The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock
Bodecker pulled a little notebook and a pencil out of his shirt pocket, pretended to write something down. “Quit the horse shit and tell me what you know about him.”
“Am I in some kind of trouble?” she asked. She stuck a strand of hair in her mouth, started shuffling nervously back and forth.
“Not if you talk, you ain’t.”
After listening to the girl repeat a few of Carl’s stories, Bodecker glanced at his watch and stood up. “That’s enough for now,” he said, putting the notebook back in his pocket. “It don’t sound like he’s the one we’re looking for.” He thought for a moment, looked at the girl. She was still nibbling on her hair. “How old are you?” he said.
“Sixteen.”
“This Bill ever ask you to pose for any pictures?”
The girl’s face turned red. “No,” she said.
“The first time he starts talkin’ that kind of stuff, you call me, okay?” If Carl hadn’t been the one trying to fuck the girl, he wouldn’t have even bothered. But the sonofabitch had ruined his sister, and Bodecker couldn’t forget about it, no matter how often he told himself it wasn’t any of his business. It just kept eating at him, like a cancer. The best he could do right now was let Sandy know about this little waitress. But someday he still wanted to make Carl pay big-time. It wouldn’t be that hard, he thought, not much different from castrating a hog.
He had left the diner after questioning the girl and drove out to the state park by the prison and waited for Tater Brown to bring him some money. The dispatcher squawked something on the radio about a hit-and-run on the Huntington Pike, and Bodecker reached over and turned the volume down. A few days ago, he had done another job for Tater, used his badge to flush a man named Coonrod from an old shack where he was hiding out along the Paint Creek bottoms. Handcuffed in the backseat, he thought the sheriff was taking him to town for questioning until the cruiser stopped along the gravel road at the top of Reub Hill. Bodecker didn’t say a word, just yanked him out of the car by the metal bracelets and half dragged him into the woods a hundred yards or so. Just as Coonrod switched from yelling about his rights to pleading for mercy, Bodecker stepped behind him and shot him in the back of the head. Now Tater owed him five thousand dollars, a thousand more than the sheriff had charged him the first time. The sadist had beat up one of the better whores who worked upstairs in Tater’s strip club, tried to extract her womb with a toilet plunger. It had cost the gangster another three hundred at the hospital to have everything pushed back inside her. The only one who ended up making out on the deal was Bodecker.
Sandy sighed and said, “Okay, Lee, what the fuck are you talking about?”
Bodecker tipped his glass up, started chewing on some ice. “Well, according to this girl, your hubby’s name is Bill and he’s a big-shot photographer from California. Told her he’s good buddies with a bunch of movie stars.”
Sandy turned back to the sink, dipped a couple more dirty glasses in the lukewarm water. “He was probably just messing with her. Sometimes Carl likes to bullshit people for fun, just to see how they’ll react.”
“Well, from what I’ve seen, he’s getting a pretty good reaction. I gotta say, I never thought the fat bastard had it in him.”
Sandy threw down her drying rag and turned around. “What the hell you doing? Spying on him?”
“Hey, I wasn’t trying to tick you off,” Bodecker said. “I figured you’d want to know.”
“You never did like Carl,” she said.
“Jesus Christ, Sandy, he had you whorin’ for him.”
She rolled her eyes. “Like you don’t do nothing wrong.”
Bodecker put his sunglasses on and forced a smile, showed Sandy his big white teeth. “But I’m the law around here, girl. You gonna find out that makes all the difference.” He threw a five-dollar bill on the bar and walked out the door and got into his cruiser. He sat there for a few minutes, staring through the windshield at the run-down trailers in Paradise Acres, the mobile-home court that sat next to the bar. Then he laid his head back against the seat. It had been a week and so far nobody had reported the plunger bastard missing. He thought maybe he’d buy Charlotte a new car with part of the money. He wanted so much to close his eyes for a few minutes, but falling asleep out in the open wasn’t a good idea these days. The shit was starting to get deep. He wondered how long it would be before he had to kill Tater or, for that matter, before some sonofabitch decided to kill him.
