Текст книги "The Devil and the River"

Автор книги: R. J. Ellory

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 33 страниц)

21

Sometimes Gaines liked to drink a glass of whiskey, but it gave him an upset liver and a bad stomach, and thus the bad outweighed the good. That night he drank as if it was the final hour of R & R, that he—the GI round eye—was heading back to the front come daybreak.

When he was at war, he knew it was the worst place he had ever been, the worst place he would ever be. Such an awareness did something to the mind, the emotions, the very spirit of a man. It blunted him, rendered him insensate, as if the upper and lower registers of his humanness had been cauterized. Just as he would now no longer experience any real depth of fear, so he would be immune to joy, to elation, to the sometimes giddy rush of pleasure that came from simple things. A child would smile, and he would see an eight-year-old facedown in a pool of muddy, stinking water, the back of its head blown away. A bright bouquet of flowers, and he would see not only the bursting hearts and lingering tails of magnesium flares but the zip and crash of tracers, and in his ears would be the thump and rumble of mortar fire. Like the devil’s firework show. The sounds of 105s and 155s were relentless, as if they were counting off the seconds. It was deafening, interminable, but—back then—hearing that sound at least meant you were still alive.

And there was the smell. The smell of things burning. The unmistakable stench of chemical fires in wet vegetation. And bodies. Like scorched hair and rotted pork. Gaines knew the mind did not pick favorites, did not prefer one recollection over another. Some days he could recall the warm aroma of fresh popcorn, the ghost of some long-forgotten and too-brief childhood. But that was always fleeting—there, and then gone. The darker sense memories lingered for hours, and it was at such times that he began to worry for the stability of his own mind. He too was fragile, and he wondered how long it would be before the seams began their inevitable and irreparable divide.

And afterward, after he had returned home, luck became important, fate even, because there was no logical reason for having survived the war. Why had one man died and another lived?

There was no delineation or marker identifying those who would see home and those who would not. Did not matter where you had come from, whether you were born army, a volunteer, or a draftee. When it came, it came. It did not matter if you were loved or despised, whether you attended church for faith or simply to steal from the charity box, whether you worshipped your mother or cursed her blind, whether you lied and swindled, blasphemed, whether you reveled in each and every one of the seven deadly sins or adhered to the letter of each commandment as a point of personal law. War possessed no prejudice, no predetermination, no preference. War would take you as you were, no questions asked.

Why? How were such matters decided? And who did the deciding?

It was such questions that invaded the normalcy and routine of his life. It was such questions that he tried not to ask himself.

But then there were moments: moments of self-doubt, moments when he questioned his own humanity, moments when he questioned the human race itself, the things of which men were made, the things that drove them, their purposes, their aspirations, their rationale. Surely war was invented by man, and if man could invent war, then was there no level to which he could not stoop?

Gaines did not believe Webster, not for a moment. He could see the man with his hands around Nancy Denton’s throat. He could see the man choking the life out of the poor, defenseless, beautiful teenager. Perhaps Webster had earned a taste for killing in Guadalcanal, and he had needed to satiate that taste any way he could. Gaines did not believe that Webster had found a dead girl in a shack by the side of the road. He had taken her there, and he had taken her there to kill her.

They found the heart. The girl’s heart. Or they found what Gaines could only assume had once been her heart. Four yards east, twelve yards north, just as Webster had told them. It looked like a small, dark knot of something, like a fragment of wood, a chunk of dried leather, and even as they opened the metal box within which it had been contained, there was a certainty that it would stand no physical contact. It was nothing more than dust, in truth, and whatever cloth it might have been wrapped in was gossamer-thin, again little more than a memory of what it had once been, and the box itself, once sturdy, once capable of carrying nails and bolts and screws and suchlike, was rusted and frail, and it came apart in pieces as Gaines and Hagen tried to rescue it from the earth.

The simple truth was that they had followed Webster’s directions, and they had found something that could have been a sixteen-year-old girl’s heart in a metal box. Irrespective of the fact that it was no longer a heart at all, it was something, and it was where Webster had said it would be. That was all that Gaines had needed to confirm his worst fears and his most assured suspicions.

