The Devil and the River

by R.J. Ellory

  “Hey, boy,” Gaines said, and the dog succumbed to Gaines’s tone of voice. His head went down, and his tail started wagging. He stroked the dog’s head.

  Gaines got in through the unlocked rear door, found a sack of dog biscuits and a bowl. He set them down in the yard, fetched a bowl of water, too, and just as he was closing up, he noticed something that caught his eye. Up near the front window, the angle of its placement catching the light through the front window, was a small aquarium. There was no water in it, and a flicker of movement within sent a shudder up Gaines’s spine.

  He was right. Garter snakes. Two of them. Bigger than the one found in the cavity of Nancy Denton’s chest, but garters all the same. He’d seen them here before, of course, but in light of recent events, they inspired a very different reaction.

  He would have to drive out and see Lester, if only to learn where Lester had gotten them from. Whytesburg was an old town, but still a town that aged only a year for every decade it existed. Maybe someone looking for a garter snake twenty years ago would look in the same places as Lester did now.

  Gaines radioed Hagen from the car, said he was taking a trip over to Cobb’s place, that he wouldn’t be long.

  “We gotta get on this Denton thing,” Hagen told him.

  “That’s what I’m on, Richard,” Gaines replied. “You heard about the snake thing, right?”

  “Yeah, sure did. What in God’s name is that all about, John?”

  “Well, maybe God knows, but I sure as hell don’t. Anyway, I got a couple of snakes down here at Cobb’s place, same kinda snakes as the one we found. I’m just gonna take a moment to find out where he gets them from, is all.”

  The drive from Cobb’s store to Cobb’s house was all of ten minutes, down along the county road that ran parallel to the Pearl River. Gaines pulled up in front of the place, steeled himself for the barrage of abuse that would more than likely come his way, and he went on up to the door.

  “Who’s there?” Cobb shouted from within.

  “Sheriff Gaines, Lester. You need to get on down to the store and sort out the hound you got tied up in the yard. He’s upsettin’ folk with all his hollerin’ and whatever.”

  “I’ll be there shortly.”

  “And I need to ask you about snakes.”

  There was a moment’s pause and then, “Snakes?”

  “Garter snakes.”

  “I got some if you want one.”

  Gaines shuddered again. He could see that dead snake, its tail in its mouth. “Want you to come on out here and talk to me civil, Lester. Don’t want to spend the next five minutes shouting through your front door.”

  “Hang fire there a moment, Sheriff.”

  Gaines waited.

  Cobb came to the door in dungarees and bare feet. His hair was tousled. He had an enamel mug in his hand. “You want some coffee, Sheriff? Just made it fresh.”

  “I’m good, thanks.”

  Cobb pushed open the screen door and let Gaines in.

  The house—as usual—was a sty. Cobb smiled. “Cleaning woman’s on vacation,” he said, just as he always did.

  “Garter snakes, Lester,” Gaines said. “You got two in a tank in the front of the store.”

  “You got inside the store?”

  “Went to get some biscuits for that damned noisy dog.”

  “Much obliged for that, Sheriff. So, the snakes. What about them?”

  “Where d’you get ’em?”

  “Down at the river; usual place.”

  “You see anyone else after snakes when you was down there?”

  “Mike is down there. Don’t know if he’s after snakes, but he’s always hangin’ around, crazy old motherfucker that he is. Well, I say he’s old, but he ain’t much more ’an fifty or fifty-five maybe.”

  “Mike?”

  “Yeah, Mike Webster. He fought the Japs, you know? Guadal-canal. He has some history, man. They call him the luckiest man alive. He wears the army jacket and whatever. He’s always down there. Wears camouflage fuckin’ paint on his face sometimes, you know? Talking to hisself most o’ the time. Says he likes it down there because the devil don’t like running water. Crazy, crazy son of a bitch.”

  Coming from you, that’s something, Gaines thought, and then there was another thought, the memory of a comment Judith Denton had made. Was there a Michael? Yes, there was. And hadn’t he been in uniform on the night that Nancy Denton had gone missing?

