The Devil and the River

by R.J. Ellory

  He possessed his own ghosts and specters. His own phantoms. He would carry these things forever, and they would always lie heavy upon his conscience.

  He did not need any more.

  8

  Bob Thurston appeared at Gaines’s office a little after five. He apologized. He’d had to leave the autopsy to attend to a delivery at the hospital.

  “It is beyond belief,” Gaines said.

  “Beyond disbelief,” Thurston said.

  “You saw the snake?”

  “I did.”

  “Any thoughts?”

  Thurston shook his head. “What is there to think? Voodoo? I don’t know, John. There are some crazy, crazy people out there.”

  Gaines was quiet for a time, and then he said, “I saw Judith. I told her. She came and identified the body. I think it might be a good idea to go see her as soon as you can.”

  “I will,” Thurston replied.

  “And I need this kept as quiet as possible, Bob, for obvious reasons, but I know I’m whistling through a tornado on that one.”

  “Hell, then don’t say a goddamned word to your mother, John. She’ll be laying brooms across all the doorways and making us wear bundles of pig bristles …”

  Gaines smiled sardonically. “You see some line of black humor in everything?”

  “I have to,” Thurston replied. “Keeps me from drinking.”

  “My mother will find out,” Gaines said. “She’ll find out from one of the neighbors.”

  “You better tell Caroline not to say anything.”

  “Caroline is a nineteen-year-old with nothing better to do than help me look after my mother. She’s gonna be the first to get into it with her. I can’t stop her finding out, Bob, and I can’t stop the things she will do or say as a result. You know that. You know her better than anyone. Regardless, you’re changing the subject … Fact is, we have a sixteen-year-old girl murdered, buried in the riverbank, her heart removed. Took six of us to dig her out.”

  “So where do you even begin on something like this?”

  “I have no idea, Bob, no idea at all,” Gaines replied. “My first thought is that I might be looking for a killer who is dead themselves. This is twenty years old.”

  “You think some of the ones who were around at the time can help you?”

  “Hell, Bob, I don’t even know that there is anyone around apart from the girl’s mother. Right now, I don’t even have a confirmed cause of death.”

  “You think there’s anything in the voodoo idea? I mean, it sure as hell is the weirdest goddamned shit I ever heard of …”

  “I can’t discount anything,” Gaines replied. “I know this kind of thing goes on. When we were kids, we used to go down to Marie Laveau’s tomb and steal the pound cake that people left for Saint Expedite. Anything that involves a snake is going to be taken as a sign of Li Grand Zombi—”

  “But this is Mississippi, not Louisiana—”

  “Head west fifteen miles, you’re in Louisiana, Bob. The influence is as strong here as anyplace between here and Baton Rouge.”

  “So let’s just hope it was a regular psycho, eh?”

  “Let’s just hope. Last thing I need right now is ritual sacrifices, gris-gris ceremonies, and people turning up at your office with jimson weed poisoning.”

  “So I’ll go see Judith Denton. I think she needs to know she’s got friends right now. You?”

  “I’m going to go check on my ma, and then I’ll be back to see Powell. I need final COD and the autopsy report.”

  “Tell your ma I’ll be over tomorrow.”

  “I will.”

  “You know I upped her morphine yesterday.”

  “I could tell,” Gaines replied.

  “She’s rambling again?”

  “In and out of it. You know how she is.”

  Thurston walked to the door. He hesitated, turned back. “This is a horrific thing, John. What the hell are we dealing with here? A sixteen-year-old girl, a twenty-year-old murder, a snake instead of a heart, for Christ’s sake.”

  “I don’t know, Bob … Don’t know that I want to know.”

  “Sure you do. That’s why you’re doing this job. That’s why we all do what we do … so we can know the answers to shit like this.”

  “Go,” Gaines said. “Go see Judith. I’ll speak to you later.”

  After Thurston had left, Gaines—sitting alone in his office—remembered an incident.

