The Devil and the River

by R.J. Ellory

  Gaines thanked the man, got back in his car and drove on.

  En route, he passed the working teams, lines of men chained together at the ankles pitching rocks into buckets, erecting fence posts, turning fields over by hand. Some of them sang; some of them did not. The whites were separated from the blacks, yet all of them wore the same striped pants and jackets, and those that had no jackets wore blue shirts with MSP emblazoned on the back in white letters.

  The work seemed ceaseless, repetitive, mind-numbing, and physically strenuous. Out here you would get nothing but lean like a hunting dog. But there was nowhere to run, just nowhere at all. Wherever you looked, there was just the same absence of anything definable. No landmarks, no trees, no ridged banks behind which to hide or seek respite from the sun. And the wardens were mounted on horseback, armed with Springfield .30-06s, sidearms, and bull-whips. Gaines figured any one of them could run down a man in a heartbeat, bring him to the ground with a nudge from the horse’s flank, and it would all be over. Then it would be a halfway-to-senseless beating with Black Annie and thirty days in the hole. Parchman Farm had earned its reputation. It was not somewhere you wanted to wind up.

  Gaines found the administrative office complex, a scattering of no more than half a dozen clapboard buildings, just where the old man had told him. He asked after Ted McNamara, found him pretty much as he expected—rail-thin, his skin the color of parchment and aged the same way, an expression that spoke of a fundamental and perpetual mistrust of all persons, said mistrust not completely unfounded due to his line of work.

  “Well, son, you gotta have one of them visiting authorization chitties,” was McNamara’s response to Gaines’s reason for being up there at the Farm.

  McNamara’s office was one of the clapboard sheds, two narrow windows, a desk, two chairs, a filing cabinet, a fan that moved the air around lethargically and yet did nothing to cool it. McNamara chained smokes one after the other, and the room hung with a pall of fug that limited Gaines’s vision. It was yet another experience in a long concatenation of such experiences, each of them seemingly more surreal than the last.

  “I have a murdered child,” Gaines said.

  “I could list a few hundred murdered children, each of them the result of the kind of handiwork they favor up here.”

  “Murdered twenty years ago, and no one was ever arrested or charged.”

  McNamara nodded. “And you think this Clifton Regis fella had something to do with it?”

  “No, it’s not that simple. Regis knows someone, and I need to speak to that someone, and I think Regis might be my way in.”

  “You know what’ll happen if I bring Regis off his chain and get him down here for you?”

  Gaines raised his eyebrows questioningly.

  “The others’ll take a dark slant on it. They’ll figure him for fessin’ up on somethin’ that’s none of our business. More ’an likely get hisself a beatin’, or maybe someone’ll sharpen up a toothbrush and put it in his back while he’s takin’ a shower.”

  “Is there some way it could be done that wouldn’t result in such a situation?”

  “Why, ’cause you care what happens to him after you’ve discovered what you wanna know and gone on your way?”

  “Sure, of course. He shouldn’t have to suffer for something he’s not guilty of.”

  “Well, that’s the one thing you can be sure of out here, Sheriff Gaines. They’s all guilty of so much more than what we got ’em for. Seems to me that justice has a way of findin’ folk, even when they least expect it. Hell, even the ones that got railroaded and is here on a bullshit testimony is guilty of more than adequate for us to keep ’em till they croak.”

  Gaines said nothing for a moment, and then he leaned forward. “I understand that this is irregular, Mr. McNamara, and I appreciate that it is additional work for you and your staff, and I wouldn’t expect such a burden of labor to be covered by the taxpayers of Sunflower County, if you know what I mean.”

  McNamara smiled. It was the kind of smile you’d get from a snake.

  “So, let me get you straight here, Sheriff Gaines. You’re tryin’ to bribe me to violate penitentiary rules and regulations, to allow you to come down here, take a man off the chain, get him into an interview room, and let you ask him however many questions you like, and then go on your way and leave him to the hounds and the wolves . . . Is that what we got happenin’ here?”

