The Heavens Rise

by Christopher Rice

  My hero, my God, my angel. The very words she used to whisper into his ear after he’d finished bringing her to the edge of pure bliss out at the old push boat in Madisonville. Same damn words he’d hear every time he went there to add beads to the little altar he kept for her in the pilothouse. No one knew those words.

  “Do you still want me to go?” Marshall asked.

  “No. No, I don’t.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “Can you drive me to Destrehan? Aw, fuck that. I need you to stay with me. Make sure I don’t do anything stupid. Half the fucking Russian captains pop open a bottle of vodka to welcome me onto their damn ship, and I’ll— I just need you to watch me. Okay. Make sure I don’t do anything stupid now that I’ve . . .”

  “You want me to come on the ship with you?”

  “Well, it’s only fair, right? Now that you’ve done your duty and shared your little message with me, it’s only fair you stick around for the consequences, isn’t it?” His voice was boiling with anger, and when he saw the wounded expression on Marshall’s face, he felt a stab of regret. Then he felt the bourbon, sloshing in his stomach, fiery and potent and poised to unleash its black magic into his veins.

  “I’m sorry,” Anthem muttered.

  “Don’t be,” Marshall whispered, but he looked crestfallen, and he was studying the floor between them. “Of course I’ll go with. The way I told you, it was all wrong—”

  “Enough about that. I’m sure you saw all kinds of things while you were under”— my hero, my God, my angel—“and if it’d been me, I don’t know, I probably woulda wanted to tell people too. So just . . .” His face flushed, but he couldn’t tell if it was the booze or the threat of new tears. He gestured to the closet. “Pick out a jacket. It’s gonna be cold out there. Then we gotta hit the road.”

  FROM THE JOURNALS OF NIQUETTE DELONGPRE

  * * *

  For days now, I have watched the horrors that have befallen the city of my birth. And while I must admit, they pale in comparison to the perversions of natural laws that sent me into exile from the very city the world now weeps for, they have inspired me. Inspired me with such force I’m reminded that no matter how much I have been changed on a cellular level, I am still human. Still a teenage girl who will always consider New Orleans her home.

  There are masses of starving and dehydrated and dying black people gathered outside the Convention Center without help or any sign of it. I have seen the cries for rescue painted on the rooftops sticking up out of the ebony floodwaters. I have tried to stare at all of it without turning away, and for the most part, I have succeeded.

  In the hours after Katrina apparently bypassed the city by a hair, I watched the first reporters stumble out of their hotels and onto Canal Street and into the milky light of a post-storm dawn. They walked dry streets, surveyed a few tree limbs and, because the power was out, they made superficial assessments of their immediate surroundings and declared that the savagery Katrina had been expected to visit on my hometown had not come to pass. Sure, part of the Superdome’s shell seemed to have been torn loose and a bunch of shattered windows in the Central Business District. But aside from that . . .

  And I knew they were wrong. They didn’t know my city like I did. They didn’t know the fingers of water that bisected most of its neighborhoods, the streets upon streets of tiny, one-story houses sitting in the shadows of levees and passing ships that often sat higher in the water than the midpoints of the levees themselves. I knew as soon as they put helicopters in the air, as soon as the first reports from outlying areas started pouring in, that the devastation would become clear.

  And I was right.

  I’m ashamed to admit this, but at first, there was a part of me that was relieved. I knew the body blow of this awful storm would knock my family’s disappearance out of the city’s collective memory. For a while, at least. And that would give me time, more time to consider what lay ahead for me.

  I had a nightmare last night. I know I will have it again. I hope I do. It will remind me of my newfound mission.

  Apparently Sid-Mar’s, a Bucktown restaurant Anthem’s family used to always drag us to, has been destroyed by the surge. Last night, I dreamed of its flooded interior. The gray water’s inexorable tug peeled Mardi Gras posters off its walls and the overturned tables drifted through the swirl of debris like the skeletons of porpoises. There were no people in this dream; just a slow ballet of ruin.

