“Nothing.” Mitch laughed and he tossed the ring over his shoulder, sending it flying back on the wind to tumble downward against the grainy surface of the highway.
And I knew what Mitch was going to do.
“Please don’t give him a beer,” I said.
“You need to ease up,” Mitch said coldly, and I could hear him rustling in the bag again. “Do you want a beer, Simon?”
“Cool.”
“That’s my man.” Mitch laughed. I heard the sound of him opening a second can.
“What if we get pulled over by the police?” I asked.
“We won’t,” Mitch said, “trust me. Do you trust me, Jonah?”
I didn’t say anything. Of course I didn’t.
Mitch waited, a silent minute that seemed so long on that highway, and then he said, “Do you trust me, Lilly?”
“Sure.” She smiled at me, like she was trying to get me to come along. I wished I could figure her out. She had to know that Mitch was poison, but I got the feeling that she just drank it all in and teased him because she didn’t care the least bit about herself.
I looked away from her.
Mitch said, “Do you trust me, Don?”
“Don says, ‘Groovy,’ ” Lilly answered.
“Do you trust me, Simon?”
Simon took a swig from the beer, and then another. And he said, “Yes.”
“So there. See? You’re outvoted, Jonah. Four to one, baby. And, after all, this is a democracy. The people have spoken. The people trust Mitch.”
And Mitch finished his beer and tossed the can out over the back of the Lincoln.
“Hey, Jonah, turn on the radio, man,” Mitch said, opening another beer.
I reached for the dashboard, but swerved the Lincoln onto the shoulder and then overcorrected. Mitch and Simon spilled their beers on their laps.
“I’ll do it,” Lilly said.
I sighed, tightening my grip on the wheel. I felt so lost and out of control. In front of her, I felt like such an idiot.
“It’s okay,” Lilly said, and rubbed my leg. “It’s been a tough day. Let’s just forget about it and have a good time.”
“Yeah,” Mitch said.
Lilly fumbled at the radio’s knob until she found a station playing “Let It Bleed” and stopped it there as soon as Mitch started singing along.
And I tried to stay calm and watch the road and think of a way to save myself and my brother; and maybe Lilly, too.
Mitch ducked behind the seat to get down out of the wind. He began rolling a joint. When he popped back up, he held his arm over the front seat and waved the crooked, stubby cigarette in the air between Lilly and me, saying, “Look what I got.”
And I felt my stomach twist and chest tighten. I heard Mitch flicking that lighter. It wasn’t because our dad had gotten himself so messed up by drugs, not exactly; and it wasn’t that I’d never been around someone who was smoking pot, but it was just something that Simon and I didn’t do.
“Not me,” I said.
“That’s okay, man, that’s okay,” Mitch said, leaning back. “Just keep driving. And turn up the radio.”
“It’s up all the way,” Lilly said.
“I love this car,” Mitch said.
“Where’d you get it?” I asked, shifting and straining to see in the small mirror at the top of the windshield, and the smaller round one on the door, anything that might show me what Simon was doing back there.
“Ask Lilly.”
Lilly just turned away, pretending to look out at the passing blur of red and yellow desert.
Even in the open car on that blisteringly hot afternoon, I could smell the ropey smoke from the joint when Mitch finally got it to burn, and dreaded him offering it to Simon. I bit my cheek as hard as I could to not say anything. I felt so terrible for what I had done to my brother, and I wanted so desperately to get him out of there that I felt sick.
So when I heard Simon say, “No thanks, man. But I’ll have a cigarette,” and Mitch reply, “It’s cool, Simon,” I felt my shoulders loosen and I could breathe again.
“I’ll have a hit,” Lilly said, reaching over to Mitch.
“That’s my girl,” Mitch said. “Ahh . . . the world is perfect.”
“I guess it is,” I said.
Mitch lay his head back and stared straight up into the sky. “I’m floating.”
I stared down the road. “Sometimes I dream about floating.”
