Heaven Should Fall (2 page)

Once I outgrew the retreat, I signed on to become a counselor, and for three summers now I had lived at Southridge full-time. I loved being outdoors in the piney air at the foot of the Allegheny Mountains, teaching people much older than me how to survive in the uncharted wilderness. All kinds of people passed through—packs of Boy Scouts and troubled foster kids, hipster folk intent on learning to garden organically and brew their own beer, paranoid survivalists seeking the skills to live off the grid when the people finally rose up against the government. I’d learned to cheerfully tolerate all kinds, and did my work so well that Dave—the head guy at the camp and, next to Cade, my favorite person in the world—had tried to persuade me to stay on through the fall and do my semester online. I’d had to patiently explain to him, again, that online classes aren’t an option for agriculture majors.

Later that very day—the one on which I had run down the road to greet Cade, loaded my stuff into the trunk of his Saturn and sped back toward College Park—he had taken me down into D.C. and proposed to me in the nighttime glow of the Jefferson Memorial. The bronze figure of Thomas Jefferson loomed overhead, his knee bent as if to take a step forward; the lettered quotes from the Declaration of Independence curved all around and above us, giving me a sense of vertigo, but beyond it the Tidal Basin lay blue and softly rippling. I knew what it meant that he had chosen this place: that he was drawing me into the pantheon of the things he loved most, showing me that nobody less than his personal hero would be called upon to witness it. Of course I accepted, even though I knew an actual wedding would be a long time coming. We were only twenty-one. We had all the time in the world.

On the day Elias came back, after Cade had dropped me off at my dorm and driven off with his brother for a night of revelry, I flicked on the TV and settled onto my bed with a bag of Starbursts to watch
Lockup: Raleigh
. My mother had been a huge fan of the show, a lurid reality program that followed six women held in a North Carolina prison for various violent offenses. Our favorite was a woman named Kendra, a former pill addict who had attacked her boyfriend with both ends of a rake. Kendra wore one side of her hair in cornrows most of the time and used expressions like “be breezy” and “tell me what’s poppin’” and “life ain’t all peaches and cream.” I think my mother liked the show so much because the women were a caricature of what she might have become had she not joined Alcoholics Anonymous, and like most successful twelve-steppers she took a dim view of people who wanted to hold their old lifestyle close to their hearts. Kendra was an easy target. As a gentle reminder of how good I had it, when I complained about the pressures of school and SATs, my mother would sometimes pat my hand and say, deadpan, “Just remember, Jill. Life ain’t all peaches and cream.”

Midway through the program, the door swung open and my roommate waltzed in. I chewed a candy and braced myself for the inevitable comments. Erica and I had been living together only since September, and already she had a finely honed skill for needling me at any tender spot she could identify. As she stuffed her makeup into its little quilted bag, she looked over at me with one arched eyebrow. “How can you eat that stuff?”

“They’re Starbursts. Who doesn’t like Starbursts?”

“They’re pure sugar.”

“Yes. I know.”

She squeezed the makeup bag into her purse and turned toward the TV. “What is this,
White Trash Wonderland
again?”

“Lockup: Raleigh.”

“Is your boyfriend still at the office?”

“Nope. He went out with his brother.”

She smiled tightly. Her face was a mask of makeup. “Well, have a great Saturday night.”

I sighed through my nose as she left the room, failing to let the door close all the way. As I got up to shut it myself, I scanned the room and tried not to see it through her eyes: the small, chattering TV; the crumpled bag of candy on the bed; my phone, plugged in to its charger because I had no use for it tonight. Before self-pity could creep in, I picked up the landline phone and called Dave.

“It’s Blackbird,” I said as soon as he answered with a hearty “
Dave Robinson here
.” I had been using my camp name for so many years, and had developed such a good reputation around the place, that normally it was a point of pride. I was the semi-legendary Blackbird, the ragtag little city kid who had blossomed into a trail-guiding, scat-identifying swan. But alone in my dorm room it sounded a little goofy, like a kid playing spy.

