The Heavens Rise

13

NEW ORLEANS

MAY 2013

What the hell are you doing?” Marissa Hopewell shouted. Her voice sounded rain muffled through the iPhone’s tiny speaker, and for a moment, Ben considered hanging up on her and blaming it on a lost connection.

He should have known better than to answer a call from his employer after what he’d just done. But it was instinct, and ever since Marissa had been promoted to editor in chief of Kingfisher a few months before, he had been determined not to take advantage of their long personal history. Still, he had no interest in involving her in the text message he’d received a few minutes earlier.

It was almost ten o’clock, and he was speeding down St. Charles Avenue in his Prius. He was most certainly not sitting in the upstairs balcony at Good Friends across from the complete bore Marissa had set him up with because they were two of the only gay men she knew.

“Well,” he finally answered, “I’m driving and talking on the phone at the same time.”

“Well, that’s fascinating.”

“You’re right. It’s big news for people who think blonds can’t walk and chew gum.”

“Uh huh. How’s your date going, smart mouth?”

“You first, hot stuff.”

“Seriously, Ben. Did you just walk out on Dobie after I—”

“No! Pardon me, I did not just walk out. I excused myself and explained that I had a— Wait, Dobie?”

“Explained that you had a what exactly?”

“His name’s not Davey?”

“Oh my God, Ben.”

“Maybe it’s for the best then.”

“Ben! Do you have any idea how difficult it was to get him to—”

“No, actually. I didn’t realize I was that hard a sell. Jesus Christ!”

“Ben!”

“Should I switch colognes?”

“It was a hard sell because you work for a newspaper and you might have to cover his office one day. But honestly, I might fire you before that ever becomes an issue, so it’s just as—”

“You’d really fire me over a blind date with a guy who admits to listening to One Direction?”

“Where are you going? Dobie says you hightailed it outta there like your pants were on fire.”

“So he was thinking about my pants, huh? Doesn’t sound like it was a total bust then, right?”

“Where are you—”

“Did he actually use those words? The ones about my pants being on—”

“No. He did not. He thanked me for wasting his time and asked me not to fix him up with anyone on my staff ever again.”

“So he was lying when he agreed to a rain check?”

“He was being polite. Which you have never, ever been in your entire life apparently.”

“Yeah, because that’s what Kingfisher needs more of right now. Polite reporters.”

“Watch your mouth, Uptown Girl.”

“Speaking of which, how is your date—”

“You have thirty seconds to tell me where you’re going right now.”

“Well, that’s good, ’cause I’m going to be there in fifteen.”

It was a lie but he hung up on her anyway.

The author of the text messages that had sent Ben Broyard flying through Uptown New Orleans was one Luther Rendell, an NOPD patrol cop with the Second District whom Ben had been cultivating as a contact for years.

The first text had read: Shots fired at Fat Harry’s.

The second, which came just a few seconds later read. & they were fired at yr buddy w. the funny name

• • •

St. Charles Avenue was a broad, oak-shaded thoroughfare that gently mirrored the Mississippi River’s crescent path through the city. Along most of its length, it was lined with Greek Revival mansions so beautiful and well maintained that an Oregon native Ben had gone to Tulane with had once asked him if people actually lived in them or if they were all museums. Antique streetcars traversed the street’s broad, grassy neutral ground, islands of segmented light that gave off great lazy rumbles as they traveled the shadowy avenue.

Ben usually avoided Uptown bars like Fat Harry’s. They were too popular with his old high school classmates. Every now and then it was fun to see which former crushworthy varsity athlete and small-time bully had been knocked from his genetic pedestal by a constant diet of fried seafood and Dixie Beer. But an occasional burst of schadenfreude wasn’t worth the risk of an old Cannon student he barely knew dragging him into a conversation about those awful final months of senior year. Anthem Landry felt the exact same way for the exact same reason, which meant that if he’d set foot inside Fat Harry’s at all that night, he’d have been pretty sauced by the time he arrived.

Ben was jogging across the grassy neutral ground when the lights atop the ambulance parked in front of Fat Harry’s spun to life. It peeled off into the night, sirens screaming, revealing the crowd of mostly white college students gathered in front of the bar’s awning and large front windows. Ben had an insane urge to run after the thing, or at the very least, dash back to his Prius so he could pursue. But then he saw Luther Rendell, one of three uniformed cops standing at the edge of the crowd, and when the guy waved him over, Ben stepped out from the path of an approaching streetcar and crossed the street.

“Was that him?” Ben asked, breathless.

“No. That was the other guy,” Rendell answered. He was bantam-framed, with knots of gray hair that looked like steel wool, and as usual he reeked of Camel Lights and gas station coffee.

“The other guy?”

“The one who fired the shots.”

Rendell walked them away him from the crowd. “So apparently your boy Landry—”

“He’s not my boy, but continue.”

