The Devil and the River (38 page)

He could see so clearly where he had let his heart rule his head, but there was something else, something he could not identify. He was deeply troubled—mentally and emotionally—and he knew that the sense of unease would only grow with time. The discovery of Webster’s hand and head were a blind. This was not some occult trial performed to prevent him from seeing the truth. It was an attempt to scare him.

This was the work of someone calculating and precise in their intentions. It could only be Wade. It
had
to be Wade. There was no one else to consider. Yet, even as Gaines recalled his conversation with Matthias Wade, he also understood that there was nothing but intuition to support his viewpoint. It wasn’t even intuition, but a simple hunch, a wish for it to be Wade, a desire to see that smug expression wiped from his face.

What he lacked was any real information about these people, and that was where Della came in, and to get to Della, he needed Regis, and to get to Regis, he had to make it all the way to Parchman Farm and then get inside.

Gaines tried to stop thinking as he drove. He turned on the radio. He found a station out of Mobile playing music he recalled from Vietnam—Janis Joplin, Hendrix, Canned Heat. Usually he would turn it off, the memories too dark and intense, but this time he let it play, and for some reason he found it comforting. If nothing else, it reminded him that a part of his life was over, a part that he never wished to see again. He had made it through. He had come out the other side—damaged, but still intact—and that was a great deal more than could be said for so many thousands of others.

Perhaps he had survived to do this, and this alone. Perhaps, in some fatalistic way, he had walked away from the war only to uncover the truths of Whytesburg. A twenty-year-old ghost had returned. That ghost was haunting the streets and sidewalks. It had changed the tone and atmosphere of the town. It had changed people’s attitudes. He sensed that people believed him responsible for unearthing so much more than the body of Nancy Denton, as if he had opened a door into some other plane, some other reality, and something dark and terrible had found its way into their world. He wondered about the number of people who wished he’d let it all be just as it was. No one need ever have known. The girl could have been spirited away into another grave, Judith Denton would still be alive, as would Michael Webster, and—for those who believed in something preternatural—there was also the possibility that Alice might still be alive, too. Whatever had happened, there was a ghost, and until the ghost was finally laid to rest, it would keep on haunting them.

And then Gaines understood the source of that nagging sense of guilt. Guilty for surviving. Guilty for being one of the few who made it home. Why him? Why had he made it? And that guilt would only resolve and become stronger the longer he remained distant and disengaged. Surely it was the foremost responsibility of those who were still alive to actually
live
. He had been in hiding for four years, hiding behind his mother’s illness, hiding behind a uniform, behind rules and regulations, behind official protocol, schedules, duty rosters, and bureaucracy. Who did he know? Who did he
really
know? Who was his best friend? Bob Thurston? Victor Powell? Richard Hagen? They were acquaintances, work colleagues, nothing more. How many times had Hagen asked him to come over for a barbecue, to spend time with his family? How many times had he been invited to Thanksgiving dinners, even Christmas? Always his excuses had been the same: his mother’s health, his work commitments.
Take a day off; you deserve it. Well, the invitation extends to your mother as well, John, and she seems to be doing just fine right now. I’m sure she’d like to get out of the house, even if only for a few hours.
But no, he had always evaded those questions, and when directly asked, he had avoided any real explanation. Truth was, he had survived Vietnam and yet had continued to live life in some sort of irreducibly minimalist fashion. He had tried his utmost to experience the least of everything. That was the way it seemed right now. Alice was gone. The barrier was down. There was nothing that he could now employ to defend himself from facing reality. Perhaps he was more damaged than he believed. Perhaps the effects of the war had taken a far greater toll than he’d imagined.

If this was right, then he was in trouble. If this was right, then perhaps this unfounded and ill-advised commitment to uncover the truth of Matthias Wade’s involvement in these recent events, regardless of whether or not he
was
involved, was a way for Gaines to justify his continuing existence. If he could not live for himself, he could live for his mother, and if he could not live for her, then he could live for the memory of Nancy Denton. She had not died in battle. She had died to satisfy some dark and horrific purpose. That was no reason to die. Nancy Denton should still be alive. She should be a mother, a woman with a career, a family, a life. But all these things had been taken from her before she’d even had a chance to see out her teens. Denial of this kind was surely the cruelest of all. The world did not favor the weak and vulnerable. Nancy had been vulnerable, perhaps weak as well, but such things did not justify her murder. She was no longer here to name names and see justice done, so those who were perhaps stronger and less vulnerable needed to stand in her place.

