The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock
Arvin bit his lip and swallowed hard. “This is the best present I ever got.”
Just then, Emma entered the kitchen carrying a plain yellow cake in a small pan. A single candle was planted in the middle of it. Lenora followed behind dressed in the long blue dress and bonnet that she usually wore only to church. She held a box of matches in one hand and her cracked leather Bible in the other. “What’s that?” Emma said when she saw Arvin holding the Luger.
“That’s Willard’s gun he give me,” Earskell said. “I figured it was time to pass it on to the boy.”
“Oh, my,” Emma said. She set the cake down on the table and grabbed up the hem of her checkered apron to wipe back a tear. Seeing the gun reminded her once again of her son and the promise she’d failed to keep all those years ago. Sometimes she couldn’t help but wonder if they would all still be alive today if she had only convinced Willard to stay here and marry Helen.
Everyone was silent for a moment, almost as if they knew what the old woman was thinking. Then Lenora struck a match and said in a singsong voice, “Happy birthday, Arvin.” She lit the candle, the same one they had used to celebrate her fourteenth birthday a few months ago.
“It ain’t much use for anything,” Earskell went on, ignoring the cake and nodding at the gun. “You got to be right up on something to hit it.”
“Go ahead, Arvin,” Lenora said.
“Might as well throw a rock,” the old man joked.
“Arvin?”
“The shotgun will do you more good.”
“Make your wish before the candle burns out,” Emma said.
“Them’s nine-millimeter shells,” Earskell pointed out. “Banner don’t carry them at the store, but he can order them special.”
“Better hurry!” Lenora yelled.
“Okay, okay,” the boy said, setting the gun down on the cloth. He bent down and blew out the tiny flame.
“So what did you wish for?” Lenora asked. She hoped it had something to do with the Lord, but the way Arvin was, she wasn’t going to hold her breath. Every night, she prayed that he would wake up with a love for Jesus Christ glowing in his heart. She hated to think that he was going to end up in hell like that Elvis Presley and all those other sinners he listened to on the radio.
“Now you know better than to ask that,” Emma said.
“That’s all right, Grandma,” Arvin said. “I wished that I could take you all back to Ohio and show you where we lived. It was nice, up there on the hill. At least it was before Mom took sick.”
“Did I ever tell you about the time I lived in Cincinnati?” Earskell said.
Arvin looked at the two women and winked. “No,” he said, “I don’t recall it.”
“Lord, not again,” Emma muttered, while Lenora, smiling to herself, lifted the stub of the candle off the cake and put it in the matchbox.
“Yep, followed me a girl up there,” the old man said. “She was from over on Fox Knob, was raised right next to the Riley place. Her house ain’t there no more. Wanted to go to secretary school. I wasn’t much older than you are now.”
“Who wanted to go to secretary school,” Arvin asked, “you or the girl?”
“Ha! Her did,” Earskell said. He took a long breath, then slowly let it out. “Her name was Alice Louise Berry. You remember her, don’t you, Emma?”
“Yes, I do, Earskell.”
“So why didn’t you stay?” Arvin said, without thinking. Though he had heard parts of the story a hundred times, he’d never before asked the old man why he had ended up back in Coal Creek. From living with his father, Arvin had learned that you didn’t pry too much into other people’s affairs. Everyone had things they didn’t want to talk about, including himself. In the five years since his parents had passed, he had never once mentioned the hard feelings he held against Willard for leaving him. Now he felt like an ass for opening his mouth and putting the old man on the spot. He began wrapping the pistol back up in the cloth.
Earskell peered across the room with dim, cloudy eyes as if he was searching for the answer in the flowered wallpaper, though he knew the reason well enough. Alice Louise Berry had died in the influenza epidemic of 1918, along with 3 million or so other poor souls, just a few weeks after starting her classes at the Gilmore Sanderson Secretarial School. If only they had stayed in the hills, Earskell often thought, she might still be alive. But Alice always had big dreams, which was one of the things he had loved about her, and he was glad that he hadn’t tried to talk her out of it. He was certain those days they spent in Cincinnati among the tall buildings and crowded streets before she took the fever were the happiest ones of her life. His, too, for that matter. After a minute or so, he blinked away the memories and said, “That sure looks like a dandy cake.”
