The Heavens Rise (13 page)

After Katrina’s surge flooded Elysium, none of the Delongpre cousins had stepped up to repair the damage, and Ben could only bring himself to visit the place a couple of times over the years as it devolved into a swamp-eaten ruin. He had his own special private places where he went to remember Nikki in peace; Elysium wasn’t one of them. How could it have been? He’d never so much as grazed his finger across the surface of the artesian-fed swimming pool. (Someone, he wasn’t quite sure who, had drained the thing right after their disappearance.) And he never got the chance to spend a single night in the raised Acadian cottage that had at times seemed like Mr. Noah’s life’s work. The year before, the State of Louisiana had finally given official death declarations to all three members of the Delongpre family and, in accordance with Mr. Noah’s will, Elysium’s flooded remains passed to the park service that managed the adjacent swampland.

Once he crossed Madisonville’s tiny drawbridge and bypassed the strip of restaurants sitting on the bank of the Tchefuncte River, Ben made a left turn onto Main Street and headed in the direction of the lake. Recently constructed suburban homes with the filigree ironwork and broad front porches of the Old South lined the blocks leading up to the Maritime Museum. Then the blink-and-you-miss-it town was gone and Main Street became an undulating two-lane road through tall, wind-tossed grass and long pools of muddy water.

At the lakeshore he came to a broad asphalt parking lot with a boat launch. But the launch was empty, the only car parked in the lot Anthem’s cherry-red F-150 pickup truck. Here, the river emptied into the lake with that same silent, unhurried ease that moved all the bodies of water in Louisiana, and resting in the shallows next to a crumbling wooden dock was Anthem’s
baby
.

She was an old river push boat that had been sitting in her current
spot for about fifteen years: a three-story hulk of steel with a white-painted shell striated by rust bands. If she’d had a name, the elements had stripped all evidence of it from her hull years ago. The rumor was, some rich guy had hauled the boat to its current spot because he planned to break down its parts and use them as a breakwater for his fishing camp. But the guy had either lost his will or his money, because here the boat sat more than a decade later.

Her tall wheelhouse was accessed by an exterior ladder on either side, her bow given over to two matching triangles of steel that had once acted as bumpers against barges and boats in distress. The bottom deck would have been flush with the water’s surface if the boat hadn’t been keeling slightly in the shallows. Still, whenever Ben saw a push boat working along the Mississippi, the design of its bottom deck unnerved him. Too many of those
Jaws
movies when he was a kid, Anthem had once chided him. That was only sort of true. Ben knew there weren’t any sharks in the river. It was the currents that frightened him; they were ferocious and just below the surface.

In broad daylight, Anthem Landry was a giant. But when he was wreathed in shadow, as he was now, he looked twice as tall. If you cracked a two-by-four across his massive upper back, the board would probably split before any of his bones did. He had the same prominent Roman nose he’d had since he was a teenager, and the rest of his face was a fortunate blend of features arising from the blend of Italian and French blood that made up so many New Orleans family lines: delicate pink lips on a long, expressive mouth and a light olive complexion that seemed to repel everything from razor burns to acne. He’d gone with Ben to the gay clubs on Bourbon and St. Ann a few times over the years, and Ben was always surprised when the lascivious stares of the other patrons landed not on Anthem’s broad chest or statuesque facial features, but on his hands: they were massive, the kind Michelangelo might have carved, but perfectly proportional to the rest of his giant frame.

“We use to do it in the wheelhouse,” Anthem said.

“You’re kidding.”

“She didn’t tell you?”

“She didn’t tell me every time you guys did it. Just the first time . . .”

“When she made me wear two condoms and pull out after five minutes?”

“Yeah. That time.”

It was still pushing eighty degrees outside and Ben was wearing a short-sleeved polo shirt and linen slacks, but the sight of the push boat’s glassless windows opening onto impenetrable darkness made him shiver.

“Remember Ares?” Anthem asked him.

“Your first kiss. How could I forget . . .”

