Dixie City Jam

by James Lee Burke

  I punched him with one finger, hard, on the shoulder again. He turned and slapped my hand away, his green eyes suddenly disturbed and dark, as though he were looking at someone he didn't know.

  'This whole gig started with you tearing up the Calucci brothers,' I said. 'It's not going to end that way. We're putting Buchalter in a cage.'

  'Tell it to the Rotary Club,' he said, and looked upward toward the closed hatch.

  We could hear Zoot cutting back the gas now, the exhaust pipes throbbing at the waterline, echoing off the steel hull of the salvage ship. Then we heard Lucinda making her way forward, picking up the bowline off the deck, as though it were natural to tie onto the metal steps that zigzagged down the side of the ship.

  Clete eased the hatch upward a half inch.

  'We found an injured man on an oil platform! We need your radio!' Lucinda shouted.

  There was no answer. We could hear the sounds of an air compressor, a winch grinding, chains rattling through pulleys, a diesel engine working hard.

  'It's a boat hand who doesn't know what to do,' Clete said. 'He probably went for somebody else.' He looked back at me again. 'Lighten up. I figure no more than five of them, including the diver in the water. Easy odds, mon.'

  But the creases in the back of his neck were bright with sweat, his knuckles white and ridged on the shotgun's stock.

  'We're calling it in for you!' someone yelled down at Lucinda.

  'I'm a nurse! I need to describe his condition! I think he's had a coronary!'

  'We're radioing your message! You can't come onboard!'

  The hull bumped against the rubber tires that were roped to the bottom of the steps.

  'Repeat… You can't come onboard! No one but company personnel are allowed! Your message is being transmitted!'

  'This man may die!'

  Clete's eyes were level with the crack between the deck and the hatch.

  'She's tying on. That broad's got ice water in her veins,' he whispered. 'That's it, Lucinda, get on the steps, do it, do it, do it, do it…'

  'Mr. Dave, leave me something 'case I got to come after y'all.'

  I turned around. It was Zoot, bent down below the level of the passageway in the cabin.

  'If it goes sour, partner, you get help,' I said.

  It was very fast after that.

  'Party time,' Clete said, and charged out onto the bow with the shotgun at port arms.

  Lucinda had already reached the top of the stairs and was on the deck of the salvage ship, her.357 pointed straight out in front of her with both hands, her hair whipping in the wind, while she shouted at two paralyzed deckhands, 'Police officer, motherfucker! Down on your face, hands laced behind your neck! Are you deaf? Down on your face! Now! Or I blow your fucking head off!'

  I hit the stairs running, right behind Clete, my.45 flopping in the pocket of my field jacket. I had already chambered a round in the AR-15, and my hand was squeezed tight on the grip and inside the trigger guard, my thumb poised on the safety. I could hear waves bursting against the stern and hissing along the hull.

  The salvage ship was old, covered with tack welds, the scuppers orange with corrosion, the paint blistered and soft and flaking under the hand, the glass in the pilothouse oxidized and dirty with oil. The hatch to the engine room was open, and from belowdecks I could smell electrical odors, diesel fuel, stagnant water in a sump, a salty, rotten stench like a rat that's been caught in machinery.

  Lucinda was standing above the two deckhands, her weapon moving back and forth between them while she worked her cuffs off her belt. I took them from her hand, hooked up one man, pulled his arm through a rail on the gate to the steps, then snipped the loose cuff on the second man's wrist.

  'Where's the old-timer?' I said.

  One man was bald and wore a chin beard; the other had an empty eye socket that was puckered and sealed shut as though it had been touched with a hot instrument. The bald man twisted his head and looked indifferently toward the south, where lightning was pulsating amid muted thunder on the horizon.

  'Look at me when I talk to you,' I said. 'Where's the old man?'

  He slowly turned his head and let his eyes drift over both me and Lucinda.

  'Fuck you, nigger lover,' he said.

  Then I heard Clete's weight shift above me and looked up just as he threw the shotgun against his shoulder and aimed at a man in a canvas coat and rain hood who stood in silhouette by the stern with a blue-black automatic in his hand.

  Clete fired twice. Part of the double-ought buckshot razored lines of paint off the bulkhead like dry confetti, then the man in the canvas coat was knocked backwards as though he had been jerked by an invisible cable wrapped around his chest.

  Clete ejected the spent easing onto the deck, pumped a fresh round into the chamber, then pressed two more shells into the magazine with his thumb.

  'Three down,' he said. 'Streak, you and Lucinda go around the bow. I'll come up the other side. Watch the bridge. Don't let 'em get behind you.'

  He didn't wait for an answer. He moved toward the stern, bearlike, his shotgun back at port arms, his scalp showing white in the wind, his utilities stiff with salt.

  Lucinda glanced down at the cabin cruiser, which was rolling in the swells while Zoot kept gunning the engines to keep the stern from swinging into the salvage ship's hull.

  'He's all right,' I said. 'My dad used to always say, "Don't ever treat brave people as less than what they are."'

