“This is what you needed me to know?” Gaines asked, almost afraid to ask, aware that even he was close to his own level of tolerance.

“Yes, John, I did.”

Powell leaned over the body, and then he carefully worked his fingers into the wound. Slowly, he drew the edges apart, and even as he did so, Gaines was aware that something was very wrong indeed.

“Where is her heart?” Gaines asked.

“She did not have one,” Powell replied. He reached left and came back with a metal dish. In it seemed to be shreds of fabric, perhaps some kind of plant matter. And there was something else. Something that disturbed Gaines greatly.

“This came apart as I removed it,” Powell said.

Gaines looked at Nancy’s face. Something seemed to have changed. This was not the way she had appeared when he had entered the room with Judith. The face now seemed tight, the skin drawn, the lips pulled back against the teeth.

It was the body being influenced by the air, the change in temperature perhaps, he told himself. Nothing more than that.

Gaines closed his eyes and mouthed a few silent words.

“What?” Powell asked.

“Nothing,” Gaines replied.

“You ready for this?” Powell asked.

“As I’ll ever be.”

“This,” Powell said, indicating the few shreds of cloth in the metal dish, “is the remains of a basket.”

“A what?”

“A basket. Very carefully constructed, almost spherical. Made in two halves, it was hinged on one side with wire and had a wire catch on the other. And it was made to open just like a pocket watch . . .”

Powell set the dish down on the table.

“A basket? What the hell?” Gaines started.

“Hold your breath, John,” Powell replied, “because you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

Powell took a wooden depressor and poked at a small shape to the side of the basket’s remains. It seemed to uncurl, and despite its fragility, it still retained its circular shape. It was then that Gaines’s eyes seemed to deceive him.

It was a snake. No question about it. An infant, its type and exact length impossible to ascertain, it was nevertheless a snake.

“Jesus Christ. What the fuck?”

“Exactly what I said,” Powell interjected. “Someone strangled her, and then they opened her up, cut out her heart, and then replaced it with a snake in a basket.”

Gaines didn’t say a word. He simply felt a quiet sense of dread drowning every other emotion he was feeling.

7

Sometimes the mind slipped its moorings.

Gaines, standing quietly in the corridor outside the morgue, thought of Linda Newman. At first he did not know why she came to mind, but then—after a little while—he did know. It was because of the child. The child that never was.

It was 1959, and he—all of nineteen years old—met a girl in the Laundromat. As good a place as any other to meet a wife, he believed. Not like there was some wife-farm where you could go pick your own and then maybe take her back if she turned out to be a sour ’un. Her name was Linda, and she got herself all trained up in a beautician school in Baton Rouge. She came on back to Opelousas, where Gaines was living at the time, but there didn’t appear to be a great demand for the things she proposed to provide. The women all wore housecoats and thick socks. They were up at five in the morning, chopping wood, firing the stove to make oatmeal for a hungover husband and a brood of kids, and such routines didn’t sit so well with a bouffant and a manicure. Women like that would rather you open up another liquor store, maybe a bar or something, so their husbands would spend more nights sleeping in the garage. Lack of employment aside, John Gaines and Linda Newman figured they would make it work somehow, and they stayed together. One time in the fall of 1960, just for the hell of it, they had driven from Alexandria to Shreveport. They had shared a passion for Nabs crackers, had eaten much of the state’s available supply en route. And then, in the early part of 1961, Linda got pregnant. When she was pregnant, she was crazy for frozen Milky Ways. For her, frozen Milky Ways were not so far from a religious experience.

While he was in-country, Gaines had thought about that child a lot. The child that almost was. Squatting in a foxhole, the darkness stabbing at his eyes, his mind playing tricks (for once it was dark, everyone believed in ghosts), he would make-believe that the child was alive, that he or she had made it, that Linda Newman and the child were waiting for him in Opelousas. But there had been no child, and there was no Linda Newman. Linda had miscarried, and afterwards it seemed that she could not bear to be around him, and so she’d returned to her folks in New Orleans. So many times Gaines had thought to find her, to speak to her, to try to convince her they could start over. He had imagined those conversations, practiced his lines, but they had never been delivered. Gaines had rehearsed a part he’d known he would never play, because he knew all along that it would never have worked. What had happened between them, how it had ended, had been so finite, so permanent, and they had both known it completely.

Gaines had tried so hard to think of other things, but it just kept coming back, like the taste of bad garlic, and it had made him bitter. The child he’d been denied. Seemed there was always something to remind him, and now this—this dead girl with a snake for a heart—was the most potent and powerful of all.

Linda had been gone all of thirteen years. His fourteen months in Vietnam had ended in December of 1968, and yet he was still alone, still caring for his mother, living now in Mississippi instead of Louisiana, but little, if anything, had changed.

He believed he had done the right things. However, doing the right thing was only a comfort if the result was right. There were individuals who accepted what nature had given them and others who strived against it. There were others who floated in limbo. They were waiting, it seemed, but for what? Even they did not know.

There was one God for the rich folks, one for the poor. And there were some men who spent the entirety of their lives looking for signs of forgiveness for a crime they had not committed.

Gaines, every once in a while, would still awaken in four-hour shifts. Suddenly, his eyes wide, his mind alert, a voice insisting in a hurried whisper, Hey! Hey, Gaines! You’re up, and he would lie there, the silence of the house around him, and realize that he did not need to get up, that there was no watch to be performed tonight, that if he stepped out behind the house and stared into the darkness, he would see nothing but distance and shadows. Whatever war had existed for him was now over. Vietnam was nine and a half thousand miles away, and yet sometimes he believed it was as close as his shadow. Believed, perhaps, that it was his shadow. It was a mighty war, both terrible and terrifying, and back then—at twenty-seven years of age—he had been a child among children, and they had been presented with both horror and rapture in equal parts. It was said that the mind healed if given sufficient time. It did not. It merely built ever-greater defenses against the ravages of conscience and memory.

After a while you forgot what was dream and what was memory.

Above and beneath all that, John Gaines was the man he had become in Vietnam. He was a man of war. A dark and merciless and unrelenting war that took everything good from the soul and replaced it with nothing. It was hard to appreciate how little more than a year could influence and affect a human being to such a degree. But it had. There was no question that it had.

Some said they left a part of themselves in the jungles and villes and tunnels of Southeast Asia. This was not true. They left all of themselves behind. They returned as someone else, and their friends, their families, their wives and mothers and daughters, struggled to recognize them. To themselves, as well, they had become almost strangers.