Heaven Should Fall Page 12

  I scowled. Glancing quickly at the house, I said in a low voice, “I think you ought to talk Elias into going back in to get his meds adjusted and to get some counseling. I can’t believe they’d just hand him a prescription and let him go home without any other treatment. He’s twenty-four years old and all he does is sit there all day. I don’t like Dodge trash-talking him, but he needs to get up, at least.”

  Cade’s expression had grown peevish. He was in a hurry to leave, and I knew it. “Give the guy a break. He spent three years fighting the Taliban. It’s okay for him to sit down and watch TV for a while. You and Dodge both need to realize that.”

  “If you think he’s acting like that because he just wants to relax, you’re off in la-la land.”

  He cocked an eyebrow at me. “What I think,” he began, and his voice was cold, “is that people ought to back off and let the guy be. Elias has always been a couch potato. Just give him some space, and stop playing into it by lavishing attention all over him for being lazy. Don’t think he doesn’t love that shit. He knows how to play it. Girls love it when he whips out his Eeyore impression.” He turned the key in the ignition and slammed the door. The window scrolled down, and he added, “I’ll try to talk him into coming with us when we do the gun-club thing with Dodge, okay? Get him to come out and socialize a little. Even with those idiots, it would be an improvement.”

  “Sure, you can try, but he won’t go.”

  “You forget where my skill set lies. If I can get college students out to the polls, you’d better be damn sure I can get my brother to walk into the backyard.”

  “If you say so.”

  “I say so.” He leaned a little out the window, and I kissed him on the mouth. Then he reversed out of the driveway and spun out onto the road, disappearing past the trees in a blue-gray haze of burning oil.

  * * *

  Another week passed before the gun club met again, and Dodge managed to hassle Cade into coming along. Cade was already in a bad mood. The ten résumés he had sent to various offices in D.C. two weeks before had resulted in no phone calls at all, and what was worse, the news had gotten back to him that Drew Fielder had taken a permanent position on Mark Bylina’s staff. The previous night Cade had been downright morose. He had drunk an entire six-pack of beer in front of the TV, slept for two hours and then was up half the night cursing at the clothes dryer he had suddenly decided to repair. He had looked like death when he woke up at four-thirty in the morning, but that afternoon he returned from work in the chipper mood I recognized from his days of campaign volunteering. It was one-dimensional and deceptively shallow, but he could muscle through a bad day with a smile on his face as long as he kept moving.

  As Dodge packed his cooler and ammo into the truck, Cade approached Elias and nudged his shoulder. “Hey,” he said good-naturedly. “C’mon. Don’t make me do this on my own.”

  Elias looked at his brother over his shoulder, barely raising an eyebrow. “I don’t think so.”

  “Just this once. I don’t want it to just be me and those dipshits.”

  “Jill’s going.”

  “Yeah, but they’ll leave her alone. I’m the one they’ll be giving all the shit to.” He barraged the back of Elias’s shoulder with pokes of his index fingers. “C’mon. Back me up.”

  Elias sighed heavily and stood up, and Cade clapped him on the back. As he headed out the door behind Cade, I felt impressed with Cade’s work. Maybe he was right about his brother after all; maybe Elias just needed more encouragement.

  Dodge drove his truck up the slim dirt road that snaked into the woods, but the rest of us walked. As I followed Cade and Elias up the trail I saw the trees clear into an opening that revealed the closest thing to a party I had seen since my arrival. An ancient boom box blasted an ’80s heavy-metal sound track; the fresh piney air carried the smoke from the grill, filling the clearing with the scent of hamburgers. On a series of tree stumps surrounding an ashy fire pit, the men of the club sat drinking beer from bottles shiny with condensation. As they drank they chatted and cleaned their guns with loving care.

  “Your old hangout,” Dodge announced to Cade and Elias, climbing out of the cab of his truck. “You know you missed it.”

  Elias looked over the scene before him. “Not really.”

