Heaven Should Fall (16 page)

TJ slept well that night. Not until two o’clock in the morning did I awake to the muted report of a gunshot from outside that I realized must be Dodge and Scooter having finally crossed paths with a bear. The noise woke TJ, and regretfully I pulled myself away from Cade’s warm bare chest and lifted the baby from his basket.

I pulled him to my breast and eased back into bed, arranging the covers over myself and the lower half of TJ’s body. Cade had left the door ajar, and the night-light from the bathroom was the only illumination in the darkness. The baby’s nursing was slow and rhythmic, and I closed my eyes in deep fatigue. When I opened them, Elias was standing in the doorway, looking at me with his plain, unreadable eyes.

I pulled up the edge of the quilt immediately, self-conscious to be caught nursing the baby bare chested in front of him. When he didn’t react, I held up a finger to let him know I would be with him in a minute. I looked down at the baby, and when I glanced up again, Elias was gone.

After a while TJ fell back asleep at my breast, and I laid him softly in the basket. I pulled on one of Cade’s T-shirts and a pair of pajama pants and tiptoed down the stairs. The entire house was dark; both televisions were off, and the lamp that always burned beside Elias’s chair when he was awake had been snapped off, as well. I checked the porch rocker and found it empty, then headed back up to my room. Only then did I notice Elias’s door was closed, and I knew he must have grown tired of waiting for me to finish nursing the baby and had gone off to bed. For that, I felt a little sorry. Elias and I needed to talk. He had put his arms out to me. That was progress. If he would do that much, maybe he would open up to me about how the rest of us could help him, too. And we could all move forward.

I slipped back under the covers and slept until four-thirty, when TJ woke to nurse again and Cade got out of bed to attend to the day’s chores. And then I drifted back to sleep for a while, until I heard Cade yelling from the barn, and then Candy’s scream, and I realized it had not been Dodge’s gun that went off that night, but Elias’s.

* * *

It was Dodge who stopped me at the door of the barn with both hands held up and out, his face a warning that he meant business, that there was no chance I would find a way to push past him. I screamed for Cade, but Cade didn’t even turn in the direction of my voice. I could see him crouched on the floor of the barn, with Elias’s legs jutting out to the side, sneakers on as always, but both he and Cade were in shadow. Candy came and went, her long hair flying behind her as she ran between the main house and the barn, then down the driveway to meet the ambulance. From the upper window came the sound of TJ squalling with increasing vehemence, but my own newborn’s crying had become a distraction from the primary event. After a while Leela appeared with TJ on her shoulder and her face bone-white, and then red and blue flashing lights twirled in the driveway, accompanied by the staticky clatter of radios. Only then did Cade reappear from the barn, both of his hands and the front of his T-shirt covered with thick red blood. His expression was stoic, and he met my eyes before pointing to the house and saying in a voice that was not to be argued with, “Get inside.”

I took the wailing baby from Leela and trailed into the house, sitting in a dining chair near the window and setting him to nurse. Instantly he went quiet. The window offered no good angle on the barn and driveway. After the sirens chirped to life, I caught sight of Cade stalking over to the shed. He pulled off his shirt and stuffed it into the trash, then squatted by the garden spigot and rinsed off his hands. I let out a shaky sigh and switched TJ to the other breast. There was nothing to do but wait for Cade.

He came back into the house and jerked open the bifold door of the laundry closet, then opened the dryer, spilling out clean clothes onto the floor as he searched for a fresh T-shirt. I asked, “Are you going with him?”

“I’m driving down there now. They wouldn’t let anyone come in the ambulance. Said we needed to follow in a car. Dodge is already on the way, with Dad.”

“What happened? Is he going to be all right?”

He pulled a shirt over his head and looked at me as though I had asked the stupidest possible question. “He shot himself in the head, Jill.”

“Okay, but do you think they can save him?”

“Of course they can’t save him. He’s dead. You think a guy like Elias doesn’t know how to pull off something like that? Did you see my hands?” He felt in the pockets of his jeans. “Damn it, where are my keys?”

“But I
saw
him. I just saw him first thing this morning. I know I did.”

“Well, I just saw him, too. Jesus Christ.” He pulled off his watch and dropped it onto the counter. Smears of blood marked both the countertop and his skin. “Get rid of all that, will you? My mom’s going to have a nervous breakdown if she sees it, and I gotta go.”

I tore off a paper towel. “Do you want me to come with you? I can leave TJ with Candy. Maybe they
can
save him. You won’t know until they get him there.”

“He’s
dead,
Jill. And no, you can’t come. It’ll be hours and hours. I’ll have to help Dad figure out where to send him and how to fill out all the paperwork. And when the hospital files their report, I want them to know every last detail. I want them to know who’s accountable.”

I set TJ on my shoulder to burp him. “What do you mean, who’s accountable? Nobody’s going to think it was you or Dodge.”

