Heaven Should Fall Read online

  He chuckled. “Homeboy does not want to put a gun in my hand.”

  “You load one every night.”

  “That’s for security. If Dodge handed me one, I might take it as an open invitation.”

  “No, you wouldn’t, Eli.”

  He cut a glance in my direction, his eyes conveying a shadow of a challenge. Smoke drifted around his face like an apparition. “Try me. You know what I did over there?”

  Over there was his term for Afghanistan. He referred to it often enough, but had never said much about the specifics of his role. “You were infantry, right? You went out on patrol and stuff like that?”

  “Yeah, trying to keep the roads secure. Doesn’t matter whether you’re at the checkpoint or on the road—where we were, there’s IEDs all over the place. You might drive over ’em, or else a car comes up to the checkpoint with a suicide bomber in it, either way you’re fucked. You wouldn’t believe how many of us end up in little bits the size of jelly beans blown all over Afghanistan. And people like Dodge and Scooter want me to come back from that and go out and shoot beer cans while they grill burgers. If that isn’t the stupidest shit on the planet, I don’t know what is.”

  “Then you and Cade should go out somewhere. Maybe over to the quarry, right? Hang out there. Isn’t that what you always used to do?”

  He cast a rueful gaze on the TV and dragged on his cigarette. “Ahh, the quarry. Good times were had by all.”

  “They’re doing another clean-out tomorrow. I’m sure they’d be glad to take you along. I think it’s the last one for a while.”

  He sipped from a can of beer, then shook his head slowly. Round one had begun, with an overweight young man in a life vest jogging in place and shaking his arms, getting ready to tackle a pendulum swinging high above the water.

  “It’d be something to do. Break the monotony.”

  “Spending time with Dodge isn’t breaking the monotony.”

  “Oh, c’mon. They found some interesting stuff yesterday. It’s like a treasure hunt.”

  At that, he snorted. I looked at him with surprise, and he said, “Grave robbing is more like it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Profiting off others’ misfortune is dirty business. Somebody saved that stuff for a reason.” I opened my mouth to speak, and he held up his hand. “I know, I know, they’re in arrears, they ought to pay their bills. But when you go and sell somebody’s grandma’s antiques because they lost their job and put priority on feeding their kids, I think that’s dirty. Life’s hard.”

  “Your family wouldn’t have been able to feed their kids if people didn’t pay their rent.”

  “Sure. Some people deserve to have their shit sold off. Some people don’t care. I’m telling you what I think, is all. Just because it’s fair doesn’t mean it’s right. There’s such a thing in this world as mercy.”

  Dodge thumped into the room, and Elias drained his beer. Once Dodge had left, he glanced at me and said, “You know he kicked out the renters, right?”

  “The ones with the broken dishwasher?”

  “Yep. Gave them forty-eight hours to pack their shit and leave, and now they’re gone. Completely illegal. All because he thinks Randy warned them that he likes ’em young. The truth hits you at the core.”

  My paintbrush was sinking into the jar of blue, untouched. “You said you didn’t believe Randy said anything.”

  Elias waved a dismissive hand. “Dodge’s looking for an excuse for a confrontation. He isn’t going to get it, not from Randy. What those renters ought to do is sue his ass, but they never would. People from Randy’s church aren’t too big on getting the government involved. Don’t think Dodge doesn’t know that.”

  “That’s terrible.”

  “Yes and no. They want to live that life, then this is a part of it. Maybe they’ll turn the other cheek. Maybe they’ll stick up for themselves, and we’ll get a knock on the door one day. It’s their call.”

  “Can’t go on like this forever, though.”

  “You’d be surprised. Some things can go on an awful long time.”

  He clicked up the volume by a notch and said nothing further. I sat beside him with my paintbrush and stars, keeping company. On the television, the chunky kid raced headlong toward the climbing wall, then was knocked from his perch by a boxing glove flying out on a mechanical arm. His arms pinwheeled in the air on his way down to the water. The announcers shouted, Ohhhhhhhh!

