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They're harmless.'
    'Tell me that out yonder's harmless.' He pointed past the
cabin to the southwest.
    It was a water spout that had dropped out of a thunderhead and
was moving like an enormous spinning cone of light and water toward the
coast. If it made landfall, which it probably would not, it would fill
suddenly with mud, rotted vegetation, and uprooted trees, and become as
black as a midwestern tornado coursing through a freshly plowed field.
    'Keep your eye on it and kick the engine over if it turns,' I
said.
    'Just look up from down there, you see gasoline and life
jackets and a bunch of bo'rds floatin' round, see me swimmin' toward
Grand Isle, that means it ain't bothered to tell me it was fixin' to
turn.'
    I went over the side, swam to the anchor rope, and began
pulling myself downward hand over hand. I felt myself sliding through
three different layers of temperature, each one cooler than the last;
then just as a school of sea perch swept past me, almost clattering
against my mask, I could feel a uniform level of coldness penetrate my
body from the crown of my head down to the soles of my feet. Clouds of
gray silt seemed to be blowing along the gulf's floor as they would in
a windstorm. The pressure against my eardrums began to grow in
intensity; it made a faint tremolo sound, like wire stretching before
it breaks. Then I heard iron ring against iron, and a groan like a
great weight shifting against impacted sand.
    I held the anchor rope with one hand and floated motionlessly
in the current. Then I saw it. For just a moment.
    It was pointed at an upward angle on a slope, buried in a
sand-bar almost to its decks, molded softly with silt. But there was no
mistaking the long, rounded, sharklike shape. It was a submarine, and I
could make out the battered steel flanges that protruded above the
captain's bridge on the conning tower, and I knew that if I scraped the
moss and layers of mud and shellfish from the tower's plates I would
see the vestiges of the swastika that I had seen on the same conning
tower over three decades ago.
    Then I saw it tilt slightly to one side, saw dirty strings of
oil or silt or engine fuel rise near the forward torpedo tubes, and I
realized that years ago air must have been trapped somewhere in a
compartment, perhaps where a group of terrified sailors spun a wheel on
a hatch and pretended to themselves that their friends outside, whose
skulls were being snapped like eggshell, would have chosen the same
alternative.
    I felt a heavy surge in the current from out in the dark,
beyond the continental shelf. The water clouded and the submarine
disappeared. I thought I heard thunder booming, then the anchor rope
vibrated in my palm, and when I looked up I could see the exhaust pipes
on my boat boiling the waterline at the stern.
    When I came to the surface the chop smacked hard against my
mask, and the swells were dented with rain circles. Batist came outside
the cabin and pointed toward the southeast. I pushed my mask up on my
head and looked behind me; three more water spouts had dropped out of
the sky and were churning across the surface of the water, and farther
to the south you could see thunderclouds as thick as oil smoke on the
horizon.
    I climbed up the ladder, pulled off my gear, tied the end of a
spool of clothesline through a chunk of pig iron that had once been a
window sash, and fed the line over the gunwale until the weight bit
into the bottom. Then I sawed off the line at the spool and strung it
through the handles of three sealed Clorox bottles that I used as float
markers. The rain was cold and dancing in a green haze on the swells
now, the air heavy with the smell of ozone and nests of dead bait fish
in the waves. Just as I started to fling the Clorox bottles overboard,
I heard the blades of a helicopter thropping low over the water behind
me.
    It passed us, flattening and wrinkling the water below the
downdraft, and I saw the solitary passenger, a blond man in pilot's
sunglasses,