The Devil and the River

by R.J. Ellory

  “Yes, John, I did.”

  Powell leaned over the body, and then he carefully worked his fingers into the wound. Slowly, he drew the edges apart, and even as he did so, Gaines was aware that something was very wrong indeed.

  “Where is her heart?” Gaines asked.

  “She did not have one,” Powell replied. He reached left and came back with a metal dish. In it seemed to be shreds of fabric, perhaps some kind of plant matter. And there was something else. Something that disturbed Gaines greatly.

  “This came apart as I removed it,” Powell said.

  Gaines looked at Nancy’s face. Something seemed to have changed. This was not the way she had appeared when he had entered the room with Judith. The face now seemed tight, the skin drawn, the lips pulled back against the teeth.

  It was the body being influenced by the air, the change in temperature perhaps, he told himself. Nothing more than that.

  Gaines closed his eyes and mouthed a few silent words.

  “What?” Powell asked.

  “Nothing,” Gaines replied.

  “You ready for this?” Powell asked.

  “As I’ll ever be.”

  “This,” Powell said, indicating the few shreds of cloth in the metal dish, “is the remains of a basket.”

  “A what?”

  “A basket. Very carefully constructed, almost spherical. Made in two halves, it was hinged on one side with wire and had a wire catch on the other. And it was made to open just like a pocket watch . . .”

  Powell set the dish down on the table.

  “A basket? What the hell?” Gaines started.

  “Hold your breath, John,” Powell replied, “because you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

  Powell took a wooden depressor and poked at a small shape to the side of the basket’s remains. It seemed to uncurl, and despite its fragility, it still retained its circular shape. It was then that Gaines’s eyes seemed to deceive him.

  It was a snake. No question about it. An infant, its type and exact length impossible to ascertain, it was nevertheless a snake.

  “Jesus Christ. What the fuck?”

  “Exactly what I said,” Powell interjected. “Someone strangled her, and then they opened her up, cut out her heart, and then replaced it with a snake in a basket.”

  Gaines didn’t say a word. He simply felt a quiet sense of dread drowning every other emotion he was feeling.

  7

  Sometimes the mind slipped its moorings.

  Gaines, standing quietly in the corridor outside the morgue, thought of Linda Newman. At first he did not know why she came to mind, but then—after a little while—he did know. It was because of the child. The child that never was.

  It was 1959, and he—all of nineteen years old—met a girl in the Laundromat. As good a place as any other to meet a wife, he believed. Not like there was some wife-farm where you could go pick your own and then maybe take her back if she turned out to be a sour ’un. Her name was Linda, and she got herself all trained up in a beautician school in Baton Rouge. She came on back to Opelousas, where Gaines was living at the time, but there didn’t appear to be a great demand for the things she proposed to provide. The women all wore housecoats and thick socks. They were up at five in the morning, chopping wood, firing the stove to make oatmeal for a hungover husband and a brood of kids, and such routines didn’t sit so well with a bouffant and a manicure. Women like that would rather you open up another liquor store, maybe a bar or something, so their husbands would spend more nights sleeping in the garage. Lack of employment aside, John Gaines and Linda Newman figured they would make it work somehow, and they stayed together. One time in the fall of 1960, just for the hell of it, they had driven from Alexandria to Shreveport. They had shared a passion for Nabs crackers, had eaten much of the state’s available supply en route. And then, in the early part of 1961, Linda got pregnant. When she was pregnant, she was crazy for frozen Milky Ways. For her, frozen Milky Ways were not so far from a religious experience.

  While he was in-country, Gaines had thought about that child a lot. The child that almost was. Squatting in a foxhole, the darkness stabbing at his eyes, his mind playing tricks (for once it was dark, everyone believed in ghosts), he would make-believe that the child was alive, that he or she had made it, that Linda Newman and the child were waiting for him in Opelousas. But there had been no child, and there was no Linda Newman. Linda had miscarried, and afterwards it seemed that she could not bear to be around him, and so she’d returned to her folks in New Orleans. So many times Gaines had thought to find her, to speak to her, to try to convince her they could start over. He had imagined those conversations, practiced his lines, but they had never been delivered. Gaines had rehearsed a part he’d known he would never play, because he knew all along that it would never have worked. What had happened between them, how it had ended, had been so finite, so permanent, and they had both known it completely.

