Whether Gaines had known that there was trouble at home, or if his wounding had merely reoriented him to the realness of his own mortality, he wasn’t certain. But when he was asked by an army chaplain if he wished to return to combat after his recuperation, he said no. He had completed his tour. He had fulfilled his obligation. He wanted out. He knew of his mother’s cancer. Had this not been the case, he believed the army might have held him to his agreement to serve the additional six months. He was discharged honorably, and his journey—combat zone to small-town sidewalk—was all of twenty-four hours. One day he was standing amid the mud and blood of a South Vietnamese field hospital, the next he was in front of the post office in Whytesburg with his discharge papers and a check in his pocket.

Gaines did not tell his mother he had been shot. It would have served no purpose but to diminish the hardship of her own situation, and—more important—it would have invalidated the belief she possessed in her will for him to survive unharmed. She knew her faith had figured prominently in his return. He had survived, but he was not unharmed. None of those who returned were unharmed. As Narosky had said, In war, there are no unwounded soldiers.

It was during the first weeks of his return that he befriended Bob Thurston. Thurston was a good deal older than Gaines, and he would spend time with Gaines when he visited Alice. Thurston would give her morphine, and while she slept, he would sit with Gaines and listen to the war stories. Thurston became John Gaines’s confidant, his confessor, most of all, his friend.

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, whyever, 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.

9

Gaines 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.