“Hey, kiddo! Good to hear from you. I just found a sweatshirt you left here. Pretty nice hoodie. Want me to mail it to you?”

His face appeared in my mind’s eye with an expression to match his voice: warm brown eyes and easygoing, energetic smile, shaggy dark hair brushing his shoulders. He shaved maybe every couple of weeks, and then with haste and indifference. I smiled and tugged the phone closer to my wooden desk chair. “Sure. I was wondering where it went. Thought maybe I left it behind at Cade’s friend’s place.”

“I’ll send it out on Monday. How’s the semester treating you?” His dog began to bark, and he made a noise to shush her. “How was October?”

“I made it through okay. Kept busy.”

“You think about your mom a lot?”

“Yeah, but I tried not to dwell on it. It’s been three years now. I need to keep moving forward. One day at a time, and all that.” I shut off the TV. “I finally got to meet a member of Cade’s family today. His brother. He just got back from Afghanistan.”

“All this time and you
still
haven’t met any of them?”

“Nope. They live pretty far away, you know. I think he finds them embarrassing. He says they’re nothing like him.”

Dave laughed ruefully. “We all think that about ourselves. Never as true as we want to believe.”

“His brother seemed fine. I’d been sending him all these care packages with snack food and Little Debbie cakes and stuff like that, and he thanked me for them. It has to be overwhelming when you first get home after three years, so I thought that was sweet that he remembered.”

“Gonna be a hell of an adjustment, I’m sure. I remember those days.”

I frowned and slouched lower in my chair. “I thought you got kicked out of Ranger school.”

“I did, but then 9/11 happened and they sent me to Afghanistan anyway. Coming back wasn’t much of a party. Why do you think I ended up living in the woods?”

“I never heard you talk about that.”

“Nope. One day at a time, right? Keep moving forward.”

I twisted the cord around my fingers, a strange cat’s cradle. “No fair using AA lingo against me.”

“Go easy on the guy, that’s all I’m saying. Around the holidays is the worst time to come back, with everybody wanting you to be all cheery when you’re not feeling it at all. What was he, a grunt?”

“Yeah. Infantry. He did roadside patrols and things like that. He got a Purple Heart for a leg wound a couple years ago—something exploded in a car that was driving up to them, or something like that.”

Dave gave a low whistle. “Get that guy into therapy, stat. I’m not joking.”

“Oh, he’s just a normal soldier. There must have been a hundred other soldiers who got off that plane with him. I’m sure they don’t all need therapy.” I let my voice slide back into a less serious register. “Be breezy, Dave.”

At the razzing sound he made, I broke into a grin. “The wisdom of Kendra,” he said. “Words to live by. So, hey—are you coming down here again for Christmas this year? Easier if you tell me in advance instead of just showing up.”

“Not this time. I’m going to New Hampshire. Embarrassing or no, Cade can’t escape it this year.”

“
That
sounds like a threat.”

I laughed, but there was an edge to it. “You know what, Dave—I need to get through to him that even if his family is a little crazy, at least he’s got one. When I was a kid, I envied the kids who had aunts and uncles and big noisy households. And these people live in a big old farmhouse in the country with three generations in it. It sounds
great
to me. I think he just doesn’t appreciate it.”

“Or maybe they really are nuts. Maybe he’s the only sane one of the bunch.”

“I doubt that. This is Cade we’re talking about. To him, everything’s got to be on a grand scale. I hate to say it, but he’s a drama queen.”

“Well, you’ll find out.”

I smiled. “Yes. I will. Finally.”

He offered a short laugh. “Love ya, kiddo. You know it. And if they all turn out to be a pack of lunatics, I’ll still be here with the dog.”

