by Andrew Smith
I squeezed the gun tightly in my hand, bracing my left palm flat against the ground, ready to launch myself out from our cover toward the trailer.
“Jonah!” Simon gasped. He grabbed my shoulder and pointed off at the rust-colored rock face towering up behind the trailer.
A crooked black figure was making its way up the side of the mesa, ascending, arms stretched out, and clutching at rock holds.
We all saw him.
Mitch.
I squinted, focusing my eyes.
“He’s all covered in black.”
“I don’t think he saw us yet,” Simon said.
“Yet?” Dalton said. “We gotta get out of here.”
I took a few short, deep breaths. “You ready to run faster this time?”
Simon swallowed, but I could tell his mouth had gone dry. He kept his eyes fixed on Mitch as he climbed, sometimes stumbling, higher up the cliff’s face.
I looked at Dalton and Simon. I held the gun up, pointed at the mesa, and nodded toward the trailer’s porch.
“Let’s go.”
We burst forward from the narrow shade, dashing out across the open space between the truck and whatever safety there could be at Walker’s little trailer.
Simon’s feet slipped out from under him and he fell forward, sprawling out on his belly in the dirt. Dalton and I were in front, and we heard him go down. We both stopped running. I pushed Dalton’s back, shoving him toward the trailer, and said, “Go!”
Then I turned around and saw my brother on the ground.
“Simon!”
I grabbed Simon by the back of his tee shirt and jerked him back up onto his feet, pulling him along as we both turned and sprinted forward. It felt like we were falling the whole way.
That’s when Mitch noticed us.
He was barely holding on to the side of the steep wall he’d been climbing, but he pivoted around and watched Simon and me as we stumbled toward Walker’s trailer. I thought it looked like he was smiling, too. Maybe I was just crazy and scared at the time, I don’t know. But I did see him swing his arm out, pointing that chrome pistol I’d seen in the Lincoln’s glove box right at us.
I twisted my fingers into Simon’s shirt and tugged him toward the steps that led up to the door on the trailer. Dalton was already there. And I was suddenly angry, mad at Simon for having fallen down, for coming along with me to get the pack in the first place, for agreeing to leave Los Rogues and not fighting me into staying home when our mother left us, for never, never doing anything the easy way. And for being right about Lilly, too—that’s what bothered me the most, because I knew all along how stupid I was being, and I wouldn’t listen to him and I knew now that Simon loved me.
Mitch didn’t shoot.
Dalton pushed the door open.
Walker stood beside the cot, watching us. I put the gun on the floor and let the pack slip down from my shoulder. I put my hand on Simon’s head and looked at him, trying to see if he’d been shot because I couldn’t figure out why he’d fallen down like he did.
“Are you okay?”
“My hands got scraped,” Simon said, holding out his palms so I could see the bits of gravel that clung there next to those red marks on his wrists.
“I thought you got shot or something.” I brushed Simon’s shirt flat where I had been tugging on it.
“I thought both of you did,” Dalton said.
Walker was standing there, in the middle of the floor, motionless and silent, just staring at me.
“Did you see my dog anywhere?”
We didn’t answer. I felt sorry for him.
Walker sighed.
“We saw Mitch,” Simon said.
“He’s gone up on the side of the mesa,” I said. “He’s behind us now.”
Walker didn’t say anything. Something was wrong.
He turned his head back at where Lilly lay on the cot.
“She stopped breathing,” Walker said.
I didn’t get it.
Then I looked at her. She was covered with the blanket. It was over her face. Just her bare feet stuck out at the bottom of the cot. I looked back at the Indian.
“What?”
“She stopped breathing, boy,” Walker repeated.
I felt like I’d been slugged in the stomach.
“What?”
I looked at Dalton and Simon. When I did, they both turned their eyes away.
I moved to the side of the bed, dropping to my knees and shakily pulling back the covers that hid her face.