“Can’t do nothing about gravity,” Mitch said, and laughed as Lilly handed the joint back over the seat.
The radio played “Run Through the Jungle.” I didn’t like the song. It sounded too much like the things I’d read in Matthew’s letters, and I was thankful when we lost the signal again and Lilly couldn’t find another station.
Simon drank a second beer.
My hands were sweating, but I couldn’t loosen their grip on the wheel. This was the farthest we’d ever been from home, the fastest we’d ever gone, and I felt so incredibly small on the road. The desert seemed so big, and I realized that until we’d gotten in that car with Mitch and Lilly, there was almost nothing else in our lives or world besides just me and Simon.
The morning wore on to the afternoon on that lonely and quiet road, overly decorated with signs hoping to attract carloads of travelers to roadside curio shops selling pecan rolls and Indian souvenirs. Black clouds billowed above the flat heat of the land, the road sending up blurry snakes in the distance. It looked like rain coming. I was getting tired at the wheel, and I watched in the rearview mirror as Mitch started to fall asleep, then jerked his head up suddenly, shook it clear, and unbuttoned his shirt and took it off.
“That air feels good,” Mitch said, and fumbled with his pants, removing them and waving them out like a blue flag. He sat there in the backseat completely naked.
“Oh brother,” I sighed.
Lilly laughed and slapped her hand down on the top of the seat.
“Don’t be a prude, Jonah,” she said.
“Let the sunshine in,” Mitch chuckled. “Ahh . . .” and he stretched his arms out over the folded top of the cream convertible canvas so that he was hugging Don Quixote.
A truck passed us, honking twice at the foolish Mitch.
Simon was drunk. He could see me watching him in the car’s mirror; he held the meteorite up between us to hide his eyes from me. But I saw him bend forward, taking off his moccasins and pants, heard him giggle when he put his bare feet up against the back of my seat, and touched my head with his toes.
“Put your clothes on, Simon,” I said. I felt myself getting angry again, tried fighting against it.
“No.”
“My brother, Simon!” Mitch shouted and tousled Simon’s hair, smiling his big yellow teeth.
“Take your clothes off, Lilly,” Mitch said.
Lilly looked at me, gently lifting her blouse, a slight smile on her tight lips, and I just glared at her and quickly turned my attention back to the road. This was ridiculous.
“Jonah doesn’t want me to.”
“You’re no fun, Jonah,” Mitch called out.
Lilly turned around and looked at the two of them in the backseat, grinning. Simon made no movement to cover himself. He never was very shy about anything.
“Put your clothes back on, Simon,” I repeated.
“They stink. They smell like you,” Simon said.
“You’re acting like a damned hippie,” I said.
“What’s wrong with that?” Mitch laughed.
“I like hippies,” Lilly said, still turned back, eyes shifting from Mitch to Simon, to the road receding behind them.
“You going to beat me up again, Jonah?” Simon asked.
“No. I said I was sorry.”
Simon bent forward and lit another cigarette.
“I have a black eye.”
“I know,” I said. “You want to hit me back?”
Simon picked up the meteorite, reflecting the sun. “Not right now.”
<
br /> And I pulled my head away when Simon put his foot over the top of the seat and brushed my ear with it.
I scowled. Simon and Mitch began laughing, and I thought, I’ve got to find a way to get that gun out of the pack.
I looked at Lilly and she pulled her glasses down, smiling, and winked at me.
I stared down the road.
“Where are you going?” I said to her.
“I told you. To California.”
She was playing with me, I was sure. I glanced back to see if Mitch was listening. His head hung over the side of the car, drugged, tuned out to the blur of the desert.
I whispered, “I’d think there’d be a better way for you to get there.”
“Just let me know when you find one, Jonah.”
Jonah. She said it like it meant something to her, and it almost sounded good to me. For all I had convinced myself that Lilly didn’t seem to care about anything, I found myself hoping that maybe she could.
