The Devil and the River (9 page)

It was Thurston who advised he apply for the sheriff’s department.

“You have to have structure. You have to have a schedule. You cannot spend the rest of your life smoking weed and listening to Canned Heat.”

“I don’t want to make any decisions until later …”

“Later? You mean after Alice has died? That could be years, John, seriously. She is a tough woman, and the cancer she has is not so aggressive. It will be a long battle before she gives up. She still believes she has to look after you.”

So, in May of 1969, Gaines did as Thurston had advised. He was accepted immediately. He was young, single, a Vietnam veteran with a service medal and a Purple Heart. He attended the police academy in Vicksburg, graduated in November of 1969, and was assigned to the Breed County Sheriff’s Department in January of 1970. In February of 1971, he was promoted to deputy sheriff, and then on October 21, 1973, the day following Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre, Whytesburg sheriff, Don Bicklow, fell down dead from a heart attack in the front hallway of his mistress’s house. His mistress was a fifty-two-year-old widow who lived out near Wiggins. Taking into consideration the fact that there was an election scheduled for January of 1974, an election that Bicklow would have won without contest, Breed County Council asked Gaines to hold Bicklow’s position for the intervening two months. After six weeks, no one having come forward to apply for the job, Breed Council petitioned for Gaines’s permanent assignment without election. Gaines did not contest the application, nor did the assigned representatives of the County Seat. So, at thirty-three years of age, John Gaines became Mississippi’s youngest sheriff. He proved himself competent, not only in the day-to-day management of the department, but also in the small-minded politics of the thing. Seemed he had been born for the job. This was what people said. He did not speak of it, and perhaps was not fully aware of it himself, but Gaines did the job because the job was all he had. No wife, no girlfriend, no children, no father, his mother taking the long road to her grave, the routine and regularity of his existence punctuated solely by her sporadic but intense outbursts, her mutterings, her diatribes and polemics against Nixon and his cabinet, the morphine-induced hallucinations that she so vigorously believed were true. This was Gaines’s life. Had been his life until now, until July 24, 1974, when the rain had uncovered a twenty-year-old murder.

One morning, no more than a week before he’d been wounded, Gaines shot a Vietnamese teenager in the face. He hadn’t meant to get a head shot. He’d intended to scare him, to warn him, to cause him to flee, but the guy dropped suddenly as he fired, perhaps thinking to turn the other way. However,
why
ever, it didn’t matter. Gaines triggered, the guy dropped, and he took a face shot right through the bridge of his nose and out the other side. He lay there surprised. Dead, but surprised. His eyes wide, his mouth agape, he looked like he’d been about to say something important and then had simply forgotten the necessary words.

Gaines had walked over there, looked down at the plain black shirt, the black pants, the rubber sandals, the body inside them. The dead boy was no more than eighteen or nineteen. He had been carrying a French 9mm MAT machine gun, captured by the North Vietnamese in an earlier war. He had on a belt, tucked into it a cracked leather scabbard, within the scabbard a hunting knife. He had a single grenade.

His eyes were like tight nuggets of jet. Black, depthless. And yet they burned with some profoundly bitter malice.

Gaines looked at those eyes, and all he could think of was the child he never had, of how he used to sit on the porch with Linda Newman eating ice-cream sandwiches and watching the sky get closer until it was finally dark, and the fireflies in the fields had been like agitated, earthbound stars.

Then he kicked the boy once, firmly, sharply, in the upper arm.

“Fucker,” he’d said, almost under his breath, not because he resented the boy, not because the boy might have been responsible for the deaths of countless Americans, not because he disagreed with the boy’s political sympathies, his loyalty to the communists, his allegiance to things that Gaines did not comprehend, but because he’d been in the way of the bullet when Gaines had pulled the trigger.

That was all he could find to hate. That the boy had been in the way.

Gaines had stood there for a moment more and then walked away, his poncho pulled tightly around him, and with the rain battering ceaselessly on his helmet, he’d eaten his breakfast out of a green Mermite tin

He’d looked out in the fog, the moist, unbreathable fog that hung over the land and through which the vagaries of the landscape took on an awful and terrifying prospect. The fog itself did not move; it was the shapes within it.