I had never seen a dead person before. And I knew Lilly was dead as soon as I saw her. I almost didn’t recognize her. She looked empty, gone.
She was gone.
I brushed her hair back softly with my palm, her skin already cold and waxy.
“I’m sorry, Lilly,” I said, and I felt the first slick tear streak like that meteor, arcing down, heavy, trailing a line down to my chin.
I pulled the blanket away from her and placed my hand on her stiff belly. I knocked Simon’s meteorite down to the floor by my knee. I couldn’t believe things like this ever really happened, even if I knew they did. But it was just like all those times I’d heard warnings in my own head about things, about Lilly, and I knew about the bad things even if I chose to ignore them. I lifted her shirt and put my ear down against her pale skin, taut and unyielding, trying to listen for anything that might make me understand what had happened, holding my breath, straining to hear the rhythm of her body, of blood, the drum drum of what it was that had killed her, anything at all contained beneath that cool and silent place.
Nothing.
I closed my eyes.
I began shaking.
“What do we do now?” Simon whispered.
Walker looked down at the gun I had dropped to the floor and said, “I better go put that window back in.”
“I’m sorry, Jonah,” Dalton said.
I held my eyes shut and pressed my face into Lilly’s belly.
“It’s my fault. It’s my fault.”
I began to cry, and I got angry for doing it. After all Simon and I had been through since we left home, I just didn’t want to cry now. But I couldn’t help myself. I felt so sorry for Lilly, for how she’d suffered. And I felt guilty for what I’d done with her, and foolish for how I just let it happen.
And the Indian turned away and left Simon and Dalton standing there, just watching me quietly in the dim of that trailer.
He stood back, waiting, then Simon lowered himself beside me and picked up his meteorite, squeezing it so tightly in his fist. I looked at him, but I couldn’t say anything. And I wanted to tell him I was so sorry for all the terrible things I’d put him through.
But I just couldn’t say the words.
Simon rubbed my head and put his arm around my shoulders. He put his face right up to my ear and whispered.
“Jonah?”
I shuddered.
“Jonah?” Simon whispered again and pulled my shoulders tight against his chest.
“I’m sorry, Jonah.”
“So am I.”
“She loved you. She told me she did. That makes it true.”
And I knew Simon tried plenty of times to make me see things clearly, but I was so selfish and stupid, absorbed by my wanting things to be like they weren’t, that I wouldn’t ever listen to him, even if I wanted to now.
Simon kissed me on the side of my head.
“I’m sorry, Jonah. I love you, brother. You know. No matter what.”
Dalton kneeled beside us and put his hand on my shoulder.
I pictured the first time we saw the girl, breezing past us in that Lincoln, blond hair whirling around her, her glasses tipped down, her smile, the stroke of her fingers. The teasing.
Simon tumbled the meteorite around in the sweat of his hand. I wondered what it would be like to look down at the earth, to fall, to burn brilliantly in the air like the image of the girl who passed by, kicking back dust like cosmic ash, and could she see that, now;
was she up there above us?
I wondered.
We closed our eyes.
All hell and chaos erupted before either one of us opened his eyes again.
(matthew)
los rogues
They drove into Los Rogues in a pale green Ford station wagon, on a sweltering and still afternoon, the two of them making nervous conversation and joking about how none of the streets had names or how they all seemed to have the same name. The passenger tried to read off the directions written on the back of an envelope from the county sheriff’s, watching, waiting, seeing just how long that curl of dangling ash on the driver’s cigarette would get before giving in and tumbling down onto his lap.
They had driven around the same dirt-road loop twice, and the lieutenant colonel on the passenger side, frustrated, flipped the envelope over the top of the seat to land beside the carefully packed box of belongings they had carried with them since they started their drive at three that morning.
“I think that’s the place there,” he said.
Stevens turned his head to see if that really was a house tucked in back there behind those bent and scarred cottonwoods, and the lieutenant colonel nearly exhaled in relief when he saw that finger of ash finally break free and fall onto Stevens’ Class A pants.
