DR07 - Dixie City Jam (5 page)

I went back to the guesthouse and called every bondsman I knew
in New Orleans. The best deal I could get was a one-week deferment on
the payment of the fifty-thousand-dollar bail fee. I told the bondsman
I would meet him at the jail in a half hour.

I couldn't even begin to think about the cost of hiring a
decent defense attorney for a murder trial.

Welcome to the other side of the equation in the American
criminal justice system.

Our room was still in disarray after being tossed by Nate
Baxter and his people. Batist's cardboard suitcase had been dumped on
the bed, and half of his clothes were on the floor. I picked them up,
refolded them, and began replacing them in the suitcase. Underneath one
of his crumpled shirts was the skull of what had once been an enormous
catfish. The texture of the bone was old, a shiny gray, mottled with
spots the color of tea, polished smooth with rags.

I remembered when Batist had caught this same mud cat three
years ago, on a scalding summer's day out on the Atchafalaya, with a
throw line and a treble hook thick with nutria guts. The catfish must
have weighed thirty-five pounds, and when Batist wrapped the throw line
around his forearm, the cord cut into his veins like a tourniquet, and
he had to use a club across the fish's spine to get it over the
gunwale. After he had driven an ice pick into its brain and pinned it
flat on the deck, skinned it and cut it into steaks, he sawed the head
loose from the skeleton and buried it in an anthill under a log. The
ants boiled on the impacted meat and ate the bone and eye sockets
clean, and now when you held up the skull vertically, it looked like a
crucified man from the front. When you reversed it, it resembled an
ecclesiastical, robed figure giving his benediction to the devout. If
you shook it in your hand, you could hear pieces of bone clattering
inside. Batist said those were the thirty pieces of silver that Judas
had taken to betray Christ.

It had nothing to do with voodoo. It had everything to do with
Acadian Catholicism.

Before I left the guesthouse for the jail, I called up Hippo
Bimstine at one of his drugstores.

'How bad you want that Nazi sub, Hippo?' I asked.

'It's not the highest priority on my list.'

'How about twenty-five grand finder's fee?'

'Jesus Christ, Dave, you were yawning in my face the other
day.'

'What do you say, partner.'

'There's something wrong here.'

'Oh?'

'You found it, didn't you?'

I didn't answer.

'You found it but it's not in the same place now?' he said.

'You're a wealthy man, Hippo. You want the sub or not?'

'Hey, you think that's right?' he asked. 'I tell you where
it's at, you find it and up the fee on me? That's like you?'

'Maybe you can get somebody cheaper. You know some guys who
want to go down in the dark on a lot of iron and twisted cables?'

'Put my schlong in a vise, why don't you?'

'I've got to run. What do you say?'

'Fifteen.'

'Nope.'

'Hey, New Orleans is recessed. I'm bleeding here. You know
what it cost me to get rid of—when he was about to be our
next governor? Now my friends are running a Roto-Rooter up my hole.'

(Hippo had spent a fortune destroying the political career of
an ex-Klansman who had run for both the governor's office and the U.S.
Senate. My favorite quote of Hippo's had appeared in
Time
magazine, during the gubernatorial campaign; he said of the
ex-Klansman, '—doesn't like us Jews now. Check out how he
feels after I get finished with him.')

'I won't charge expenses,' I said.

'I'm dying here. Hemorrhaging on the floor. I'm serious.
Nobody believes me. Dave, you take food stamps?'

Hippo, you're a jewel, I thought.

Batist and I picked up my boat and
left the dock at three the
next morning. The breeze was up, peppered with light rain, and you
could smell the salt spray breaking over the bow. The water was as dark
as burgundy, the chop on the edge of the swells electric with
moonlight, the wetlands to the north green and gray and metamorphic
with mist. To the southeast I could see gas flares burning on some
offshore rigs; then the wind dropped and the sky turned the color of
bone and I could see a red glow spreading out of the water into the
clouds.

It was completely light when I cut the engine and drifted
above the spot where I had dove down into darkness and the sounds of
grinding metal three days earlier. Batist stood on the bow, feeding the
anchor rope out through his palms, until it hit bottom and went slack;
then he tied it off on a cleat.