Standing there, his breath coming hard and fast, not only from the physical exertion of digging, but also the mental stress of what was happening, Gaines believed that the only mind he possessed was broken. Sometimes his certainty of this was intense, and it burned with the luminescence, the intensity, the smell of a heat tab beneath a makeshift stove.

Other times he believed he was the only who’d returned sane.

When he closed his eyes, he could still see the dead. He could see the pieces of the dead. He could see heaps of blood-soaked fatigues and flak jackets outside the makeshift triage tent. Almost as if to say, Hey boys, if the NVA don’t get getcha, we’ll finish the job pronto right here and now!

Only at such times could people look at one another and say all that needed to be said without uttering a single word.

Gaines possessed that same feeling then—right there in Whytesburg—as he and Hagen dug into the wet ground. They did not speak as they worked, and they did not speak when they found what they’d hoped they would not find.

The earth had given up Nancy Denton, and now it had given up her heart. The earth was a living thing, a thing with memory, with history, and releasing its secrets would perhaps permit the escape of other things, other darknesses, other memories that would have been best left buried.

What were they doing here? Were they bringing out the dead, and alongside them, the very madness that killed them in the first place?

And what would happen if they took Nancy Denton right now, carried her back to the river, and returned her to the grave that Webster had given her? Would the world return to how it had been before they found her? Was it better to hide what had happened all those years before? Was it better to let the dead go on being dead, to let the truth die with Michael Webster, to release Whytesburg from the ghosts it never knew it had?

Gaines was disturbed. He was cold, distracted, upset. Nevertheless, he went on with the business in front of him. He directed Hagen to put sawhorses around the scene. Together they roped it and taped it. Hagen took a dozen or more photographs from every angle, and each time the flash popped, Gaines started. Even when he knew the flash was coming, he still started. They took what they could of the box, the cloth within, the memory of a young girl’s heart, and they bagged it as carefully as they could. Hagen sat in the passenger seat with this strange cargo in his lap. He looked straight ahead, almost as if to look at the remnants directly was to somehow be cursed.

Hagen closed his eyes when the engine started, and he did not open them again until he and Gaines had reached the office.

Gaines and Hagen filled out paperwork, and then Gaines called Victor Powell. Powell told Gaines to meet him at the Coroner’s Office, to bring everything he had found. When Powell took these things from him, thanked Gaines, and put them in the same room as Nancy Denton’s body, it was late. Gaines looked exhausted, and Powell told him so.

“Go home now,” he said. “You need to rest, my friend, before you collapse.”

Gaines nodded. Powell was right. He went home. He looked in on his mother. She was out for the count. He closed her door silently, returned to the kitchen, and then he took the bottle of whiskey from the cupboard and he started drinking.

For an hour he tried to feel something other than the horror, and then for an hour he tried to feel nothing at all.

And then he lay down on his bed and closed his eyes.

Gaines knows he is dreaming, but he cannot bring himself awake. He stands in a secluded area, somehow clear of vegetation, yet around him and over him is the shroud and the canopy and the wilderness of impenetrable jungle. A thin and insubstantial light seeps into the fug as a misty, malodorous haze. He is not alone. Of this much he is certain. He is being watched, and whoever is watching him is as patient as Job. Gaines knows he has been there for some time—hours, perhaps days—and yet whoever is stalking him has made no attempt to challenge him. And yet Gaines knows this is what they wish to do. What they need to do. This is war, and if you are not an ally, a comrade, a friend, then you are an enemy. There is no middle ground.

Gaines understands then that it is he who needs to move first.

And so he does.

He is seated cross-legged, and he seems to grow from the ground effortlessly. He is naked. His body is dark with mud and blood and black-and-green, and his eyes are stark white against his visage. His hair is glued back against his scalp, and he feels like something from one of his own nightmares. He is outside himself, and he can see himself, and he is terrifying.

In the distance he can hear CH-47s. They are mounted with 20x102 mike-mike Vulcans. He can hear them as certainly as he can hear his own heart. Or can he?

Perhaps he is hearing nothing but the rush and chatter of his pulse, the blood in his veins, the sound of his pores opening in the warm moisture-drenched air.

