Heaven's Prisoners (2 page)

“Take the wheel,” I said.

I saw her thoughts gathering in her face.

“We didn’t refill the air tanks last time,” she said.

“There’s still some in there. It’s not more than twenty-five feet here, anyway. If they haven’t settled into the silt, I can get the doors open.”

“Dave, it’s deeper than twenty-five feet. You know it is. There’s a trench right through the Pass.”

I got the two air tanks out of the gear box and looked at the gauges. They both showed almost empty. I stripped down to my skivvies, hooked on a weight belt, put on one air tank and a mask, and slipped the canvas straps of the other tank over my arm. I picked up a crowbar out of the gear box.

“Anchor outside so one of them doesn’t come up under the boat,” I said.

“Leave the other tank. I’m going down, too.” She had cut back the throttle, and the boat was pitching in its own wake. The side of her tanned face was wet with spray, and her hair was stuck to it.

“We need you up here, babe,” I said, and went over the side.

“Damn you, Dave,” I heard her say just as I plummeted with a clank of metal tanks through the water’s surface.

The bottom of the Gulf was a museum of nautical history. Snorkel and scuba diving over the years, I had found clusters of Spanish cannonballs welded together with coral, U.S. Navy practice torpedoes, and the flattened hull of a Nazi submarine that had been depth-charged in 1942, a cigarette boat that dope runners had opened the cocks on before the Coast Guard had nailed them, and even the collapsed and twisted wreckage of the offshore oil rig on which my father drowned over twenty years ago. It lay on its side in the murk in eighty feet of water, and the day I swam down to it the steel cables whipped and sang against the stanchions like hammers ringing against an enormous saw blade.

The plane had settled upside down on the edge of the trench, its propellers dug deep in the gray sand. Strings of bubbles rose from the wings and windows. I felt the water grow colder as I went deeper, and now I could see crabs and jewfish moving quickly across the bottom and puffs of sand from the wings of stringray that undulated and glided like shadows down the sides of the trench.

I got down to the pilot’s door, slipped the spare tank off my arm, and looked through the window. He stared back at me upside down, his blond hair waving in the current, his sightless green eyes like hard, watery marbles. A short, thick-bodied woman with long black hair was strapped into the seat next to him, and her arms floated back and forth in front of her face as though she were still trying to push away that terrible recognition that her life was about to end. I had seen drowning victims before, and their faces had had the same startled, poached expression as the faces of people I had seen killed by shell bursts in Vietnam. I just hoped that these two had not suffered long.

I was kicking up clouds of sand from the bottom, and in the murky green-yellow light I could barely see through the window of the back door. I held myself out flat, holding on to the door handle for balance, and pressed my mask to the window again. I could make out a big, dark man in a pink shirt with pockets and cloth loops all over it, and a woman next to him who had floated free from her seatbelt. She was squat, with a square, leathery face, like the woman in front, and her flowered dress floated up around her head. Then, just as my air went, I realised with a terrible quickening of my heart that somebody was alive in the cabin.

I could see her small, bare legs kicking like scissors, her head and mouth turned upward like a guppy’s into an air pocket at the rear of the cabin. I dumped the empty tank off my back and jerked on the door handle, but the door’s edge was wedged into the silt. I pulled again, enough to separate the door a half-inch from the jamb, got the crowbar inside, and pried the metal back until I felt a hinge go and the door scrape back over the sand. But my lungs were bursting now, my teeth gritted against my own exhalation of breath, my ribs like knives inside my chest.

I dropped the crowbar, picked up the other tank, slapped the valve open, and got the hose in my mouth. The air went down inside me with the coolness of wind blowing across the melting snow. Then I took a half-dozen deep hits, shut the valve again, blew my mask clear, and went in after her.

But the dead man in the pink shirt was in my way. I popped loose his seatbelt buckle and tried to pull him free from the seat by his shirt. His neck must have been broken because his head revolved on his shoulders as though it were attached to a flower stem. Then his shirt tore loose in my hands, and I saw a green and red snake tattooed above his right nipple and something in my mind, like the flick of a camera shutter, went back to Vietnam. I grabbed his belt, pushed under his arm, and shoved him forward toward the cockpit. He rolled in a slow arc and settled between the pilot and the front passenger seat, with his mouth open and his head resting on the pilot’s knee, like a supplicant jester.