So we followed the road into the stretching shadows of the afternoon. I thought we were lost. Mitch told me to turn north and off of the main highway, into empty and vast Indian lands, and I was relieved when the first stinging drops of rain fell from the sky. Within moments we were caught in a deluge. Mitch and Simon struggled back into their clothes, Simon leaving the bloody shirt on the seat beside him.
I fumbled to find the controls for the windshield wipers, thinking how ridiculous it was to worry about such a thing in an open convertible. We were all completely soaked in less than a minute.
“Can we put the top up?” I asked.
“Don’s too tall,” Mitch said.
The water ran in small streams down the metal man, the feathers on his war bonnet flattening and streaking their artificial tinting.
I watched Simon as he wiped the cool rainwater into his face. He looked sober now in the roar of that dark storm.
“We need to find a place to stop,” Lilly said.
But I could hardly see the road in front of me, the rain was so thick and the sky had gone so black, and I thought about crashing the car off the road so we could get away, but couldn’t make myself do it. Finally, south of Everett, Mitch told me to turn into an isolated spot beneath a giant fiberglass tepee, a motel called the Palms, a gathering of squat stucco cabins made up to look like adobe dwellings, dwarfed by a green neon sign with a palm tree. There were no palms around the place at all. I pulled the car into the muddy parking lot and Mitch asked Simon to come into the office with him, and told us that we would get a room here.
So Lilly and I sat out in the car, in the rain, with the metal man behind us, his mask turning to a gray pulp and oozing down from the hammered tin beard on his chin. Lilly took off her wet glasses and folded them into her purse. I looked at her, and I could see her breasts clearly through the soaked gauze blouse she wore, so I turned away and stared at the motel office.
“Why are you and Mitch doing this, Lilly?” I asked.
“Because Mitch is a nice guy,” she said. She said it like she didn’t understand what I was talking about.
“That’s not what I mean,” I said. “Back there. At the rest stop, Mitch told me he would kill my brother if I didn’t get back in the car.”
“Oh,” she said. “Why don’t we stand under there?”
And now I could see a more serious look in her eyes. She didn’t blink at all. She just looked right into my eyes and I felt like I had to look away, but I couldn’t.
She pointed toward the overhanging eaves in the front of the office. I opened my door as a flash of light spit my shadow down across the puddled ground and a thunderous boom sucked the air away.
Under the overhang, Lilly pulled her blouse away from her skin, looking down, and said, “I’m getting fat. Does it show much?”
She pivoted to the side and I looked at her, calmly, seeing the fabric clinging to her, the small bubbles of air trapped between it and her skin.
“No,” I said. “Are you going to talk to me?”
“I guess we did some pretty bad things, Jonah. Me and Mitch.”
“Worse than stealing that car?”
She tried to giggle, but it just kind of stuck in her throat; then she became suddenly serious. “Yes.”
And I didn’t know what to think. The rain clapped down like artificial applause from the uneven porch. I stood mystified by the girl, unable to take my eyes from her, watching the droplets of water collect and tumble down from the strands of hair that fell over her shoulders, pasting her transparent blouse against her skin.
Embarrassed, I looked down at my wet feet.
“Have you ever kissed a girl, Jonah?”
I couldn’t look at her. I felt like I was stuck on top of the biggest Ferris wheel in the world.
“Why?”
“I bet you never have,” Lilly teased.
And I started to say something, but only managed to clear my tightening throat.
Lilly pressed up against me and raised her mouth to mine, lifting my head as she wrapped her arms around me. At first I backed away. It was instinct. Of course I’d never kissed a girl before, and she was so incredibly beautiful that it terrified me and buckled my knees. I put my hands in her hair and pulled her tightly against me.
It was what I wanted to do ever since I saw her floating past me in that car. And at the same time, I felt this tremendous rush of fear because I knew that the only way she’d be doing this right now, right here, had to be that she was going to make me do something bad, something stupid. I tried to think about Simon, but her mouth felt so good that I just wouldn’t listen to anything sensible my brain was trying to tell me.
