In the Path of Falling Objects

  (mitch)

  rat

  The sun disappears.

  The air finally begins to cool.

  He stands there and watches.

  He is dizzy, tired, his mind swirls in numbers, thoughts of Lilly, those boys, Lilly and that boy. Whore.

  Piss-kid lied. He is trying to make me mad. Push my buttons again.

  He rubs a hand on his chest. The sandy grit of dried blood and ash flake under his touch. He feels the wound on his neck, licks his fingers, touch, lick, his tongue dry as a cat’s.

  “Know what I’ll do? I know what to do.”

  Nothing comes from the trailer, no sound or movement. He waits. Mitch lowers to a crouch and crawls from the stand of bushes toward the trailer. His ankle is now stiff and swollen, so he drops to his knees, scoots along the ground like a limping dog.

  “Like a dog,” he whispers, smiling. “Stupid dog.”

  He crawls right to the skirt of the trailer. He stops and listens. He can hear faint voices inside, can’t tell which punk is talking.

  There is a gap in the rocks beside the trailer’s wheel. He puts an arm in first, moves his hand around to gauge the area, then he squeezes his body in and disappears into the black pit beneath the floor of the trailer.

  Something with fur runs across his hand. Mitch almost shrieks and flails his arm dumbly in the dark. The thing brushes against his leg and escapes out the same opening he crawled through.

  A rat.

  (jonah)

  prayer

  Walker moved the infantry flag just an inch at the corner, then let it fall back into place.

  “It’s not dark enough yet,” he said. “Fifteen more minutes.”

  Dalton inhaled deeply. “Ten.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  I looked at Simon. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking.

  The cans we had eaten from were arranged in a line across the top of the small stove, their upturned tops peeled back like rising metallic moons, edges jagged, toothlike.

  I stood and stretched, tucking my shirt behind the grip of the pistol in the back of my pants so I could draw it quickly if I needed to. I slung my backpack over my arm. Simon watched me, sitting with his back against the door, legs straightened out in front of him. As if saying he was ready to leave, too, Simon pushed the black meteorite into his pocket, and rolled slightly onto one side so he could slide his hand all the way down behind him and pull out the keys to the truck. He handed them to Dalton, who looked around the inside of the trailer like he was trying to see if there was something else that needed to be done.

  I paused over the cot where Lilly lay beneath the blankets.

  Simon looked like he was going to say something, but he was silent. I held an open hand over the bedding, feeling nothing there in the space between my palm and the covered girl.

  I turned and looked at Simon and Dalton, then Walker.

  “Door or window?” I asked.

  “What?” Simon said.

  “Which way are we going out?”

  “It’s gotta be the door,” Dalton said. “It’s closer to the truck.”

  Simon pushed himself up to his feet. He looked tired; his eyes watered as he yawned.

  “Do you want to pray or something before we go?” Walker asked.

  “Why?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” the man said, “I just thought you might.”

  “I do,” Simon said.

  And Dalton said, “Okay.”

  (mitch)

  hiss

  Mitch hears them moving just above him. Their feet shuffle, there is a soft hum of indistinguishable voices muted through the floor in conversation. He rolls onto his back.

  The black is so complete as he turns upward, he imagines he is at the edge of a starless universe. He reaches out, fingers pressing through sticky webs and soft balls of spider eggs.

  He feels the underside of the floor. He pulls the gun from his pants and points it up, wondering if he would be able to hear the telltale sound of one of them directly above. He presses the barrel against the peeling laminate of the floorboard. It makes the faintest scraping hiss before he recoils his hand and rests in silence.

  (jonah)

  below

  “I heard something,” Simon whispered, looking down. He unclasped Dalton’s and my hands, the creases of his palms shining with sweat.

  We sat, circled, on the floor beside Lilly.

  My eyes widened. I held my breath, trying to hear what Simon had, hoping it was nothing, even if I had a feeling it was something terrible.

  We were completely frozen.

  “I felt something under me.” Simon’s voice was just the faintest breath, mouthed more than heard.

  I didn’t move. My eyes turned to Walker.

  “I have rats,” Walker whispered. “Probably just a rat.”

  “He’s under the house,” Simon panted.

  Walker let Dalton’s hand go. “Couldn’t be.”

  And I’d never seen Simon look so scared and so sure of himself at the same time.

  (mitch)

  flick

  Flick.

  No sounds come through the floor above him.

  Mitch opens the lighter and drops it onto his chest. The metal case feels smooth and cool. Like that falling rock Piss-kid picked up that night in the desert.

  His thumb finds the wheel, a spark explodes in the black, staining his eyes with purple smears, and a flame leaps up, fanning waves of yellow light beneath the trailer.

  Near one end of the trailer, a corroding pipe elbow drips rusted water onto the dirt. A desiccated orange hose, cracked and striped with electrical tape, snakes out from between the rocks and up into the floor.

  A gas line.

  He worms his way on his back. The gun lies flat on his chest. He holds the lighter like a torch before him, as he makes his way toward the end of the trailer. Serpentine black coils of smoke writhe upward from the lighter and flatten out against the underside of the floor.