29
ON A SUNDAY MORNING, Carl fixed some pancakes for Sandy, her favorite food. She’d come home drunk the night before in one of her sad-ass moods. Whenever she got tangled up in all those worthless feelings again, there was little he could say or do to make things better. She just had to work it out herself. A couple of nights of drinking and whining about it and she’d come back around. Carl knew Sandy better than she knew herself. Tomorrow night, or maybe the next, she would fuck one of her patrons after the bar closed, some crew-cut country boy with a wife and three or four snot-nosed kids at home. He’d tell Sandy that he wished he had met her before he ever married the old sow, that she was the sweetest piece he’d ever had, and then everything would be fine and dandy until the next time she got the blues.
Beside her plate he had laid a .22 pistol. He had bought it a few days ago for ten dollars from an elderly man he’d met at the White Cow. The poor sonofabitch was afraid that he would shoot himself if he kept the gun around. His wife had passed away last fall. He had treated her badly, he admitted, even when she was lying on her deathbed; but now he was so lonely, he couldn’t stand it. He told all this to Carl and the teenage waitress while icy snow pinged against the plate-glass windows of the diner and the wind shook the metal sign out by the street. The old man wore a long overcoat that smelled of wood smoke and Vicks VapoRub and a blue watch cap speckled with lint pulled down tight on his head. While he was confessing, it occurred to Carl that it might be good for Sandy to have her own weapon when they went out hunting, just as a backup in case something ever went haywire. He wondered why he hadn’t thought of it before. Though he was always careful, even the best fucked up sometimes. He had felt good about buying the gun, thought maybe it meant that he was getting wiser.
You’d have to shoot someone in the eye or stick it directly in their ear to ever kill anyone with a .22, but it would still be better than nothing. He’d done that once with a college boy, stuck a gun in his ear, some curly-haired Purdue prick who had snickered when Sandy told him that she’d once dreamed of going to beauty college, but then she ended up tending bar and everything had turned out just the way it was supposed to. Carl had found a book in the boy’s coat pocket after he tied him up, The Poems of John Keats. He tried asking the fucker nice what his favorite rhyme was, but by then the smart-aleck bastard had shit his pants and had a hard time concentrating. He opened the book to a poem and started reading it while the boy cried for his life, Carl’s voice getting louder and louder to drown out the other’s pleading until he came to the last line, which he has forgotten now, some bullshit about love and fame that he had to admit made the hair stand up on his arms at the time. Then he pulled the trigger and a wad of wet, gray brains shot out the other side of the college boy’s head. After he fell over, blood pooled in the sockets of his eyeballs like little lakes of fire, which made a hell of a picture, but that was with the .38, not some goddamn peashooter .22. Carl was sure that if he could show the smelly geezer the picture of the boy, the sad sack would think twice about ever doing himself in, at least not with a gun. The waitress had thought Carl was pretty slick the way he got the pistol away from the old man before he hurt himself. He could have fucked her that night in the backseat of the station wagon if he’d wanted to, the way she kept going on about how wonderful he was. There was a time a few years ago when he would have been all over that little bitch, but something like that just didn’t hold much appeal these days.
“What’s this?” Sandy said when she saw the pistol beside her plate.
She shook her head, pushed the gun across to his side of the table. “That’s your job, making sure that never happens.”
“I’m just saying—”
“Look, if you ain’t got the balls for it anymore, just say so. Jesus Christ, at least let me know before you get us both killed,” Sandy said.
“I told you before, I don’t like that kind of mouth,” he said. He looked at the stack of pancakes getting cold. She hadn’t touched them. “And you’re going to eat those goddamn griddle cakes, too, you hear me?”
“Fuck you,” she said. “I’ll eat what I want.” She stood up and he watched her take her coffee into the living room, heard the TV come on. He picked up the .22 and aimed it at the wall that divided the kitchen from the couch that she had no doubt plopped her skinny ass down on. He stood there for a couple of minutes, wondering if he could make the shot, then put the gun in a drawer. They spent the rest of the cold morning silently watching a Tarzan movie marathon on Channel 10, and then Carl went to the Big Bear and bought a gallon of vanilla ice cream and an apple pie. She’d always liked the sweets. If he had to, he’d force it down her, he thought as he paid the clerk.