Chapter 2

Cade

Street hockey was the first thing to go. Up until Jill came along I’d spent every Sunday afternoon on my Rollerblades on the closed-off section of Pennsylvania Avenue that fronted the White House. The other guys who showed up for the pickup games were mostly young Capitol Hill staffers, people I’d worked with in previous political campaigns or knew from my internship the summer before. There was a rare glory to battling it out with hockey sticks in the shadow of the White House, skates clunking and whirring, our shouts and cheers carrying into the air that rose to the surreal blue D.C. sky. My body felt strong then, my spirit light. As a kid I’d spent every winter ice-skating on the frozen quarry lake, so I was a pro on skates, and aggressive on the court besides. Girls watched from the sidelines, rooting from the spectator space along the tall iron fence. When I scored a goal, they cheered, and I loved it. Arrogant as it might be, I was a junkie for adulation.

And then, for Jill. Jill who had no interest in power, who did not find the city exciting. Jill who had crash-landed in my life during a season when the crush of school, the constant lack of money and the pressure of that season’s campaign were all conspiring to make me snap. I needed fewer obligations, not more. The consolation for being a campaign volunteer, working like a cult member with the stakes so high they made wealthy men break out in a cold sweat, was the sex. Late nights stapling signs together in a small office get really monotonous. Trudging around neighborhoods knocking on doors, working the phone banks. You want to blow off some steam. These opportunities crop up for very hot, very random sex in interesting locations. I looked forward to it every year. And yet there I was, giving all that up, even giving up street hockey to spend more time with Jill, because I ached to be with her
all
the time. It was dumb love, and I knew it, and I didn’t give a shit even remotely.

In any campaign, if you’re aspiring to be a legislator yourself one day, you do it in part for the connections. In life you can never, ever underestimate the power of networking. Same goes for making enemies—make a good-faith effort not to piss people off any more than absolutely necessary. This was a lesson I sure didn’t learn at home. My father was the Coos County Regional Grand Champion in pissing people off. He was a farmer—one who did sorely little to network with the locals, the way farmers ought to—but mainly he just picked fights with the people who rented storage units from him at the U-Store-It owned by my family, and gradually he sold off his other commercial real estate holdings because his business relationships got too contentious. He and his brother, Randy ran a shooting club. When Dad’s friends there started acting like a bunch of drunk jackasses Randy objected, and instead of working it out, Dad just told him to go suck it. From a political-science perspective this is not the kind of thing we call “effective collaboration.” But then a few years ago Dad had a stroke—brought on by smoking, yelling at everybody, or maybe the locals putting a hex on him—and he’s been pretty docile ever since. He’d mellowed somewhat even before that, mainly because my sister married a similar asshole and so my dad handed over the crown to him. Dad kind of took the role of Queen Mother Asshole, so after that he just showed up at special events to wave and be an asshole for old times’ sake.

I learned a lot from that example. If you want to break bad with people and determine your manliness by how many people avoid you, then you get to live in a pile of disintegrating lumber a stone’s throw from the Canadian border, eating the saliva of everyone who prepares your sandwiches locally. The life I wanted was not that one.

What drew me to Mark Bylina’s campaign was not strictly the connections or the networking. It was the fact of him being an environmentalist Republican. In my opinion that’s where the future of the country is headed. This country has seen enough of the nice-guy Democratic bleeding hearts who make as good a commander-in-chief as my mother would, and enough yahoo Republicans making it look as if Americans can have brains or values but not both at the same time. What we need is a true statesman in the tradition of Teddy Roosevelt himself. Somebody who can set a hard line economically but not make it sound as though he plans to burn polar bears for fuel. Bylina is a fiscal conservative but a social moderate, supported initiatives to reduce industrial waste and the carbon load on the atmosphere. He had a great message, and I believed in it. And in him.

The master plan had it that I would graduate with a master’s degree in economics the following spring. It was a five-year program, and it was an honor to have gotten into it in the first place. I graduated high school summa cum laude. Even for a hick school, that was still an achievement. The magna cum laude grad was a girl named Piper Larsen, who could solve formulas in AP chemistry as fast as most people could calculate a tip. I dated her for a while.

