The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock
“Shit, you had all week to do that,” she said.
“I’m telling you, girl, you better watch it.”
At the Texaco on Main Street, Carl got out and started filling the can. When the high, sharp sound of a siren cut through the air, he nearly jumped out in front of a Mustang leaving the pumps. Turning around, he saw Bodecker sitting in his cruiser behind the station wagon. The sheriff shut the siren off and got out of the car laughing. “Damn, Carl,” he said, “I hope you didn’t make a mess in your pants.” He glanced in their car as he walked past, saw their stuff piled up in the back. “You all taking a trip?”
Sandy opened the door and stepped out. “Going on vacation,” she said.
“Where to?” Bodecker asked.
“Virginia Beach,” Carl said. He felt something wet and looked down, saw that he’d soaked one of his shoes with gasoline.
“I thought you went there last year,” Bodecker said. He wondered if his sister had started up whoring again. If so, she was evidently being more careful about it. He hadn’t heard any complaints about her since the woman’s phone call last summer.
Carl glanced over at Sandy, then said, “Yeah, we like it there.”
“I been thinking about taking me a little respite,” Bodecker said. “So it’s a good place to go, huh?”
“It’s nice,” Sandy said.
“What is it you like about it?”
She looked back toward Carl for help, but he was already bent over the can again, topping it off. His pants were hanging low, and she hoped Lee didn’t notice the crack of his white ass showing. “It’s just nice, that’s all.”
Bodecker pulled a toothpick out of his shirt pocket. “How long you gonna be gone?” he said.
Sandy crossed her arms in front of herself and gave him a dirty look. “Why all the fuckin’ questions?” Her head was starting to pound again. She should have never mixed beer with the vodka.
“No reason, sis,” he said. “Just curious.”
She stared at him for a minute. She tried to imagine the look on his smug face if she told him the truth. “About two weeks,” she said.
They stood and watched Carl tighten the cap on the gas can. When he went inside the station to pay, Bodecker pulled the toothpick out of his mouth and snorted, “Vacation.”
“Knock it off, Lee. What we do is our own business.”
42
JAMIE JOHANSEN WAS THE FIRST OF HIS KIND that they ever picked up, hair down to his shoulders, a set of thin gold hoops hanging from his earlobes. That’s what the woman told him as soon as he got in their filthy car, like it was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to her. Jamie had run away from home in Massachusetts the year before, which was also the last time he’d been to a barbershop. He didn’t consider himself a hippie—the few whom he’d met on the streets acted retarded—but what the fuck? Let her think what she wanted. For the past six months, he’d been living with a family of transvestites in a run-down, cat-infested house in Philadelphia. He had finally split when two of the older sisters decided Jamie needed to share more of the money he was making in the bus station restroom over on Clark Street. Fuck these hags, Jamie figured. Just a bunch of losers in bad makeup and cheap wigs. He’d go to Miami and find himself a rich old fag who would be thrilled just to play with his long, beautiful hair and show him off on the beach. He looked out the car window at a sign that said something about Lexington. He couldn’t even remember how he had ended up in Kentucky. Who the fuck goes to Kentucky?
And these two who just picked him up, another couple of losers. The woman seemed to think she was sexy or something, the way she kept smiling at him in the mirror and licking her lips, but just looking at her gave him the willies. There was a ripe, fishy smell coming from somewhere in the car, and he figured it had to be her. He could tell the fat man was dying to suck his dick, the way he kept turning around in the front seat and asking stupid questions so he could take another look at his crotch. They hadn’t gone but five or six miles when Jamie decided that, if he got the chance, he was going to steal their car. Even this piece of junk would be better than hitchhiking. The man who picked him up last night, stiff black hat, long white fingers, had scared the shit out of him, talking about gangs of rabid rednecks and tribes of half-starved hoboes and the awful things they did to sweet, young waifs they caught out on the road. After relating a number of stories he had heard—boys buried alive, tamped down headfirst into tight holes like fence posts, others turned into a gooey mulligan stew seasoned with wild onions and windfall apples—the man had offered good money and a night in a nice motel for a special kind of party, one that involved a bag of cotton balls and a funnel in some way, but for the first time since he had left home, Jamie turned the good money down, could see the maid finding him the next morning hollowed out like a Beggar’s Night pumpkin in the bathtub. These two here were like Ma and Pa Kettle compared to that crazy bastard.
Still, it surprised him when the woman turned off the highway and the man asked him straight out if he would be interested in fucking his wife while he took a few photographs. He hadn’t seen that one coming, but he played it cool. Jamie wasn’t really into women, especially ugly ones; but if he could talk the fat man into taking his clothes off too, stealing the car should be a piece of cake. He’d never had his own set of wheels before. He told the man, sure, he was interested, that is, if they were willing to pay for it. He looked past the man out the windshield smeared with the guts of dead insects. They were on a gravel road now. The woman had slowed down to a crawl and was evidently looking for a place to park.
“I thought your kind believed in that free love shit,” the man said. “That’s what Walter Cronkite said on the news the other night.”
“A boy’s still got to make a living, right?” Jamie said.
