Holly burst into even harder laughter, and he could almost picture the two of them falling into each other, grabbing the other’s arms to steady themselves as they howled. Not long after this, he drifted to sleep, sediment-slow, and he dreamed of Holly’s wedding, outdoors in the midst of a blizzard. The snow fell like clumps of wet cotton, and Gail was there. The four of them walked up a slope to where the preacher waited, their feet carving a path into the white blanket coating the hillside.
T
HE
Y
EARS OF
R
AIN AND
T
HUNDER
: P
ART
II
2028
Eleven years earlier, I got into her truck.
After four days on the road and a night camping in the Smoky Mountains, we crossed the Teddy Roosevelt Bridge in the morning dawn. A tired wind pushed river mist over the Potomac, and this city that would become my home for over a decade had a stillness to it, a gray-born mystery. At first, we lived two blocks from the Capitol in a dingy brick-block apartment building called Hill House. It was home mostly to congressional staffers, bouncing out of their overpriced shoebox hovels by 6 a.m. with a thermos of coffee and a bagel. The Republican National Committee was close by, and during the grim days of the Trump presidency, this felt like enemy territory, a dangerous movement’s dark core. Kate rode her bike to her offices over on the H Street Corridor, making $37,000 a year, which in D.C. is close to a poverty wage. I struggled to find any kind of work, and for the first seven months did a lot of paid line-standing for lobbyists outside congressional hearings. Eventually I found an internship with a social services organization that worked with sexual assault survivors, though I’d be let go when Covid came. I plowed through the last of my savings to help make rent while Kate tended bar on the weekends. Even though we were broke, everything was new and came with the thrill of early, hungry adulthood. That era now has the blur one’s twenties take on over time, especially after the chaos descended in 2020. My parents visited that March, and we were all sitting in Hawk ’n’ Dove, Kate bickering good-naturedly with my dad about Trump’s first impeachment, when we heard news of the lockdowns.
Twenty-twenty was our first blush with that sensation of true global emergency, and because we spent that year initially secluded, then in the streets as Kate and her coworkers took part in the Black Lives Matter protests, then working furiously on the 2020 election, and then back to a curfew after the attack on the Capitol and another Covid surge, and then… well, you know.
To say there was ever any return to normality isn’t quite right, but there was an acquiescence, a decision that a certain amount of chaos would be tolerated in order to let the world grind on, and within the context of the climate crisis, this was very bad news indeed.
By then, Kate was deeply unhappy with the job she’d come to D.C. for, and she and Liza set off on their own. They started a 501(c)(4) and 501(c)(3), opened offices in thirty states with field directors, and a slew of hubs with neighborhood organizers, but, as she pointed out every night at dinner, this was not much different from anything else folks had been trying for thirty years. As Kate put it to me over wine and a very potent weed gummy, “We need to shock the system.”
“How do you expect to do that?” I asked.
“First and foremost,” said Kate, “fuck off with the messaging apparatus that can only preach to the converted. It’s dour, man. We live on this incredible, joyful, one-in-a-trillion blue marble in the depths of cold black infinite space! We can either be another feeble assemblage of do-gooders patting themselves on the back or we can get rowdy. We set off a riot in the American political system and give all sides of the spectrum unshirted hell.”
In less than three years, they raised astonishing money and built an incredible, daring organization. Even before they began gaining attention, fame, notoriety, I knew Kate and A Fierce Blue Fire were heading for something big. Even when it was just her and Liza working on laptops in our apartment, and the idea that she would be splashed across the front page of a glossy magazine seemed ludicrous, I already knew. It was my first encounter with the sensation of destiny. How that word feels like living inside a bright, wet fog. If you close your eyes you know it’s still there, a premonition made tactile.
I was thinking about this long journey, from hopping into Kate’s truck in Wyoming to her explosion into the public realm, as we sat in the hideaway of one of the most powerful Democrats in the Senate. I thought of how my life’s path had careened, and remembered that ride with her out of the Wind River Range and across the blunt plains east of the Rockies.
“I was an actual working-class hero,” Senator Cy Fitzpatrick whittered on to Kate, his cotton-ball eyebrows bouncing. “I worked in a meatpacking plant with a bunch of Mexicans to put myself through college.” Hideaways are small, secluded offices, and the most senior senators got the ones even the staffers didn’t know about. Supposedly only two keys exist, one for the senator and one for his or her chief of staff. Like most things about Washington, it was not as impressive as it sounds, but now here we were in Cy’s. He made no secret how happy he was to have a pretty audience, and Kate flirted enough to delight the wheelchair-bound Pennsylvania senator. Whatever this cloak-and-dagger meeting was about, it had been brokered by Fitzpatrick, one of the first senators to take FBF’s radical approach seriously.
The door popped and scraped open loudly, and finally Russ Mackowski, West Virginia’s Far Right firebrand, arrived, trailed by his chief of staff, Dave Montreff. Mackowski made the rounds, shaking hands with curt hellos. He was big and barrel-chested with steel-gray hair and a red, weathered face. When he shook my hand, his palm felt like tree bark. He pumped my hand once and said “Goodtoseeya” before moving on.
Tom Levine, our Capitol Hill vet, now whispered in the ear of Coral Sloane, our policy director, while Kate herself took Mackowski’s hand, smiled huge, and gave him a joyful “Senator!” The old Republican did not return the enthusiasm despite the fact that Kate practically got him elected over Elmer Nolan.
In addition to the four of us from FBF, Fitzpatrick had invited only one advisor, a man of South Asian descent, thin, intense, and severe looking. He stood with his arms crossed and shoulders hunched, staring through rectangular glasses directly at the floor. He had not bothered to introduce himself but appeared to be listening so intently, the effect was somewhat creepy.
The eight of us—four civilians, two politicians, and their aides—crammed together in that little office with a window overlooking the darkling Capitol—felt uncomfortably intimate. As the introductory chatter wound down, Tom Levine leaned into my ear to mutter, “You’re in the big leagues now, Stanton. But don’t worry. Once you watch these esteemed members finger every turkey wrap on the tray before picking one, you quit going gooey. Generally, all these fuckers live solely to get on TV.”
“Enough with the throat clearing, Cy.” Mackowski’s voice boomed inside the small room as he cut off Fitzpatrick’s efforts at glad-handing. Mackowski popped his index finger at Kate. “This meeting that doesn’t exist has one objective: me and this gal.”
“We’re just as curious why we’re here,” said Coral. Their words stuck on their lip ring. They wore a black short-sleeve button-up and tan slacks, dressed like they were going bowling rather than meeting with senators. “We’ve got an election in less than two weeks, and it’s hard to see how our interests might align.”
“Cy didn’t mention that we may have found a piece of common ground?” Mackowski’s disdain with them was plain to see. He projected a military bearing (though he’d never served) and stood stock-straight with his ample arms crossed over his chest like a drill sergeant.