  But it’s the first vivid dream I’ve had since what happened on Highway 22 that night, and it reminded me that I am not dead, that my life is not a nightmare on pause. But I’m going to need a reminder every day, and that’s what this journal is about. I’ve gone days without speaking, and I probably will again, but if I talk to these pages, maybe all of those days won’t end with the same lost, hollowed-out feeling. It’s either that, or start cutting myself.

  I am alive. I am real. I still dream, and I still wake up.

  My name is Niquette Delongpre and on the night before her 47th birthday I killed my mother.

  24

  * * *

  DESTREHAN

  The crew boat pulled up out of the darkness, spitting a trail of bright froth. The black river behind it was a thicket of tug boats and idling container ships. Presiding over this scene was the monolithic Luling–Destrehan Bridge, with matching tuning fork–shaped towers of steel that rose into the night sky, crowned with blinking red lights.

  “Hey,” Marshall whispered.

  Anthem gave him a steady look. He was still a bit glassy-eyed but a couple cans of Diet Coke had given him some edge. Not his blood, though, Marshall thought. The alcohol level in his blood is still plenty high, and that’s all that will matter once this ride is over with.

  “Do me a favor and don’t throw my name around out there,” Marshall said. “There’s just some bullshit with the estate, now that I’m alive again and all. And you know, it’s a small town and I don’t want people to—”

  “Yeah, yeah. Sure,” Anthem answered. “Who should I say you are?”

  “Cousin?”

  “Sure. I got plenty of cousins.”

  Once they were standing together on the open back deck of the crew boat, charging across the obsidian vein of the Mississippi toward the towering black hulk that was their destination, Anthem shouted, “She’s a grain ship. A Panamax, the largest they have. But she’s empty so she’s running real fast on the water. She was supposed to load up north of here but the crew found a leak inside one of her dry bulk containers right after she passed under the Luling–Destrehan Bridge. Other pilot and those tugs got her turned around. Now it’s my job to get her as far as Chalmette, so they can send her to Houston for repairs. Greek crew. Registry, Singapore. Do you even care about this shit or should I just let you—”

  “No, no. I care!” Marshall shouted back over the wind. The railing he held was attached to a narrow metal staircase that went up ten steps to a platform atop the crew boat’s wheelhouse. The entire boat was rolling so much in the chop that Marshall was forced to hold on with both hands. And he was praying the gun tucked inside the waistband of his jeans didn’t fly out into the river. That would really screw everything up.

  But the worst part was how the giant ship had almost no definition at all as they barreled toward it. It gave Marshall the nauseating sense that they were heading straight for a looming black void, a realm of hallucinatory nightmares ready to swallow them both. But the grain ship wasn’t all ghostly darkness. Floating a hundred feet above the water, the bridge was a bright halo of light tucked at the very back of the vessel: electrified, human, real.

  “All right, look,” Anthem said, voice raised over the wind. “I’m not gonna lie to you. This part is dangerous, okay? But it’s quick and you’re gonna have people helping you. How’s your movement?”

  “My movement?”

  “Your muscle coordination. Your reflexes. You were out for a long time so I’m—”

  “I’m good. I can move.” />
  “Good. Okay, so ship’s crew’s gonna throw down a ladder. It’s short and you just go straight up. I’ll help you from behind, and some crew’ll pull you up from on deck. Sound good?”

  Marshall nodded. The crew boat pulled parallel to the grain ship’s enormous black hull, and about fifteen feet overhead, a hatch popped open, piercing a rectangle of bright fluorescent light in the ship’s flank. An unfamiliar, stinging heat speared up through his chest, raking the back of his throat. Fear. He hadn’t felt much of it since he’d awakened six months ago, not since almost killing himself at Beau Chêne that afternoon. Now, here it was again, as fresh and overwhelming, as full of hot pulsating life as it had been when he was a pimply teenager.

  One of Anthem’s powerful hands came down on Marshall’s shoulder and gave him a tight, paternal squeeze.

