Island of Saints (13 page)

Dixie Bar was an enormous stretch of sand extending more than two miles into the Gulf. Created by the outgoing tides of Mobile Bay as they boiled around the Fort Morgan peninsula, the monstrous sandbar was a peril to shipping, but a fisherman's paradise. Functioning as an immense reef, it attracted sea life to waters marked by a pronounced shore-bound current. West or southwest winds fed that current and knocked the tops off the surf, making it easier for fishermen to reach their quarry as the Gulf swept everything in its grasp toward shore.

The white sand squeaked beneath her bare feet as Helen leaned into the night. For almost an hour, she walked on the boundary of the surf's highest reach, not in the soft sand or in the surf, but on the very edge of both. There was a hint of phosphorous in the water, she saw, giving the white foam of the breaking waves an odd, glowing tinge of blue. She smiled faintly at the beautiful sight. In the summer, Wan had told her, late at night the phosphorous was visible, sometimes dramatically so, more often than anyone knew. In fact, he had said, most people had never even heard of this phenomenon, and fewer were privileged to see it.

Helen slowed her pace for a moment and frowned, squinting at a large shape that lay in the edge of the surf fifteen or so yards in front of her.
A dolphin,
she thought, trying to see through the darkness and smart enough not to rush immediately to the poor creature. If it was dead, that was one thing—she had experienced that twice before—but if the animal was only stranded . . . Helen had heard Billy talk about helping a group of men rescue a stranded dolphin. One of them had suffered a broken arm during the experience.

Helen approached cautiously. She had no desire to be hurt by the wild struggles of a panicked creature with no help nearby. Venturing closer, she saw vague movement, but the animal's effort moved it several inches up onto the beach. The dolphin was going the wrong way . . .

In that split second, Helen saw that the form, now only eight feet from her, was not a dolphin, but a human being . . . a man. She gasped and rushed to him. He was on his stomach with arms outstretched, his face in the sand and pointed away from her. As she fell to her knees beside his stricken form, Helen saw blood. It came from his right shoulder, the one closest to her. More blood was on his right leg.

As Helen reached out to touch him, the man moaned, and she realized that she had no idea what to do. She was at least an hour from the cottage and from there, without a phone, almost another hour to help. He could be dead by the time she returned. Helen's mind raced. Had he been in an accident? Was he one of the sailors from the group Wan had seen earlier that day? No, that wasn't possible. Those men, she had heard, had been in the water for days. This man was still bleeding. He couldn't have been hurt too long ago.

Deciding she had no choice but to move the man, Helen first went around to his other side—the way his face was turned—in order to roll him over. He was conscious. Though he didn't move his head, the man's eyes blinked wildly, trying to focus as she came into view.

“Hang on,” Helen murmured. “You're safe. I'm here to help.” The man seemed to be clothed in black, she noted absently, though that was probably just because he was wet.
A suit,
she thought,
or a uniform. Not navy . . . merchant
marine?

“Can you help me?” Helen said loudly into the sailor's face. She was speaking over the roar of the pounding surf. “We need to roll you onto your back.”

The man coughed and nodded slightly. Helen saw a comprehending look on his face as she got her left arm under his shoulders. She placed her right hand on the man's hip, pushing and lifting with every ounce of her strength. The man shifted his weight with Helen and grunted with effort or pain as she succeeded in moving him onto his back. Immediately Helen, who was on top of him after the maneuver, felt the man draw easier breaths as he quickly began to inhale and exhale deeply.

Spent, Helen raised herself from the man and fell back into a sitting position in the sand beside him. Her shirt hung soaking wet from her thin frame as she wiped sand from her face with a forearm. “Can you speak to me?” she asked, continuing to watch the sailor's face closely. “What happened?”

“I think so,” he rasped. “I am shot.”

Helen dusted her hands, then reached to remove some of the sand from the man's face and from around his eyes. “We need to get you some help. I live down the beach three or four miles back that . . .” She stopped suddenly. Helen had gestured over her shoulder and glanced away as she had spoken, but a small . . . something . . . had interrupted her thought. Frowning, she looked back at the man on the sand before her and broadened her gaze.

