“Hey there,” Gaines said. “Sheriff’s Office, ma’am.”

There was silence for a minute or so, but just as Gaines was about to call out a second time, the door opened.

The woman was in her late twenties or early thirties. She had on worn-out jeans, a cheesecloth blouse, over it a suede vest with tassels hanging off of the front and back. Her belt was decorated with silver and turquoise ovals, like some sort of Native American Indian design. Her hair was long in back, her bangs almost in her eyes.

“ ’S up?” she said.

“Looking for Mike,” Gaines said.

“Lieutenant Mike?”

“He the vet?”

“Sure is.”

“That’d be him, then.”

“He’s in the far one at the end,” the woman said. She pointed at the other side of the crescent of cabins. “Whether he’s in or not, I don’t know, but that’s where he lives.”

The music had stopped. Gaines could smell grass.

“ ’Preciated, ma’am,” he said, and touched the brim of his hat.

The woman neither smiled nor acknowledged him. She merely closed the door.

Gaines walked back across the pitted gravel forecourt.

Gaines could smell something rank before he even arrived at Lieutenant Mike’s cabin door. It was an overripe smell, beneath it the funk of rot and decay. It was obscured by joss or grass—he couldn’t work out which—but it was there all right. It was a smell from his past, a smell he’d hoped never to experience again.

Gaines knocked on the door. There were sounds within.

Gaines called out. “Mike!”

“Who’s that?”

“Sheriff Gaines, Whytesburg.”

“Whassup?”

“Need a handful of words with you, Mike.”

“Busy right now.”

“Need to see you now, Mike.”

The smell was becoming too much. It was sweat and filth, a stench like bad meat, something even worse beneath that.

There were more sounds within, and then the door opened a crack, and Gaines saw the man’s face, the faint vestiges of black-and-green camouflage on his skin, the same greasepaint they’d used back in the jungle. In that darkened visage, Mike’s eyes were white like a frightened animal.

The smell came, too, that stench of fetid rot, and Gaines took a handkerchief from his pocket and held it to his face.

He knew what he was dealing with then. Mike was in category two, those who still wore their history like a second skin. But Mike was a veteran of the Second World War, somewhere in his early- to midfifties, and thus he had carried it a great deal longer.

Somehow war was a legacy and a heritage, handed down through generations. War was the history of the world. It connected with part of the mind, with the heart, the soul perhaps, and once connected, it never fully retreated. There was no forgetting, only a practiced unremembering, and yet you knew—without question—that the memories could always find you.

Still, even now, six years on, Gaines would sometimes wake and think, Where the hell am I? It had happened when he was awake also, drifting out of some conversation, his eyes unfocused, gazing into the middle ground between somewhere and nowhere else, and then he would return, slowly, as if surfacing through dark and cloudy water, water that held the stink of human waste and death, and he would have to pretend he had heard the conversation in which he had just been engaged.

War was a holiday from reality: While you were there, it seemed as though you’d never been anywhere else; upon your return, a week felt like an hour, a year little more than a single day. Time stretched, bent, folded, collapsed; time was both ally and enemy, friend and foe; time was a sleight-of-hand parlor trick, the irony being that the recognition of its reality has been lost with the passage of itself. War changed nothing, and yet it changed everything, depending simply upon your absence or presence.

In war, a lot of people lost it. Some got it back. Lieutenant Mike—whoever the hell he was, whatever the hell he had seen—seemed to be one of those who had not.

“Do for you?” Mike asked.

“My names is Gaines. I’m the sheriff in Whytesburg.”

“So you said.”

“I understand you are a veteran, Mike.”

Mike frowned; then he smiled. “You been out there in ’Nam, ain’t you?”

“Yes, I was.”

Mike grinned. “Oh man, I shoulda gone there. I really shoulda gone.”

Gaines said nothing.

