The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock
Sandy shut off the engine, stepped out of the car, went around to the passenger’s side. “I ain’t drivin’ another mile until I get some real food,” she said. “I been eating nothing but candy for three days. Shit, my teeth are getting loose.”
“Jesus Christ, we just got on the road,” Carl said, as she turned and started walking toward the diner door. “Hold up,” he yelled. “I’m coming.”
After locking the car, he followed her inside and they found a booth near a window. The waitress brought two cups of coffee and a ragged menu spattered with ketchup. Sandy ordered French toast and Carl asked for a side of crisp bacon. She put her sunglasses on, watched a man in a stained apron try to install a new roll of paper in the cash register. The place reminded her of the Wooden Spoon. Carl looked around the crowded room, farmers and old people mostly, a couple of haggard salesmen studying a list of prospects. Then he noticed a young man, early twenties maybe, sitting at the counter eating a piece of lemon meringue pie. Sturdy build, thick, wavy hair. A backpack with a small American flag sewn on it leaned against the stool beside him.
“So?” Carl said, after the waitress brought the food. “You feeling any better today?” As he talked, he kept one bloodshot eye on the man at the counter, the other on their car.
Sandy swallowed and shook her head. She poured some more syrup on the French toast. “That’s something we need to talk about,” she said.
“What is it?” he asked, pulling the burnt rind off a slice of the bacon and sticking it in his mouth. Then he took a cigarette from her pack and rolled it between his fingers. He shoved what remained on his plate over to her.
She took a sip of her coffee, glanced at the table of people next to them. “It can wait,” she said.
The man at the counter stood up and handed the waitress some money. Then he slung the backpack over his shoulder with a weary groan and went out the door with a toothpick stuck in his mouth. Carl watched him go to the edge of the road and try to thumb a passing car. The car went on without stopping, and the man started walking west at a lazy pace. Carl turned to Sandy, nodded toward the window. “Yeah, I seen him,” she said. “Big deal. They’re all over the place. They’re like cockroaches.”
Carl watched the road for traffic while Sandy finished eating. He thought about his decision to head home today. The signs were so clear to him last night, but now he wasn’t so sure. One more model would jinx the three sixes, but they could drive for a week and not find another who looked like that boy. He knew better than to fuck with the signs, but then he recalled that seven was the number of their room last night. And not a single car had passed by since the boy left. He was out there right now, looking for a ride in the hot sun.
“Okay,” Sandy said, wiping her mouth with a paper napkin, “I can drive now.” She got up and reached for her purse. “Better not keep the fucker waiting.”
17
ARVIN WAS SENT TO LIVE WITH HIS GRANDMOTHER right after his father’s suicide, and though Emma made sure that he went to church with Lenora and her every Sunday, she never asked him to pray or sing or kneel at the altar. The welfare people from Ohio had told the old woman about the terrible summer the boy had endured while his mother was dying, and she decided not to push anything other than regular attendance on him. Knowing that Reverend Sykes was prone to be a little too zealous at times in his attempts at bringing hesitant newcomers into the fold, Emma had gone to him a couple of days after Arvin’s arrival and explained that her grandson would come into the faith his own way when he was ready. Hanging roadkill from crosses and pouring blood on logs had secretly impressed the old preacher—after all, weren’t all the famous Christians fanatical in their beliefs?—but he went ahead and agreed with Emma that maybe that wasn’t the best way to introduce a young person to the Lord. “I see what you’re getting at,” Sykes said. “No sense turning him into one of them Topperville nut jobs.” He was sitting on the church steps peeling a bruised yellow apple with a pocketknife. It was a sunny September morning. He wore his good suit coat over a pair of faded bib overalls and a white shirt starting to unravel around the collar. Lately, his chest had been hurting him, and Clifford Odell was supposed to give him a ride to a new doctor over in Lewisburg, but he hadn’t shown up yet. Sykes had overheard someone at Banner’s store say that the sawbones had gone to college for six years, and he was looking forward to meeting him. He figured a man with that much education could cure anything.
“What’s that supposed to mean, Albert?” Emma asked.
Sykes glanced up from the apple and saw the hard look the woman was giving him. It took him a moment to realize what he had said, and his wrinkled face flushed red with embarrassment. “I’m sorry, Emma,” he sputtered. “I wasn’t talking about Willard, no way. He was a good man. One of the best. Shoot, I still remember the day he got saved.”
“That’s all right,” she said. “No sense buttering up the dead, Albert. I know what my son was like. Just don’t go pestering his boy, that’s all I ask.”
LENORA, ON THE OTHER HAND, couldn’t seem to get enough of her religion. She carried a Bible with her everywhere she went, even to the outhouse, just like Helen had; and each morning, she got up before everyone else and prayed for an hour on her knees on the splintered wooden floor beside her and Emma’s bed. Although she had no memory of either of her parents, the girl directed most of the prayers that she let Emma hear on her murdered mother’s soul and most of her silent ones on some news of her missing father. The old woman had told her time and time again that it would be best to forget about Roy Laferty, but Lenora couldn’t help wondering about him. Nearly every night, she fell asleep with an image of him stepping up on the porch in a new black suit and making everything all right. It gave her a small comfort, and she allowed herself to hope that, with the Lord’s help, her father really would return someday if he was still alive. Several times a week, no matter what the weather, she visited the cemetery and read the Bible out loud, especially the Psalms, while seated on the ground next to her mother’s grave. Emma had once told her that the book of Songs was Helen’s favorite part of the Scriptures, and by the time she finished the sixth grade, Lenora knew them all by heart.
