we needed to keep our rifles locked up. How stupid is that? I guess he doesn’t think we need them or something, when all he probably does is watch his color television all day long. So we locked them up, and about 10 minutes after he was gone, we got them back out, too. Then a bunch of us got into a card game and we all got pretty drunk. I know I shouldn’t do that, but I did anyway. I know what you’d say about that. My eating is even worse. When I got sent into the rear outside of Da Nang, they had a mess hall there and it gave about 100 guys food poisoning, so I stopped eating. Now all I eat is the peanut butter out of C-rations because everything else tastes like dog food, and looks like it, too. I bet Dad gets better treatment in prison than we do out here, and we’re supposedly the ones serving our country instead of serving time for our country (ha ha).

  I guess I’m getting crazy from not sleeping, but I just can’t keep my eyes shut.

  We put up some Christmas lights on the ceiling of our hooch and when we went to sleep a few nights ago, they caught on fire and broken glass and pieces of burning stuff started falling on us. That’s how it is over here, everything is crazy and the weirdest things are always happening, like how quiet it is right now.

  Well, I’m going to try to get some sleep, even if I have to drink two more cans of beer.

  Good night.

  Love,

  Matthew

  We left in the morning.

  It was still dark when we got in that noisy camper truck.

  His mother and sister gave me a hug.

  Dalton stopped the pickup just across the bridge—I asked him to—and we got out and walked back onto that sagging wooden span.

  His father had told him to be careful, saying that he knew we’d both come back, and I offered to pay him for letting us use the truck but he just smiled and waved it away. I could tell that Arno knew there was more going on than either of us admitted, but I think, too, that he was letting his son grow up and he respected Dalton enough to let him help me out.

  “When we lived in Mexico, an American man saw my paintings on the street,” Arno had said. “It was in Mérida. I painted scenes of the people in the town, how they would all come out to dance in the plaza on Sundays. The American wanted to buy them. Every one of my paintings. I realized, then, that I didn’t even want to sell them. It seemed almost dirty to me, and after all that time I’d been trying to sell them, but I realized that I was afraid to. But my family needed to eat, so I asked him for a bag of rice. He ended up giving me more money than I’d ever seen in my life. I would have taken the rice.”

  We all sat at the table and ate breakfast in the cool of the morning, tortillas with jelly on them and black coffee.

  “Did you buy rice with the money?” I asked.

  “I couldn’t bring myself to spend it. I felt so bad about what I’d done. I felt like I sold my own children, or worse. It was pretty naïve, I suppose, but I’d spent all this time wrapped up in the idea of being an artist and I never faced the fact that surviving meant I would have to actually exchange my art for other things. I almost felt like I didn’t have the right. We probably would have starved to death, and Bev talked me into coming here.”

  “And that’s how you got here?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Arno said. “Now, Jonah, when you come back, you can tell me how you got here, too.”

  “Okay. I will.”

  In the dark, I opened my comp book and began to draw in it. Dalton’s sister leaned over me, resting against my shoulder, watching.

  “That’s Dalt,” she said, puttin
g a finger on the picture I’d drawn of him.

  “Yeah. It’s my map.”

  “Are you going to draw me, too?” Shelly asked.

  Arno lifted his eyes over the top of his coffee cup so he could see the page I was open to.

  “I like that,” he said.

  “Thanks. It’s a kind of map, a diary.”

  “It’s all a map,” Arno said. “That’s all we do. The same as those hands painted on the cave wall. Those people so long ago wanted to leave a map, showing where they had come from, showing us where they were. It’s what we do, Jonah. We all make maps.”

  “His is a story, too,” Dalton said. “A good one. About him and his brother. And a girl. He let me read it.”

  “Then that proves he thinks you’re his friend,” Arno said. “Maybe he’ll let me see it when he comes back. When it’s finished. I’d like that.”

  I was embarrassed.

  “I promise I’ll draw you, too, Shelly,” I said, and I closed my book.

  I wore the clothes and boots Dalton gave me. The backpack sat between Dalton and me. I kept my map book and pencil out, open to the last pages I’d drawn.

  I walked out onto the bridge and stopped at the same place where Simon had pushed me down into the water below. The sun wasn’t up yet, but the sky was light and cool, the river polished mirror smooth and glassy, like the surface of the meteorite Simon found.

  I stood at the edge of the bridge, almost wishing something would push me back into the water, wanting to jump, to fall, to be rescued again, to strip myself out of my strangling skin that smelled like the road, like cigarettes, to go back to the camp where Dalton’s father painted and worked on the ruins of that pueblo and forget everything else.

  Dalton stood behind me.

  I knew he was waiting.

  “In some way, I don’t want to go,” I said. “I’m just tired. But I promised Simon I’d take care of him.”

  “Come on,” Dalton said. “Let’s go.”

  I looked once back down the road, almost expecting to see the Lincoln. I was scared for Simon and Lilly.