Mike stood there silently, looking inward at nothing for a good ten seconds, and then he seemed to snap right out of it. He grinned again. “You wanna come in? You wanna come in and have a drink or something?”

“Nothing to drink,” Gaines said, “but yes, sure, I’d like to come in.”

Mike stepped back and opened the door, and even as Gaines took the first step into the room, he knew. Despite the stench, the face paint, there was something else going on, and he sensed—somehow, someway—that it was inherently connected to the death of Nancy Denton. What had McCarthy said? Even those that leave tend to discover they don’t much care for the wider world, and they come right on back.

Lieutenant Mike had carried a lot of darkness back from the war, and perhaps he had chosen Whytesburg as the place to share it with the world.

14

Everyone’s war was different. Personal. Unique.

Gaines could think of it, could speak of it, could remember every detail.

Sometimes it seemed that the flares just dropped and hovered, a pale light hanging there above the ground like a ghostly multitude, the myriad dead haunting the land where they fell. And he knew the dead would always hold court, remaining long after he had departed, long after the earth and trees and sky and rivers had forgotten who he was or why he was there. It was a simple land, but its history was complex and thus never known at all, or too easily forgotten.

There were endless numbers of ways to die, both natural and man-made—malaria, gangrene, snakebites, bullets, bombs, bayonets, mortars, grenades, booby traps, staked pits, napalm, friendly fire, burial alive in the networks of tunnels that lay beneath the VC outposts, the heat, the rain, the rivers, the mudslides, the hopeless mediocrity of inadequate supply lines that gave you too little ammunition in your time of need. And tigers. Some of them had been killed by tigers. Most of all, there were those who died because of their own lack of belief that they could survive. As one NCO used to tell Gaines, Only things that can kill you out here are faithlessness and shortness of breath.

Most cheerful guy Gaines ever met worked in Graves Registration. He dealt with the dead from dawn to dusk and all the hours beyond. Would have seemed to be the very worst of miserable tasks, but no, apparently not. If others were dead, well, it wasn’t him. That’s how come he smiled so much. People expected it of him after a while. If a guy like that doing a job like this could stay cheerful, then maybe it wasn’t all as bad as it seemed. Wherever you were, there were always worse places to be. Strange how consideration of a far greater hell could lift your spirits.

Gaines remembered Coleman lanterns; he remembered the Givral Restaurant on the corner of Le Loi and Tu Do.

He remembered the time a commander ordered his men to load ten or fifteen dead Viet Cong into a chopper and then drop them like so many sacks of flour into a VC-sympathetic ville. They rained down from five hundred feet, crashing through the roofs of hooches, killing animals stone dead, exploding on the ground with a noise you could hear above the whirlwind of rotor blades. “It’s not psychological war,” the commander had shouted. “It’s just war.”

He remembered a beautiful blonde attaché from the Joint US Public Affairs Office, somehow standing amid all the mayhem and carnage, head to toe in a cream linen pantsuit, her eyes bright blue, her corn-silk hair woven back from her face in a French braid, some sort of demigoddess—surreal, unbelievable, desperately, heartbreakingly, impossibly beautiful. You didn’t just want to fuck her; you wanted to make love to her, and you wanted to make love forever. Gaines believed she should have led them into battle. The blond girl right there at the frontline, the amassed battalions and companies and units behind, the choppers flanking, the strike force and heavy bombers overhead, and she in her cream linens, her corn-silk hair rushing behind her in the downdraft, in her hand a golden spear, like some Boudicca, hurling them forward at the enemy, one mighty scream from every lung, and the war would have been over. For a good while, he dreamed of her, and then he dreamed no more. War accepted everyone. In war, there was no racism, no bigotry, no intolerance, no division, no separation of race, color, creed, denomination, nationality, age, or gender. War would consume a five-year-old Vietnamese child who had seen nothing of life just as effortlessly and hungrily as it would consume a forty-year-old Marine Corps veteran with an insatiable thirst for dead VC.