The water was smoky green, the swells full of skittering bait
fish, the air hazy with humidity. I had fashioned a viewer box from
reinforced window glass inset in a waterproofed wood crate, and I
lowered it over the side by the handles and pressed it beneath the
surface. Pockets of air swam across the glass, then flattened and
disappeared, and suddenly in the yellow-green light I could see schools
of small speckled trout, like darting silver ribbons, drumfish, as
round and flat as skillets, a half dozen stingrays, their wings
undulating as smoothly as if they were gliding on currents of warm air,
and down below, where the light seemed to be gathered into a vortex of
silt, the torpedo shapes of sand sharks, who bolted and twisted in
erratic circles for no apparent reason.

Batist peered downward through the viewer box over my
shoulder. Then I felt his eyes studying me while I strapped on my tanks
and weight belt.

'This don't make me feel good, Dave,' he said.

'Don't worry about it, partner.'

'I don't want to see you lunch for them sharks, no.'

'Those are sand sharks, Batist. They're harmless.'

'Tell me that out yonder's harmless.' He pointed past the
cabin to the southwest.

It was a water spout that had dropped out of a thunderhead and
was moving like an enormous spinning cone of light and water toward the
coast. If it made landfall, which it probably would not, it would fill
suddenly with mud, rotted vegetation, and uprooted trees, and become as
black as a midwestern tornado coursing through a freshly plowed field.

'Keep your eye on it and kick the engine over if it turns,' I
said.

'Just look up from down there, you see gasoline and life
jackets and a bunch of bo'rds floatin' round, see me swimmin' toward
Grand Isle, that means it ain't bothered to tell me it was fixin' to
turn.'

I went over the side, swam to the anchor rope, and began
pulling myself downward hand over hand. I felt myself sliding through
three different layers of temperature, each one cooler than the last;
then just as a school of sea perch swept past me, almost clattering
against my mask, I could feel a uniform level of coldness penetrate my
body from the crown of my head down to the soles of my feet. Clouds of
gray silt seemed to be blowing along the gulf's floor as they would in
a windstorm. The pressure against my eardrums began to grow in
intensity; it made a faint tremolo sound, like wire stretching before
it breaks. Then I heard iron ring against iron, and a groan like a
great weight shifting against impacted sand.

I held the anchor rope with one hand and floated motionlessly
in the current. Then I saw it. For just a moment.

It was pointed at an upward angle on a slope, buried in a
sand-bar almost to its decks, molded softly with silt. But there was no
mistaking the long, rounded, sharklike shape. It was a submarine, and I
could make out the battered steel flanges that protruded above the
captain's bridge on the conning tower, and I knew that if I scraped the
moss and layers of mud and shellfish from the tower's plates I would
see the vestiges of the swastika that I had seen on the same conning
tower over three decades ago.

Then I saw it tilt slightly to one side, saw dirty strings of
oil or silt or engine fuel rise near the forward torpedo tubes, and I
realized that years ago air must have been trapped somewhere in a
compartment, perhaps where a group of terrified sailors spun a wheel on
a hatch and pretended to themselves that their friends outside, whose
skulls were being snapped like eggshell, would have chosen the same
alternative.

I felt a heavy surge in the current from out in the dark,
beyond the continental shelf. The water clouded and the submarine
disappeared. I thought I heard thunder booming, then the anchor rope
vibrated in my palm, and when I looked up I could see the exhaust pipes
on my boat boiling the waterline at the stern.

When I came to the surface the chop smacked hard against my
mask, and the swells were dented with rain circles. Batist came outside
the cabin and pointed toward the southeast. I pushed my mask up on my
head and looked behind me; three more water spouts had dropped out of
the sky and were churning across the surface of the water, and farther
to the south you could see thunderclouds as thick as oil smoke on the
horizon.