“Your friend, ’scuse me. He and the guy with the revolver get into it over the video poker machines and everyone’s watching like it’s not going to go so well for the guy with the revolver. Because they don’t know the guy has a revolver. They just know he’s got a big mouth and your buddy Landry’s about twice his size. About twice everyone’s size, to hear them tell it.” Which meant A-Team was long gone, Ben noted, otherwise Rendell would have seen for himself how tall Anthem actually was.

“Who ID’d Anthem?”

“Old classmate of his tending bar. Classmates of yours too, I guess. Said Landry kinda went off the deep end when his girlfriend went missing.”

“The video poker machines?” Ben said, hoping the effort it took to ignore this reference didn’t show on his face.

“Gunslinger wanted to try his luck apparently. Landry didn’t seem interested in giving him a turn.”

“And so?”

“Things got physical. Sounds like Landry knocked the guy on his ass, then when the guy got up, he had a gun all of a sudden.”

“And he fired it, apparently.”

“Yep. Into his own foot.”

“You’re fired, Ben!”

Ben was so startled by the voice of his boss, he spun away from this baffling detail.

Marissa Hopewell Powell was dressed in a plain V-neck T-shirt and hip-hugging blue jeans, and she was approaching with a relaxed gait and a casual smile that made Ben wonder if he had imagined her outburst. Once again, Ben was reminded of how much weight the woman had lost since they’d first met. True, the stress of losing her home in Katrina had forced her to shed a bunch of pounds in a very short time. But the rest of it she’d unloaded the old-fashioned way. A diet, brought on, in large part, by the publication of her first book, a critically acclaimed account of Katrina’s terrible aftermath that included a searing retelling of the seventy-two hours she, Ben and a few other Kingfisher staff members had spent pulling people from their flooded homes in the Lower Ninth Ward.

But Marissa’s scheduled date that night had not been some blind fix-up with a dull city accountant. More like dinner with a housing rights advocate and attorney who’d graduated from the same college she did. The guy was marriage material, and jeans and a T-shirt were not what Marissa wore to dinner with marriage material.

“Were you following me?” Ben asked.

“I live close by,” she answered, giving Rendell a polite smile.

“You live in the Marigny.”

“It’s called a police scanner. We used to use ’em before Twitter.”

“You knew I was coming here, and you were testing me, weren’t you?”

“Yep,” she said with a bright smile. “And you failed.”

“Yeah, sure. How’d your date go?” Ben asked her.

“How’s all this going?” Marissa asked.

Rendell gave Ben a searching look.

“Oh, I see,” Marissa said. “So you two are best buds now. I’m actually the reason those guys who knocked over your mother’s restaurant got caught, Luther.”

“I helped,” Ben offered meekly.

“I wrote the story,” Marissa countered.

“Because I bugged you about it every day.”

“I still wrote it.”

“That’s because I didn’t have a desk yet, so I couldn’t write the story, which is why I had to get you to—”

“Keep talking. It’ll go well for you. I promise.”

Rendell lifted his hands like an intervening parent, and to Ben’s surprise, the gesture was enough to silence both him and Marissa instantly.

“Now, Lord knows, I am truly indebted to both of you fine, fine journalists for the piece you wrote about what happened to my momma. But if memory serves, I’ve bought you both a helluva a lot of beers to make up for it. So right now I’m gonna need to tend to a bunch of scared little white kids over there who aren’t used to hearin’ a gun go off, ’less they’re duck huntin’ with Daddy. So if y’all don’t mind.”

Rendell started off.

“Well, that wasn’t racist,” Ben muttered.

“Oh, please,” Marissa groaned.

When Rendell stopped and turned to face them suddenly, Ben thought the cop might have heard his comment. But the man formed one hand into a trigger finger and pointed it at his foot. “Ben. I forgot—it was both feet.”

Ben just stared at him, so Rendell mimed shooting his right foot, reaiming, and shooting his left.

“Are you serious?” Ben called after him.

Rendell nodded.

“How is that even possible?”

“Ask them,” Rendell called back, jerking one thumb at the crowd. “When I’m done with ’em, of course. Guy who actually did it wasn’t any help at all. Said he doesn’t remember even pulling his own gun. But if you find your buddy, tell him we’d love his opinion on the matter as well.”

Ben turned to Marissa. “One foot after the other? How’s that possible? The first bullet would knock him on his ass, right?”

“Well, you know what they say.”

“Do I?”

“God watches over children and drunks. And Anthem Landry is a combination of both. So maybe he’s got extra, extra good luck.”

“Yeah, that last part is what you say, I think.”

“So you off to find your buddy now?”

“You want to join me?”

“No. And don’t ever hang up on me again.”

“Promise, as long as you tell me how your date went.”

“It didn’t go anywhere.”

“You canceled?”

