The Heavens Rise (22 page)

“Look, uh, we’re a dry house. But maybe I can offer you a Dr Pepper? How’s that sound?”

“Dry?”

“Yeah, I gave up the hard stuff a while back.”

“I see . . .”

“So what do you say, huh?”

“I think that sounds great.”

N
o Dr Pepper,” Anthem said. “Sorry. False advertising. How ’bout a Coke?”

“Water’s fine,” Marshall answered, distracted by a stack of papers sitting on Anthem’s kitchen counter.

“It
is
the source of life, after all,” Anthem said.

“You can say that again,” Marshall muttered before he thought better of it. “The River’s Response,” proclaimed the headline atop the first page. “What’s this?” he asked.

Anthem waited for Marshall to take the bottle. “Aw,
Kingfisher
published this article that had all kinds of bullshit in it about the pilots association. But they let me post a response on their website a few hours ago.”

“That’s nice of them.” Marshall could not have cared less about the article itself. It was the comments that got to him. Anthem had printed out every last one. (Well, one hundred as of 2:30 that afternoon, according
to the time stamp on the last one. Who knew how many there were now?) With a few outraged exceptions, they all said pretty much the same thing: Anthem Landry was a bona fide hometown hero, sticking up for local workers. Sticking up for
New Orleans
.

My hero, my God, my angel.

The thought of anyone calling Anthem Landry a hero tempted Marshall to force the man in question to yank a meat cleaver from the block of knives right next to him and drive it once through each eye; two quick stabs just like the ones their housekeeper used to inflict on the plastic wrap around the cases of water bottles that were delivered to the house.

How does one destroy a hero? Let’s see. Let me count the ways . . .
There were so many possibilities they all overwhelmed him. So many sharp edges, so many sudden drops, so many cars, so many flammable substances. Hell, the entire apartment itself was laced with one of the best weapons of all: electricity. But while all of those deaths might make for a delightfully hideous scene when the police arrived (or someone from Anthem’s family, if Marshall arranged it properly), were they a fitting fall for a hero?

“A hundred comments,” Marshall said, but he was setting the papers down on the counter as if he’d just realized they had shit stains on them.

“Pretty cool, huh?” Anthem said. Then he tapped his Diet Coke can against Marshall’s water bottle in a quick, perfunctory toast before he took a slug. “Never fancied myself much of a writer. That was always Ben’s beat. You remember Ben Broyard, right?”

“Kinda.”

The apartment wasn’t quite the pigsty Marshall had expected, or hoped for, but it was certainly threadbare. The whole building looked like it had once been a corner store, and the ceilings inside the apartment were about twelve feet high. No shades on the soaring windows, just frilly lace curtains that covered only the bottom half of each one. (Some girlfriend had probably hung them for him.) And the top half of
each window offered a bleak industrial view of the loading cranes visible above the floodwall across the street.

The TV caught him off guard, just as every TV had since he’d come out of his coma. Out of all the things that looked different after eight years in purgatory, televisions had undergone the most dramatic transformation. They were flat as boards now, and hung all over like electrified paintings. The rest of the walls were mostly bare, except for a poster from the Krewe of Ares parade from 1999. It featured an expressionist rendering of the parade’s lead float, a towering plaster statue of the god of war himself, multiplated armor sitting astride his insanely large muscles, giant head covered by a massive Spartan helmet replete with the typical Mohawk and plunging cheek guards that revealed a glimpse of his apelike jaw. It wasn’t the dreamlike statue that had rattled through the perpetual Mardi Gras parade in Anthem’s soul, but the resemblance was close enough that Marshall had to look away quickly to avert a twinge of nausea.

“How long you on call for?” Marshall asked.

“Till nine a.m.”

“Do you love it?”

“Being a pilot?” Anthem asked.

Marshall nodded, trying to hide the fact that he was studying Anthem’s every move. The way he was tapping the edge of the Diet Coke against the counter ever so slightly, shifting his weight back and forth between each foot.
A dry house, indeed. Maybe giving up the hard stuff had been harder than he let on.