Many years ago, he’d heard one of his mother’s boyfriends say that, back in the old days, a man could sell his wife if he got hard up or sick of her, drag her ass to the town market with a horse collar clamped tight around her lousy neck. Making Sandy choke on a little ice cream wouldn’t be that big a deal. Sometimes they didn’t know what was best for them. His mother sure didn’t. A man named Lyndon Langford, the smartest of the long line of bastards she had gotten messed up with during her time on earth, a factory worker in the GM plant in Columbus who sometimes read real books when he was trying to stay off the sauce, had given little Carl his first lessons in photography. Just remember, Lyndon had once told him, most people love to have their picture taken. They’ll do damn near anything you want if you point a camera at them. He would never forget the first time he saw his mother’s naked body, in one of Lyndon’s pictures, tied to her bed with extension cords, a cardboard box over her head with two holes cut in it for her eyes. Still, he was a halfway decent man when he wasn’t drinking. Then Carl fucked everything up by eating a slice of the deli ham that Lyndon kept in their icebox for the nights when he stayed over. His mother never forgave him for it, either.
30
WHEN OHIO STARTED TO TURN WARM and green again, Carl began seriously planning the next trip. He was considering the South this time, give the Midwest a break. He spent evenings studying his road atlas: Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia, the Carolinas. Fifteen hundred miles a week, that’s what he always planned for. Though they usually traded cars around the time the peonies bloomed, he had decided that the station wagon was in good enough shape for one more outing. And Sandy wasn’t bringing home the money she used to when she was whoring regular. Lee had taken care of that.
Lying in bed late one Thursday night, Sandy said, “I been thinking about that gun, Carl. Maybe you’re right.” Though she hadn’t mentioned it, she’d also been doing a lot of thinking about the waitress at the White Cow. She’d even stopped in there once, ordered a milk shake, checked the girl out. She wished Lee had never told her. What bothered her most was the way the girl reminded Sandy of herself right before Carl walked into her life: nervous and shy and eager to please. Then, a few nights ago, pouring a drink for a man she had recently fucked for free, she couldn’t help but notice that he wouldn’t even give her a second glance now. As she watched the man leave a few minutes later with some toothy bimbo in a fake fur jacket, it occurred to her that maybe Carl was looking for her replacement. It hurt to think he’d turn on her like that, but then why should he be any different from any of the other bastards she had known? She hoped she was wrong, but having her own gun might not be such a bad idea.
Carl didn’t say anything. He had been staring miserably at the ceiling, wishing the landlady was dead. It surprised him, Sandy mentioning the gun after all this time, but maybe she had just come to her senses. Who in the hell wouldn’t want to carry a gun doing the shit they did? He rolled over, tossed his share of the bedsheet off his fat legs. It was sixty fucking degrees outside at three in the morning, and the old bitch still had the thermostat cranked up. He was certain that she did it on purpose. They’d had words again the other day about his singing at night. He got up and opened the window, stood there letting the slight breeze cool him off. “What made you change your mind?” he finally asked.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “Like you said, you never know what might happen, right?”
He stared out into the darkness, rubbed the stubble on his face. He dreaded getting back in the bed. His side was soaked with sweat. Maybe he’d sleep on the floor tonight by the window, he thought. He leaned down near the ripped screen and took several deep breaths. Damn, he felt like he was suffocating. “She’s just doing it for spite, goddamn it.”
“What?”
“Leaving the fuckin’ heat on,” he said.
Sandy rose up on her elbows and looked at his dark form crouched by the window, like some brooding, mythical beast about to spread its wings and take off in flight. “But you’ll show me how to shoot it, won’t you?”
“Sure,” Carl said. “That’s no big deal.” He heard her strike a match behind him, take a drag off a cigarette. He turned back toward the bed. “We’ll take it out somewhere on your day off, let you fire a few rounds.”
