Heaven Should Fall (13 page)

“What about counseling or support groups or anything like that?”

He shook his head. “I don’t need any of that. Sit around with a bunch of other loads and talk about the past? No thanks.”

I got up from the chair, accepting the hand he offered to help pull me to standing. “It’s not like that, though. I’m telling you, those groups can make all the difference in the world. My mom swore by them.” I glanced at the pamphlet display on the wall. “They must have
something.
”

“Don’t worry about it, Jill. This’ll do me. Come on.”

He started out the door, and I followed him. I wished Cade were here with me, able to back me up, because Cade believed as much as I did that Elias needed to reconnect with people—old friends, other soldiers, anybody who didn’t live in our one little household. Elias had lived in this town all his life—surely those people were all around us, the friends he had grown up with, the women he must have loved. And yet he seemed like someone lingering just outside the doorway of a school dance, unsure how to make his entrance, or if stepping into the crowd would only amplify the loneliness inside him.

As we climbed into the Jeep he didn’t say anything more, and I turned my attention to the drive. Partway back, as Alison Krauss sang “
Two Highways
,” I cocked an ear to the harmony and realized Elias was singing along, his rough voice quiet and crooning. I reached over and patted his hand, and as if by reflex he flared his fingers the way a man would to interlace them with his lover’s, before letting his hand drop against the seat once again.

Chapter 13

Elias

The little girl always unnerved him. She lived in the mud hut at the end of the road, a dust-caked old crapheap not fit to store a broken lawn mower, but her eyes were green. Green, like a regular person’s; faceted, luminous and edged all around with deep black kohl, even though she was only seven or eight years old. A tiny whore. Elias knew it was normal, all that eyeliner, that Pashtun kids wore it all the time. Many of the men in their families, heterosexual or so they claimed, used it, too. More than three years in the country, in and out, living in the grit and smelling their sweat and eating some of the shit they called food, and he still didn’t get these people. Savages all. Scrabbling to survive, living in the Stone Age. The children wore rags and threw rocks at dogs. They had their strange and vengeful God, their mothers whose hands fluttered to cover their faces with swaths of black, like caped vampires. More than anything, Elias wanted to get the fuck out of there. More than anything, he believed he had fallen through the quicksand of Pashtun country and into some sort of nightmare gnome hole where the bright upper world would never look the same again.

The green-eyed girl wore bracelets—bangles that clinked when she played—and a ratty teal skirt too short by half a foot. Her auburn hair had a blaring reddish sheen that he would have thought was fake if he hadn’t known better, too rock-and-roll to be real, but nevertheless it was hers. It was thick and longish and blunt cut above those eyes. There was a permanent crust under the girl’s nose. She ran back and forth from her family’s place to the market, or to her aunt’s or cousins’, because everybody here was related to everybody else and deep in the night on patrol it made your skin crawl to think of all those ancient people plotting against you, jabber-whispering in their strange language, and all those relatives fucking.

The problem with intel was that everybody knew things and nobody could document a single one of them. In the military there were the intel people, those whose job it was to fish for information and get it all square and pass it up to the right people, and then there were the guys on the ground, the ones in Elias’s unit, who saw things and heard them but whose knowledge was met with shrugs. Little crumbs of intelligence. Piled up together, they meant something. But nobody cared what the grunts knew. They were there to protect the Afghans, not that the Afghans gave a shit.

He saw the girl every day before Wharton died. He saw her every day after. She was one of the multitudes, but among all those other raven-haired, sand-colored children he couldn’t shake the sense that she was a plant. A crusty-nosed spy from his own tribe of real people, sent to report back about whether he performed with bravery and valor. He knew there was nothing too strange about her coloring. The region was like the hallway bathroom of the high school we call the Earth, where all the paper spitwads of every delinquent passing through merged to form a rippling topography born of every race, color and creed, and betraying none specifically. She wasn’t the only one who looked like she could have been his own mixed-blood cousin. It was the kohl that drove the point home.
Look at my eyes
, said her face. Taunting.

The rumor—and it came at first as one of those crumbs—was that one of the hajjis, a young man who drifted between the various homes of his kinsmen, had funneled explosives to the ones who killed Wharton. Probably it was true. The guy came and went from the town as he pleased, never collecting enough bad associations to get himself arrested or his house raided, but they knew what he was up to just the same. It ate at Elias for months, knowing that this was the one sure guy on whom he could pin the death of his brother-in-arms, and still the man walked free as a bird. Finally word came that the man was suspected in another grenade attack in the next town over, and they got orders to arrest him. On that morning, as soon as the hajji had wandered from one house to another that was easier to secure, they formed a four-man stack at the door and rushed in. Elias knew this drill. He knew his part, knew the skills so well that they were not conscious thought so much as a dance between his optic nerve and the fibers of his muscles. His eyes transmitted orders across the web of his nerves like a cyborg, and in the moment of it he felt not pride, not competence, but like a most excellent machine. Evolved above his own humanity to something better, specialized exactly, humming along its own perfect code.