I had to get her out and up fast. I could see the wobbling balloon of air she was breathing out of, and there wasn’t room for me to come up inside of it and explain what we were going to do. Also, she could not have been more than five years old, and I doubted that she spoke English. I held her small waist lightly between my hands and paused, praying that she would sense what I had to do, then dragged her kicking down through the water and out the door.

For just an instant I saw her face. She was drowning. Her mouth was open and swallowing water; her eyes were hysterical with terror. Her close-cropped black hair floated from her head like duck down, and there were pale, bloodless spots in her tan cheeks. I thought about trying to get the air hose in her mouth, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to clear the blockage in her throat and she would strangle before I could get her to the top. I unhooked my weight belt, felt it sink into the swirling cloud of sand under me, locked my arms under her chest, and shoved us both hard toward the surface.

I could see the black, shimmering outline of the jug boat overhead. Annie had cut the engine, and the boat was swinging in the current against the anchor rope. I had gone without air for almost two minutes, and my lungs felt as though they had been filled with acid. I kept my feet out straight, kicking hard, the bubbles leaking through my teeth, the closure in my throat about to break and suck in a torrent of water that would fill my chest like concrete. Then I could see the sunlight become brighter on the surface, like a yellow flame dancing on the chop and glazing the flat slicks, feel the layers of current suddenly become tepid, touch the red-brown wreaths of seaweed that turned under the waves, then we burst into the air, into the hot wind, into a dome of blue skies and white clouds and brown pelicans sailing over us like welcoming sentinels.

I grabbed the bottom of the deck rail with one hand and held the little girl up to Annie’s arms. She felt as though she had the hollow bones of a bird. Annie pulled her up on deck and stroked her head and face while the little girl sobbed and vomited into Annie’s lap. I was too weak to climb out of the water right away. Instead, I simply stared at the red handprints on the child’s trembling thighs where the mother had held her up into the pocket of air while she herself lost her life, and I wished that those who handed out medals for heroism in war had a more encompassing vision about the nature of valor.

I knew that people who took water into their lungs sometimes developed pneumonia later, so Annie and I drove the little girl to the Catholic hospital in New Iberia, the small sugar town on Bayou Teche where I had grown up. The hospital was a gray stone building set in Spanish oaks on the bayou, and purple wisteria grew on the trellises above the walkways and the lawn was filled with yellow and red hibiscus and flaming azalea. We went inside, and Annie carried the little girl back to the emergency room while I sat across the reception desk from a heavyset nun in a white habit who filled out the girl’s admission form.

The nun’s face was as big and round as a pie plate, and her wimple was crimped as tightly across her forehead as a medieval knight’s visor.

“What is her name?” she said.

I looked back at her.

“Do you know her name?” she said.

“Alafair.”

“What is her last name?”

“Robicheaux.”

“Is she your daughter?”

“Sure.”

“She’s your daughter?”

“Of course.”

“Hmmm,” she said, and continued to write on the form. Then, “I’ll look in on her for you. In the meantime, why don’t you look over this information and make sure I wrote it down accurately.”

“I trust you, Sister.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that too quickly.”

She walked heavily down the hall with her black beads swinging from her waist. She had the physique of an over-the-hill prizefighter. A few minutes later she was back and I was growing more uncomfortable.

“My, what an interesting family you have,” she said. “Did you know that your daughter speaks nothing but Spanish?”

“We’re heavy into Berlitz.”

“And you’re so clever, too,” she said.

“How is she, Sister?”

“She’s fine. A little scared, but it looks like she’s with the right family.” She smiled at me with her lumpy, round face.