In any event, the goal was that the work I did on Bylina’s campaign would be enough to propel me into a job in his administration, if he won. I wanted to assist with creating policy, develop some connections, move into the private sector for a while and then run for Congress in about ten years—once I had some money and was old enough to be credible. In the meantime, in between working my crappy bursar’s-office job and hanging out with Jill, I was spending every spare minute at Bylina’s office, helping out with fundraising.

The main challenge to my policy of making as few enemies as possible was Drew Fielder, this pasty-looking peckerhead who lived on my floor in the dorms and who volunteered with me on Bylina’s campaign. The guy had a gut, and acne on his neck. Twenty-two years old and already he had a gut, and yet his favorite thing was to give everybody else, and me in particular, shit about how we looked. This coming from a guy who liked to dress up for
The
Rocky Horror Picture Show
with a whole group of people, including my buddy Stan who was otherwise normal, and prance around the Student Union in drag. He wasn’t a good-looking guy and he sure as hell was even uglier as a woman.

“It’s The Most Handsome Bastard in the World,” he always announced when I entered the room. This was a joke Stan had started. Fielder knew it because back when we were roommates, Stan liked to shout it down the hall when he saw me walking back from the bathroom in a towel. But it was funny when Stan said it. Fielder just shouted it at random, and it was annoying as all hell. He was also fond of constantly asking if I’d just gotten back from vacation, which was his way of mocking me for tanning. Try to suggest to him that a little vitamin D might clear up some of that acne, though, and he’d pout for hours. But around Bylina he brought out his pro game, using the energy he had saved by acting like a dick to everybody else. I’d worked on political campaigns since my senior year of high school, and never had I seen an ass-kissing sycophant on the level of Fielder. The ridiculous part was that he wasn’t even a Republican. He was registered as a Democrat. It was killing me, wondering if the staffers closest to Bylina already knew and just didn’t care at that point, or if they had no idea. Nobody wants to be the snitch, but God, did I ever hate that guy.

Normally I was glad to be in the office—model volunteer, always—but on the day Elias came home I was counting down the hours from the minute I got there. Fielder was in, too, but everybody knew my brother was coming back from the war, and for once he kept his mouth shut so as not to sound like a jackass. At three o’clock sharp I left to pick up Jill and rush over to the airport, then as soon as we got Elias settled in I took Jill back to her dorm and he and I went out to get cheesesteaks. That was his singular focus: it was as if he’d spent three years in the Middle East mainly missing that specific food product. Other than the cheesesteak talk, he was pretty quiet. Unnaturally quiet. Elias was one who, in his ordinary life, would talk until your ears fell off. You had to get him started first, but if you said to him, say, “Elias, tell us again about that time in high school when you tripped and fell on your face on the track while the cheerleaders were practicing,” he’d stretch out the story to twenty or thirty minutes even if he knew you’d already heard it a dozen times. But today he couldn’t be provoked by that kind of stuff. He just wanted the cheesesteak.

So I filled the silence by talking about myself instead. After dinner I told him there was a place I wanted to show him. I drove west on the parkway until the hospital appeared above the trees. Took that exit, then the one onto a road that seemed to go nowhere, then an access road. With every turn we climbed higher up the hill. At the top was this gigantic blue water tower shaped like an upside-down teardrop. The sun was setting and the clouds were blazing pink, like radioactive cotton candy or a scene from
Fantasia.
Under the tower was a parking lot made out of rough construction sand, no painted lines. Nobody ever parked there except maintenance workers, but damn, was there ever a view. I got out, and Elias slammed his door at the same time I did.

We walked to the crest of the hill, that blue bulb looming above our heads. Electrical cables looped up and then down the hill, past some sort of concrete-block structure surrounded by razor wire, an electrical substation probably. But past that, way down in the distance where the land was low, there was D.C. Staggered roofs, a thousand lights—
ten
thousand—glowing like fireflies, double headlights cutting through the dusk. The memorials, white marble all lit up, made a compass rose: the Lincoln Memorial a cube, the one for Jefferson curved like a lens and farthest away, the needle of the Washington Monument pointing at the sky.