They, the squad, were order in the chaos. That was to be expected. The two men in the house jumped up and started yelling, and the woman screamed. A pack of kids ran out the back into the courtyard. A shot rang out, and the older man flew backward into the mud wall beside the black barrel stove, his white caftan blooming with blood, before he slid down, slumped. The woman dropped to the floor, her body lost in a black
salwar kameez
curling like a snail shell over the baby. Her jeweled shoes stuck out the other side. He aimed his gun at her.

The hajji was already zip-tied and collared. He shrieked in high-pitched pussy Pashto. The words, which Elias could understand to a certain degree, rolled through his mind interpreted but ignored. The baby wailed its haggard newborn scream, and the woman, shaking, peeked out at Elias through the hijab she had pulled across her face defensively. They were Pac-Man ghosts, these women. Eyes floating down the street, loose and disembodied, but don’t be fooled, they’re after you. The pissed-off baby started crying with everything it had, choking and strangling on the end of every sob, like it was pulling that last bit of sound from the bottom of its intestines before jerking down another gulp of oxygen. Elias heard the
clunk-clunk-zzzzzzzt
of her shoes falling off and somebody zip-tying her ankles. She mumbled something to Elias in pleading, miserable Pashto, but it was muffled by the hijab. He looked at her eyes and thought about those mouthless ghosts, how they ran from you one minute, turned on you the next.

Another soldier secured the woman’s wrists and dragged her out to the courtyard with the hajji, leaving the baby on the carpet. A couple of the children had made it over the high mud walls around the garden, but three remained, huddling in a corner. They did not look as frightened as Elias thought they should. There was a boy of about ten and two girls, one dark, the other with her lined green eyes and crusted nose. The staff sergeant barked a few textbook phrases at the man, trying to milk him for information. From inside the house the baby’s cry drifted out, but listlessly, and the situation started to feel organized and under control. The hajji would implicate himself as an insurgent, killing the man in the house would be justified and they could move forward with tracking down every last bastard responsible for Wharton’s death.
I have no notion of being hanged for half treason,
a great patriot once said. The pure notes of this rang in Elias like the first chord of a song, not because he would commit treason either in half or in full, but because the army had shaped in his soul the belief in being
all in,
and in his life there would be no more half-assing. Since childhood he had fought the bugaboo of his own lethargy, that and the timidness he liked to cover up with one cocked, ironic brow—but no longer. Gone was the fat-ass kid forever getting shouldered into lockers and bleachers, who could laugh it off, who fantasized extensively about going down on the girls who struck his fancy but could not ever bridge the gap that would make it happen. Now he was the real Elias, the soldier with the M16, backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government and sporting abdominal muscles you could bounce a quarter off. His center of gravity was low and stable, he did not laugh it off and once he got out of this sand trap and into a place where sex was legal, he would make it happen. Oh yes.

The staff sergeant, still shouting, jabbed his rifle into the ribs of the hajji. Elias scanned the top of the wall. It all happened very fast. The boy in the corner, the kid, let out a
Braveheart
cry and rushed toward the staff sergeant, head down, arms pumping. And Elias dropped him. Just like that, he aimed and fired, and the kid fell to the ground like a duck. The woman in the hijab howled, then shrieked, stretching out her zip-tied wrists toward the boy. She flopped sideways in the dirt and began inchworming rapidly toward him, ignoring the shouts of the soldiers to
wadrega, wadrega, wadrega
. Then another shot snapped the air—that would be Kitson, who easily freaked—and the woman finally stopped as ordered, but not of her own volition.

The baby began to cry again.

Something inside Elias’s head, a place apart from the instinct that saw threat in the kid’s run and squeezed the trigger by reflex, began to whir like an airplane engine. Reflection was a horror. By the light of it he knew—of course he knew, it was obvious—that his shot had been unnecessary. The kid could easily have been stopped by a large adult hand or a solid kick. He was unarmed. He could have been restrained with a thin piece of plastic. The two girls huddled in the corner and he was making a grand show of being brave for them. That was all. And now the woman was dead, too. None of this was right, it was unraveling, the signals getting tangled and jammed. If you didn’t have control, you had nothing. No safety. No authority. You were just a pack of fuckers shooting people for no specific reason.