Afternoon rain clouds had started to build in the south when we crossed the drawbridge over the bayou and drove out East Main toward the edge of town. Huge oak trees grew on each side of the street; their thick roots cracked through the sidewalks, their spreading branches arched in a sun-spangled canopy overhead. The homes along East Main were antebellum and Victorian in design, with widow’s walks, second-story verandas, marble porches, Greek columns, scrolled iron fences, and sometimes gleaming white gazebos covered with Confederate jasmine and purple bugle vine. The little girl, whom I had offhandedly named Alafair, my mother’s name, sat between us in the pickup. The nuns had kept her damp clothes and had dressed her in a pair of faded child’s jeans and an oversized Softball shirt that read
New Iberia Pelicans
. Her face was exhausted, her eyes dull and unseeing. We rumbled over another drawbridge and stopped at a fruit stand run by a black man under a cypress tree on the edge of the bayou. I bought us three big links of hot
boudin
wrapped in wax paper, snowcones, and a lug of strawberries to fix later with ice cream. Annie put the ice in Alafair’s mouth with the small wooden spoon.

“Little bites for little people,” she said.

Alafair opened her mouth like a bird, her eyelashes blinking sleepily.

“Why did you lie back there?” Annie said.

“I’m not sure.”

“Dave…”

“She’s probably an illegal. Why make problems for the nuns?”

“So what if she’s an illegal?”

“Because I don’t trust government pencil pushers and paper shufflers, that’s why.”

“I think I hear the voice of the New Orleans police department.”

“Annie, Immigration sends them back.”

“They wouldn’t do that to a child, would they?”

I didn’t have an answer for her. But my father, who had been a fisherman, trapper, and derrickman all his life, and who couldn’t read or write and spoke Cajun French and a form of English that was hardly a language, had an axiom for almost every situation. One of these would translate as “When in doubt, do nothing.” In actuality he would say something like (in this case to a wealthy sugar planter who owned property next to us), “You didn’t told me about your hog in my cane, no, so I didn’t mean to hurt it when I pass the tractor on its head and had to eat it, me.”

I drove along the dirt road that led to my boat-and-bait business on the bayou. The rain began to fall lightly through the oak trees, dimpling the bayou, clicking on the lily pads that grew out from the bank. I could see the bream starting to feed along the edge of the lilies and the flooded canebrake.

Up ahead, fishermen were bringing their boats back into my dock, and the two black men who worked for me were pulling the canvas awning out over the side porch of the bait house and clearing the beer bottles and paper barbecue plates off the wooden telephone spools that I used as tables.

My house was a hundred yards from the bayou, in a grove of pecan trees. It was built of unpainted oak and cypress, with a tin-roofed gallery in front, a dirt yard, rabbit hutches, and a dilapidated barn in back, and a watermelon garden just beyond the edge of the pecan trees. Sometimes in a strong wind the pecans would ring like grapeshot on the gallery’s tin roof.

Alafair had fallen asleep across Annie’s lap. When I carried her into the house she looked up at me once as though she were waking briefly from a dream, then she closed her eyes again. I put her to bed in the side room, turned on the window fan, and closed the door softly. I sat on the gallery and watched the rain fall on the bayou. The air smelled of trees, wet moss, flowers, and damp earth.

“You want something to eat?” Annie said behind me.

“Not now, thanks.”

“What are you doing out here?”

“Nothing.”

“I guess that’s why you keep looking down the road,” she said.

“The people in that plane don’t fit.”

I felt her fingers on my shoulders.

“I’ve got this problem, officer,” she said. “My husband can’t stop being a homicide detective. When I try to hit on him, his attention is always somewhere else. What’s a girl to do?”

“Take up with a guy like myself. I’m always willing to help out.”

“I don’t know. You look so busy watching the rain.”

“It’s one of the few things I do well.”

“You sure you have time, officer?” she said, and slipped her arms down my chest and pressed her breasts and stomach against me.

I never had much luck at resisting her. She was truly beautiful to look at. We went into our bedroom, where the window fan hummed with a wet light, and she smiled at me while she undressed, then began singing, “Baby love, my baby love, oh how I need you, my baby love…”

She sat on top of me, with her heavy breasts close to my face, put her fingers in my hair, and looked into my eyes with her gentle and loving face. Each time I pressed the back of her shoulders with my palms she kissed my mouth and tightened her thighs, and I saw the strawberry birthmark on her breast darken to a deep scarlet and I felt my heart begin to twist, my loins harden and ache, saw her face soften and grow small above me, then suddenly I felt something tear loose and melt inside me, like a large boulder breaking loose in a stream-bed and rolling away in the current.