And then he folds into the vegetation and the jungle swallows him. He understands that he has vanished from view and the watcher cannot see him and does not know where he has gone. Gaines flits from tree to tree, from shadow to shadow, and before he knows it, he is standing behind the watcher, and the watcher has become his prey. The watcher turns and holds out his hands, his eyes wide beneath the shadow of his coolie hat, and somehow Gaines has his rifle before him, the bayonet affixed, and he lunges forward with that blade. The steel punches through outstretched hands, the wounds in the pale flesh of the palms like stigmata, and everything is silent but for the ripping of flesh and the sound of the blood against the ground, against the trees, against his own face. His enemy falls, and he—Gaines—is over him like a wild thing. He has his knife in his hand, and he is hacking and sawing furiously. When he is done, he sees that he has made a ragged series of incisions from the throat to the navel, and suddenly—opening up, as if a zipper had been drawn—the snakes unfold and tumble out, dozens of them, all sizes and colors, and beneath the shadow of the coolie hat is the face of Nancy Denton, a taut smile, a bared-teeth rictus grin, and all the darkness and hatred of the war is there within her eyes.

And then Gaines woke.

He did not wake sweating. He did not lurch awkwardly from the mattress—heaving, retching, his mouth bitter with the imagined taste of blood, his nerves taut, his heart thundering.

When he woke, he was calm, and though he remembered vividly each fragmented second of the nightmare, though he saw every scene in slow motion as he replayed it, he did not torture himself with questions of significance.

He just lay there, and he remembered how it was to be beside someone.

Linda Newman, mother of the child that never was.

He had dreamed such dreams before, a long time ago. For a year or so following his return, the nightmares—vivid and terrifying—would throw him violently from the bed, and he would wake suddenly, startled, enraged even. He had tracked enemies in the boonies, and when he had found them, he had killed them. Often—possessing no discernible weapon, no gun, no blade—he had killed them with his hands.

Reason enough to sleep alone.

He did not wish to wake beside a corpse, their unnecessary and inexplicable death founded somewhere within a nightmare.

And then the dreams had stopped.

There had been times he’d wished for the dreams to return, terrible though they were, just so he could wake and realize that he was no longer there.

Now the girl had invaded his thoughts, his emotions, his mind.

Nancy Denton had joined the cast of characters—those who had died beside him, those he had killed, the dead he had seen lying in the mud.

It was four in the morning. Gaines rose and sluiced his face with cold water. He did not feel sick, despite the whiskey he had drunk. He knew he would not sleep again, and yet he lay down on the mattress and tugged the covers over him. Perhaps the last few hours before daylight would serve no purpose other than to delay the continuing and inevitable confrontation of Nancy Denton’s pointless and terrible death. As was always the case with murder, it resulted, ordinarily, in the death of both victim and perpetrator, one by the hand of a killer, the other by the hand of the state.

As Gaines closed his eyes against the gathering light, there was an echo in his mind—half-remembered, half-forgotten. Something that Webster had said, something about finding Nancy in a shack, just lying there in the doorway, and how he had buried her near running water.

Why running water? Why had he buried her near running water?

The question presented no immediate answer, and Gaines dismissed it from his mind. It was a detail, a simple detail, and there were so many other questions that begged to be answered first.

22

Even now, if I close my eyes and think as hard as I can, I can remember the feeling of sun on my face.

I can feel that warmth against my skin. I can smell the grass, the flowers in the field. I can hear birds somewhere in the distance.

I went down there with Nancy, and Michael took her hand for just a moment. He smiled at her and then at me, and we turned and started walking.

I know that when Nancy was with Michael, she saw little but him, but Michael was never like that. Michael had a heart the size of a house, and he made everyone feel special. That was just his way. He didn’t try. It came naturally.

Nancy was laughing. She was so excited, she could barely speak, but she spoke anyway. After just a few words, Michael started laughing and told her, “Slow down, Nance. Slow down there.”

