Dixie City Jam

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