  Gaines had tried so hard to think of other things, but it just kept coming back, like the taste of bad garlic, and it had made him bitter. The child he’d been denied. Seemed there was always something to remind him, and now this—this dead girl with a snake for a heart—was the most potent and powerful of all.

  Linda had been gone all of thirteen years. His fourteen months in Vietnam had ended in December of 1968, and yet he was still alone, still caring for his mother, living now in Mississippi instead of Louisiana, but little, if anything, had changed.

  He believed he had done the right things. However, doing the right thing was only a comfort if the result was right. There were individuals who accepted what nature had given them and others who strived against it. There were others who floated in limbo. They were waiting, it seemed, but for what? Even they did not know.

  There was one God for the rich folks, one for the poor. And there were some men who spent the entirety of their lives looking for signs of forgiveness for a crime they had not committed.

  Gaines, every once in a while, would still awaken in four-hour shifts. Suddenly, his eyes wide, his mind alert, a voice insisting in a hurried whisper, Hey! Hey, Gaines! You’re up, and he would lie there, the silence of the house around him, and realize that he did not need to get up, that there was no watch to be performed tonight, that if he stepped out behind the house and stared into the darkness, he would see nothing but distance and shadows. Whatever war had existed for him was now over. Vietnam was nine and a half thousand miles away, and yet sometimes he believed it was as close as his shadow. Believed, perhaps, that it was his shadow. It was a mighty war, both terrible and terrifying, and back then—at twenty-seven years of age—he had been a child among children, and they had been presented with both horror and rapture in equal parts. It was said that the mind healed if given sufficient time. It did not. It merely built ever-greater defenses against the ravages of conscience and memory.

  After a while you forgot what was dream and what was memory.

  Above and beneath all that, John Gaines was the man he had become in Vietnam. He was a man of war. A dark and merciless and unrelenting war that took everything good from the soul and replaced it with nothing. It was hard to appreciate how little more than a year could influence and affect a human being to such a degree. But it had. There was no question that it had.

  Some said they left a part of themselves in the jungles and villes and tunnels of Southeast Asia. This was not true. They left all of themselves behind. They returned as someone else, and their friends, their families, their wives and mothers and daughters, struggled to recognize them. To themselves, as well, they had become almost strangers.

  Gaines had not gone the route of grad school deferment, nor the National Guard, nor the reserves; he did not cite opposition in principle, nor from some religious or ethical stance, nor from some real or imagined medical status; he did not think of running away or hiding in Canada or Mexico. On Thursday, February 9, 1967, he received his Order to Report for Physical Exam. He attended the exam. On Wednesday, May
10, he received his Order to Report for Induction. He simply read the draft notice carefully, read it once again, and then returned it to the envelope. So that’s it, his mother had said. Yes, Gaines had replied. That’s it.

  Even now, looking back, he could remember the expression on her face. I lost my husband to war, that expression said, and now I will lose my son. She had been born Alice Devereau in Pointe à la Hache, Louisiana, in January of 1915. She met her husband-to-be, Edward, in 1937. Within two years, they were married. John, their only child, was born in June of 1940. When John was two, his father left for Europe. He served with the First Army, and was killed near Malmedy and Stavelot on the road to Liege, Belgium, on December 23, 1944. Alice Gaines had been all of twenty-nine years old.

  So she looked at her son, two years younger than she herself had been when she’d lost her husband, and she asked him if there was any other way.

  “No,” John had said. “There is no other way.”

