The Devil and the River (14 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes,” Gaines said. “Yes, I did.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You wanna ask me about Nancy Denton?”

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

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

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

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

Gaines’s intake of breath was audible.

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

“Nancy, Mike . . . tell me about Nancy Denton,” Gaines urged.

“I can’t, Sheriff. I made a promise. Too many people loved her too much. I done what I had to do, and that’s all there is to the story.”

It was a little after one when Gaines brought Lieutenant Michael Webster into the Sheriff’s Office. Not only in the stark normalcy of the office, but also in the car on the drive over, Gaines had been aware of how dirty Webster was. His hands were gray, filth ingrained in the pores, the fingernails black, the smell of him close to unbearable. It was the sickening funk of bad meat, as if Webster himself were rotting from within. But it was not only the way Webster appeared; it was not only the smell, the things he said, the expression in his eyes; there was also a kind of haunted intensity, something that Gaines had seen all too often in war. In truth, it was the way Webster
felt
. The very presence of the man was unsettling—even when silent, even when his distant expression was directed elsewhere, Gaines could
feel
the tension around the man.

Webster said nothing on the drive over, and Gaines did not encourage him. Until Webster was in a room with a tape recorder and a second officer, Gaines didn’t want to hear what he had to say about Nancy Denton.

Gaines just drove, his eyes on the road ahead, but he was so terribly aware of the man beside him. Webster was a product of war. Webster was a product of nightmares. Webster had perhaps carried some demon inside of him all the way from the foxholes of Guadalcanal and delivered it to Whytesburg.

They had dug up the body of a teenage girl, but what else had they dug up? Had they released something preternatural, some malevolent force, some specter of the past that would now forever haunt the streets and the spaces between the houses?

Gaines knew enough to understand that he could not ignore the unknown, especially in this part of the country. There were reminders everywhere that the world was not limited solely to the physical and the tangible.

As they approached the Sheriff’s Office, Webster spoke for the first time since they had left the motel. “Did you find her, Sheriff Gaines? Did you find Nancy?”

“Yes, Michael, I did.”

Webster closed his eyes. He made a sound as if he were deflating inside. “So she is never coming back?”

“No, Michael, she is never coming back.”

Gaines pulled up ahead of the office. He started to get out, and then he realized that Webster was sobbing. He turned and looked at the man—this filthy, bedraggled man—and he watched as his chest rose and fell, as he tortured himself through whatever emotional storm he was experiencing.

After a while, a good while, he started to settle. “I knew she wouldn’t,” he eventually said. “Inside, deep inside, I knew it was impossible.”

Gaines did not reply; he needed the man in a room with a witness and a recorder.

Webster turned and looked at Gaines. Somehow Webster’s tears had made small tracks through the grime on his face. “Will I be able to see her again?” he said.

Gaines took a moment to register what Webster was saying.

“Why?” he asked. “Why would you want to see her again?”

Webster shook his head and sighed. “To see if what I did helped her in any way. To see if what I did helped her at all . . .”

G
aines was used to small-time, at least as far as Whytesburg’s law requirements were concerned.

The predominant order of business was the drunks—the garrulous, the sentimental, and the violent. Those in the third category were the only ones who ever inhabited the cells beneath the Sheriff’s Office, and that type was rare. Seemed that the wives of Whytesburg had that kind of thing under control before it ever reached the streets. Occasionally, Gaines held on to a hobo for a few hours, waiting to see if he’d figure out some way to pay the train fare he’d just skipped. Invariably he did not, and invariably said hobo was released before he stank up the place too much. One time Gaines snared a couple of paperhangers from Mobile who figured that small-town Mississippi was as good a place as any to write checks that would never cash. In truth, Gaines’s clientele was ordinarily insufficiently crooked or ballsy to cheat on their tax forms or buy stolen goods, but still found it necessary to redress the balance of imagined social ills by committing pointless and negligible misdemeanors. These then consumed his days. Gaines’s legacy, when he retired, would be measured in traffic violations, speeding tickets, and stern words with teenagers regarding the downside of Richards Wild Irish Rose or Ripple wine.

Whytesburg was neither ready nor able to absorb the horror of Nancy Denton and Lieutenant Michael Webster.

Gaines put Webster in a cell. The man had not confessed to anything; nor had any evidence—damning or circumstantial—been isolated or identified that could attribute the death of Nancy Denton to Webster. Regardless, the very presence of the man was sufficient to instigate a sense of agitation and disturbance in the place. Gaines had Hagen, Chantry, and Dalton take Webster’s clothes from him. They gave him a pair of jeans, a white T-shirt, and a blue-and-white-striped shirt. His feet were left bare, and he was given no belt. Webster did not profess to understand what was happening, nor did he question their actions. They asked for his clothes. He stripped and handed them over. He did not complain, protest, or resist. When he stood there in his clean clothes, he seemed ageless, almost a child, the expression on his face one of bemused detachment.

Once his clothes had been bagged and tagged, Gaines went down there.

Webster was seated on the bed. Gaines stood outside the cell.

“You understand why you’re here, Mike?” Gaines asked.

“Because you think I did something to Nancy Denton that I shouldn’t have done.”

Gaines could not argue with that.

“But I know what I know, and I see what I see,” Webster went on, “and unless you knew what I knew, unless you had seen what I have seen, then there’s no way to understand what I did.”

“I don’t think I will ever understand what you did.”

Webster smiled. “Then you surprise me, Sheriff Gaines. I thought you, of all people, would appreciate what had to be done.”

Gaines restrained himself from asking a direct question.

Did you kill Nancy Denton?

Did you cut open her body and remove her heart, and did you put a snake inside her and bury her in the riverbank?

A confession was needed, but on record, on tape, and preferably in the presence of a lawyer. Gaines did not wish to exhaust whatever urge Webster might have to confess in a way that could not be admissible when pressing charges and seeking arraignment.

There was silence between them for some time. Gaines could hear Webster breathing. He could feel his own heartbeat—in his chest, in his temples, in his wrists. He felt electrified, a raw tension throughout his whole body, as if his skin had been stripped and he was being doused in salt water.