Michael was all of thirty or thirty-one years old, and Nancy was going on sixteen. Though it seemed strange that two people could be so far apart in years, it did not seem strange to anyone who knew them. He never did lay a hand on her. If nothing else, Michael was a true gentleman. You could see that in his eyes, in the way he permitted Nancy to kiss him on the cheek every once in a while and nothing more than that. He behaved like her older brother. That sounds weird, but that’s the only way I can tell it. He wasn’t her father, nor her uncle, nothing like that. He was like a cousin maybe, someone close, but not too close. He had just made a decision. Nancy was the girl for him. This was the woman with whom he planned to spend the rest of his life, and if he had to wait a while for her to become that woman, then so be it. For Michael, Nancy was worth a thousand years of waiting, no question about it.

And Nancy knew too. Maybe she had known from the first moment he stepped off the train that day in 1945.

But when we were together—me and Matthias, Nancy and Michael—it was as if we were all the same age. Catherine came along sometimes—but only when her father told her to keep an eye on us. Eugene and Della floated around the edges of our little world, and sometimes they were involved and sometimes they were not. But no one frowned on our friendship. Perhaps folks believed Michael was a good influence on these rowdy, troublemaking teenagers. We were all from different families, different backgrounds. Nancy’s mom didn’t have two quarters in the same place at the same time. My mom was just as ordinary as ordinary people could be, and yet none of it mattered. Matthias’s family had more money than anyone could spend in a dozen lifetimes, and yet he dressed the same as us and he talked the same as us, and only when he brought down the old Victrola and the records, only when he turned up with a picnic hamper for us to share by the river, was it obvious that he had more than we did. Age was not a barrier, nor was money or possessions or what name we were given. We were just getting on with living the best way we knew how, and it wasn’t complicated.

I remember those years—just a couple of them—that seemed to last forever. It was as if the sun shone each and every day, and it shone for us. And even when it rained and was cold, there was a warmth in friendship and fellowship that defied the elements. I know I look back with rose-colored glasses—we always do when we recall our childhood—but we really did seem to be blessed with something special. Me and Nancy and Michael and the Wade clan, as we used to call them. The best times. The very best times we could ever have wished for.

And that day was really no different from so many others that we had shared.

We chattered as we walked. We talked of what we would do, where we would go, if Eugene would come out this time or if he would stay home and read like he seemed to do so much these days.

We did not talk about Lillian Wade. She had died back at the end of 1952, and no one said her name. Everyone tried not to think about her, because it had been an awful, frightening thing.

I asked my mother one time why someone so rich and young and beautiful had died, and she shook her head and said, “No one knows why, Maryanne. Maybe being so rich and young and beautiful all at the same time is more than the human heart can bear,” and then she never spoke of it again.

I had heard rumors that she had taken her own life. I did not know if it was true, and I wasn’t about to go asking her children.

Maybe having to wake up and look at Earl Wade every day—that scary face he sometimes had—finally killed her.

I remember when it happened. I remember how me and Nancy were on our own for weeks. Lillian Wade died in October of 1952, and we saw Michael infrequently until after that Christmas. Even though the Wades were about as Whytesburg as the Rockefellers, everyone was stunned by the news. I heard she was a drinker, but that meant nothing to me. I liked to drink—soda, water, orange juice, pretty much everything. I figured it was maybe a polite way of saying something else entirely. But it wasn’t until the spring of 1953 that we saw Matthias and Catherine and Della and Eugene again, at least for any length of time. Then—slowly, but surely—things started to come right again. Except for Eugene. Eugene was still Eugene, but he was like a quieter version. He still laughed, but he never laughed for long. He still smiled, but the smile seemed more an effort than a pleasure. He never really talked to me directly about his mother, but he made reference to her often. He was fifteen years old by then, and I think he took it the worst of all of them. He always had his books with him, and every once in a while I’d see him drift a little, but he’d always come back, you know? He was still Eugene, however, and Eugene was just a little older than me. If I had to be honest, which I would never have been, I would have said that of the two of them—Matthias and Eugene—I loved Eugene just that little bit more. There was something sensitive and artistic about him. Whereas Matthias had to force himself to learn poems to impress Nancy, Eugene just knew them. He talked about things he’d read and films he’d seen, and he was always the one who brought the best records to play.

But that day, that Thursday in August of 1954, thoughts of Lillian Wade and what had really happened were the furthest thing from all our minds, it seemed.

We walked a little way toward the Five Mile Road, and then Michael told us that we were going to wait there for Matthias and the others.

