The Devil and the River (33 page)

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.

Y
es, 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.

H
is 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.