“On the phone today he made some crack about how he couldn’t be married to anyone with a dangerous job.”

“And?”

“I told him I had to ask tough questions of dangerous people. And that I’d be doing it for as long as I could.”

“You wouldn’t reform your dangerous ways? Not even for an attorney?”

“Not even for Barack Obama.”

“Aw, come on. You could cover the Garden District beat. You know, new flower shops, the occasional car theft. It’d give you more time to actually edit the paper.”

“Yeah, ’cause that’s what I want to do. Spend the rest of my life interviewing nice old white ladies who think they’re going to have some kind of moment with me because they just read The Help.”

“Whatever. It’s not like we’re war correspondents out here.”

“You’re just sayin’ that ’cause we haven’t had an oil rig blow up in the past few months.”

“Suit yourself.”

“It wasn’t a match, all right?”

“All right. Fine. Makes sense, I guess.”

“How’s that?” Marissa asked.

“Well, you’re the one who told me if I was ever going to have a boyfriend, I’d have to divorce trouble first.”

“I wasn’t talking about your job, Ben. I was talking about Anthem Landry.”

His cheeks burned. He averted his eyes from hers before he could stop himself. He’d actually lain awake a few nights since she’d made the comment, wondering if the stresses of being promoted to editor in chief by Kingfisher’s new owners were starting to wear on her, wondering if his mentor had, in fact, been trying to warn him off the very career path she had shepherded him onto eight years prior. Apparently, 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 smell from the float trucks mingled with the scent of spilled beer to make an odor as acrid and overpowering and suggestive of sex as the one that blanketed the shores of Lake Pontchartrain.

Ben didn’t trust memory. He respected its seductive power, but he didn’t trust it. Early on, Marissa had hammered into him how unreliable eyewitness accounts could be, how many gaps people filled in with their imagination and their biases. Multiple accounts were the basis of solid journalism. So didn’t it follow that all memories, the good ones and the bad ones, were just fanciful re-creations of what a person had either wished for or feared in a given moment? To be accurate, and to remain accurate over a period of years, a memory required its possessor to have an almost impossible degree of awareness of each passing second, each smell, each touch, each sound. Waking dreams: that was a better description of what people called memories. And he didn’t care for them.

But a small, persistent voice kept urging him to question these intellectualizations. Why? Because they were always prompted by a flash, an echo, the tail edge of a nightmare about Niquette Delongpre. And he feared that the righteousness with which he had repudiated the efficacy of memory over the past few years was driven not by maturity, but by his contempt for his own grief. A man who doesn’t trust his memories cannot be easily haunted.

“You’d tell me if you thought she was alive, right?”

“She’s not alive, A-Team.”

“Most days, I’m sure. But you . . . Every day you’re sure. How the hell you manage that shit, Benny?”

“Because I know she loved you too much to walk away.”

“You too, Benny. She loved you too.”

“It was different.”

“Different, maybe. But not . . . less.”

It wasn’t like Anthem to be this charitable, not when he’d danced with the bottle right into the path of law enforcement or firearms. He had maybe another night or two in the drunk tank before someone at the New Orleans–Baton Rouge Steamship Pilots Association decided to look past his family connections and ask whether or not it was a good idea to let him pilot giant ships full of dangerous chemicals up and down one of the most populated stretches of the Mississippi River.

But tonight, something was different, and Ben wasn’t quite sure how. Anthem reached inside his pocket and pulled out a crumpled piece of paper. There wasn’t much of a moon, so Ben took out his iPhone and used his flashlight app to read it by.

There were three words written on the paper in the draftsmanlike block-printing in which Anthem wrote most everything except his signature.

I AM DONE.

For a while Ben stared at the note, until a gust of hot wind made it almost impossible to hold on to, and Anthem plucked it from his grip to keep it from blowing away. Ben was no stranger to the man’s drunken theatrics, but this one he couldn’t figure out. For starters, Anthem didn’t seem that drunk, and then there’d been the text message. What had his closing line been? Bring sanity.

“Guy took a shot at me at Fat Harry’s ’cause I wouldn’t give up the video poker machine,” Anthem finally said.

“I heard. But he missed.”

“Yep. Shot his own foot.”

“Both his own feet.”

“Yeah. Guess he was drunker than I was. So I left, my evening being ruined and all, and I remember getting home, remember popping a bottle of Crown Royal. A little 7-Up. Next thing I know, I’m staring at this”—he shook the note in one hand—“and every bottle of liquor in my house has been emptied out the sink and the bottles are all smashed up in a pile on my kitchen floor.”

Don’t say anything, Ben told himself. If this is real, if this is going to be . . . an actual thing, just keep your mouth shut.

“You believe in God, Benny?”

“A couple of ’em, yeah.”

Anthem cackled, then he reached through the darkness, pinched one of Ben’s cheeks and gave it a little slap. “You’re so clever, Benny. You’ve always been so damn clever.”

