DR07 - Dixie City Jam (49 page)

I stripped off my field jacket, picked up a scuba tank and
diving mask off the deck, checked the air gauge, and slipped my arms
through the straps. I tied one end of a rope to the winch and the other
around my waist.

'When I jerk, you pull us up,' I said.

'Big mistake,' Clete answered.

'I'll live with it. Don't let me down, Cletus.' He shrugged
his shoulders and shook his head. I fitted the air hose into my mouth
and went over the side.

The coldness was like a fist in the stomach, then I felt
currents tear at me from several directions and I heard metal ringing,
cable clanging on steel, plates grinding, perhaps a long-silenced
propeller gouging a trench in packed sand, and I realized that the
storm in the south was already destabilizing the sub's environment and
was twisting the keel against the cables that Buchalter's crew had
secured to the bow and stern.

I had no weight belt or flippers and had to struggle to gain
depth. I blew the mask clear and swam deeper into the vortex of gold
and brown light and spinning silt until I was only five feet away from
the drowning figure in the diving suit. My head was aching with the
cold, my teeth locked on the rubber mouthpiece to keep them from
chattering, my ears pinging from the water pressure.

Then I saw what we had interrupted. The plates in the hull,
just aft of the tower, probably already weak with strain and corrosion,
had been cut with acetylene torches and prized out of the spars with
jacks, exposing a compartment whose escape hatch into the tower was
locked shut.

A battery-powered underwater light burned amid the drifting
silt and softly molded skeletons of a dozen Nazi submariners.

Their uniforms were green rags now, their faces a yellow
patina of pickled skin, their atrophied mouths puckered with rats'
teeth.

I swam behind the diver, untied the rope from my waist, and
slipped it under the canvas arms of the diver's suit, then knotted it
hard in the spine. I felt the sub shift on its keel in a sudden surge
of coldness from the gulf's bottom. As the deck listed to port, the
diver turned in a slow pirouette and looked through the glass into my
face.

The water had risen inside the suit to her neck, and her red
hair floated like strands of dried blood against the glass. Her chin
was twisted upward into the air, her cheeks pale, her mouth working
like a guppy's.

It was too late to spin the wing nuts off the helmet and place
my air hose in her mouth. I jerked hard on the rope and felt it come
taut as Clete started to retrieve it topside. Then I tried to push both
me and the woman who called herself Marie Guilbeaux to the surface.

Then, inches from my face, I saw the salt water climb to the
top of the glass and immerse her head as though it were a severed and
preserved specimen in a laboratory, her hair floating about her in a
dark web. She fought and twisted, tried to hold her breath, her eyes
bulging in their sockets; then a broken green balloon slipped suddenly
from her mouth into the top of the helmet. Her arms locked about my
neck in an almost erotic embrace, her body gathering against mine, her
lips meshed against the glass like torn fruit, the teeth bare now, the
loins shuddering, a wine-dark kiss from the grave.

A moment later I felt Clete stop
pulling on the rope, then it
was slipping free over the side of the salvage ship, curling down out
of the waves toward me. I released the body of the woman called Marie
Guilbeaux and watched it spin downward, the puffed arms extended
sideways like a scarecrow's, the weighted boots pulling it past the
bank of lights into the darkness, until the rope snapped taut again,
and Marie's drowned figure swung back and forth against the bottom of
the sub's hull.

I blew my glass clear again and swam upward to the surface. I
popped through a wave into the wind, the groan of cables straining from
the side booms, my mask streaked with water, my eyes searching the deck
for Clete and Lucinda.

They were nowhere in sight. I climbed back aboard, breathless
with cold, and slipped the straps to the air tank off my back. My AR-15
was gone.

I put on my field jacket, buttoned it against the wind, and
took the .45 from the side pocket. A hollow-point round was already in
the chamber. I cocked back the hammer and moved toward the stern, past
the air compressor, the gasoline-powered generator, the winches, the
piles of salvage nets and coils of acetylene hose, my shoulder brushing
lightly against the base of the pilothouse, past an entrance to a room
throbbing with the diesel motors that powered the side booms, past the
galley, past a machine shop, finally to an open hatch that gave onto a
small confined area that served as crew quarters.