Later, when the fog cleared, the boy had gone.

That strange sense of distortion, a sense of mystery, of profound disorientation, now assaulted Gaines once more.

In closing his eyes, in trying to remember Nancy Denton’s face from only a handful of hours before, he could not. He saw only the dead teenager with depthless eyes and the fog that came to retrieve him.

G
aines made his way back over to see Powell. Powell was not there, though he would be back before too long. Gaines just stood in the corridor and waited. After remembering Linda Newman, Charles “Too High” Binney, the VC teenager with the hole in his face, his thoughts had been quiet. He remembered a neatly stenciled legend on the side of a Jeep:
Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity.
Why he remembered such a thing, he did not know. He smiled. He closed his eyes, and then he took a deep breath. Sometimes—even now, and for no reason—he experienced the bitter taste of salt tabs. Like sweat, like tears. No, like nothing else.

Sometimes he felt as if he’d spent his life missing the punch line, catching the last part of things, laughing not because he understood, but because everyone else was.
Get up to speed
, he kept thinking to himself.
Get with it
—another admonition.

He had never been one of the chosen few. A different world awaited the beautiful.

Sometimes resentment bled from every pore like a dark sweat. Resentment of himself, his dead father, his sick mother, of the people he had known and lost, of Linda and the child. He had believed in her—in
them
. He had found her, somehow. As if the clumsy poetry of his words had given her hope, hope that he—a spent and broken man, by all accounts—had yet somehow secured a path through the tortuous rapids and shallows of the human heart, that he had navigated a way, that he knew some means of escape, that alongside him, she would never experience the lovesick travails that appeared to befall all people. He had believed her his true north. But life happened. Life got in the way. The minuses added up, and no matter how many minuses were added, it never became a plus. Now he looked at the world as if everything before him was a little more than he could absorb, a fraction more than he could understand. And he resented it. Such an emotion infected all he touched, a virus of shadows, and some other sour-tasting bitterness.
This is not the life I envisioned or wanted . . . This is not my life, but someone else’s. There has been a grave mistake. Who do I speak to about this? No one
, the world replied.
You make your bed, my friend, and you lie in it.

“John?”

Gaines looked up. How long had he been standing there?

Powell smiled. “You okay?”

“Yes,” Gaines replied. “I came back for the autopsy results.”

They stood in silence for some time. The girl was laid out before them, her chest and stomach now stitched more neatly, her skin and hair washed, her hands enclosed in plastic bags, as were her feet.
To preserve any detritus or blood beneath the nails
, Powell had said.
Unlikely, and even if there is, well, the possibility of matching it to anything is unlikely to impossible. But we do what we can.

It was the snake that held Gaines’s attention.

The remnants of the small basket had been washed clean of blood and mud, the snake—now clearly identifiable as a garter—there on the table beside it. It held its own tail in its mouth. Unraveled, the snake could not have been more than a foot long, but here it was in a circle, its tail in its mouth as if ready to swallow itself.

Gaines had heard of this. Ouroboros. A symbol of the unity of all things, the cyclic nature of birth and death, of something constantly re-creating itself, of something existing with such force it cannot be extinguished.

“I have no idea,” Powell said. “I don’t know what it means, and I don’t know what it was intended to signify. This is all lost on me.”

“Was it strangulation, as you thought?” Gaines had asked him.

“Yes,” Powell said. “The muscular damage around her throat and the fracture of the hyoid bone—”

“Hyoid bone,” Gaines echoed. He was elsewhere. He was still thinking of Ouroboros, the snake that devours its own tail and disappears.

“The damage to her throat and clavicle was preserved, almost as if this happened a week ago. Truth is, had she not been buried in mud, well, she would be nothing but a skeleton now.”

Gaines closed his eyes. He tried his best not to picture it. What she must have gone through. Perhaps the only saving grace was that she had not been raped or sexually abused. He’d seen rape victims before, girls as young as ten or twelve assaulted by the VC as revenge for Army of the Republic of Vietnam collaboration. That faraway stare, the light in the eyes extinguished, the physical inertia, the apathy. The platoons left them behind. What could they do? The field hospitals couldn’t take them, and there was no way the US military could provide a transportation service to the few religious missions and outposts that were scattered back behind the rear lines. This was war. This was collateral damage.

