by Andrew Smith
The driver swept his arm in the direction of the open door.
“My name’s Mitch,” he said. “And this is Lilly. And the backseat’s a little small ’cause of Don being with us, but you boys are pretty skinny, I’d say.”
“I’m Simon Vickers. And the one there who doesn’t want to talk is my brother Jonah. How far can you take us?”
“We’re going to California, so I guess anywheres between here and there,” Mitch said.
I didn’t know what to do. I felt like I was being swept along by something that had already gone too far. I knew I didn’t like Mitch from the moment I saw him, but there was something about that girl that just practically dragged me along with my brother’s lead.
So I balled up my shirt and stuffed it down inside the pack, and Simon, acting so comfortable and relaxed, said, “We’re practically starved to death.”
He glanced at me. I guess it wasn’t really breaking the rule to say it to someone else.
Lilly brushed her hair back and pulled her glasses away from her face, just an inch, so I could see her eyes, and said, “You just throw your bag in the trunk.” Then she paused and I could hear her breathe, “Jonah Vickers. I’ll get you boys something to eat.”
I’d heard the stories about sailors who were lured onto jagged rocks by sirens. They must have sounded just like her when she said Jonah Vickers, I guess.
And I knew we shouldn’t get into that car, but at the same time I wanted to say something to her, at least to say thanks, but I couldn’t force anything out of my mouth and I just followed Mitch and Lilly as they led Simon and me toward that idling black convertible.
The thing I saw in the backseat was a man, nearly life-size and made from hammered tin, standing upright on a pedestal and holding a lance. He was clad with incongruous armor, an inverted plate of a hat tilted back on his head.
“That’s Don,” Mitch said. “He’s been riding with us ever since we found him in Mexico. I hope you guys don’t mind sharing the backseat with him. He doesn’t say much.”
I knew the statue was supposed to be a version of Don Quixote, and wondered why, across the sculpture’s face, and fixed upon it with bands of black electrical tape, was a photograph, cut from a glossy black-and-white magazine page, a mask, the face of a man with black-rimmed glasses.
Lilly held before us both a feast—a closed box of Nilla cookies and a bag of Fritos.
“How about these?” she said, holding out the food for me, the colors nearly blurring my starved eyes.
My mouth hung open and I reached out for the cookies, fumbling, and dropped the box on the road in front of my feet.
“Ha!” Mitch laughed. “Isn’t gravity a wonderful thing? It makes everything you could ever want drop right at your feet. What could be more convenient than that?”
I looked at him, and then bent over and picked up the box, saying, “Sorry,” and thinking, Simon, we should get the hell out of here.
“This is just like The Wizard of Oz,” Simon said. “Us being lost and following this road, and along comes the Tin Man.”
Lilly pushed the seat on her side forward and said, “Come on. Get in before we run out of gas again.”
Mitch shut his door and the car’s wheels spun forward in the dirt. Simon and I sat on either side of the metal man with the paper mask, eating vanilla wafers by the handfuls.
Mitch began singing, “We’re off to see the wizard . . .” and then stopped and said, “You boys aren’t going to make me sing alone, are you?”
And he began the song again, this time with Simon joining in, smiling at me, trying to get me to sing, too, as bits of cookie fell out of his mouth and onto his lap.
“Oh brother.” I rolled my eyes.
And neither Simon nor Mitch knew the words to the song, so they just kept on repeating the first line over and over until I suppose they both got tired of singing it.
Even on that dry dirt road, in the heat of August, I was impressed by a certain remarkable beauty in this land, the slope of the road, the grasses gone almost white in the summer, the unexplainable rocks tilted every direction but flat, the redness of the mountains in the distance rising above the brush and occasional tree, the road so straight and wind-worn, the dry breath of the air cooling my skin, blowing the sweat-damp hair under my arm that lay bent across the rim of that open-top convertible while the car ground its way forward upon the gravel of our path.
I’d been this way before, but never like this. Not with Simon, alone, and knowing we were never going back. It felt like I was seeing the desert for the first time in my life.
