The Heavens Rise

by Christopher Rice

  The party would be held at Elysium the following evening, and when Marshall imagined the place with lanterns strung from its cypress branches, when he thought of well-dressed guests standing and chatting in the same spot where he hurled Nikki into the pool, he was filled with a silent, focusing rage that distracted him from the stapled-shut grocery bag shifting on the passenger-side floor of his father’s BMW.

  If he waited in the car any longer, he would lose his opportunity.

  He could still hear Nikki’s parents calling to each other inside the house when he lifted the Explorer’s cargo door by about two feet and set the grocery sack in between two Louis Vuitton satchels and a crate of Beaujolais. Then he took his car key and made three quick cuts in the side of the bag, each one large enough for the inhabitant to work its way through when it decided it was time to emerge.

  By the time he was back to the BMW, he heard the back door to the Delongpre residence close with force, followed by the family’s excited laughter. Nikki was recounting some childhood story about how her father had once screwed up his fishing line and hooked a lump of her hair in the process.

  Marshall slid behind the driver’s seat of his father’s BMW and waited. He waited until the Ford Explorer pulled out of the driveway and headed down Prytania Street. He waited until the red taillights turned the corner, leaving him alone with a steady, rasping sound. At first he thought it was coming from the grocery bag next to him—he had spent most of the day with the thing—but then he remembered that his gift had been delivered, that it had been tucked inside the SUV that had just driven past him into the night, leaving him with the desperate rattle of his own strained breaths.

  5

  * * *

  ATLANTA

  MAY 2013

  Arthelle was at the drink machine when she heard the screaming.

  She’d know as soon as she rounded the corner up ahead if the commotion was coming from Ferriot’s new room. Please, God. Let it be anything else. A rat or a mouse loose on the hall. Anything. Just let it be alive!

  Things had been quiet for a week now, probably because Emily had steered clear of the boy, and there’d been no more strange animal deaths outside the center either. The only one to raise the subject of Ferriot at all had been Tammy Keene, and only to Arthelle. Tammy had two kids she had to support on her own, which meant no time to fill her head with stupid books about UFOs and doomsday prophecies; in other words, she was as eager to keep Emily in check as Arthelle was.

  Emily was the one screaming, all right. She was standing outside the open door to Ferriot’s room, bent at the waist, hands to her mouth as she wailed. Other nurses had come running too. They also stumbled in their tracks when they saw the bloody footprints Emily had made around the doorway.

  Ferriot was in his wheelchair, just like he was every morning, staring into space with the same slack-jawed expression that made him look like he’d been trying to remember someone’s phone number for years.

  Tammy Keene was on the floor, curled into a fetal position, back to the doorway, the blood flowing from her chest forming a dark curtain across the linoleum. Arthelle hit the floor on both knees, rolled the woman onto her back and saw her wide, staring eyes, radiating nothing but shock over the fact that the box cutter she always carried on her hip when she was doing gift distribution was embedded in her chest. The other nurses started pouring into the room, but not Emily. She was still screaming.

  “I told her not to! But she didn’t believe me. I told her not to look into his eyes!”

  Once she pulled Tammy’s bloodstained shirt up over her bloody chest and saw the extent of her wound, Arthelle started cursing under her breath, bloody fingers trembling as she traced a gash that started just above Tammy’s navel and made a straight, gurgling line right up to where the box cutter’s blade had caught on the underside of her rib cage. The blood was everywhere. Tammy’s lips moved, but nothing came out except weak, hissing breaths. Everyone around them was sliding into action, and that was good, because Arthelle was paralyzed, stunned, trying to put it all together.

  No blood on Emily’s hands or face. None at all. But the only screams she’d heard had come from Emily, not the gutted colleague the other nurses were now rushing to save. And the window was closed and Ferriot was right in front of it, so how could someone have scrambled out into the alley without knocking the poor boy out of his wheelchair?

  These thoughts were assaulting Arthelle from all sides, reducing her to a quivering wreck in one corner of the room while her colleagues tried to stop the flow of Tammy’s blood, ignoring as they worked the fact that Tammy’s eyes now stared up at the ceiling with the glaze of death.

