The Devil and the River

by R.J. Ellory

  Gaines couldn’t argue, didn’t want to. He had enough on his mind without starting some political debate with his mother. Besides, she was right. The January 1973 cease-fire had held, for sure, but it was only a matter of time before the Vit Minh would come in from Laos and Cambodia, and then Saigon would fall. However, America’s attention was on Nixon. He’d talked his way out of the frying pan and into the fire. Reports of the last US troops coming out of Southeast Asia at the end of March had been overshadowed by the resignation of Bob Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff, and a whole handful of others. It was a mess. Nixon himself had as much as admitted that there had been a cover-up. The country was in limbo, everyone waiting to see whether Nixon would be impeached. Nixon was a crook—no doubt about it—and more than likely Chief Justice Warren Burger would get those tapes and the curtains would come down.

  Alice Gaines drank her soup. John Gaines sat and watched The Bob Newhart Show with her, and then he fetched her sleeping tablets from the bathroom.

  As she drifted away, she held his hand. “How was your day, sweetheart?” she asked.

  “Same old, same old,” he said.

  She reached up and touched his face. “You look tired.”

  “I’m okay, Ma.”

  “You worry too much about me. You don’t need to have Caroline over here day in and day out. She’s a young woman now. She has things she needs to be doing. She has her own life.”

  “She’s happy to come over, Ma, and besides, I give her some money, and if she weren’t here, she’d have to go get a job, and she doesn’t want to do that right now.”

  “She should have stayed in school.”

  “She can do whatever she pleases, Ma; you know that. Don’t get on her about it, now. Just leave her be.”

  “She tells me . . .” Alice Gaines smiled wryly. She knew she was starting something that would never finish.

  “Ma—”

  “I’ll be gone soon enough,” Alice interjected, “and you’re not getting any younger, and if you want children—”

  “Ma—”

  She squeezed her son’s hand. “Enough,” she said. “I’ll leave you be. You want to be a bitter and lonely old man, then that’s your business.”

  Her eyes started to droop. She inhaled deeply, exhaled slowly, and Gaines knew she was almost asleep.

  “Love you, Ma,” he whispered.

  “Love you, Edward,” she whispered back, and Gaines knew that in whatever world she inhabited when she slept, his father was there. Edward Gaines, the father that never was.

  Maybe Edward was waiting for her. Maybe it would be best to just let her go. Gaines glanced at the morphine tablets in a bottle on the bedside table. He closed his eyes for a moment and then shook his head.

  He rose slowly, removed the tray, drew one of the pillows out from behind his mother’s head, and eased her down. She did not stir or murmur.

  Gaines left the room, headed back to the kitchen to wash up and make himself a sandwich. He sat in the front room, ate slowly, drank a glass of root beer.

  He thought of his father, of his mother, of what she would have to say about Nancy Denton.

  One dead body was more disturbing than a hundred. One dead body was you, your friend, someone you loved, someone you just knew. A hundred dead was a featureless mass, an event, a happening, something distant and disconnected.

  Gaines thought of the ones who never came home. The ones who never would. Just like Nancy Denton. Families kept looking, kept hoping, kept praying, all of them believing that if they wished hard enough, well, the wish had to come true. Not so. They did not understand that if a wish was destined to be realized, then it needed to be wished only once. Real magic was never hard work. And even if they did return, they would see that the world they’d left behind would never accept them again, would never contain them, would never be big enough or forgiving enough to absorb what they had become.

  Here he was—a veteran, a casualty of war—starting a new war here in Whytesburg. A war against hidden truths. If there was one thing he knew, it was the degree of creativity and imagination that could be employed to bring a life to some unnatural end. But this? This was without precedent.

  The strength of the heart had been measured—not in emotional terms, not in terms of love or passion or betrayal, for this was not possible. It had been measured in physical terms, in pounds of pressure per square inch, the force with which it could move so many gallons of blood for so many meters at such and such a speed. But the heart, irrespective of its power, was silent until fear crept in. Until panic or trauma or terror assaulted our senses, the heart went quietly about its powerful, secret business. Now Gaines believed his heart was more alive than it had been since leaving Vietnam.