Something wasn't right. Helen looked at the uniform, its ribbon and buttons. Her eyes narrowed, and hot saliva poured into her mouth. Breathing heavily, she said, “You are not an American sailor.”

The man said simply, “My name is Josef.”

Nausea threatened to overwhelm her. Helen asked flatly, “Are you German?”

“Yes,” Josef confirmed.

In that one word, at the precise second it was uttered, Helen experienced an avalanche of emotions raining down upon her consciousness. There were far too many sensations to categorize, or even recognize, so violently and abruptly did they flood upon her. Rage, caution, suspicion, revulsion, despair, opportunity, frustration, satisfaction, hatred, fear . . .

It was amazing, really, with all the choices available to her in that moment that she would choose opportunity, but to Helen, it was the proper selection. After all, it might never present itself again. Helen balled her right hand into a fist, and with everything she had, she punched Josef in the face. Rewinding, she swung her fist into his wounded shoulder. “You filthy bastard!” she shrieked. “You killed my husband!” And she hit him again and again and again.

Finally physically unable to swing and sobbing uncontrollably, Helen crawled off a few steps and threw up. She fell back into the sand and cried again until there was nothing left. Trying for a moment to think rationally, she looked over at the sailor who'd said his name was . . . ?
Who cares
what his name is? What do I do now? Should I kill him? Can
I kill him? I don't have a knife or a gun . . . I could get him
back into the water and hold his head under, but I don't
have the energy.

Helen decided to turn him in when she got to town the next morning. She looked again at the sailor, who lay with his eyes closed. He certainly wasn't going anywhere, at least not far. Wan would be at the café when she got there. He would take care of this.

Shakily Helen got to her feet and began to move away when the man spoke: “I am so sorry about your husband.” Helen wanted to run, but Josef's voice carried over the sound of the waves and held her there. “You can hit me more if you want. I do not have the strength, or I would do it for you. Can you kill me?” Josef began to cry. It was a wretched wailing that rose above the dunes and into the sky. His weeping held no tears, but was filled with anguished cries of hopelessness and shame. “Tatiana!” he screamed. “Tatiana! Rosa! Oh, God! My God!”

Helen watched him without expression. After a time, Josef only sobbed. Looking toward her, he addressed the young woman in a voice louder than was necessary: “What was his name?” Helen simply stared at him. He spoke again: “Your husband . . . what was his name?”

“Tyler Mason,” Helen replied. “Why do you care?”

He didn't answer.

Not knowing why, and certainly giving it no thought, Helen walked over to Josef, grabbed him by the collar, and jerked. “Get up,” she commanded, and with her unpleasant help, he did.

She draped his arm over her shoulder and said, “Walk.”

“To where?”

“My house is this way.”

Josef struggled for breath and leaned heavily on the young woman. He felt her strength as she hauled him through the sand. “Why are you helping me?” he asked.

“Who said I was helping you?” she answered. “Shut up.”

IT WAS ALMOST DAWN, 5:15, WHEN THEY REACHED THE COTTAGE. Helen dropped him at the bottom of the small home's only stairs. She was already late for work. “There's medicine in the bathroom and water in the icebox. Get up the steps as best you can,” she said to Josef. “Or lie here. I don't really care which.”

Helen bathed and was ready to leave in ten minutes. Josef still sat on the ground at the bottom of the steps as she drove off. She had not said a word to him when she passed.

Josef propped himself against one of the cottage's pilings and watched as the young woman drove off.
She is a nurse,
he thought, noticing her white uniform.
She helped me
because she had to.
Josef knew that nurses and doctors took some kind of an oath that bound them to care for the sick and injured. He looked up the stairs, a distance that seemed impossible, but that he knew was not. What he had just survived was impossible.

Josef had never lost consciousness. Not when he'd been shot, not when he'd finally made it to shore, or not when he made the long walk with the young woman. He had managed that by keeping his mind occupied trying to deconstruct the puzzle of Ernst Schneider's actions of the night before.

