Christopher Rice - The Heavens Rise

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.

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.

But none of that mattered now. What mattered was, his passenger’s frosty silence notwithstanding, that everything suddenly felt like a gift to Anthem Landry. They had just entered that spot in the middle of the causeway where it was impossible to see land and, for the first time, he knew complete contentment. Or at least what he thought contentment should feel like; it was such a grown-up word, so superior sounding and so removed from the hormonal mood swings of adolescence.

What Anthem Landry felt that night was the sense that he and the two people closest to him were living in a sacred space between great moments in their lives. And for years afterward, whenever he was in pain or trapped in the dark minutes of another sleepless night, he would exert all the effort he could to return to that lone, blissful hour. To Fred LeBlanc’s voice singing about how the morning mist arises through a crack in the glass after another sleepless night of wishing someone would take him back to New Orleans. To the hot wind ripping through the half-open windows and the briny smell of the moon-rippled lake water. To that eternal, frozen hour, buffed and polished to perfection, a lens focused perfectly on past promise.

For years afterward, the sound of oyster shells cracking under tires ignited a low flame in the pit of his stomach because that was the sound that brought an end to so many things. That sound, and the sight of Elysium’s long curving driveway, empty and deeply shadowed behind the padlocked cast-iron gate. He tried Nikki on her cell but got her voice mail.

That didn’t mean anything, Ben insisted. Coverage on this part of the North Shore was always spotty.