  “And he’s the only one you seen down there?”

  “Only one I seen regular. Asked him one time why he was always down there and he said he was waiting for someone.”

  “Waiting for someone?”

  “ ’S what he said.”

  “He say who he was waiting for?”

  “Nope. And I didn’t ask. He ain’t the sort of person you feel like you should encourage to converse, if you know what I mean. Kinda creepy. Looks at you like he’s figurin’ out how it would feel to wear your skin.”

  “How often’s he down there?”

  “He’s been there every time I go. Last time was two days ago, three maybe. I was down there doin’ some fishing, and he came along. We had a smoke. He talks a lot. Most of it I don’t fucking understand. Lot of stuff about the war in Japan.”

  “He lived around here long?”

  Lester shrugged. “Always been around, ’s far as I know. He came back here after the war, I think. He told me he was in a unit in fuckin’ Japan, and he was the only one who survived. And then there was that thing that happened in the factory back in whenever . . .”

  “Factory? What thing?”

  “Go see him, man. You go talk to him. Ask him about what happened in Japan, and then ask him about the fire in . . . hell, whenever it was. Fifty-two, I think. You go ask him about all of that. Helluva story, man, helluva story.”

  “What’s he look like?”

  “Kinda my height, sandy-colored hair, cut longish in back. Denims, army jacket, one of them bush hats like folks wear in the jungle an’ all. Has a beard and whatever. Kinda like a hippy maybe, but he has the mad eyes goin’ on.”

  Gaines couldn’t think of anyone fitting that description in Whytesburg. “Where does he live, Lester?”

  “Christ knows. I asked him one time, and he just said up the river a while. Was thinking he was from Poplarville, or maybe someplace in between.”

  “Okay, Lester, that’s really appreciated. Now, you finish up your coffee and get on down to that store of yours. You got enough complaints going on, you know?”

  “Hell, Sheriff, they’s animals. They’s gonna make a noise whatever you do with them. And them folks that complain? If they weren’t complainin’ about me, they’d be complainin’ about someone else. That’s just their nature.”

  Gaines said nothing. Cobb was right. Here is a dead child in the arms of her dead mother . . . now let us speak of small and inconsequential things.

  Gaines went on back to the car. He turned the way he’d come and headed for the office. Somewhere northwest was a World War II veteran called Mike, a man who had been here forever, and Gaines needed to find him. Whytesburg was a small town, and small-town ways never seemed to change. No matter what happened, people seemed to stay put, as if distrusting and disbelieving of any wider world. In this light, it was not impossible to consider that the Michael mentioned by Judith Denton and the Michael of whom Lester Cobb spoke were one and the same person.

  In Gaines’s experience, there were three types of war returnees. First were those who reintegrated, neither forgetting nor remembering, those who had somehow absorbed the horror, parceled it, packed it away. They found empty spaces every once in a while, gazing into some middle distance that was neither one place nor another. They saw things that others did not see, but they did not speak of them. Partly because to speak of them was to grant them strength and longevity, partly because no one would believe them. But they held it together. They came back, and they did all they could to belong again. Gaines was such a man—
still there, still fighting with memories, with conscience, but somehow there despite all.

  The second type were those who wore their history in all that they were: still wore fatigues and flak jackets, still woke sweating in the cool half-light of dawn, aware of shapes in the fog, aware of water around their ankles, the smell of blood and cordite and the sulfurous rot of dank vegetation. They were the ones on whom you kept a watchful eye, the ones who drank alone, their few conversations scattered with references to Bouncing Betties, toe poppers, Willie Pete, 105 rounds, and napalm. They would quote aphorisms from PsyOps propaganda pamphlets as if such aphorisms were gospel. They would talk of cutting LZs for dust offs, of long-range recon patrols. They needed routine. They needed orders. They were scared of the lonely places, the middle ground, the places between here and there, between departure and destination. They would smoke weed and get crazy-mischievous, calling random strangers from the Yellow Pages and making sinister threats. The past always finds you out. People know what you did afore you got here. The girl survived . . . She saw what you done. They stole restaurant napkins by the handful, motel matchbooks, even water dispenser cones. They had no use for them, but in some small way they believed they were striking a blow for the common man, the small guy, the working stiff, for those who had been betrayed by an uncaring government.