  Five days later, John Gaines reported for Basic Combat Training at Fort Benning, Georgia. Boots, bed, hygiene, weaponry and maintenance, C rations, first aid, land navigation, rules of war, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, marching in ranks and parade, inspections. He graduated in July, moved on to Advanced Individual Training. He learned how to hide from people. He learned how to follow people. Then he learned how to kill them. In September, he graduated to Republic of Vietnam Training. Toward the end of the month, he took a week’s leave, went home to see his mother, helped her move to Whytesburg, Mississippi, so as to be nearer an old friend, and then he shipped out. Fort Benning to Saigon, Saigon to Đà Lat, Đà Lat and onward into the Central Highlands. Two weeks’ in-country orientation and training, and he was set.

  Back then, back in the real history of the thing, there were smaller empires. Vietnam was a world all its own, and included the territories of Tonkin, Annam, and Cochinchina, out to Laos and Cambodge sat Siam in the west. Now it was all North and South, nothing more. Before the Second World War, the French maintained Indochinese colonies. They occupied Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia until they were overrun by the Japanese. After the Japanese surrender, the French came back. They wanted a new French Union. Ho Chi Minh wanted complete independence. The United States supported France, but when the fortress of Dien Ben Phu fell in May of 1954, it was all over.

  They should have learned then, but they did not. It would never be size or influence or money that would win a war in the jungle. It was knowledge. It was being there. It was understanding the land. Only the Vietnamese possessed this, and thus they would never lose.

  The history of the place was important to Gaines. He had wanted to know why he was fighting. Because your president and your country needs you to had never been sufficient for him.

  After the French defeat, they just cut the country in half where the South China Sea became the Gulf of Tonkin. North Vietnam would be governed from Hanoi by the Vit Minh. South Vietnam would be governed from Saigon. On the throne would be the French ally, Emperor Bo Ðại. The United States did not agree.

  A year later, the South Vietnamese elected a new leader. Ngô Đình Dim was a tyrant, a corrupt and dishonest man, but he was Catholic and an anticommunist, and the United States wanted to keep him in place. But then rebellion came in 1957, communists and nationalists in the south receiving their orders from the north. They coalesced, grew stronger, and three years later they became the National Liberation Front. Vietnamese communists. The Viet Cong.

  These were the people that Gaines had been trained to kill.

  Back in ’54, Eisenhower had promised that noncommunist Indochina would never fall to the Reds. It was a matter of principle. America, the mightiest of all, had been outwitted and overthrown by a gang of sandal-wearing Russian collaborators. Eisenhower’s pride had been hurt. He had defeated Nazi Germany, and yet he couldn’t take out a strip of land that was half the size of Texas. Eisenhower was a Texan. Vietnam was a nothing place in the middle of nowhere. He was galled.

  In November of 1963, just three weeks before Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, South Vietnamese president Ngô Ðình Dim was murdered in an army coup. When Johnson assumed the presidency, he declared, “I am not going to lose Vietnam.” August of 1964 saw a US destroyer fired upon by North Vietnamese patrol boats in the Gulf of Tonkin. Johnson launched air attacks on North Vietnamese shore installations. Johnson had a resolution-approved fistfight on his hands. Vietnam was some piece-of-shit backyard where US boys were getting their asses kicked by little yellow guys in sandals and coolie hats. Enough was enough.

  By the end of ’65, there were one hundred and eighty thousand American soldiers in Vietnam. By 1968, there were well over half a million. They carried orders to run offensive attacks against NLF guerrillas. Napalm rained down on Viet Cong outposts and guerrilla units in the south. Johnson went great guns. He threw more bombs at Vietnam than the combined total of all bombs hurled at Europe between ’39 and ’45. But this was no European engagement. The enemy the United States fought was faceless, without uniform, familiar with the terrain, its anomalies and idiosyncrasies, and thus they always possessed the upper hand. The United States had fire-power, air cover, strong supply lines, an almost inexhaustible source of men, but they did not have an enemy they could see. They fought ghosts and shadows. They fought a nightmare.

