The Devil and the River Page 15

  And afterward, after he had returned home, luck became important, fate even, because there was no logical reason for having survived the war. Why had one man died and another lived?

  There was no delineation or marker identifying those who would see home and those who would not. Did not matter where you had come from, whether you were born army, a volunteer, or a draftee. When it came, it came. It did not matter if you were loved or despised, whether you attended church for faith or simply to steal from the charity box, whether you worshipped your mother or cursed her blind, whether you lied and swindled, blasphemed, whether you reveled in each and every one of the seven deadly sins or adhered to the letter of each commandment as a point of personal law. War possessed no prejudice, no predetermination, no preference. War would take you as you were, no questions asked.

  Why? How were such matters decided? And who did the deciding?

  It was such questions that invaded the normalcy and routine of his life. It was such questions that he tried not to ask himself.

  But then there were moments: moments of self-doubt, moments when he questioned his own humanity, moments when he questioned the human race itself, the things of which men were made, the things that drove them, their purposes, their aspirations, their rationale. Surely war was invented by man, and if man could invent war, then was there no level to which he could not stoop?

  Gaines did not believe Webster, not for a moment. He could see the man with his hands around Nancy Denton’s throat. He could see the man choking the life out of the poor, defenseless, beautiful teenager. Perhaps Webster had earned a taste for killing in Guadalcanal, and he had needed to satiate that taste any way he could. Gaines did not believe that Webster had found a dead girl in a shack by the side of the road. He had taken her there, and he had taken her there to kill her.

  They found the heart. The girl’s heart. Or they found what Gaines could only assume had once been her heart. Four yards east, twelve yards north, just as Webster had told them. It looked like a small, dark knot of something, like a fragment of wood, a chunk of dried leather, and even as they opened the metal box within which it had been contained, there was a certainty that it would stand no physical contact. It was nothing more than dust, in truth, and whatever cloth it might have been wrapped in was gossamer-thin, again little more than a memory of what it had once been, and the box itself, once sturdy, once capable of carrying nails and bolts and screws and suchlike, was rusted and frail, and it came apart in pieces as Gaines and Hagen tried to rescue it from the earth.

  The simple truth was that they had followed Webster’s directions, and they had found something that could have been a sixteen-year-old girl’s heart in a metal box. Irrespective of the fact that it was no longer a heart at all, it was something, and it was where Webster had said it would be. That was all that Gaines had needed to confirm his worst fears and his most assured suspicions.

  Standing there, his breath coming hard and fast, not only from the physical exertion of digging, but also the mental stress of what was happening, Gaines believed that the only mind he possessed was broken. Sometimes his certainty of this was intense, and it burned with the luminescence, the intensity, the smell of a heat tab beneath a makeshift stove.

  Other times he believed he was the only who’d returned sane.

  When he closed his eyes, he could still see the dead. He could see the pieces of the dead. He could see heaps of blood-soaked fatigues and flak jackets outside the makeshift triage tent. Almost as if to say, Hey boys, if the NVA don’t get getcha, we’ll finish the job pronto right here and now!

  Only at such times could people look at one another and say all that needed to be said without uttering a single word.

  Gaines possessed that same feeling then—right there in Whytesburg—as he and Hagen dug into the wet ground. They did not speak as they worked, and they did not speak when they found what they’d hoped they would not find.

  The earth had given up Nancy Denton, and now it had given up her heart. The earth was a living thing, a thing with memory, with history, and releasing its secrets would perhaps permit the escape of other things, other darknesses, other memories that would have been best left buried.

  What were they doing here? Were they bringing out the dead, and alongside them, the very madness that killed them in the first place?

  And what would happen if they took Nancy Denton right now, carried her back to the river, and returned her to the grave that Webster had given her? Would the world return to how it had been before they found her? Was it better to hide what had happened all those years before? Was it better to let the dead go on being dead, to let the truth die with Michael Webster, to release Whytesburg from the ghosts it never knew it had?

  Gaines was disturbed. He was cold, distracted, upset. Nevertheless, he went on with the business in front of him. He directed Hagen to put sawhorses around the scene. Together they roped it and taped it. Hagen took a dozen or more photographs from every angle, and each time the flash popped, Gaines started. Even when he knew the flash was coming, he still started. They took what they could of the box, the cloth within, the memory of a young girl’s heart, and they bagged it as carefully as they could. Hagen sat in the passenger seat with this strange cargo in his lap. He looked straight ahead, almost as if to look at the remnants directly was to somehow be cursed.

  Hagen closed his eyes when the engine started, and he did not open them again until he and Gaines had reached the office.

  Gaines and Hagen filled out paperwork, and then Gaines called Victor Powell. Powell told Gaines to meet him at the Coroner’s Office, to bring everything he had found. When Powell took these things from him, thanked Gaines, and put them in the same room as Nancy Denton’s body, it was late. Gaines looked exhausted, and Powell told him so.

  “Go home now,” he said. “You need to rest, my friend, before you collapse.”

