Heaven Should Fall

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 a*shole and so my dad handed over the crown to him. Dad kind of took the role of Queen Mother A*shole, so after that he just showed up at special events to wave and be an a*shole 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.

“Goddamn,” 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 f*ckin’ 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 f*cking 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.”

“All right, then.” I held out my fist, and Elias bumped it. “This one’s on me.”

* * *

The next morning I drove Elias to the bus depot. I felt hungover as all hell. Elias, though, had put back twice as many and still looked okay. He had changed back into a tight brown T-shirt and fatigue pants that tucked into his boots. With him slouched in the seat, one foot resting on the opposite knee, it was more obvious than ever: dude was ripped. In my mind my brother was still the fat kid, the one everyone teased about his jelly-belly gut and man boobs, but now I felt out of shape next to him. He must have done nothing in the desert except lift weights.

When we pulled into the drop-off lane, Elias didn’t get out right away. He just tapped a finger against the window frame and stared at the low concrete building.

“Tell Mom and Dad I said hi,” I said to him. When he didn’t respond, I added, “And take it easy, all right?”

He grunted. After another few beats of silence, he said, “Bus isn’t here yet.”

“It doesn’t leave for twenty minutes. People say they usually run pretty tight. I’m sure it’ll get here in time. If it doesn’t, give me a buzz and I’ll come get you.”

He took his cigarettes out of his pocket and lit one. Then he set the lighter on top of his pack and passed them over to me. I held up a hand to decline, but my willpower misfired. I shook one out of the box and lit up.

“Back to reality,” said Elias.

“You don’t sound too pleased.”

He exhaled lackadaisically. “I don’t even know what reality looks like anymore.”

I turned just slightly in the driver’s seat, twisting around so I could see him better. Elias’s voice seemed to have gotten much deeper, maybe as a side effect of smoking like a chimney. His soft-edged New Hampshire accent was gone, replaced with sharp r’s and a flat intonation. If I didn’t look directly at him, it was hard to reconcile the voice with my brother.

“You could always reenlist,” I said.

Elias snorted a laugh. “No way. My body’s too jacked up for it. I probably couldn’t even pass the physical.”

“Are you kidding? I’ve never seen you in better shape.”

He shook his head, scornful. “My leg never really healed right. I get migraines. My shoulder’s f*cked up. You name it. I’m done playing in the Sandbox.”

“So what are you gonna do instead?”

Silence fell again. He held his cigarette out the window and gave the filter a few soft flicks with his thumb. He paused, dragged and finally said, “Man, don’t ask me that question.”

“Sorry. I’m just making small talk.”

“Yeah, I don’t know how to make small talk. It’s not what we do in my line of work.”

“Sorry. Jeez.”

Elias exhaled with a frustrated sigh. The vibe between us felt tense. I smoked nervously, glad to have something to do in the dead space. In the distance a silver bus appeared, driving slowly toward us down a long, curving road.

“Good luck with your girl,” said Elias. “I envy you that.”

I grinned. The tension vanished like a wave pulling back from the sand. “Thanks.”

He leaned into the backseat and wrestled his duffel bag over the console. Probably I would have hugged him to say goodbye, but the bulky bag wedged into the space between the seats. He reached across and bumped my fist.

“F*ck her brains out, man,” he said. “It’s what I’d do if I were you.”