The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock
“Get that cocksucker out of here,” the one behind the movie camera growled. Before Carl knew what was happening, three men had dragged him out the door and put him in his car. “Now you wait here or she’s going to get hurt real bad,” one of them told him. He chewed on his cigar and watched shadows move back and forth behind the covered windows, tried to convince himself that everything was going to be all right. After all, it was the movie business, couldn’t be anything too serious go wrong. Two hours later, the front door opened and the same three men carried Sandy out to the car, tossed her in the backseat. One of them came around to the driver’s side and handed Carl twenty dollars. “This ain’t right,” Carl said. “The agreement was for two hundred.”
“Two hundred? Shit, she wasn’t worth ten. Once that big sonofabitch got it in her ass, she passed out and laid there like a dead fish.”
Carl turned and looked at Sandy lying on the seat. She was starting to come to a little. They had put her blouse on backward. “Bullshit,” he said. “I want to talk to them guys I made the deal with.”
“You mean Jerry and Ted? Hell, they left an hour ago,” the man said.
“I’ll call the law, that’s what I’ll do,” Carl said.
“No, you won’t,” the man said, shaking his head. Then he reached through the window and grabbed Carl by the throat and squeezed. “In fact, if you don’t quit your bitching and get the hell out of here, I’m going to take you back inside and turn ol’ Frankie loose on your chubby ass. Let him and Tojo make another hundred.” As the man walked back toward the house, Carl heard him say over his shoulder, “And don’t try bringing her back. She ain’t got what it takes for this business.”
The next morning, Carl went out and bought an ancient-looking Smith & Wesson .38 at a pawnshop with the twenty dollars the porno man had given him. “How do I know this thing even works?” he asked the pawnbroker.
“Follow me,” the man said. He took Carl into a back room and fired two bullets into a barrel filled with sawdust and old magazines. “They quit making this model in 1940 or thereabouts, but it’s still a damn good gun.”
He went back to the Blue Star Motel, where Sandy was soaking in a tub of hot water and Epsom salts. Showing her the gun, he swore that he was going to plug the two bastards who had set them up; but then he went down the street and sat on a bench in a park the rest of the day thinking about killing himself instead. Something broke in him that day. For the first time, he could see that his whole life added up to absolutely nothing. The only thing he knew how to do was work a camera, but who needed another fat guy with thin hair taking boring pictures of whiny, red-faced babies and sluts in their prom dresses and grim-faced married couples celebrating twenty-five years of misery? When he returned to their room that night, she was already asleep.
They headed back to Ohio the next afternoon. He drove and she sat on the pillows they had stolen from the motel room. He found that he had a hard time looking her in the eye, and they barely said two words to each other all the way across the desert and into Colorado. As they started up into the Rockies, the bleeding finally stopped and she told him that she would rather drive than sit there thinking about being raped by that midget’s doped-up slave while all those men cracked jokes about her. When she got behind the wheel, she lit a cigarette and turned the radio on. They were down to their last four dollars. A couple of hours later, they picked up a man smelling of gin thumbing his way back to his mother’s house in Omaha. He told them that he had lost everything, including his car, in a whorehouse—just a house trailer, really, with three broads working shifts, an aunt and her two nieces—out in the sand north of Reno. “Pussy,” the man said. “It’s always been a problem for me.”
“So it’s like some kind of sickness gets hold of you?” Carl said.
“Buddy, you sound like that head doctor I had to talk to one time.” They rode along in silence for a few minutes, then the man leaned forward and laid his arms casually on the top of the front seat. He offered them a drink from a flask, but neither of them were in the mood for a party. Carl opened up the dash to take the camera out. He was thinking that he might as well take some nature shots. Good chance he would never see these mountains again. “This your wife?” the man asked, after he scooted back again in his seat.
“Yeah,” Carl said.
“I’ll tell you what, friend. I don’t know what your situation is, but I’ll give you twenty bucks for a quickie with her. To tell you the truth, I don’t think I can last to Omaha.”
“That’s it,” Sandy said. She hit the brakes and flipped the turn signal on. “I’ve had my fill of motherfuckers like you.”
Carl glanced down at the pistol in the glove box half hid under a map. “Wait a minute,” he said to Sandy in a low voice. He turned and looked at the man, nice clothes, black hair, olive complexion, high cheekbones. A hint of cologne mixed with the smell of the gin. “I thought you lost all your money.”
“Well, I did, all I had anyway, but I called Mom when I got to Vegas. She wouldn’t buy me another set of wheels this time, but she did send me a few dollars to get home on. She’s good about stuff like that.”
“How about fifty?” Carl said. “You got that much?”
“Carl!” Sandy screeched. She was on the verge of telling him that he could get his fucking ass out, too, when she saw him slip the gun out of the dash. She turned her eyes back to the road and brought the car back up to cruising speed.
“Boy, I don’t know,” the man said, scratching his chin. “Sure, I got it, but fifty bucks oughta buy some fireworks, you know what I mean? You care to throw in some extras?”