  Gaines nodded. Powell was right. He went home. He looked in on his mother. She was out for the count. He closed her door silently, returned to the kitchen, and then he took the bottle of whiskey from the cupboard and he started drinking.

  For an hour he tried to feel something other than the horror, and then for an hour he tried to feel nothing at all.

  And then he lay down on his bed and closed his eyes.

  Gaines knows he is dreaming, but he cannot bring himself awake. He stands in a secluded area, somehow clear of vegetation, yet around him and over him is the shroud and the canopy and the wilderness of impenetrable jungle. A thin and insubstantial light seeps into the fug as a misty, malodorous haze. He is not alone. Of this much he is certain. He is being watched, and whoever is watching him is as patient as Job. Gaines knows he has been there for some time—hours, perhaps days—and yet whoever is stalking him has made no attempt to challenge him. And yet Gaines knows this is what they wish to do. What they need to do. This is war, and if you are not an ally, a comrade, a friend, then you are an enemy. There is no middle ground.

  Gaines understands then that it is he who needs to move first.

  And so he does.

  He is seated cross-legged, and he seems to grow from the ground effortlessly. He is naked. His body is dark with mud and blood and black-and-green, and his eyes are stark white against his visage. His hair is glued back against his scalp, and he feels like something from one of his own nightmares. He is outside himself, and he can see himself, and he is terrifying.

  In the distance he can hear CH-47s. They are mounted with 20x102 mike-mike Vulcans. He can hear them as certainly as he can hear his own heart. Or can he?

  Perhaps he is hearing nothing but the rush and chatter of his pulse, the blood in his veins, the sound of his pores opening in the warm moisture-drenched air.

  And then he folds into the vegetation and the jungle swallows him. He understands that he has vanished from view and the watcher cannot see him and does not know where he has gone. Gaines flits from tree to tree, from shadow to shadow, and before he knows it, he is standing beh
ind the watcher, and the watcher has become his prey. The watcher turns and holds out his hands, his eyes wide beneath the shadow of his coolie hat, and somehow Gaines has his rifle before him, the bayonet affixed, and he lunges forward with that blade. The steel punches through outstretched hands, the wounds in the pale flesh of the palms like stigmata, and everything is silent but for the ripping of flesh and the sound of the blood against the ground, against the trees, against his own face. His enemy falls, and he—Gaines—is over him like a wild thing. He has his knife in his hand, and he is hacking and sawing furiously. When he is done, he sees that he has made a ragged series of incisions from the throat to the navel, and suddenly—opening up, as if a zipper had been drawn—the snakes unfold and tumble out, dozens of them, all sizes and colors, and beneath the shadow of the coolie hat is the face of Nancy Denton, a taut smile, a bared-teeth rictus grin, and all the darkness and hatred of the war is there within her eyes.

  And then Gaines woke.

  He did not wake sweating. He did not lurch awkwardly from the mattress—heaving, retching, his mouth bitter with the imagined taste of blood, his nerves taut, his heart thundering.

  When he woke, he was calm, and though he remembered vividly each fragmented second of the nightmare, though he saw every scene in slow motion as he replayed it, he did not torture himself with questions of significance.

  He just lay there, and he remembered how it was to be beside someone.

  Linda Newman, mother of the child that never was.

  He had dreamed such dreams before, a long time ago. For a year or so following his return, the nightmares—vivid and terrifying—would throw him violently from the bed, and he would wake suddenly, startled, enraged even. He had tracked enemies in the boonies, and when he had found them, he had killed them. Often—possessing no discernible weapon, no gun, no blade—he had killed them with his hands.

  Reason enough to sleep alone.

  He did not wish to wake beside a corpse, their unnecessary and inexplicable death founded somewhere within a nightmare.

  And then the dreams had stopped.

  There had been times he’d wished for the dreams to return, terrible though they were, just so he could wake and realize that he was no longer there.

  Now the girl had invaded his thoughts, his emotions, his mind.

  Nancy Denton had joined the cast of characters—those who had died beside him, those he had killed, the dead he had seen lying in the mud.

  It was four in the morning. Gaines rose and sluiced his face with cold water. He did not feel sick, despite the whiskey he had drunk. He knew he would not sleep again, and yet he lay down on the mattress and tugged the covers over him. Perhaps the last few hours before daylight would serve no purpose other than to delay the continuing and inevitable confrontation of Nancy Denton’s pointless and terrible death. As was always the case with murder, it resulted, ordinarily, in the death of both victim and perpetrator, one by the hand of a killer, the other by the hand of the state.

  As Gaines closed his eyes against the gathering light, there was an echo in his mind—half-remembered, half-forgotten. Something that Webster had said, something about finding Nancy in a shack, just lying there in the doorway, and how he had buried her near running water.

  Why running water? Why had he buried her near running water?

  The question presented no immediate answer, and Gaines dismissed it from his mind. It was a detail, a simple detail, and there were so many other questions that begged to be answered first.

  22

  Even now, if I close my eyes and think as hard as I can, I can remember the feeling of sun on my face.

  I can feel that warmth against my skin. I can smell the grass, the flowers in the field. I can hear birds somewhere in the distance.

