Текст книги "The Devil and the River"

Автор книги: R. J. Ellory

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Текущая страница: 18 (всего у книги 33 страниц)

38

Gaines believed in crazy.

In war, truth was the first casualty. So said Aeschylus. Gaines did not agree with Aeschylus. In war, sanity went first, and crazy followed in right after to take its place.

As crazy as the handful of survivors who made it out of the NVA assault of Lang Vei in February of ’68.

As crazy as the nineteen-year-old lance corporal telling you that you were lucky to be going someplace that had a lower-thanaverage kill rate.

Gaines remembered someone telling him that the Marine Corps was earning its reputation as the most efficient and effective means of killing young Americans ever devised.

A dead marine cost eighteen thousand dollars.

Someone else, maybe like a spec 4 from Special Forces, cost a good deal more.

So yes, Gaines knew all about crazy.

Despite the fact that he had not been there in Khe Sanh at the end of ’67, he knew that Khe Sanh was really was the beginning of the end. The NVA had the US encampment surrounded—the 304th division lay to the south, the 320th to the east; northwest was 325C, northeast was B, and a fifth unidentified division waited patiently across the Laotian border. The NVA were using routes along foothills bridging Laos and Vietnam, routes that had been used by the Viet Minh in the 1940s. They understood the war. They understood the weather. They understood the country. This was their territory.

In April and May of ’67, additional forces that had been deployed to keep Khe Sanh secure engaged with NVA battalions holding hills 881 North and 881 South. The 1st and 3rd Battalions of 26th Marines were rotated through the firebase.

In the Terrace Bar of the Continental, in the L’Amiral Restaurant, the Danang Press Center, in the daily forty-five minute briefings in the Saigon press rooms, endless parallels were drawn between the 1954 French defeat at Dien Bien Phu and what was happening in Khe Sanh. Fortune was against the United States. America had challenged fate, and fate would not be challenged lightly. Special Forces had moved in in ’62 and built their defense lines over the remains of the French bunkers. The French had lost there, and so would the Americans. Monsoons favored the NVA. Air observation and cover were impossible to maintain. Khe Sanh was encircled. All evacuation routes, including Route 9, were NVA held. Everyone was going to die. The war was going to be lost. That was where you found real crazy. Soldiers on their way out found themselves unable to leave. Their tours were over, and they could not go home.

Only in war did people understand war.

And then—finally—when bad news was coming in from Hue, Danang, Qui Nho’n, Khe Sanh, Buôn Ma Tht, Saigon, from every fucking place, that was when people really started to lose it. That was when they realized that the entire fucking thing had been pointless. The administration already knew it was over. The VC had the embassy, they had Cholon. Tan Son Nhut was burning to the ground. Convoys of trucks were coming from Phu Bai with replacements. So many had been lost in all the shit going down south of the Perfume River, and the rain was heavy, and the mud was everywhere, and Gaines could remember standing at the side of the road and watching that convoy of vehicles coming in. He saw the faces of the grunts, and he knew what they were seeing. They saw their own deaths. Some of them were there for the very first time and yet somehow they understood that this was where they were going to die. Everyone knew the end was coming, but the war machine was too dumb and too arrogant to cry uncle. Those boys were going to see a handful of hours, a day perhaps, and then they’d be shipped back in body bags while another five hundred fresh ones were convoyed in. It was like delivering targets to an amusement park shooting gallery. Gaines had been with the Marines of 2/5 when they gained the central south bank, and he saw the graves. Five thousand graves of all those the NVA had executed.

There was a Hotel Company, a Sierra Company, an India Company, a Foxtrot Company. No Charlie Company. That would have been too much irony for anyone to bear. It just started Alpha, Bravo, Delta, like the first three acts of some ironic Greek tragedy. And in every company there was always the one. He walked between bullets; hell, the guy could even walk between raindrops in monsoon season, to hear his fellows speak of him. He was the one who always survived, who went in first, came out last, never a scratch. A million near misses and almosts, bullets close enough to feel the sharp breeze and hear the whistle, but never a hit, as if God had some other divine intent and the war was just a movie to sit through so he could say he’d been there.