I have to write this down. What this feels like to be out here with Simon, and those two up front that I’m not sure about.
I stared at her and listened to the road.
Our bellies were full. We drank warm 7UP and threw the bottles out over the back of the car when we were finished, and Mitch turned on the radio, but I could hardly hear it in the rush of wind through my hair, the crackling AM station playing “All Right Now,” between the spastic bursts of static from the hills and dips in the road.
And Mitch just said, “Why?”
I looked at Simon. I thought he was only pretending to be asleep. He leaned against the side of the tin man so comfortably, the way he’d leaned against me the night before in the rain, in that trailer.
Mitch asked it again.
And I knew he was talking to me.
I said, “Why what?”
“Why are you going to Arizona? Who are you running away from?”
“We’re not running away from anyone,” I said. “We’re trying to find someone.”
“Well, you definitely found someone, man.”
Lilly laughed.
“Our dad. He’s in Arizona.”
“This road go to Tucumcari?” Mitch had a slight accent; I thought he probably came from Texas; the plates on the car were from there, anyway.
“Yes.”
“Hope we get there before we run out of gas,” Lilly said.
“Thanks anyway. I mean for the ride,” I said, and she turned back and looked at me, the faintest smile on her mouth.
And then I said, “Or hope we get there before it starts raining again.”
“Why’s he in Arizona when you’re practically in Texas?” Lilly asked.
“It’s a long story.”
“So’s this road,” she said.
“Not that long.”
Lilly turned around, propping her legs up on the bench of the white leather seat beside Mitch, letting her arm swing over the top, dropping her hand so smoothly to come to rest on my knee. For just a moment, I thought, she flashed a bit of anger and it nearly scared me, but I let it go.
“Look, sweetie,” she said, and I thought, how condescending for her to talk like that when she was probably no more than seventeen herself, “if you don’t want to talk, that’s okay. I was just trying to be nice.”
Then she rubbed my leg and turned back around, fixing her face forward.
I was embarrassed. I moved my hand to the place on my knee where hers had been. And I thought, She’s doing something to you. Don’t let it happen. Don’t be a sucker.
Mitch didn’t say anything, and Simon’s eyes were still closed, but I knew my brother was awake and had been taking it all in. He did that kind of stuff all the time.
“My mother went off with someone and never came back. Our dad’s in jail. He’s supposed to get out soon, maybe he already is. I don’t know,” I said. “Our brother’s in the Army. In Vietnam.”
I watched Simon. He twitched like he’d been stung when I told Mitch about Matthew.
Mitch whistled.
“What’s your dad in jail for?”
“You don’t have to say, Jonah,” Lilly said.
I didn’t want to tell him anyway. I was mad at myself for telling them as much as I did.
I felt stupid.
I lowered myself into the seat, my left knee scraping against the tin statue, and Lilly turned aroun
d and looked at me again.
“So there. That’s our whole story. We’re all alone, and sometimes it’s like we can’t hardly stand each other anymore.”
I didn’t want to say it. I felt stupid, and hated myself for doing it. I wanted to get out of that car.
And I saw Simon’s eye pop open for a moment.
“I’m sorry, Jonah,” she said. “Let’s forget about the whole thing. They’re probably melted, but we got a bag of M&M’s. Do you want some?”
“M&M’s don’t melt,” Simon said flatly, hair hanging down in his face and trailing back in the wind, his eyes still closed.
“Thirteen,” Mitch said.
“No. I’m fourteen,” Simon said.
“Not you,” Mitch said. “There.” And he pointed at the sky. “There’s thirteen vultures flying there.”
I didn’t say anything, but looked at the circling birds, overlapping, some blurring behind the others, wondering how Mitch knew there were thirteen of them.
“Mitch counts things automatically,” Lilly said. “Just by looking at things, he can instantly tell you how many are there. It’s pretty amazing. He’s never wrong.”
“How do you know he’s never wrong?” I asked.