Approaching Hattiesburg, Gaines determined that whatever had taken place all those years ago could never remain unpunished.

T
here at the intersection of Route 49 West and Highway 32, Gaines found the less-than-imposing entrance to Parchman Farm. What was at first evident was the complete lack of an external fence, an absence of trees, just an endless vista of flat scrubland. There was nowhere to hide. Even if you broke free from the chain gang, even if you managed to escape from the work team or detention unit, there was no place to go. It was a desert, little more than that, and its bleakness and desolation seemed more ominous and threatening than any dense facade of monolithic granite walls. Gaines turned and drove through a simple plank-board gateway. Overhead the sign read Mississippi State Penitentiary, and he pulled up alongside a small wooden office. Exiting his car, he went up and knocked on the window. The window opened, a face appeared, and an elderly man with a glass right eye looked at him askance and asked him his business.

“Sheriff John Gaines, Whytesburg, Breed County, come on up here in the hope of speaking to one of your inmates.”

“You got a name for him?”

“Clifton Regis.”

“Appointment?”

“Nope.”

“He a colored fella?”

“He is, yes.”

“He is solitary?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

“Well, he’ll be out on the chain gang, then.”

“Time they finish?”

The old man squinted at his pocket watch. “It’s just after half past three now, and they’ll work until eight. Unless you got yourself an appointment, then you’ve got a wait on your hands.”

“Where do I find the people who arrange appointments?” Gaines asked.

“Oh, you just keep on drivin’, son, and then you drive some more. Straight road. Don’t go nowhere but the horizon. Maybe four, five miles, and then on the left you’ll see a sign that says
Administrative Buildings
, and you hang a right there. You’ll come to a huddle of small offices, and you go on up there and ask for Ted McNamara. You can see if he’ll give you the time o’ day, but you sure as hell woulda been wise to call up and arrange this before comin’ on out here.”

Gaines thanked the man, got back in his car and drove on.

En route, he passed the working teams, lines of men chained together at the ankles pitching rocks into buckets, erecting fence posts, turning fields over by hand. Some of them sang; some of them did not. The whites were separated from the blacks, yet all of them wore the same striped pants and jackets, and those that had no jackets wore blue shirts with
MSP
emblazoned on the back in white letters.

The work seemed ceaseless, repetitive, mind-numbing, and physically strenuous. Out here you would get nothing but lean like a hunting dog. But there was nowhere to run, just nowhere at all. Wherever you looked, there was just the same absence of anything definable. No landmarks, no trees, no ridged banks behind which to hide or seek respite from the sun. And the wardens were mounted on horseback, armed with Springfield .30-06s, sidearms, and bull-whips. Gaines figured any one of them could run down a man in a heartbeat, bring him to the ground with a nudge from the horse’s flank, and it would all be over. Then it would be a halfway-to-senseless beating with Black Annie and thirty days in the hole. Parchman Farm had earned its reputation. It was not somewhere you wanted to wind up.

Gaines found the administrative office complex, a scattering of no more than half a dozen clapboard buildings, just where the old man had told him. He asked after Ted McNamara, found him pretty much as he expected—rail-thin, his skin the color of parchment and aged the same way, an expression that spoke of a fundamental and perpetual mistrust of all persons, said mistrust not completely unfounded due to his line of work.

“Well, son, you gotta have one of them visiting authorization chitties,” was McNamara’s response to Gaines’s reason for being up there at the Farm.

McNamara’s office was one of the clapboard sheds, two narrow windows, a desk, two chairs, a filing cabinet, a fan that moved the air around lethargically and yet did nothing to cool it. McNamara chained smokes one after the other, and the room hung with a pall of fug that limited Gaines’s vision. It was yet another experience in a long concatenation of such experiences, each of them seemingly more surreal than the last.