“Where are we going?” I asked him.

“Everywhere and nowhere,” he said. He lit a cigarette then, and—just like always—Nancy asked him for one.

“Not a prayer, Miss Nancy Denton,” he replied, just as he always did.

It was a game—and a silly one at that—but there were so many such games between Nancy and Michael, and no matter how many times they played them, they never seemed to tire of it.

We heard them before we saw them. They came on bikes—all four of them. Eugene and Della had lollipop sticks wired to their spokes, and the noise they made was like a thousand children clattering sticks along a picket fence.

It was a sight to behold—Della and Eugene and Matthias caterwauling over the hill, hollering like fire sirens, whooping and squawking like banshees. And then there was Catherine some way behind, and you could just tell from the way she looked that she had been sent as supervisor yet again. Catherine would escape as soon as she could. She would return to the house alone and get back to whatever it was that Catherine Wade got back to. She was younger than Matthias, but still there was always something of the boy in Matthias. My ma told me that girls grow up faster, as if that were something to be grateful for. Seemed sad that anyone would be better by having less of their childhood.

And then it was all noise and laughter and wisecracks and bottles of soda being shaken and sprayed, and Della with her hair soaking wet and sticky and Michael just standing there watching over us all like the grown-up that he was.

“The river,” Matthias said. “We have to go to the river.”

Eugene was laughing like a mad thing. It was good to see him laugh. It made me happy.

“Come on, then,” Catherine said. “If we’re headed that way, then let’s get going.”

“You don’t have to stay, Catherine,” Michael said. “I can take it from here.”

“But my father—”

“Is off at one of the factories, I am sure,” Michael interjected, “And will be none the wiser unless someone tells him. You go off and enjoy your day. I’ll look after this lot.”

Catherine reached out and touched his shoulder. Nancy didn’t see her; otherwise Catherine would have gotten an icy look.

“Thanks, Michael,” Catherine said. “That’s really kind of you.”

“It’s nothing,” he said, and then he turned and started off toward the river.

Catherine took her bike and headed back the way she’d come.

Nancy ran after Michael, and then me and the others went after her.

I walked with Matthias and Della. Eugene was up ahead a little way. He kept glancing back at us, almost as if he wanted to make sure that we didn’t drag behind.

I smiled at him. He smiled back. I felt the color rise in my cheeks.

He was such a handsome boy. He had these deep, dark eyes, and the line of his mouth was just like his mother’s. If he’d been a girl, he would have been so beautiful. I remember thinking that, and though it seemed such a strange thought, it also seemed to make perfect sense.

“You didn’t bring the record player?” I asked Matthias.

“I’ll go back and get it later,” he said. “We have food, though. We made a great picnic, didn’t we, Della?”

“Apart from stinky boiled eggs,” she said, and she wrinkled her nose.

“That’s funny,” Eugene said, “because those eggs said the same thing about you.”

She stuck her tongue out.

Eugene did the same, crossed his eyes, and Matthias sighed and shook his head like they had already tried his patience sufficiently for one day.

And then we were at the river, and Nancy was already ankle deep in the cool water. Michael was seated against the trunk of a tree, and he smoked his cigarette and watched us as we shed our shoes and socks and went on down there.

Eugene said how he would catch a fish with his bare hands and we’d eat it for lunch.

“You’d no more catch a fish with your bare hands than catch a ride on a moon rocket!” Della shouted, and he splashed her once, twice, and it was all downhill from there.

Had Catherine been there, she would have had words to say, but Michael just watched us, laughing at our foolishness, and it seemed like the happiness we felt somehow reached him in a way that he needed. Looking back, maybe it reminded him of a time before the war, before everything that happened to him out there, and it was somehow healing for him.

Half an hour later, five drenched troublemakers stumbled up the bank and lay on the grass in their sodden clothes, but the sun was high by then, and it seemed like no time at all before we were dry.

That was what was different. That was the thing that seemed so strange. Time was flexible, almost liquid. When I wanted it to go quickly, it went slowly. When I wanted it to drag its heels, it ran full tilt to the finish line.

“So, where’s this fish?” I asked Eugene.