  'Cover your own ass,' she said.

  We moved toward the bow. I could feel the deck vibrating under me from the machinery roaring on the other side of the ship. I paused at the steps that led onto the pilothouse, worked my way up them until I could see inside, then moved quickly through the open hatch.

  I looked at the shape in the corner and lowered my rifle. I heard Lucinda behind me.

  'Oh God,' she said.

  'Check the starboard side,' I said, and knelt next to Brother Oswald. He lay on top of an oil-grimed tarp, his poached, round face filled with the empty, stunned, disbelieving expression that I had seen once in the faces of villagers who had been killed by airbursts in a rice field.

  A switchblade knife, a made-in-Korea gut-ripper that you can buy for five dollars in Laredo, had been driven to the hilt just above his right lung. He had pressed a rag around the wound, and the rag had become sodden and congealed as though it had been dipped in red paint. I put my ear to his mouth and felt his breath touch my skin.

  'We're going to medevac you out of here, partner,' I said. 'You hear me? We're going to secure the ship, then have you on a chopper in no time.'

  His tongue stuck to his mouth when he tried to speak. I leaned down close to his face again. His breath smelled like dried flowers.

  '… after the wrong one,' he whispered.

  'I don't understand,' I said.

  'Hit's the woman… She can speak in tongues… I heard her talk on the radio…'

  'Who did this to you, Reverend?'

  His lips moved, but no sound came out. His pale eyes looked like they were drowning.

  'I can't see anybody on the starboard side,' Lucinda said.

  I raised Brother Oswald's head with my palm, bunched up the tarp like a pillow, then turned his head sideways so his mouth could drain. I picked up the AR-15. The plastic stock felt cold and light and smooth in my hands.

  'You know how to get the Coast Guard on the radio?' I said to Lucinda.

  'Yes.'

  'Tell them we're thirty miles south of Grand Isle. Describe the two oil platforms, and they'll know where to go.'

  She nodded toward Brother Oswald, the question in her face.

  I don't know, I said with my lips.

  A moment later I crossed the deck in front of the pilothouse. I stepped out into the open, the iron sights of the AR-15 aimed at whoever might be standing between me and the stern.

  But there was no one, except Clete Purcel, who was on one knee, his back toward me, amid a tangle of hoses, ropes, scuba
and acetylene tanks, and salvage nets in pools of water. Two giant side booms towered above him, their cables almost bursting with the great weight anchored to them. Then beneath the sliding waves, the foam curling off the stern, the clouds of seaweed in the swells, glowing dimly under a bank of underwater lamps, I saw the long, tapered outline of the U-boat. It looked like the top of an enormous sand shark that had been torn out of the silt. I could see the forward deck gun shaggy with moss and crustaceans, air bubbles stringing from the torpedo tubes in the bow, the crushed steel flanges at the top of the conning tower, and the indistinct and dull glimmer of a swastika painted on the plates.

  Clete's right arm was working furiously at a task that his body concealed from view. Then I saw the gasoline-powered generator and the air compressor just beyond where he was crouched on the deck, and I realized what he was doing.

  I ran toward him, the rifle hanging loosely from my hand. With his single-bladed Case knife he had already sawed halfway through the air hose and the safety rope attached to it. The escaping pressure had blown a bare spot on the deck like a clean burn.

  'Don't do it, Clete!'

  'Too late, mon. Buchalter is about to do the big gargle.' He stood erect, ripped his knife through the remainder of the hose, and flung it like a severed snake into the water.

  I stared over the side. Framed in silhouette against the bank of underwater lights, just aft of the conning tower, was a steel-mesh diver's platform, held aloft by a cable. In the middle of the platform, a diver in canvas suit, weighted boots, and hard hat was looking upward frantically, while a forgotten acetylene torch bounced like a sparkler across the sub's deck and the severed air hose spun limply downward into the darkness.

  I dropped the rifle to the deck and tried to work the levers on the winch and spool that controlled the cable to the platform. I pushed the levers the wrong way, then corrected them and felt the engine buck into gear and start to retrieve the diver from below.

  'Sorry, Dave, but this is one time you're wrong,' Clete said, pulling a fire ax from the wall above me. He tore all the connecting wires out of the winch's engine. Suddenly the spool locked in place, and the cable squeaked and oscillated slightly from side to side at the tip of the boom and trembled rigidly at the waterline. Then he swung the ax overhand into the spool and sheared the cable as neatly as you would coat hanger wire. It whipped free from the pulley on the boom and disappeared beneath the waves.

  'It's homicide, Clete.'

  'The hell it is. There's still at least one guy loose. All I did was keep a player off the board.'

  But the story under the waves wasn't over. The platform had tipped sideways before it plummeted to the bottom, and the diver had managed to land on the deck, just behind the conning tower. I could see the brass helmet, the face glass, and the white hands waving in the tidal current, like a cartoon figure struggling at the bottom of a well.

  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 th
e 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.'