  Mayhem and a dark kind of magic had seemed inseparably blended as he’d looked down into the cavity of Nancy Denton’s chest, as he had seen the basket, the snake that had been within it.

  When you saw a blond, nineteen-year-old high school football star decapitate a fifteen-year-old Vietnamese kid and then stand there for snapshots, the head dangling from his hand by the hair, its eyes upturned, the rictus grin, the pallid hue of bloodless flesh, you knew something was wrong with the world. You never looked at people the same way again.

  This was the same. The same sense of surreal and morbid fascination. The same sense of dark and terrible wonder.

  Gaines closed his eyes and breathed deeply.

  Seemed that we all made a deal with God. Believe, trust, have faith in His goodness, and it will all be fine. Well, hell, it wasn’t fine. Never had been, never would be. It was all horror and bullshit.

  Gaines truly believed—when it came to deals with God—that it sure looked like someone wasn’t holding up their end of the deal.

  11

  The years will always erase the precise memory of a face, but they cannot erase my recollection of how beautiful Nancy Denton was.

  And I was not the only one who thought Nancy Denton was the most beautiful girl in the world.

  I know that everyone in Whytesburg thought she was an angel, and I think half the world would have agreed.

  I remember her standing there near a turn in the road, and as soon as she saw me, she started running. I ran, too. Didn’t matter whether I’d seen her an hour before or a day or a week; seeing Nancy was always the best thing.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey back.”

  “You ready?”

  “As ever,” I replied.

  She twirled then, and she said, “This is my best dress for dancing. I am going to dance with Michael until the sun goes down, and then I will just keep on dancing.”

  I laughed with her. She looked so happy.

  This was how it was. This was how it was meant to be. I believed it, but Nancy believed it more.

  Before Michael Webster came home from the war, there was just me and Nancy. There was Matthias Wade, of course, and it was so very obvious that Matthias loved Nancy as much as it was possible for one person to love another. If she hadn’t fallen head over heels for Michael, then maybe she would have been Matthias’s girl. But—like my mom said—maybe that never would have happened, the Wades being who they were an’ all. Anyway, Michael Webster did come home from the war, and everything changed.

  Michael was famous before he even got off the train. We had seen his picture in the Whytesburg Gazette. He had a Purple Heart and some other medal that I cannot now recall the name of, and there was a party for when he arrived. It was October of 1945, and I was all of five and a half years old, but even I knew who Michael Webster was.

  Michael was twenty-two years old, and every girl in Whytesburg wanted to marry him.

  Sometimes, a town like this, the most interesting thing going on was the weather, and that didn’t change much more than once a month. But this was a big deal. This was a special day. This was a historic event. Michael Webster came home from the war, the only member of his unit to survive, and he was Whytesburg born and bred.
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  He was shy and humble, and he said he hadn’t done much to be such a hero, but that made people love him all the more. Seemed the more self-effacing he was, the more they built him up. It went on for weeks, it seemed. He couldn’t do anything for himself. He couldn’t put his hand in his pocket for anything. Everyone took care of him. Everyone wanted to be Michael Webster’s friend.

  Nancy was all of seven years old. I was two years behind her. We thought Michael Webster was like a movie star from Hollywood. People said he should wear his uniform all the time. People said that everyone should know what a great hero he had been. I think Michael just wanted to disappear into anonymity. I think he just wanted to be a normal person, but it seemed that no one was going to let him.

  After a while, the hubbub died down.

  And then Michael seemed to withdraw. He had his mother’s place down at the end of Coopers Road, and he stayed there most of the time. Everyone thought he would get a job, but he didn’t. Not for a long time. He seemed to want nothing but his own company. It stayed that way for four or five years, and then he started work at the machine plant west of Picayune. And then a while later, he met Nancy, really met her, and that was when it all changed.