“God
damn,
” said Elias. “Terrorists’ wet dream, this little crow’s nest here. Can’t believe they don’t have it secured.”

“Nothing you can do from here.”

“You can look.” Elias took a few steps closer, then stopped and crossed his arms. A siren blazed down the parkway; the sound, from where we stood, was lonesome.

“That’s my city,” I told him. “Someday, man, that’s gonna be my fuckin’ chessboard. Not a room I can’t get into or a rope I can’t get past.”

“You planning on getting elected king?”

I laughed. “No, I’m gonna be like Ted Kennedy. Not right away. Not even real soon. But eventually, over time.” I pointed toward the Jefferson Memorial. “That’s where I proposed to Jill.”

Elias nodded. He slid a box of cigarettes from his pocket and clenched one at the side of his mouth, then asked, “You want one?”

I hesitated. Sophomore year I’d worked late nights on a contentious campaign for state delegate. That season, I’d picked up the habit from the other staffers. I told myself I’d quit as soon as the election was over, and I did. But goddamn—was it ever a murderous struggle. I didn’t have the money to support the addiction—that was the bottom line. Otherwise I would have kept it up forever. It gives you something mindless to do when you’re sitting around waiting for things to happen, and there’s a lot of that in politics. It helps you focus and relax at the same time. In no time flat I had gone from being a nonsmoker to the guy who rolled out of bed and lit up before he peed. I’d stayed away from the stuff ever since I quit, because it was so hard the first time I figured I couldn’t quit twice. But this was Elias. That’s the other thing smoking does—it helps people bond.

“Yeah, sure,” I said.

He handed me a Marlboro and his lighter. As soon as I lit up, the pleasure of it was visceral. Tasting the smoke in my mouth was like sex after months of jacking off. Sex with the wrong person. Right away I knew this had been a bad idea.

Elias exhaled through his nose like an angry bull. “Mind if we sit down?”

We sat on the bristly grass on the curve that overlooked the city. For a few minutes neither of us said a word. I asked, “So how was Afghanistan?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“’Course I do. Not like you ever wrote.”

He shrugged. “It sucks. It’s hot. Sand shits up everything you brought with you inside of a month. And the
people.
It’s still the Stone Age over there. Trying to fix anything’s like pissing in the wind.”

“So what do you think about how the president’s allocating troops? Do you think he should have gone with Congress’s recommendation instead?”

Elias gave a slow shake of his head. “Man, politics is your bag, not mine. I don’t give two shits.”

“How can you not care? It was your
job.
”

He shook his head again. I rested my arms against my knees and looked toward the city. From the roof of a building near the Washington Monument, a flag flapped like crazy in the wind. The dark and the distance obscured the details, the stripes and the stars, the color. It had to be American from the soil it was on, but in the dark you’d never know.

I tried to change the subject to get him talking again. “What did you think of Jill?”

“She’s cute.” He paused and looked out over the city. “I’d do her.”

I grinned. “Yeah, she’s cool.”

“How long have you been with her?”

“About a year. She was friends with somebody Stan was dating, so they introduced us.”

“White chick?”

I snickered. “Of course. As soon as I started seeing her I deleted all my booty-call numbers from my phone, changed around my work hours to spend more time with her, you name it. It was crazy. I was eat-sleep-and-breathing her.”

“You felt the same way about Piper.”

I crushed out the smoke against the earth. “Not even close. Anyway, Piper’s long gone. And I was in high school then. That doesn’t count.”

Elias gave a scornful laugh, exhaling hard, clouding the air between us. “Man, don’t ever say it didn’t count. Don’t fucking insinuate it wasn’t worth your while. I’m not sure which one of us would get a bullet in the head over that one.”

“All right, all right. Sorry.”

The silence pulled tight. Elias said, “I’m just messing with you.”

“I know,” I said. But it sounded unconvincing. “Hey, want to get a beer?”

Elias laughed again. “Man, I don’t want to get
a
beer. I want to get
hammered.
”