  I went down there with Nancy, and Michael took her hand for just a moment. He smiled at her and then at me, and we turned and started walking.

  I know that when Nancy was with Michael, she saw little but him, but Michael was never like that. Michael had a heart the size of a house, and he made everyone feel special. That was just his way. He didn’t try. It came naturally.

  Nancy was laughing. She was so excited, she could barely speak, but she spoke anyway. After just a few words, Michael started laughing and told her, “Slow down, Nance. Slow down there.”

  Michael was all of thirty or thirty-one years old, and Nancy was going on sixteen. Though it seemed strange that two people could be so far apart in years, it did not seem strange to anyone who knew them. He never did lay a hand on her. If nothing else, Michael was a true gentleman. You could see that in his eyes, in the way he permitted Nancy to kiss him on the cheek every once in a while and nothing more than that. He behaved like her older brother. That sounds weird, but that’s the only way I can tell it. He wasn’t her father, nor her uncle, nothing like that. He was like a cousin maybe, someone close, but not too close. He had just made a decision. Nancy was the girl for him. This was the woman with whom he planned to spend the rest of his life, and if he had to wait a while for her to become that woman, then so be it. For Michael, Nancy was worth a thousand years of waiting, no question about it.

  And Nancy knew too. Maybe she had known from the first moment he stepped off the train that day in 1945.

  But when we were together—me and Matthias, Nancy and Michael—it was as if we were all the same age. Catherine came along sometimes—but only when her father told her to keep an eye on us. Eugene and Della floated around the edges of our little world, and sometimes they were involved and sometimes they were not. But no one frowned on our friendship. Perhaps folks believed Michael was a good influence on these rowdy, troublemaking teenagers. We were all from different families, different backgrounds. Nancy’s mom didn’t have two quarters in the same place at the same time. My mom was just as ordinary as ordinary people could be, and yet none of it mattered. Matthias’s family had more money than anyone could spend in a dozen lifetimes, and yet he dressed the same as us and he talked the same as us, and only when he brought down the old Victrola and the records, only when he turned up with a picnic hamper for us to share by the river, was it obvious that he had more than we did. Age was not a barrier, nor was money or possessions or what name we were given. We were just getting on with living the best way we knew how, and it wasn’t complicated.

  I remember those years—just a couple of them—that seemed to last forever. It was as if the sun shone each and every day, and it shone for us. And even when it rained and was cold, there was a warmth in friendship and fellowship that defied the elements. I know I look back with rose-colored glasses—we always do when we recall our childhood—but we really did seem to be blessed with something special. Me and Nancy and Michael and the Wade clan, as we used to call them. The best times. The very best times we could ever have wished for.

  And that day was really no different from so many others that we had shared.

  We chattered as we walked. We talked of what we would do, where we would go, if Eugene would come out this time or if he would stay home and read like he seemed to do so much these days.

  We did not talk about Lillian Wade. She had died back at the end of 1952, and no one said her name. Everyone tried not to think about her, because it had been an awful, frightening thing.

  I asked my mother one time why someone so rich and young and beautiful had died, and she shook her head and said, “No one knows why, Maryanne. Maybe being so rich and young and beautiful all at the same time is more than the human heart can bear,” and then she never spoke of it again.

  I had heard rumors that she had taken her own life. I did not know if it was true, and I wasn’t about to go asking her children.

  Maybe having to wake up and look at Earl Wade every day—that scary face he sometimes had—finally killed her.

  I remember when it happened. I remember how me and Nancy were on our own for weeks. Lillian Wade died in October of 1952, and we saw Michael infrequently until after that Christmas. Even though t
he Wades were about as Whytesburg as the Rockefellers, everyone was stunned by the news. I heard she was a drinker, but that meant nothing to me. I liked to drink—soda, water, orange juice, pretty much everything. I figured it was maybe a polite way of saying something else entirely. But it wasn’t until the spring of 1953 that we saw Matthias and Catherine and Della and Eugene again, at least for any length of time. Then—slowly, but surely—things started to come right again. Except for Eugene. Eugene was still Eugene, but he was like a quieter version. He still laughed, but he never laughed for long. He still smiled, but the smile seemed more an effort than a pleasure. He never really talked to me directly about his mother, but he made reference to her often. He was fifteen years old by then, and I think he took it the worst of all of them. He always had his books with him, and every once in a while I’d see him drift a little, but he’d always come back, you know? He was still Eugene, however, and Eugene was just a little older than me. If I had to be honest, which I would never have been, I would have said that of the two of them—Matthias and Eugene—I loved Eugene just that little bit more. There was something sensitive and artistic about him. Whereas Matthias had to force himself to learn poems to impress Nancy, Eugene just knew them. He talked about things he’d read and films he’d seen, and he was always the one who brought the best records to play.

  But that day, that Thursday in August of 1954, thoughts of Lillian Wade and what had really happened were the furthest thing from all our minds, it seemed.

  We walked a little way toward the Five Mile Road, and then Michael told us that we were going to wait there for Matthias and the others.

  “Where are we going?” I asked him.