  The third type were the dead. The army of the dead. Always a greater army than those who survived.

  If “Mike from Poplarville,” or wherever the hell he was from, with his bush hat and his mad eyes, was down the Pearl River, then Gaines wanted to speak with him, if for no other reason than to see what he was doing, if he knew anything of snakes, if he perhaps remembered an incident that had taken place in August of 1954 when a sixteen-year-old girl had vanished from the face of the earth.

  He could not ask questions of Bicklow or Austin. Nancy Denton would remain as silent as she had been for the past twenty years. Now it was time to challenge the memories of those who had been here two decades before.

  But there was something else drawing Gaines in, something he could neither define nor determine. He could not clearly picture the girl’s face, despite the fact that he had seen her lying there on the mortuary slab only hours before. He could remember his father’s face, Linda Newman’s, the faces of Charles Binney and a host of other people who had briefly populated his life so many years before. But he could not remember Nancy, and he did not know why.

  August of 1954, Gaines had been fourteen years old. McCarthyism was in its dying throes, Elvis was recording his first single, Rocky Marciano was champion of the world, and Johnson would soon be head of the Senate. The same world, but a very different world in so many ways. The subsequent twenty years had seen the assassinations of both Kennedys and Martin Luther King, the beginning of the Vietnam War, his mother’s illness, the loss of Linda Newman and the child that never was, the end of so much hope.

  It had also seen a body lying undiscovered and preserved in the banks of the Whytesburg River.

  Perhaps Nancy—symbolically—had become the child that never was.

  Perhaps he—John Gaines, latterly of the nine circles of hell—was destined not to be haunted by those he himself had killed, but by those who had been killed in his absence.

  13

  Sheriff Graydon McCarthy of Travis County, Mississippi, was a simple man with simple secrets, and not so many of them. He was approachable, a talker, would always share a bottle, but there were things of which he did not speak and of which you did not ask. He did not bear question of his politics. You did not ask about money, neither where it came from, nor where it went. You did not ask of the unexpected disappearance and subsequent return of his father after two years of unexplained absence. You did not ask about the night of June 16, 1959, nor a girl named Elizabeth-May Wertzel and what she swore she would never repeat to a living soul. Beyond that, if you could get Graydon McCarthy to talk, you could ask him pretty much anything.

  Gaines found him at his desk in Bogalusa a little after ten that Thursday morning and was afforded the kind of courtesy that came from one man to another in the same line of work.

  Coffee was brought and accepted, a cigarette was offered but declined, and Gaines sat with McCarthy making small talk until Gaines approached the subject directly.

  “Mike, you say?” McCarthy asked. “Mike, Mike, Mike. War veteran. Mmmm . . .” He paused to think, to look through the window to the right of his desk and out into the forecourt of the Sheriff’s Office building as if the view would assist his memory. “Can’t say I do,” he finally replied, “but then, this is a big county full of small towns, and I tend to keep my eyes on the bad ’uns.”

  “As we all do,” Gaines said.

  “All say the same thing when they come in here, don’t they? Always desperate to tell us that they ain’t bad men. Well, I say, if you ain’t a bad man, then why the hell d’you keep actin’ like one?” He smiled at his own smartness and lit another cigarette.

  “So no one of that name with that description comes to mind? He might have a reputation. Word has it he’s a pretty wild character.”

  “Like I said, son, it’s a big county and I can’t be relied upon to know everyone. Around here you find people born, schooled, working, multiplyin’, getting’ old, and dyin’ within about a fivemile radius. Even those that leave tend to discover they don’t much care for the wider world, and they come right on back. You might try the motel.”

