In the Path of Falling Objects - Softcover

Smith, Andrew

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312659296 ISBN 13: 9780312659295

Verlag: SQUARE FISH, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

Two brothers leave home looking for their father, and find themselves hitching a ride with a violent killer – here is a road trip from hell.

Jonah and his younger brother, Simon, are on their own. They set out to find what's left of their family, carrying between them ten dollars, a backpack full of dirty clothes, a notebook, and a stack of letters from their brother, who is serving a tour in Vietnam. And soon into their journey, they have a ride. With a man and a beautiful girl who may be in love with Jonah. Or Simon. Or both of them.

The man is crazy. The girl is desperate. This violent ride is only just beginning. And it will leave the brothers taking cover from hard truths about loyalty, love, and survival that crash into their lives.

One more thing: The brothers have a gun. They're going to need it.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Andrew Smith is the author of Ghost Medicine and The Marbury Lens, both of which were named American Library Association Best Books for Young Adults. In addition to writing, he teaches high school advanced placement classes and coaches rugby. He lives in Southern California with his family, in a rural location in the mountains.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

In the Path of Falling Objects

By Andrew Smith

Macmillan

Copyright © 2009 Andrew Smith
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-312-65929-5

Contents

title, 
copyright, 
dedication, 
scorpion, 
gravity, 
dumb kids, 
rule, 
map, 
driver, 
palms, 
river, 
roadhouse, 
don quixote, 
chief, 
piss-kid, 
cool, 
cruces, 
bridge, 
the fall, 
rope, 
dalton, 
pueblo, 
trust, 
walker, 
black simon, 
drum, 
meteor, 
homestead, 
paths, 
the watch, 
lilly, 
dog, 
out there, 
ascent, 
running, 
los rogues, 
hell, 
piggies, 
sounds, 
down, 
plan, 
white simon, 
evening, 
rat, 
prayer, 
hiss, 
below, 
flick, 
dark, 
poison, 
fire, 
homecoming, 
mitch, 
falling objects, 
flagstaff, 
acknowledgments, 
gofish, 

CHAPTER 1

(jonah)

scorpion

Our brother fell apart in the war.
Mother fell apart after that.
Then we had to leave.

Even in a perfect world the horse would not have carried me and my brother all the way to Arizona; it fell and died not ten miles away from our home in Los Rogues, New Mexico. And while I sat in the dirt and heat of the dusty road, looking at how my hands had been scraped when we fell, Simon, my stubborn little brother, tried to pretend he wasn't crying, but he cried anyway and pressed his face into the knees of his jeans, soaking the fraying denim with his tears for more than an hour before even looking up at me.

And I don't know what I was thinking. There was no way I could pull that dead horse out of the road, but I was so ashamed at leaving it there that I tried to anyway.

"What do you think you're going to do, Jonah?" Simon said.

And I kept pulling dumbly on the horse's leg, leaning my weight back as far as I could.

"We can't just leave it here. It's embarrassing." I could feel the sweat crawling down my face.

"No one ever comes down this road."

"Just our luck someone will today," I said.

So I jerked at my canvas pack, pinned beneath the hulk of the horse's flank, wiped my arm across my nose as I slung the pack over my shoulder, and tugged the dirty, sagging pants higher on my waist.

"We should go back home," Simon said, his throat still choked tight from the crying.

"We can't. Don't be stupid. We'll starve to death."

"I hate you, Jonah."

"So what?"

Of course I knew that Simon didn't really hate me. It's just something brothers say to brothers, sometimes. Because I always believed that Simon was my best friend. I still do believe it.

Mother and Matthew, our older brother, said we always fought when we were little, but I don't think that's true. But we did have some pretty good ones, at times, and Simon almost always ended up getting me in trouble. He'd always been good at that.