Emma took up her knife and cut it into four pieces, one for each of them.
20
ONE DAY ARVIN WENT LOOKING FOR LENORA after school let out and found her backed up against the trash incinerator next to the bus garage, surrounded by three boys. As he walked up behind them, he heard Gene Dinwoodie tell her, “Hell, you’re so damn ugly I’d have to put a sack over your head before I could get a hard-on.” The other two, Orville Buckman and Tommy Matson, laughed and squeezed in closer to her. They were seniors who had been held back a year or two, and all of them were bigger than Arvin. They spent most of their time at school sitting in the shop building trading dirty jokes with the worthless industrial arts teacher and smoking Bugler. Lenora had shut her eyes tight and begun praying. Tears were running down her pink face. Arvin got only a couple of licks in on Dinwoodie before the others tackled him to the ground and took turns punching him. While he was lying in the gravel, he thought, as he often did when in the middle of a fight, of the hunter that his father had beaten so badly that day in the outhouse mud. But unlike that man, Arvin never gave up. They might have killed him if the janitor hadn’t come along with a cart of cardboard boxes to burn. His head ached for a week, and he had trouble reading the blackboard for several more.
Though it took him almost two months, Arvin managed to catch each of them alone. One evening right before dark, he followed Orville Buckman to Banner’s store. He stood behind a tree a hundred yards down the road and watched the boy come back out swigging a pop and eating the last of a Little Debbie. Just as Orville started past him with the bottle tipped up to take another drink, Arvin stepped out into the road. He smacked the bottom of the Pepsi bottle with the palm of his hand and sent the glass neck halfway down the big boy’s throat, breaking two of his rotten front teeth off. By the time Orville realized what had hit him, the fight was pretty much finished except for the blow that put his lights out. An hour later, he woke up lying in the ditch along the road choking on blood and a paper sack over his head.
A couple of weeks later, Arvin drove Earskell’s old Ford over to the Coal Creek High School basketball game. They were playing the team from Millersburg, which always brought a big turnout. He sat in the car smoking Camel cigarettes and watching the front door for Tommy Matson to show his face. It was drizzling rain, a chilly, dark Friday night in early November. Matson liked to think of himself as the school cock-hound, was always bragging about the pussy he picked up at the games while their stupid boyfriends scrambled up and down the gym floor chasing a rubber ball. Right before halftime, just as Arvin flipped another butt out the window, he saw his next target walk outside with his arm around a freshman girl named Susie Cox and head to the row of school buses parked in the back of the lot. Arvin got out of the Ford carrying a tire iron and followed them. He watched Matson open the rear door of one of the yellow buses and help Susie up inside. After waiting a few minutes, Arvin twisted the handle on the door and let it swing open with a raspy squeak. “What was that?” he heard the girl say.
“Nothing,” Matson told her. “I must not got it shut all the way. Now come on, girl, let’s get them bloomers off.”
“Not until you close that door,” she said.
“Goddamn it,”
When he leaned out to grab the latch and pull the door back, Arvin swung the tire iron and hit Matson across the kneecaps, toppling him out of the bus. “Jesus!” he yelled when he hit the gravel, landing hard on his right shoulder. Swinging the tire iron again, Arvin cracked two of his ribs, then kicked him until he stopped trying to get up. He took a paper bag out of his jacket and knelt down beside the moaning boy. Grabbing hold of Matson’s curly hair, he pulled his head up. The girl inside the bus didn’t make a peep.
The next Monday at school, Gene Dinwoodie walked up to Arvin in the cafeteria and said, “I’d like to see you try and put a sack over my head, you sonofabitch.”
