In the Path of Falling Objects

by Andrew Smith

  Simon put his arm around Lilly’s shoulders. He sat beside her on the steps, pressing his bare chest against her.

  “You’ll be okay now, Lilly,” he whispered.

  “You’re so sweet,” she said. “I just need to lay down.”

  “Is there somewhere she can lay down?” Simon called back.

  “Let’s get her inside,” Walker said, kicking at the dog. “Lady! Get the hell out of the way!”

  Simon pulled Lilly to her feet and helped her up the creaking stairs as Walker fumbled past them, placing both feet on each step as he did. He opened his door.

  “There’s no electricity here, so be careful,” he said.

  Walker swiped a wood match against the doorjamb and lit an oil lamp dangling from the ceiling.

  “Put her on the cot,” he said, pointing to a low metal bed strewn with dark wool Army surplus blankets.

  The trailer was small, twenty feet long, barely bigger than the one Simon had slept in the first night away from home, hiding from the monsoon storm, but it was very clean and orderly. Simon could see in the yellow light cast from the lamp that everything Walker owned was perfectly arranged, dustless and straight. Lilly sat on the edge of the bed, curled tightly forward, and pulled her legs up onto the blankets so she could rest on her side.

  Simon stroked her hair away from her face. She was sweating and pale.

  “I’ll be okay,” she repeated.

  Simon tugged a blanket over her.

  “Just rest,” he said.

  The dog sat outside, with his ears up, his begging nose just inside the open doorway.

  “Are you going to throw up?” Walker asked. “Do you want some water?”

  “No,” Lilly said, and closed her eyes.

  Walker sat on a wood and canvas chair, his hands folded between his legs, watching his visitors.

  The floor was completely covered by Indian rugs, but there were none of the “Friendly Indian” trinkets that were so common in the places Simon had traveled through. He sat down on a rug beside Lilly’s cot. At one end of the trailer, there was a shining chrome sink, a hand pump jutting up behind the faucet, which stood between carefully stacked shelves that were filled with canned food, all the labels aligned and facing outward. There was a four-burner propane stove with a coffeepot in the corner, and the walls were smooth and glossy polished wood. The windows had been screened with curtains made of flags, an American one and some sort of military flag. A black-and-white picture of soldiers hung, framed, on the wood-paneled wall, and beside it, another frame with some sort of official-looking certificate behind the glass.

  “What about you?” Walker asked.

  “What?”

  “Are you thirsty?”

  “No thanks. I had a Coke.”

  Walker rubbed his leg and winced.

  “Well, you can sleep in here with your girlfriend, I guess,” he said. “I don’t mind sleeping in the hut, anyway.”

  “She’s not my girlfriend,” Simon said. “She’s my brother’s girlfriend.”

  “Oh,” Walker said. “If she’s your brother’s girlfriend, then why’d he take off?”

  “It was my fault.”

  “Oh. Hell. Brothers fighting over a girl.”

  “I guess so. More than that, maybe.”

  “Is it his baby she’s carrying?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh.”

  Simon didn’t think it was so much a lie as a protection of the girl.

  Lilly slept.

  Simon looked around the small room.

  “Were you in the Army or something?” Simon asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “I have a brother in Vietnam. He’s missing, though.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Walker said. “It’s how I did this.”

  Walker pulled up his pants leg to show Simon the scuffed mannequin leg he limped on.

  “You were in Vietnam?” Simon asked.

  “I’m not that young,” Walker laughed. “Korea.”

  “It’s pretty funny,” Simon yawned, “a guy named Walker who’s missing a leg with a dog named Lady who’s a boy dog.”

  “You think that’s funny?”

  Simon thought.

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, you’re the first one who ever got the joke,” Walker said. “I think it’s pretty funny, too. Almost everything out here is like that. A contradiction, I guess.”

  “What else?”

  “I got a drum of gasoline outside, but no car to put it in. I got a gun, but I don’t have any bullets for it.”

  “That’s not good,” Simon said.

