James Burke: Dixie City Jam

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.