Arvin was sitting at a table with Mary Jane Turner, a new girl at the school. Her father had grown up in Coal Creek, then spent fifteen years in the merchant marine before returning home to claim his inheritance, a run-down farm on the side of a hill that his grandfather had left him. The redheaded girl could curse like a sailor when the opportunity presented itself, and though Arvin wasn’t sure why, he liked that a lot, especially when they were making out. “Leave us alone, you dumb prick,” she said, glaring scornfully at the tall boy standing over them. Arvin smiled.
Ignoring her, Gene said, “Russell, after I get done with you, I might just take your little girlfriend out for a nice long ride. She ain’t no beauty queen, but I gotta say, she’s not nearly as bad as that rat-faced sister of yours.” He stood over the table with his fists clenched, waiting for Arvin to leap up and start swinging, then watched dumbfounded as the boy closed his eyes and put his hands together. “You got to be shittin’ me.” Gene looked around the crowded lunchroom. The gym teacher, a burly man with a red beard who wrestled for extra money in Huntington and Charleston on the weekends, was scowling at him. The rumor around the school was that he’d never been pinned, and that he won all his matches because he hated everybody and everything in West Virginia. Even Gene was afraid of him. Leaning over, he said to Arvin in a low voice, “Don’t think praying’s gonna get you out of this, motherfucker.”
After Gene walked away, Arvin opened his eyes and took a drink from a carton of chocolate milk. “Are you all right?” Mary said.
“Sure,” he said. “Why you ask that?”
“Were you really praying?”
“I was,” he said, nodding his head. “Praying for the right time.”
He finally caught Dinwoodie a week later in his old man’s garage changing a spark plug in his ’56 Chevy. By then, Arvin had collected a dozen paper bags. Gene’s head was tightly encased in them when his younger brother found him several hours later. The doctor said he was lucky that he hadn’t suffocated. “Arvin Russell,” Gene told the sheriff after he came to his senses. He’d spent the last twelve hours in the hospital believing that he was running dead last in a race at the Indy 500. It had been the longest night of his life; every time he stomped the accelerator, the car slowed down to a crawl. The roar of the engines passing him by was still ringing in his ears.
“Arvin Russell?” the sheriff, a hint of doubt in his voice. “I know that boy likes to scrap, but hell, son, you twice as big as he is.”
“He caught me off guard.”
“So you seen him before he put that knot on your head?” the sheriff asked.
“No,” Gene said, “but he’s the one.”
“And how exactly do you know this?”
Gene’s father was leaning against the wall watching his son with sullen, bloodshot eyes. The boy could smell the Wild Irish Rose wafting off his old man clear across the room. Carl Dinwoodie wasn’t too bad if he stuck to beer, but when he got on the wine, he could be downright dangerous. This might come back to bite me in the ass if I’m not careful, Gene thought. His mother went to the same church as the Russell bunch. His father would kick the shit out of him all over again if he heard he’d been harassing that little Lenora bitch. “I could be wrong,” Gene said.
“Why did you say the Russell boy did it then?” the sheriff said.
“I don’t know. Maybe I dreamed it.”
Over in the corner, Gene’s father made a sound like a dog retching, then said, “Nineteen years old and still in school. What you think about that, Sheriff? Worthless as tits on a boar hog, ain’t he?”
“Who we talking about?” the sheriff said, a puzzled look on his face.
“That no-account thing laying right there in that bed, that’s who,” Carl said, then turned and staggered out the door.
The sheriff looked back to the boy. “Well, any idea why whoever did do it put them sacks over your head like that?”
“No,” Gene said. “Not a clue.”
21
“WHAT YOU GOT THERE?” Earskell said, as Arvin stepped up onto the porch. “I heard you over in there shooting that pop gun.” His cataracts were getting worse every week, like dirty curtains being slowly pulled shut in an already dim room. A couple more months and he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to drive anymore. Getting old was next to the worst goddamn thing that had ever happened to him. Lately, he’d been thinking about Alice Louise Berry more and more. They had both missed out on a lot, her dying so young.
