In Gaines’s experience, there were three types of war returnees. First were those who reintegrated, neither forgetting nor remembering, those who had somehow absorbed the horror, parceled it, packed it away. They found empty spaces every once in a while, gazing into some middle distance that was neither one place nor another. They saw things that others did not see, but they did not speak of them. Partly because to speak of them was to grant them strength and longevity, partly because no one would believe them. But they held it together. They came back, and they did all they could to belong again. Gaines was such a man—still there, still fighting with memories, with conscience, but somehow there despite all.

The second type were those who wore their history in all that they were: still wore fatigues and flak jackets, still woke sweating in the cool half-light of dawn, aware of shapes in the fog, aware of water around their ankles, the smell of blood and cordite and the sulfurous rot of dank vegetation. They were the ones on whom you kept a watchful eye, the ones who drank alone, their few conversations scattered with references to Bouncing Betties, toe poppers, Willie Pete, 105 rounds, and napalm. They would quote aphorisms from PsyOps propaganda pamphlets as if such aphorisms were gospel. They would talk of cutting LZs for dust offs, of long-range recon patrols. They needed routine. They needed orders. They were scared of the lonely places, the middle ground, the places between here and there, between departure and destination. They would smoke weed and get crazy-mischievous, calling random strangers from the Yellow Pages and making sinister threats. The past always finds you out. People know what you did afore you got here. The girl survived . . . She saw what you done. They stole restaurant napkins by the handful, motel matchbooks, even water dispenser cones. They had no use for them, but in some small way they believed they were striking a blow for the common man, the small guy, the working stiff, for those who had been betrayed by an uncaring government.

The third type were the dead. The army of the dead. Always a greater army than those who survived.

If “Mike from Poplarville,” or wherever the hell he was from, with his bush hat and his mad eyes, was down the Pearl River, then Gaines wanted to speak with him, if for no other reason than to see what he was doing, if he knew anything of snakes, if he perhaps remembered an incident that had taken place in August of 1954 when a sixteen-year-old girl had vanished from the face of the earth.

He could not ask questions of Bicklow or Austin. Nancy Denton would remain as silent as she had been for the past twenty years. Now it was time to challenge the memories of those who had been here two decades before.

But there was something else drawing Gaines in, something he could neither define nor determine. He could not clearly picture the girl’s face, despite the fact that he had seen her lying there on the mortuary slab only hours before. He could remember his father’s face, Linda Newman’s, the faces of Charles Binney and a host of other people who had briefly populated his life so many years before. But he could not remember Nancy, and he did not know why.

August of 1954, Gaines had been fourteen years old. McCarthyism was in its dying throes, Elvis was recording his first single, Rocky Marciano was champion of the world, and Johnson would soon be head of the Senate. The same world, but a very different world in so many ways. The subsequent twenty years had seen the assassinations of both Kennedys and Martin Luther King, the beginning of the Vietnam War, his mother’s illness, the loss of Linda Newman and the child that never was, the end of so much hope.

It had also seen a body lying undiscovered and preserved in the banks of the Whytesburg River.

Perhaps Nancy—symbolically—had become the child that never was.

Perhaps he—John Gaines, latterly of the nine circles of hell—was destined not to be haunted by those he himself had killed, but by those who had been killed in his absence.

13

Sheriff Graydon McCarthy of Travis County, Mississippi, was a simple man with simple secrets, and not so many of them. He was approachable, a talker, would always share a bottle, but there were things of which he did not speak and of which you did not ask. He did not bear question of his politics. You did not ask about money, neither where it came from, nor where it went. You did not ask of the unexpected disappearance and subsequent return of his father after two years of unexplained absence. You did not ask about the night of June 16, 1959, nor a girl named Elizabeth-May Wertzel and what she swore she would never repeat to a living soul. Beyond that, if you could get Graydon McCarthy to talk, you could ask him pretty much anything.

Gaines found him at his desk in Bogalusa a little after ten that Thursday morning and was afforded the kind of courtesy that came from one man to another in the same line of work.

Coffee was brought and accepted, a cigarette was offered but declined, and Gaines sat with McCarthy making small talk until Gaines approached the subject directly.

“Mike, you say?” McCarthy asked. “Mike, Mike, Mike. War veteran. Mmmm . . .” He paused to think, to look through the window to the right of his desk and out into the forecourt of the Sheriff’s Office building as if the view would assist his memory. “Can’t say I do,” he finally replied, “but then, this is a big county full of small towns, and I tend to keep my eyes on the bad ’uns.”

“As we all do,” Gaines said.

“All say the same thing when they come in here, don’t they? Always desperate to tell us that they ain’t bad men. Well, I say, if you ain’t a bad man, then why the hell d’you keep actin’ like one?” He smiled at his own smartness and lit another cigarette.

“So no one of that name with that description comes to mind? He might have a reputation. Word has it he’s a pretty wild character.”

“Like I said, son, it’s a big county and I can’t be relied upon to know everyone. Around here you find people born, schooled, working, multiplyin’, getting’ old, and dyin’ within about a fivemile radius. Even those that leave tend to discover they don’t much care for the wider world, and they come right on back. You might try the motel.”

“The motel?”

“Northeast of here along 59, a handful of miles. I call it a motel. Ain’t nothin’ but a scattering of shacks that used to be a motel. Owned by a man called Harvey Blackburn. Drunks and hookers mainly. Always someone trying to get the place razed to the ground, but they ain’t managed it yet. I’d check there. If your man’s a crazy ’un, that just might be the kind of haunt he’d be hankering after.”

Gaines thanked McCarthy, headed back to the car and took I-59. Follow 59 all the way to Meridian and it became I-20, took you west to Jackson and onward into Louisiana. Head the opposite way and it was no more than thirty miles to the Alabama state line, and that road would bring you right into Birmingham.

Gaines figured he knew the place McCarthy had spoken of, this scattering of rundown motel shacks set in a crescent around a gravel forecourt. It sat a quarter mile behind a derelict gas station off of the highway. Gaines followed his memory and knew where he was within minutes.

The place looked deserted, but there was music playing somewhere: Hendrix maybe.

Gaines drew to a stop and got out. He stood for a while. The music played on. That was the only sound.

Ten minutes waiting and he’d had enough. He headed for the first cabin on the right, knocked on the door, got no answer. Second and third cabin on the same side provided no response either. Second one on the left got a holler from within.

“Hold up,” a woman’s voice called back.