by Andrew Smith
“ ’Cause we pinned her down there. And she wasn’t good at it, so she just quit. That’s all. Then Matthew,” I said.
The rain pounded, making an angry noise.
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“And you still don’t hate her?” Simon said.
“I gave up.”
“When you gonna give up on this?” Simon asked. “On me, I mean?”
“Not gonna. So let’s not talk about it anymore.”
“Brothers’ Rule Number Two,” Simon said. “Don’t be a quitter.”
“Are you making that one up mostly for you or for me?”
Simon didn’t answer that.
Thunder.
I listened.
And I said, “Sometimes when it rains like this it makes me feel like it’s never going to stop. Like the world’s coming to an end.”
Dear Joneser,
I got my orders today and I’m going to be leaving on the 25th of this month. They’re going to send me to Oakland and then I’ll find out where I’m going for sure. Maybe they’ll just leave me in Oakland (ha ha).
I’m really tired. I wrote four letters before this one, but I didn’t want to forget my little brother. I should get some sleep I guess.
Hey.
There’s a flight line of choppers outside my window, if you could call it a window. When they’re taking off at night and in the day, it’s a beautiful sight. They fly right over our window about 15 to 20 feet up. You would love to see that and hear it.
I thought it was funny how you said not to write to Mother till after September cause Dad might get out of jail then, and how Simon just said for me to not get killed. I will try. But you and me know why Dad keeps getting himself put in jail. Don’t say anything to Simon.
Good night.
Love,
Matt
I never liked my name, so Matthew always called me Joneser or Brother Jones or something like that.
I liked how he did that. Everyone else just called me Jonah.
Simon fell to sleep, propped up against the wall at the back of the trailer, his head tilted over and his body leaned sideways. Eventually he slumped over and his head fell down onto my shoulder. At first I was going to push him off—he’d have done it to me—but I stopped myself and sighed.
I felt like crying. I guess I felt like giving up.
But Simon laid down a rule and if I broke it, that would be like letting him beat me in a fight.
The rain ended quietly before night came.
I fell to sleep.
Simon was already awake when I opened my eyes. It was late in the morning and the air in the trailer was becoming hot and thick when I heard the soft rubbery thud of something dropping down from the ceiling and hitting the floor below the edge of the bed where we had slept. Then came the scraping-clicking of movement of legs along the linoleum.
“There’s a big scorpion over there under that trash, Jonah.”
It didn’t really register. I sat up, letting my feet down onto the floor, and then, realizing what Simon had said, lifted them back up onto the bed.
“What did you say?”
“I saw a scorpion crawl under that trash there.” Simon nodded his chin to show the direction, across the floor, the trash piled up on the other side of the doorway.
“It’s really hot in here,” I said.
“I think it’s late.”
I looked down at the floor once more, then swallowed and put my feet down and stood. I felt surrounded by an empire of angry and poisonous bugs, all hiding, watching, waiting to attack. I opened my pack with two fingers, and peered inside to be sure there was nothing alive there. I saw the shine of the pistol’s barrel and the rest of our tangled clothes on the bottom, beneath the canteen. I shook out my shoes and slipped my bare feet into them, then cuffed my jeans and tiptoed to the door. When I tried to open it, the knob came right off in my hand and I nearly fell down, backwards, right on the spot where the scorpion was hiding.
“I told you you wouldn’t be able to get that open,” Simon complained. “Now what are we going to do?”
Sometimes, just the way he said things could make me so mad, and at that moment I wanted to throw that useless metal knob right at his head. But I knew I had to do everything I could to avoid fighting with Simon out on the road, even if he was always pushing at me. We didn’t make a rule about it, but I think we both knew we didn’t have to say it.
So I took a slow breath and bent to line my eye up with the rotten cavity where the doorknob had been attached. I poked a finger into the grease and rust of the hole, pushing and twisting at what was there, but nothing moved, and the door remained wedged tight.
Simon sat up, pulling straight the dingy tee shirt that had wound around him in his sleep. He was wearing my socks, and from the scattered and muddied papers on the floor he carefully picked his shoes, looking into them and shaking them out before slipping them loosely onto his feet.
I kicked the bottom of the door as hard as I could, denting its tin paneling and causing the top to buckle just a crack. It hurt my foot. I was hot, and so frustrated I wanted to scream.
“You’re stupid,” Simon said, goading.
And the scorpion emerged, flattening its yellow-brown body beside my foot. I jumped and stamped my heel across its abdomen, sending a spray of thick white slime several inches out on the floor. The stinger twitched and curled like a beckoning finger. I kicked the door again and raised my hand to punch it, but stopped myself. I didn’t want to look at Simon. I know I would have hit him if he said anything to me; even—especially—if he said “nice job.”
Sweating now, I pried at the top of the door, bending it slightly, but it began cutting into my fingers and would not move. I just stood there, sweat dripping from my neck, running down my chest. I stared at my feet, at the dead thing on the floor next to me, my hair, untied, hanging like blinders so I didn’t have to look at Simon.
“We’ll have to bust the window,” I said.
“Do you want me to do it?”
He might as well have just called me stupid again.
I sighed. “I will.”