No one.

I went inside the crew's quarters. It smelled of unwashed
bedding and expectorated snuff. A color photograph of a nude black
woman torn from a magazine was glued against one bulkhead. I went
through another open hatch into a passageway that traversed the
interior of the ship and led back toward the pilothouse and the bridge.
The bulkheads were gray and cold with moisture, the deck patterned with
the wet imprints of tennis shoes.

I opened or went through each hatch along the passageway.

Nothing.

The end of the passageway was unlighted, shrouded in gloom, as
indistinct as fog. I didn't notice the broken lightbulb glass until the
sole of my shoe came down on a piece of filament and cracked it against
the deck. By then it was too late.

Buchalter stepped out from behind an open storage locker door,
the stock of the AR-15 tight against his shoulder and cheek, one green
eye as hard and bulbous as an egg behind the iron sights.

'You lose again, Dave. Throw it away,' he said, and kicked the
door shut behind him, allowing me to see Lucinda and Clete on their
knees by the ladder that led into the pilothouse, their fingers hooked
behind their necks. There was a raw, skinned area above Clete's left
eye.

'You want to take a chance and plant one in them?' Buchalter
said.

'Don't give up your piece, Streak!' Clete shouted.

I held the .45 out to my side, bent slightly with my knees,
and placed it carefully on the deck. Buchalter wore combat boots and
khakis, a heavy gray wool shirt, and long underwear buttoned to the
throat. His cheeks and chin were gold with the beginnings of a beard,
the spray of blackheads fanning from his eyes like powder burns.

I smelled a bright, clean odor in the air, one that travels to
the brain as quickly as a slap. Like the smell of white gas.

'Your friend killed my sister, Dave. What do you think of
that?' he said. He looked at me with his lopsided grin.

'We tried to save her,' I said.

'Come join us,' he said.

'Maybe I shouldn't.'

'Oh, yes. It won't be complete without you. You and I have a
date. All three of you do.' His thick tongue worked itself wetly along
his lips.

'He soaked us with gasoline, Dave. Run!' Lucinda said.

'You know you're not going anywhere, Dave. Come closer. That's
it, come on. The little boy is always inside the man. Don't be ashamed.
You'd be surprised what people are willing to do under the right
circumstances.' He held the rifle against his side by the pistol grip
and worked a Zippo lighter out of his left pocket with his thumb.

'One's a Negro, the other a gentile who has intercourse with a
Jew,' he said. 'They're going to die, anyway. Would you like to watch
their performance with me, or be part of it? Nobody'll know, either,
Dave.'

He pursed his lips and sucked in his cheeks, as though a mint
lay on his tongue.

'The Coast Guard's on the way, Will.'

'I guess we should finish quickly then. Even when they catch
my kind, you know what they do with us. Government hospitals. Clean
drugs, maybe a horny nurse who needs a few extra dollars. Come on,
kneel down with your friends, now.'

The heel of one boot clanked against a gasoline can. But then
I heard another sound, too—behind me, at the far end of the
passageway, a clumsy thud like an awkward person tripping across the
bottom of a hatchway.

Buchalter heard it too, and his eyes shot past me, trying to
focus on an image that they couldn't quite accept.

'Duck, Mr. Dave!'

I dropped to the deck, curling in an embryonic ball, waiting
for the quick, sharp report of the AR-15. Instead, I heard a sound like
a strand of broken piano wire whizzing through the air.

I stared down the passageway at the frozen silhouette of Zoot
Bergeron, the discharged speargun held in front of him.

I grabbed the _.45 from the deck just as Will Buchalter
stumbled along the bulkhead, through the gloom, toward the ladder,
partly obscured by the open door on a locker. Then I saw both his hands
clenched on the aluminum shaft that protruded from his mouth. He
careened up the ladder, the tendons in his shoulders and neck knotted
like the roots in a tree stump, his hands gathered in front of his
mouth, his combat boots ringing like hammers on the iron steps.

I fired twice through the hatchway into the pilothouse and
heard the hollow points shatter panes of glass out on the deck.