  “You fat fucker,” Elias muttered.

  Cade

  The quarry was at the end of a long road barely wide enough to hold a car. When they approached it back then—Cade and Elias, Piper and whoever else could fit into Elias’s converted bread-delivery van—broken chunks of asphalt rattled the tires. Now and then low-hanging oak branches brushed the windows, the leaves like aggressive hands. Then the land opened, the quarry lake came into view and Elias parked the van in the scrubby grass in the shade of the tree line. Ragged chunks of granite—some softball-sized, others large enough to stretch out on—littered the ground. A yellow knotted rope hung from a solid branch next to an outcropping of rock, high above the water.

  They stripped down to their swimsuits in the shadow of the trees. Just past them lay the shimmering surface of the water, reflecting the treetops in a dark and lacy silhouette. Against it, the squealing teenagers in trunks and bikinis transformed into Indonesian shadow puppets. Treading water, slapping the surface in joyous half-drowning, then flipping like a dolphin and going under into the sudden thick silence. Cade moved through it like an eel. He loved the feel of his own physical symmetry, his resistant strength. Through some primitive sonar he sensed an edge, a wall, and he reached out and grabbed the narrow hip band of Piper’s bikini bottom, tugged. Her shriek penetrated the water, and he came up laughing, already ducking the swat of her hand.

  On the ledge stood Elias, brown as toast from the sun, the Hawaiian flowers on his swim trunks blotched yellow and orange. Go, go. He heaved his arms back and then threw himself forward onto the rope, chest and stomach jiggling, and they loved him for it. The fat-kid smash into the water was epic. When Cade jumped in, nobody cared, but Elias drew a crowd. And then Piper scrambled up the rock, her body angular, a knife edge, her hair blunt-cut and threaded with summer blond. On the rope she was an acrobat. She flipped back and around, tucked and rolled, until she cut through the water long and lean and disappeared.

  Disappearing: that was what Piper did. She lived down the road but left for months at a time on mysterious trips with her family, to summer camp, to ski. Once, when they were younger, she left for a year. She was never taken for granted. Elias loved her first. But her preferences were beyond Cade’s control, and Elias seemed to bear him no ill will when she singled out Cade for another kind of disappearing. Sometimes, together, they straddled the line between present and gone: on the shaded end of the quarry where a high subsurface ledge made the water shallow, there they could kiss and be ignored. But below the surface her hand worked down his trunks, and she plied him steadily, purposefully, until he came into the water in full view of every one of his friends, his brother, but of course they could not see a thing.

  That summer they spent nearly all their free time with one another. Often they bought fireworks and, after building a campfire in the dirt-swept circle of the Olmsteads’ shooting range, set them off above the trees. On more than one occasion Elias singed his fingers and would hold them out, black tipped and smarting, for the girls to soothe with ice from the cooler. The range, deep in the woods as it was, hid everything. They drank whatever alcohol they could steal from the back of their folks’ top cabinets, then played squealing games of Duck Duck Goose, like little kids, around the fire. On one occasion, one of the other guys found a gun someone had left behind on the range. A box of ammo sat beside it, as though the owner had intended to target shoot but forgot about that particular weapon. Cade found a paper target without too many holes in it and clipped it to the pole. Then the whole group pe
rsuaded Elias, who was the best shot among them, to try to shoot out the bull’s-eye. He didn’t shoot out all the red in the center, but he hit it on the second shot.

  Except Elias, they were all drunk on Jim Beam. Elias was heavier and could hold his liquor better. Cade got up and, jerking the sneaker from Piper’s kicking foot, climbed onto the stump between the two target poles. “I am William Tell,” he announced. He set the shoe on top of his head and added, “This is my apple.”

  “It doesn’t smell like an apple,” someone shouted.

  “Shut up,” Piper said.

  “I cannot tell a lie,” he said, confusing his fruit legends due to the effects of the Jim Beam, and held out his arms for balance. “My brother Eli will shoot the apple from my head and we will all be saved.”