  There was a grunt, name of Charles Binney. His helmet name was Too High on account of the fact that he was six four, maybe six five. It was a bright Tuesday morning outside of Nha Trang, near the foot of the Chu Yang Sin Mountains. There was a Vietnamese girl. Her name was not Me Quick Fuck or Suck Man Root or any of the other defamatory aliases with which such girls were christened by the members of Five Company. Her name was something like Kwy Lao, though perhaps with a Q and a handful more vowels. And Too High set his mind to impressing her by climbing a neem tree. Had Too High, arriving in-country no more than three months before, survived his brief excursion into the Southeast Asian theater of war, he would have described the young girl as angelic. Too High used such words because Too High was a cultured, book-reading kind of guy. It was not his height alone that singled him out, but also his intellect and vocabulary. Too High was an anachronism, always had been, and when his draft notice had arrived, his lack of resistance to military service was questioned by his younger brother. Too High had quoted Goethe: ‘Unless one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness … Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, magic and power in it. Begin it now.’

  The following morning, Charles Binney kissed his ma, shook his father’s hand, hugged his younger brother, and left for the war.

  The next time they saw him, he was a stars and stripes triangled into a military tuck.

  Kwy Lao had been amused by Too High’s scaling of the tree, for a neem tree isn’t the easiest thing in the world to climb. Spurred on by her apparent enthusiasm for this feat of daring, he attempted to climb higher and faster, even made a noise like a monkey. It was the attempted scratching of his own armpit that was his undoing. One hand seemed insufficient to bear the sudden weight of his lengthy frame, and he fell suddenly, silently, and altogether surprised. He broke his neck on impact, and the expression on his face was as calm and untroubled as a summer sky.

  Five Company had possessed neither the will nor the stamina to cut an LZ for a dust off, nor to call in a Huey or a Chinook to carry Too High home. They decided to commit him to the ground then and there, and while a young man from Boise, Idaho, called Luke “Dodge” Chrysler said a few words from the Bible, Too High’s body was sunk in a swamp. “Oh God, thou art my God,” he murmured. “Earnestly I seek thee, my soul thirsts for thee; my flesh faints for thee, as in a dry and weary land where no water is …” They were the only words Luke Chrysler knew—Psalms 63, the Psalm of David when he was in the wilderness of Judah. How he knew them, and why, he could not remember, but he did. And though this in itself did not seem fitting, seeing as how they were sinking him in a swamp, it seemed better to have some words quoted than none at all.

  Five Company RTO radioed a message, the message became a dispatch, the dispatch became a telegram, and then a flag. The flag was folded perfectly into something no bigger than a 9th Street Diner king-sized chili burrito, and it was delivered to the Binney household by a narrow-shouldered, pinch-faced man called Mr. Weathers.

  And so Charles “Too High” Binney—who fell from a neem tree while showing off for a girl called something like Kwy Lao, a breathtakingly pretty girl, slender as a fern, her ai do draped over her form like a ghost—died not in battle, not with the taste of blood on his teeth; died not for valor nor country nor simply the spirit of war, but with an erection and the promise of a good lay. Such was the idiocy and reality and simplicity of war. Of course, his parents were never told such a thing, for such a thing would not have been respectful of
the dead. They were told he’d been hit by a sniper while seeking refuge for his company on a bright Tuesday morning near Nha Trang at the foot of the Chu Yang Sin Mountains. His father, perhaps wishing to gain some sense of understanding, had searched out an atlas and looked for this place. He found it, right there on the tip of a country he had never even considered before, the width of his fingernail from something called The Mouths of the Mekong, and though he now knew where his son’s body lay, it did not ease nor explain the vast gulf of sadness into which he and his wife had been swallowed. And swallowed they were, like Jonah into the whale.

  Gaines remembered Binney’s face, as he did all those who died around him, in front of him, behind him. They all bore the same expression. The same as Nancy Denton. An expression like an empty house. In death, bodies do things that they could never do in life. They bend, they break, they hang upside down. A booby trap in a tunnel mouth turned a solider into nothing but blood and jutting bones, as if the force of war alone could fold a human being inside out.

  Gaines thought of Binney in that moment, the way his body disappeared into the swamp. He wondered then if Binney would still be the same, preserved like Nancy Denton.

