James Burke - Dixie City Jam

'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.