The sister, she stood shouting in the corner, her eyes covered by the other girl’s hands.
Manan, Manan,
she called at the boy in a sharp voice, as though she expected her brother to get back up; she must not know yet that her mother was dead. He looked at her shouting mouth, the hands cupped over her eyes like the bulging closed lids of a lizard, then behind her to the other girl. The green-eyed girl stared back at him, her pupils tight against the light, the kohl thick and unsmudged. She was a plant. She knew he was Elias from New Hampshire, slumming in the land of the savages, faking at being an American badass. The difference between cyborg and savage lies in a single shot.

It was an accident.

He could absolve himself for each he had killed as a machine of war.

He could never forgive himself for a human failure, for that was something he owned alone.

It was one of the things he shoved down, and locked away, and carried home.

Chapter 14

Cade

The first Sunday I had off, I drove down to the U-Store-It and rolled up the door on that storage unit where Elias used to lift weights. All of the customer’s crap was still there, exactly how we’d left it years ago. Gradually, taking my time about it, I moved the whole weight bench and most of the weights into the Saturn. I had to go into the office and find a bolt wrench to get the bench apart. Dodge would have kicked my ass if he’d seen me making off with that customer’s stuff, even if he knew the reason, so I couldn’t exactly ask for help. Once I got it back to the house I had to repeat the whole process, carrying it all down to the cellar and reassembling everything. It was possible Dodge would come downstairs at some point and ask why the hell we had a weight bench, but probably he wouldn’t have put together where it came from. Most people’s first reaction when they see you with something new is not to ask where you stole it from. And anyway, I felt justified. If we couldn’t get Elias to leave the house without having a nervous breakdown, I could at least give him something worthwhile to do at home.

While Candy and Jill were cooking supper, I coaxed Eli downstairs. It didn’t take a whole lot to do it; nothing ever changes around there, so even a hint of anything different gets those people all hot and bothered. Once he was standing at the bottom of the stairs he looked straight at the weight bench and said, “You crazy son of a bitch.”

I grinned. “Hey, everybody needs a hobby.”

“You actually went and stole that guy’s equipment.”

“I
borrowed
it. He hasn’t been back to look in what, five years? He’ll never know it’s missing.”

Elias walked up to it as if it was an unfamiliar dog. Touched the weight I’d already set on the bar, ran a hand along the top of the bench. I said, “Try it.”

He sat down and slid beneath the bar, braced his hands on it and lifted. Three times, up and down, and that wasn’t any small amount of weight, either. “Hoo-ah,” I said. “That’s the spirit. Knew you had it in you.”

“It’s nothing. At Bagram I was lifting twice this much, sets of ten reps, all damn day.” He did two more and then let it rest in the frame. “Guess I’m out of shape, though.”

“We’ll get you back into it. We’re gonna get you
laid,
buddy.”

He laughed. “Never had a lot of luck with that in Frasier. No reason to think it’ll change now.”

“You don’t know that. Get back in shape and see what happens. Even Jill thought you were pretty hot last fall.”

He’d lifted the barbell again, but shifted his head to glance at me. “Shut up.”

“I’m serious. If Jill thinks so, you know she wasn’t the only one.”

He shook his head and worked through a set of five. “We’ll see about that.”

“How’s the new medicine working out for you?”

“I hate it.”

That was not the expected answer. I said, “Huh?”

“I told Jill the old stuff made me feel like a ghost. Just numb and lethargic. I couldn’t even jack off half the time.” I laughed, but he shot me a reproachful look. “I’m serious. It makes it so you can’t, and if you think that’s funny,
you
try living like that for six months. Now I’m off that, and they gave me Xanax instead, which is supposed to just stop anxiety. Fine.” He sat up on the bench and shrugged his shoulders around a little to loosen them. “I figured I’d just take it when I needed it. But it doesn’t work like that. It’s like I was standing in a canyon, turned around and saw a wall of water coming toward me. All the stuff I wasn’t feeling while I was on the first drug, it came right at me. The happy, the sad. Loss. Anger. Wanting things.” He rubbed his forearms, the way people do when they’re cold. “It’s too much.”

“But that’s good, though, right? That’s the human experience.”

He chuckled. “Man, fuck the human experience. Don’t even give me that line. Here we are, right? The day I sat on this bench and you sat across from me and told me you’d knocked up Miss Piper, don’t tell me you were all jazzed up about the human experience. You just wanted to crawl into a hole and disappear.”

“Yeah. But it worked out. Everything always does.”

“Didn’t work out for that baby.”