  Guns scared Simon, anyway. But he was more afraid of Mitch finding them there than he was afraid of guns.

  Simon looked toward the end of the trailer, at the rows of all those cans, the red curtain with a black hourglass shape on it covering what had to be a window on the other side.

  “You got a can opener?” Simon asked.

  Walker erupted in laughter.

  “You like to mess with people, don’t you, kid?” he said. “Why? Are you hungry?”

  Simon was hungry, but he didn’t want to ask for food.

  “No. No thanks.” He stifled another yawn. “Are you an Indian?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “I don’t know. I was just wondering. Some people talk bad about Indians in New Mexico, where I come from.”

  “Do you?”

  “I never knew any Indians. Not really.”

  “Well, I heard it all before.”

  “Did you make those huts out there?”

  “Yes.”

  “I think they’re bitchin’. If I had a hut like that, I’d live in it.”

  “Well, you got the shoes for it. You’d do okay, I bet.”

  Walker smiled at the boy.

  Simon raised a foot up from the floor and turned it in the air.

  “Yeah.”

  Simon stretched out on the rug and put his head down on his arm. Uncomfortable, he twisted around and pulled the meteorite out from his pocket and put it down on the floor beside him.

  “What you got there? A rock?” the man asked.

  “A meteor,” Simon said. “I saw it hit the ground the other night. It was still hot when I picked it up. Everyone else was scared.”

  “Let me see that.”

  Walker leaned forward in his chair and took the shiny black rock from Simon’s hand. He turned it over, examining the features on the heavy stone.

  “It kind of looks like a face,” Walker said.

  “That’s what I thought, too.”

  “Well, it’s a real lucky thing, finding one of those.”

  Walker handed the meteorite back to Simon.

  “How do you know it’s a lucky thing?”

  Walker thought.

  “Well, I guess I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve seen plenty of them fall, but I’ve never actually touched one, so it must be lucky. Just think of how far that thing came to end up in some boy’s pocket.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So it’s gotta be lucky. You should hang on to that.”

  “Do you believe in good luck?” Simon asked.

  “If you didn’t believe in luck, life would be pretty sad, and pretty boring, too. So, yes. Of course I believe in luck.”

  “Thank you for helping us, Walker.”

  Walker looked disappointed.

  “I don’t even know your name, boy.”

  “Simon.” Simon pointed his thumb at the girl in the bed. “Lilly.”

  “You told me her name once. And you’re welcome, Simon,” Walker said. “You’ll be okay. But you shouldn’t go to sleep on the floor half-naked like that. You’ll get stung by a scorpion.”

  Simon’s eyes widened, suddenly not as sleepy as he was a minute earlier.

  “I’ll get you some blankets to wrap up in,” Walker said.

  By the time Walker had pulled some fresh blankets from the cabinet under the picture, Simon was asleep on the floor. The man
covered the boy and tucked the blanket around him, saying a prayer as he did. He lifted Simon’s head and slipped a folded blanket under him, and said, “C’mon, Lady,” as he turned out the lamp. Then he shut the door and climbed down the stairs to the cool of the mud hut.

  At the bottom of the stairs, the man paused and said to the door, “I really hope your brother’s okay, boy. Both of them. Hell.”

  “Walker. Hey, Walker!” Simon pulled the tattered cloth back from the doorway on the hut. Walker was covered with blankets, sleeping on the straw mats, the dog curled up beside him. The man’s plastic lower leg stood, detached, along the wall like some incomplete effigy. The dog perked its head up, and Simon prepared to get out of the way when it started peeing again, but the man under the blankets did not move.

  It was morning. Enough light spilled in from the hut’s wood-posted doorway that Simon could see a crude stove made from a black oil drum sitting in the middle of the flat dirt floor, a rectangular opening cut near the bottom, and a wide pipe leading up through a hole in the hut’s timbered ceiling.

  The air inside the hut felt cool and clean.

  “Walker!”

  Finally the man moved, pulling the blanket down from his face and squinting at the boy, a paper-shadow silhouette in the doorway. Walker sat, bracing himself upright with his arms locked straight.

