The Heavens Rise (15 page)

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.

MANDEVILLE

OCTOBER 2013

D
anny Stevens made it to the front porch just in time to see the taillights of his wife’s Mercedes disappear around the wall of stately oak trees at the end of their driveway. He tried her cell, but there was no answer. Satellite radio, Kelly Clarkson, his wife’s impatience: Danny blamed all three in equal measure.

“Metamucil,” he said after the beep. “Orange-flavored. None of that pink lemonade crap . . . And sorry. You know, about . . .” What was he apologizing for? His irregularity or his forgetfulness? He wasn’t sure, so he hung up.

Just a few minutes earlier, Sally had cornered him in the kitchen, armed with pad, pencil and her plainest pair of eyeglasses, the ones she only wore to Albertsons on the weekends. Danny had insisted up and down that they weren’t out of anything, only to realize his omission once he was alone with his bloat. But that’s not what was really bothering him. Lately, he’d been consumed by a burning need to issue some kind
of apology to his wife whenever she entered the room. And he often did, usually a mumbled, halfhearted thing, as reflexive and irritating as a dry cough. Sometimes she would hear it and stop in the doorway to ask if something was the matter, and he’d do his best not to give her a guilty look. Because in the end, what did he have to feel guilty about?

Unlike most of the men he worked with at Cypress Bank & Trust, he’d never cheated. (Not on his wife, anyway.) And he was a damn good provider—that was for sure. The house was proof of that: two stories of French Regency perfection with immaculate limestone walls and second-floor windows adorned by slender, intricate iron railings. Just another year of bleeding the Ferriot trust and the damn thing would be paid off too. Because that’s what good providers did; they made deals that had to be kept in the shadows.

It was a crisp autumn afternoon. The house wasn’t right on the Tchefuncte River, but it was pretty close. Just a few yards of smooth, rolling lawns separated them from the glassy green waters and the boat dock they shared with their neighbor Lloyd Duchamp. Technically the oaks between the house and the water belonged entirely to Lloyd, but he’d allowed Sally to dress them up with string lights last Christmas, probably as penance for that awful hog of a motorcycle he’d bought after his wife left him.

Danny loved Beau Chêne. And no matter how bad things got at the bank, he’d fight like hell to stay within its grassy, wooded borders. The place had given his son a damn near perfect childhood, a childhood where Douglas and his friends could water ski in their own backyard and spend afternoons on the rope swing without fearing stray bullets. Nothing like his childhood, trapped in the Irish Channel with a mother who refused to let go of the old house on Constance Street even after the blacks moved in on all sides.

But things at the bank were bad, had been bad for a long time in fact. Like most of the other managers and officers at Cypress, Danny wore the fact that he was employed by the last locally owned bank in New Orleans as a badge of honor. But lately the whispers about a sale to one of the nationals
had grown into a dull clamor, and even senior staff were starting to jump ship to JPMorgan Chase. Layoffs were imminent, he was sure of it. And if his situation were any different, Danny probably would have left by now.

But his situation wasn’t different. There was one trust he just couldn’t afford to leave.

His son had arrived for a visit the night before, but he’d only been home an hour or two before zipping across the causeway to meet up with some friends. They’d probably done a circuit of all the old Uptown bars they used to frequent in high school with their fake IDs, and now Douglas was probably sleeping it off at a buddy’s house. Midway through his junior year at Chapel Hill, his son’s connection to his hometown was still as strong as ever.
Good,
Danny thought as he made his way to the kitchen.
Too many of us leave. Too many of the good ones anyway.
As for the fact that Douglas had left his bags at the foot of the stairs? Everyone has room for improvement.

Home alone, for a half hour at least. Too fast for a quick wank to some of the new porn he’d downloaded the night before: naughty nurse stuff, a little spanking thrown in, predictable but efficient. (And the truth was, at fifty-five, a quick wank wasn’t as easy to pull off as it had been a few years before.) The news was out too. More depressing footage off that awful pipeline explosion over in Ascension Parish; trailers turned to molten heaps, mothers weeping for the incinerated children. The whole place looked like Pompeii, and though Sally couldn’t seem to pull her eyes away from the coverage, he’d had enough after twenty minutes.