“There’s usually a moment . . .” Anthem said, straightening. “So I’ll pick up a ship anywhere from Baton Rouge to Chalmette. But my favorite route’s southbound in the morning. Especially when I hit Audubon Park and it’s sunny and the oak trees are all spread out, and you can just see Holy Name Cathedral above the tree line, watchin’ over it all. It’s like . . . I feel connected to the past.”

“Awesome,” Marshall said. “I’ve always wanted to go out on the river. Can you see Cannon?”

“Nah. It’s not tall enough. Most of what you can see of Uptown’s just trees.”

“And the Fly, right? You used to hang out at the Fly a lot.”

Don’t lie to me, shithead. I followed you and Nikki there after you got back together. I watched you kissing on the stairs of rocks that lead down to the water’s edge. If I’d known what I was capable of then, I would have made you drown her.

“Some,” he said. “Who didn’t, right? A few Coronas. A little weed, maybe. Blast some Cowboy Mouth. Same shit I’d do today if I didn’t have a job.”

Anthem gave him a big toothy grin, and Marshall tried to return it.

“The morning sun beats down upon me like the Devil’s smile,” he said slowly and quietly.

“I’d rather be anywhere else but here,” Anthem sang back at him, straightened, eyes brightening. “Was it a blinding lack of subtlety or just a lack of
styyyyle
, responding to the ways and means of
fear
?” With that, Anthem skipped past Marshall toward the stereo. “Take me back to New Orleans, and drop me at my door. ’Cause I might love you—” He yanked his iPod from its charging cradle. “I’ve got it here, just a sec.”

“The message . . .”

Anthem slumped over his stereo suddenly, and when he went to set the iPod back in its cradle his movements were sluggish and unfocused.

“Yeah . . . listen, man, I’m not sure I really—” But before he could finish his own sentence, he flounced down onto the sofa as if he’d been placed in time-out. The sofa was too small for the living room and it was too small for
him
; the cushion crumpled so much under his weight, Marshall wouldn’t have been surprised if it spit out from under him like an inner tube on a water slide.

“So you think Nikki gave you some kind of message?” he finally asked.

“Not Nikki. Her mother.”

Anthem Landry’s eyes were saucer-wide, his lips pursed, his giant
frame preternaturally still as he braced himself for a blow from another dimension of existence. He’d stopped nervously rubbing his thighs and now his hands gripped both kneecaps as if they’d been glued to them.

The connection between them was as pure as the one Marshall had forged just moments earlier by using his power, only this had come from quick thinking. Quick thinking, patience and the time-honored tradition of turning a disadvantage into an opportunity. Yes, Anthem’s soul had seemed different, more vivid and overpowering, but it also given Marshall plenty he could use.

“It started as a vision, really.” Marshall let his focus shift to the hardwood floor between them. “A Mardi Gras parade. I think it was Ares, the one that used to roll on Friday.” Anthem flinched and glanced back in the direction of the poster hanging on his nearby wall. “I didn’t know her all that well, but I kept seeing Nikki. She had a pair of Mardi Gras pearls around her neck and she was wearing this fleecy pullover and she was beaming and she had her arms around a man. And after a while, I realized that man was you. And she was whispering the same words to you, over and over again . . .”

Anthem’s lips had parted and his chest was rising and falling and when he went to close his eyes, several tears slipped from them; rather than wipe them away with one hand, he chewed his lower lip and let out a desperate wheeze.

“Are you sure you want me to—”

“Keep going.”

“I mean, it gets kind of—”

“
Keep going.
”

“My hero, my God, my angel. That’s what she kept whispering.”

It was as if the giant’s strings has been cut, and six words alone had done it. Had they been a private incantation Nikki had whispered only while in the throes of passion, or the creation of Anthem’s own longing and grief? Either way, they were the key. He slouched back against the sofa, his face twisting with the first contortion of a sob. Then his
giant hands went to his face, forming a protective shield, and Marshall advanced several steps toward him, trying his best to prevent the sound of the sexual excitement flickering within his belly from lighting up his voice. “Then I saw her mother. I didn’t know who she was at first, ’cause I’d never met her. But she told me who she was, and she told me who you were. And she said if I ever came back, if I ever joined the living again, I would have to set you free. I would have to tell you the truth about what happened that night so that you could move on.”

