The Heavens Rise

he couldn’t have been more wrong.

“So I guess you don’t want to help me look for him then?” Ben asked.

“I need you in my office nine a.m. Monday morning. Don’t come strolling in at ten thirty just ’cause we have history. It doesn’t go over well. Trust me.”

“With you?”

“With everyone.”

She was a few feet away when Ben called after her. “So you really are firing me?”

“Don’t hang up on me again,” she said and kept walking.

“What’s the meeting about?”

“A story,” she said, without turning. “And it’s yours. If you’re up for it.”

With that, she waved at him over one shoulder and stepped into the intersection.

Ben checked his phone to see if he had any messages from Anthem, then he just stood there for a while, wondering what kind of drug a man would have to be on to fire two clean gunshots through both of his feet, one right after the other.

14

MADISONVILLE

It was almost midnight by the time Ben crossed Lake Pontchartrain.

He hadn’t conducted a search of Anthem’s favorite bars, hadn’t so much as placed a concerned phone call to any of the guy’s brothers, all of whom were so high-strung, a concerned phone call would have been enough to send them into a tailspin of worry. Instead, Ben had returned to his apartment, kicked back in front of the rebroadcast of the WWL evening news and waited for the inevitable text message from his bullet-evading buddy. It came right on schedule: Big trouble. Meet me @ my baby . . . Bring sanity.

What did drunks do before they had text messages to manipulate people with, Ben wondered? Kept pay phones in business, he guessed.

Now he was heading north on Highway 22, the same route he and Anthem had traveled the night Nikki disappeared. But his destination tonight was well short of Noah Delongpre’s old compound in the swamp, which was a good thing, because there wasn’t a timber of the old place left.

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