  “Something’s really wrong with Lilly,” Simon said. “She’s really sick.”

  Walker took a moment to let it sink in, recalling the events of the long night, the talk he’d had with the boy.

  “Give me a minute, okay?” Walker said and grabbed at the leg, knocking it over as he did.

  “Okay.”

  Simon was embarrassed. He let the blanket fall back across the doorway and looked out at the desert. He didn’t want to watch the man attaching that lifeless thing to himself just so he could stand up. He rubbed the crust of sleep away from his eyes and combed his hair straight with his fingers. He held his open hands before his face, studying the bruised welts across the soft undersides of his wrists where Mitch had bound him with the yellow rope.

  The dog came out of the hut and immediately began peeing, scooting itself clockwise in a tight circle at Simon’s feet, and Simon danced backwards to avoid the spray. Walker pushed the blanket aside and limped out into the light.

  “Sorry. I don’t usually sleep that late,” he said, looking at the sun behind Simon, pulling the hat down on his head. “But it was four o’clock by the time you fell asleep. What’s the matter?”

  “I don’t know,” Simon said. “She’s really hurting. She says she can’t move and she’s sweating. Burning up.”

  “I don’t know anything about women, especially pregnant ones,” he said.

  “I don’t know anything about anything,” Simon said.

  The boy was scared; Walker could see that.

  When they got inside the trailer, Walker saw the grayness of Lilly’s skin, how her mouth was drawn back in a tight grimace. It was real, something was very wrong with her.

  He asked her if she was bleeding, and she said no, but her side hurt so badly. She lay on her back, her eyes shut tight. Her skin was damp, her hair pasted to her neck.

  Simon dropped to his knees at the edge of the bed and held Lilly’s hand while Walker hovered over the boy and looked down at the girl.

  Neither one of them had any idea what they could do to help her.

  “You’ll be okay,” Simon said. He touched her white fingers. “Put your hand where it hurts the most.”

  Lilly moved her fingers to her belly and placed them just inside her hip.

  “I’m going to look, okay?” Simon asked.

  Lilly didn’t say anything.

  Simon lifted her shirt and pulled the waist of her pants down.

  “Does this hurt?” Simon asked. He pressed his fingers into Lilly’s skin, just below her navel.

  “Yes,” she said. Her eyes remained shut.

  “It feels tight,” Simon said. He placed the flat of his palm across her belly and pressed so lightly against her smooth and perfect skin. Lilly jolted in pain.

  “I’m sorry, Lilly,” Simon said. “It feels like a rock in there.”

  He lowered her shirt back over her belly and pulled the blanket up around her.

  Walker just watched.

  “What should we do?” Simon pleaded.

  “It could be just a normal thing,” Walker said. “I don’t know. It could be she’s bleeding inside, or losing the child. I don’t know.”

  “She’s going to need a doctor, isn’t she?” Simon said.

  “I think so.”

  Walker turned and went to the door, thinking. Simon squeezed Lilly’s hand again and followed the man out onto the porch.

  Walker stared out across the desert.

  “I don’t know what to do to help you two, Simon. I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Show me the fastest way to the highway and I’m going to run and get help,” Simon said. “I have to try.”

  Walker looked at Simon, and then up at the sky.

  “You can get to the highway in less than an hour,” he said. “Here. Come over here.”

  He led Simon to the side of the trailer and opened a spigot, splashing water down over the red rocks at the bottom, raining across the sand of the desert, up onto the boy’s moccasins.

  “Drink some water first.”

  Simon bent forward and began gulping the cool water. He held his head under the flow and let the water run through his hair, down his body.

  “What if he’s out there?” Walker said.

  “He is,” Simon answered.

  “Well, I have that gun,” Walker said. “But no bullets. Stupid. I meant to get some, but I never did. That was stupid. You should take it anyway.”

  Simon had always been afraid of guns.

  “No. I’ll keep away from him. I can handle that guy,” he said.