“I mean so they know it’s the army that did it. So it’s on the record that they broke this poor bastard and then ignored him and blew him off, and when he tried to get help they threw some pills at him, and then he shot himself because they’d turned him into a drug addict.” The volume of his voice ramped up gradually with each sentence, until he was nearly shouting. “I want it to be on that last line on his death certificate. ‘Cause of death: homicide.’”

“Cade…they’re not going to do that.”

“They’d better. It’s criminal. You don’t agree with me? You don’t think they royally screwed him over?”

“I never said I didn’t agree. I just said there’s no recourse.”

“It’s my opinion,” Cade began, leaning toward me with his hands against the kitchen island, “that people are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, namely life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

“Nobody’s arguing with you.”

“And whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it’s the right of the people to alter or abolish it. That’s my right and my duty.”

I stood up and joggled TJ on my shoulder. “Cade, don’t go in there with your sleeves rolled up quoting the Declaration of Independence. They’ll think you’re a nut job. The important thing is to get Elias taken care of.”

Cade threw his arms in the air. “He’s
dead!
”

“I just saw him!”
I shouted back again, and in the moment I felt so passionately correct that nothing would ever have convinced me otherwise. “I bled a lot, too, and here I am! So don’t you write him off until someone with a degree who knows what they’re talking about tells you different!”

He swore at me, grabbed his keys from the hook and slammed the front door.

It would be many hours before I saw him again. And by the time he walked back in the door, dry-eyed and grim and smelling of cigarette smoke, I’d had much more time to consider all that had been said.

I felt sorry for what I’d said about hearing it from a person with a degree. I knew that must have been salt in the wound for Cade, that only a person who had finished college was qualified to judge what he himself had seen.

I believed, finally, that Elias was dead.

And I thought, where the army was concerned, Cade might be right. Maybe it
was
the army’s fault for throwing him back into the world when he returned from war, woefully ill equipped to make his way through the battlefield of normalcy. Maybe it was their fault for nurturing a culture in which he couldn’t admit need without acknowledging failure.

But also came the terrible thought that it was my fault, too. For not listening to my mother’s voice that had whispered to me so insistently over these past months, warning me that what we were doing for Elias was not enough—never enough. For not recognizing, the previous afternoon, that Elias was trying to make his peace with me and Cade. And worst of all was not what I had failed to do, but what I
had
done: how I, with the best of intentions, had led him to love me. Deep in my heart I had known for months that his fondness for me was not sisterly, but in spite of that I laid my hands on his shoulders and my son in his arms and expected him to find it a comfort and not a burden.

For a long time after the funeral it seemed always to be on my mind—the constant question of whether my friendship with Elias played a role in his death. He left no note, no letters, no explanation. In the infinite stretch of time that followed, some days I told myself it was egotistical to assume I had a part in it at all. He was addicted, in pain, mentally ill. None of those things had anything to do with me. But I couldn’t get away from the belief, down in the core of me, that it was true. Elias’s mind was a crowded room of people he could never get his arms around: not to hold, not to carry, not to save. And so he put a bullet in it, and in doing so joined most of them, and left only one behind.

Chapter 20

Elias

Today is the day I will die
. The words scrolled through his mind every morning as he awoke, like the news ticker on CNN, steady and plain. With his arms still tucked beneath his pillow, his face pushed into its foam, he would mull on the thought until he had accepted it. Some days it was easy, especially if the previous patrol shift had gone very well or very badly. A good day meant he was ready to die. A bad day meant he might as well.

He rolled out of bed and followed the smell to the bathroom. Above the urinal was a message scrawled in thick marker:
VALOR
HONOR
DUTY
QUIT
WHINING
,
followed by a second message scratched beneath it in ballpoint pen, in shaded block letters to make up for the wimpier medium—
FUCK
YOU
SIR
.

Get dressed. First smoke of the day. Three doughnuts and an omelet. And it was time to go on patrol.

* * *

Before he’d deployed, Candy had given him a book of daily devotionals to take with him. Each day had a Bible verse and inspiring story and ended with some kind of affirmation, like “I know that my redeemer lives” or “I dedicate this day to you, Lord.” After a while it got to be too much to lug around, and he gave it away. The skills of being a soldier were straightforward, but the brain game was a paradox. He never prayed for his own safety, because it somehow felt cowardly, but the whole day became a long rosary for every soldier who crossed his path:
Protect him today, Lord. And him. And her.
And even though he began every day with an affirmation that he would die, he knew that wasn’t the struggle; there were harder things to reconcile. At the end of it all, you die whether or not you’re prepared to. But he still couldn’t bring himself to think upon awakening,
Today is the day I’ll kill somebody.

* * *

His patrol shift was set to end at seven. The day had been slow, hot and boring; they had spent the shift driving around the desert in the Cougar—an imposing hulk of a vehicle, solid as a safe at Fort Knox, with Elias in the machine-gun turret at the top. Now the sun was setting behind the western stretch of land not marked by any mountains, and bands of tangerine and gold streaked the sky.
Sunkist,
Elias thought. The sky looked like the soft-drink can, and the small fireball of a sun completed the image. The suffocating heat was starting to dissipate ever so slightly; the sweat that trickled to his jaw felt cool. This side of the landscape was disorienting to him, so flat and singularly pale, a planet other than his own. He could sense his pupils contract and open again as he looked at it, like they couldn’t figure out what they were seeing or determine whether to gaze close or far. He was tired.