  “Steady and ready, podnah. That’s what my dad said to me first time I ever did this. When we’re done, we’ll put it on a T-shirt for yah. How’s that sound?”

  “Why’s it so dangerous?”

  “ ’Cause neither boat’s gonna stop moving. Also, the river’s so high now they had to ballast down the stern so we can get under the Huey P., which means the ship’s gonna be angled . . . kinda.”

  “Kinda?”

  So we’ll fall in the water. What’s so bad about that?

  Well, you could get crushed in between both boats on your way down. Or you could make it to the water alive and then get torn apart by one of the giant propellers right below the surface.

  Of course Anthem didn’t mention any of these facts specifically. Because he was such a gentleman. A hero.

  This was too ambitious, braving the elements with Anthem like this. He could have done something to the guy on dry land, for Christ’s sake, something that would have disgraced him as effectively as what he was planning out here. It was people he could control; not ships, not currents. And he still hadn’t figured out why Anthem’s frequencies seemed to all resonate at Mach 10 when he’d tried to hook him. But maybe he was reading too much into that to begin with. Maybe it was just performance anxiety, this whole need to murder Anthem Landry in the most spectacularly perfect way.

  He’d been provided with a wonderful opportunity the minute the phone had rung in Anthem’s apartment. How ungrateful it would have been for him to turn it down.

  “You don’t have to do this, man!” Anthem shouted.

  High above them, two crew members tossed a rope ladder out of the open hatch. The rungs were metal, heavy enough to keep the ladder weighted and to the side of the ship. “I can have the crew boat take you back and we can meet—”

  “No, no, no!” Marshall shouted back. “It’s fine, it’s fine. Really.”

  “You sure?”

  Why don’t you go first, you patronizing piece of shit? You go first, then I’ll make sure you slip and fall and turn into mincemeat in the muddy Missusip?

  But he couldn’t have that. An accident would never do. Yes, it might be enough to bring Nikki out of hiding, but from the moment he read all those groveling comments in response to Anthem’s missive, Marshall knew disgrace was the only option. And for that he needed the river. And for that he needed to stop being such a goddamn pussy and climb the fucking ladder.

  It was over in a few minutes.

  The worst part was mounting the platform on the crew boat, those few nauseating minutes of being trapped on a tiny platform swaying with the vessel’s every movement ten feet above the churning river. But the climb was mercifully brief, only a second or two of weightlessness between the moment when Anthem couldn’t push anymore and the crew members overhead started pulling on his shoulders. Then his feet were planted on a solid metal floor and a sickly, sweet stench plugged his nose and throat. Empty or fully loaded, the grain smell was still overwhelming, like loaves of bread that had been left in the sun for days.

  Behind him, the crew members hoisted Anthem through the hatch. And the guy had a shit-eating grin on his face even before his feet came to rest on steel. Pride. He was proud of Marshall. Genuinely, stupidly proud of his new friend. Marshall managed his best sheepish grin in return, but he had to look away because all he could think of was that Anthem had probably smiled that way when he was fucking Nikki. And she’d probably given him plenty of reason to.

  A stout bearded white guy in a baseball cap and a vest jacket was hovering behind the tiny, dark-skinned crew members. “Who’s this, A-Team? One of your journalist friends?”

  Anthem cackled, but immediately looked away from his fellow pilot, probably to avoid breathing on the guy. “Naw, man. Just a cousin of mine from out of town. Careful on the way down there, Favreaux. Wouldn’t want to have to comfort your wife in that nice Jacuzzi of yours.”

  “Only comfort you’re ever gonna give a lady is a child support check, Landry.”

  And then the pilot disappeared down the ladder, and Anthem gave Marshall a conspiratorial grin, as if they had just accomplished something momentous together. Then the two crewmen—Asians, Marshall could see now, probably Thai or Malay or some other for-shit country where the only thing to do was leave—led them down the long metal-walled corridor.

  Anthem had been so concerned with remembering the walkie-talkie he’d need to communicate with other vessels on the river, he’d forgotten Marshall was carrying his cell phone, and he didn’t notice when Marshall fell back and hurled the thing through an open porthole.