  He thought he could figure out what Mitch wanted to hear, if it came to that.

  “Don’t you have no shirt?” Walker asked.

  “No.”

  “I’ll get one.”

  “No.”

  “Then take this,” the man said, and put his wide hat down onto the boy’s head.

  “Okay.”

  Simon drank again. “I had enough.”

  Walker turned the spigot shut.

  “I need to go now,” Simon said.

  “You left that rock in there.”

  “I’ll come back.”

  “Okay.”

  “Just give me a minute before I go.”

  Simon launched himself up the steps to the door and looked in at Lilly, her body motionless beneath the cover of blankets. He held Walker’s hat in his hand and kneeled at the side of the bed and stroked her hair.

  “I’m going to go get help, Lilly,” he said. “You’ll be okay.”

  Then Simon swallowed hard, his throat constricting. “I love you, Lilly, and I love Jonah, too. I do. I’m sorry for everything I did. I’m going to stop being bad. I’m going to stop doing bad things. I promise.”

  “You’re a good person, Simon.” Lilly’s voice surprised him. “I’ll be fine.”

  And Simon picked up his meteorite from the floor where he’d slept and placed it on the bed beside her.

  Then Simon kissed her cheek and whirled around and ran down the stairs.

  Walker led Simon from the shade of the trailer and into the blaring sun.

  “See that notch right out there?” he said.

  Walker extended his arm straight out, pointing at a gap between two rounded boulders of naked hills.

  “Yeah.”

  “Keep going straight that way. It’s the fastest way, you’ll cut the bend out of the road. When you come out across the dirt road that circles around to my place, follow it to the right and it will take you to the highway.”

  Simon studied the line.

  “Okay.”

  “Watch out, Simon.”

  “Okay.”

>   Simon pulled the old hat down tight on his head and began running straight out across the desert toward the gap between the hills in the distance.

  (mitch)

  homestead

  Blood and ashes sprinkled on the bodies of unclean people make their bodies holy and pure. He remembers the verse from Hebrews. Something like that.

  He’s caked and cracking all over with the paste of his own blood.

  Black Simon.

  His armpits reek. His sweat softens the cardboard and tape on the tattered shoe box he carries. His shins are raked raw with cholla spines that rip through his pants.

  Mitch stops and watches. He keeps perfectly still. Counts, can’t help it.

  There is a shining metal trailer sitting out there in the piss-middle of hell. It sits atop a spreading mound of red lava rocks beside two Navajo mud huts.

  He knows this is where they came.

  “Bitchin’,” he says.

  He smiles.

  (jonah)

  paths

  Brother Jones,

  It’s now about 2 or 3 in the morning. I’m not on guard, I just can’t get to sleep. In case you were wondering, my arms are getting better. In case you were wondering, my head is getting worse (ha ha). I’ve seriously thought about doing drugs. Seriously, but I don’t want to end up like our old man.

  You know all those stories you hear about marijuana over here? Well, they’re true. About 8 of 10 enlisted men I’ve met here smoke or use cocaine, or do both. Marijuana, I don’t care about, but if I catch my men using coke, I’ll bust their butts for it. The only reason I don’t care if they smoke marijuana is because if something happens, they straighten up right away.

  This letter is for you and me only, Joneser. I don’t want you letting Simon or Mother read it or tell them anything about it, OK? Just tell them I’m OK.

  I killed someone yesterday. It was a kid, about 16 years old. He threw something at me, which I thought was a grenade, and I shot him in the belly. It turned out it was just a bottle. He fell down in the mud and rolled around for a minute. It looked like it hurt so bad I thought about shooting him again. I didn’t know what to do. And then he just died. Then some old lady came out of a hut and started screaming at me and one of the guys in my crew was going to shoot her too but I told him not to. I didn’t care about the kid, but I keep seeing him whenever I close my eyes. I don’t care. He deserved it. He had a little brother with him, but the kid didn’t even cry or nothing. He just took stuff out of the other kid’s pocket after he was dead. That’s a future VC for sure. I’m sick of this place.