The Heavens Rise

Maybe. Perhaps. I’m not sure. Every statement he gave them was peppered with these qualifying phrases; he knew he’d have to back out of them eventually if any of the deputies recovered. But for now, the detectives had little to say in return; Ben hoped that was a sign that the Stevens murder was still their focus, that they knew more about the explosion then they were letting on. But he knew better than to ask, and when one of them firmly instructed him not to go anywhere, he nodded gravely and assured them he would camp out in the waiting room.

It was only then that he realized he’d been wearing wet clothes for almost two hours. They weren’t soaked anymore, but they weren’t exactly dry either. He tried to turn his iPhone on but it was fried. He’d asked a drowsy- looking woman sitting nearby if he could use her cell phone before he’d planned what he was going to say to Anthem if he answered. Only once he heard the ringing on the other end did he realize he couldn’t ask Anthem to drive all the way across the lake. Not tonight. For one, he was on call, and secondly, he didn’t want to tell anymore lies that night.

This thought speared him in the gut. Maybe it had been the mention of Marshall Ferriot’s trust earlier that night, or maybe it was just fatigue and shock combining into a kind of nervous delirium, but the extent to which he had lied to Anthem over the years overwhelmed him suddenly. Eight years and he’d never said one word to the man about his suspicions of Marshall Ferriot. How many years did it take before a lie of omission that big became an all-out betrayal?

The waiting room was filling up, mostly with frantic women who stormed in as they talked on cell phones, detailing everything they didn’t know yet about their loved ones to the person on the other end. The wives of the injured deputies from Beau Chene; they had to be. He walked a safe distance away from the woman whose phone he’d borrowed. Then, before he thought twice about it, he pressed his nose to a plate-glass window that reflected the harshly lit interior of the room behind him.

“Hello?” Anthem finally answered.

“I’m okay.”

“Ben! You’re . . . Why? What happened?”

“There was an accident, on the North Shore.”

“Beau Chene! You were there?”

“Me and Marissa. Were we on the news?”

“No.” Good. More time, Ben thought. “But it’s crazy. That goddamn pipeline and now this. My brothers all called me ’cause they think the whole state’s about to blow up.”

“Listen, if we do show up on the news, call me, okay? Then call my mother in St. Louis and tell her I’m fine. My phone’s fried and she won’t be able to get me.”

“I’ll call her right now if you want me to.”

“No. No. I don’t need her freaking out before she absolutely has to.”

“Is Marissa, okay? . . . Ben?”

“She’s fine. Just . . . She’s fine.”

“You need me to come?”

“You can’t drive all the way to Covington. You’re on call.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, I’ll get off call if I need to.”

Anthem 2.0, indeed, Ben thought, when he heard the man’s eagerness to put someone else’s needs ahead of his own for once. But remembering Marissa’s utterance of this flattering term earlier that day only reminded him of her lifeless expression as she lunged at him like a snake and shoved him overboard, of the scored propeller blades biting into his neck.

Ben’s eyes watered.

“Ben?”

“I’m good. A- Team. But I appreciate it.”

“All right then. Well . . . Hey, when you see Marissa, thank her for me.”

“For what?”

“My piece. It’s up. Sixty comments already. Some of them think I’m a shithead, but the rest of ’em . . . they’re callin’ me a hero, Benny.”

“Yeah, well . . .”

The words he’d meant to say next were You are a hero, but a great, silent wave of darkness seemed to course through his entire body before it robbed him of his vision, and then his hearing a few seconds later. Ben expected to feel the floor rising up to meet him. Instead he felt nothing at all.

•   •   •

“Ben?”

A few more tries, and then Anthem Landry was answered by a dial tone, and once again he was alone with his glowing computer screen, filled with the big headline they’d given his article, “The River’s Response,” and the smart-looking photo he’d emailed them earlier that day. Ben had probably been called away or the call itself had dropped and he’d ring again in a second. Whatever the case, there was no sense in standing there like an idiot listening to a mocking dial tone.

Of course, that wasn’t really what he was doing, now that he thought about it. It was the computer he couldn’t tear himself away from. Every few minutes or so, more comments were posted. Hell, if the whole state could stop catching fire for an hour or two, his first piece of journalism just might make the evening news. But the suddenly dropped call had made it feel too quiet all of a sudden, and that’s when Anthem realized that something else was missing, a comforting and familiar sound he usually took for granted.

His apartment was on the second floor of an old corner grocery store on Tchoupitoulas, directly across the street from the concrete Mississippi River floodwall and the wharves just behind it. The constant hum of idling container ships drove most of his neighbors insane, but he loved it. It made him feel connected to his lifeblood, especially on nights like this, when he was giddy with anticipation about going out on a ship. That’s why he’d left open the door to the exterior staircase’s second-floor landing. So he could hear the pulse and the throb of the river’s constant call as he went about finding various ways to kill time until the phone rang.

Beignet. His dog. That was it. The little slobberbox had been snoring up a storm on the porch just outside. And now he was gone.

The building had a side yard shared by both the upstairs and downstairs apartment, but it was Anthem who had turned it into a veritable jungle. And he’d done most of the work on those first early nights of trying to stay sober while he was on call, when he had no choice but to avoid friends who hadn’t taken his pledge seriously, and women who liked to knock back a beer after a hookup, and his brothers, who were the absolute worst. Those guys spun through the nearest drive-through daiquiri shop on their way home from just about anywhere.

First he’d planted the banana trees, then he’d started work on the birdhouses and then he’d gone about laying the flagstones for a circuitous path from the tall wooden back gate, through the dense leaves and to the foot of the exterior wooden staircase that climbed the side of the building. His neighbor, an overworked paralegal, had once remarked to him when he’d caught him working on the pathway, “You realize we don’t own any of this, right?” As if Anthem hadn’t known, as if he’d been doing it for any other reason than to keep his hands busy and his head filled with something other than the terrible fear that he wasn’t going to make it through another night sober.

Now he stood on the second-floor landing, staring down at a million places where his pet might be hiding. But Beignet was an English bulldog, which meant he wheezed like a runner in the Crescent City Classic wherever he went; if the little guy was down there somewhere, Anthem would be able to hear him. But he couldn’t hear him. Just the rustle of the banana leaves in the humid breezes off the river.

When he noticed the shadow in the garden below, Anthem’s mouth opened, but nothing came out and then it appeared to him as if the shadow itself had turned into a column of darkness, shot upward and swallowed him whole.

21

The darkness cleared and Ben found himself lying facedown on a twin bed, lips parted against a chemical,