The Heavens Rise (17 page)

“Can you change the channel, please?” Ben asked the bartender as he took a seat.

“Do
not
change the channel,” Marissa said.

“Enough already, Marissa. You’re not—”

“Do
not
change the channel,” Marissa repeated, with enough force in her voice to make the bartender set the remote back on top of the register.

And so they sat there for a while, watching the same loop of terrible images most of the city had been hypnotized by for twelve hours now: blackened trailers guttering flames in their shattered windows, a morbidly obese white woman, her uncombed hair like bales of straw, screaming bloody murder as sheriff’s deputies shoved her back from the scene of a scorched home in which her young daughter had burned to death. Only now the woman’s screams were silent, her excruciating display reduced to a visual backdrop for speculating news anchors. The gas leak had probably started in the middle of the night, they were explaining for the thousandth time, and that’s why no one had called the emergency number posted on warning signs that ran the pipeline’s length through Ascension Parish; because they hadn’t been awake to smell the cloud of methane spreading over their homes, before something, probably infinitesimal, had ignited it: a pilot light, the small spark inside a light switch. Someone’s furtive late-night smoke in the backyard.

“Remind me again what I said to you in my office that day,” Marissa whispered.

“I’m not going to help you punish yourself for something you didn’t do.”

“
Remind
me, Ben.”

“Or else what?”

“Marissa Hopewell Powell is not in a position to reprimand anyone on her staff today. So, if you can find it in your heart, just remind me what I—”

“You said it wasn’t the right time for us to take risks. You said . . . we needed time to let the Lanes get comfortable, to let
you
get comfortable—”

“Comfortable,” Marissa snarled, and when she lifted her glass to her
lips, it trembled in her hand. “If I wanted to make people comfortable, I should have gone to work in a fucking mattress store,” she growled. Then she drank.

“Marissa—”

“You came to me with a line on Judge Crowley weeks before he ruled the owner of that damn pipeline didn’t have to reduce their operating pressure—”

“And no piece of mine would have forced him to rule another way, and you know it. It’s gradual, what we do. It’s cumulative, if it works at all. You get a silver-bullet hit piece maybe once in a lifetime. Anything else is movie crap. And come on, you know how this state is. It’s just like Edwin Edwards use to say. Unless we catch ’em in bed with a live boy or a dead girl, then we’ve got nothing. It takes
time—
”

“We don’t have time!”

Ben hadn’t seen her come apart like this in years, not since their fifth hour of night rescues after Katrina, their fifth hour of listening to the anguished, pleading wails of Marissa’s trapped and dying neighbors calling out to them from attics and rooftops. One minute she’d been ordering them in the direction of one house, the one flashing SOS at them with a flashlight, then she’d crawled to one corner of their aluminum boat, curled into a ball and started shaking all over until Ben curved an arm around her back and held her until she went still. Of course, she’d repaid the favor a few days later, when they’d finally arrived at the Ernest M. Morial Convention Center on foot, expecting the National Guard, food and water and finding only masses of the abandoned and the dying. That’s when Ben fell to his knees and wept, and the proud, educated black woman who had once snapped at him that she would never be
his mammy,
collected him off the ground, took him in her arms and kissed him gently on the neck while whispering assurances that everything would be all right. On many nights in the years since, they’d called each other randomly and without explanation, sometimes in the hours just before dawn, because something about the other person’s
voice served to remind them that the bloated corpse they had awakened to find in their bedroom, the one piled in the corner like several sacks of sand, was in fact just an untethered memory that had taken on the illusory weight of a nightmare.

Had those late-night calls—they were always mock-casual, as if the other was just calling to chitchat, even though it was almost 3:00 a.m.—pushed those years too far into the past? Had they lost hold of some fundamental piece of themselves that had been revealed during those seventy-two hours in August of 2005? It was as if the city itself had asked them a clear and direct question when the levees failed—
Will you fight for me?—
and they answered with courage and a boat. But ever since, the answer to that same question had been:
Get back to me. I’m busy trying to get comfortable.