  Me and Nancy were already friends with the Wades by that time. It was 1950, if I remember rightly. Matthias was seventeen, Catherine was fifteen, Eugene was twelve, and Della was seven. I remember their mom as well. Her name was Lillian, and she was the most beautiful woman in America, perhaps the world. Seemed to me that some people had been personally blessed by God. Here she was, as beautiful as any magazine picture I had ever seen, and she was married to one of the richest and most powerful men in America, and she had four children, all of them kind and sweet and funny and smart.

  I mean, Matthias was the eldest, but despite his age, despite his family, he never played boss. He never played that card. It was as if he had set himself to doing all he could to make us happy.

  It was—at least to me—a magical time.

  We played pinochle for nickels and dimes, and we played it with serious faces, like we were betting on the outcome of a capital trial or a gunfight.

  I would make wisecracks, and Michael would do a John Wayne voice and say, “Well, missy, that’s an awful big mouth for such a little girl.”

  Other times, Matthias was so darn serious, quoting lines of poetry that he’d learned in order to impress us, to impress Nancy most of all, considering himself some type of philosophical outlaw, a Frenchman perhaps, a European of indistinct origin. A sudden teenage growth spurt had stretched him unexpectedly. He seemed to forever be apologizing for his height, not with words, but with awkwardness and hesitancy, as if he imagined himself clumsy and awkward when he was in fact not. His body language was a collection of confusing signs, as if physical movement was something new to him, and he was still furiously working to get a grip on what was going on. Forever agitated, all elbows and knees and mumbled apologies. There was little he could not break or spill or damage. I imagined there would be an abundance of glue in his house, and someone—patient as a fisherman—was forever following in his wake with a sharp eye and a steady hand for delicate repair work. Matthias carried this awkwardness through his childhood and into his teens, carried it well it seemed, for awkwardness appeared to be the only thing about him still undamaged. People tried to avoid him, but could not. They gravitated toward him, magnetized into some strange, intractable orbit, perhaps no greater motivation than the simple curiosity of seeing what he could now bring to ruination by personality and presence alone.

  I saw something else in him. In his eyes were a thousand secrets and always that tight-lipped tension that suggested some desperate unfulfilled urge to tell the truth and be damned. He wanted Nancy to love him as desperately as he loved her, and yet he knew she never would. His compassion was in his silence, in the strength it took not to tell. That’s how I knew he was a good person. It would have been cruel to tell the truth, and so he did not.

  But more than anything, Matthias’s mind was full of magic, too, and he shared it equally.

  Until Michael became one of us, and then everything changed a hundred times and then a hundred times more.

  It was so right, but it was so wrong.

  How do I know that?

  Because of what happened, that’s how.

  But in that moment, standing there near the turn in the road, we knew nothing but excitement for the day ahead.

  I remember what Nancy said as we started walking.

  “I hope the summer lasts forever . . .”

  That’s what she said.

  She was smiling, her eyes so bright and clear, and she asked me if I had to choose just one, would I fall in love with Matthias or Eugene.

  I was not like Nancy. I couldn’t talk about such things without feeling embarrassed.

  “Oh, come on,” she said. “I reckon you think about Eugene just as much as he thinks about you.”

  “Nancy, stop it! Really, I mean it. Stop teasing me.” I felt my cheeks flush with color.

  “Or maybe you want me to think that you love Eugene, when really you love Matthias.”

  “I don’t love either of them, okay? Really. Now stop it.”

  She touched my arm. “I’m just playing, Maryanne. You know I am.”

  “Well, I don’t like it,” I said, but I lied. I did like it. I wanted to think about Eugene. I wanted to think about Matthias. Sometimes I made believe I was a princess and they were gallant knights, and one day they would fight a duel over me and I would marry the victor. At the same time, I knew it was just a silly dream and that neither of them loved me the way that Nancy loved Michael.

  “So come on . . . let’s hurry. Michael is going to meet us on Five Mile Road,” Nancy said, and she grabbed my hand.