'Sorry, Streak. He came up behind me while I was pulling on
that rope,' Clete said.

'Get the rifle,' I said, and went up the ladder after
Buchalter.

But the chase was not to be a long one.

I found him out on the deck, his back slumped against the
rail, like a lazy man taking a nap, the spearpoint protruding from the
back of his neck in a bloody clot, the shaft trembling slightly with
the vibrations from the engine room. His eyes were open and empty,
staring at nothing, the gold down on his chin slick with the drainage
from his wound.

It started to rain, and the spray off the stern was blowing
hard in the wind. A cable snapped loose from a side boom and was gone
below the water's surface in the wink of an eye.

I heard Clete behind me.

'Did you hit him?' he said.

'Nope.'

'A bad way for the black kid to get started,' he said, and
looked at me.

I glanced up at the broken Windows in the pilothouse. Lucinda
and Zoot were still below.

'Let's do it,' I said.

We pulled Buchalter away from the rail and laid him flat on
the deck, then rolled him over the side. His shirt was puffed with air,
and a wave scudded the upper portion of his body along the hull of the
ship; his mouth was locked open around the spear shaft as though he
were yawning or perhaps considering one final thought before the waves
pressed him under in a cascade of dirty foam.

'That storm looks mean. Time to cut loose from the
Katzenjammer Kids,' Clete said. He paused. 'Is there some paperwork
later that's going to cause a problem for me?'

'What do I know?' I said. I shielded my eyes against the rain
and watched as he sliced the line that held the suspended body of the
woman who called herself Marie Guilbeaux, shut down motors, released
winches, chopped cables and ropes in half, his sandy hair blowing in
the wind, his Marine Corps utilities flapping and flattening against
his legs.

I felt the deck pitch under me when all the cables had snapped
free from the submarine's weight. For just a moment I watched the mud
and blackened seaweed and oil trapped in sand churn in clouds out of
the gulf's bottom, and I knew that down below the U-boat's crew and
Buchalter and his sister were setting sail again. But it wasn't a time
to muse upon old historical warnings about protean creatures who rise
from biblical seas or slouch toward Bethlehem to be born again.

Instead I mounted the steps into the pilothouse, where Lucinda
and her son had fixed a blanket under Oswald Flat's head and pulled a
second one up to his chin. They stood at one of the shattered windows,
Zoot with his arm on his mother's shoulders, looking at a Coast Guard
helicopter that was flying toward us from the east, just ahead of the
impending storm.

Zoot's eyes searched my face.

'You saved our butts, partner, but you missed Buchalter
completely,' I said.

'Then why ain't I seen the spear?'

'Who cares, podna? It's yesterday's box score now,' I said.

Down below, Clete stretched his big arms and shoulders,
clenched the deck rail, and spit over the side.

'Good guys 
über alles
,'
he called up to
us.

'What's that mean?' Zoot said.

'I think that's German for
Semper fi
,
Mac,' I said, and hit him on the arm, trying not to intrude upon the
affectionate smile in his mother's eyes.

The winter was mild that year; the
days were balmy, the grass
in the fields a soft green, the nights touched with a faint chill, a
hint of smoke from a stump fire in my neighbor's pasture. Even during
duck season, when the marsh should have been gray and thick with mist,
the skies remained a porcelain blue and the cypress and gum and willow
trees seemed to stay in leaf through Christmas, almost right up to the
spring rains that begin in late February.

There was only one day when I truly felt winter's presence,
and that presence was in the heart rather than the external world. For
our anniversary Bootsie and Alafair and I treated ourselves to a
weekend at the Pontchartrain Hotel on St. Charles Avenue. We were
having supper at an outdoor café down the street, and the day
had been
warm and bright, the camellia bushes thick with newly opened pink and
blue flowers, the wonderful old green-painted iron streetcars
clattering down the neutral ground under the overhang of the oak trees.
Then the sun dropped behind the rooftops, the air became cold and
heavy, and suddenly there was no traffic or sound in the streets, only
dust and scraps of newspaper whirling in the wind through the tunnel of
trees.