“Yeah, well, I try.”

“You don’t have to. It’s in your blood. It’s in your brain.”

“Sure . . .”

Anthem seemed to forget him altogether suddenly, his attention fixed on the old push boat and the warren of shadows within. “Hand of God wrote that note, Benny.” He turns his flask over in his hands. “Don’t know how. Don’t know why. But I’m gonna listen to it. I’m gonna be done.”

Without warning, he hurled the silver-plated flask into the air. It vanished into darkness, and then Ben was amazed to hear the thing impact the side of the push boat yards away with a resounding, metallic gong. The same flask Anthem had drunk from, to nauseating effect, as they’d driven the state eight years earlier, putting up flyers of the Delongpres. The same flask he’d snuck in his jacket pocket to both his high school and college graduations.

“That’s okay,” Anthem finally said. “I wouldn’t believe me either.”

Anthem turned and clapped a hand on Ben’s shoulder, shaking him with enough force to jostle Ben’s ankles where he stood. Then he took him into a full embrace and lifted his feet off the ground.

“Guess I’ll just have to prove it to you, you little shit.”

“No,” Ben wheezed. “I believe you. I promise.” And maybe his words, despite being squeezed out of him by Anthem’s childish aggression, were more true than he’d realized; he was blinking back tears as he said them.

15

NEW ORLEANS

Do you believe him?” Marissa asked. It was the Monday after Anthem’s alleged run-in with the hand of God, and Ben had arrived in Marissa’s office at nine o’clock on the dot, just as she’d requested. He was well rested and well caffeinated, but he’d also been possessed by a strange, energizing optimism in the wake of Anthem’s declaration. Maybe Anthem’s bottle-smashing God gave me a little nudge too. What can I give up? Worrying half to death?

Leave it to Marissa to question his faith in his friend so bluntly. “I’m not sure I’d bet the house on it,” Ben said. “But you know . . . fingers crossed.”

“AA?”

“I doubt it. He’s not exactly a team player.”

“Yeah, well, speaking of his team. We’re doing an investigation of the pilot’s associations. All three of ’em. It’s going to be a whopper. Months of investigation, probably across several issues. Huge exposure . . . if you take it, that is.”

“You’re only putting one reporter on it?”

“Yes. And I’m offering it to you.”

“What sort of investigation?”

“The usual allegations. That the admissions process is driven by nepotism. That they’ve got too much lobbying power in Baton Rouge. That the pilots are overpaid and don’t have—”

“They’re not overpaid.”

“Three hundred thousand dollars a year. A lot of people would beg to differ, Ben. Including me.”

“They pilot tankers full of deadly chemicals through one of the most populated and dangerous stretches of river in the country. One wrong move and the foot of Canal Street is gone.”

“Ben—”

“They’re not overpaid, Marissa.”

“Well, that’s a point of view worth exploring if you take the story.”

“I want Crowley first.”

“I’m not talking about a trade, Ben.”

“I’ve got a member of Judge Crowley’s personal staff who says they can get me chains of title on the man’s plane, on all his boats, and all the other shiny little gifts he gets from the oil industry before he makes a decision in their favor.”

“You think he gets those gifts from the oil—”

“I would know for sure, and so would our readers, if you’d let me run with it.”

“He’s off-limits. Sorry.”

“Why?”

“Orders from on high.”

“I see. So our new owner, Peter Lane, told us to leave Crowley alone. Is that it?”

“Hilda Lane is our owner, not her husband. And if you haven’t heard her say it a thousand times, she’s a registered libertarian who claims to have no political agenda with this paper—”

“But her husband and the judge are both members of Metairie Country Club so Crowley’s off-limits.”

“Take a seat before your halo falls off, Ben.”

“Please. Just tell me you didn’t ask the Lanes for permission to—”

“I most certainly did not!” Marissa barked, and for just a second, Ben glimpsed the old, fiery, Marissa, the one who’d been more journalist than bureaucrat, the one who hadn’t had the entire fate of the paper resting on her shoulders and its temperamental, wealthy new owners constantly nipping at her heels. “Crowley’s about to rule on whether or not five miles of natural gas pipeline running through Ascension Parish is going to need to reduce its maximum operating pressure to fit with current standards.”

“And he will rule that the pipeline was built before 1970 and therefore if they have operating information that dates back that far, the law says they can keep pumping as much money as they want through all those poor people.”

“I understand that. But the plaintiffs have good lawyers arguing that if the information from before 1970 is incomplete, then Hodell Gas will have to reduce the pipeline’s pressure—”

“And Crowley will rule in favor of Hodell Gas, Marissa. He’s got a history.”

