James Burke: Dixie City Jam

'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.

This is what it could become, I thought. All we had to do was stop believing in ourselves and let the charlatans and the manipulators convince us they have the answers that we don't. They aren't fashioned from anvil and chain in a devil's forge, either. Judas Iscariot was us; there was no metaphysical mystery to Will Buchalter and his sister and the Calucci brothers. Their souls had the wingspan of moths; they functioned because we allowed them to and gave them sanction; they stopped functioning when that sanction was denied.

'What's wrong, Dave?' Alafair said from across the table.

'Nothing, little guy. Everything seemed too quiet for a minute.'

'Then let's go hear the band at Preservation Hall,' she said.

'I think that's a fine idea,' I said, and rubbed the silky smooth top of her head.

One beautiful evening that spring we went to the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival at the Fairgrounds. The Fat Man was up on the stage with his band, his sequined sports coat painted with a lavender glow, sweat streaking his walrus face like lines of clear plastic, his pudgy hands and ringed sausage fingers pounding on the piano keys. People began dancing in the infield, jitterbugging like kids out of the 1940s, doing the bop, the dirty boogie, the twist, the shag, arms and legs akimbo, full of fun and erotic innocence.

Everyone was there for it-Clete and Martina, Batist, Lucinda and Zoot (who wore his Marine Corps Reserve uniform), Pearly Blue and her ex-con pals from the Work the Steps or Die, Motherfucker group, Ben Motley, Hippo Bimstine and his family, black and white people, visitors from Europe, Japanese businessmen, zydeco and Dixieland musicians, granola hippies, Bourbon Street strippers, cross-dressers, French Quarter hookers, coon-ass bikers, Jimmie Ryan and Count Carbonna, the meltdowns, religious crazoids with placards warning of apocalyptic destruction, even Brother Oswald Flat and his wife, who strolled about the grounds, sharing a bag of pork rinds. The music rose into the sky until it seemed to fuse with the gentle and pervasive light spreading far beyond the racetrack, over oak-lined streets, paintless wood houses with galleries and green window shutters, elevated highways, the Superdome, the streetcars and palm-dotted neutral ground of Canal, the scrolled iron balconies, colonnades, and brick chimneys in the Quarter, Jackson Square and the spires of St. Louis Cathedral, the Café du Monde, the wide mud-churned sweep of the Mississippi, the shining vastness of the wetlands to the south, and eventually the Gulf of Mexico, where later the moon would rise like an enormous pearl that had been dipped in a glass of burgundy.

It's funny what can happen when you lay bare the heart and join the Earth's old dance through the heavens.