  “The motel?”

  “Northeast of here along 59, a handful of miles. I call it a motel. Ain’t nothin’ but a scattering of shacks that used to be a motel. Owned by a man called Harvey Blackburn. Drunks and hookers mainly. Always someone trying to get the place razed to the ground, but they ain’t managed it yet. I’d check there. If your man’s a crazy ’un, that just might be the kind of haunt he’d be hankering after.”

  Gaines thanked McCarthy, headed back to the car and took I-59. Follow 59 all the way to Meridian and it became I-20, took you west to Jackson and onward into Louisiana. Head the opposite way and it was no more than thirty miles to the Alabama state line, and that road would bring you right into Birmingham.

  Gaines figured he knew the place McCarthy had spoken of, this scattering of rundown motel shacks set in a crescent around a gravel forecourt. It sat a quarter mile behind a derelict gas station off of the highway. Gaines followed his memory and knew where he was within minutes.

  The place looked deserted, but there was music playing somewhere: Hendrix maybe.

  Gaines drew to a stop and got out. He stood for a while. The music played on. That was the only sound.

  Ten minutes waiting and he’d had enough. He headed for the first cabin on the right, knocked on the door, got no answer. Second and third cabin on the same side provided no response either. Second one on the left got a holler from within.

  “Hold up,” a woman’s voice called back.

  “Hey there,” Gaines said. “Sheriff’s Office, ma’am.”

  There was silence for a minute or so, but just as Gaines was about to call out a second time, the door opened.

  The woman was in her late twenties or early thirties. She had on worn-out jeans, a cheesecloth blouse, over it a suede vest with tassels hanging off of the front and back. Her belt was decorated with silver and turquoise ovals, like some sort of Native American Indian design. Her hair was long in back, her bangs almost in her eyes.

  “ ’S up?” she said.

  “Looking for Mike,” Gaines said.

  “Lieutenant Mike?”

  “He the vet?”

  “Sure is.”

  “That’d be him, then.”

  “He’s in the far one at the end,” the woman said. She pointed at the other side of the crescent of cabins. “Whether he’s in or not, I don’t know, but that’s where he lives.”

  The music had stopped. Gaines could smell grass.

  “ ’Preciated, ma’am,” he said, and touched the brim of his hat.

  The woman
neither smiled nor acknowledged him. She merely closed the door.

  Gaines walked back across the pitted gravel forecourt.

  Gaines could smell something rank before he even arrived at Lieutenant Mike’s cabin door. It was an overripe smell, beneath it the funk of rot and decay. It was obscured by joss or grass—he couldn’t work out which—but it was there all right. It was a smell from his past, a smell he’d hoped never to experience again.

  Gaines knocked on the door. There were sounds within.

  Gaines called out. “Mike!”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Sheriff Gaines, Whytesburg.”

  “Whassup?”

  “Need a handful of words with you, Mike.”

  “Busy right now.”

  “Need to see you now, Mike.”

  The smell was becoming too much. It was sweat and filth, a stench like bad meat, something even worse beneath that.

  There were more sounds within, and then the door opened a crack, and Gaines saw the man’s face, the faint vestiges of black-and-green camouflage on his skin, the same greasepaint they’d used back in the jungle. In that darkened visage, Mike’s eyes were white like a frightened animal.

  The smell came, too, that stench of fetid rot, and Gaines took a handkerchief from his pocket and held it to his face.

  He knew what he was dealing with then. Mike was in category two, those who still wore their history like a second skin. But Mike was a veteran of the Second World War, somewhere in his early- to midfifties, and thus he had carried it a great deal longer.

  Somehow war was a legacy and a heritage, handed down through generations. War was the history of the world. It connected with part of the mind, with the heart, the soul perhaps, and once connected, it never fully retreated. There was no forgetting, only a practiced unremembering, and yet you knew—without question—that the memories could always find you.