It seemed clear to him now that the Nazi had intended to shoot him all along. That was obviously why he had requested Josef as part of the deck party. It was also why he had “forgotten” the gold and sent Hans Kuhlmann below to retrieve it. Schneider wanted to be alone with Josef on the deck of the U-166. And except for the shabbily bearded man in the red-topped boat, they
were
alone. But what cargo had the small boat brought to the submarine that required only three men—no, two men—to off-load it? It couldn't have been much. The boat left shortly after Josef was shot. And when Hans returned to the deck, how could Schneider possibly have explained Josef's absence? There were too many questions and no answers for any of them.

Josef had been stunned when Schneider drew the pistol and aimed at his chest, but not so stunned that he was unable to move. Twisting sideways at the instant of the first shot, he had avoided being mortally wounded, but the impact of the .32 caliber hollow-point bullet in his right shoulder was enough to drive him off the sub's deck and into the water. Schneider had sent two more shots his way, one of which grazed his thigh before Josef had managed to hide in the shadows between the two vessels.

He had dog-paddled with one arm to the other side of the old boat and, there in the dark, held on to one of the tires tied to its rail. Many smaller boats, Josef knew, used old tires as bumpers and had several on both the port and the starboard. When he had heard the diesels rev, Josef held tight and used the boat's forward motion to take him out of the shadow of the U-166. Thirty yards away, he let go, intending to be far enough out for the sub's searchlight to catch him in its glare. He was certain that Kuhlmann, his captain and friend, would soon be searching for him. But the searchlight was never turned on, and Josef had watched in astonishment as the U-166 silently slipped beneath the waves.

Alone and beginning to feel pain from his wounds, Josef had feared not drowning, but sharks. He had known he was bleeding—how badly he could not tell—but Josef knew sharks could find food in an incredibly short period of time. And when they found it, they were not shy or polite. Josef, with the rest of the crew, had always watched in horrified fascination as the garbage was dumped from their decks. The monsters arrived in packs, and they were never long in showing up.
How many times,
Josef had thought as he struggled against the rising panic,
have I dreaded dying this way?

He had known the wind direction and current were both in his favor. The tide was rushing into the vast mouth of Mobile Bay, sucking everything with it in that direction. The wind and current where Josef floated, hanging to a timber he had washed against, ran almost parallel to the bay mouth's tidal surge. Josef had remembered a huge sand bar from the submarine's area charts. If he could just reach that, he had known, the wind and water would continue to push him toward the beach.

When Josef's feet had finally touched bottom, he walked the bar, alternately being lifted by the waves and swept with the current, for almost two more miles—all the way to the beach. There, he had dropped, almost dead from swallowed seawater, exhaustion, and loss of blood, but grateful for the absence of sharks.

Crawling to the stairway now, Josef looked up at the cottage and wondered briefly how long he had lay in the surf before the young woman had come along. He pulled himself up into a standing position and swayed dizzily. Sitting back down, Josef rested before taking his time and backing his way up the steps, still sitting, to the door above.

BY THE TIME HELEN ARRIVED, WAN HAD ALREADY OPENED the café and made the coffee. As deputy, he had a key to every place in town anyway and knew that Billy wouldn't mind. Wan accepted Helen's terse, “Morning. I overslept,” as all the conversation he would get, and when the Gilberts arrived soon after, they never knew she had been late.

The morning went by without incident. Helen thought Margaret might be watching her a bit more closely than usual, but after their conversation the day before, Helen didn't blame her.

All the talk by the lunch crowd was about the bodies that had floated up and U-boats and whether anybody intended to fish that weekend. “I'll fish from my backyard,” Weaver Sullivan told the other men.

“You don't live on the water, Sully,” one of them remarked.

“That's right,” he responded, “and I ain't likely to be torpedoed off my porch neither.” Everyone chuckled grimly.

“Hey, Wan,” one of the men called. “What's that old peckerwood Harris Kramer up to? Pal says he's showing up ever' time there's a sinking. That right?”