I climbed up the ladder, pulled off my gear, tied the end of a
spool of clothesline through a chunk of pig iron that had once been a
window sash, and fed the line over the gunwale until the weight bit
into the bottom. Then I sawed off the line at the spool and strung it
through the handles of three sealed Clorox bottles that I used as float
markers. The rain was cold and dancing in a green haze on the swells
now, the air heavy with the smell of ozone and nests of dead bait fish
in the waves. Just as I started to fling the Clorox bottles overboard,
I heard the blades of a helicopter thropping low over the water behind
me.

It passed us, flattening and wrinkling the water below the
downdraft, and I saw the solitary passenger, a blond man in pilot's
sunglasses, turn in his seat and stare back at me. Then the helicopter
circled and hovered no more than forty yards to the south of us.

'What they doin'?' Batist said.

'I don't know.'

'Let's get goin', Dave. We don't need to be stayin' out here
no longer with them spouts.'

'You got it, partner,' I said.

Then the helicopter gained altitude, perhaps to five hundred
feet directly above us, high enough for them to see the coastline and
to take a good fix on our position.

I left the Clorox marker bottles on the deck and pulled the
sash weight back up from the bottom. We could return to this same area
and probably find the sub again with my sonar, or 'fish finder,' which
was an electronic marvel that could outline any protrusion on the gulfs
floor. But the sky in the south was completely black now, with veins of
lightning trembling on the horizon, and I had a feeling that the Nazi
silent service down below was about to set sail again.

We lived south of New Iberia, on an
oak-lined dirt road next
to the bayou, in a house that my father had built of notched and pegged
cypress during the Depression. The side and front yards were matted
with a thick layer of black leaves and stayed in deep shade from the
pecan and oak trees that covered the eaves of the house. From the
gallery, which had a rusted tin roof, you could look down the slope and
across the dirt road to my boat-rental dock and bait shop. On the far
side of the bayou was a heavy border of willow trees, and beyond the
willows a marsh filled with moss-strung dead cypress, whose tops would
become as pink as newly opened roses when the sun broke through the
mist in the early morning.

I slept late the morning after we brought the boat back from
New Orleans. Then I fixed coffee and hot milk and a bowl of Grape-Nuts
and blackberries, and took it all out on a tray to the redwood picnic
table under the mimosa tree in the backyard. Later, Bootsie came
outside through the screen door with a glass of iced tea, her face
fresh and cool in the breeze across the lawn. She wore a sleeveless
white blouse and pink shorts, and her thick, honey-colored hair, which
she had brushed in swirls and pinned up on her head, was burned gold on
the tips from the sun.

'Did you see the phone messages from a police sergeant on the
blackboard?' she asked.

'Yeah, thanks.'

'What does she want?'

'I don't know. I haven't called her back.'

'She seemed pretty anxious to talk to you.'

'Her name's Lucinda Bergeron. I think she probably has
problems with her conscience.'

'What?'

'I tried to help her on an insubordination beef. When I asked
her to do a favor for Batist, she more or less indicated I could drop
dead.'

'Maybe it's just a misunderstanding.'

'I don't think so. Where's Alafair?'

'She's down at the dock with Batist.' She drank from her iced
tea and gazed at the duck pond at the foot of our property. She shook
the ice in the bottom of the glass and looked at it. Then she said,
'Dave, are we going to pay for his lawyer?'

'It's either that or let him take his chances with a
court-appointed attorney. If he's lucky, he'll get a good one. If not,
he can end up in Angola.'

She touched at her hairline with her fingers and tried to keep
her face empty of expression.

'How much is it going to cost?' she said.

'Ten to twenty grand. Maybe a lot more.'

She widened her eyes and took a breath, and I could see a
small white discoloration, the size of a dime, in each of her cheeks.

'Dave, we'll go into debt for years,' she said.

'I don't know what to do about it. Nate Baxter targeted Batist
because he couldn't get at me or Clete. It's not Batist's fault.'

The breeze blew through the mimosa, and the shade looked like
lace rippling across her face. I saw her try to hide the anger that was
gathering in her eyes.

'There's nothing for it, Boots. The man didn't do anything to
deserve this. We have to help him.'

'All this started with Clete Purcel. He enjoys it. It's a way
of life with him. When are you going to learn that, Dave?'