“I guess that’s fair enough. How’s twenty bucks sound?” The woman put the car in park and shut off the engine. They were sitting at the edge of a soybean field.
“Heck, I’ll take you both on for twenty dollars,” Jamie said with a smile.
“Both of us?” The fat man turned and looked at him with cold, gray eyes. “It sounds like you think I’m pretty.” The woman gave a little giggle.
Jamie shrugged. He wondered if they would still be laughing when he drove away in their car. “I’ve had worse,” he said.
“Oh, I doubt that,” the man said, shoving his car door open.
43
“YOU ONLY BROUGHT THE ONE SHIRT?” Sandy asked him. They had been on the road six days, and had worked with two models, the kid with all the hair and a man with a harmonica who thought he was going to Nashville to become a country music star, that is, right up until a few minutes after they listened to him completely butcher Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire,” which happened to be Carl’s favorite song that summer.
“Yeah,” Carl said.
“Okay, we’re gonna have to do some laundry,” she said.
“Why?”
“You stink, that’s why.”
They came across a Laundromat in a small town in South Carolina a couple of hours later. Sandy made him take the shirt off. She carried a grocery bag of dirty clothes in and put them in a washer. He sat on a bench out front, watching the occasional car drive past and chewing on a cigar, his saggy tits nearly hanging to his fishy-white paunch. Sandy came out and sat on the other end of the bench and hid behind her sunglasses. Her blouse was plastered to her back with sweat. She rested her head against the building and shut her eyes.
“What we did was the best thing that could have happened to him,” Carl said.
Jesus, Sandy thought, he’s still talking about that fucker with the mouth harp. He had been yapping about him all morning. “I’ve already heard it,” she said.
“I’m just saying, for one, he couldn’t sing worth a shit. And he had, what, maybe three fucking teeth in his head? You ever look at them country music stars? Those people got expensive teeth. No, they would have laughed him right out of town, and t
“The end of what?” Sandy said.
“The end of his dream, that’s what. Maybe he couldn’t see it last night, but I did that boy a big favor. He died with that dream still alive in his head.”
“Jesus, Carl, what the hell’s got into you?” She heard the washer stop and stood up, held out her hand. “Give me a quarter for the dryer.”
He handed her some change, then bent down and untied his shoes, kicked them off. He wasn’t wearing any socks. He was down to his trousers now. Taking his pocketknife out, he started cleaning his toenails. Two young boys, maybe nine or ten years old, came speeding around the corner on bicycles just as he smeared a gob of gray gunk on the seat of the bench. They both waved to him and smiled when he looked up. Just for a second, they made him wish, as they flew by pumping their legs and laughing as if they didn’t have a care in the world, that he was somebody else.
44
ON THEIR TWELFTH DAY OUT, ONE GOT AWAY. That had never happened before. He was an ex-con named Danny Murdock, the fourth model they had picked up this trip. On his right forearm, he had a tattoo of two scaly serpents wrapped around a tombstone that Carl imagined doing something special with once they had him down. They had been riding around all afternoon drinking beer and sharing a jumbo bag of pork rinds and getting him relaxed. They found a spot to park along a long, narrow lake just a mile or so inside the Sumter National Forest. As soon as Sandy shut the engine off, Danny flung the door open and got out of the car. He stretched and yawned, then started ambling toward the water, shucking off his clothes as he went. “What are you doing?” Carl yelled.
Danny tossed his shirt on the ground and turned to look back at them. “Hey, I got no problem giving your old lady the cock, but let me get cleaned up first,” he said, jerking his underwear down. “I’m warning you, though, ol’ buddy, I get past the used part, she ain’t gonna be happy with your ass no more.”
“Boy, he’s got a mouth on him, don’t he?” Sandy said, as she walked around the front of the station wagon. She leaned against the fender and watched the man jump into the water.
Carl set the camera on the hood and smiled. “Not for long, he ain’t.” They shared another beer and watched him swim, arms pumping and feet kicking, out to the middle of the lake and then roll over on his back.
“I gotta say, that looks like fun,” Sandy said. She kicked off her sandals and spread the blanket on the grass.
“Shit, hard to tell what’s in that mud hole,” Carl said. He opened another beer, tried to enjoy being out of the stinking car for a while. Eventually though, his patience with the swimmer wore thin. He had been out there playing over an hour. He went to the edge of the beach and started yelling and motioning for Danny to come in, and each time the man dove under and came back up whooping and splashing water like some schoolboy, Carl got a little more pissed. When Danny finally walked up out of the lake grinning with his dick hanging halfway to his knees and the evening sun sparkling all over his wet skin, Carl pulled the gun out of his pocket and said, “Are you clean enough yet?”
“What the hell?” the man said.
Carl motioned with the gun. “Goddamn it, get over there on that blanket like we talked about. Shit, we’re losing the light here.” He looked back at Sandy and nodded. She reached behind her head and started to undo her ponytail.
“Go fuck yourself!” Carl heard the man yell.
