Heaven Should Fall

“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