  25

  * * *

  TANGIPAHOA PARISH

  APRIL 2005

  She would drain the pool as soon as she got there. That was her plan.

  The execution of it was another matter entirely, and that’s what Nikki Delongpre was plotting as her family trundled along Highway 22 in her father’s massive Lexus SUV, a car so big and cosseted, her mother claimed it could double as an insane asylum cell for a wealthy heiress. And her mom would know; whenever they took long drives together as a family, Millie Delongpre would stretch out across the length of the backseat with her favorite pillow, several strands of platinum-blond hair draping her slack mouth as she dozed. Tonight was no exception. Her father was driving, as always, and he was caffeinated but silent, probably running through party preparations in his head.

  While Nikki kept her head turned to the window so she could chew her fingernails without fear of parental disapproval, her father gently tapped his fingers atop the steering wheel, keeping time to Louis Armstrong’s “A Kiss to Build a Dream On.” It was the official song of her parent’s epic, enduring love affair, the song her father had played on a cheap old stereo the night Millie had accepted his marriage proposal in a shadowy cathedral of cypress and string lights. The song of Elysium, and the song of their lavish wedding, still spoken of in ecstatic terms by the close friends who’d been in attendance. But Nikki always found Satchmo’s voice to be haunting and mournful, and this piece of music relegated her to the sidelines of a mythic romance she feared she’d never be able to live up to in her own life.

  She kept telling herself she should be grateful for how quickly things had worked out, and part of her was: Ben’s detective work, the confession from Brittany Lowe, all of it was miraculous, really, and now Anthem, the only man she’d ever loved, had been returned to her after days of darkness and grief and worst of all, uncertainty, days of having her carefully crafted life plans blown to the winds like dust from her palms. But there was one loose end, and it was a big one.

  The pool.

  It hadn’t been touched since her terrible night with Marshall Ferriot, and odds were it was still swarming with those awful little nameless things. They’d been all over her skin as she’d run for her 4-Runner and she was willing to bet the little creepy-crawlies were the cause of the terrible headaches she’d suffered for days after. They weren’t excruciating; it was the brief, distortions of her vision that had frightened her the most. A pressure would start in her temples, and then for a few seconds, everything was grayscale, and a little twinkly around the edges, like she was lookin
g at the world through a fish tank stained with ash. But she hadn’t said a word about them to anyone. How could she?

  Any mention of the headaches or the stuff in the pool and suddenly one question from her father was sure to turn into two and then her mother would get involved, her mother who could never keep a secret, and then they’d both be demanding to know why she’d gone all the way out to Elysium without telling anyone, and swimming? Had she really gone swimming out there by herself? . . . Time. That was what she wanted. Just a little time to let everything settle, to let the reconciliation between her and Anthem become a solid, reliable thing before she had to answer any questions about Marshall Goddamn Ferriot.

  But she didn’t have time.

  Ben, Anthem, her own parents; she had no right to let them become victims of her secret. She couldn’t let them get anywhere near that stuff, whatever it was. Tons of Google searches had given her all kinds of images of bacteria and parasites and microbes but none that matched what she’d seen floating through the flashlight’s beam that night. So a nickname had come to her unbidden, and she couldn’t manage to shake it no matter how hard she tried. Swamp sperm! And the real reason she couldn’t get the words out of her mind was obvious; they were part of her not-so-subconscious belief that the headaches were divine punishment for what she’s done—what she’d almost done. Even though she’d read tons of pamphlets on domestic violence, even though she’d rolled her eyes at plenty of TV shows where battered women blamed themselves for the abuse heaped on them by their lovers, her thoughts about what Marshall had done to her always reset at the blame game.

  If you hadn’t kept it a secret. If you hadn’t been so quick to believe Brittany Lowe’s story about Anthem. You knew something was wrong with Marshall. You’ve always known. But you ignored it because he was so handsome and because he made you feel special and valuable and worth going to North Carolina for if it ever came to that.