“I’m aware that it’s a distinct possibility. But I can’t offer you a trade on this, Ben. Not right now. We’re still . . . Everything’s still transitional around here, all right? Let the Lanes get comfortable. Let me get comfortable, and then you can go back to taking all kinds of risks. But right now, this is the best I can do.”

He bit his lip because it seemed less risky than biting his tongue. The office’s expansive window offered a view of the beautifully restored brick buildings outside. When he’d started work with the paper as a lowly summer intern, they’d been crammed into a decrepit office building in the Central Business District, on one of the last remaining floors that hadn’t yet been turned into a valet lot for the hotels on Canal Street. Now they were in a shiny new office building in the Warehouse District with a high-end spa on the first floor and a chrome water feature in the lobby that hadn’t broken once since they’d moved in. But all of it—the three new full-time copy editors, Marissa’s mahogany desk, even the professionally framed blow-up of her book cover hanging on the wall next to him, were gifts from Peter and Hilda Lane. For that matter, so was Marissa’s promotion to editor in chief, and a lot of the holdovers liked to grouse that the Lanes had vaulted Marissa over folks with more editorial experience because they were smitten by the rave review her book had received in The New York Times.

“Any idea why the Lanes put the pilots in their sights all of a sudden?” he asked.

“Peter Lane’s father, probably. Rivalry between the oil companies and the pilots predates this building.”

“That’s all?”

Marissa took a deep breath and rested her hands against the edge of her shiny new desk. Ben thought she was going to ask him to leave. Instead, she said, “Hilda Lane’s nephew’s had an application in front of NOBRA for six months. No one’s even looked at it. They think it’s ’cause he doesn’t have an in.”

“Or they know his uncle was one of the most powerful men in Louisiana oil.”

“If you take the story you can control it, Ben. Within limits, of course.”

“You mean keep Anthem out of it.”

“It’s a valid concern, considering his DUI last year. And that he wasn’t pulled from the pilot’s rotation even once because of it. If I toss this to Leo Pigeon and he turns that up, it’ll be his to roll with.”

“Not if I get to Leo first.”

“That’s between you and Leo.”

“All right. Well, I appreciate the offer, but—”

“Ben. Come on, now—”

“Don’t give me another ultimatum. Please. I’ve honored the last one for eight years now—”

“Ben—”

“—I never bothered his family. I never followed him to Atlanta after Katrina. Christ, I haven’t so much as typed his name into a goddamn search engine, ’cause I’m afraid you’re gonna fire me if I do. Marshall Ferriot could be dead for all I know and—”

“Ben!”

His face felt so hot he suddenly wouldn’t have been surprised if his cheeks had started to blister. Even though it was a good five minutes after Marissa had first ordered him to sit down, he forced himself into an empty chair.

His outburst had embarrassed him on a variety of levels, not the least of which was the fact that both he and Marissa knew full well why her ultimatum had been so easy for Ben to follow. Deep down, Ben knew that if he ever turned up significant evidence that Marshall had contributed to the disappearance of the Delongpres, Anthem would find out about it and murder the bastard in his hospital bed—that fact hadn’t changed in eight years. Not a fact, Ben corrected himself. A fear. Your fear. And he also couldn’t deny that once the initial burst of adolescent resourcefulness and outrage had subsided, once Katrina ripped the foundations out from under just about everything he held dear, Marshall’s long, uninterrupted sleep and the destruction of Heidi Ferriot’s life as she became his embittered, shut-in nursemaid seemed to Ben like adequate consolation prizes for having to leave the whole truth resting somewhere in the shadows off Highway 22. Especially if the cost of going deeper into those woods was losing Anthem Landry to his own rage.

“I scared you that bad, huh?” Marissa asked.

“I’m sorry . . . I shouldn’t have raised my voice.”

“It’s fine. I just wish I had that kind of power over the Lanes, I guess.” After a long silence, Marissa said, “Last time I checked, Marshall was in a long-term care facility in Atlanta. His mother died last year, and his condition was unchanged, so he probably won’t live much longer either.”

“Just for the record . . . I didn’t ask. That’s not what that was about.”

“I know you didn’t. But, Ben . . . please. The Lanes were the only offer we had. You didn’t want to work for a blog for free, did you?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“All right, then. Go see what else you can drum up. I’m sure you’ll find something. You always do.”

She gestured for him to leave, but once he reached the door, she called out to him.

“Are you in love with him?” she asked.

“Anthem? You serious?”

She nodded.

“Nine times out of ten, I look at him, I don’t see him. I see her.”

Marissa nodded again as if she were considering his answer, but she’d averted her eyes. He would have preferred if she’d ask him something this personal outside the office, but it wasn’t like she didn’t have the right, not after what they’d been through together: Nikki’s disappearance, her own mother’s death, Katrina.

“If I lose him . . . Nikki’s gone forever. That’s how it feels, at least. I don’t know. What do you think? Does that sound like love?”

