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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.
'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.
epilogue
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.