  “Maybe we can use this.”

  The hose gives off the faintest smell of propane.

  Mitch smiles.

  He waves the lighter around to look for the way out. He watches the soot from the lighter spread a circle of black on the blistering hose. It begins to smoke and stink.

  Nothing.

  He burns his fingers, drops the lighter.

  They’re dead.

  The floor creaks above him. Someone is moving up there. He looks at the blackened hose, the lighter, still burning in the dirt and spiderwebs.

  He grasps his pistol, pointing it up at where he can hear the sound of weight sagging the dry plywood.

  Gravity.

  (jonah)

  dark

  “Well, is it dark enough now?” I whispered to Dalton.

  Dalton glanced at Walker, then up at the sky through the jagged slash in the ceiling.

  “I think so,” he said. Then he said to Simon, “Make sure you stay with him. And don’t fall this time. We might only have one chance.”

  Simon didn’t answer. He continued to listen.

  “Simon?” I grabbed my brother’s shoulder.

  “Okay.” His voice was just a breath. “I can do it.”

  We stood.

  I watched the door, barely seeing it through the dark, not wanting to turn back and look at the bed where Lilly was, not even one last time.

  “Help me up,” Walker said, extending an arm and pulling his leg beneath him with the other.

  Dalton grabbed the man at his wrist, dropping the truck’s keys to the floor as he did.

  Then he felt the jerking impact of the bullets striking Walker’s body as they tore upward through the floor. The Indian fell backwards onto me, and I crashed against the frame of the door as I tried to catch his weight.

  (mitch)

  poison

  He chokes and gasps against the airless poison beneath the trailer. He rolls onto his belly, the pistol held out in front of him, and crawls, feeling
his way to the hole by the wheel. Something is on fire, but it’s not the gas line.

  He can’t breathe.

  In the still silence of the night, the arms squeeze their way out from the breach in the rocks and pull the body forward on a wave of reeking exhaust. Mitch, black, stripped to the waist and smeared in ash and blood, an obscene parturition, stumbles forward and inhales deeply, spiderwebs plastered against his hair, sweating, smiling.

  He circles around toward the rear of the trailer.

  (jonah)

  fire

  Simon froze, staring at the thread of smoke curling up from the holes in the floor.

  “Hell!” Walker grunted. A slug had lodged in his artificial leg. Small splinters splayed out from the blackened tear where his jeans were creased by the path of the bullet.

  My hands braced Walker steady by his armpits; and I leaned over his shoulder to see where the man had been shot.

  “Are you okay?” Dalton asked.

  Walker rubbed his hand over his leg.

  “It’s nothing,” Walker said, his voice hushed. “He’s down there.”

  “No he’s not,” Simon said, and he pointed at the twin holes in the floor, now glowing with pulses of amber light as twisting and thickening ropes of black smoke curled upward. “We got to get out of here.”

  “What the hell?” Walker said.

  “Come on!” Dalton said, picking up the keys.

  I pushed Walker upright and turned to open the door. And I hesitated there, thinking about what we would see on the other side.

  “We got to get out now!” Simon pleaded, and ran for the back window, stumbling, sightless.

  “Hey!” Dalton called out, but Simon had already climbed out into the night.

  I yelled, “Simon!”

  My lungs convulsed. The fumes from below the trailer were suffocating. Points of flame splattered up from the bullet holes in the floor, and every bit of space inside the trailer filled with smoke in seconds.

  “Come on.” Walker pushed me aside and flung open the door.

  (mitch)

  homecoming

  Simon has come home.

  Mitch waits there and watches the boy climb down from the window.

  “Welcome home, Simon.” His voice is sandpaper. “I missed you. I love you. Why do you want to hurt me?”

  He squats in the rocks behind the trailer, the silver barrel of his gun pointed level at Piss-kid’s belly.

  Slashes are scabbed over, the dirt-skeleton tattooed in filth.

  The yellow teeth, eyes fixed on the boy.

  The kid stands there and stares at Mitch.

  “You said he was the bastard,” Mitch says. “Look at what you did to me.”

  Jonah is calling his brother from inside the trailer. Smoke coughs from the window.

  “Look at what you did to me, Mitch,” the kid says. “I hate you.”

  “You’re dead, punk.”

  The Indian and some other kid come around the corner. Mitch sees something reflecting in that kid’s hand. He swings the pistol over and shoots. The Indian goes down. Half his face is gone. He brings the pistol right up to the other boy’s head and the boy backs off and ducks behind the trailer.

  Now it’s just him and Piss-kid. Push this button, punk. Just try letting that whore flirt with you again.

  Click.

  The gun does not fire.

  Click.

  All his counting brings him to zero.

  And Simon runs for the truck.

  Piss.

  He stumbles around the opposite side of the trailer, moves painfully, wide enough to avoid the fire that now spears outward from the underside. He sees flames through the covers over the windows.

  The universe turns to numbers. Nothing but numbers. Stacking. Falling. Collapsing. Reducing.

  He can’t stop it.

