Dixie City Jam

'Probably?' He shook his head.

But I wasn't listening now. Just off the port bow, beyond one of the drilling platforms, I saw the low, flat outline of a salvage vessel, one that was outfitted with side booms, dredges, and a silt vacuum that curved over the gunwale like the body of an enormous snake. I sharpened the image through the field glasses and saw that the ship was anchored bow and stern and was tilted slightly to starboard, as though it were straining against a great weight.

Then I saw something move on the drilling platform closest to us. I stepped outside the cabin and refocused the field glasses. The tide was washing through the pilings at the base of the platform, and upside-down in the swell, knocking against the steel girders, was the red and white hull of a capsized boat. I moved the glasses up a ladder to the rig itself and held them on a powerful, sunburned, bare-chested man whose Marine Corps utilities hung just below his navel.

'What is it?' Lucinda said behind me. The side of her face was printed with lines from her sleep.

I handed the glasses to her.

'Take a look at that first rig,' I said.

She balanced herself against the sway of the deck and peered through the glasses.

'It's Clete Purcel,' she said. 'He looks half frozen.'

'With a sunk boat,' I said. 'Clete's no sailor, either. Which means he probably went out with somebody who didn't make it to that ladder.'

'Who?'

'I don't like to think about it.'

'Who?'

'The elderly preacher comes to mind.' I went back inside the cabin. 'Zoot, take us on into the rig. But try to keep it between us and that salvage ship so whoever's onboard doesn't get a good look at us.'

'It's Buchalter and them Nazis?' he said. I saw his long, ebony hands tighten involuntarily on the wheel.

'Maybe it's just an ordinary salvage group trying to raise some drilling equipment.'

'There's some oil field junk down out here, but not yonder, Mr. Dave.'

'Okay, podna.'

'I know what you got in that canvas bag. If the time come, is one of them for me?'

'You have any experience with firearms?'

'A lot.'

'With what kind?'

'The kind you shoot things wit'… Me and my cousin, we gone under the Huey Long Bridge and shot bottles all over the place.'

'Look, Zoot, we want the people on that salvage boat to think we're a fishing party. Can you set the outriggers and put some trolling rods in the sockets while I take the wheel?'

'Sure,' he said, but his eyes were still on the canvas bag.

'Just keep your hood tied on your head, too, in case they put binoculars on us.'

'You ain't gonna let me have one of them guns?'

'If that's Buchalter out there, we'll call the Coast Guard.'

'Then why you bring all them guns?'

I'd never guess you were Lucinda's son, I thought to myself.

I kept the bow pointed in a straight line at the rig and the salvage ship. The sun had broken through a bank of lavender and black clouds, and you could see flying fish and the stringlike tentacles and swollen pink air sacs of Portuguese man-o'-wars in the swell. The day should have warmed, but the wind had risen again and the tidal current looked green and cold flowing under the oil platform, rolling the capsized boat against the pilings and the steel ladder.

To the south there was a frothy white line along the horizon where the waves were starting to cap.

Zoot worked his way forward onto the bow, and I cut the gas and let the cabin cruiser drift into the ladder that extended out of the water, upward to the platform where Clete Purcel was leaning over the rail, staring down at us, the sandy curls of hair on his shoulders and chest blowing dryly in the wind.

He came down the ladder fast, his face pointed downward, his love handles flexing, his huge buttocks working as he clanged onto each rung. When he dropped onto the bow, he kept his face pointed in the opposite direction from the salvage ship and made his way aft along the side of the cabin.

His teeth were chattering when he came through the hatchway.

'Streak, I love you,' he said. 'I knew my old podjo wouldn't let me down. I ain't kidding you, I was turning to an ice cube up there. I tried to wrap myself up in a piece of canvas, but it blew away.'

'What happened?'

'It's Buchalter. We found him about three this morning,' he said, pulling a blanket around his shoulders.

'We came up on him from the south. I thought we had him. There's a metal stairs on his port side. We were going to drift up to it, then take them from behind while all that machinery was roaring. Except we hit a log and punched a hole in the hull.'

He sat on top of a locker filled with life vests and scuba gear and worked the stopper from a bottle of Cutty Sark he had taken from the liquor cabinet. The scar through his eyebrow and across the bridge of his nose looked like a stitched strip of pink rubber.

'Who's we, Clete?'

'Brother Oswald.' His voice changed when he said the words. His eyes looked away from me, then at Lucinda and Zoot. Then he looked at the deck. He lifted the bottle to his mouth.

'Why didn't you wait?' I said.

'For what? The guy to blow the country?'

'You could have waited,' I said.

'Get real, Streak. You nail this guy under a black flag or he'll live to piss on your grave.'

'What's a black flag?' Zoot said.

Clete started to raise the Scotch again, then the color drained out of his face and he went through the hatchway and threw up over the stern. He came back inside, wiping his mouth with a towel.

'Excuse me, I swallowed some oil out there,' he said. 'When the boat turned over, I hung on to it. Brother Oswald had on a life preserver. He was drifting right past that stairs I was talking about. He didn't come out north of the ship, either.'

'You mean he's onboard with Buchalter?' Lucinda said.

'The tide was coming in real strong. He couldn't be anywhere else,' Clete said. 'I would have seen him. I know I would have.'

'I'll give our position to the Coast Guard,' I said.

'The old guy kept talking about Gog and Magog. What's Gog and Magog?' Clete said.

'It's a biblical prophesy about the war between good and evil,' I said.

'I don't know about no black flags and Magogs, but there's something I ain't mention yet,' Zoot said.

We all stared at him. In the silence a wave broke across the bow and streaked the glass.

'The radio don't work,' he said.

chapter thirty-two

I was crouched behind Clete on the steps of the small passageway that gave onto the bow. He had put on my raincoat and a red wool shirt he found in a closet. His big hands were clenched on the stock and pump of the twelve-gauge shotgun. I could hear him breathing with expectation.

He glanced backwards at me and started to smile. Then stopped.

'Why the scowl, mon?'

'This is your fault.'

'I don't read it that way.'

'Why didn't you go take care of Martina? Why'd you have to go out on the salt with a fanatical old man?'