  “Is everyone going to be there?” I asked. “Della and Catherine too?”

  “Catherine will come only if her dad says she has to, and Della is going to be with us all summer.”

  “Catherine can be so bossy sometimes.”

  Nancy stopped dead in her tracks. “Last week, you know what she said to Matthias?”

  “What?”

  “She said that I was childish.”

  “She did not.”

  “She absolutely did,” Nancy said. “She said I was childish and immature.”

  “I think she’s jealous.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of how pretty you are and that Michael loves you and doesn’t love her.”

  “Oh, don’t be silly, Maryanne.”

  “I’m serious, Nancy. I think she’s jealous.”

  “Well, if she is, then she deserves to go crazy with jealousy and end up in a madhouse.”

  “Nancy, you can’t say that! That’s an awful thing to say about someone.”

  “I don’t care, Maryanne. I am not childish and immature.”

  “Of course you’re not, Nancy. But you can’t go wishing bad things on people. You know what my ma says about that.”

  Nancy twirled again. “Let’s not talk about Catherine. Let’s talk about something else.”

  And then we did—about Michael, as always, about Matthias and Eugene, about how Della was going to be beautiful like her mother, about what records Matthias would bring and whether he would have ham in the picnic basket or maybe cheese from Switzerland and fresh bread and lemonade.

  Nancy was always ahead of me, running a few steps, turning around, walking backward as we talked. One time she stumbled, nearly fell, and for some reason we couldn’t stop laughing.

  And then Michael appeared in the distance, and he raised his hand, and from that moment until we reached him, it was as if I were no longer there.

  I became a ghost perhaps, which now—looking back—seems both ironic and prophetic.

  Perhaps we all haunted the edges of Nancy’s universe that summer. Perhaps Michael and Nancy were stars, and we were merely satellites in orbit.

  She was there, and then she was gone. And though the memory o
f her face would fade, the memory of that day in August would haunt me for the rest of my life.

  12

  Gaines’s first order of business on Thursday morning was to go see Lester Cobb.

  Lester looked like the kind of feller who’d eat his dinner straight off of the floor. He transmitted a dense wave of stupidity, as if all who were drawn into it would find themselves making foolish utterances and inadvertent quips. Surely this could not have been the truth, but such was the profundity and abundance of Lester’s ignorance that it seemed such a way. He perpetually wore a suspicious expression, as if wary of being gypped or deceived. He ran the pet store in Whytesburg, a pet store that seemed to be closed more than open, and certainly more trouble than it was worth. Gaines would get a report and send Hagen or one of the uniforms down there. Some howling and caterwauling beast was forever in back disturbing neighbors and passersby, and Lester Cobb would be dragged from his home to feed the thing or let it loose. Gaines had had words with him on three or four occasions, said he would get the Animal Welfare people in to close him down, and Cobb would stand there, his tics and twitches in full force, a nervous habit that saw him constantly finger-tipping imaginary lint from the cuffs of his jacket, and say, “Yes, sir, Sheriff Gaines. Yes, sir, indeedy.” And that would be that. Cobb would feed his animals and lie low for a month or two. Gaines would see him in town, off down the street wearing that unique and extraordinary expression, as if ever alert for underhanded overtures and con tricks from strangers.

  That Thursday morning was different. Gaines wanted to see Lester about snakes. He arrived and found the pet store closed, the same sign in the window as ever. BACK IN THIRTY MINUTES. If urgent, call 224-5659. Gaines could just imagine it. Hey, Lester, you gotta get back here quick! It’s an emergency! We need three white mice and a talking bird!

  Driving out to Cobb’s house had not been on the agenda. Gaines needed to be in the office, needed to get active on the Denton killing, but the riot of barking that erupted from behind the store forced his hand. If he didn’t deal with this, there would be one phone call after another about Lester’s damned noisy dogs. Gaines went around back and looked over the fence. Thankfully, the hound was chained. Gaines vaulted the fence and then he stood there quiet and still until the animal settled. He approached it slowly.