By the time he realized what was happening, Danny Murdock was already bolting into the woods on the other side of the road. Carl fired twice wildly and took after him. Slipping and stumbling, he went deep into the woods, until he was afraid he’d never find his way back to the car. He stopped and listened, but couldn’t hear a thing except for the sound of his own raspy breathing. He was too fat and slow to be chasing anyone, let alone a long-legged prick who had bragged to them all afternoon about outrunning three squad cars on foot through downtown Spartanburg the week before. By then, it was near dusk, and he suddenly realized that the man might have circled back around to where Sandy was waiting at the car. But even with blanks in her gun, he should have heard a shot, that is, unless the fucker took her by surprise. Goddamn that sneaking sonofabitch. He hated going back to the car empty-handed. Sandy would never let him hear the end of it. He hesitated a second, then pointed the pistol up in the air and fired twice.
She was standing by the open driver’s door holding the .22 in her hands when he came crashing through the brush at the edge of the road, red-faced and panting. “We got to get out of here,” he yelled. He grabbed the blanket they had spread on the ground behind the car and hurried over and scooped up the man’s clothes and shoes out of the grass. He tossed them in the backseat and climbed in the front.
“Jesus, Carl, what happened?” she said as she started the car.
“Don’t worry, I got the bastard,” he said. “Put two through his stupid head.”
She looked over at him. “You chased that fucker down?”
He heard the doubt in her voice. “Be quiet for a minute,” he said. “I got to think.” He pulled out a map and studied it for a minute or so, tracing his finger back and forth. “The way it looks we’re maybe ten miles from the border. Just turn around and make a left where we came in, and we oughta run into the highway.”
“I don’t believe you,” she said.
“What?”
“That guy took off like a deer. Ain’t no way you caught up with him.”
Carl took a couple of deep breaths. “He was hiding under a log. I damn near stepped on him.”
“What’s the hurry then?” she said. “Let’s go back and take some pictures.”
Carl laid the .38 on the dash and pulled his shirt up, wiped the sweat off his face. His heart was still beating like a hammer in his chest. “Sandy, just drive the goddamn car, okay?”
“He got away, didn’t he?”
He looked out the passenger window into the darkening woods. “Yeah, the bastard got away.”
She put the car in drive. “Don’t lie to me no more, Carl,” she said. “And another thing, while we’re on the subject, if I hear about you messing around with that little cunt at the White Cow again, you’re gonna be sorry.” Then she pressed her foot to the accelerator, and twenty minutes later, they crossed the state line into Georgia.
45
LATER THAT NIGHT, SANDY PARKED at the edge of a truck stop a few miles south of Atlanta. She ate a piece of beef jerky and crawled in the backseat to sleep. Around three AM, it began to rain. Carl sat in the front and listened to it beat on top of the car and thought about the ex-con. There’s a lesson to be learned from this, he thought. He had just turned his back on the cowardly fucker for a second, but that had been long enough to screw everything up. He pulled the man’s clothes from underneath the seat and started going through them. He found a broken switchblade and a Greenwood, South Carolina, address written inside a matchbook and eleven dollars in his wallet. Underneath the address were the words GOOD HEAD. He put the money in his pocket and rolled everything else up into a ball, then walked across the lot and tossed it in a trash barrel.
The rain was still coming down when she woke the next morning. Eating breakfast with Sandy at the truck stop, he wondered if any of the drivers sitting around them had ever killed a hitchhiker. It would be an excellent job for that sort of thing if a person was so inclined. As they started on their third cup of coffee, the rain let up and the sun popped out like a big, festering boil in the sky. By the time they paid the bill, wisps of steam were already rising up off the blacktopped parking lot. “About what happened yesterday,” Carl said, as they walked back to the car, “I shouldn’t have done that.”
“Like I said,” Sandy told him, “don’t lie to me no more. We get caught, it’s my ass in the sling just as much as yours.”
Carl thought again about the blanks he’d stuck in her gun, but decided it wo
“Yeah, well, you probably didn’t think one would ever get away, either.”
“Don’t worry,” he said, “that won’t ever happen again.”
They drove around Atlanta and stopped in a place called Roswell for gas. They had twenty-four dollars and some change to get home on. Just as Carl was getting back in the station wagon after paying the cashier, a gaunt man in a worn black suit timidly approached. “You wouldn’t be headin’ north by any chance, would you?” he asked. Carl went ahead and picked his cigar up out of the ashtray before he turned to look the man over. The suit was several sizes too big. The cuffs of the pants were turned up several times to keep them from dragging on the ground. He could see a little paper price tag still attached to the sleeve of the coat. The man was packing a flimsy bedroll; and though he could have easily passed for sixty, Carl figured the wayfarer at least a few years younger than that. For some reason, he reminded Carl of a preacher, one of the real ones that you seldom run into anymore: not one of those greedy, sweet-smelling bastards just out to take people’s money and make a fat fucking living off God, but a man who truly believed in the teachings of Jesus. On second thought, that was probably taking things a bit too far; the old boy was probably just another bum.
“Might be,” Carl said. He looked over at Sandy for some indication that she was on board, but she just shrugged and put her sunglasses back on. “Where you going?”
“Coal Creek, West Virginia.”
Carl thought about the one who got away last night. That big-dicked sonofabitch was going to leave a bad taste in his mouth for a long time. “Aw, hell, why not?” he told the man. “Get in the back.”