  Dodge chucked the package of paper targets onto a fallen log. Cade reached into a cooler and retrieved two beers, offering one to Elias, who held up his hand to decline it. Even Candy had come along; she stood at a card table removing sheets of plastic wrap from bowls of pasta and potato salad, scooping a spoon down into each one. Scooter looked expectant, standing on the sidelines squinting at us through his little glasses, arms crossed over his chest, displaying the oversize tattoo winding around his biceps. Beside him squatted Matthew, balancing his small weight against the butt of his rifle pressed against the ground. He had received the gun for his eighth birthday, Candy had told me, and he often shot birds and squirrels with it in the woods behind the house. According to Candy he did this only with Dodge’s supervision, but that seemed to be a flexible rule. He wore it slung on his back at every opportunity, regardless of whether his father was home.

  The other men moved easily around the space, but Elias stood more or less where Cade had left him, holding the uncomfortable posture of a new kid approaching the high school cafeteria. I got him a cheeseburger from the grill and carried it over, offering it to him on a paper plate with a flourish and a friendly smile.

  “Keep it for now,” he said. He looked around the perimeter of the clearing, eyes steady. “Know what, I don’t think this was a great idea. Why don’t you walk me back to the house.”

  “No, you don’t,” called Dodge. “It’s a beautiful day and we’re about to get started. Leave now and you’ll miss all the fun.”

  Somebody pulled back the slide on a handgun, and at the click of it Elias shook his head. “No. I don’t like this.”

  “I’ll walk him back,” I called over to Dodge. “It’s not a problem.”

  Cade planted a foot against the fallen log beside him. “Come over here and sit down, Eli. I’ll hang out with you until my turn comes up.”

  Elias looked at Cade’s earnest face, then at the log, and brushed past me to where his brother stood. He eased himself down beside Cade, but at the metallic clunk of a magazine being locked into a rifle his arms twitched, and I watched as he pushed a hand back across his hair to make the sudden jerk of his muscles look natural.

  Dodge was standing at one of the wooden posts wedged into the dirt, unwrapping the pack of targets. I sidled up to him, turning my back to Elias and Cade. “Hey, I think Elias ought to go home,” I said. “I think he’s too nervous for this.”

  He picked up his staple gun and glanced at me as he fastened a target against a post. “I think he can be the judge of his own self. How about you stick to cutting the balls off the poultry and let Elias keep his for the time being.”

  I breathed in deeply through my nose, not eager to create a scene that would make it obvious to Elias that I had been talking about him. As I retreated toward the grill, Dodge barked, “Jill. Cade. You two get to go first.”

  He handed a .22 to me and another to Cade, then rattled off a list of rules that appeared to be for Matthew’s benefit. When I racked my rifle, Cade snickered and shook his head. “I’m so screwed,” he said. “You’re probably a hundred times better than me at this.”

  “Probably.”

  He grinned, and I focused on the target and sighted in. Candy laughed and said, “A pregnant lady shooting a rifle. If that isn’t the doggone funniest thing I’ve ever seen.”

  Dodge gave the signal, and we both fired. When I glanced over at Elias his shoulders had relaxed, and he watched us with more engagement in his eyes than I had ever seen when he sat in front of the television. This turned out to be a good idea after all, I thought, lining up my second shot. Even Cade looked happy, and with only a few shots left to go, he said in a cheerful voice, “You are indeed k
icking my ass.”

  “I try.”

  “I had no idea they’d trained you so well at militia camp.”

  “It’s not militia camp, it’s homesteading camp.”

  “Or so Dave claims. Looks to me like—”

  A loud cry from Matthew snapped my attention to the sidelines. As I lowered the rifle I saw the boy hurrying toward his father with his arms extended, a black plastic zip tie tight around his wrists. “Now, what in the hell did you do to yourself?” demanded Dodge.

  “I was just playing. I pulled it with my mouth.”

  “Well, that’s not a good way to play, is it?”