And every day the kind of sights that opened one eye wide in shock and caused the other to rapid-fire blink in disbelief.

That drove you crazy.

That was what crazy was all about.

And that’s what Michael Webster had carried in his heart and his soul all the way from Southeast Asia, and that’s what he had delivered, unexpectedly perhaps, unintentionally, to Whytesburg.

And that kind of crazy was contagious. Perhaps airborne, perhaps absorbed through the pores of the skin, but insidious, malignant, consuming.

Maryanne Benedict had it, and perhaps Matthias Wade too.

Nancy Denton had escaped early.

What had they uncovered? Really, what had they dug up out of that riverbank? Gaines could not believe that it was simply the preserved body of a teenage girl. They had opened a door, a portal, a window into some other place, some other reality, and through that aperture had come something strong enough and malevolent enough to poison the very air they breathed. They were all infected. The town was infected. And there was no way to put it back where they had found it.

John Gaines sat alone with these thoughts in his car, and he wondered if he was going crazy, too. He was just a little way down the street from Maryanne Benedict’s house, but he could have been a thousand miles away.

It seemed to be a closed circle now, much like the snake itself. It had swallowed its own tail and would finally disappear.

Gaines started the car. He headed back to Whytesburg. By the time he arrived home, it would be close to eight, maybe a little after. He’d had enough. He would spend some time with his ma, perhaps watch a little TV, try to get a decent night’s sleep. He would address this tomorrow, Sunday, and see if there wasn’t some thread left somewhere that he could follow.

What had happened that night in August of 1954 was, in truth, less important than what had happened to Michael Webster. If Webster had in fact been responsible for Nancy’s death, then there was nothing further to investigate. The killer had found his own justice, albeit two decades after the fact. The killer of Webster, however, was—in all probability—somewhere close, and Gaines believed it was Wade. Had Webster and Matthias Wade searched those woods together that night? No one but Wade knew, and he was not talking. If they had searched separately, then either one could have strangled Nancy without the other knowing. And if Wade had been her killer and Webster had known this, why had Webster maintained his silence? And why did Wade wait for twenty years to kill Webster, knowing all the while that Webster could tell the truth of what happened?

Gaines’s head was filled with thoughts, images, bizarre ideas, and none of it made sense. In the final analysis, all that mattered was the identity of Nancy Denton’s killer, the identity of Michael Webster’s killer, and Gaines could not escape from the intuitive certainty that they were one and the same person: Matthias Wade.

Irrespective of what Gaines might believe, however, he had nothing of a probative nature with which to pursue an investigation of Wade. Wade had paid Michael Webster’s bail, had driven him away from the Sheriff’s Office, and that was that.

If Gaines discovered nothing else of significance, then the investigation—to all intents and purposes—was over.

That troubled him more than anything else: the simple fact that whoever had done these things might never be called to account.

But tonight, just for a few hours perhaps, he had to let it go. He had to rest his mind from the ever-nagging insistence of these mysteries. He had to devote some time to his mother, to her needs and wants. He had neglected her these past days, and that needed to be remedied.

Gaines turned on the radio. He turned it up loud. He found a music station somewhere out of Mobile. He forced himself to hear the song. He tried hard not to picture Maryanne Benedict’s face as she’d told him that the devil had come to Whytesburg.

39

Yes, childhood was a time of magic, but perhaps the magic came at a price.

People do bad things, and then they run away from reminders. They move towns, change states, sometimes even countries. But conscience is an internal country, and guilt is a town you can never leave, and that’s just part of being human. No matter how you change the landscape, there’ll always be someone or something that reminds you of the worst you’ve ever done. What was it that we did that made this happen? I didn’t know then, and I don’t know now.