  “From what?” Piper yelled.

  “From the smell of your feet,” answered the guy who had brought the booze.

  “Drum roll, please,” called Cade.

  Someone thumped a rolling up-tempo against the cooler with his hands.

  Cade looked at Elias, who stood, legs braced apart, at the shooter’s mark. He held the gun pointed at the sky, elbow bent, at the ready. “Aim true, brother,” said Cade.

  Elias shook his head.

  “Aw, c’mon,” Cade called, dropping character. “Straight through the middle. You can do it.”

  “Didn’t say I couldn’t.”

  “Hit the R,” suggested Cade. “Make it say, ’eebok.’”

  Elias shook his head again.

  Cade stumbled backward and fell off the stump, and they all laughed. Piper scampered over and collected her shoe. After a little while someone threw up in the bushes, and then they all went home.

  There were more afternoons at the quarry lake, more nights that summer at the shooting range, although they never saw that gun again. One evening, driving home, Elias spoke up in the silence. The van was empty except for the two of them. The Eagles played low on the radio, and the fan’s gentle rattle thrummed from the deep interior of the dash. Cade, barefoot, watched the clouds cast moving purple shadows against the mountains. He felt thoroughly content.

  “I really wish you wouldn’t do that,” said Elias.

  Cade looked at him. “Do what?”

  “You know. With her. In the water.”

  Cade absorbed that thought. He exhaled through his teeth, scoffing. “I’ll do anything I want with her, anywhere I want,” he said. “You would, too, if you could.”

  Elias said nothing. Kept on driving home.

  Everyone knew Elias had loved her first.

  But Cade felt no remorse. Not then. Not later. May the best man win. And the best man always did; that was why he was the best.

  And Elias said nothing because he knew this about Cade, and loved him in spite of it.

  Chapter 9

  Jill

  Only a few days after Elias told me the renters were gone, on a Sunday morning when Candy, Eddy and Leela were off at church with the boys, Dodge pressed the rest of us into service painting and cleaning the rental house. He even managed to bully Elias into coming along, handing him a paint roller and putting him in charge of the room that, judging by the crayon scribbles on the wall, had been the province of the now-evicted children. Cade was put on carpet-cleaning duty, while Scooter and I were sent to the porch to paint trim and lattice. I didn’t mind; the air outside was light and clear, more like spring than midsummer, and the view of the mountains from the porch of the shabby little place was breathtaking. From the corner of my eye I watched Scooter as he painted—he was a skinny caricature of a man, with giant work boots and a barbed-wire tattoo around his biceps that appeared sized for someone much larger. His thin wire glasses would have given him a scholarly look were it not for the cigarette he clenched between his lips like a cowboy, puffing as he worked. In a different town, coming from a different family, Scooter might have been another person entirely. The people I loved most—my mother, Cade and even Dave—all took pride in standing in defiance of their families’ expectations for them, and Scooter was the opposite of that. Yet something about him hinted at the raw material of a different sort of man—someone he might never become, but could be. I wondered what it was inside a person that set them on one path or the other, and if they chose it, or if it chose them.

  We worked all morning. Around eleven, Dodge drove off to buy lunch, and a few minutes later Elias wandered outside for a break, obviously pleased to be free of his brother-in-law for half an hour. He walked out to the mailbox that stood at the edge of the road and leaned against it with his back to us, smoking and looking at the mountains. His shorts and sneakers were spattered with paint, and dabs of it spotted his hands and his forearms, obscuring the shapes of his tattoos. For once, he looked at ease.

  “You been talking to Elias much?” Scooter asked me, low voiced. He had worked his way over to where I sat painting a section of lattice, and now hovered above me painting a support beam. I looked up at him, squinting at the light.

  “Sometimes,” I said. “He’s not very talkative when other people are around.”

  Scooter nodded. “He tell you anything about how he’s doing? Or what’s going on?”

  “What do you mean, ‘what’s going on’?”