“I knew that was going to happen.”
“Damn,” Stevens said, and swiped at the white-gray smear on his leg. “You think that’s it?”
“Yeah.”
“I hate being wrong.”
“I’d rather be wrong than lost,” the colonel said.
Stevens twisted the wheel around and drove the car forward up the rutted drive to the nearly hidden shack, grinding the butt of his cigarette against the lip of the filled ashtray.
“I don’t know what that means,” Stevens said. “If you’re wrong, then you’ve got to be lost. Right?”
“Not if you convince yourself that you’re right. If you admit you’re lost, you’ve given up.”
“If you say so, Colonel.” Stevens stopped the car and turned off the motor, bending forward at the wheel and looking out at the small and crumbling house. “I don’t think anyone lives here. So which are we . . . wrong or lost?”
The colonel opened his door and put a foot down on the dirt.
“Neither one, I’ll bet.” He stood up and stretched his back, damp with sweat, and, as he pulled his jacket from the wire hanger over the back door’s window, said, “Get the box, Stevens. I want to get out of here as quick as we can.”
The men, in their uniforms and hats, their perfect shoes, walked across the narrow dirt strip that was front yard to the shack, the colonel holding a thin leather folder, Stevens carrying the box, sealed with tape, an ID strip glued crookedly over the top. They stood on the porch, the colonel half-expecting the deck to give way under their weight. He looked at the torn piece of cardboard tucked into the corner of a broken window, taped with yellowed cellophane that had become some sort of death trap to hordes of dried insects, petrified in the place of their final struggle.
“This is it,” he said, almost in a whisper. “Look.”
He pointed at a smeared handwritten card pushed into a metal enclosure on the empty black slot mailbox hanging beside the door.
“It says ‘Vickers’ on it,” the colonel said.
“Okay,” Stevens conceded. “Who in America doesn’t have a telephone in their home in 1970, anyway?”
“Never had a phone in my house when I was a kid.”
Stevens held the box level, bringing his knee up so he could free the hand that knocked on the frame of the warped screen door.
They listened quietly, but heard no sound from inside the house.
They waited.
“I don’t think there’s anyone here,” Stevens said, kicking his feet at the ancient rotting leaves scattered through the dust on the planks of the porch. “It looks abandoned. How much family did he have, anyway?”
The colonel opened his folder and thumbed through the pages inside.
“His address is reported here. He lived with a mother and two younger brothers—Jonah and Simon. From their DOBs, it looks like the older one is just about seventeen and the younger one’s fourteen. They have a father incarcerated at Yuma.”
“Incarcerated? For what?”
“It doesn’t say.”
Stevens put the box down at his feet and sighed.
“Are we going to have to drive to Yuma?”
The colonel snapped his folder shut.
“No. Try the door.”
Stevens pulled the screen forward and it fell, crookedly tilting from the only loose screw in its failing upper hinge, the spring catch-arm swinging downward and clanking against the peeling door.
“Oh, great.”
He knocked, loudly, against the front door.
“Maybe they’re just sleeping,” the colonel offered.
Stevens felt the perspiration spreading beneath his arms.
“Who sleeps on days like this?”
“What else would you do?”
“In this place?” Stevens said, “Enlist, I guess.”
The colonel pushed his way past Stevens and wrapped his hand around the wobbling, spotted brass knob.
“Not by the book,” he said. “But I’ve got better things to do.”
“I didn’t know there was a book, sir.”
“There’s not.”
The door swung open at the colonel’s nudge and the men just stood there.
“They left it unlocked,” the colonel said.
“I don’t imagine there’s too much to keep in, or too much to keep out, either way.”
“Hello?” the colonel called out. “Mrs. Vickers? Is anyone home?”
Nothing.
“What do you think we should do?” Stevens asked.