He studied her wide-eyed, furious stare, and the way she was now lifting one trembling hand as if to hold him back, even though he hadn’t moved an inch since her outburst. Maybe it was post-traumatic stress syndrome, or maybe it was the old, uncompromised Marissa. One thing was for sure, he was so desperate for the return of that long-lost woman, he didn’t mind if she broke the door down on her way in.

“This city lost its margin of error twenty years ago,” Marissa said. “Somebody’s supposed to tell the truth even when no one wants ’em to. Goddamn
Times-Picayune
isn’t even a daily paper anymore. And while I was waiting for some spoiled white lady to give me permission to do my
real
job, sixteen people burned to death in their sleep.”

The door to the bar was swept open as if by a gale-force wind, and when Ben matched the strength of the person on the other side with the height of the baseball cap–crowned shadow suddenly blocking out the sun, an involuntary groan escaped from him.

“This is
not
the time, A-Team,” Ben managed, sliding off his bar stool.

But by then, Anthem Landry had slammed the latest issue of
Kingfisher
down on the bar so hard the row of beer mugs behind the register clinked together, and for a few stunned seconds Ben and Marissa just stared at the cover: “RIVER ROYALTY: How a Culture of Nepotism Is Putting Our City, and Our Lives, at Risk.”

The graphic, which Ben had literally turned away from when it first went up on the art board at the office, was a giant, bloodred oil tanker enlarged to the point that it looked like its wheelhouse was about to tear out the bottom half of the Crescent City Connection bridge. Ben thought it was a cruel irony that he would have been less afraid of this confrontation if Anthem had still been drinking. But at six months of sobriety, he wasn’t just a live wire; he was a curtain of them wrapped around leaner, more efficient muscles. Sure, his skin looked great, and there was an unmistakable twinkle in his eyes, but ever since he’d tossed his flask into Lake Pontchartrain, he had a tendency to bare his teeth during everyday conversations and shout at waiters if they brought him a Diet Pepsi instead of a Diet Coke.

Ben saw no good end to the collision before him, no good end at all.

“You followed me here?” Ben asked.

“You wouldn’t tell me where she was yesterday, and I have something to say to this nice lady.”

“No, you don’t. Not today.”

“Oh, let him talk,” Marissa muttered.

“San Francisco Bay?” Anthem growled. “You had your reporter compare our pay scale to bar pilots on San Francisco Bay? May I just point out to you that San Francisco Bay is almost as big as San Francisco. They don’t have anywhere near the currents or the proximity to population we deal with out there every day.”

“She didn’t write the piece, Anthem.”

“Did
you
?”

“Did you see my name on it?” Ben asked.

“You could have at least given me a warning, goddammit!”

“I apologize. Next time when I have to practically bribe a colleague
to keep your DUI out of my paper, I’ll give you plenty of notice so you can give some thought to where you’re gonna buy me dinner.”

“You really did that?” Anthem asked. Then, to Marissa, he said, “Did he really do that?”

“We both did,” she said quietly.

“So is that some kind of consolation prize?”

“You know what, buddy?” Ben started, stepping between his best friend and his boss. “We’re kinda having a day here, and it’s not about you right now. I know this may come as a shock, but it’s not
always
about Anthem La–”

“You’re right. It’s not about me. It’s about the men I work with up and down this river. And they all want to know the same thing.”

“Which is?” Marissa asked him.

“What do you want? You want us all fired? Restructured? Because if that’s the case, then it’s my duty to explain what the alternative is. It’s a bunch of outsourced South Americans who will be willing to launch a tanker full of crude in a fog so thick you can’t see your hand in front of your face, all so they can make a delivery deadline on the other side of the world for British Fuckin’ Petroleum.

“How safe do you think our river will be then? How will you all sleep at night knowing you got ships moving up and down out there, full of God knows what, being piloted by guys who’ve got no connection to anything on the other side of the floodwall? Guys who live and die by what the oil industry tells ’em to do. And pardon me, but if you don’t think being bossed around by the oil and gas companies is a problem, allow me to direct your attention to Ascension Parish today.”