  He sees an antler of flame with four spikes that flashes into six; debris scattered on a mound of trash, eleven wads of paper and fourteen opened cans; the number one, a rusted pipe the length of his arm; counts his steps, counts his steps.

  (jonah)

  mitch

  The smoke thickened inside the trailer as soon as Dalton opened the door. I saw him and Walker go out. I was scared Simon and I wouldn’t see each other again, so I turned and ran back through the burning trailer to follow him.

  My eyes ached and pooled with stinging tears; all I could see were my feet and the faintest outline of the window frame, where Simon had gone.

  “Simon!”

  I tripped, falling to all fours near the back of the trailer. I tried to breathe, but my lungs seized in coughing spasms of rejection. I kept my head down, trying to find some air, and realized I had to force myself up or I would not make it out of the smoke. I felt my way along the floor to the back wall and pulled myself up to the edge of the window, thrusting my head out, blinking to try to clear the blindness from my eyes.

  I heaved myself over the sill and lowered my feet to the ground, thinking, How long ago did me and Simon climb out this way?

  I slid along the trailer, edging my way around the back.

  The truck’s engine coughed in ignition.

  I stepped over Walker’s body on the ground at my feet. I only looked at him for an instant and had to turn away. It made me sick. I knew he was dead.

  When I rounded the corner I saw Mitch, ghostlike and blackened, a metal bar in his hand, swinging an arc downward at Simon’s upraised arms.

  Simon dodged the swing and fell backwards onto the steps of the trailer.

  “Where’s Lilly?” Mitch demanded; his voice sounded slurred and groggy. He raised the pipe again, the gun hanging limply at his side.

  “Mitch!” I screamed.

  “Come on!” Dalton called nervously from the truck, revving the rumbling engine.

  I ran toward them.

  As I pulled the pistol from my waist, the metal bar came down across my head and I dropped to the dirt, the blood already seeping down into my eyes that closed on a red-smeared and flaming image of Mitch panting above me and raising the heavy pipe again.

  I knew what was happening, but I could not move. I kicked my feet against the ground, attempting to push myself away and into the dark. My body felt so heavy, like it had melted into the earth. The gun had fallen from my grasp onto the ground behind me.

  Dalton sprang from the truck, flashing that shining straight razor low beside his hip. He leapt at Mitch and slashed a line across Mitch’s side before he could swing that pipe a second time at me.

  Flames twitched and wriggled from beneath the trailer and smoke vomited out, blacker than the sky, in great billowing coils.

  Simon pushed himself up from the steps. In the pulsing copper light from the fire, I tried to raise myself onto hands and knees, blood crawling across my forehead and dripping in warm blobs to the dirt between my hands, the amber glint of the gun barrel in the dirt behind me.

  Mitch spun around and pointed his pistol at Dalton.

  Simon grabbed my gun from the dirt and swung it across me, leveling it at Mitch.

  Mitch held the pipe over his head in one hand, the gun in his other pointed at Dalton, who crouched in the dim light with his razor held in front of him.

  “No!” Simon yelled.

  “Simon!” I stood behind my brother on unsteady legs, a hand flattened over the gash in my scalp.

  Mitch looked at Simon, smiling his gap-toothed yellow grin. He looked over to Dalton, panting, and then back at my brother, who held a gun.

  “What are you going to do, Simon?”

  “Get away,” he said.

  “Simon,” I whispered.

  “What are you going to do, Piss-kid?” Mitch repeated.

  Mitch began slowly walking toward us.

  “Ferris wheel,” Simon whispered.

  Then Simon kept shooting until the gun was empty.

  falling objects

  We knew it was the only thing to do.

  We dragged the corpses into the trailer
.

  We had to do it fast, before the fire grew too big.

  Simon was sick. He threw up all over the place after he shot Mitch. So he sat with his legs resting out the passenger side of the truck and watched as Dalton and I pulled those bloody bodies up the stairs and rolled them through the doorway.

  Neither of us said anything while we did it. I think we were both in shock at the sickening scene in which we were playing parts. I wouldn’t have blamed Dalton if he just abandoned me and Simon out there in the middle of the desert beside that burning house and tried to forget everything he ever knew about us.

  We were covered in blood. It smeared on our hands and shirts, down the front of our pants when we pulled the bodies into the fire, each of us tugging on a leg, trailing the torsos and arms along on the dirt. There was too much blood for us to try to lift either one in any respectable manner.

  And as we worked, sweating, pulling the dead as quickly as we could up the stairs and into the smoke of the doorway, I thought about everything that Matthew had written about his own horrors, and I understood how there really was no coming back from things like this.

  When we were finished, we took off our clothes and threw them into the doorway as the flames rose up from beneath Walker’s trailer. Then we dressed ourselves in new clothes from the camper and we both climbed inside the truck’s cab.

  I sat in the middle. Simon was beside the door with his head resting outside the window. The flames inside the trailer were curling over the top of the open door, lapping from the windows, rising up into the night sky.

  “I’d understand if you just told me and Simon to get out of your truck now,” I said.

  Dalton looked at me. “Why would I do that?”

  “We got you in trouble.”