“I bet you never have,” Lilly said again.
I let her go. I looked away, toward the door of the office.
I felt her brush up against me from behind. She wrapped her arms around my waist and pressed herself into me. I tried to look away, watching the door across the curtains of rain.
Why was I letting her do this?
I spun around in her grasp and we kissed again, this time harder.
“Mitch is coming. He’ll kill us,” I said. I pushed her away from me.
“I know,” she said.
I pulled the wet locks of hair back from my face and rubbed the back of my neck, still unable to take my eyes from her, watching the door beyond.
“Why did you stop for us?”
“Silly,” she smiled. “Your brother had his thumb out. And you’re both so pretty and pathetic. I just wouldn’t let Mitch drive off. He was going to, you know. Now I guess it doesn’t matter, does it? Oooh!” And Lilly pushed her fingers in at her side, just above the waist of her jeans. “Sometimes this thing really hurts me. Do you think that’s normal?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Well, when we get to California, that’s the first thing I’m going to do. Get rid of it.”
“You are?”
“That’s the only reason I’d let him drive me there, Jonah.”
“Is it his?”
“No.”
“Lilly? You wouldn’t let him hurt Simon, would you?”
She bit at a strand of her wet hair, then wiped her face with her palm. “I don’t think I could stop Mitch from doing what he decides to do.”
The clattering of the rain was so loud.
I looked back at the car.
Maybe I had been pretending that things weren’t really as bad as they were. But I looked at Lilly and saw that she was scared, and that terrified me.
The door of the office swung open, and they came out, Mitch with his arm around my brother’s shoulders, dangling a brass key with an orange plastic fob in the shape of a palm tree hanging from it.
palms
Dear Brother Jones,
I haven’t gotten any mail from you in over three weeks. I know you’re writing, but I’m just not getting it. I’m trying to not let it get me down, though.
The reason I am printing this letter is so it would take up more time. I don’t k
now what else to do anyway.
You know what happened? Yesterday one of the enlisted men got into a fight with Scotty and he really flipped out. He went and got his .45 and was looking to kill Scotty and he almost shot the platoon leader before he could get the guy to put the gun away. The guy with the gun ended up going behind the supply building and shooting himself. He didn’t die, though, they just sent him away to someplace, I don’t know.
If you think I’m going nuts here, you’re right. We all do.
I am trying to arrange my R and R now. I can go to Sydney, Australia, for just a couple hundred bucks. And Jones, Scotty knows people who can get me back to the States from there and I won’t have to come back here. Sometimes, honestly, I think I’d rather be shot for deserting than have to spend another minute here. Got to change the subject, man, that’s making me want to cry.
When I came here from Phu Bai I rode in a truck and had my gear in the back, and while we were going through Da Nang, a gook teenager jumped in and stole my duffle bag that had all my clothes in it, even the sweatshirts you sent me last Christmas. These people are really starting to get to me. Some of the GIs here will shoot kids for doing that stuff. I think they ought to shoot them more often. Sorry for saying that, ’cause they are just kids and you and Simon just don’t know how lucky you are for not being born in a place like this.
I hope you’re not fighting all the time with Simon. I’m going to write a letter to Mother and ask her if you are. I guess there are always going to be forces that pull brothers apart that you just can’t do anything about, like this war. But the things you can do something about, you shouldn’t let them pull us down. Over here, there’s nothing you can do about it so you might as well deal with it. I guess in a perfect world, nothing like that ever is going to happen and in a perfect world nothing ever pulls a brother away from his brother. Do you know what I mean? Subject change.
Last night the VC dropped about 20 mortars in on us. I could see the flash where they were coming from, they were so close. Three of our guys got wounded pretty bad, then their position just lit up in a flash, so I think we got the VC who were shooting. Anyway, they stopped.
It’s been raining here nonstop for about 2 weeks.
I feel better now.