By the time Matthew was in twelfth grade, he began spending less time at home. I couldn't blame him. He'd gotten a job at the bowling alley, and he'd sometimes stay there all night, or sleep at a friend's house just to stay away. But he'd always come back, especially at times when our mother would leave Simon and me there alone. Matthew would bring us food wrapped in waxed paper from the bar at the bowling lanes. We never said it out loud, growing up, but Matthew and I understood that we were all we had, and the three of us brothers needed each other just to survive.

There's only one bed in our room, and when Matthew was home that meant Simon and I had to sleep on the floor with blankets, next to each other to stay warm. When it was real cold, we'd all three sleep in that bed. Sometimes I knew that Simon and I would lose patience with each other, too, because there's only so much you can put up with during the daytime from someone you have to sleep with every night of your life. At least, that's how I look at it.

And now Matthew was gone. Simon and I didn't talk much about where he was. The thought of losing him was more frightening than probably anything else. But we had also gotten used to his not being home, even if we'd never get used to the possibility of his not coming back. And there were things about Matthew that I knew, but never told Simon, and couldn't tell Mother because after we stopped getting letters from him, she just shut down and then she vanished.

Now our horse was dead, and I felt so lost and scared. But I didn't want Simon to know that, so I made him keep walking with me. He didn't have a choice. And he hated that.

So we walked, Simon dragging his feet in the dirt of the road, following three paces behind me. His shoes were too big and he never tied them, so his feet made this awful snoring sound wherever he went.

And I looked back only once, where the road broadened out, curving around a creek bed where cottonwoods picketed, trunk upon trunk, silver-dollar leaves clattering like teeth, but I couldn't see the horse.

"We're going to keep going anyway. I promise I will take care of you."

I knew Simon wouldn't reply, and my words sounded so strange and hollow in the quiet of the afternoon. I guess I hadn't really heard my voice in the past two weeks, or, at least, hadn't noticed it as much as I did out there on the edge of the desert. Mother had gone off with one of her men friends for Georgia, or Texas, or someplace, and Simon and I had been left behind, alone in the crumbling shack of our home.

The electricity had been gone for days.

I was sixteen that summer. My jeans were cuffed even though I was already nearly six feet tall, and where they were folded they had begun picking up dirt and twigs. They first had belonged to Matthew. The shirt I wore had been ordered from an Alden's catalogue; my brother had worn it, too, when it was new. The elbows were wearing through and I kept the sleeves rolled up, the tails tucked in tightly down inside my jeans, almost to my knees. It was too hot for flannel, anyway.

The last letter from Matthew came two months ago, at the end of the school year.

And all Matthew's letters to me were in our pack, ordered, tucked beneath the carelessly wadded clothes and the canteen of piss-warm water that tasted metallic, like it had been strained through the filth in the drain of the streaked porcelain sink basin in the kitchen. At the bottom, under our clothes, was the comp book where I drew my map, and a small pistol.

So Simon and I came down from the hills where we lived, where we had abandoned our horse, the trees thinning out to open on the vastness of the desert, the dirt road stretching in a narrowing line to disappear among the mesas in the distance, the stream becoming nothing more than dampness, shaded somewhere beneath the rocks strewn to mark its path, following the road, or the road following it. On the opposite side of the bed, a derelict trailer sat crookedly, one wheel missing, the blackness of its doorway yawning upward at the shadows of gathering clouds.

We said nothing to each other.

It would rain soon; I could smell it.

The rain came in relentless slate sheets. We saw its approach, a smoky drape across the desert, sweeping toward us like some monstrous black broom, the first spitlike gobs of wet streaking down through my hair and pasting my shirt to my chest. By the time we decided to go back to the doubtful shelter of the trailer, Simon and I must have looked like castaways climbing from the sea.

"Here." I interlaced my fingers to give a boost...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: SQUARE FISH
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0312659296
• ISBN 13: 9780312659295
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 352
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchpark GmbH; gpsr@buchpark.de; ; Krügerweg 1; Trebbin; Brandenburg; 14959; Deutschland