Arvin held up three red squirrels. He had his father’s pistol stuck in the waistband of his pants. “We’ll eat good tonight,” he said. Emma had served nothing but beans and fried potatoes for four days now. Things always got lean toward the end of the month, before her pension check came. Both he and the old man were starving for some meat.
Earskell leaned forward in his chair. “You surely didn’t get those with that German piece of shit, did you?” Secretly, he was proud of the way the boy could handle the Luger, but he still didn’t think much of handguns. He’d rather have a pepper gun or a rifle any day.
“It ain’t a bad gun,” Arvin said. “You just got to know how to shoot it.” It was the first time the old man had ridiculed the pistol in quite a while.
Earskell laid down the implement catalog he’d been peering through all morning and pulled his penknife out of his pocket. “Well, go fetch us something to put ’em in, and I’ll help you clean ’em.”
Arvin pulled the skins off the squirrels while the old man held them by their front legs. They gutted the carcasses on a sheet of newspaper and cut the heads and feet off and laid the bloody meat in a pan of salted water. After they finished, Arvin folded up the mess in the paper and carried it out to the edge of the yard. Earskell waited until he came back up on the porch, then pulled a pint out of his pocket and took a drink. Emma had asked him to talk to the boy. She was at her wit’s end after hearing about the latest incident. He wiped his mouth and said, “Played cards over at Elder Stubb’s garage last night.”
“So did you win?”
“No, not really,” Earskell said. He stretched his legs out, looked down at his battered shoes. He was going to have to try mending them again. “Saw Carl Dinwoodie there.”
“Yeah?”
“He wasn’t none too happy.”
Arvin sat down on the other side of his great-uncle in a creaky cast-off kitchen chair held together with baling wire. He studied the gray woods across the road and chewed at the inside of his mouth for a minute. “He pissed off about Gene?” he asked. It had been over a week since he’d bagged the sonofabitch.
“A little maybe, but I think he’s more ticked off about the hospital bill he’s gonna have to pay.” Earskell looked down at the squirrels floating in the pan. “So what happened?”
Though Arvin didn’t ever see the point of offering up any details to his grandmother for beating the shit out of someone, mostly because he didn’t want to upset her, he knew the old man wouldn’t be satisfied with anything other than the facts. “He’s been teasing Lenora, him and a couple of his candy-ass buddies,” he said. “Calling her names, shit like that. So I fixed his wagon for him.”
“What about the others?”
“
Earskell heaved a long sigh, scratched at the whiskers on his neck. “You think maybe you should have held back just a little bit? Boy, I understand what you’re saying, but still, you can’t go sending people to the hospital over some name-calling. Puttin’ a couple knots on his head is one thing, but from what I hear, you hurt him pretty bad.”
“I don’t like bullies.”
“Jesus Christ, Arvin, you going to meet lots of people you might not take a liking to.”
“Maybe so, but I bet he won’t pick on Lenora anymore.”
“Look, I want you to do me a favor.”
“What’s that?”
“Stick that Luger away in a drawer and forget about it for now.”
“Why?”
“Handguns ain’t made for hunting. They’re for killin’ people.”
“But I didn’t shoot the bastard,” Arvin said. “I beat him up.”
“Yeah, I know. This time anyway.”
“What about them squirrels? I hit every one of them in the head. You can’t do that with no shotgun.”
“Just put it up for a while, okay? Use the rifle if you want to go after some game.”
The boy studied the floor of the porch for a moment, then looked up at the old man with narrowed, suspicious eyes. “He get mouthy with you?”
“You mean Carl?” Earskell asked. “No, he knows better than that.” He didn’t see any sense in telling Arvin that he had drawn a royal flush on the last and biggest pot of the night, or that he had folded so that Carl could take the money home with two pissy pair. Though he knew it had been the right thing to do, it still made him half sick thinking about it. There must have been two hundred dollars in that kitty. He just hoped the boy’s doctor got a chunk of it.
22