  In his five years of police service, Gaines had not seen such a thing as Nancy Denton. He had seen enough, of course, but nothing so macabre, nothing so unsettling.

  Gaines’s twelve-month tour of duty had ended in October of 1968. Back then, as had remained the case right through, if a soldier agreed to serve another six months, he could take a thirty-day R & R at the army’s expense anywhere in the world. They would fly him out there, bring him back, pay him while he soaked up whatever world he’d been transported to, and then they would come and get him. Gaines did that. He didn’t know why. He completed his twelve months, he survived, and yet he could not face the prospect of going home. Going home seemed more fearful than staying in-country. He took the thirty days. He asked them to fly him to Australia, and they did. He was in Melbourne for a week, did nothing but chain-smoke, drink bourbon, listen to Hendrix and Joplin. He sat in bars crowded with Seabees who had served on coastal patrol boats in the Yellow Sea and Cat Lo; with brown water sailors; with Marine Corps and SEALs; with men from the Mobile Construction Battalion; with laconic and intimidating Special Forces flattops, their jackets bearing eight or ten gold hash marks, one for each six-month tour they had served. A week, that was all, and then Gaines applied for reintegration to his platoon. He knew that if he stayed for thirty days, most of the people he knew, most of his friends, would be dead by the time he got back. The application was received; Gaines was told to see an army psychologist. The psychologist asked questions that Gaines could not answer, and then he signed the release and Gaines was packed onto a flight and expedited to a combat zone near Ðk Tô.

  On the 12th of December, 1968, John Gaines was shot through the stomach in Buon Enoa, east of Ban Me Thuot. His platoon had been assigned to assist the Special Forces deployment run by 5th Group at Nha Trang. Special Forces were working “hearts and minds” on the Montagnard people, a minority peoples persecuted by the South Vietnamese. Their history of conflict with the South Vietnamese made them easy targets for Viet Cong subversion, but in exchange for their loyalty to the South, they were given military assistance and civic support. The program worked, and the Montagnard militia became enormously effective in search and destroys against VC bases and outposts.

  It was during one such mission that Gaines’s platoon came under heavy fire. Thirty-eight men went out, twenty-one came back, and of those twenty-one, eight were wounded. The bullet that hit Gaines had missed all vital organs. It was a through and through, but he bled heavily, and when he arrived in the field hospital outside of Ðà Lat, he was in poor shape. Gaines had survived Ðk Tô in November of the previous year, the heaviest conflict since the Ia Drang Valley in 1965. Back then, the fighting had been so intense that medevacs—the KIA Travel Bureau—could not land to collect the dead and wounded. Perhaps Gaines had believed himself impregnable, unassailable, blessed with divine protection. His mother, Alice, had written to him about faith. She was a Louisiana Catholic. She believed in God, in Jesus Christ who died for our sins, but she believed also in Papa Legba, in conjure, in grimoires, in Li Grand Zombi and gris-gris. She was a complex woman, a woman of strange superstitions and intense shifts of mood, and in her letters—the few that Gaines received—she spoke of perceiving him, guiding him, defending him against the shadow of death. It was not until Gaines returned to Whytesburg that he understood how ill she had become, that in his absence she had been diagnosed with cancer, that she was drifting between spells of extraordinary lucidity and morphine-induced hallucination. Gaines’s neighbors, Leonard and Margaret Rousseau, their daughter, Caroline—all of thirteen years old at the time—were good people, and they kept watch over her, did their utmost to assist her, but she was a difficult and ornery woman at the best of times.

  Whether Gaines had known that there was trouble at home, or if his wounding had merely reoriented him to the realness of his own mortality, he wasn’t certain. But when he was asked by an army chaplain if he wished to return to combat after his recuperation, he said no. He had completed his tour. He had fulfilled his obligation. He wanted out. He knew of his mother’s cancer. Had this not been the case, he believed the army might have held him to his agreement to serve the additional six months. He was discharged honorably, and his journey—combat zone to small-town sidewalk—was all of twenty-four hours. One day he was standing amid the mud and blood of a South Vietnamese field hospital, the next he was in front of the post office in Whytesburg with his discharge papers and a check in his pocket.

