The Devil and the River

  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.

  41

  It nagged at his thoughts. The light in the field.

  He could not see it now, but he had seen it earlier, believed it to be nothing more than something reflective catching the rays of the rising sun. A discarded bottle. A tin can. But it had flickered before dawn. He had seen something out there in the back field before the sun even rose, and so it could not have been what he thought it was.

  Victor Powell came. He was quiet and methodical, and he went about his business and did not ask questions of Gaines until he and Gaines had taken Alice out on the gurney and into the back of the vehicle. And then they came inside once more. Gaines sat at the kitchen table, and Powell stood for a while in silence before he spoke.

  “I met your mother on the first day she arrived here,” he said. “It was the spring of 1968. You were on your way to Vietnam, far as I recall.”

  Gaines looked up at Powell. All he could think of was the fact that his mother would now be in the morgue alongside the Dentons and Michael Webster. That and the light in the field. He had looked for it, but it had gone. Later he would walk out there and see what he could find.

  “What was it like?”

  Gaines frowned, shook his head. “What was what like?”

  “The war? In Vietnam?”

  “The war?” Gaines asked, almost of himself. “I should imagine it was like any other war, Victor. The strange thing is that since this has happened, since we found Nancy, it has been in my thoughts far more than ever.”

  Powell merely nodded, as if understanding that there was no appropriate acknowledgment for Gaines’s comment.

  “I thought a great deal of your mother, John,” he said. “I am really sorry she’s passed, but it was inevitable.”

  “It’s inevitable for all of us.”

  Powell stepped forward, took the chair facing Gaines. “Was there anything specific that you didn’t have a chance to say to her?”

  Gaines didn’t reply.

  “I mean, I have often found that not everything has been said . . . everything that needed to be said, and sometimes it is just best to say it. Say it out loud. Say it like they can still hear it.”

  “I understand,” Gaines replied, and then h
e slowly shook his head. “There is nothing that didn’t get said.”

  Powell reached out and closed his hand over Gaines’s. “I am taking her now. You let me know of the arrangements, and if you wish to see her again . . .”

  “I will, and thanks, Victor. Thank you for being her friend.”

  Powell rose slowly. He put on his hat, walked to the door, looked back once more at Gaines, and then left.

  Gaines listened to the sound of the mortuary wagon as it pulled away, and then there were voices outside, those of Caroline and her parents, Leonard and Margaret. They came in from the back yard, and when Caroline saw Gaines she rushed towards him and started to cry.

  Gaines just looked back at Margaret and Leonard, their faces like lost dogs, and he closed his eyes. He held Caroline tight as she sobbed, and he could smell juniper in her hair, and he was reminded of a girl he once knew from Fort Morgan, Alabama, but he could not remember her name.

  It seemed that they stayed that way for some small eternity, and then Margaret pulled Caroline away from him. They all sat, and Margaret made coffee, and Caroline started talking. Once she started talking, it seemed that she did not want to stop, for to stop would mean silence, and it was always in the silence that her grief returned to fill the vacuum.

  They talked among themselves then—Margaret and Leonard and Caroline—and Gaines listened, as if eavesdropping on a conversation that had nothing to do with him. He was thankful for their presence, for the decision that Margaret made to make eggs, to feed him, for had they not been there, he would have eaten nothing.

  He did eat, surprising even himself, and quietly, as if in slow motion, he seemed to return, inch by inch, to some semblance of the real world, to the reality that necessitated funeral arrangements, a memorial service, the transportation of his mother’s body out to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to be buried in the plot that was always meant to welcome his father.

  It seemed then, strangely, that Alice had been yet another victim of this sequence of events that had begun with the discovery of Nancy Denton.

  Gaines was struck with the oddest thought: that Alice had gone after Nancy, after Webster, too, to find them, to ask them, to resolve the mystery for herself.