And it felt good to break something, to hear the sound, the release of the glass snapping and popping beneath my foot as I balanced myself atop the splintered table, bracing with both hands pressed up against the smoke-yellowed ceiling of the trailer. I looked up and saw I’d left two sweat-grimed handprints over my head.
I thought maybe someday, someone would know I’d been here, even if they never knew who I was.
We gathered up the wet clothes we had taken off during the storm, and I threw them from the window, far enough so they would not land in the shards of glass on the ground below us.
Simon crawled out first, and I handed him the pack before following.
I brushed myself off and looked up at the sky, squinting, and judged that it was already nearly noon.
We walked out beyond the edge of the trailer’s shadow and began picking up our wet clothes.
“We should just leave those here,” Simon said, “they’re too wet to put in the pack.”
“I don’t have anything else to wear. Except for some underwear, it’s all your stuff in there now.”
“Well, why’d you give me your socks then?”
“ ’Cause I’m stupid.”
I stepped through brush, gathering our scattered clothes, shaking them out, draping them across the fold of the pack. I felt like an idiot. I stopped and let the pack fall to the ground, turning back to face my brother standing there in the shade of the crooked trailer.
“You left Matt’s letters in there, didn’t you?” Simon said.
And I didn’t say anything. I just left the pack there in the dirt and walked back to the trailer, and boosted myself up on the naked wheel hub so I could squeeze my way back into the opening of the broken window. I felt the sting of a small cut on my belly when it raked across a tooth of glass. I climbed back into the hot trailer, watched as th
e blood slowly trickled, thick and dark, staining the top of my jeans. I wiped it away with a rust-stained palm and pressed against the cut to stop the bleeding. It didn’t hurt too bad.
I found Matthew’s letters stacked on the bed where I had slept, where I had left them. The cut stopped bleeding. Frustrated and sweating again, I picked up the letters and went to the window to hand them out to Simon and just then the door swung open behind me, spilling the brightness of the sun and a few dirt-stained drops of water into the trailer.
Simon had gone around and, smiling, effortlessly, pushed the door open.
Simon loved pushing buttons.
And I felt so stupid and mad I just closed my eyes tight and said, “I swear to God I’m going to kill you today, Simon.”
And Simon just stood there in the doorway, a crooked smile on his lips, watching me clutching those papers, sweating in the steaming heat of that crooked trailer, blood smeared like crusted paint across my tightening belly.
“Are those mountains Arizona?”
“No.”
We had been walking on that dirt road away from the trailer for two hours. Shirtless in the heat, I tied my torn flannel around my head, draping the sleeves and tails over my burning shoulders. Our clothes, dry now, were stuffed into the pack again, and I stopped, looking back at Simon, who held a hand out like a baseball cap shading his eyes, dressed in jeans that were a good two inches too short and a graying tee shirt that was beginning to show small holes beneath the arms, dragging his feet in the dirt. I removed the canteen and took a mouthful of the summer-warm swill.
“Here.”
I held the canteen out.
Simon tilted his head back and drank.
“That’s the dirt track to Glenrio out there,” I said. “It goes just about all the way to Texas.”
“How far is it?”
“I don’t know. Do you want to sit down?”
Simon corked the canteen and handed it back to me.
I kicked my shoes off, pushing my feet around in the warm sandy dirt of the road. It felt good, dry. I sat, legs crossed in front of me, and opened the pack. As Simon lowered himself to the ground to sit in the small shade I cast, I took a pencil and my comp book from the pack and began making my marks, scrawling my words.
“What’s that?” Simon asked.
“I’m making a map.”
“Of how to get to Arizona?”
“No.” I said, “Of where we came from.”
I kept drawing, writing notes beside certain marks: where the horse died, the trailer, the streambed. “In case we die out here and someone finds us.”
Simon stretched a leg out, kicking up dirt.
“I’m not going to die.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’m not planning on it either.”
“Then why are you making the map?”
I squeezed the pencil in my sweating grip. I almost wanted to break it.
“Did you mean it, Jonah?”
“What?” I said.
“When you said you wanted to kill me.” He sounded scared, but I knew he was just testing me.
I stopped writing.
“I’m sorry, Simon. Sometimes you just make me so mad. You make me feel so stupid.”
“You don’t have to get so mad at all those things,” Simon said. “About Matt. About Mother. Dad. There’s nothing we can do.”
Simon shrugged.
I sighed. “Well, if there was something, we sure didn’t do it. Anyway, you said you hated me yesterday.”
“That was yesterday. I don’t hate you yet today.”
“None of this is my fault.”
“Do you think I don’t know that?” And Simon leaned back, propping his loose shoulders up with his arms locked behind him, fingers scooping dirt beneath his palms. “Jonah, I’m really hungry.”
He broke the first rule.
I sighed and waved my arm out at the road in front of us. “We have ten dollars, Simon. Pick any restaurant you see. And you broke your own stupid rule.”
And I thought Simon would start crying, but he just looked up and pointed away in the distance and said, “I pick that one there,” pointing nowhere, really, but when I looked down the road to where he was pointing, I could see the dust kicking up in the distance behind us, trailing like smoke, a reversed wave like the tail on a scorpion from a black car that was following the same road we were sitting on.