On Sunday they left the apartment around noon and drove to the top of Reub Hill and down the other side. He made a left into a muddy lane and stopped when they got to the trash dump at the end. “How do you know about this place?” Sandy asked. Before Carl came along, she had spent more than a few nights getting screwed back here by boys she didn’t care to remember now. Always, she had hoped that if she put out for this next one, he’d treat her like his girlfriend, maybe take her to one of the dances at the Winter Garden or the Armory, but that had never happened. As soon as they got a nut, they were done with her. A couple of them even took her tip money and made her walk home. She looked out her window and saw, lying in the ditch, a used rubber stretched down over the top of a Boone’s Farm bottle. Boys used to call the place Train Lane; from the looks of things, she figured they still did. Now that she thought about it, she had never been to a dance in her life.
“Just saw it when I was out driving around one day,” he said. “Reminded me of that place in Iowa.”
“You mean with the Scarecrow?”
“Yeah,” Carl said. “Ol’ California, here I come, that cocksucker.” He reached across her and opened the glove compartment, grabbed the .22 and a box of shells. “Come on, let’s see what you got.”
He loaded the gun and set up a few rusty tin cans on top of a soggy, stained mattress. Then he walked back to the front of the car and fired off six shots at thirty feet or so. He knocked four cans over. After he showed her again how to load it, he handed the gun to her. “The fucker goes a little to the left,” he said, “but that’s okay. Don’t try to aim so much as point, like you’d do with your finger. And just take a breath and squeeze the trigger as you let it out.”
Sandy held the pistol in both hands and sighted down the barrel. She closed her eyes and pulled the trigger. “Don’t shut your eyes,” Carl said. She fired off the next five rounds as fast as she could. She put several holes in the mattress. “Well, you’re gettin’ closer,” he said. He handed her the box of shells. “You load this time.” He pulled out a cigar and lit it. When she hit the first can, she squealed like a little girl who’d found the prize Easter egg. She missed the next one, then plugged another. “Not bad,” he said. “Here, let me see it.”
He had just finished loading the gun again when they heard a pickup coming fast down the lane toward them. The truck stopped with a lurch a few yards away, and a middle-aged, gaunt-faced man got out. He wore a pair of blue dress pants and a white shirt, polished black sh
“Nobody.” Carl looked around and then shrugged. “Shit, buddy, it’s just a dump.”
“It’s my land is what it is,” the man said.
“We’re just getting in some target practice, that’s all,” Carl said. “Trying to teach my wife how to defend herself.”
The man shook his head. “I don’t allow no shooting on my land. Hell, boy, I got cattle over in there. Besides that, don’t you know it’s the Lord’s Day?”
Carl heaved a sigh and cast a look at the brown fields that surrounded the dump. There wasn’t a cow in sight anywhere. The sky was a low canopy of endless, immovable gray. Even this far out of town, he could detect the acrid smell of the paper mill in the air. “Okay, I get the hint.” He watched as the farmer headed back to his truck, shaking his gray head. “Hey, mister,” Carl suddenly called out.
The farmer stopped and spun around. “What now?”
“I was wondering,” Carl said, taking a few steps toward him. “Would you mind if I took your picture?”
“Carl,” Sandy said, but he waved his hand for her to keep quiet.
“What the hell you want to do that for?” the man said.
“Well, I’m a photographer,” Carl said. “I just think you’d make a good picture. Heck, maybe I could sell it to a magazine or something. I always keep my eyes peeled for fine subjects like yourself.”
The man looked past Carl at Sandy standing beside the station wagon. She was lighting a cigarette. He didn’t approve of women who smoked. Most of them he’d known were trash, but he figured a man who took pictures for a living probably couldn’t get anything decent. Hard to tell where he had picked her up. A few years ago, he’d found a woman named Mildred McDonald in his hog barn, half naked and sucking on a cancer stick. She had told him she was waiting on a man, just as casual as anything, then tried to get him to lie with her in the filth. He glanced at the gun Carl was holding in his hand, noticed that his finger was still on the trigger. “You better go ahead and get out of here,” the man said, then started walking fast toward his truck.