I had nothing to say to that. It kind of pissed me off that he said it, even. I shrugged, and when Elias stood up I slid onto the bench. The remark irritated me enough that I figured I could probably match him with the lifting. Hostility is good for things like that.

“Feelings are overrated,” Elias concluded. He stood with his arms folded, his skin marked up like the margins of a high schooler’s notebook. “I’m done with ’em. Wouldn’t mind getting laid, though. Not fair only one of us is getting all the fun.”

* * *

I briefed Jill about the whole thing the next day, once I’d more or less stopped stewing over what my brother had said. When I found her, she was reading some kind of parenting book by the small lamp in the living room. The rest of the lights were off for Candy’s kids, who sat in front of the TV watching cartoons and eating Potato Pearls out of a giant metal can. They stuffed their hands down in it and scooped them out while the Looney Tunes flickered over their faces. Potato Pearls kept falling out of their hands and bouncing across the floor like plastic BBs. The beagles were on alert, chasing down every one that went astray.

Once I got her attention, Jill followed me out back and heard me out. I’d backtracked to talking about my weight-lifting idea when she interrupted me.

“I don’t care where you got the bench from,” she said, “but did you say he’s on
Xanax?
”

“I think that’s what he said, yeah.”

She looked alarmed, and laughed without any humor at all. “That’s not good. You definitely don’t give that drug to someone with a drinking problem. It’s a benzo. I wonder if they even asked him about that or if they just wrote the scrip and stuffed it in his hand before they kicked him out the door.”

“Elias doesn’t have a drinking problem.”

“Of course he does. When have you ever seen him go to sleep on less than six beers? You don’t call that a problem?”

Beats the hell out of me,
I thought. I just stared at her.

“Make him another appointment,” she said. “Make it for
soon.
Like, next week. This time I’ll actually go back to the examining room with him. And if they try to kick me out I’ll tell them they’re idiots. My mom would freak if she heard this. It’s one of those basic questions they should have asked automatically.”

“I don’t think he’ll go. I think he’d rather be on nothing at all.”

“That’s not a good idea at all. Cade, this is getting more and more stupid. You know what I think?” I hated it when Jill said that, because she didn’t actually care whether you wanted to know or not; you were going to hear it, either way. “I think I should call up Dave and see if he’ll let us live down there for a couple months. You, me and Elias, I mean, once the baby gets here. He might, and you’d be closer to all your interviews.”

I was shaking my head before she was even finished. “At that camp you worked at? No way.”

“Why not? We’ve both got enough skills that we could pitch in and teach. And Dave’s a great guy. He’s got the space, and I’m pretty sure he’ll let us all stay. We need to get Elias out of this house, away from Candy and Dodge and that damn TV. He needs a fresh start, and there’s no better one than Southridge. Believe me, I know.”

Any words of explanation that came to mind would only make me sound petty. I was remembering the picture I’d seen of her and Dave standing together in the woods, his arm thrown around her shoulders, both of them leaning toward each other and smiling for the camera. He was older for sure, but not by a significant margin—ten years, maybe twelve. It was the kind of age difference that would have been huge when she was fourteen or fifteen, but wouldn’t be all that noteworthy now. And I’d been in the room when she called him to tell him she wouldn’t be back this summer. At the end of the call she said, quiet but matter-of-fact,
I love you,
as if that was just something she always said. There had been a pause after it, and my brain filled in his voice saying
I love you, too.
No way would I take my girl and my new baby and go live next to the other guy she loved, owing him favors, letting him be my boss. Screw
that.

“It’s the most therapeutic thing,” she said. Her hands were slicing the air, as if she had this whole thing specced out on a grid. “I’m telling you. Dave used to be an army ranger—well, he was almost one. Elias could relate to him, and it’d be way better than leaving him up here with Dodge and Candy.”

“Not going to happen,” I told her. “I’ve already got a plan. It’ll work. You just have to have a little faith in me.”

She tipped her head, and her hands went still in midair. “I’ve got all the faith in the world in you. But we need to act
soon
with him. Dave will help us, and sometimes you just have to accept help when it’s offered. Admitting you need it isn’t a weakness. It’s a sign of strength.”

This was something Jill did a lot. When she was talking about moving in with Stan or what my dad needed these days or anything where someone was having a hard time, she started sounding like she was running an AA meeting. I wouldn’t have rolled my eyes at her, but I sure wanted to some days. So I let it go. I told her we’d figure it out once the baby got here. And I guess I just ignored the obvious, which was that if I was really a good judge of my capabilities, we wouldn’t have been stuck in fucking Frasier in the first place.