“I have a murdered child,” Gaines said.

“I could list a few hundred murdered children, each of them the result of the kind of handiwork they favor up here.”

“Murdered twenty years ago, and no one was ever arrested or charged.”

McNamara nodded. “And you think this Clifton Regis fella had something to do with it?”

“No, it’s not that simple. Regis knows someone, and I need to speak to that someone, and I think Regis might be my way in.”

“You know what’ll happen if I bring Regis off his chain and get him down here for you?”

Gaines raised his eyebrows questioningly.

“The others’ll take a dark slant on it. They’ll figure him for fessin’ up on somethin’ that’s none of our business. More ’an likely get hisself a beatin’, or maybe someone’ll sharpen up a toothbrush and put it in his back while he’s takin’ a shower.”

“Is there some way it could be done that wouldn’t result in such a situation?”

“Why, ’cause you care what happens to him after you’ve discovered what you wanna know and gone on your way?”

“Sure, of course. He shouldn’t have to suffer for something he’s not guilty of.”

“Well, that’s the one thing you can be sure of out here, Sheriff Gaines. They’s all guilty of so much more than what we got ’em for. Seems to me that justice has a way of findin’ folk, even when they least expect it. Hell, even the ones that got railroaded and is here on a bullshit testimony is guilty of more than adequate for us to keep ’em till they croak.”

Gaines said nothing for a moment, and then he leaned forward. “I understand that this is irregular, Mr. McNamara, and I appreciate that it is additional work for you and your staff, and I wouldn’t expect such a burden of labor to be covered by the taxpayers of Sunflower County, if you know what I mean.”

McNamara smiled. It was the kind of smile you’d get from a snake.

“So, let me get you straight here, Sheriff Gaines. You’re tryin’ to bribe me to violate penitentiary rules and regulations, to allow you to come down here, take a man off the chain, get him into an interview room, and let you ask him however many questions you like, and then go on your way and leave him to the hounds and the wolves . . . Is that what we got happenin’ here?”

Gaines didn’t avert his gaze. “Not so much a bribe, Mr. McNamara, more a willingness to help carry the administrative cost of such a thing.”

“Well, down here, Sheriff Gaines, we call a nigger a nigger, a white a white, and there don’t happen to anything resembling a shade of gray. Are you offerin’ me a bribe, or am I mistaken?”

Gaines still could not look away. McNamara had him cornered, and if Gaines lied, he would be as transparent as glass.

“You’re not mistaken, Mr. McNamara.”

McNamara smiled, but with his lips, not his eyes. It was the cruelest smile Gaines believed he’d ever seen.

“Well, good ’nough, Sheriff Gaines. That’s the kind of language I understand. If we’re gonna be straight with each other, then we’re gonna be straight. None of this bullshit fancy footwork. The fee for what you require of me is fifty bucks. That’s twenty-five dollars for finding the boy and bringing him someplace for you to speak with him, the other twenty-five for finding some way to make sure he don’t get hisself stabbed in the yard tomorrow morning.”

Gaines took the money from his pocket. He kept it beneath the edge of the table. If McNamara saw he had a hundred bucks, the price would go up, no doubt about it.

Gaines folded the notes and passed them over to McNamara. They went into McNamara’s desk drawer, and then he rose, ground out the half-smoked cigarette, and told Gaines to go back to his car, to pull out onto the main road, and then wait for McNamara to come out in his vehicle.

“You follow me on up to Unit 26, and then you’re gonna wait there until I find this boy and bring him down to you. Then we’ll get you a room someplace where you won’t be disturbed. Maybe I’ll put you in the chapel, huh? Some of these lowlifes professed to findin’ Jesus someplace out in them fields, took it upon themselves to build a chapel a few years back. Ain’t much of anythin’, to tell you the truth, and ain’t much used now ’cept when some of these fellas first come in. They get such a shock to the system; they think they’s in hell an’ figure that prayin’ might be a good ’nough way to make it different. They can pray all they like; it only gets worse.”