  Gaines didn’t avert his gaze. “Not so much a bribe, Mr. McNamara, more a willingness to help carry the administrative cost of such a thing.”

  “Well, down here, Sheriff Gaines, we call a nigger a nigger, a white a white, and there don’t happen to anything resembling a shade of gray. Are you offerin’ me a bribe, or am I mistaken?”

  Gaines still could not look away. McNamara had him cornered, and if Gaines lied, he would be as transparent as glass.

  “You’re not mistaken, Mr. McNamara.”

  McNamara smiled, but with his lips, not his eyes. It was the cruelest smile Gaines believed he’d ever seen.

  “Well, good ’nough, Sheriff Gaines. That’s the kind of language I understand. If we’re gonna be straight with each other, then we’re gonna be straight. None of this bullshit fancy footwork. The fee for what you require of me is fifty bucks. That’s twenty-five dollars for finding the boy and bringing him someplace for you to speak with him, the other twenty-five for finding some way to make sure he don’t get hisself stabbed in the yard tomorrow morning.”

  Gaines took the money from his pocket. He kept it beneath the edge of the table. If McNamara saw he had a hundred bucks, the price would go up, no doubt about it.

  Gaines folded the notes and passed them over to McNamara. They went into McNamara’s desk drawer, and then he rose, ground out the half-smoked cigarette, and told Gaines to go back to his car, to pull out onto the main road, and then wait for McNamara to come out in his vehicle.

  “You follow me on up to Unit 26, and then you’re gonna wait there until I find this boy and bring him down to you. Then we’ll get you a room someplace where you won’t be disturbed. Maybe I’ll put you in the chapel, huh? Some of these lowlifes professed to findin’ Jesus someplace out in them fields, took it upon themselves to build a chapel a few years back. Ain’t much of anythin’, to tell you the truth, and ain’t much used now ’cept when some of these fellas first come in. They get such a shock to the system; they think they’s in hell an’ figure that prayin’ might be a good ’nough way to make it different. They can pray all they like; it only gets worse.”

  McNamara opened the door. Gaines walked to his car, pulled back out onto the main road, and waited for McNamara to come out after him in one of the official MSP pickup trucks.

  They drove for another mile, maybe a mile and a half, and then—seemingly out of nowhere—another complex of low-slung white-painted buildings appeared out of the landscape, as if they had just grown from the dust and dry air.

  McNamara pulled over. Gaines parked behind the pickup, and McNamara came around to the driver’s-side window.

  “You stay here. I’ll check what gang he’s on and then go fetch him. Anyone asks what you’re doing here, just lie, all right, son?”

  Gaines nodded.

  McNamara drove away once more, and Gaines was left stranded in the middle of the Mississippi delta, a half-dozen miles from the highway, no valid reason for being there, and he wondered whether he would ever see Ted McNamara again.

  47

  If Ted McNamara was precisely as Gaines had imagined, Clifton Regis was not.

  Despite the fact that he wore regulation stripes, that he had been out on a chain gang for pretty much the entire day, he somehow managed to look anything other than browbeaten and disheveled. He was a tall man, a good three or four inches over Gaines, and aside from a fine scar running the length of his left nostril and ending a quarter inch beneath his left eye, his face was unmarked. His hair was close-cropped, nothing more than a shadow, and only when Gaines extended his
hand and Regis took it, did Gaines realize that the pinky and ring fingers were missing from Regis’s right hand.

  It was like shaking the hand of a small child, and it was unnerving.

