It was in late fall of '42, out on the Gulf of Mexico, just off the Louisiana coast, the water green and cold and sliding across sandbars in the sunset, when we saw the bodies bobbing in a wave, each in life vests and floating belly-down, their arms outstretched, their fingers touching, like a group of swimmers studying something on the floor of the Gulf.
My father was standing behind the wheel in the cabin. He wore a fedora and a raincoat, the redness of the sun reflecting off the water, flickering on his face, as though he were standing in front of a fire.
"Come here and hold the wheel for me, Aaron," he said.
"Are those dead people out there?"
"Yes, they are." There was no change in his expression. At age eighteen he had been at Saint-Mihiel and the Somme, and had been buried alive during an artillery barrage. He still had dreams about the war, but denied their seriousness, even after my mother and I had to shake him awake and put a cold towel on his face lest he injure himself or others.
"They look burned, Daddy," I said.
"Just keep the boat steady. Don't look at these poor fellows."
He went out of the cabin and picked up a long-handled boat hook from the deck, then worked his way up on the bow and probed the figures floating in the waves. He was bent over, his raincoat flapping in the wind, peppered with spray from the waves bursting against the hull, his face sad, as if he knew these men, although I was sure he did not. He put down the hook and gazed at the horizon through a pair of binoculars, then came back into the cabin and picked up the microphone to our radio, his eyes empty. The sun had dipped out of view, leaving behind a sky that seemed filled with soot and curds of black smoke. A solitary piece of reddish-yellow flame wobbled on the horizon, so bright and intense my eyes watered when I looked at it.
"Mayday, Mayday," my father said into the microphone. "Tanker capsized and burning south of Terrebonne Bay. Four visible casualties, all dead."
He laid the microphone on the console and turned off the radio, then looked at the radio blankly.
"You didn't tell them who we are," I said.
He took over the wheel and reversed the engine, backing away from the bodies. "You mustn't tell anyone about this, Aaron."
"Why not? It's what happened."
He cut the gas and squatted down and wrapped me inside his raincoat and held me to his chest, the boat rising on a wave, dropping suddenly into a trough. I could feel the warmth of his breath on my neck and cheek. "There's a great evil at work in the world, son," he said. "All kinds. We mustn't bring it into our lives."
My father was a natural-gas engineer, but like none of his colleagues. He hated the oil-and-gas industry. He scrubbed his hands up to his elbows when he came home from work and never discussed what he did on the job. Nor would he socialize with his fellow employees or even use their names in conversation. He had wanted to be a journalist or a historian, and instead ended up a pipeliner during the Great Depression and hostage to both the job and my mother's hospital bills. Part of that job involved dredging channels through freshwater swamp and marshland, poisoning the root system with saline, and contributing to the erosion of the Edenic wetlands in which he had grown up.
We stayed at the Hotel Frederic in New Iberia, his birthplace, whenever his company sent him to Louisiana. The Frederic was a grand building, four stories high, made entirely of brick and stone and concrete, with a roofed gallery above the entrance and a ballroom and marble pillars and potted ferns and palms in the lobby and a birdcage elevator and wood-bladed ceiling fans and a saloon with batwing doors and a shoeshine stand where a man of color popped a rag in 4/4 time. I loved staying at the Frederic and riding up and down on the elevator and waking to the Angelus. I loved eating breakfast in the dining room with my father, just as I loved everything else we did together in New Iberia.
It was raining when we returned to the hotel. The sky was black, veined with electricity, the fog as soft and white as cotton rolling off Bayou Teche. We ate silently in the dining room. There was no one else in the room except a waiter and two men in suits eating in the corner with their hats on. My father looked casually at the two men, then ordered a bowl of ice cream for me and went into the saloon. When he came back I could smell whiskey and cherries on his breath. "Ready?" he said.
"Yes, sir," I said.
"Was that ice cream okay?"
"It was fine."
"You're a good boy, Aaron. Don't ever forget that. You're the best little boy I've ever known."
We rode up in the elevator, piloted by an elderly black man in a gray uniform and white shirt and a black tie. "Mighty cold out there tonight," he said.
"Yes, it is," my father said.
The black man stopped on the third floor, the skeleton-like structure of the elevator rattling. "Mr. Broussard?"
"Yes?"
The black man's eyes were lowered. "These are dangerous times. That's when bad people tend to come around."
My father waited for him to go on, but he didn't. "Thank you, Clarence," he said.
After we were inside our room, he went to the window and looked down on the street, then pulled the shade and turned on the desk lamp and sat down.