  He whipped out his buck knife from its case on his belt and set to work trying to convince his son that he wouldn’t cut off his hand at the wrist in the process of removing the tie. I rolled my eyes and unloaded my rifle. Beside me, Cade grinned and did the same. “Game over,” he said, and only then did I focus past the tussle between Matthew and Dodge to see Elias doubled over behind them. Candy was rubbing his back, her long hair falling forward as she leaned down to talk to him.

  “Hey, I think Elias is sick,” I said.

  I hung back while Cade rushed over. Even from a distance I could hear Elias’s gasping, stilted breathing, see him nodding rapidly at the soft things his siblings said to him. Sweat trickled down his temples in slow, broad droplets. “Matthew’s fine,” Cade was assuring him. “It wasn’t even all that tight.”

  “I know. I know.”

  “So don’t worry about it. Just breathe.”

  Candy fluttered around him for a few more minutes, and finally Elias rose to stand, taking unsteady steps toward the path as Cade draped his arm around his brother’s shoulders. I watched them until they vanished beyond the trees.

  “All right, enough of that drama,” shouted Dodge. He snapped the buck knife closed and patted his son on the back, sending him running back to the food table. “Who’s up next?”

  * * *

  “Apparently he just doesn’t like the sight of zip ties,” said Cade. We were speeding down the road toward Liberty Gorge, a spontaneous excursion Cade had announced as soon as I walked in the door from the gun-club get-together. I understood exactly why: tonight he couldn’t abide another family dinner, sitting across the table from Dodge as he offered a postgame analysis of the gathering. I’d offered to go with him, gladly.

  “That’s a little strange,” I said.

  “Sounded like he had to use them on people before, so it really bugged him to see his nephew bound up like that. I only ever saw him like that once before, over Christmas. We drove into town to see a movie, and once we got there he saw a piece of trash in the parking lot and freaked out. We ended up going back to the car and driving home.”

  “Over a piece of trash?”

  He flipped his visor down against the lowering sun. “Yeah, well, apparently over there people hide IEDs under pieces of trash along the roadways. And he’d just gotten back, so I understood he was still in soldier mode and all that.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t think freaking out at trash is ‘soldier mode.’”

  “Maybe not. I dunno. Makes more sense now why he never wants to leave the house, though. I figured he was over all that.” We approached a turnoff marked by a mailbox—a simple dirt path that led through a field. “You know what, let’s go to the quarry. I’ve been wanting to show it to you anyway.”

  I braced myself for the sharp turn. “So are you going to talk to him about going back to the doctor now?”

  “Yeah, I suppose so. That’s got to be embarrassing, what happened to him today. If it was me, I wouldn’t want to be going around like that.” He parked on the scrubby grass beneath a tree. “This is it. Our old parking spot and everything. Hasn’t changed a bit, except there’s no water. Which was kind of the whole point.”

  I looked out over the jagged expanse of rock. It was a long way down. Cade left his sunglasses in the car, and as we approached the gaping, empty space, he stopped and peered up at the sky, squinting. High cirrus clouds marked the clear and solid blue, and the sunlight shone down through the trees as sharply as if thrown. He said, “I haven’t been back here since they drained it. It’s disorienting.”

  “Sounds kind of like it was an old swimming hole, like in Tom Sawyer.”

  “Yeah, and in the winter you could skate on it. We used to come out here all the time—winter, summer, anytime except when it was raining. Every year at Christmastime all the kids who’d gone away to school would have a reunion up here. Me and Elias and a lot of the other guys, we’d play hockey here once it was good and frozen. You see that spot?” He gestured toward the center of the empty space. “That was the no-go zone. It didn’t freeze hard enough over there, so if your puck went that way you were just screwed. One winter we lost so many pucks, we took to making them out of firewood dipped in beeswax just so they wouldn’t be worth anything. It didn’t work very well. We thought the beeswax would make them slicker, but it knocked off real fast once we started banging on them with the sticks.”

  “So why’d they drain it?”

  “Somebody drowned. One of the Vogels’ daughters from the next farm over. It was during the winter.”