  Regis said nothing at all as he sat down. McNamara had in fact given them use of the chapel, though the term chapel was applied in the very loosest sense of the word. It was a shack, constructed—it seemed—not only from random sections of wood and offcuts, but also heavy branches and sawn logs. The floor was wood in places, oilcloth in others, and in the corners the dry earth beneath was visible. The roof was corrugated iron, rusted in the main, punched through with fist-sized holes, and it was solely through the gaps in the walls and the roof that any light entered. Thus John Gaines, here on a wild mission to find something that seemed impossible, and Clifton Regis, thankful perhaps for nothing more than an hour away from the work party, sat on a rickety wooden bench in the gloom of a makeshift building on Parchman Farm and looked at each other in awkward silence for a little while.

  “You know who I am?” Gaines eventually asked.

  “I know you’re law,” Regis said, and—yet again—Regis surprised Gaines with his diction and accent. He was almost accentless, if such a thing were possible.

  “Any idea why I might have asked to see you?”

  Regis shrugged. “Only three or four reasons the law comes out to see people like me,” Regis replied. “You think I’ve done something which I haven’t, you think I know someone who’s done something they didn’t do, you want me to find out something from someone in here about something they didn’t do, or you brought me a reprieve and a pardon from the governor.” Regis smiled sardonically. “I’m guessin’ we can rule out the last one, right?”

  “We can rule out all of them,” Gaines said.

  Regis’s expression changed then, noticeably so, and not for the good. He slid a little farther away on the bench and eyed Gaines suspiciously.

  “I have to level with you, Clifton,” Gaines said. “Otherwise this is all bullshit.”

  “You got smokes?” Regis asked.

  Gaines took a pack from his shirt pocket, handed them over. Regis withdrew one and Gaines lit it for him. He set his Zippo there on the packet as an open invitation for Regis to just help himself.

  “I want to talk to you about Della Wade.”

  The reaction was immediate and astonishing. Regis seemed to visibly pale, as if the blood was being drawn downward from his face. He seemed nervous. He looked away, shook his head, turned back to Gaines.

  “I been here seventeen months, sir,” Regis said. “Took me a year to forget what she looked like, another three or four to forget why I loved her, and I just started working on convincing myself that I lost my fingers some other way. Now you show up and spoil it all.” Regis switched his cigarette from his right to his left and then held up his right hand for Gaines to see. “That, sir, is my constant reminder of Della Wade and her crazy-ass family.”

  “Heard word that you took ten thousand dollars from Earl Wade.”

  “Is that so? Well, that’s precisely what I’d expect you to have heard.”

  “Not the truth?”

  “About as far from the truth as you could hope to get and then some.”

  “So, the truth is what?”

  Regis dropped his half-smoked cigarette on the ground, put his foot on it, took another from the pack and lit it with Gaines’s Zippo. It was simply nervousness, something with which to be momentarily distracted.

  “I have to talk to you?” Regis asked.

  Gaines shook his head. “No, you don’t have to talk to me.”

  “Then give me a good reason why I should.”

  “Because I have a dead girl with her heart missing, a dead war veteran with his head and his hand cut off, and I think both of these things are connected, and I think both of these things have something to do with the Wades.”

  Regis looked at Gaines for some time, as if his mind was simply trying to absorb the information he’d just been given.

  Finally, he cleared his throat and said, “And you think you can touch the Wades?”

  “I can try.”

  Regis smiled, started to laugh. “Then you have bigger balls than me, sir. However, you do have one thing that I don’t.”

  “I am the law.”

  Regis laughed again. “Shit, no. You think the law has any authority or influence over people like the Wades? No, the thing you have that I don’t is your color. Being a colored man, see, everyone knows we are lying before we even say a word.”

  “Things are changing—”

  “Tell the Freedom Riders that. Tell the niggers they got swinging from trees south of here every Saturday night. You go looking for the Wades, you’re gonna find yourself in a whole heap of Klan trouble, my friend, and the fact that you’re a white sheriff won’t count for much of anything, believe me. They might not hang you literally, but they’ll hang you some other way. I guarantee it.”

  “So what was the deal with you and Della?”

  “Romeo and Juliet.”

  Gaines frowned.

