The Devil and the River

by R.J. Ellory

  Still, even now, six years on, Gaines would sometimes wake and think, Where the hell am I? It had happened when he was awake also, drifting out of some conversation, his eyes unfocused, gazing into the middle ground between somewhere and nowhere else, and then he would return, slowly, as if surfacing through dark and cloudy water, water that held the stink of human waste and death, and he would have to pretend he had heard the conversation in which he had just been engaged.

  War was a holiday from reality: While you were there, it seemed as though you’d never been anywhere else; upon your return, a week felt like an hour, a year little more than a single day. Time stretched, bent, folded, collapsed; time was both ally and enemy, friend and foe; time was a sleight-of-hand parlor trick, the irony being that the recognition of its reality has been lost with the passage of itself. War changed nothing, and yet it changed everything, depending simply upon your absence or presence.

  In war, a lot of people lost it. Some got it back. Lieutenant Mike—whoever the hell he was, whatever the hell he had seen—seemed to be one of those who had not.

  “Do for you?” Mike asked.

  “My names is Gaines. I’m the sheriff in Whytesburg.”

  “So you said.”

  “I understand you are a veteran, Mike.”

  Mike frowned; then he smiled. “You been out there in ’Nam, ain’t you?”

  “Yes, I was.”

  Mike grinned. “Oh man, I shoulda gone there. I really shoulda gone.”

  Gaines said nothing.

  Mike stood there silently, looking inward at nothing for a good ten seconds, and then he seemed to snap right out of it. He grinned again. “You wanna come in? You wanna come in and have a drink or something?”

  “Nothing to drink,” Gaines said, “but yes, sure, I’d like to come in.”

  Mike stepped back and opened the door, and even as Gaines took the first step into the room, he knew. Despite the stench, the face paint, there was something else going on, and he sensed—somehow, someway—that it was inherently connected to the death of Nancy Denton. What had McCarthy said? Even those that leave tend to discover they don’t much care for the wider world, and they come right on back.

  Lieutenant Mike had carried a lot of darkness back from the war, and perhaps he had chosen Whytesburg as the place to share it with the world.

  14

  Everyone’s war was different. Personal. Unique.

  Gaines could think of it, could speak of it, could remember every detail.

  Sometimes it seemed that the flares just dropped and hovered, a pale light hanging there above the ground like a ghostly multitude, the myriad dead haunting the land where they fell. And he knew the dead would always hold court, remaining long after he had departed, long after the earth and trees and sky and rivers had forgotten who he was or why he was there. It was a simple land, but its history was complex and thus never known at all, or too easily forgotten.

  There were endless numbers of ways to die, both natural and man-made—malaria, gangrene, snakebites, bullets, bombs, bayonets, mortars, grenades, booby traps, staked pits, napalm, friendly fire, burial alive in the networks of tunnels that lay beneath the VC outposts, the heat, the rain, the rivers, the mudslides, the hopeless mediocrity of inadequate supply lines that gave you too little ammunition in your time of need. And tigers. Some of them had been killed by tigers. Most of all, there were those who died because of their own lack of belief that they could survive. As one NCO used to tell Gaines, Only things that can kill you out here are faithlessness and shortness of breath.

  Most cheerful guy Gaines ever met worked in Graves Registration. He dealt with the dead from dawn to dusk and all the hours beyond. Would have seemed to be the very worst of miserable tasks, but no, apparently not. If others were dead, well, it wasn’t him. That’s how come he smiled so much. People expected it of him after a while. If a guy like that doing a job like this could stay cheerful, then maybe it wasn’t all as bad as it seemed. Wherever you were, there were always worse places to be. Strange how consideration of a far greater hell could lift your spirits.

  Gaines remembered Coleman lanterns; he remembered the Givral Restaurant on the corner of Le Loi and Tu Do.

  He remembered the time a commander ordered his men to load ten or fifteen dead Viet Cong into a chopper and then drop them like so many sacks of flour into a VC-sympathetic ville. They rained down from five hundred feet, crashing through the roofs of hooches, killing animals stone dead, exploding on the ground with a noise you could hear above the whirlwind of rotor blades. “It’s not psychological war,” the commander had shouted. “It’s just war.”