Ben had watched it transpire from a few yards away, where he held to a lamppost to avoid being jostled off his feet by the crowd. To be reminded of it now was to remember the quiet terror that overcame him as he had watched his best friend fall into Anthem’s arms. It wasn’t envy; he had no desire for either of them. It was a sudden, frightening belief that Nikki Delongpre had, in a simple series of movements, taken her rightful place in the world, a place he could not take beside her because there was something inside him that was broken, something that would keep him forever out of step.

And yet, here he was—alive—while Nikki had been torn from them just a few years after that night.

“There’s a spot . . .” Anthem started. But he lost his voice suddenly. He pulled his silver flask from his pants pocket, but instead of taking a sip, he turned it over in his hands. Ben didn’t hear anything slosh inside. Was it actually empty? There was no way. The thing had never been empty since they were both eighteen years old. “It’s the spot where we . . . up in the wheelhouse. Every year on her birthday, I take some pearls and beads that I caught at the Ares parade . . . I ju— I take them up there and I make a little . . .”

“An altar?” Ben asked. His vision had blurred, but his voice sounded steadier than Anthem’s.

“Yeah,” Anthem whispered.

Neither of them said anything for a few minutes. And with the hot flush of tears running through him, the temperature of the damp wind seemed to rise. The rustling of the tall grass hypnotized him. And then he was hearing the distant sounds of marching bands.

He was back on Third Street and St. Charles Avenue, where Mardi Gras flags banded with stripes of purple, green and gold flapped against the Ionic columns of the Greek Revival mansions all around him and the diesel fuel smell from the float trucks mingled with the scent of spilled beer to make an odor as acrid and overpowering and suggestive of sex as the one that blanketed the shores of Lake Pontchartrain.

Ben didn’t trust memory. He respected its seductive power, but he didn’t trust it. Early on, Marissa had hammered into him how unreliable eyewitness accounts could be, how many gaps people filled in with their imagination and their biases. Multiple accounts were the basis of solid journalism. So didn’t it follow that all memories, the good ones and the bad ones, were just fanciful re-creations of what a person had either wished for or feared in a given moment? To be accurate, and to remain accurate over a period of years, a memory required its possessor to have an almost impossible degree of awareness of each passing second, each smell, each touch, each sound. Waking dreams: that was a better description of what people called memories. And he didn’t care for them.

But a small, persistent voice kept urging him to question these intellectualizations. Why? Because they were always prompted by a flash, an echo, the tail edge of a nightmare about Niquette Delongpre. And he feared that the righteousness with which he had repudiated the efficacy of memory over the past few years was driven not by maturity, but by his contempt for his own grief. A man who doesn’t trust his memories cannot be easily haunted.

“You’d tell me if you thought she was alive, right?”

“She’s not alive, A-Team.”

“Most days, I’m sure. But you . . . Every day you’re sure. How the hell you manage that shit, Benny?”

“Because I know she loved you too much to walk away.”

“You too, Benny. She loved you too.”

“It was different.”

“Different, maybe. But not . . .
less
.”

It wasn’t like Anthem to be this charitable, not when he’d danced with the bottle right into the path of law enforcement or firearms. He had maybe another night or two in the drunk tank before someone at the New Orleans–Baton Rouge Steamship Pilots Association decided to look past his family connections and ask whether or not it was a good idea to let him pilot giant ships full of dangerous chemicals up and down one of the most populated stretches of the Mississippi River.

But tonight, something was different, and Ben wasn’t quite sure how. Anthem reached inside his pocket and pulled out a crumpled piece of paper. There wasn’t much of a moon, so Ben took out his iPhone and used his flashlight app to read it by.

There were three words written on the paper in the draftsmanlike block-printing in which Anthem wrote most everything except his signature.

I AM DONE.

For a while Ben stared at the note, until a gust of hot wind made it almost impossible to hold on to, and Anthem plucked it from his grip to keep it from blowing away. Ben was no stranger to the man’s drunken theatrics, but this one he couldn’t figure out. For starters, Anthem didn’t seem that drunk, and then there’d been the text message. What had his closing line been?
Bring sanity.

“Guy took a shot at me at Fat Harry’s ’cause I wouldn’t give up the video poker machine,” Anthem finally said.

“I heard. But he missed.”

“Yep. Shot his own foot.”

“
Both
his own feet.”

