The Devil and the River (2 page)

And the rain fell, and the rain was black, and it did not stop.

The one thing that combat gave you was a willingness to expect everything and nothing at the same time. It took hold of your need for prediction, and it kicked it right out of you. Run for three days; stand still for four. Move at a moment’s notice; go back the way you came. And all of it without explanation as to why.
How come this is so utterly, utterly fucked?
someone asked.
Because this is the way God made it
was the answer given.
How else d’you think he gets his rocks off?
After a few weeks, a couple of months perhaps, you realized that there was no one who gave a single, solitary crap about where you were.

One time, Gaines had taken a forty-five-minute chopper ride with six dead guys. Just Gaines, the pilot, and half a dozen dead guys. Some were in body bags, some just wrapped in their ponchos. Ten minutes in and Gaines unzipped them, uncovered their faces, and they all had their eyes open. He had talked for thirty minutes straight. He’d told them everything he felt, everything he feared. They did not judge him. They were just there. Gaines knew they understood. He also knew that Plato was right, that only the dead had seen the end of war. He believed that had he not done that, he would not have been able to go back. He unloaded those good ol’ boys and then returned in the same chopper. He could still smell their dead-stink for five clicks.

That same smell overwhelmed Gaines as they carried the girl away. The rain had washed her clean. She was fifteen or sixteen years old; she was naked; and a crudely sewn wound divided her body from neck to navel. It had been sewn with heavy twine, and the mud had worked its way inside her. Even as her pale frame was carried to a tarp above the bank, the mud appeared and disappeared again like small black tongues from the stitched mouths of the wound. Gaines watched the men as they transported her—a line of sad faces, like early-morning soldiers on the base-bound liberty bus. Fun is done. Girls and liquor are all left behind. Like the faces of those transporting the dead to a chopper, the weight of the body in the poncho, their faces grim and resolute, eyes squinting through half-closed lids, almost as if they believed that to see half of this was to be somehow safe from the rest. The precise and torturous gravity of conscience, the burden of guilt, the weight of the dead.

And then Gaines noticed the trees, these arched and disheveled figures, and he believed that had they not already skewed and stretched their roots into rank and fetid earth, they would have come forward, shuffling and awkward, stinking their way out of the filth and shit of the swamps, and they would have suffocated them all within a tangled, knotted argument of arthritic branches and spiders’ webs of Spanish moss. There would always be some grotesque and gothic manner of death, but this would perhaps be the worst.

The sorry gang carried her as quickly as they could, the mud dragging at their feet, the rain hammering down, drowning all words, drowning the sound of six men as they stumbled up the bank.

The memory of the dead is the greatest burden of all.
That’s what Lieutenant Ron Wilson had once opined in a field beyond 25th Division Headquarters at Cu Chi in February of 1968. He uttered those words to Gaines, the very last words ever to leave his lips, and he uttered it in the handful of seconds between changing his damp socks and the arrival of the bullet that killed him. There were no sounds—neither from the bullet itself, haphazardly fired without aim, merely a vague hope that somewhere it would find a target, nor from Lieutenant Wilson’s lips. The bullet entered his throat at the base and severed his spinal cord somewhere among the cervical vertebrae. For a brief while, his eyes were still alive, his lips playing with something akin to a reflective smile, as if
The memory of the dead is the greatest burden of all
had been the precursor, the introduction to something else. Lieutenant Wilson was a philosopher. He quoted Arnold Bennett aphorisms about time and human industry. He was a good lieutenant, more a leader than a follower, a characteristic founded more in his vague distrust of others rather than any real sense of trust in himself. Gaines did not know what Wilson had done before the war. Later, after Wilson had been choppered away, he had asked the other guys in the platoon.
Who was Wilson? Before the war, I mean. Who was he?
They did not know either, or they did not say. Where he had come from was of no great concern. His life before was irrelevant. The life after was all that concerned them, and for Lieutenant Wilson there would be none.