  I looked out over the canyon the rock formed, at all its precipitous ledges and sharp, loose boulders. Filled with water it must have been idyllic, but beneath the surface, dangerous as hell. “That’s awful.”

  He kicked a few rocks over the edge. “Yeah. She was a friend of Candy’s. She’d been at one of the reunion games but nobody else knew her real well, so we were all just…talking to each other and not much to her, I guess. She must have been skating like everybody else, and at some point she went through the ice and nobody noticed. I didn’t hear anything about all that until later. Me and Elias had already left, so we missed the whole thing.”

  “Candy must have been devastated.”

  “She was in shock about it, I guess. Candy’s funny about stuff like that. It’s hard to say her faith comforts her. It’s more like she uses it to work out the logic of why everything happens. If something good happens she goes on about how it’s a reward for obedience or an answer to a prayer, and if things go wrong she says it’s a test of faith or a punishment. It’s almost like karma with her. I think it drives my mom nuts.” He sat down on a smooth stretch of rock. “This is the old sunbathing stone. In August, anytime you came here, there’d be a bunch of girls in their swimsuits stretched out here trying to get a tan.”

  I moved to sit down beside him, and he reached for my arm to ease my way down. “I can’t stand it when people try to explain random tragedies. You wouldn’t believe how many people have said to me that small planes are dangerous and my mom never should have been in one in the first place. As if I’m going to say, ‘Oh, I feel much better about losing her now that you’ve explained why it was her own fault.’”

  “Yeah, you and Candy are going to be the best of friends.”

  I laughed and turned onto my back, resting my head in Cade’s lap. The sky was a more appealing sight than the jagged gap of the quarry; the high clouds moved through it slowly, their trailing edges thin as contrails. Cade stroked my hair back from my forehead in an idle way, and said, “I wish you could see this place the way it was before. I feel like there’s this part of me I can’t even show you because it doesn’t exist anymore.”

  “It’s pretty much the same, though, right? It’s just the water that’s missing.”

  “It’s just the people that’re missing,” he said.

  I turned sideways so I could look out at what he was seeing: the ledges where his friends had once stood, the knotted yellow rope hanging from a tree, the scrubby and pebble-strewn grass that must have been the site of a hundred tailgate parties. I wondered if Elias missed it the same way. The Olmstead home seemed riddled with broken connections—to their extended family, to their way to gather as a community and even to each other, for the atmosphere of the house felt heavy with brooding thoughts that nobody talked about. I
t was no wonder Cade hated coming home. I had never imagined, in all my time growing up with just my mother, how hard it might be to live in a family. From the outside it had looked like the easiest and most natural thing.

  Maybe it’ll be different after the baby gets here, I thought. The common work of caring for a newborn might bind the family together once again; a christening might even be an opportunity to reach out to Randy’s family and put a stop to the enmity from Dodge’s side. It might even give Elias a sense of renewal and purpose, and a distraction from all he had going on in his head. These are the thoughts I had, heady and optimistic, as Cade tried to make sense of the lost quarry lake. After all, my mother had never hesitated to share her burning testimony that it’s never too late to start over. My mother, however, was not an Olmstead. It was a lesson I would learn, again and again, in the months ahead.

  Chapter 12

  Jill

  The first blow came with the letter from the university, telling Cade that he had been cut from the work-study program due to a missed filing deadline. He started out bewildered, then grew angrier and angrier as he paced the back porch with his phone against his ear, pleading with the people in Financial Aid. I sat in the chair beside Elias and folded the freshly washed hand-me-down baby clothes slowly into a basket, lying low but listening in. At last he came in and slapped the phone down on the table in disgust.

  “April 25,” he barked. “That was the deadline. You know what I had going on April 25?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  He jabbed the air with his index finger, gesturing toward my belly. “Junior there. School during the day, work in the afternoon, Stan’s in the evening, five hours of sleep. Bylina’s office any spare minute I got. You puking your guts out until they had to stick an IV in you. Like I’m supposed to remember financial aid paperwork in the middle of that.”