Marissa shrugged, made a show of rifling through paper she didn’t seem to be reading.

“Besides, I only date black guys.”

“Go.”

“Especially if they’re related to you,” he said as he left.

“Go!”

• • •

That night, the dream came back. It was Ben’s only recurring dream, and in it, he was never alone. Anthem walked beside him and the land under their bare feet was dry, cracked and uneven. As always, Ben was dimly aware that they were traversing the long-submerged bedrock of Louisiana after it had been scorched dry by a nuclear sun. The blackened, tangled trees on every horizon always seemed to be the same vast distance away, tattered fringes of shadow against a cloudless, bloodred sky. Great swirls of paper defied the laws of gravity all around them; propelling themselves through the air like waterborne bacteria. And on every piece of paper the word MISSING screamed out at the wasteland in 36-point typeface. And on every piece of paper there was a photograph of Niquette Delongpre, smiling confidently in her fleecy pullover, a pair of Mardi Gras pearls around her neck.

And even though they were stark naked, their skin lacerated and oozing from a thousand lashes with origins unknown to him, Ben and Anthem kept walking through the swirls of desperate, pleading flyers. And with one hand held against the small of Anthem’s naked, bloody back, Ben urged them both forward through this wasteland of long-ago fire and perpetual loss. Then at some point, the papers would start turning to cinders the second they touched the scorched earth, and Ben would become aware that the man next to him was muttering something. Not just words but lyrics.

The Texas sun beats down upon me

Like the Devil’s smile

I’d rather be anywhere else but here

Was it a blinding lack of subtlety or just a lack of style

Responding to the ways and means of fear?

And though it would feel to Ben like he had joined Anthem in song, he was never able to hear his own voice, just Anthem’s, raspy and muffled, as if he were singing in his sleep, his mouth half buried in a pillow.

Take me back to New Orleans

And drop me at my door

’Cause I might love you, yeah

But I love me mooooore . . .

Ben woke from the dream as he always did, with a sense of certainty that comforted him and the lyrics of Anthem’s favorite Cowboy Mouth song cycling through his brain. Sure, the dream was full of blood and apocalyptic set pieces, but its message was always the same comforting incantation. No matter what happened, all he and Anthem needed to be on any given day were just two boys walking, wounds and all, one foot in front of the other, the other ready to reach over and right the other should he stumble.

The clock on the nightstand said it was 12:30. But the longer Ben stared at the glowing green numerals, the more his sense of peace departed.

12:31. The change of minute roused him suddenly. And then he realized what had awakened him, because he heard the noise a second time: the creak of a floorboard nearby. His apartment was one half of an old town house; the warped hardwood floors were sensitive. But this noise was too close to his bed.

He sat up, planning his next moves. First he’d pull the gun from his nightstand drawer, then he’d turn on the light. But before he could do either, a wave of darkness passed over the entire room. His first thought was that a plane had flown low over the house, but there was no way a plane could have blocked out the streetlights; everything inside the room—every shadow, every dull glare from outside—was suddenly gone. It felt as if the darkness itself had claimed him from within.

And then it was over. And the streetlight’s tree-branch laced halo on the floor near his bed seemed preternaturally vivid, the result of having been blotted out entirely for several impossible seconds by . . . he had no idea what.

He pulled the handgun Anthem had forced on him for his birthday one year, firing-range lessons included, from the nightstand drawer—If you’re gonna be gettin’ up in people’s faces, you’re gonna need to protect yourself, Benny—then he turned on the lamp and swung his feet to the floor, gun leveled on his yawning bathroom door. The worst part was drawing back the shower curtain, but there was nothing there except his enormous collection of body washes.

In the living room, he found the front door locked, the lock undamaged, every piece of unopened mail exactly where he’d left it on his desk. The kitchen sink’s usual mountain of unwashed coffee cups hadn’t been disturbed, and the window just above was still locked. No impressions in his humble collection of IKEA furniture.

His apartment was empty, the doors and windows locked, the only sound the slight, steady rattle of the AC vents overhead. But the conviction that he wasn’t alone was like a second heartbeat inside his chest. And he knew there was only one way to be rid of the feeling, and it didn’t come from inside a bottle. It came from his phone. Or at least that’s where it started.

The app had become a punch line among almost every gay man he knew, but it was effective, and within a few seconds of settling down onto his sofa, Ben was paging through semigrainy photos of other gay men like himself, most of whom were only a few blocks away, doing exactly the same thing he was. He swiped through a few familiar faces and lots of bare chests. Camera phones had shown the world there was no end of dehumanizing poses the male form could be contorted into before a bathroom mirror.

After a few minutes of searching, he hit on a potential target. A broad-shouldered linebacker type with the right dusting of hair on his pecs. They chatted for barely five minutes, each individual exchange barely more than a few words in length. No niceties, no flirting; nothing other than the almost split-second joining of two compatible and wildly superficial fantasies.