“Yeah. Guess he was drunker than I was. So I left, my evening being ruined and all, and I remember getting home, remember popping a bottle of Crown Royal. A little 7-Up. Next thing I know, I’m staring at this”—he shook the note in one hand—“and every bottle of liquor in my house has been emptied out the sink and the bottles are all smashed up in a pile on my kitchen floor.”

Don’t say anything,
Ben told himself.
If this is real, if this is going to be . . . an actual thing, just keep your mouth shut.

“You believe in God, Benny?”

“A couple of ’em, yeah.”

Anthem cackled, then he reached through the darkness, pinched one of Ben’s cheeks and gave it a little slap. “You’re so clever, Benny. You’ve always been so damn clever.”

“Yeah, well, I try.”

“You don’t have to. It’s in your blood. It’s in your brain.”

“Sure . . .”

Anthem seemed to forget him altogether suddenly, his attention fixed on the old push boat and the warren of shadows within. “Hand of God wrote that note, Benny.” He turns his flask over in his hands. “Don’t know how. Don’t know why. But I’m gonna listen to it. I’m gonna be
done
.”

Without warning, he hurled the silver-plated flask into the air. It vanished into darkness, and then Ben was amazed to hear the thing impact the side of the push boat yards away with a resounding, metallic gong. The same flask Anthem had drunk from, to nauseating effect, as they’d driven the state eight years earlier, putting up flyers of the Delongpres. The same flask he’d snuck in his jacket pocket to both his high school and college graduations.

“That’s okay,” Anthem finally said. “I wouldn’t believe me either.”

Anthem turned and clapped a hand on Ben’s shoulder, shaking him with enough force to jostle Ben’s ankles where he stood. Then he took him into a full embrace and lifted his feet off the ground.

“Guess I’ll just have to prove it to you, you little shit.”

“No,” Ben wheezed. “I believe you. I promise.” And maybe his words, despite being squeezed out of him by Anthem’s childish aggression, were more true than he’d realized; he was blinking back tears as he said them.

NEW ORLEANS

D
o you believe him?” Marissa asked. It was the Monday after Anthem’s alleged run-in with the hand of God, and Ben had arrived in Marissa’s office at nine o’clock on the dot, just as she’d requested. He was well rested and well caffeinated, but he’d also been possessed by a strange, energizing optimism in the wake of Anthem’s declaration.
Maybe Anthem’s bottle-smashing God gave me a little nudge too. What can I give up? Worrying half to death?

Leave it to Marissa to question his faith in his friend so bluntly. “I’m not sure I’d bet the house on it,” Ben said. “But you know . . . fingers crossed.”

“AA?”

“I doubt it. He’s not exactly a team player.”

“Yeah, well, speaking of his
team
. We’re doing an investigation of the pilot’s associations. All three of ’em. It’s going to be a whopper. Months of investigation, probably across several issues. Huge exposure . . . if you take it, that is.”

“You’re only putting one reporter on it?”

“Yes. And I’m offering it to you.”

“What sort of investigation?”

“The usual allegations. That the admissions process is driven by nepotism. That they’ve got too much lobbying power in Baton Rouge. That the pilots are overpaid and don’t have—”

“They’re not overpaid.”

“Three hundred thousand dollars a year. A lot of people would beg to differ, Ben. Including me.”

“They pilot tankers full of deadly chemicals through one of the most populated and dangerous stretches of river in the country. One wrong move and the foot of Canal Street is gone.”

“Ben—”

“They’re
not
overpaid, Marissa.”

“Well, that’s a point of view worth exploring if you take the story.”

“I want Crowley first.”

“I’m not talking about a trade, Ben.”

“I’ve got a member of Judge Crowley’s personal staff who says they can get me chains of title on the man’s plane, on all his boats, and all the other shiny little gifts he gets from the oil industry before he makes a decision in their favor.”

“You
think
he gets those gifts from the oil—”

“I would
know
for sure, and so would our readers, if you’d let me run with it.”

“He’s off-limits. Sorry.”

“Why?”

“Orders from on high.”

“I see. So our new owner, Peter Lane, told us to leave Crowley alone. Is that it?”