“You should test him sometime,” Lilly said.
“Okay.”
“You can test me, kid. Just don’t try to mess with me about it. But you can test me, anytime. Sometime when we’re not in the middle of a bunch of nothing.” Mitch said, “Hey, Lil, would you grab me a cigarette?”
Mitch steered the car with his propped left knee and held his lighter out over the top of the steering wheel.
“Watch this, guys,” he said, and with one hand he made a sweeping motion that simultaneously snapped the lighter open, spun its wheel, and produced a flame, ringing the bell of the cap as he did.
“Cool!” Simon said.
Lilly opened the glove box, and, leaning forward to watch her, I could see a shiny chrome-plated gun tucked behind two crumpled packs of cigarettes and wads of tissue. I was certain Lilly knew I was watching, could see the gun, but she just nonchalantly left the box open and went about lighting a Kool for Mitch and passed it across to him.
“Do either of you two smoke?” she asked.
“No,” I said.
“I do,” Simon said, putting his hand up on the back of the driver’s seat.
I couldn’t figure out what Simon was trying to do. Maybe, I thought, he was just trying to look cool in front of these two. Maybe he could tell I didn’t trust Mitch, or he didn’t like the way I kept my eyes on that girl, I don’t know. Either way, it was just Simon being Simon, trying to push my buttons. Because I knew that while he may have smoked a cigarette or two back home with his friends in Los Rogues, he didn’t actually “smoke.”
And I watched as he took the lit cigarette from Lilly and leaned back in his seat and started smoking it, saying, “Thank you, Lilly,” as she lit another for herself.
So I scooted over, and leaned my head around the chest of Don Quixote, peering around his lance and bringing my face just close enough so Simon could hear me say, “Pretty soon, I’m going to beat the crap out of you if you don’t cut this out.”
“I don’t care,” Simon mouthed, voicelessly, and turned away, exhaling a long cloud of smoke into the rushing air, tilting his head back against the seat top and slumping his shoulders. “ ’Cause you better watch out for yourself,” he whispered. “That girl’s messing with you. I can tell.”
“I like the kid,” Mitch said, tugging at his greasy beard between drags. “He’s cool.”
And part of me knew, because it was my job to be the grown-up one, that all of Simon’s tests and jabs weren’t pointed at me, they were aimed at the world and he had every right to be mad about what happened to us and how we were both so abandoned and adrift. But part of me wanted to be mad, too. I didn’t like having to be the grown-up.
Still, I wasn’t about to ever listen to Simon, or take any advice from him for that matter, when it came to a girl.
The music on the radio faded to nothing but epileptic sparks of static.
In the evening, before we came within five miles of Tucumcari, Mitch pulled the Lincoln off the dirt road, following another weed-grown track at a gray-rotted sign that read DRINKWATER FLATS. That’s when Mitch told us that we would spend the night there and go get some gas and food in town the next morning.
“How many letters in ‘Drinkwater Flats’?” Simon blurted out. I could tell he was counting, chewing his lip and rolling out his fingers on his lap, and Mitch instantly said, “Fifteen. Too easy.”
Lilly laughed as Mitch slowed the car and parked it. “I told you.”
Drinkwater Flats was a wide clearing in the brush at the base of a steep-sided mountain that seemed to be nothing more than three enormous red boulders tossed together in some ancient calamity. Mitch had stopped the car alongside the black mouth of a well made from a circle of stones piled about two feet high in most places. The sun was gone, the sky, cloudless, dimming above our heads as the first stars appeared.
“I want to see if there’s any water in there,” Mitch said. “The car could probably use some.”
He opened the Lincoln’s trunk and pulled out a coil of yellow rope. I followed beside him, and saw that the inside of the trunk was packed with suitcases and a cardboard shoe box sealed with masking tape.
“Can I get our pack?” I said. “I want to put my shirt on.”
Mitch looked at me. Simon had gone off to the edge of the clearing, turned away. He was peeing in the bushes.