A few minutes later, he’d managed a quick shower, changed his T-shirt and boxers and was standing just inside the front when there was a flash of headlights turning onto his street. He’d dimmed most of the lights so he could peer out at his visitor without being noticed. When the guy stepped under the porch light’s bright halo, Ben was relieved to see the guy matched his profile pic; the same brawn, the same five o’clock shadow.

He’d executed his next moves countless times. Open the door, give the guy a slight smile, nothing too toothy or broad or effusive (or effeminate). Don’t say too much; who knows what turn of phrase could ruin whatever fantasy the guy had cooked up in his head about who Ben was or who he wanted Ben to pretend to be for the next twenty minutes or so? He’d offer the guy a drink, let him work his way toward the bedroom and then they’d be good to go.

Ben was halfway through this script when he realized that something about the guy was off. He wasn’t sweating or skittery like the tweakers Ben often had to turn away. Instead he was a blend of sullen and tightly wound that set off alarm bells in Ben’s brain. Hand jammed in his jeans pockets, surveying their surroundings carefully, as if he were inventorying the room. And he was big. Anthem big. But when Ben asked him if he wanted a drink, the guy asked for a beer in a breathy, even tone of voice that didn’t have a psychotic edge to it.

When Ben emerged from the kitchen, Corona in one hand, the guy was gone. The door to Ben’s bedroom was open. It was the only place the guy could have gone, so Ben stepped into the darkness after him. And that’s when the guy hit from behind with bone-rattling, breath-stealing force, sending Ben hurtling face-first onto the bed. The beer bottle flew from his hand and smashed to the floor. Before he could protest, the guy had driven his head into the pillow, one giant hand clamped on the back of his neck.

“Bite it, you little faggot,” the guy growled. “Bite it!” The smoothness had left the man’s voice, replaced by a tone as precise and taut as a piano wire. But none of this was what Ben had agreed to do during their chat. He was into quick, frenzied passion, not outright violence. When he yelled, “Stop!” the guy seized the back of his neck and slammed him face-first into the headboard. A ring of fire encircled Ben’s skull, so fierce and brilliant he couldn’t tell what exact part of his head had struck wood. He tasted blood and realized he’d bitten down on his tongue. Then he felt a strange pressure in his jaw and realized some kind of gag was being shoved into his mouth.

Mouth at Ben’s ear, the man growled, “You shut your fuckin’ mouth, you little faggot. You hear me? You shut your goddamn—” And then his grip on Ben’s neck went slack. His weight lifted off him and the breath suddenly rushed back into Ben’s lungs. The bastard hadn’t finished fastening the ball bag to the band in back, so Ben was able to spit the thing out onto the pillow. He threw himself onto his back, grabbed for the nightstand drawer and pulled out the handgun he’d never drawn on another human being before that moment.

His attacker was now wide-eyed, slack-jawed and standing a few feet from the foot of the bed, as if he’d been drawn off of Ben by an invisible cord. But there was a dullness to his eyes, a vacantness there. Maybe it was a trick of the light streaming into the darkened bedroom from the living room, carving strange shapes on one side of the man’s face. The gun, Ben finally realized. He’s not looking at the gun. I’m pointing a gun at him and he’s not even looking at the damn thing.

“You deserve better than this,” the man said, his voice drained of all aggression. “You are beautiful and you deserve better than this.”

“Get out! Now!”

“You are beautiful and you deser—”

“Get out!”

Ben’s scream was loud enough to wake the neighbors, and in response, the man pivoted on one heel, walked toward the doorway, grabbed the edge of the door frame in both hands and brought his own forehead into the wood with a crack that turned Ben’s stomach. Without flinching or hesitating, he did it a second time. Then a third time. Blood sprouted from his forehead, painting the bridge of his nose.

“Get out! Now!”

The man turned on one heel and headed into the living room. Ben shot to his feet, gun raised and sighted on the man’s back as he headed for the front door, steps steady. Blood from the giant man’s gashed forehead dribbled into a neat trail along the hardwood floor. He left the front door open behind him so Ben moved through it, gun raised.

His neighbor Elsa lived in the other side of the town house, which meant they shared a front porch. She was a surgical resident used to blood and long hours but she was still given pause by the sight of her tiny gay neighbor in boxers and a T-shirt, holding a shiny gun on a giant, bloody-faced man who was shuffling toward his pickup truck with the casual air of someone who’d left his cell phone inside it.

“Give him three minutes,” Ben said, his voice shaking. “If he’s not gone in three minutes, we call the cops.”

“Three minutes,” she responded.

“Three minutes,” Ben repeated, only now it was a trembling whisper.