  An alarm screamed. But it was the wrong one, not the steady honking of the Code Blue alarm meant to summon all of them to a patient’s room. This was the old whoop and wail, as the girls called it; the shrill, screaming fire alarm. An alarm’s an alarm, she thought. And what does it matter now? She’s gone. Tammy’s plum gone.

  Emily was halfway across the room before Arthelle sprang to her feet. The crazed girl had hauled the fireman’s ax back over one shoulder, its red and silver blade glinting in the fluorescent light. The nurses working on Tammy were too busy to see what was about to happen, but Arthelle did. The ax blade struck the arm of the wheelchair a few inches from Marshall Ferriot’s limp right hand. By then, Arthelle had driven Emily face-first into the floor with enough force to knock the wind out of the crazy little bitch.

  Thanks to Arthelle Williams, they had all been spared two gruesome deaths at the center that day. But as soon as Arthelle felt a surge of triumph, she looked up and saw Tammy Keene’s blood sliding toward them across the linoleum, making the victory feel as empty as the patient sitting a few feet away appeared to be.

  FROM THE JOURNALS OF NIQUETTE DELONGPRE

  * * *

  Anthem Landry came to us in the middle of sophomore year, a transfer student from an all-boys’ Catholic high school in Jefferson Parish, where he’d been required to wear a khaki uniform to class each day. That’s why he showed up for his first day of class at Herschel B. Cannon in acid-washed blue jeans and a black T-shirt with the phrase PAIN IS WEAKNESS LEAVING THE BODY printed on the back in paint-splatter font. Obviously he thought the absence of an official dress code meant he could attend his new school looking like he was about to go fishing with his brothers.

  If he hadn’t been almost six feet tall, there might have been a few snickers as he made his way to the nearest empty desk. But the other students in our English class that day registered his size and his outfit with the same stunned silence.

  What I remember even more vividly is the look he gave me once he took a seat and sensed me staring holes in the back of his thick, olive-skinned neck; a look of such unguarded fear that my breath caught in my throat. At first, I was filled with pity for him—there’s nothing worse than being the new kid. If Ben and I hadn’t had each other the year before, I’m not sure what we would have done. But then I found myself dizzy from a strange combination of desire and opportunity. I wasn’t used to seeing that kind of vulnerability in a boy of his size and good looks, and I couldn’t help but see it as an invitation.

  That afternoon, Ben and I found him sitting alone in the central courtyard, a few yards away from the giant oak tree where most of the freshmen and sophomores gathered during lunch, inhaling a plate of turkey tetrazzini as if it were the first meal he’d consumed in months.

  I think I was the first one to speak. So your name’s Anthem, huh? That’s kinda cool.

  And Anthem said something like. My mom’s got a thing with names. My brotha says she likes tuh name her kids like we all celebrities or royalty or something.

  Ben and I exchanged a look as we heard the guy speak. The accent was way too Jefferson Parish, that was for sure: 100% yat. (And yat, by the way, is a derogatory nickname for working-class folk who live along the lakefront, folks who see crawfish boils and hair spray as a religion, folks who dress their toddlers in Saints gear
every game day and speak with what is essentially a Cajun accent deprived of its French lilt and turned into something you might hear in the South Bronx.) We could fix the clothes with a few trips to Perlis or the Lakeside Mall. But the accent might be hopeless. Or so we thought. At the time, we underestimated how several years surrounded by genteel Uptown drawls would soften the edges of it dramatically.

  Anthem went on to explain how his older brother Charlie had really been named for King Charlemagne, and Merit, his next oldest brother—he had five in all, a figure that astonished Ben and me into deeper silence—thought he’d been named for good character but the rumor in the family was that his mother had just been a fan of Merit Ultra Light cigarettes before the doctors had told her not to smoke during her many pregnancies.