Gaines remembered Wilson’s face—the moment alive, the moment of death—as they reached Jim Hughes’s flatbed with their grim burden. They laid the girl out on the rough, waterlogged boards, and Gaines set one half of the tarp beneath her, the other half over her, and he instructed Hughes to drive, his two sons up front, and he would follow them in his squad car back to town. He told Hagen to radio in and request both Dr. Thurston and the coroner be at the Coroner’s Office upon their return.

It was now two o’clock in the afternoon. It had taken the better part of four hours to release the girl’s body from the mud.

In a little while, once her body had been handed over to the coroner, Gaines would begin the onerous task of identifying whose child this was. And once identified, the task would be to find her parents and deliver the truth. There would be no triangled stars and stripes. There would be no telegram. There would be John Gaines, sheriff of Whytesburg, lately of the nine circles of hell that was Vietnam, standing on a mother’s porch with his eyes cast down and his hat in his hands.

I
remember it like my own name.

That day.

That Thursday.

I remember waking with a sense of urgency, of excitement, anticipation.

I remember the light through the window beside my bed, the way it glowed through the curtain. I remember the texture of the fabric, the motes of dust illuminated like microscopic fireflies.

It was as if I had slept for a thousand years, but sleep had let me go without any effort at all. I felt as if I could just burst with energy.

I rose and washed and dressed. I tied my laces and hurried downstairs.

“Maryanne!” my mother called when she heard my footsteps in the hall. “You come on here and get some breakfast before you go out playing!”

I was not hungry, but I ate. I ate quickly, like a child with endless siblings, hurrying through the food before one of them could snatch it away.

“Now, I need you back before dark,” my mother said. “I said you could go today, but I don’t want a repeat of last time. I’m not coming out looking for you at ten o’clock at night, young lady. You hear me?”

“Yes, Mom.”

“And that Wade boy . . . You remember that they’re different from us, Maryanne. Don’t you go falling in love with a Wade, now.”

“Mom—”

She smiled. She was teasing me.

“And Nancy will be with you, right?”

“Yes, Mom.”

“And Michael Webster?”

“Yes, Mom.”

“Okay, well, I don’t want to hear that you’ve been giving him any trouble, either. He’s the oldest one among you, and if you cause trouble, he’ll be the one to get a harsh word from Sheriff Bicklow.”

“Mom, we’re not going to cause any trouble. I promise. And Michael is not going to have to speak to Sheriff Bicklow. And I don’t love Matthias, and I don’t love Eugene—”

“Well, that’s good to hear, young lady. Even if you fell head over heels for either one of those Wade boys—” She hesitated mid-sentence. A curious expression appeared and was gone just as quickly.

“Okay,” she said. “Enjoy yourself. But back before dark, and if I have to come looking for you . . .”

“I’ll be back before dark, Mom.”

“And I suppose Matthias Wade will be providing food for everyone, as usual . . .”

“He’ll bring a basket, I’m sure. He always does.”

“Well, as long as you understand that this sort of special treatment won’t go on forever. He’s a young man, Maryanne. He’s all of twenty years old, and I am not so sure that I approve of this friendship . . .”

“We’re just friends, Mom. Me and Nancy and the others. We’re just friends, okay?”

“And there’s the other Wade girl . . . the youngest one. What’s her name?”

“Della.”

“Well, make sure that you don’t leave her out of your plans. Nothing worse for a child than to feel that they’re the odd one out.”

“I won’t, Mom. I promise. Now, can I go, pleeease . . . ?”

My mother smiled then, and there was such warmth and love and care in her smile that I could do nothing but smile back.

I reached the door, and she snapped me back with a single “Maryanne,” as if I was tied by elastic.

“Your room?”

“Tonight, Mom. I promise. I promise I’ll clean it tonight. Really, I will.”

“Be gone,” she said, and flicked the dish towel toward me as if shooing a fly.

I was gone like a rocket, like a thunderbolt, haring out of the house and down the path, turning left at the end of the road and running until I felt my legs would fall right off.