As soon as the man slid behind the wheel of his truck, he jerked as if he had awakened from an alcoholic blackout. Split personality disorder, Ben thought. It had to be. Whatever it was, Ben didn’t give a shit. Whatever it was, it was dangerous and his skull was still singing and he’d fire at the fucker’s kneecap if he made a run at the house.

The nearby streetlight threw enough dull light inside the truck’s cab that Ben could see that the man’s eyes were focused now, and full of wild hostility again. But there was confusion there too. And for the first time, he seemed to notice the gun in Ben’s hands. Maybe that’s because Ben was now standing only a few feet from the truck’s driver-side window, gun raised, his hands finally steady.

With the careful enunciation of a kindergarten teacher, Ben said, “Get the fuck out of here. Right now.”

The truck sped off, giving Ben a glimpse of the Confederate flag sticker and pissing Calvin on the rear window. Once the taillights vanished around the corner, Elsa joined him on the sidewalk, portable phone pressed to her breasts.

Ben lowered the gun.

“Jesus Christ,” she whispered. “What did you do to— Whoa.” Her fingers went to the bruises on his face, bruises he hadn’t seen yet so he had no idea how bad they were.

“He did it—”

“No. The blood on his face—”

“I know. He did all of it. He threw me on the bed and then it was like he changed his mind. He smashed his head into the door frame.”

“Ben . . .”

“I’m dead serious, Elsa.”

“How’d you get him off you?”

“I didn’t. He just . . . stopped. I don’t know.”

“Because of the gun?”

“No. Before I got the gun.”

“Crazy,” Elisa whispered again.

“Pretty much. Yeah.”

“You got a permit for that thing?” she asked him.

“Yeah. Why?”

“ ’Cause I’m calling the cops,” she said, heading back toward their front steps.

“And what are you going to tell them?”

“His plate number. I wrote it down.”

She was almost inside her front door when she said, “And Ben. This might not be the time, but maybe you could try meeting men the old-fashioned way.”

“What’s the old-fashioned way again?”

“I don’t know. Dinner?”

“I wasn’t in the mood for dinner,” he said.

“Were you in the mood for this?”

He returned to his bedroom, turned on the lamp, put the gun back inside his nightstand. Then he shook for a few minutes

What had he been in the mood for? He’d never dated anyone for longer than a few months because that was how long it took him to feel the upsurge of desperate possessiveness within him that he knew would destroy any chance at a healthy relationship. So instead, he’d nuke the thing with the usual platitudes and clichés. He had his career to focus on. He wasn’t all that big on gay bars or leaving the house when he wasn’t working or blah blah blah. Some guys were pros at the Internet sex game and as far as he was concerned, more power to them. But he was different, always had been. For him, these quick, late-night assignations had become a grim compulsion that protected him from the terror of being abandoned again.

You are beautiful and you deserve better.

Insane that the guy had chosen those words. They must have been fueled by some kind of schizophrenic self-loathing; maybe the sick bastard saw himself as Ted Bundy one minute, Ted Haggard the next. It was a good thing Elsa has insisted on calling the police. At the very least, they had to give them the guy’s plate number before he hurt somebody else.

You are beautiful and you deserve better.

There was a pad and pen in his nightstand. He wrote the words down exactly as he remembered the guy saying them. And as soon as he lifted the sheet of paper in his hands, a flood of adrenaline-fueled warmth coursed through him, causing his extremities to tingle and the hairs on the back of his neck to stand on end in pinprick formations. He could hear the sound of his own breathing.

Hand of God wrote that note, Benny. A few nights earlier he’d held a piece of paper similar to this one, and the phrase written on it had been just as brief and direct. Of course, his story wasn’t the same as Anthem’s. He hadn’t come out of some blackout to find this note sitting on his desk, in his own handwriting. But the words themselves had come from somewhere else, they’d tumbled from the suddenly slack jaw of his attacker, who had just been seized up and off Ben’s prone body as if by the . . . hand of God.

Belief. Faith. Maybe those were the only apt words to describe the sensations that were moving through him now, edging out the stark terror of his assault, replacing it with something softer and more malleable. He hadn’t been lying when he told Anthem that he believed in more than one god. But his faith in some kind of higher power was an untested thing, more of a bet on fifty-fifty odds than the result of an actual spiritual experience of the kind Anthem had described to him the other night. And now, here he was, feeling as if events around him had been manipulated in some mysterious and unknowable way, but at a speed that was suddenly visible and obvious. Undeniable.

You are beautiful and you deserve better. Not the words of that deranged man who had just filled his bedroom with terror. The words that had come through that man.

A faith experience. Isn’t that what they called this? The kind of bullshit you read about on those vaguely Christian pamphlets left behind in hospital waiting rooms, the kind with crude, brightly colored illustrations. And it had happened to him.

When Elsa stepped inside his front door to tell him what the police had said, she froze in her tracks and gave him a funny look, and that’s when Ben realized he was smiling.