It was a special time, but it ended with a strange and inexplicable tragedy that no one could comprehend.

But that day, that afternoon, that evening seemed like all the others.

Dusk approached; the sun kissed the tops of the trees, and we could hear Matthias returning with the record player even before we saw him.

Matthias had changed his shirt and combed his hair, and as he set up the player and started winding it, he glanced at me.

He knew that I would have to dance with him, and yet I sensed something else. More than before, I was aware of how pleased he was that Eugene was not there to vie with him for my attention. I felt awkward, and then I dismissed it. This was Matthias. This was my friend Matthias. Nothing would happen here unless I wanted it to, unless I agreed to it. How naive I was, for never once did I consider that what would happen might involve Michael and Nancy.

Matthias put on a record. It was “Cry” by Johnnie Ray, and then he played “Why Don’t You Believe Me?” by Joni James. I danced with him, and I could feel how close he was. I think he must have been wearing some of his father’s cologne, because he smelled sweet, like lavender maybe, or violets.

I danced with Matthias for a little while, and then I was content to just lie down in the cool grass and watch Michael and Nancy.

I felt warm and sleepy and so utterly alive.

Matthias sat right there beside me, and I could feel his hand against my leg, and even though I was aware of how close we were, I did not want to move.

Nancy was perfect. Michael said one time that they left the gates of heaven open for a moment, and an angel escaped. She seemed like that to me that night, more than any other night, and it was as if her feet never touched the ground as she danced with her soldier, her Michael, the handsomest and bravest man in Whytesburg.

But there was something else present, too, though I could never have defined it.

Perhaps I knew the end was on its way. Perhaps I knew in my heart that here was a night that I would recall for the rest of my life. When I became an old lady, sitting somewhere on a stoop, perhaps rocking in a chair on a veranda somewhere, I would cast my mind back and relive this evening, this night. But I would not remember it for the sunshine or the picnic hamper or the music we played that evening, or the way Nancy danced with Michael, her with her bare feet on his shoes, the way he held her at a gentle distance, never too close, never too near, as if he understood and respected the simple fact that she was not yet the woman he could love with anything but his heart and mind. No, I would not remember it for those things, but for something altogether different. Something terrible and awful, something that struck right through my heart like an iron nail, a nail that would lodge there and spread its rust into my blood for the rest of my life.

It should have all been so right, and yet it was all so very wrong.

Love may be blind. It may be quiet. It may rage like a torrent or howl like a storm. It may begin lives and end them. It may have the power to extinguish the sun, to stop the sea, to illuminate the deepest of all shadows. It may be the torch that lights the way to redemption, to salvation, to freedom. It may do all these things. But regardless of its power, it is something we will never truly understand. We do not know why we feel this thing for someone. We just know we need to be near them, beside them, to feel the touch of their hand, the brush of their lips against our cheek, the smell of them, the sensation of their fingers in our hair, the realness of who they are, and know that they will forever find a home in our heart. We need this, but we do not comprehend it.

But loss. We understand loss. Loss is simple. It is perfect in its simplicity.

They were there, and then they were gone.

That is all there is to say.

I could feel their love—the love so effortlessly shared by Michael Webster and Nancy Denton—and it was pure and simple and perfect.

It should have stayed that way forever, but nothing lasts forever, does it?

At least nothing like love.

40

His mother was well enough. She had slept much of the day. She told him that Caroline had brought her some supper, and now all she wanted to do was sleep some more.

Gaines sat with her for a good hour, listened to her talk of Nixon yet again, what a dreadful man he was, how he had lied his way into office, how he was now attempting to lie his way out of any responsibility for what he had done. “He will fall,” she said, “but it is just a matter of how many others he will take with him when he goes.”

Gaines listened, but he did not pay a great deal of mind to the significance of what she was saying. In that moment, the machinations of Nixon’s tentative hold on power were the least of his concerns. When it came to politics, Gaines agreed with Eugene McCarthy, that it was nothing more than a game for those smart enough to understand it and yet dumb enough to think it was important.