I knew my mother was right. However much I might think about Matthias Wade, or think I loved him, or even wish that Eugene Wade would get his head out of his books every once in a while and kiss me, the fact still remained that the Wade family was the Wade family, and—to me—they seemed to be the richest and most powerful family in the world. And their daddy, Earl Wade, well, he scared me ever such a little. I mean, I knew he must be lonely and maybe even a bit crazy perhaps, but still he scared me. The way he stood at the top of the stairs and looked down at us. The way it seemed to take some Herculean effort to crack his face with a smile. The way he referred to us as “incorrigible” and “wearisome” and “vexatious.” Seemed to me that a man like that, a man who seemed to have no friends, would appreciate some noise and laughter in the house, but no, apparently not.

I mean, with everything that happened with his wife, I could sort of understand what he might have gone through. Well, no, perhaps not. I am looking at this in hindsight, as an adult, and I can appreciate what might have happened to him, but then—all of fourteen years old—what could I have known? He was a scary man. That was all he was to me. He was Earl Wade—businessman, landowner, involved in politics, always engaged in serious discussions with serious men that could not be disturbed. You tiptoed in the Wade house—that’s if you ever got inside. The few occasions I did go in, creeping around like a church mouse with Della and Eugene and Catherine and Matthias, I could sense that even they were wary of upsetting his humor. He had a temper. I knew that much. I heard him hollering at Matthias one time.

“You think you can just waltz in and out of this house as if you own it? Is that what you think? You might be my eldest son, Matthias, but that does not mean you can freeload off of me for the rest of your life. You may have done well in your studies, and you may have earned yourself a place at one of the best colleges in the country, but that does not mean that you can spend the entirety of your summers lazing around like some sort of superficial Hollywood playboy. You are not Jay Gatsby, young man . . .”

I did not know who Jay Gatsby was, but it sounded like he wasn’t the sort of person Earl Wade wished his son to be.

And so it was, in some narrow place between the wealth and power of the Wades and the simple reality of my friendship with Nancy Denton, that we found a handful of years that would influence all of our lives for the rest of our lives. It could have been different—so very, very different—but the cruel reality of life is that the things we hope for and the things we have are rarely, if ever, the same.

There are small truths and big truths, just as there are small lies and big lies, and alongside those truths and lies run the questions that were never asked and those that were never answered.

The worst of all is the latter. What happened? What really happened? Why did something so good become something so awfully, terribly bad?

Was it us? Did we make it happen? Did those seven human beings—myself, Nancy Denton, the four Wade children, and Michael Webster—just by circumstance and coincidence, just because we were all in the same place at the same time, conjure up some dreadful enchantment that captured our hearts and souls and directed them toward tragedy?

Is that what happened?

It was a long, long time before I understood that there might never be an answer to that question.

It was the not knowing that killed us all, if not physically, then in our hearts and minds.

A little something in all of us died that day, and perhaps we will never know why.

W
hytesburg coroner, Victor Powell, was present in the doorway as the pickup and two squad cars drew to a halt ahead of the squat building. He merely nodded as Gaines exited the vehicle, waited in silence as the men lifted the girl’s body from the bed of the truck and carried it around toward him.

It was a funeral procession, plain and simple, their expressions grave, their hands and faces smeared with mud, their hair plastered to their heads as if painted with a crude brush.

Gaines excused them when the girl had been delivered, thanked them for their help, their time.

He shook hands with each of them in turn, stood there beside Deputy Hagen as the pickup pulled away and headed back into town.

Gaines turned then, nodded at Hagen, and they went inside to join Powell.

Powell was silent and motionless, looking down at the naked teenager on the slab. Her skin was alabaster white, almost faintly blue beneath the lights. The mud from the riverbank filled the spaces between her fingers and toes; it had welled in the sunken sockets of her eyes; it filled her ears and her nose. Her hair was a dense mass of ragged tails—all of this as if a monochrome photograph had been taken of some weathered statue. It was a surreal and disturbing image, an image that would join so many others that crowded Gaines’s mind. But it was here in Whytesburg, and such images—at least for him—should have belonged solely to a war on the other side of the world.