  “In his head, I mean. If he’s getting any better.” I didn’t reply right away, and Scooter tossed his cigarette into a bush with a grudging sigh. “I took him to the doctor a while back. He hasn’t said anything to me about whether any of it is working.”

  “I didn’t realize you were that close with him.”

  “I’m not, exactly. He used to give me rides to the bus stop all the time, when I was in middle school. It was almost two miles. He’d see me walking up the side of the road and pick me up in the van. Practically every day.” He gestured toward the road, pointing north. “My grandparents live in the senior care home now, but we used to live down that way, near the turnoff. They raised me.”

  “That was sweet.”

  “Yeah, it was really cool of him. Especially in the winter. I never forgot it. After he got back from the Middle East, when he saw I was working for Dodge, he asked me who my tattoo guy was, so I took him out to the shop and introduced them. This was maybe three weeks after he got back. The next week he wanted me to take him there again, and the one after that. I felt weird about it, but I didn’t really want to say no. I mean, I can’t tell this guy what to do, even though the tattoo-a-week program feels strange to me. That and the fact he wouldn’t drive his own car.”

  I set down the brush and shielded my eyes with my hand so I could watch him as he spoke. “So what did you do?”

  “I just tried to get him talking. Asked him what the new tattoos stood for, whether he was frustrated with living in Frasier, stuff like that. I kept telling him I owed him for all those rides and I’d take him anywhere if he ever needed me to drive. And then one week he asked if I’d mind driving him to the doctor. It was a huge relief for him to ask. I was starting to get real worried he’d do something bad to himself. He had that vibe, you know? Like right before a kid sweeps his hand across the Chutes and Ladders board and knocks all the pieces on the floor. Spring-tight.”

  I looked through the lattice at Elias. He seemed unaware that we were talking about him, and even on his best days he had a habit of cocking his left ear toward whoever was speaking. He looked watchful, eyeing the road, but if he was anxious or tense I couldn’t tell. Whatever was going on with him lived inside his mind, and there it stayed.

  “If you could maybe talk to him,” said Scooter. “Try to suss out if he’s doing any better. He never wants to go anyplace anymore, so I hardly talk to him. Dodge thinks he just needs to work, and Cade—well, I don’t really know Cade. And I wouldn’t feel right going to him and telling him how to look after his own brother.”

  “I’ll see what I can do. He seems to trust me.”

  Scooter nodded and gazed toward him. “Thanks. Probably he’s fine now, but I gotta ask. There aren’t enough
decent people out there as it is.”

  “Too true,” I said, and he shot me a halfhearted smile before taking up his trim brush again and retreating into his deferential silence.

  * * *

  The chickens hadn’t come out as they were supposed to. Once the chicks in the porch incubator hatched from their neat little circle of eggs, Candy was indignant. The Vogels, who had traded them to Candy, had told her they were Rhode Island Whites—standard white chickens with a red comb, the kind from cartoons and Corn Flakes boxes. But almost as soon as they had hatched, it was clear that some were not like the others. They came out with a fine ash-colored sheen across their backs, and at six weeks some were heather-gray all over, while others—the males—kept the color on their necks and tail feathers even as their backs and bodies whitened. They were Brahmas, I could see, and Candy was annoyed. Despite their beauty, she felt swindled. She had been promised Rhode Island Whites, same as all the others.

  As soon as they reached the age where they could be sexed, she wasted no time in separating the male chicks from the females. On the morning when I saw her in the poultry yard rounding them up into a tall-sided box, I felt sorry, but I knew she would care nothing for the pleas of a city girl who thought the roosters too beautiful to kill. They weren’t needed, and so they had to die.

  On that morning, when the back door slammed, Candy came in from the yard carrying a cardboard box with half a dozen chicks in it. She set it on the table and got started filling up her mop bucket with water from the sink. Her youngest boy, John, peered over the edge of the box and made clucking noises. He reached in and scooped up one of the chicks, holding it to his chest. I looked from the boys to the bucket and then at Candy. I asked, “You want me to take the kids outside?”