Anthem dropped his hands from his face, which was now a snotty, tear-streaked mess. “Wh—what ha—”

“She was driving that night. Nikki. She was the one behind the wheel, but she had been drinking and she didn’t tell her parents and they got into an accident . . .”

“An accident? Did she—”

“Millie was killed, and Nikki and her father, they covered it up. And they ran.”

Marshall could see the disbelief fighting a losing battle inside the man a few feet away from him, and he wondered if he’d chosen the right tack. He’d thought of adding in some bullshit detail about Nikki drinking that night because she’d found out Anthem had knocked her up. But it was too far.

“You need to go, dude.”

“She told me you had to know the truth so that you could finally let her go. So that you could stop drinking so much . . .”

Anthem was on his feet, pointing toward the door. “All right, man. That’s enough. I’ve got a long night ahead of me and this is just a little— I mean, for
fuck’s sake,
you’re asking me to believe—”

“I’m not asking you to believe anything. It was just . . . I felt like it was my duty to tell you.”

“She just
walked
away? Is that it? From all of us? She just walked away. All these years and not one word because she was
drunk
? Because she
killed
her own—”

“It could be a metaphor, for all I know.”

“A metaphor
for what
?”

Marshall gave the man his best grimace, shook his head as if the very idea of metaphors in general filled him with despair. The more he tried to deny that his supposed vision had been the truth, the more the stupid Neanderthal across from him believed that it was.

“I appreciate you comin’ and I don’t mean to be rude. But I need to—”

Anthem rushed into his bedroom, but he was in such a desperate hurry that he didn’t bother to shut the door behind him, so Marshall followed.

Anthem found it on the top shelf of his bedroom closet, just where he’d left it months ago. Silver-plated, gleaming in the harsh light from the overhead bulb, looking as new and full of untapped promise as it had the day his brother Merit gave it to him as a graduation present. He’d stashed it there because of the words of an old girlfriend from college, who’d assured him the only way she’d been able to quit smoking was by carrying an unopened pack of Marlboro Lights with her everywhere she went.
I needed to feel like my little friends had left me completely,
she’d told him.

He uncapped it and drank. There was no burn. Just a warm rush of inevitability, and already the rationalizations were tumbling through him right behind the firewater. Sometimes he didn’t get called at all. Some guys would go whole shifts without getting called up once.

Floorboards creaked behind him, and there was Marshall Ferriot, standing in his bedroom door, and Anthem in the closet with a flask like some desperate gutter trash.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Seriously, dude. I need you to—”

“You shouldn’t be alone right now, Anthem.”

The phone rang, and Marshall seemed more startled by it than Anthem was. Anthem brushed past him and yanked the portable from its
cradle next to the bed. The woman on the other end had already started speaking to him by the time Anthem realized he was still holding the flask in his left hand. From the weight of it, it felt like he’d downed half the thing in thirty seconds.

“Hey, Landry. Driver’s gonna be at your place in about thirty. We got a grain ship hatched a leak in one of its dry bulk containers and they’re turnin’ it around and sending it to Houston for repairs.”

“Don’t send the driver,” Anthem responded, the smell of the bourbon on his breath dilating his nostrils as he spoke.

“You’re pickin’ up this baby in Destrehan, A-Team. You gonna drive yourself?”

“Just . . . I’m good. I’ll get myself there.”

“All right. Suit yourself. These guys want to turn this ship around yesterday. Sounds like they’re losing a fortune by the hour.”

He hung up on the dispatcher before he might slip up and allow her to hear any intensifying slur in his speech. Some base instinct drove him to put the flask to his mouth and empty the rest of it down his throat. Then he hurled it at the wall so hard it sounded like the thing had dented before it clunked to the floor.

And there was Marshall Ferriot, studying him with a piteous expression.

“It was almost empty. I . . . I couldn’t just let it go waste. Had to finish the . . .” Anthem sank down onto the foot of his bed. Six months gone in an instant because of, what? One sick kid’s deranged coma dream, brought on by medications and brain injuries and God knows what else? Six months, down the drain. Down his throat.