Rather than wince right in Anthem’s face over this deep cut, Ben stepped out from between his best friend and his boss, and turned his back on them both. The reaction must not have been lost on Anthem, because when he spoke again, his voice had lost its hard, furious edge.

“Every moment I’m out there, I’m thinking about my family. I’m
thinking about the two of you. I’m thinking about how far away everyone I care about is from the bridge I’m piloting my ship under, in case something goes wrong. Now, I know I rode out Katrina in a condo on Pensacola Beach. But if I had known what was coming, I would have been here with you both. But you have to believe me. There’s not a day when I round the bend in the river and see all those buildings still standing there that I don’t thank my lucky stars . . .
There’s my girl.
I say it every damn time, whether I want to or not. Ask any captain who’s done a turn with me.
There’s my girl . . .
But this . . .
crap
made it sound like men like me would run a ship straight through the Riverwalk if we didn’t get paid on time. And that is wrong. It’s just flat-out
wrong.
”

When he saw her watching the images of fiery destruction on the TV above the bar, Ben figured Marissa had tuned out Anthem’s lecture altogether.

“You think you can put all that in writing?” Marissa finally asked.

“Excuse me,” Anthem whispered. Ben was just as startled as Anthem appeared to be.

“I
said,
do you think you can put that in writing? That way, I can have one of our copy editors go over it and we can put it up on our website this evening.”

“What . . . like a letter to the editor?”

“No. A rebuttal. Better placement. Your photo. The works. It’ll even get its own comment thread if your pals want to chime in.”

Slack-jawed, Anthem shook his head, eyes moving from Marissa to Ben. Once he had his old friend in his sights again, he barked, “You write it!”

“I’m flattered, really,” Ben said. “But I have grout to clean.”

“Come on. I can’t write!”

“Well, you know how to spell and you know how to shoot off your mouth. Apparently, that’s all you need to know these days.”

“It’s all
you
knew how to do when I took you on,” Marissa said to Ben.

“I don’t want to work at your paper,” Anthem said.

“Well, that’s good, son,” Marissa said, rising from her bar stool. She pulled a business card and pen out of her pocket and wrote something on the back of the card. “ ’Cause I didn’t offer you a job. This is a one-shot deal, and I’ll need it by three o’clock. Email it to Sue LaSalle, she’s our Web person.”

“All right . . . But you can’t blame me for being suspicious. You’ve never liked me very much.”

“Well,
A-Team,
let’s just say I’m a bigger fan of Anthem two-point-oh then I was of the old version. Still, nothing can change the fact that I do hate white people. Even the pretty ones.” She chucked Anthem on the cheek, then she headed for the door. “Good-bye, y’all. I have booze at home.”

Ben returned to his bar stool. Anthem took Marissa’s spot and gestured for the bartender. When he saw Ben’s startled look, he said, “I’m gettin’ a Diet Coke.” Then he repeated his order to the bartender with petulant emphasis.

Ben ordered a Corona.

“You mad at me?” Anthem asked.

“No. But I do wish that you would, you know,
maybe
shut the hell up every now and then.”

“Well, that’s the pot calling the kettle a pot. You know, you’re never going to find a boyfriend, you keep spending all your weekends with her.”

“Funny. She says the same thing about you.”

“I don’t want a damn boyfriend!”

“That’s not what I meant, genius.”

“Whatever. You
don’t
spend all your weekends with me.”

“I used to. I used to have to chase you all over town. Your mother would be calling me all night, half out of her mind.”

“Well, then you spent the weekend with my momma and not me, all right? Anyway, that’s not how it is anymore.”

“Guess not.” The bartender brought Ben’s beer. He took a slug. “Does it bother you that I’m—”

Anthem hissed and waved one hand at him dismissively, but in the same instant, he turned away from the sight of the froth collecting inside the bottle’s neck as if it were a picture of Nikki Delongpre.

“This isn’t some kind of setup?” he finally asked. “What do you—I don’t even know what you’d call it. An article? A
piece
?”

“Piece is good,” Ben said.

“You don’t think she’s going to try to make me look like crap?”

“No. I don’t. I think it’s a good thing.”