The Heavens Rise

prided himself on being a young man who could recognize opportunity when it arrived and, with the fiery end of the passionate romance between Niquette Delongpre and Anthem Landry, opportunity arrived at Marshall’s doorstep with bells on.

He had wanted her since they were sophomores, after her breasts had swelled to fullness over the course of one summer, after her walk had acquired a swaying, adult confidence, probably ’cause she’d given up her virginity to that stupid fathead she’d fallen head over heels for the minute he’d transferred into their class. Since then, Marshall Ferriot had spent hours watching Nikki glide gracefully through the hallways of Herschel B. Cannon School, all the while wondering what the skin around her nipples tasted like, or how much pressure he’d have to bite down on them with before she let out a pained yelp that would curl his toes with pleasure.

He’d concocted a few plans over the years, most of them intended to get her white-trash boyfriend kicked out of school and sent back to Jefferson Parish where he belonged. But it was clear the two of them were too much in love to be driven apart by such a meager separation, so Marshall had even thought about cozying up to that little homo she was best friends with, maybe letting the guy give him a BJ or two if he promised to do Marshall’s dirty work. But Ben Broyard, pipsqueak that he was, always looked at Marshall as if there was a stink coming off of him, as if he could detect the dark thoughts Marshall nursed about people who made him angry and thought they were kind of stupid, even if they did involve knives and rope.

What Marshall had been waiting for was a golden opportunity, a sign that the stars had aligned on his behalf, and it didn’t come until the last months of senior year. There had been plenty of girls to occupy his time along the way, of course. There were the real girlfriends, the ones befitting a young man of his stature and breeding, classically pretty, with first names that were more often used as last names for men— Chesley, Whitney, Preston—girls who never let him go below the waist unless he got them shitfaced on Zima. And then there were others. The ones who could keep secrets. The band geeks and the computer dorks. The ones so grateful for any kind of attention from a guy like Marshall they’d let him use things like beer bottles and staplers.

But Nikki Delongpre, she was the prize. The ultimate. Everybody agreed; there was something different about her. Like the fact that she’d been the only freshman ever to make varsity cheerleading, and then had ditched the squad a few months later because, as she told everyone who asked, she thought she was too young to have an eating disorder. Stuff just didn’t get to Nikki the way it got to the other girls at Cannon; she wasn’t a gossip, she rarely drank. And until Anthem’s betrayal, she was rarely swept up in some tearful drama over something somebody might have said about her three weeks ago. Marshall had overheard two teachers talking about her once and their words had seared themselves into his mind. While the first asserted the Delongpre girl had a wisdom beyond her years, the second—in the same kind of superior tone Marshall’s mother used to discuss the moral failings of Democrats—asserted that Nikki was a perfectionist, and if she was ever going to really grow up, she would have to stop planning her life and actually begin living it.

And there it was, the opening. The way in.

He could show her how to start living.

•   •   •

When he asked her out the first time, she made him meet her at some ratty coffeehouse over in the Faubourg Marigny that was full of hippies and fags. And even though the whole thing made him feel like some cheap man-whore, the way she was keeping their meeting a secret from everyone on their side of town, he knew better than to complain.

And there was no getting her to talk about the great betrayal that had ended her three-year relationship to Anthem Landry, but it didn’t matter. The story was common knowledge by then anyway.

Poor Nikki. She had planned her entire life down to the last detail, without giving any thought to the type of man she’d selected to make the trip with her. Davidson College had been her school of choice: North Carolina was just far enough from home to get them away from her boyfriend’s sprawling, overbearing family, but not so far that they couldn’t fly home for every holiday. The problem, of course, was that everyone except for Nikki knew that her boyfriend didn’t have a snowball’s chance in Houma of getting in, not when he couldn’t be bothered to memorize anything besides old Saints scores. But Niquette Delongpre—planner and perfectionist, daughter of one of the most respected maxiofacial surgeons in the country—wouldn’t be deterred by her boyfriend’s rejection letter. Obviously, Anthem should move with her to North Carolina anyway. Get a job to support himself, maybe find a community college and gets his grades up to where he could reapply. Anthem’s response, heard by most of the Cannon campus during lunch, “You expect me to fuckin’ pump gas all day while you sit in a classroom talking about poetry?”

The lawns outside the cafeteria had certainly paid host to worse lovers’ quarrels. But a few days later, the news broke that after consuming half a bottle of Southern Comfort, Anthem Landry had somehow wound up in the arms and accommodating mouth of a doe-eyed junior, Brittany Lowe, who was well known among her male classmates for having tiny, unobtrusive teeth. That’s what the girl said, anyway. Anthem denied the charge with shouts, and more than a few tears, to anyone who would listen. Nikki chose to believe the worst.

And for Marshall Ferriot, that was very good news. Especially when you considered the story was a complete lie. Turns out Brittany Lowe was willing to do pretty much anything Marshall wanted her to do, as long as he supplied her with a bottle of Vicodin out of his mother’s medicine cabinet.

Despite his success so far, Marshall knew better than to speak ill of the man in question to Nikki’s face, even if he did think the guy was a worthless piece of Lakefront trash. Anthem Landry came from a family of riverboat pilots and those assholes were the worst, a bunch of drunken slobs who had bought all kinds of political power in Baton Rouge so they could keep the entire port hostage with their ridiculously high salaries. He should know; his father ran one of the most successful cold storage companies on the Gulf Coast. Men like his dad kept the city running, his family always said, while lazy niggers threatened to take the whole thing down.

And what the hell kind of queerbait name was Anthem anyway? It chapped Marshall’s ass that the guy never caught any flack for it at school. Let Marshall belch in the wrong direction and he’d end up with some stupid nickname he couldn’t live down for months.

Of course he didn’t say a word of this to Nikki.

Instead he started talking about his desire to travel the world, to make big bucks in a city like New York and Chicago after he graduated from Duke (which was, by the way, not too far from Davidson). He thought he was being subtle, but maybe he wasn’t. After three more coffee dates, Nikki’s smiles started to seem a little indulgent. But she listened to him ramble on, and then, finally, just when he feared he might have lost her, she invited him to Elysium. 

3

ATLANTA

MAY 2013

They moved the patient out of Room 4 when animals started dying outside his window.

The squirrels came first, a slightly disjointed row of them that appeared in a single day, just a few feet away from the window ledge: furry tails limp and snakelike, chests sealed to the patchy lawn with dead weight. Two of the three nurses who gathered at Room 4’s window that afternoon blamed the live oak tree nearby; some sort of awful fungus must have laced itself all through the branches overhead, then Alvin and his poor buddies took a few nibbles and plop, plop, plop.

But Arthelle Williams wasn’t sold on this scenario. It would have been five plops in all, and not a single one of the squirrels had landed on its back. Was that even statistically possible? The thought of there being statistics related to random squirrel deaths made her laugh so hard her breath fogged the glass.

She volunteered to go outside and take a closer look. It was a marvel, she thought, that her coworkers could empty a bedpan without so much as a wince, but the idea of getting within a few feet of a dead rodent turned them into squealing little girls.

They watched her from the window as she poked at the furry carcasses with a stick. There was no sense in pushing Marshall Ferriot’s wheelchair to the window; he wouldn’t be able to see any of it anyway. The boy hadn’t