"I owe you an explanation, Aaron."
"About the dead men?"
"A German submarine was out there. I saw its conning tower and periscope go underwater."
"Why didn't you tell the people that on the radio?"
"The government always knows this. But they don't want to share their information."
"Why not?"
"Maybe they're afraid of panic. Maybe they wish to hide their incompetence."
"But they're supposed to tell the truth," I said.
"This is a different kind of situation, Aaron."
"The families of the burned men in the water won't know where they are."
He looked at the design in the rug. The fabric was worn, the colors softened with dust. "They knew what they were doing when they signed on. The world is for the living."
"This doesn't sound like you. Daddy," I said.
"The government is wrong to suppress the truth. If they question me, I'll tell them what we saw. But I'll also have to tell the newspapers. Not to do so would be dishonorable."
"I don't understand."
"The men who start wars never go to them," he said. "They kill people with a fountain pen and call themselves leaders. Never allow yourself to become their servant, Aaron."
That night I dreamed of a giant shark that had a human face. It broke the surface of the Gulf and crunched a toy ship in its jaws, a red cloud blossoming in the waves around its head, pieces of the ship and tiny men washing through the wetlands and into the streets of New Iberia and through the lobby of the Frederic Hotel and up the elevator shaft and into our room, drowning my father and me.
The next day was Saturday. He took me across the street to Provost's Café & Bar for lunch. That might seem strange in our current culture, but in that era in South Louisiana the pagan world and Christianity had formed a truce and got along well. The ceiling was plated with stamped tin that resembled pewter and was hung with wood-bladed fans. There were domino and bourré and pool tables in back, and a ticker tape under a glass hood below the blackboards where gaming results of all kinds were posted. On Saturday afternoons the floor was littered with football betting cards.
There was no profanity in Provost's, no coarseness, no ill manners. When we went to Provost's we always sat at a checker-cloth table in the corner, and my father always bought me a po'boy fried-oyster sandwich and a side of dirty rice and a bottle of Dr. Nut, the best cold drink ever made. But as soon as I sat down I knew that today was different, that the world had changed, that the sinking of the tanker would not leave our lives. The two men who had been eating in the Frederic's dining room with their hats on came through the front door and walked past us and stood at the end of the bar. One looked like a boxer and had a scar across his nose. The other man was very big, and wore a vest, with a pocket watch and fob. They each ordered beer from the spigot and faced the bar mirror, one foot on the brass rail, while they sipped from their mugs.
I could see my father looking at them and knew he remembered them from the hotel dining room. My father was a handsome man, with soft, dark hair he combed straight back. His eyes were small and narrow, like those of his grandfather, who had been with Stonewall Jackson through the entirety of the Shenandoah campaign, and also at Gettysburg.
"Is there something wrong about those men, Daddy?" I said.
"Pay them no attention."
"Who are they?"
"I think they're police officers."
"How do you know?"
"A gentleman does not wear his hat in a building."
A black man put my sandwich and bottle of Dr. Nut in front of me, then came back with a bottle of Jax for my father.
"They're coming this way, Daddy," I whispered, my eyes on my plate.
"Don't speak to them or look at them. This is our home. Our family has lived on the bayou since 1836."
I didn't have any idea what he was talking about. The two men were now hovering over our table. The man with the scar on his nose was standing immediately behind me, his loins eye level with me. "How y'all doin'?" he said.
My father wiped his mouth with a cloth napkin. "How can we help you?"
"We thought you might have been fishing out on Terrebonne Bay yesterday," the man in the vest said.
"Not us."
"The trout are running," the same man said. His eyes were like brown marbles that were too big for his face, his body too big for his suit and vest and starched white shirt. "I'd like to get me a mess of them."
"My name is James Eustace Broussard," my father said. "This is my son Aaron. We live in Houston. I'm an engineer with an oil and natural gas company there, although I was born and raised in New Iberia."
"You know how to cut to it," said the man with the scarred nose.
"Sorry?" my father said.
"You keep your words neat and tidy," the same man said. "You don't clutter up the air."
"We were having lunch, gentlemen," my father said.
"Put your lunch on hold and take a walk," said the man in the vest. "I'm Agent Hamilton. This here is my partner, Agent Flint. We'll have you back in five minutes."
"I'm afraid I will not be going anywhere with you," my father said. "I'd also like to see your identification."
"I'll show it to you outside," Mr. Hamilton said. He pulled on his collar and rotated his neck.
"I know why you're here," my father said.