Oh God, what was this girl doing here?

And seeing this girl brought back memories of another child . . .

The child that never was . . .

He could hear Hagen on the radio. People would come—Jim Hughes and his eldest sons, Hagen’s brother—and photographs would be taken. Gaines would survey the area for anything indicative of foul play, and then they would reach into the blackness and bring the girl out. Then, and only then, would they know what fate had befallen her, a fate that had buried her in the riverbank before her life had even really begun.

The rain did come, an hour later. The rain was black. Gaines would remember it that way. It fell as straight as gravity, and it was hard and cold and bitter on his lips. He had seen the pictures taken, and then he and Hagen and Hagen’s brother, Jim Hughes and his two sons, had started working their hands into the mud around the girl in an effort to release her. They knelt there, all six of them, and they tried to work ropes down under her, beneath her neck, her arms, her waist, her thighs. And then they had to lie down, for the mud was black and depthless, and it sucked relentlessly. And the smell was damp and rank and fetid. It was a smell that filled Gaines’s nostrils, a smell that he would always remember. The smell of blood and mud and stagnant water, all blended together into some unholy brew. And there was fear. Only later would he understand this. That he had smelled his own fear. That he had smelled the fear of the others. Fear of what had happened to this girl, that something terrible would be revealed, that her body would surface in pieces perhaps. Fear for themselves, that the mud was too deep, too strong, that they—in their efforts to help, unable to leave her, unable to do anything but persevere—would be drawn into the blackness as well.

Back there, back in the war, perhaps in the hours following his return from some long-range recon patrol, Gaines would walk down to the medical tent and watch the sawbones at work. Hands, arms, legs, feet. A bucket of devastated limbs beneath each makeshift operating table. Perhaps he’d believed that if he could grow immune to such things in reality, he could grow immune to the images in his mind. It had not worked. The mind was stronger than anything reality could present.

He saw those things now. He saw them in the face of the girl they were bringing up from the mud.

And when they brought her out, when they saw the deep crevasse that had been cut into her torso, the way it had been bound together again like laces in a shoe, they were bereft of all words.

Finally, it was Jim Hughes who opened his mouth, and he simply said, “Oh my God . . . Oh my God almighty . . .” His voice was all but a whisper, and those words drifted out into the mist and humidity, and they were swallowed without echo.

No one asked who she was, and it was as if no one wanted to know. Not yet.

They paused for a little while, almost unable to look at her, and then they worked on silently, nothing but the heaves and grunts of effort as they brought her onto the tarp and lifted her free from the darkness of her grave.

And the rain fell, and the rain was black, and it did not stop.

The one thing that combat gave you was a willingness to expect everything and nothing at the same time. It took hold of your need for prediction, and it kicked it right out of you. Run for three days; stand still for four. Move at a moment’s notice; go back the way you came. And all of it without explanation as to why. How come this is so utterly, utterly fucked? someone asked. Because this is the way God made it was the answer given. How else d’you think he gets his rocks off? After a few weeks, a couple of months perhaps, you realized that there was no one who gave a single, solitary crap about where you were.

One time, Gaines had taken a forty-five-minute chopper ride with six dead guys. Just Gaines, the pilot, and half a dozen dead guys. Some were in body bags, some just wrapped in their ponchos. Ten minutes in and Gaines unzipped them, uncovered their faces, and they all had their eyes open. He had talked for thirty minutes straight. He’d told them everything he felt, everything he feared. They did not judge him. They were just there. Gaines knew they understood. He also knew that Plato was right, that only the dead had seen the end of war. He believed that had he not done that, he would not have been able to go back. He unloaded those good ol’ boys and then returned in the same chopper. He could still smell their dead-stink for five clicks.

That same smell overwhelmed Gaines as they carried the girl away. The rain had washed her clean. She was fifteen or sixteen years old; she was naked; and a crudely sewn wound divided her body from neck to navel. It had been sewn with heavy twine, and the mud had worked its way inside her. Even as her pale frame was carried to a tarp above the bank, the mud appeared and disappeared again like small black tongues from the stitched mouths of the wound. Gaines watched the men as they transported her—a line of sad faces, like early-morning soldiers on the base-bound liberty bus. Fun is done. Girls and liquor are all left behind. Like the faces of those transporting the dead to a chopper, the weight of the body in the poncho, their faces grim and resolute, eyes squinting through half-closed lids, almost as if they believed that to see half of this was to be somehow safe from the rest. The precise and torturous gravity of conscience, the burden of guilt, the weight of the dead.

And then Gaines noticed the trees, these arched and disheveled figures, and he believed that had they not already skewed and stretched their roots into rank and fetid earth, they would have come forward, shuffling and awkward, stinking their way out of the filth and shit of the swamps, and they would have suffocated them all within a tangled, knotted argument of arthritic branches and spiders’ webs of Spanish moss. There would always be some grotesque and gothic manner of death, but this would perhaps be the worst.

The sorry gang carried her as quickly as they could, the mud dragging at their feet, the rain hammering down, drowning all words, drowning the sound of six men as they stumbled up the bank.

The memory of the dead is the greatest burden of all. That’s what Lieutenant Ron Wilson had once opined in a field beyond 25th Division Headquarters at Cu Chi in February of 1968. He uttered those words to Gaines, the very last words ever to leave his lips, and he uttered it in the handful of seconds between changing his damp socks and the arrival of the bullet that killed him. There were no sounds—neither from the bullet itself, haphazardly fired without aim, merely a vague hope that somewhere it would find a target, nor from Lieutenant Wilson’s lips. The bullet entered his throat at the base and severed his spinal cord somewhere among the cervical vertebrae. For a brief while, his eyes were still alive, his lips playing with something akin to a reflective smile, as if The memory of the dead is the greatest burden of all had been the precursor, the introduction to something else. Lieutenant Wilson was a philosopher. He quoted Arnold Bennett aphorisms about time and human industry. He was a good lieutenant, more a leader than a follower, a characteristic founded more in his vague distrust of others rather than any real sense of trust in himself. Gaines did not know what Wilson had done before the war. Later, after Wilson had been choppered away, he had asked the other guys in the platoon. Who was Wilson? Before the war, I mean. Who was he? They did not know either, or they did not say. Where he had come from was of no great concern. His life before was irrelevant. The life after was all that concerned them, and for Lieutenant Wilson there would be none.

Gaines remembered Wilson’s face—the moment alive, the moment of death—as they reached Jim Hughes’s flatbed with their grim burden. They laid the girl out on the rough, waterlogged boards, and Gaines set one half of the tarp beneath her, the other half over her, and he instructed Hughes to drive, his two sons up front, and he would follow them in his squad car back to town. He told Hagen to radio in and request both Dr. Thurston and the coroner be at the Coroner’s Office upon their return.