  “I loved her, man, and she loved me, and that’s all there was to it. If I was some white fella out of Mobile with a daddy and a plantation then I wouldn’t be here. She and I would be married, and around about now we’d have gotten ourselves a handful of kids and I’d be talkin’ with Mr. Matthias Wade about how there might be an opening somewhere within one of his companies, seein’ as how I was like family an’ all.”

  “And the money?”

  “Was her money, sir. That ten thousand dollars was her money, and her money alone, and she got it for me, and she gave it to me, and it was how we was gonna get away from that damned crazy family and go disappear somewhere and start over. That was the plan.”

  “Her money?”

  “Hers by law and by birthright and by anything else that’s supposed to be meaningful, but that brother of hers got involved. He found us together, and he took her back.”

  “And he cut your fingers off?”

  Regis shook his head. “Someone like Matthias Wade doesn’t do his own business. No, he had a fella with him, and he got me sat down quiet while Matthias gave me a talkin’ to.”

  “And he said what?”

  “He said that he didn’t believe I had stolen the money, that he knew Della was deluded, maybe a little crazy, and that she had somehow gotten it into her mind that she loved me, but such a thing was not possible, me bein’ a black fella an’ all, and so he was going to give me a choice. Either he was going to report me to the police and have me arrested for raping Della and then stealing the money, or he was going to take away my livelihood.”

  “I don’t understand,” Gaines interjected. “Your livelihood?”

  “You think I’m a thief? You think I’ve always been in trouble with the law? No, sir. I was a musician. I am a guitar player. That’s how I met Della in the first place. I used to know her brother, Eugene, down in some of them blues and jazz joints in New Orleans, and she came on down to see him and that was that. One look at her and it was all over.”

  “So he cut your fingers off?”

  “Well, he had his fella cut my fingers off. It was either that, or twenty-five to thirty up here, and that was something I could never have done. I get myself out of here, I can learn to play guitar again, missing two fingers or not. That gypsy fella in France did it, right?”

  Gaines reached for a cigarette himself, lit it, inhaled, closed his eyes for a moment, and wondered where he would next take this conversation.

  “So you want Matthias, or you want the old man?” Regis asked.

  “Matthias,” Gaines replied. “I think Matthias killed a girl twenty years ago, and I think he killed another man just recently.”

  “And I am sure he got a few of my kind with the old Saturday-night necktie parties, as well.”

  “So how do I get to Della?” Gaines asked. “That’s what I need to do. I need to get to Della. As far as I can see, she is the only o
ne who might be able to help me.”

  Regis shook his head. “You don’t get to her,” he said. “That’s the point.”

  “When did you meet her?”

  “Late summer of seventy-two.”

  “In New Orleans?”

  “Right.”

  “And you started dating?”

  Regis laughed. “If that’s what you want to call it, yes.”

  “How soon after you met her?”

  “Right away, the same night. It was like that. I saw her, she saw me, and we was done for.”

  “And how long did the relationship go on until she gave you the money?”

  “Four, five months. She would come down to New Orleans every weekend with the pretense of seeing Eugene, but she was coming to see me. Far as I could tell, she didn’t have a great deal to do with Eugene. Never had. But Eugene knew what was going on. I think Eugene feels the same way about his family as Della does. He stays out of their business, and they stay out of his. He has his music and his church, and he pretty much keeps himself to himself. Live and let live, you know?”

  “And Eugene had no problem with you being with her?”

  “You’ve met Eugene?”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  Regis smiled. “No, Eugene never had a problem with us.”

  “And she brought the money, when?”

  “Twenty-first of December.”

  “And Matthias came to see you how soon after?”

  “Two days.”

  “The twenty-third.”

  “Right.”

  “And he gave you your choice.”

  “He sure did.”

  “And then when were you arrested for this thing here?”

  “Arrested at the end of January 1973, held over, tried, sentenced, shipped up here in March of the same year, and, like I said, been here all of the seventeen months since.”