Where do I begin?
This was the question in Gaines’s mind. He did not voice it.

“Do you know anything of the story?” Gaines asked.

Powell shook his head. “I was transferred here just a couple of years before you. However, I did speak to Jim Hughes, and he told me that it was never reported as a murder. The girl just disappeared. That was it. People figured her for a runaway. Don Bicklow, your predecessor, was sheriff back then, or so Hughes tells me, and his deputy was a guy called George Austin. Both of them are dead now, so whatever they found out has probably gone with them.”

Gaines listened to the words, but he wasn’t paying attention. He was trying to find some context within which to place his thoughts.

Whytesburg had seen three murders in Gaines’s four and a half years. Two had been domestics: discovered love affairs, one a cheating husband, the second a cheating wife. Leonore Franks had put a kitchen knife through her husband’s chest in November of 1970. She had caught him fucking a girl called Deidra Collins, a short-order cook from Picayune. Tommy Franks was a big man, but Leonore was bigger. She waited until he was sleeping, and then she brought that blade down into his heart with all the force she could muster. Powell told Gaines that Franks wouldn’t have had time to even open his eyes. It seemed no great loss to Gaines. Franks had always seemed to be too much of everything that was worthless. Infidelity was not the only way he proved himself an asshole. The man had been as crude and brash as a circus poster.

Second case was March of 1971, a man called Cyrus Capaldi, all of five foot four. He was a barber, one with a better view of himself than was warranted. He talked ceaselessly, opinions worth little more than a cent or a nickel. He wore a perpetually furtive expression, as if his purpose were to relay some sordid sexual escapade, such escapade punishable by law in thirty-nine of fifty states.
Hey, Capaldi
, Gaines wanted to say.
Why don’t you shut the hell up?
But he didn’t. Figured the barber would do as he was asked, but would cut the back of Gaines’s hair all ragged and ornery just to get a small revenge. Anyway, Capaldi discovered his wife was screwing an itinerant carpenter called Hank Graysmith. Graysmith was not his real name, but was the name he chose to use for work and other various extracurricular activities. Cyrus poisoned his wife, Bernice, with a combination of sleeping tablets and fungicide. The fungicide had been purchased from the hardware store to treat a mysterious mold that showed around the corner posts of the veranda. Evidently, Cyrus considered that his wife was now a mold, for he used the preparation to rid himself of her once and for all. According to Cyrus, this was not the first time she had
gone out
on him.

In both of these cases, there had been no investigation. Leonore Franks had sat in her house, her hands covered in blood, until Sheriff Don Bicklow had shown up to arrest her. Cyrus Capaldi had called the sheriff himself, simply said,
It’s over, Don. I done killed Bernice. She’s sat here at the kitchen table with her head slumped down, and there’s a white foam coming from her nose. Better come and get the both of us.
Both Cyrus Capaldi and Leonore Franks were doing life, Cyrus up at Parchman Farm, Leonore at the women’s facility at Tupelo.

The third murder had been a real murder. A dismembered body in a machine at the Whytesburg Laundromat. June of 1973, two days after Gaines’s thirty-third birthday, just four months before Bicklow gave himself a coronary seizure doing precisely what Tommy Franks should not have been.

There was a head, two arms, two legs, but the torso was gone. The arms and legs had been severed at the elbows and knees respectively, and thus there were five parts, each carefully wrapped in a heavy-duty polyethylene. It wasn’t long before an ID was made. The victim was one Bradley Gardner, a salesman, a purveyor of sometime-necessaries, fripperies, extravagances, and wares. He was of the view that anything could be sold. Everything had a tradable value. It was simply a matter of clientele and confidence. Haircutting devices, ever-sharp razor blades, unbreakable coffee cups, socks guaranteed to last as long as your feet. Seemed to Gaines that such people as Bradley Gardner had only two functions in this world: getting drunk and sleeping it off. He was a petty criminal—nothing more, nothing less—but it seemed he had ideas above his station. Later, it transpired, Bradley Gardner was more than capable of blackmail.