  And it was into this nightmare that John Gaines arrived, a twelve-month tour of duty, and it was from this arena of horror that he would bring things that would dictate and define the rest of his life. He had known that within a week.

  Afterward, there would be stories. Some lavish, some exuberant, some exaggerated; others brief, succinct, to the point. Those who were not there grew tired of the telling; questioned veracity, questioned the purpose of the stories. The reason for telling the stories is to join the seams together, a fellow veteran once told Gaines. To see if the past cannot belong to the present again … but it’s like trying to stitch the sea to the sky. You know they are somehow made of the same thing, but they will always and forever be incompatible. For Gaines, it had simply been a matter of trying to understand how the boy he had once been had become the man that he now was. The past was a different country, and if you returned, you soon realized that they spoke a language you no longer understood. War stories. If it did not seem surreal, it probably never happened. If it centered on trust and bravery and self-sacrifice, on some unquestioning loyalty to a man, a unit, a detachment, a mission, it was probably a lie. If it spoke of duty to God, to nation, to a religion, a belief, it was almost certainly a falsehood.

  If it appeared unbelievable, you were safe to believe it. If you listened to the telling and even the teller seemed to doubt the story himself, then that was the one you could bet your house on.

  War was a drama scripted by spite-fueled and evil children, by warped delinquents, by incarcerated madmen driven into a deep and irredeemable psychosis by the drugs and barbaric shocks of demented psychiatrists, by men with single eyes and hooks for hands and small shards of scorched glass in place of their souls.

  War was a firework display for the shallow entertainment of darker gods. War cleansed men of all that was best in them. It cleansed with fire, with bullets and blades and bombs and blood. It cleansed with loss and pain, and with its own sense of unique and incommunicable disbelief engendered in all who attended the ceremony of battle. In ten thousand years, all that had changed was distance. Perhaps, eons ago, there was some small nobility in seeing the face of the man you killed, in watching the already-too-brief light extinguished, in hearing the silence as breathing halted. Now you could kill a man a mile away. Now you could release bombs through clouds and obliterate thousands.

  At first you dropped the terrible fire from the sky and you believed it was purifying. In some small way, you were an emissary of right and truth and justice, perhaps of God. Later, when you saw the burned children, you understood you were simply an emissary from hell.

  There were those who got their kicks herding a half
-dozen sandal-footed, coolie-headed gook collaborators into a chopper and then throwing them out from a height of three hundred feet. Hands and feet, a guy at each end—Three-two-one-awaaaay—like teenagers at the poolside. The speed of their descent just kicked the air right out of them. Gaines never heard one of them scream. Not even the kids.

  A man who possessed a motivation for war was a man who hated. Hatred sourced its foundations in ignorance. Yet hatred of another was also hatred of self, for beneath all things we were the same. Agreeing to go to war did not make you wrong. It was agreeing to stay that was at fault. And the ones who went back a second time, a third time, had already lost so much of themselves, they knew they could never belong elsewhere.

  There were the rationales that came afterward. The alone times when men had to justify their actions, when they had to explain to themselves why they did those terrible things.

  But they did them in war. In times of war. They did not do them for love, nor for money, nor for the satisfaction of some dark and horrifying compulsion.

  Outside of war, you were faced—simply—with people. Gaines believed that the vast majority of what went on in people’s heads should stay in people’s heads. But people carried shadows inside them, and sometimes the shadows escaped.

  The death of Nancy Denton, what had been done to her, the things that Gaines had seen—this was an act performed out of some strange and terrifying vision of hell that exceeded much of what he had experienced.

  He had told Judith Denton that he would do his best to find the truth of what had happened.

  It went beyond that.

  Someone had murdered a girl. Someone had cut out her heart and replaced it with a snake. Someone had roughly stitched her body and buried it in mud, and there that body had remained—undisturbed—for twenty years. It had taken six men four hours to bring her back.

  There were questions to be asked. Many questions.

  The burden of responsibility came down upon him like a wave, like the downdraft of a Huey.