In the Path of Falling Objects by Smith Andrew

Author:Smith, Andrew [Smith, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781429954839
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends
Published: 2009-09-29T00:00:00+00:00

Before they left the township, Mitch filled the Lincoln’s gas tank and bought some food and drinks from a liquor store. He asked Simon and Lilly to come inside with him, and Simon dreaded that he might have to watch Mitch kill someone just because Mitch thought it felt like a carnival ride. Simon was relieved that the only thing he had to put up with was Mitch tearing a page from a magazine and asking Simon to hide it under his shirt. The page turned out to be a black-and-white photograph of a soldier’s face, and large enough that when Mitch, Lilly, and Simon returned to the Lincoln, Mitch fixed the picture with black electrical tape right over the face of Don Quixote, saying, “Now that looks good. He looks real mean.”

Mitch drove into Arizona, through a forgotten area east of Kayenta, where the road cut straight through a desert unmarked by any signs of men. The highway stretched like an asphalt streambed following an upward-sloping ridge of huge and seamless mountains that turned from gold to red in the light of the evening, the stone gapping unevenly, like Mitch’s teeth. The Lincoln began to wheeze and sputter.

The car was dying.

“Damn!” Mitch slapped the steering wheel.

“What’s wrong?” Lilly said.

“I don’t know,” Mitch answered. “I don’t know anything about cars.”

Simon fumbled with that meteorite in his lap.

It was just like a horse falling dead beneath them.

He didn’t say anything. He didn’t know if the car’s dying was a good or bad thing.

The Lincoln jerked and seized as Mitch guided it off the road and onto the moonlike surface of the desert. When the Lincoln finally expired, wheels half-buried in the dry soil, smoke billowing out from both sides of the undercarriage, it ended up wedged inside a small stand of hopseed brush that swallowed them up, making the car nearly invisible from the road.

Mitch hammered his fist into the steering wheel again, and just sat there as white steaming clouds coughed skyward from the Lincoln’s engine. Simon looked back at Lilly. He wanted to tell her this was it, but he said nothing, and he followed the white puffs upward with his eyes into the dimming sky. It looked like they were sending smoke signals into the quiet evening.

Simon lit a cigarette.

“Looks like we’re spending the night in the desert again,” Mitch said.

“It’s cool,” Simon said, swinging his door open. “But, Mitch . . .”

“You don’t have to ask me, Simon. I won’t do it. I promised.”

The Lincoln’s engine began ticking and cracking.

“Let’s unload,” Mitch said. “This thing smells like it might burn.”

Lilly was sick again. She sat down, away from the smoking car, as Mitch and Simon began unpacking it. Simon put his black rock in his pocket and helped Mitch lift Don Quixote from the backseat. They stood him beside Lilly, Mitch’s bags of groceries at his feet, turned so that he was almost watching them.

The sun had vanished behind the western mountains; there were no sounds from the highway.

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