Elias pushed the sweat from one eye with the heel of his hand and scanned the perimeter. All at once—it was unmistakable—he saw the figure of a man disappearing into a ditch. A crumpled sheet of plastic lay on the other side of the road: the hallmark of a hidden IED. Without hesitation he swung the gun into position and fired on the man, rattling out a volley of bullets at the ditch. The staff sergeant shouted his orders to him quickly: “Don’t kill.” He was an insurgent, and the captain wanted him brought in for interrogation. “Shoot near him until the Buffalo gets here to neutralize it. Keep him down, but keep him alive.”

“He’s wounded already,” Elias called back, but the answer was the same.

The man’s dark head appeared at the edge of the ditch, and Elias greeted it with a fresh round of rifle fire. Minutes stretched on in silence. The sun drifted lower; the sky was a Sunkist can no longer. Darkness was falling over the desert like a hand descending. Elias fired again, watching the bullets skim the sand like flat stones across the quarry lake.

An hour passed.

Two.

The desert around him was black as blindness. He watched the man now through night-vision goggles, which cast the landscape in
Ghostbusters
green. Now and then the radio crackled, promising the Buffalo to relieve them in short order; his stomach growled protests that he ignored. The man kept peeking out at intervals, eyes frantic and forlorn, and each time Elias shot over him again. Beneath the starlit sky he felt all the exposure of a stage. Darkness and isolation caused paranoia to rear up inside him, and as time wore on he began to feel jumpy on the trigger, desperate for resolution.
Just kill him, Elias
came the voice in his mind.
End this thing.
Kill him and you can get back in the Cougar. Chill out and wait for dinner
.

But that wasn’t the order.

The ghoulish palms and scrub trees rustled in the wind. In the strange glow of the goggles the desert offered up the starlight with a sheen that looked like ice. Fatigue and hunger wore at him, and some irritating corner of his brain, exhausted to the point of delirium, had decided that the desert was the quarry lake in winter. Each time the man ducked back into the ditch it seemed as though he were slipping underwater; strange thoughts invaded Elias’s mind, whispers that didn’t follow logically.
You can’t shoot here on private property. He would have drowned by now anyway.
And then the man’s eyes would glow deerlike above the ridge again and Elias would barrage the sand in reply. Because it
was
sand, he reminded himself. Even at home, the lake wasn’t there anymore. The county had drained it when the Vogel girl went under. He thought back to the sight of the girl skating on wobbly ankles across the open ice, her arms out at a low angle for balance. To the way his sister’s eyes had followed her all afternoon in the manner one watches a kitchen fly, calculating where it will land.

From the ditch he heard a few broken phrases, weakly shouted. None of it was intelligible. Most likely the man had looked up at the stars, considered his wounds and his odds, and decided to talk, but they couldn’t be sure. They couldn’t leave the vehicle until the ordnance was disposed of, and they couldn’t give the enemy the chance to get away. A hand clawed at the ground above the ditch, then vanished at the clatter of the rifle.

Why didn’t you help her?
he had asked Candy late that evening, once it was all over. Only in his mind had he asked the real question:
How could you just stand there and do nothing when you know somebody’s dying?

I did,
she had replied.
I called for help.

The third hour turned over, and at last the Buffalo rumbled into sight. “Good job, soldier,” the staff sergeant said to him as he ambled down the turret and collapsed onto the bench. Somebody handed him a Red Bull, and it kept him awake long enough to get back to the barracks.

The air conditioners greeted him with a blast of wet cool air and all their incessant grinding. He squirted some peanut butter onto a packet of crackers from field rations, smoked his last cigarette of the day and stripped down to his undershirt and boxers. At the urinal he recycled his Red Bull—
VALOR
HONOR
DUTY
QUIT
WHINING
—before falling into his bunk and pressing his face into his pillow. He was still alive.

With his sleep came his dreams. He dreamed of kneeling on the rifle range with his father beside him as he shot and missed, shot and missed. Everybody was watching. With each shot the helplessness doubled in his belly and doubled again, infused every moment with the dread of the inevitable. He dreamed of the man’s dry hand against his skull, pounding his forehead against the stump—not of the pain so much as the humiliation of his sister watching it all and knowing her brother had failed, feeling pity for him. He dreamed of her curling up behind him, offering him her love as he feigned sleep to ease the embarrassment of accepting it.

And when he awoke the next morning, the dream dissolving with the light, he understood the man in the ditch had felt just as he had—helpless, desperate, abandoned—but no, a hundred times worse, and without the glimmer of love to comfort him at the end of what he had endured. Elias pushed this away and forced a new thought, a dependable thought:
Today is the day I will die.
And it was easy to accept that morning, because he knew, in a small way, he already had.