In the Path of Falling Objects Read Online Free Page A

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, sothey 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