“Sure, anything you want,” Carl said, his mouth turning dry as his heart started beating faster. “We’ll just have to find somewhere private to pull over.” He sucked in his gut and slid the gun down in his pants.
A week later, when he finally got up the nerve to develop the photographs he’d taken that day, Carl knew with the first glimpse, with a certainty that he had never felt before, that the beginning of his life’s work was staring back at him in that shallow pan of fixer. Though it hurt him to see Sandy once again with her arms wrapped around the whore hound’s neck in the throes of her first real orgasm, he knew he would never be able to stop. And the humiliation he had felt in California? He vowed that would never happen again. The next summer they went out on their first hunt.
The waitress waited until Carl lit the cigar, then asked, “So what do you do out there?”
“I’m a photographer. Movie stars mostly.”
“Really? You ever took any pictures of Tab Hunter?”
“No, can’t say that I have,” Carl said, “but I bet he’d be a nice one to work with.”
27
WITHIN A FEW DAYS, Carl was a regular at the White Cow. It felt good to be out among people again after spending so much of the winter holed up in the apartment. When the waitress asked him when he was heading back to California, he told her that he had decided to stay put for a while, take a break from all the Hollywood crap. One evening he was sitting at the counter when a couple of men who looked to be in their sixties pulled up in a long black El Dorado. They parked just a few feet from the front door and strutted inside. One was dressed in a Western outfit trimmed in sparkling sequins. His potbelly pushed against a belt buckle designed to look like a Winchester rifle, and he walked bowlegged, as if, Carl thought, he had either just gotten off a mighty wide horse or was hiding a cucumber up his ass. The other wore a dark blue suit, decorated across the front with various badges and patriotic ribbons, and a square VFW cap at a jaunty angle. Both of their faces were flushed red with strong drink and arrogance. Carl recognized the cowboy from the newspaper, a Republican loudmouth on the city council, always complaining at the monthly meetings about the degenerate, wide-open sex scene in the Meade city park. Though Carl had driven through there a hundred times at night, the hottest thing he’d ever encountered was a couple of gawky teenagers attempting a kiss in front of the little World
The two men sat down in a booth and ordered coffee. After the waitress served them, they began talking about a man with long hair they had seen walking down the sidewalk on their way over from the American Legion. “Never thought I’d see anything like that around here,” the suit said.
“You just wait,” the cowboy said. “If something ain’t done, they’ll be thick as fleas on a monkey’s ass within a year or two.” He took a sip of his coffee. “I got a niece lives in New York City, and that boy of hers looks just like a girl, hair clear down over his ears. I keep telling her, you send him to me, I’ll straighten his ass out, but she won’t do it. Says I’d be too rough on him.”
They lowered their voices a bit, but Carl could still hear them talking about the way they used to hang niggers, how someone needed to start lynching again, even if it was goddamn hard work, but with the longhairs this time. “Stretch a few of their dirty necks,” the cowboy said. “That will wake ’em up, by God. At least keep ’em out of these parts.”
Carl could smell their aftershave clear across the diner. He stared at the sugar bowl in front of him on the counter and tried to imagine their lives, the irrevocable steps they had taken to get to where they were on this cold, dark night in Meade, Ohio. It was electric, the sensation that went through him just then, the awareness he had of his own short time on this earth and what he had done with it, and these two old fucks and their connection to it all. It was the same sort of feeling he got with the models. They had chosen one ride or one direction over another, and they had ended up in his and Sandy’s car. Could he explain it? No, he couldn’t explain it, but he sure as hell could feel it. The mystery, that’s all Carl could ever say. Tomorrow, he knew, it wouldn’t mean anything. The feeling would be gone until the next time. Then he heard water running in the sink back in the kitchen, and the clear image of a soggy grave he’d once dug on a starry night rose to the surface of his memory—he’d dug in a wet spot, and a half-moon, high in the sky and as white as new snow, had bobbed and settled on top of the water seeping into the bottom of the hole and he had never seen anything so beautiful—and he tried to hold on to the image because he hadn’t thought about it for a while, but the old men’s voices broke in again and disturbed his peace.
His head began to ache a little and he asked the young waitress for one of the aspirins he knew she kept in her purse. She liked to smoke them, she had confessed to him one night, crush them and put the powder in a cigarette. Small-town dope, Carl had thought, and he had to restrain himself from laughing at her, this poor stupid girl. She handed him two tablets with a wink, Jesus, like she was passing him a shot of morphine or something. He smiled at her and thought again about taking her out for a trial run, watch a hitcher get his jollies with her while he took some pictures and assured her that this was the way all models got their start. No doubt she’d believe him. He’d told her some pretty wild stories, and she didn’t act embarrassed anymore. Then he swallowed the aspirins and turned a bit on his stool so he could hear the two old men better.
“The Democrats gonna be the ruination of this country,” the cowboy said. “What we need to do, Bus, is start our own little army. Kill a few of them and the rest will get the idea.”