“I nearly had him . . . I did, really,” he said, but he was kidding me, and I pushed him.

He grabbed my hand to stop himself falling, and even when he righted himself, he didn’t let go. Just for a moment, a moment while the world waited, he held my hand and looked at me. I felt my heart go bump, and even though I should have been embarrassed, I was not.

“I will get you a fish, Maryanne,” he said. “One day, I will get you a fish . . . I promise . . .”

And then the moment was gone. He released my hand, and like a record slowed down on the turntable that suddenly resumes its speed, the world caught up with us and everything came to life once more.

I glanced around, expecting to see Della and Matthias and Nancy looking at us, but they were elsewhere, laughing among themselves, oblivious to what had happened.

And then it was as if nothing had happened. We were all together again, Michael telling us to stay in the sun until our clothes dried off.

The morning became the afternoon, and Eugene and Matthias brought the picnic baskets from their bikes. We sat out beneath the canopy of a tree and unpacked everything. Michael told Della he would give her fifty cents if she ate a boiled egg, but she would not.

“They smell so bad,” she said. “I can’t bear the thought at all.”

So Michael ate three. He had his cheeks all full of boiled egg, and Della couldn’t even look at him.

Michael laughed so much, he nearly choked.

“So disgusting,” Della said. And then she looked at Nancy like a disapproving aunt and said, “Such a disgusting man, Nancy.”

And Michael nearly choked again, because Della was so serious, and she said it like she really meant it.

After we were done eating, we lay on the grass, and Michael made up stories about a man so tall he could reach the stars from the sky and put them inside his hat. He carried some in his vest and some in his shoes, and one special star he kept tucked behind his ear in case of emergencies. And he used the stars to light the way for lonely travelers and ships lost at sea, and sometimes he used them to help people find what they were looking for. It was a beautiful story, but ever such a little bit sad, and now I can’t remember how it ended.

I just remember that when he was done we were all quiet, and it seemed like an eternity before anyone said a word.

And when someone spoke, it was Della, and she said that she wanted to dance.

Matthias said he could take the picnic baskets back and fetch the record player. Della said she didn’t want to go home, but we could all see how exhausted she was. She was barely able to stand.

“I’ll come too,” Eugene said, and I didn’t know whether he was leaving to make Della feel better, or leaving because he didn’t want to be with us anymore. It could have been either. Eugene was both considerate and lonely, compassionate and a little sad. He was sensitive, it seemed, to all things and all people. The death of his mother had caught him unaware, kicked him off balance, understandably of course, and the quiet moments that swallowed him seemed to swallow him whole.

Eugene looked at me. Perhaps he saw that flash of disappointment in my eyes.

He mouthed something. Was it Sorry?

My imagination, I guess.

Eugene no more loved me than I loved . . . well, I don’t know what.

I tried to smile, but there was a lump in my throat. Perhaps there was a premonition there, a sense that not only was I saying goodbye for the evening, but that I was saying goodbye to something a whole lot more significant. It was only August, the second week, and summer stretched out ahead of us like some endless road. We would just keep on walking toward that sunset, but that sun would never really set, and it would always be hazy and warm and beautiful, and beneath everything there would be the sense that here we were witnessing the best time of our collective lives. It could never be better than this. Better than this was not possible.

But this moment was a punctuation mark, a hesitation, a scratch on the record.

I watched Eugene as he took Della’s hand and started toward the bikes. Della looked back and smiled. She gave a little wave, as if to let us know that even though she could not stay, she wished she could stay more than anything in the world . . .

I raised my hand. I looked away, and then they were gone.

Michael said we’d walk down to the field at the end of Five Mile Road, the last field before the trees started, and we would meet Matthias there.

And so we walked—Michael and Nancy up ahead, me trailing behind, pushing my bike, already feeling the weariness of the day in my heart and in my bones. Evening was threatening the horizon. The cicadas were warming up for their nightly performance. We all knew the day would soon be closing, but no one wanted to think about that.

I had so wanted to dance with Eugene. I had so hoped he would ask me. I had already decided that I would wait for two songs, and if he didn’t ask me, then I would ask him. But he had gone home, and I would have to dance with Matthias, and though I didn’t mind, it was not what I had wished for.