  They were a family of riverboat pilots—the men were, at least—and most of them lived within several blocks of one another near the spot where Avron Drive dead-ended with the Lake Pontchartrain levy. Anthem’s dream was to join the ranks of the New Orleans–Baton Rouge Steamship Pilots Association just like most of his brothers had done, pulling down $300,000 a year piloting massive cargo ships and container vessels up and down the treacherous curves of the Mississippi.

  His father, also a pilot, had died the year before in a car accident and the payout from his life insurance policy had allowed Anthem to transfer to what was arguably the most prestigious private school in all of Louisiana. When Ben revealed that his father was also dead, I could practically feel every muscle in Anthem’s body relax a bit, and the moment of silence we all shared seemed strangely comfortable given the subject of Ben’s admission. The confines of adolescence excused any of us from coming up with some empty, comforting platitude to soothe the pain of a lost parent. Shared pain, unresolved and beating inside each of us like a second heart, formed our initial bond with the strikingly handsome new kid from the wrong part of town.

  After what felt like an appropriate amount of silence, I brought up the idea of a shopping excursion after school, as if it would be as spontaneous and innocuous as a trip to CC’s Coffee House. I can’t remember exactly how I phrased it, but I tried to be diplomatic. Something about getting him some stuff to wear that would make him feel more comfortable. He played dumb; he admitted as much later. But I took the bait.

  Comfortable? Did he look like he was uncomfortable? The jeans fit pretty nice, didn’t they?

  Finally I blurted out something like, You’re not going to win over a bunch of new friends with that shirt, okay?

  He gave us both a big grin and said, Looks like it won you two over just fine.

  It seems inevitable now, that Anthem and I would end up together. But when I remember those first few weeks after we became a trio, I can still feel the constant fear that he would leave us, that his imposing physical form would demand that he turn into one of the brutish jocks Ben and I so despised.

  He fell in love with me instead.

  Our first kiss was at a Mardi Gras parade. Several nights before Fat Tuesday, the Krewe of Ares rolled through Uptown, and Ben and I invited Anthem to join us at our regular parade watching spot at Third and St. Charles Avenue, in front of an old florist shop and surrounded by Greek Revival mansions, their front porches crowded with other drunken revelers.

  Ben had stolen a bottle of scotch from his mother’s liquor cabinet and the three of us had been sharing sips out of his secret flask. Anthem took every opportunity to get closer to me as we were jostled by the crowd of parade-goers, their arms shooting skyward as papier-mâché floats rolled past us belching diesel fumes. The masked riders on board tossed handfuls of glittering doubloons and plastic beads into the night and the giant heads of Greek gods and goddesses at the head of each float just missed scraping the thick oak branches overhead. Once he’d found the courage to press his chest up against my back, and once both of our arms were raised at the same time, Anthem Landry wrapped his fingers around both of my wrists, turned me as if we were going to dance, and kissed me with a gentle determination that made me lose my balance and fall against him.

  I had known the bonds of friendship before that night. I had known loyalty and unshakable commitment of a certain chaste kind. And while there had been a few fumbling experiences where I’d let boys get to second base, pure romantic affection had been unknown to me until that very moment. Until Anthem Landry took me in his powerful arms and kissed me, I had never known what it was like to become briefly lost in someone else’s desire to know your smell and your taste. And that’s what I became; blissfully, irretrievably lost.

  Bloodred plastic beads bearing the Krewe of Ares logo—a spear and Spartan helmet—slammed to the pavement all around us, some of them snapping upon impact. From a few yards away, Ben watched, slack-jawed with amazement. But I was lost to everything except the scotch-sharpened breath of my first and only real lover.

  Ironic, I guess, that I experienced this kind of intimacy for the first time at a Mardi Gras parade named for an ancient god of violence and war. Or perhaps not, considering everything that came later.