  Gaines did not tell his mother he had been shot. It would have served no purpose but to diminish the hardship of her own situation, and—more important—it would have invalidated the belief she possessed in her will for him to survive unharmed. She knew her faith had figured prominently in his return. He had survived, but he was not unharmed. None of those who returned were unharmed. As Narosky had said, In war, there are no unwounded soldiers.

  It was during the first weeks of his return that he befriended Bob Thurston. Thurston was a good deal older than Gaines, and he would spend time with Gaines when he visited Alice. Thurston would give her morphine, and while she slept, he would sit with Gaines and listen to the war stories. Thurston became John Gaines’s confidant, his confessor, most of all, his friend.

  It was Thurston who advised he apply for the sheriff’s department.

  “You have to have structure. You have to have a schedule. You cannot spend the rest of your life smoking weed and listening to Canned Heat.”

  “I don’t want to make any decisions until later …”

  “Later? You mean after Alice has died? That could be years, John, seriously. She is a tough woman, and the cancer she has is not so aggressive. It will be a long battle before she gives up. She still believes she has to look after you.”

  So, in May of 1969, Gaines did as Thurston had advised. He was accepted immediately. He was young, single, a Vietnam veteran with a service medal and a Purple Heart. He attended the police academy in Vicksburg, graduated in November of 1969, and was assigned to the Breed County Sheriff’s Department in January of 1970. In February of 1971, he was promoted to deputy sheriff, and then on October 21, 1973, the day following Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre, Whytesburg sheriff, Don Bicklow, fell down dead from a heart attack in the front hallway of his mistress’s house. His mistress was a fifty-two-year-old widow who lived out near Wiggins. Taking into consideration the fact that there was an election scheduled for January of 1974, an election that Bicklow would have won without contest, Breed County Council asked Gaines to hold Bicklow’s position for the intervening two months. After six weeks, no one having come forward to apply for the job, Breed Council petitioned for Gaines’s permanent assignment without election. Gaines did not contest the application, nor did the assigned representatives of the County Seat. So, at thirty-three years of age, John
Gaines became Mississippi’s youngest sheriff. He proved himself competent, not only in the day-to-day management of the department, but also in the small-minded politics of the thing. Seemed he had been born for the job. This was what people said. He did not speak of it, and perhaps was not fully aware of it himself, but Gaines did the job because the job was all he had. No wife, no girlfriend, no children, no father, his mother taking the long road to her grave, the routine and regularity of his existence punctuated solely by her sporadic but intense outbursts, her mutterings, her diatribes and polemics against Nixon and his cabinet, the morphine-induced hallucinations that she so vigorously believed were true. This was Gaines’s life. Had been his life until now, until July 24, 1974, when the rain had uncovered a twenty-year-old murder.

  One morning, no more than a week before he’d been wounded, Gaines shot a Vietnamese teenager in the face. He hadn’t meant to get a head shot. He’d intended to scare him, to warn him, to cause him to flee, but the guy dropped suddenly as he fired, perhaps thinking to turn the other way. However, whyever, it didn’t matter. Gaines triggered, the guy dropped, and he took a face shot right through the bridge of his nose and out the other side. He lay there surprised. Dead, but surprised. His eyes wide, his mouth agape, he looked like he’d been about to say something important and then had simply forgotten the necessary words.

  Gaines had walked over there, looked down at the plain black shirt, the black pants, the rubber sandals, the body inside them. The dead boy was no more than eighteen or nineteen. He had been carrying a French 9mm MAT machine gun, captured by the North Vietnamese in an earlier war. He had on a belt, tucked into it a cracked leather scabbard, within the scabbard a hunting knife. He had a single grenade.

  His eyes were like tight nuggets of jet. Black, depthless. And yet they burned with some profoundly bitter malice.

  Gaines looked at those eyes, and all he could think of was the child he never had, of how he used to sit on the porch with Linda Newman eating ice-cream sandwiches and watching the sky get closer until it was finally dark, and the fireflies in the fields had been like agitated, earthbound stars.