THE SHERIFF HAD LONG SINCE GIVEN UP on finding Roy and Theodore. It was as if they had turned into ghosts. Nobody was able to find a photograph or record of any kind on either of them. “Hell, even the retards up in Hungry Holler got birth certificates,” he offered as an excuse, whenever one of his constituents brought up the two’s disappearance. He didn’t mention to Emma the rumor that he’d heard right after they disappeared, that the cripple was in love with Roy, that there might have been some queer homo thing going on between them before the preacher married Helen. During the initial investigation, several people testified that Theodore had complained bitterly that the woman had taken the edge off Roy’s spiritual message. “It’s ruined many a good man, that ol’ nasty hair pie,” the cripple was heard to say after he’d had a few drinks. “Preacher, shit,” he’d go on, “all he thinks about now is getting his dick wet.” It irked the sheriff to no end that those two sodomite fools might have committed murder in his county and gotten away with it; and so he kept repeating the same old story, that in all likelihood the same maniac that butchered the Millersburg family had also killed Helen and hacked Roy and Theodore to pieces or dumped their bodies in the Greenbrier River. He told it so much that he half believed it himself at times.
THOUGH ARVIN NEVER CAUSED HER any serious trouble, Emma could easily see Willard in him, especially when it came to the fighting. By the time he was fourteen, he had been kicked out of school several times for using his fists. Pick your own time, he remembered his father telling him, and Arvin learned that lesson well, catching whoever his enemy happened to be at the moment alone and unaware in the restroom or stairwell or under the bleachers in the gymnasium. For the most part, however, he was known throughout Coal Creek for his easygoing ways, and to his credit, most of the scraps he got caught up in were beca
WHENEVER EMMA ASKED HIM about the fighting, Arvin always thought of his father and that damp fall day long ago when he had defended Charlotte’s honor in the Bull Pen parking lot. Though it was the best day he ever remembered spending with Willard, he never told anybody about it, or, for that matter, mentioned any of the bad days that soon followed. Instead, he would simply say to her, his father’s voice echoing faintly in his head, “Grandma, there’s a lot of no-good sonsofbitches out there.”
“My Lord, Arvin, why do you keep saying that?”
“Because it’s true.”
“Well, maybe you should try praying for them then,” she’d suggest. “That wouldn’t hurt none, would it?” It was times like this when she regretted ever telling Reverend Sykes to leave the boy to find the path to God on his own terms. As far as she could tell, Arvin was always on the verge of heading the other direction.
He rolled his eyes; that was her advice for everything. “Maybe not,” he said, “but Lenora already does enough of that for the both of us, and I don’t see where it’s doing her much good.”
18
THEY SHARED A TENT DOWN AT THE END of the midway with the Flamingo Lady, a rail-thin woman with the longest nose Roy had ever seen on a human being. “She ain’t really a bird, is she?” Theodore asked him after the first time they met her, his usual brash voice turned timid and shaky. Her strange appearance had frightened him. They had worked with freaks before, but nothing that looked quite like this one.
“No,” Roy assured him. “She’s just putting on a show.”
“I didn’t think so,” the cripple said, relieved to find out that she wasn’t real. He looked over and noticed Roy checking out her ass as she walked toward her trailer. “Hard to tell what kind of diseases something like that’s got,” he added, his cockiness quickly returning once he was satisfied she was out of hearing range. “Women like that, they’ll fuck a dog or a donkey or anything else for a buck or two.”
The Flamingo Lady’s wild, bushy hair was dyed pink, and she wore a bikini that had ragged pigeon feathers glued to the flesh-colored material. Her act consisted mostly of standing on one leg in a little rubber swimming pool filled with dirty water while preening herself with her pointy beak. A record player sat on a table behind her playing slow, sad violin music that sometimes made her cry if she had accidentally taken too many of her nerve pills that day. Just as he had feared, Theodore figured out after a couple of months that Roy was tapping it, though try as he might, he could never actually catch them in the filthy act. “That ugly bitch is gonna hatch an egg one of these days,” he railed at Roy, “and I’d bet a dollar to a doughnut the goddamn chick will look just like you.” Sometimes he cared; sometimes he didn’t. It depended on how he and Flapjack the Clown were getting along at the moment. Flapjack had come to Theodore wanting to learn a few chords on the guitar, but then he’d showed the cripple how to play the skin flute instead. Roy once made the mistake of pointing out to his cousin that what he and the clown were doing was an abomination in the eyes of God. Theodore had set his guitar down on the sawdust floor and spit some brown juice in a paper cup. He’d recently taken to chewing tobacco. It made him a little sick to his stomach, but Flapjack liked the way it made his breath smell. “Damn, Roy, if you ain’t a good one to talk, you crazy bastard,” he said.