  II

  * * *

  BEN

  6

  * * *

  TANGIPAHOA PARISH

  APRIL 2005

  Anthem Landry considered it a miracle that Nikki took him back, and every hour since that fateful phone call, he felt like an electric-chair-bound convict rescued by the governor’s pardon at the last possible second. He’d turned into one of those chatty, cheerful jackasses who could make conversation about almost any topic with any clerk in any place of business. His older brothers, who only rallied around him when he was down, had taken to calling him Cool Whip, which was really just a version of the term pussy whipped that they could use when their mother was in the room.

  For Anthem, the real discovery was that none of the begging, none of the sobbing late-night phone messages and none of the long letters he had tucked under the windshield of her Toyota 4-Runner, letters in which he had pled his innocence to kingdom come, had done the job.

  Once again, it was Ben who had come to the rescue. The kids and teachers who’d observed their little trio from a distance over the years always wrote Ben off as their third wheel, the nerdy hanger-on Nikki stayed loyal to because they’d been besties since birth. It was horseshit, and Anthem told them so whenever he got the chance.

  Ben Broyard was their glue, their rational mind, the provider of their few deep breaths. And in the past twenty-four hours he’d averted the end of Anthem’s whole world. Sure, he was barely five foot two, and had a high-pitched nasally voice that wasn’t about to get him work on WWL radio, but when the little dude set his mind to something he could marshal as much wallop as a hurricane. And for the past two weeks the most important project in his life had been getting Brittany Lowe to admit that her story about hooking up with Anthem was a complete crock. How he’d done it, Anthem wasn’t exactly sure. All that mattered was that he’d tape-recorded the lying skank’s confession and played it for Nikki.

  And the rest, as they say, was makeup sex.

  “Why?” Anthem had asked Ben after things were reconciled, after a night spent inhaling the scent of Nikki’s perfume and feeling like he’d been pulled up and over the edge of a cliff by one arm. “Why’d she lie?”

  “I’m workin’ on it, A-Team” was Ben’s cryptic reply.

  That had been three days ago, and now the two of them were flying across the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, bound for Elysium. Of course, someone was missing, and in light of recent events, Nikki’s absence from his pickup truck that night left knots of tension across Anthem’s upper back. It wasn’t just a housewarming party they’d be attending in the morning; it was also Miss Millie’s birthday, so she had every right to demand that her daughter ride out to Elysium with her and Mr. Noah. But still, it made Anthem nervous, like the weekend away was actually an audition rather than a welcome back celebration.

  It was neither, Ben pointed out about three times after they got on the causeway, probably because it
gave him an excuse to turn down the volume on the Cowboy Mouth CD Anthem had been playing on repeat for about a year now.

  “This is a birthday party for her mom,” Ben said, with that maddeningly parental tone that sometimes made Anthem want to pop him one. “Don’t make this all about you. God knows. The Anthem and Nikki Show has had enough cliffhangers this season.”

  “It’s just good that we’re going, right?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “I mean, if she wasn’t sure, we wouldn’t be going at all. And they sure as hell wouldn’t let us come out the night before like this and sleep in the guest room, so—”

  “You know, we’ve really covered this, A-Team.”

  “I know, I know. I’m just saying.”

  “Yeah, well, less saying. More driving. The causeway cops are all bored a-holes.”

  “You’re a real gift in my life, you know that?”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Totally bullshitting.”

  “Yeah, I figured.”

  But he wasn’t kidding. And he figured from the way Ben had gone quiet, his hands clasped between his bony knees, his gaze straight ahead so that the dashboard lights glowed in his circular-framed glasses, Ben knew he wasn’t kidding but didn’t want to talk about it. The older they all got, the more sarcastic and uncomfortable with touchy-feely moments Ben got. And, Nikki insisted, the less interested in girls he got. But Anthem figured that was just because most of the girls Ben was hot for were the pretty, popular types who weren’t all that interested in a nerdy bookworm who wanted to write for a newspaper someday. Right, Nikki would answer, the ones he knows are out of his league so he doesn’t have to worry about— And Anthem would change the subject or cut her off because the idea of his best buddy being a bone-smoker felt oddly like some kind of betrayal, and worse, Nikki’s insistence on bringing it up all the time told him she was trying to prepare him for the possibility, and not herself.