“You know, that war’s a stupid thing,” Mitch said, handing our pack over to me.
“I know.”
“I hope you and your brother find what you’re looking for.”
In the entire course of time that I knew Mitch, that was the only thing he ever said to me that sounded close to being human. I know that now.
And for just a moment I thought Mitch was being sincere, that he really cared about me and Simon. But it was only just a moment, because I already had this nagging sense that Mitch was dangerous. And he had eyes like a statue’s; like nothing that ever passed before them would really make him care about anything, or have feelings for anyone.
At least, that’s what I saw when I looked at him.
“We have a canteen in the pack. You could use it.”
“Good. I was thinking about tying Piss-kid over there onto the rope and lowering him down.”
Mitch smiled, big dirty teeth. I didn’t know if he was joking or not.
Simon came back, buttoning his jeans.
“Let’s see what we have left to eat,” Lilly said.
“Can I have another cigarette?” Simon asked.
“Sure, handsome.”
I shook my head and rolled my eyes as Simon casually took a cigarette from Lilly.
The water in the well was good and cool. Once Mitch had filled the Lincoln’s radiator, I took the canteen after him and drank, a little repulsed at sharing it with him. Simon and Lilly stood at the edge of darkness, the orange eyes of their cigarette tips winking in the nighttime, close together as the two whispered to each other.
I tried to guess at what it was that brought her along on this ride through the desert with Mitch, but everything I imagined didn’t make sense. I could feel, in the way she talked and looked at him, the way she’d slide away an inch or two on that seat if Mitch looked at her or said anything, that there was something about him that she didn’t trust, either; that she was keeping her distance. But it seemed like she was counting on him for something, too.
I wanted to ask her.
I wanted to talk to her so bad. But I just watched those fireflies of cigarette ends off in the distance.
There was no moon, no light, no sound out there on the flats, and the stars were thick and crowded splatters of white. The four of us sat on the edge of the well and ate, and Mitch found a Mexican radio station that broadcast only at night. It played “American Woman
,” and Mitch sang along, but kept changing the words to “American Lilly,” and Lilly laughed and told him to quit it, but I don’t think she meant it.
Mitch and Simon had taken Don Quixote out of the backseat, and he stood, like a guard, at the side of the Lincoln, his metal just catching the dimmest reflections from the night.
I gulped and looked at the girl.
“So who are you running away from?” I asked.
“Oh man!” Mitch laughed. “Everyone is after me and Lilly.”
“Why?” I asked. “Is that car stolen or something?”
“That’s funny,” Mitch said, but I could see, even in the dark, he wasn’t smiling when I asked it.
“That’s Mitch’s daddy’s car,” Lilly said. “He didn’t exactly say Mitch could take it, but it’s not exactly stolen. Mitch is just a spoiled rich boy, aren’t you, Mitch?”
Mitch’s eyes were cold. And he was looking at me when he said, “Lilly has a thing for poor boys, don’t you, Lilly?”
Lilly shifted and looked away from Mitch, saying, “Jonah. That’s quite a name.”
I sighed.
“I suppose there will be all kinds of hell to pay if we don’t get you all the way to Nineveh,” Mitch said, twisting his mouth into a grin. His eyes still looked dead, still watched me.
I was sick of all the Bible stories, anyway, and how many times people would make the belly-of-the-whale jokes to me like I’d never heard them before.
“I don’t think you have anything to worry about, Mitch,” I said. “And besides . . .” But I didn’t finish what I was thinking to say, that they’d probably end up throwing me overboard.
Simon cleared his throat. “Is she your wife?”
“That’s even funnier,” Mitch said. “Lilly? She doesn’t belong to anyone. And good luck to anyone who catches her. She’s pregnant, besides.”
Lilly didn’t say anything.
I looked at her. I guess I’d never really known a girl who was about my age and pregnant, too. I could see by her face that what Mitch said was true, and that it made her sad, too. And I felt sorry for her and wondered, again, why she’d ever gotten into that car with him in the first place.