“What the hell does that mean? I ain’t no peter puffer.”
“Maybe not, but you sure as hell murdered your old lady with that screwdriver, didn’t you? You ain’t forgot about that, have you?”
“I ain’t forgot,” Roy said.
“Well then, you figure the Lord thinks any worse of me than He does of you?”
Roy hesitated for a minute before answering. According to what he had read in a pamphlet that he had found under a pillow in a Salvation Army shelter one time, a man laying with another man was probably equal to killing your wife, but Roy wasn’t sure if it was any worse or not. The manner in which the weight of certain sins was calculated sometimes confused him. “No, I don’t reckon,” he finally said.
“Then I suggest you stick to your pink-haired crow or pelican or whatever the hell she is and leave me and Flapjack the fuck alone,” Theodore said, digging the wet wad of chew out of his mouth and slinging it toward the Flamingo Lady’s wading pool. They both heard a tiny splash. “We ain’t hurting nobody.”
The banner outside the tent read THE PROPHET AND THE PICKER. Roy delivered his grisly version of the End Times while Theodore provided the background music. It cost a quarter to get inside the tent, and convincing people that religion could be entertaining was tough when just a few yards away were a number of other more exciting and less serious distractions, so Roy came up with the idea of eating insects during his sermon, a slightly different take on his old spider act. Every couple of minutes, he’d stop preaching and pull a squirming worm or crunchy roach or slimy slug out of an old bait bucket and chew on it like a piece of candy. Business picked up after that. Depending on the crowd, they did four, sometimes five shows every evening, alternating with the Flamingo Lady every forty-five minutes. At the end of each show, Roy would quickly step out behind the tent to regurgitate the bugs and Theodore would follow in his wheelchair. While waiting to go on again, they smoked and sipped from a bottle, half listened to the drunks inside whoop and holler and try to coax the fake bird into stripping off her plumes.
By 1963, they had been with this particular carnival, Billy Bradford Family Amusements, for almost four years, traveling from one end of the hot, humid South to the other from early spring until late fall in a retired school bus packed with moldering canvas and folding chairs and metal poles, always setting up in dusty, pig-shit towns where the locals thought a couple of creaky whirly rides and some toothless, flea-bitten jungle cats along with a tattered freak show was high-class entertainment. On a good night, Roy and Theodore could make twenty or thirty bucks. The Flamingo Lady and Flapjack the Clown got most of what they didn’t spend on booze or bugs or at the hot dog stand. West Virginia seemed like a million miles away, and the two fugitives couldn’t imagine the arm of the law in Coal Creek ever stretching that far. It had been nearly fourteen years since they had buried Helen and fled south. They didn’t even bother to change their names anymore.
19
ON ARVIN’S FIFTEENTH BIRTHDAY, Uncle Earskell handed him a pistol wrapped in a soft cloth along with a dusty box of shells. “This was your daddy’s,” the old man told him. “It’s a German Luger. Brought it back from the war. I figure he’d want you to have it.” The old man had never had any use for handguns, and so he’d hid it away under a floorboard in the smokehouse right after Willard left for Ohio. The only time he’d touched it since was to clean it occasionally. Seeing the elated look on the boy’s face, he was glad now he’d never broken down and sold it. They had just finished supper, and there was one piece of fried rabbit left on the platter in the middle of the table. Earskell debated whether or not to save the haunch for his breakfast, then picked it up and started gnawing on it.
Arvin unwrapped the cloth carefully. The only gun his father had kept at home was a .22 rifle, and Willard never allowed him to touch it, let alone shoot it. Earskell, on the other hand, had handed the boy a 16-gauge Remington a
“But I don’t want to shoot anything,” Arvin said that day, when Earskell stopped and pointed out two gray squirrels jumping back and forth on some branches high in a hickory tree.
“Didn’t I see you eatin’ a pork chop this morning?”
“Yeah.”
The old man shrugged his shoulders. “Somebody had to kill that hog and butcher it, didn’t they?”
“I guess so.”
Earskell lifted his own shotgun then and fired. One of the squirrels fell to the ground, and the old man started toward it. “Just try not to tear ’em up too bad,” he said over his shoulder. “You want to have something left to put in the pan.”
The coat of oil made the Luger shine like new in the wavering light cast from the kerosene lamps hanging at both ends of the room. “I never did hear him talk about it,” Arvin said, lifting the gun up by the grip and pointing it toward the window. “About being in the service, I mean.” There had been quite a few things his mother had warned him about when it came to his father, and asking questions about what he had seen in the war was high on the list.
“Yeah, I know,” Earskell said. “I remember when he got back, I wanted him to tell me about the Japs, but anytime I brought it up, he’d start in about your mother again.” He finished the rabbit and laid the bone on his plate. “Hell, I don’t think he even knew her name at the time. Just saw her waiting tables in some eatin’ place when he was coming home.”
“The Wooden Spoon,” Arvin said. “He took me there once after she got sick.”
“I think he saw some rough things over on them islands,” the old man said. He looked around for a rag, then wiped his hands on the front of his overalls. “I never did find out if they ate their dead or not.”