The colonel answered by stepping through the doorway and into the dark room. The windows were covered with ragged curtains; the sun, stretching low through the treetops on the hill, stabbed the smallest spears of amber light through the fraying gaps in the draperies.
“Hello?” he called out again.
The colonel walked forward into the center of the small front room, Stevens following behind and flicking at a light switch that produced nothing more than a clicking sound.
Flick.
“No electricity,” Stevens said. “Maybe they’ve moved.”
“Doesn’t seem right. Everything is still here,” the colonel said, moving toward a darkened hallway at the back of the room, while Stevens followed.
The colonel was right, Stevens thought. In the gray light of that cramped small room, he could see the furnishings that meant someone had been living there: an RCA television with bent rabbit ears ribboned at their tips with twisted aluminum foil, a sofa and chair, a scratched dinner table with dirty plates and glasses, one of them with an inch of water in it, and clumps of wadded, discarded clothing balled-up against the corners of the floor, looking like pale sleeping cats in the dimness.
The colonel tried the faucet at the rusted and filthy sink in the kitchen. No water came.
“Nothing’s on in here,” he said. “I think they left, but probably not too long ago. There’s still some water in that glass on the table.”
“I saw that,” Stevens said. “Do you think it would be okay if I had a cigarette, sir?”
“Sure. I’ll have one, too.”
The men smoked in the kitchen, Stevens flicking his ashes into the sink and the colonel just letting his fall to the spotted and blistered linoleum. The colonel bit the inside of his lip. He placed his folder down on the counter, scooting smeared silverware across the tiles as he did, and began opening the cabinet doors.
Stevens watched him while he smoked.
“There’s no food or anything in here,” the colonel said. “It’s like they just ran out of everything.”
Stevens pulled open the latch on the yellowed refrigerator and nearly fell backwards from the damp corpselike stench that exhaled out a
t him. Gagging, he covered his mouth with his hand, the cigarette pinched between his fingers, and slammed the door shut as he turned away.
He could hear the colonel peeing in the bathroom at the back of the small shack, heard the useless lifting of the valve and the gurgling suction as the colonel flushed but no water came. Stevens walked back through the hallway, peering into the small bathroom, its mirrorless wall, the dingy bathtub without a shower curtain, the colonel’s soggy cigarette butt lying crooked in the yellow fluid that just covered the bottom of the toilet bowl, stained pink with a line where the water level had once been. Stevens wanted the man to just admit that they had done all they could, that they could go home now, but the colonel seemed to enjoy examining this place where a soldier had lived once, and so Stevens kept quiet.
He lit another cigarette.
“Little wonder why they left,” the colonel said.
“Or why the boy enlisted,” Stevens answered. He inhaled, standing behind the colonel where the hallway ended at two opened bedrooms.
“I guess we got off easy today,” the colonel said.
Stevens sighed in relief. It sounded like the colonel was getting ready to admit they were lost, or wrong; either way it meant they could go home soon.
“It never gets easy, telling someone their boy’s dead,” Stevens said.
“He killed himself,” the colonel answered. “That’s even worse.”
“I know.”
The colonel looked down at his hands.
“Where’d I put my folder?”
“You left it in the kitchen.”
“Hanged himself.”
“I know.”
“That’s the tough one.”
“Yeah.”
“ ’Cause no one ever knows why that happens.”
“Yeah.”
“I guess this is the mother’s room.”
Stevens looked past the colonel into the room, dark and square, everything tidy, the bed made up cleanly, not the smallest wrinkle on its covers. A rack of clothes hung in an open closet.
“It looks like they mean to come back. Or, at least, she does,” Stevens said.
The colonel turned around and entered the other bedroom. The floor was scattered, strewn with clothes and paper. The one small bed sat low against the wall, its covers trailing off onto the floor, two sweat-yellowed pillows, still indented from the heads that had slept on them, flattened, at opposite ends of the mattress.