In the Path of Falling Objects (25 page)

This has been the worst week for me since I got here. I honestly don’t think I can handle it anymore. I can’t even tell you what happened, just know that I’m OK and in a couple weeks I’ll be going to Sydney. Then, you know.

I can’t write anymore. I’ll try to write you before I go. I hope this isn’t my last letter. But no more pictures. I’m not taking them anymore. It’s too hard to get rid of the pictures in my head.

Tell Simon I love him.

Love
,

Matthew

Simon just stared at the limping man.

“We weren’t planning on killing ourselves,” he said. “Me and Lilly are trying to get away from that guy you found us with back there.”

“You in some kind of trouble?” Walker said.

“I think he wanted to kill us. I’m pretty sure he was going to,” Simon said. “He was getting ready to shoot you when you came up on us.”

Walker shook his head and wiped a hand across his mouth. He looked at Lilly, not saying anything.

“I think he was going to,” Lilly said. She nodded. “He was.”

“Hell,” Walker said. “I could tell something was off with that guy. With that whole situation.”

Walker leaned closer to Simon, looked at the boy’s cut neck and bruised face.

“He beat up on you?”

“No.”

“Who did that, then?”

“My brother.”

“Your brother?” Walker bit the inside of his lip. “Where’s your brother now?”

“I don’t know.”

“He took off back in New Mexico,” Lilly said. “He got smart. He knew what was going on.”

Simon stood and pulled Lilly to her feet.

“My brother’s looking for me, though,” Simon said. “I know it. We just got lost. He’ll probably never find us now. Or, he won’t before Mitch does.”

“Hell, boy. You two ain’t lost if I could find you. Anyway, what do
you want to find your brother for? To beat up on him, I bet,” Walker said.

Simon looked down at his moccasins. “I already got even with him.”

“I guess brothers’ll do that. I should know. I beat the tar out of mine more times than I can count. He did the same for me, too.” Walker looked at Simon, then Lilly, and said, “I don’t have a phone or nothing at my place, but at least it’s a place, and it’s not too far from here, so you can come with me. At least until daylight. Then we’ll see what we can do.”

Lilly began sweating. She was sick again.

Walker’s homestead was less than a mile from where he’d found them. It was built, he explained, at a crack in the bottom of the mesa, the only place around with water, and he promised, too, that he would lead them out of the desert when they were ready to leave.

“What if Mitch comes and finds us here when he wakes up?” Simon asked.

“He’d be crazy if he tried that,” Walker said.

“Well, he is crazy,” Simon answered.

Walker limped along, with Simon following, as Lilly struggled. She had a fever and was beginning to shake.

“My side hurts,” she said. “Can we stop for a minute?”

“We’re almost there,” Walker said. “See that yellow light up there? That’s a candle burning on my front porch. I lit it when my dog started barking, and I came out looking for you.”

“She’s pregnant,” Simon said.

“Oh,” Walker swallowed. “Well, I won’t ask you to tell me nothing else. Please. Every time either one of you opens your mouth, the truth gets worse and worse.”

They made their way across a gutted streambed and up the slight
slope to where the light from Walker’s candle flickered in the dark. Lilly suffered the walk, breathing in sharp and abbreviated gasps.

“Are you okay?” Simon asked.

“Yeah. You know.”

“You look different,” he said. “This is different than those other times you got sick.”

“Yeah.”

As they came trudging up the small rise before Walker’s home, panicked, yelping barks called their warned welcome, and, somewhere ahead in the dark, Simon could hear the clanking of a dog chain sweeping against the rocky ground there at the bottom of the towering mesa.

“Shut up, Lady!” Walker shouted, and the dog immediately stopped barking, whimpering its joy at the man’s return.

In the dark, Walker’s home looked like a sort of spaceship to Simon. The candle burned on a slat-wood porch built out from the door of a gleaming metal trailer that was surrounded by stacked rocks on the bottom. The trailer sat just at the base of the giant towering mesa, a frozen explosion of red boulder. Simon could see a small, windowless mud hut with an open doorway covered only by a fraying blanket, a narrow black stovepipe coming up from the rounded adobe roof. And he could make out the dark form of another hut, built in the same manner, farther down along the dry rocky bed.

Walker bent down and unhooked a stocky and tailless merle-colored dog that yelped with excitement and huddled down at Simon’s feet, shuddering its rump and urinating all over the ground.

“She’s going to pee on me,” Simon said, backing away from the frenzied dog.

“He always gets that way when he sees someone new,” Walker explained.

“He?” Simon asked. “I thought you said his name was Lady.”

“That
is
his name,” Walker said.

“Oh. Okay.”

Lilly slumped down on the railing along the steps up to the trailer’s porch.

“I don’t feel good,” she said.

She dropped to her knees on the lower step. The dog, still whimpering and dripping piss, sniffed at her feet.

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.”