It was nearing ten by the time Alice Gaines finally wound down and drifted to sleep.

Gaines left her room and went to the kitchen. He fetched down the bottle of bourbon, a clean glass, took some ice from the freezer. He sat in silence, drinking a little, thinking a lot, considering the facts that within one day he had discovered the decapitated body of Michael Webster in the burned-out shell of his motel room, the dead body of Nancy’s mother, and had spoken to both Matthias Wade and Maryanne Benedict. One day. So much in so little time. He remembered a quote from Wendell Holmes, how a man’s mind, once stretched by an idea, never again regained its original dimensions. That had applied in war, but it applied here as well. Whatever may have happened twenty years before, and whatever was happening now, irrespective of whether Gaines believed in these undertones of cabalistic and occult influence, they were still present, still in force, and they needed to be understood.

And then, finally, Gaines’s mind slowed down too. Perhaps it was the whiskey, perhaps the sheer mental and physical exhaustion of what had occurred, but he knew that if he lay down, he would sleep, and he wanted to sleep so very badly.

Gaines left the half-empty glass, the melting ice cubes, the bottle of bourbon. He went through to his room, shuffled off his clothes, and collapsed into bed. He breathed deeply—once, twice—and then he was gone, his thoughts extinguished like lights.

And within moments, they came. Both of them.

The girl comes first and then her mother, both Nancy and Judith Denton, and they stand at the door of his room, a pale light within each of them, and they beckon him. They don’t speak, but everything they wish to communicate is in their eyes, their expressions, their outstretched hands.

He does not wish to go, but he knows he has to.

He follows them, seems to pass right through them, and yet when he steps beyond the threshold of the door, they are still ahead of him.

The rich cloying decay of rank vegetation fills his nostrils.

Once again, as if this sound is now an inherent and integral part of his very being, he can hear the distant chatter of CH-47s, the crack and whip and drumroll of the 105 howitzers and the Vulcans, behind that Charlie’s 51 cals and the 82mm mortars. But it is all so very distant this time, so deeply lost in the sound of his own heart, his own breathing, the rush of blood though his veins and arteries, that he has to strain to hear it. He wonders if in fact those sounds do not come from without, but from within.

They fold into the vegetation, and the jungle swallows them, and he is swallowed also, and he understands that he has vanished from view and that no one but Nancy and Judith can see him, and no one will ever find them.

He does not wish to be here.

He calls out to them, asks them to slow down, to stop, to tell him what they can.

Who killed you, Nancy?

Was it Michael?

Was it Matthias?

What happened to you all those years ago?

He hears nothing now but the sweep of foliage as they flit through it—appearing, disappearing, the indistinct trace of laughter as they vanish ahead of him once more.

Eventually he tires. He cannot follow them any more. He sits on the damp earth, the moisture seeping through the seat and legs of his pants almost immediately. He smells blood. He knows it is blood, and he feels the warmth of the blood as it seeps up through the dirt, through the roots and undergrowth, and yet he does not care anymore. Perhaps this is all the blood that he has seen spilled in his life, and wherever he hesitates, wherever he pauses, it will seek him out and remind him of his past.

Michael is there. He sits facing Gaines, cross-legged, his head and his hands attached to his body, and he speaks so quietly that Gaines cannot understand a word he is saying.

Louder, he says. Speak louder, Michael.

But Michael just goes on and on, his voice like a whisper, incessant, too fast to be anything other than a torrent of unintelligible words, and Gaines feels the frustration and desperation of this thing in every pore of his being.

And then he hears a single word. Clear, precise, defined, unmistakable.

Goodbye.

A word from reality that has somehow found its way into his dreams.

And he knows. Even in sleep, he knows.

He knows the time has finally come.

John Gaines opened his eyes and lay there for some time. How long, he did not know. It could have been merely a handful of minutes, perhaps half an hour, maybe more.