  He remembered a beautiful blonde attaché from the Joint US Public Affairs Office, somehow standing amid all the mayhem and carnage, head to toe in a cream linen pantsuit, her eyes bright blue, her corn-silk hair woven back from her face in a French braid, some sort of demigoddess—surreal, unbelievable, desperately, heartbreakingly, impossibly beautiful. You didn’t just want to fuck her; you wanted to make love to her, and you wanted to make love forever. Gaines believed she should have led them into battle. The blond girl right there at the frontline, the amassed battalions and companies and units behind, the choppers flanking, the strike force and heavy bombers overhead, and she in her cream linens, her corn-silk hair rushing behind her in the downdraft, in her hand a golden spear, like some Boudicca, hurling them forward at the enemy, one mighty scream from every lung, and the war would have been over. For a good while, he dreamed of her, and then he dreamed no more. War accepted everyone. In war, there was no racism, no bigotry, no intolerance, no division, no separation of race, color, creed, denomination, nationality, age, or gender. War would consume a five-year-old Vietnamese child who had seen nothing of life just as effortlessly and hungrily as it would consume a forty-year-old Marine Corps veteran with an insatiable thirst for dead VC.

  War was crazy, but it possessed a craziness that could be understood. There were rules, and the rules were simple. Sometimes Gaines wondered if he didn’t want to go back there just for a rest.

  And, often, Gaines believed it had been a privilege to be so utterly, indescribably afraid. If you stayed afraid, you might make it through. That fear kept you alert; it kept your head in the game, and thus—possibly—it would enable you to keep that same head on your shoulders.

  There were others who became unafraid. There were guys who became so numb to everything, they stopped looking and they stopped caring. They would walk out into gunfire with the certainty that it was all a dream.

  Gaines believed that Mike Webster might be one of these men, the ones who had lost all connection to reality, the ones who had experienced emotions so far beneath and beyond actuality that they now lived in a different universe.

  Gaines looked at Mike Webster, and he could see so many other men, so many who did not come back. Perhaps they returned physically, but not mentally or spiritually. They were still in-country. Would always and forever be in-country. In-country was the same, whichever war you spoke of.

  It took a while for Gaines’s eyes to become accustomed to the darkness within Webster’s room, but when they did—when he started to pick out individual items among the shadows—he knew that Webster had slipped whatever moorings might have tethered him, and now he was elsewhere.

  “Some folks, the way they think, they forever seem to come at something backward. Can’t see a thing for what it is. Forever considering something ain’t what it appears to be . . .”

  Webster’s words hung in the air for a moment, and then he laughed. He lowered himself into a deep armchair, and Gaines noticed how the stuffing protruded from holes in the arms and the headrest. It was almost identical to the chair in Judith Denton’s house.

  Gaines took a seat facing him—a plain wooden chair that creaked as he sat down.

  “S’pose that’s just the way some folks is wired, is all,” Webster went on. “Sometimes everybody’s looking just so damned hard, they head out and overlook the obvious, you
know?”

  Webster reached for a half-empty bottle of rye, uncorked it, drank from it. He wiped the lip, handed it to Gaines.

  Gaines shook his head, looked down for a moment. Beneath his feet was a pale brown rug, across it a dark stain that could have been blood or mud or oil. To his right was a low table, on it a collection of books, the titles obscured but for one slim volume of poetry by Walt Whitman. Beside the books were items he recognized with vivid familiarity: army-issue knives, a compass, webbing, a single boot, two .45s, a box of shells, an empty bandolier, a water canteen.

  Against the left-hand wall were stacked boxes of numerous sizes, the uppermost balanced precariously on those beneath. Draped over the corner of one was a flak jacket.

  The single window had been covered with a doubled-up bedsheet, and through it the light was dim and indistinct.

  The more Gaines looked, the more he saw things that he did not wish to see.

  Webster was holed up in here, bedded down. He had turned a motel cabin into some kind of foxhole, and he was waiting out whatever firefight was still raging in his head.

