In the Path of Falling Objects Read Free Page B

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