“You mean the Democrats or the longhairs, J.R.?”
“Well, we’d start with the sissies first,” the cowboy said. “Remember that crazy sonofabitch had that chicken stuck to him out on the highway that time? Bus, I guarantee you these longhairs is going to be ten times worse than that.”
Carl took a sip of his coffee and listened while the two men fantasized about a private militia. It would be their final contribution to the country before they died. They would gladly sacrifice themselves if need be. It was their duty as citizens. Then Carl heard one of them say loudly, “What the hell you looking at?”
They were both staring at him. “Nothing,” Carl said. “Just drinking my coffee.”
The cowboy winked at the suit and asked, “What you think, boy? You like them longhairs?”
“I don’t know,” Carl said.
“Shit, J.R., he’s probably got one at home waiting on him,” the suit joked.
“Yeah, he don’t have the grit for what we need,” the cowboy said, turning back to his coffee. “Shit, probably never even served in the military. Soft as a doughnut, that boy.” He shook his head. “Whole damn country’s gettin’ like that.”
Carl didn’t say anything, but he wondered what it would be like to kill a couple of dried-up fuckers like them. For a moment, he thought about following them when they left, have them screw each other just for starters. He bet he could have that cowboy shitting in the suit’s little hat by the time he got serious. Those two pricks could look at Carl Henderson and regard him as a nothing all they wanted, he didn’t care. They could blow off from now until doomsday about the killing they would like to do, but neither of them had the guts for it. In fifteen minutes he could have them both begging for a seat in hell. There were things he could do that would make them eat each other’s fingers for just two minutes of relief. All he had to do was make the decision. He took another sip of his coffee, looked out the window at the Cadillac, the foggy street. Sure, just an old fat boy, boss. Soft as a fucking doughnut.
The cowboy lit another cigarette and coughed up some brown gunk that he spit in the ashtray. “Turn one of them goddamn things into a pet, that’s what I’d like to do,” he said, wiping his mouth on a paper napkin the other handed him.
“Would you want it to be a man or a woman, J.R.?”
“Hell, they look the same, don’t they?”
The suit grinned. “What would you feed it?”
“You know damn well what I’d feed it, Bus,” the cowboy said, and they both laughed.
Carl turned back around. He had never thought of that before. A pet. Keeping such a thing wasn’t possible right now, but maybe someday. See, he thought to himself, there was always something new and exciting to look forward to, even in this life. Except for the weeks they were out on the hunt, he always had a hard time staying upbeat, but then something would happen that would remind him that it wasn’t all shit. Of course, to even consider turning a model into some sort of pet, they would have to move out of town, get a place out in the sticks. You’d need a basement or, at the very least, some sort of outbuilding close to the house, a toolshed or a barn. Maybe he could eventually train it to do his bidding, though he doubted, even at the same time he was considering it, that he’d have the patience. Just trying to keep Sandy in line was hard enough.
28
BODECKER WALKED INTO THE TECUMSEH one afternoon near the end of February, right after Sandy started her shift, and ordered a Coke. Nobody else was in the bar. She poured it for him without saying a word, then turned back to the sink behind the bar where she was cleaning dirty beer mugs and shot glasses left over from last night. He noticed the dark circles around her eyes and the gray streaks in her hair. She didn’t look like she weighed ninety pounds, the loose way her jeans hung on her. He blamed Carl for the way she’d gone downhill. Bodecker hated the thought of that fat sonofabitch living off her like he did. Though he and Sandy hadn’t been what you’d call close in years, she was still his sister. She had just turned twenty-four her last birthday, five years younger than himself. The way she looked today she’d have a hard time passing for forty.
Lee moved to a stool down at the end of the bar so he could watch the door. Ever since that night he’d had to come in the bar and pick up that bag of money—the dumbest fucking thing that Tater Brown had pulled on him so far, and the bastard had heard about it, too—Sandy had hardly spoken to him. It bothered him, at least a little when he took the time to consider it, that she would think badly of him. He figured she was still pissed off because of all the hell he’d raised about her selling her ass out of the back of this dump. He turned to look at her. The place was dead, the only sound that of glasses clinking together in the water as she picked one up to wash it. Fuck it, he tho
Sandy set the glass in the plastic drainer and dried off her hands while she thought of something to say. Carl had been driving her to work an awful lot lately, but that was none of Lee’s business. What would he do with some girl anyway? The only time Carl got hard anymore was when he looked at his photographs. “So what?” she finally said. “He gets lonely.”
“Yeah, he lies a lot, too,” Bodecker said. Just the other evening, he had seen Sandy’s black station wagon sitting at the White Cow. He parked across the street and watched his brother-in-law flap his jaws with the skinny waitress. They looked like they were having a good time together, and he’d gotten curious. After Carl left, he went in and sat down at the counter, asked for a cup of coffee. “That guy that just left,” he said. “You happen to know his name?”
“You mean Bill?”
“Bill, huh?” Bodecker said, trying not to smile. “He a friend of yours?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “We get along all right.”