  And Gaines could smell the sweat, the fear, the paranoia, the tension. It was an all-too-familiar smell.

  “Things happen, right?” Webster said.

  Gaines nodded. “Right,” he said.

  “More bad than good, most times.”

  Gaines stayed silent. He figured silence was the most effective encouragement he could give for whatever Webster had to say.

  It was eleven in the morning; it could have been midnight, three a.m., anytime at all, and they could have been anywhere. Felt like Whytesburg stopped at the door, almost as if it didn’t want to come in.

  “I was in the war before this one,” Mike said. “Joined up in May of forty-two, just four days after my nineteenth birthday. Was there in Guadalcanal in November of the same year.” He took another swig from the bottle. “After we secured Henderson Field, we went in, the only army battalion alongside six other marine battalions. Vandergrift had the First Marine Division. They wanted offensive actions west of the Matanikau River. Edson ran the show, and he wanted us to capture Kokumbona. Japs had their Seventeenth Army just west of Point Cruz. They were falling apart. They had been there forever. Disease was rife, they were malnourished, battle-fatigued, and we had more than five or six thousand men coming on strong. But they were merciless bastards. Fanatical. They gave us everything they had. November third, I was in a foxhole with my section. Nine of us left, all hunkered down to weather it through, and they hit us direct. Eight dead, one living.” Webster smiled, almost nostalgically. “And here I am, Sheriff Gaines of Whytesburg. Knocked sideways and senseless I might be, but here I fucking am.” He laughed, but there was little—if any—humor in that sound. “I seen it all, man, seen all that shit and then some. I spent weeks on point or rear cover, or maybe walking ridgelines. Never in the middle. Always visible. You know, if there was someone who was gonna get it today, well, that someone would be you. Like I said, it changes your fucking viewpoint, man.”

  Mike drank again. Once more he offered it to Gaines. Gaines declined.

  “Sometimes you would come back from a search and destroy, and you would simply puke, and then you would cry, and then you would puke some more. You would feel neither better nor worse, just confused, cheated perhaps, like God was on no one’s side. He was just fucking with everyone, you know? I feel like I’ve been fucked by God. Someone said that to me one time . . .”

  Another pause.

  Gaines could not have described how he felt. Sweat was running from his hairline and down his brow. His scalp felt electrified, as if every hair on his head was standing at attention. He felt the same as he had back then. Webster’s words, his monologue, his memories . . . they brought it all back like it was yesterday.

  “Most of the bad stuff happens at night,” Webster said.

  Gaines shuddered. Did he mean now, or back then?

  “At night, you know? When the journalists and correspondents couldn’t take pictures. Man, I’d see them boys come down from wherever after forty-eight hours’ break, a half-dozen cameras slung around their necks like Hawaiian garlands, and there was still that distant look in their sun-bleached eyes, the look that came from watching the worst that the world could deliver through a viewfinder.” Webster laughed. “Present and correct, but not present and definitely not correct. Involved, but as spectator, not a participant. Even when they managed to grab a few hours’ sleep in a temporary barrack somewhere, they didn’t shower or shave, because they believed that if they washed the stink off of their skin, they’d be washing away their shield. War stink is camouflage; it’s disguise and protection, as good as any GI flak jacket. Those boys mailed cans of film out of combat zones by the fucking bucket load, but the shots that told the truth never made the presses, right?”

  Gaines nodded. He leaned back a little. The chair creaked.

  Webster leaned further toward Gaines, as if trying to keep him within the circle. The smell around him was a rank blend of wet dog and whiskey.

  “You ever have a friend out there, Sheriff? I mean, a real friend, someone who watched your back, someone who looked after you, someone who was always there when you were ready to blow your own brains out just to get away from the horror?”

  “Yes,” Gaines said. “Yes, I did.”

  Webster smiled. “I had a friend like that, too . . .”