Just our luck.
gravity
Mister Jones,
I’m finally here. It took 18 hours. It rained last night. All it did was thunder once and before you could blink everything was soaked, it’s really weird. It’s really hot here, and it’s wintertime. I don’t think Hell is as hot as it is here. Right after I ate chow I went outside and in five minutes I was soaked.
About a week ago they mortared the airstrip here and killed 6 guys and wounded 14, but that doesn’t happen often. Not every day or nothing.
Last night I went to a spa. I went in the steam room and it was so hot I could barely breathe. Then I went in the cold sauna bath then the hot sauna bath, then I took a cool shower and got a massage by a good-looking Vietnamese girl.
I like the Army a lot better here than in the States. They told me to tell you about hoax telephone calls and letters about my dying or deserting or something. A lot of people get stuff like that I guess.
But don’t be scared. I don’t think I am. I haven’t seen or heard anything yet other than the strangeness of this place. It even smells weird. I bet you can even smell it on this letter. It smells like a funeral home.
It took me 18 hours to get here. It will take the mail 8 days to get to you.
Well I don’t have anything else to say, so bye for now.
Love,
Matt
The car rolled toward us.
Thunderclouds balled black in the sky above.
“The monsoon rains are going to come again today, I think.”
The car was a 1940 Lincoln Cabriolet, black and white with broad whitewall tires. Its top was down, and, as it neared, crunching and kicking back the dirt of the road, I saw a man at the wheel and a pretty yellow-haired girl sitting in the front, and there was also what appeared to be a third person sitting bolt-upright in the backseat.
It was as out of place in that desert as a sailboat would have been, and it was the kind of car you knew had to carry stories with it, but I had no intention of finding out what those stories told.
“Let’s start walking,” I said. “Just don’t even look at them.”
“We should ask them for a ride.”
“No.” I put my head down like I didn’t even know or care about that car coming up alongside us. I began walking forward, just looking at the ground, listening to our feet, the scattering sounds of tires on the gravel and dirt of the road.
I warned Simon again, “Don’t even look at them.”
So I just concentrated on not paying that car any attention. I could hear Simon following along, scooting his feet in the rocks and dirt. And it wasn’t until later, until it was too late for both of us, that I found out Simon was sticking a thumb out to beg a ride.
The car swerved out, passing us, giving us a wide share of the road. The driver never turned to look at us, but my eyes were drawn to the girl. I don’t know why, but I couldn’t stop myself from looking across at her as she sailed by us on that road, her hair swirling wildly in the wind, eyes shaded behind black glasses. And I could see she was watching us, her head turning farther around so she could look at us through the haze of rising dust as she passed. And as the car receded before me, the girl waved her open hands imploringly, saying something to the driver, and twisted around back over the seat and smiled at me and my brother before the car came to a stop a hundred yards in front of us.
Simon slid his hand in his pocket.
I stopped walking and watched.
The car’s doors swung open, and both riders stood in the road, looking back at us standing there, watching them.
> “They look like hippies,” Simon whispered.
“They probably think we do, too.”
I looked at my brother, but he kept his eyes fixed down the road.
Simon straightened himself, flicking his hair back over his shoulders with both hands.
The driver was thin, shorter than me, and had long and wavy black-brown hair that nearly reflected the sunlight. His face was covered with hair, beard untrimmed, and he wore low-cut bell-bottoms and an unbuttoned patchwork vest with no shirt beneath it, a fishing-line string of beads hanging down into the black hairs on his chest. Except for the uneven beard, he didn’t look too old, maybe eighteen, maybe twenty. I guessed the girl was even younger than that.
She was taller than the driver, hair windblown and light, wearing jeans torn at each knee, and the sunglasses, and a tight pink tee shirt with three buttons on top, all unfastened.
They were walking toward us; Simon, squinting in the glare and dust at the driver, the car, the strange metal thing sticking up from the backseat, and me, dumbly mesmerized by the glint of light from the black lenses on the girl’s glasses in the hazy fog above the roadway, the way she moved inside that pink shirt.
“Hey, Tom and Huck, aren’t you a long ways from home?” the driver said, showing yellowed teeth and pivoting his head, birdlike, from me to Simon and back to me.
“Not that far,” I said.
“Where are you boys going?” the girl asked.
“Nowhere.”
“Arizona,” Simon said.
“Either way,” the driver said, punctuating his speech with the clink of a Zippo lighter he flicked open and shut with his thumb, “Arizona. Nowhere. They’re both pretty far.”
“Mitch,” the girl said, “we could give them a ride.”
I pulled the shirt away from my head. I was sweating, my shoulders and back were sunburned, and the air felt cool in my damp hair.
The driver looked right at me and said, “Do you want a ride?”
I shot a look at Simon, hoping to stop him from talking, but I knew it was already too late for that and Simon immediately said, “Sure! Thanks!”
And then Simon looked at me, grinning, and nodded in the direction of the girl, and the way she watched me made me feel like I was some kind of captured specimen. And Simon whispered to me, “Now go draw that on your stupid map.”