Free The Devil and the River by R.J. Ellory Page B

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
    G aines 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.
    He had never been one of the chosen few. A different world awaited the beautiful.
    Sometimes resentment bled from every pore like a dark sweat. Resentment of himself, his dead father, his sick mother, of the people he had known and lost, of Linda and the child. He had believed in her—in them . He had found her, somehow. As if the clumsy poetry of his words had given her hope, hope that he—a spent and broken man, by all accounts—had yet somehow secured a path through the tortuous rapids and shallows of the human heart, that he had navigated a way, that he knew some means of escape, that alongside him, she would never experience the lovesick travails that appeared to befall all people. He had believed her his true north. But life happened. Life got in the way. The minuses added up, and no matter how many minuses were added, it never became a plus. Now he looked at the world as if everything before him was a little more than he could absorb, a fraction more than he could understand. And he resented it. Such an emotion infected all he touched, a virus of shadows, and some other sour-tasting bitterness. This is not the life I