He knew what had happened, and yet he struggled to absorb it.

Gaines had not imagined it would be this way.

He had imagined a hundred different scenarios, but not this one.

He had believed he would be there, always there, that he would be the last one to whom she spoke, that she would hold his hand, that there would be final words exchanged, a final gentle admonishment to marry, to raise up a family, to be a father. Be like your father, she would say, if in that way alone, be like your father.

But not this.

Not waking in the cool half-light of nascent dawn with a deep and profound certainty that this had finally happened, and without him.

He rose slowly. He dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. He glanced at the clock. It was 4:15 a.m.

He stood at the window for a while. There was a flicker of light in the back field behind the house, perhaps a hundred or so yards away. He paid it no mind. His mind was elsewhere, perhaps looking for her, trying to sense her presence, trying to register some vague awareness that she was still with him.

There was nothing.

Gaines stepped into the bathroom and sluiced his face with cold water. He held the towel against his skin for a long time, and he felt the emotion rising in his chest.

He set down the towel, turned back, and left his room.

He stopped at her door, and with his fingers upon the handle, he paused for some moments. There was silence everywhere, even within, everything but his heart, but it did not race. It did not fight within his chest. It merely swelled with something indefinably sad and powerful and deep.

He opened the door.

The scent of lavender was in the room. He was aware of that. He hesitated in the doorway, and then he closed the door behind him, almost as if to exclude the rest of the world from this very private moment.

He did not know how it was to be irretrievably alone, and yet now he was.

It was just him—John Gaines—and no one else.

He stepped closer to the bed, and he could see her. Her eyes were closed. She appeared to be sleeping, and yet there was no sound at all. The blankets that covered her did not gently rise and fall. The lids did not flicker. She did not murmur words known only to her dream self. She was gone. Her body was there, but she had left.

Gaines stepped closer, sat on the edge of the bed, took her hand, and held it.

Some slight vestige of warmth remained in her skin, and yet Gaines was certain that, whatever élan or soul or spirit had occupied this body, it had left. She looked like Alice Gaines, and yet she was not Alice Gaines. This was Alice Gaines’s body, but that was all it was. Alice herself was not present.

For some reason Gaines felt the need to kneel. He did so, there at the side of the bed, and he placed his hands together, steepled his fingers, rested his face on the edge of the mattress, his cheek to the blanket, his eyes directed toward his mother’s face.

Why had he not seen this coming? Was it always meant to be this way? That he would not have any prediction at all? That there would be no sudden and noticeable decline? That she would fight to go on living even as she knew the end had come?

He wanted to cry, but he could not. Not now. Not here.

He needed to call Bob Thurston. He needed to deal with the official aspects of her death.

He rose to his feet once more. He looked down at her, leaned to kiss her forehead, to whisper I love you, and then he hesitated, closed his eyes, felt the salt sting of tears, the taut knot of grief in his chest, his throat, and he uttered a single, whispered word—“Goodbye”—and turned once more to leave the room.

Standing in the hallway, the receiver in his hand, he felt awkward about waking Thurston, but there was no choice.

The phone was answered within moments, and Bob Thurston’s slurred voice greeted him.

All Gaines said was, “Bob, it’s John . . .”

Thurston replied, “I’ll be there right away.”

He was there right away, or so it seemed, but when Gaines glanced at the clock, it was nearing five thirty a.m. More than an hour had passed, though had he been asked, he would have said that he’d stepped across the threshold of his mother’s room no more than ten minutes earlier.

Thurston attended to Alice Gaines alone. He took her body temperature, made notes, recorded the estimated time of death on the certificate, signed it, tucked it away in his case, and joined Gaines in the kitchen.

Gaines had made coffee, asked Thurston if he wanted some.

Thurston said yes, that would be much appreciated.

“I am surprised,” Gaines said. “Not greatly, but a little.”

“That it wasn’t more dramatic?”