  Gaines could see the Highlands then, as if he had returned only yesterday. Mountainous peaks, valleys like ruptures in the earth, as if something from within, some terrible force, had split the world at its seams. The bleak expanses of open ground, ground without respite, without cover, the sudden ravines and gorges, the scattering of Montagnard villages where the War of Hearts and Minds was being fought to engage them as allies, not suffer them as enemies. Up there the days were so wildly hot, the nights so freakishly cold, that there was no way to acclimate. The Ia Drang battles of ’65, battles that were over long before Gaines ever arrived in-country, were still a subject that evaded discussion. The Highlands were a country of the past, and the present would never find it. The reported VC dead at Ðk TÔ didn’t tally with the number of bodies they found. Hundreds, thousands of dead had just vanished. Where had they gone? Had the earth swallowed them? Did the earth up there just absorb its own? If ever there was a war, it had begun there. If ever it had ended, it had ended there. It was impossible to know. The Highlands were a country with no time, a country out of time, a country of ghosts.

  He remembered late ’67, a trip up to Twenty-fifth Division HQ at Cu Chi.

  Gaines closed his eyes for a moment, turned his head toward the window as if following a sound, and then he smiled.

  Gaines opened his eyes, looked back at Webster. He considered the fact that here was a man who had somehow survived the very same war that his own father had not. Is this how his own father would have been, had he survived? Gaines also considered the fact that he and Webster had themselves fought the same war in the same type of terrain, just twenty-five years apart.

  “I spent weeks up there,” Webster said. “Sometimes I wonder if I left my mind up there.” He grinned. “The trees and rocks, the dirt beneath your feet . . .” His voice trailed away.

  “Need to ask you about something, Mike,” Gaines said, steeling himself, feeling his fingernails digging crescents into the palms of his own hands.

  Webster seemed not to hear Gaines. “You know, it took me more than a year to learn how to sleep again. Back then I could baby sleep, you know? Just one moment of stillness, sitting, lying down, even leaning against a tree, and I was gone.” Webster shook his head and closed his eyes. His lids seemed to come down in slow motion, like a lizard. “I knew a guy, a marine from Boise, Idaho, and he would just lie down next to the dead and find his rest there. I asked him why. He shook his head, man . . . just shook his head and said, ‘You ever get to the point where you’re too tired to be afraid?’ You know, I never did answer that question. I f
igure he granted the dead some invisible shield or something. Like, he knew that the gods of war wouldn’t waste their energies killing people twice, and so he would lie down there among them as that was gonna be the safest sanctuary of all . . .”

  Gaines saw the intensity in Webster’s eyes, as if emanating mental waves, vibrations, some sort of influence that would change the way others reacted toward him. His features were animated, his words alive. He spoke with passion and fervor, that insistent and emphatic tone reminiscent of so many Baptist preachers. But here there was no tentful of repentant sinners, merely a single man, but still Webster eulogized as if he were assigned to redeem souls otherwise lost.

  “Man, I tell you . . . sometimes the only certainty was that if you were killed today, you could not be killed tomorrow. There weren’t too many sure things, but that was one you could bet your house on.”

  “Mike,” Gaines said. “I gotta ask you about something . . .”

  Webster turned and looked at Gaines. Everything he did seemed to be at half speed.

  “I need to ask you if you know someone called Nancy Denton.”

  Webster smiled. “Seems some men meet their destiny on the very road they took to avoid it.” He was silent for a time. He looked directly at Gaines, and Gaines wondered whether there were tears in Mike Webster’s eyes.

  “You wanna ask me about Nancy Denton?”

  Gaines’s thoughts fell silent. His skin was cold, dry like a snake, and he felt hollow inside. Utterly, completely hollow.

  “Been waiting twenty years for someone to ask me that question, Sheriff Gaines.”

  Gaines’s chest felt like a lightbulb, a vacuum, a fragile vacuum of absolutely nothing. He felt as if he would just simply implode.

  “Waiting twenty years for that one single question, but I cannot tell you anything . . .”

  Gaines’s intake of breath was audible.

  Webster smiled knowingly. “The shit I seen, man . . . a man’s flesh falling straight from the bone like all-night ribs, nothing more beyond gravity required to bring it away. Tell you this right now, that’s the sort of shit no one should ever have to see.”