“Yes.”

“Better this way, John. She passed in her sleep. She would not have known anything at all.”

Gaines stopped filling the cup. “You believe that? That we’re just a body and a brain, that there’s no separate awareness?”

“I don’t know, John.”

“I do. I think she is still alive. She, herself, not my mother, because my mother was a physical personality as well, but whatever force of life animated my mother’s body is still alive. Whatever awareness gives us life is still there . . .”

Gaines finished pouring the coffee, brought it to the table for Thurston, and sat down.

Thurston did not respond to Gaines’s comments, and there was silence between them for some time.

“I will get Vic Powell over here,” Thurston eventually said.

“I can call the Coroner’s Office,” Gaines said.

“Let me deal with it,” Thurston replied. “I want to deal with it, John.”

“Okay,” Gaines said. He closed his hands around his coffee cup as if to draw warmth from it.

“You will not be able to avoid a service and a memorial, John,” Thurston said. “Too many people knew her, and too many loved her. You are going to have to accept that you will not grieve alone.”

“I know.”

“So what can I do?”

Gaines shook his head. “Nothing.” He looked at Thurston, his gaze unerring. “I am okay, Bob. I think I am okay.”

“Well, you know I am here, whatever’s going on, alright?”

“Yes, I know. Appreciated.”

“I’ll call Victor Powell,” Thurston said. “I’ll deal with all of that. You need to organize her funeral. Maybe not today, but soon.”

“I can deal with it.”

Thurston rose. “Do you want me to say nothing? Do you want to tell people yourself?”

“No, you tell whoever, Bob. It’s not an issue.”

“I just wondered if you wanted some time alone. If I tell people, you’ll be overwhelmed with visitors.”

“That is inevitable, Bob. It happens now, or it happens tomorrow or the next day. Best just to deal with it.” Gaines smiled weakly. “You cannot postpone life, and you can’t postpone dying either, right?”

“Seems not,” Thurston replied.

Gaines stayed in the kitchen while Thurston used the phone in the hall. His conversation with Coroner Powell was hushed, respectful, brief.

Gaines stood near the back-facing window and looked toward the horizon. His attention was again caught by the brief flicker of light out there in the field, but again he dismissed it.

“He’ll be here soon,” Thurston said as he came back into the room. “He’ll take her to the mortuary, and then we’ll arrange for the undertaker to prepare her for burial. Have you thought . . . ?”

“My father was buried in Europe,” Gaines said, “but he had a family plot in Baton Rouge. She wanted to be buried there.”

“Understood. Then best to contact whoever you need to. But tomorrow. That can wait until tomorrow.”

“It’s Sunday,” Gaines said. “It will have to wait until tomorrow.”

“I’ll stay with you until Victor gets here, then,” Thurston said.

“No, Bob, it’s okay. You go on back home. Go have breakfast with your family. I just need a little time alone with her before she goes.”

Thurston nodded understandingly. He walked toward Gaines, and for a moment they just looked at each other.

Gaines held out his hand. They shook.

“Thanks for all you did for her, Bob.”

“I wish I could have done more.”

“Don’t we all?” Gaines replied.

And then Bob Thurston gathered up his things and was gone, and John Gaines returned to the window and watched for a little while as the sun rose across the fields, and he tried to empty his mind of everything, but could not.

In that moment, he knew that there was nothing left in him of the child he’d once been. His mother had kept that part of him alive, the small reminiscences and anecdotes, the reminders of barefoot summers, the stories of the father he had never known.

Now it was all gone. Gone for good.

A ray of sunlight, bright and precise enough to be solid, and yet within it the constant motion of dust particles, broke through the kitchen window.

John Gaines reached out his hand toward it. The motes swarmed and danced around his fingers.

He closed his eyes. He inhaled deeply, exhaled once more, and tried to recall the last words he had shared with his mother.

There was nothing there at all, as if she—in leaving—had taken with her the very last memory that he’d possessed.