The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock
“Ain’t nothing free,” Willard said.
The lawyer smiled slightly. “There’s some truth to that, I guess. But still, would you be interested?” He set his glass on the desk.
“I’m not sure what you’re getting at.”
“Well, neither am I,” Dunlap said, “but how about you call me next week here at the office and maybe we can talk about it. I should have things worked out by then.”
Willard stood up and drained his glass. “That depends,” he said. “I’ll have to see how my wife’s doing.”
Dunlap pointed at the money Willard had laid on the desk. “Go ahead and take that with you,” he said. “Sounds like you might need it.”
“No,” Willard said, “that’s yours. I still want that receipt, though.”
THEY KEPT PRAYING AND SPILLING BLOOD on the log and hanging up twisted, mashed roadkill. All the while, Willard was considering the conversation he’d had with the fat-ass landlord. He’d run it through his head a hundred times, figured Dunlap probably wanted him to kill the black man or the wife or maybe both of them. There wasn’t anything else in the world he could think of that would be worth signing over the land and the house. But he also couldn’t help but wonder why Dunlap would think that he would do something like that; and the only thing Willard could come up with was that the lawyer considered him stupid, was playing him for a fool. He’d make sure his renter’s ass was sitting in jail before the bodies cooled off. For a brief spell, he had thought after talking to Dunlap that maybe there was a chance he could fulfill Charlotte’s dream. But there wasn’t any way they were ever going to own the house. He could see that now.
One day in the middle of August, Charlotte seemed to rally, even ate a bowl of Campbell’s tomato soup and held it down. She wanted to sit on the porch that evening, the first time she’d been out in the fresh air for weeks. Willard took a bath and trimmed his beard and combed his hair, while Arvin heated some popcorn on the stove. A breeze blew in from the west and cooled things off a bit. They drank cold 7-Up and watched the stars slowly cross the sky. Arvin sat on the floor next to her rocking chair. “It’s been a rough summer, hasn’t it, Arvin?” Charlotte said, running her bony hand through his dark hair. He was such a sweet, gentle boy. She hoped Willard would realize that when she was gone. That was something they needed to talk about, she reminded herself again. The medicine made her so forgetful.
“But now you’re getting better,” he said. He stuck another handful of popcorn in his mouth. He hadn’t had a hot meal in weeks.
“Yeah, I feel pretty good for a change,” she said, smiling at him.
She finally went to sleep in the rocker around midnight and Willard carried her to bed. In the middle of the night, she woke up thrashing around with the cancer eating another hole through her. He sat beside her until morning, her long fingernails digging deeper and deeper into the meat of his hand with each new wave of the pain. It was her worst episode yet. “Don’t worry,” he kept telling her. “Everything’s going to get better soon.”
He spent several hours the next morning driving along the back roads searching in the ditches for new sacrifices, but came up empty. That afternoon, he went to the stockyards, reluctantly bought another lamb. But even he had to admit, they didn’t seem to be working. On his way out of town, already in a foul mood, he passed by Dunlap’s office. He was still thinking about that sonofabitch when he suddenly jerked the truck over and stopped along the berm of Western Avenue. Cars drove by honking their horns, but he didn’t hear them. There was one thing that he hadn’t tried yet. He couldn’t believe that he hadn’t thought of it earlier.
“I’D ALMOST GIVEN UP ON YOU,” Dunlap said.
“I been busy,” Willard said. “Look, if you still want to talk, how about you meet me at your office at ten o’clock tonight?” He was standing in a phone booth in Dusty’s Bar on Water Street, just a couple of blocks north of the lawyer’s office. According to the clock on the wall, it was almost five. He’d told Arvin to stay in the sickroom with Charlotte, said he might be getting in late. He’d made the boy a pallet on the floor at the foot of her bed.
“Ten o’clock?” the lawyer said.
“That’s as early as I can get there,” Willard said. “It’s up to you.”
“Okay,” the lawyer said. “I’ll see you then.”
Willard bought a pint of whiskey from the bartender and drove around for the next couple of hours listening to the radio. He passed by the Wooden Spoon as it was closing, saw some skinny teenage girl walking out the door with the bowlegged old cook, the same one who had been working the grill there when Charlotte was waiting tables. He probably still couldn’t fix a meat loaf worth a shit, Willard thought. He stopped and filled the truck with gas, then went to the Tecumseh Lounge on the other side of town. Sitting at the bar, he drank a couple of beers, watched a guy wearing thick glasses and a dirty yellow hard hat run the pool table four times in a row. When he walked back out into the gravel lot, the sun was starting to go down behind the paper mill smokestack.
At nine thirty, he was sitting in his truck on Second Street, a block east of the lawyer’s office. A few minutes later, he watched Dunlap park in front of the old brick building and go inside. Willard drove around to the alley, backed up against the building. He took a few deep breaths before getting out of the truck. Reaching behind the seat, he got a hammer and stuffed the handle down his pants, pulled his shirt over it. He looked up and down the alley, then went to the rear door and knocked. After a minute or so, the lawyer opened the door. He was wearing a wrinkled blue shirt and a pair of baggy gray slacks held up by red suspenders. “That’s smart, coming in the back like that,” Dunlap said. He had a glass of whiskey in his hand and his bloodshot eyes indicated that he’d already had a few. As he turned toward his desk, he staggered a bit and farted. “Sorry about that,” he said, just before Willard struck him in the temple with the hammer, a sickening crack filling the room. Dunlap fell forward without a sound, knocking over a bookcase. The glass he’d been holding shattered on the floor. Willard bent over the body and hit him again. When he was sure the man was dead, he leaned against the wall and listened carefully for a while. A couple of cars drove by on the street out front and then nothing.
Willard put on a pair of work gloves he had in his back pocket and dragged the lawyer’s heavy body to the door. He straightened up the bookcase and picked up the broken glass and wiped up the spilled whiskey with the sport coat that was slung over the back of the lawyer’s chair. He checked the lawyer’s pants pockets, found a set of keys and over two hundred dollars in his wallet. He put the money in a desk drawer, stuck the keys in his overalls.
Opening the office door, he stepped into the small reception room and checked the front door to make sure it was locked. He went into the lavatory and ran some water on Dunlap’s jacket and went back to wipe the blood off the floor. Surprisingly, there wasn’t that much. After tossing the sport coat on top of the body, he sat down at the desk. He looked around for something that might have his name on it, but found nothing. He took a pull from the bottle of scotch on the desk, then capped it and stuck it in another drawer. On the desk was a photo in a gold frame of a chubby teenage boy, the spitting image of Dunlap, holding a tennis racket. The one of the wife was gone.
Turning out the lights in the office, Willard stepped into the alley and laid the jacket and the hammer in the front seat of the truck. Then he let the tailgate down and started the truck and backed it up to the open doorway. It took only a minute to drag the lawyer into the bed of the truck and cover him with a tarp, weigh the corners down with cement blocks. He shoved the clutch in on the truck and coasted a couple of feet, then got out and shut the office door. As he drove out Route 50, he passed by a sheriff’s cruiser parked in the empty store lot at Slate Mills. He watched in the rearview and held his breath until the illuminated Texaco sign faded from view. At Schott’s Bridge, he stopped and tossed the hammer into Paint Creek. By three AM, he was finishing up.
The next morning when Willard and Arvin got to the prayer log, fresh blood was still dripping off the sides into the rancid dirt. “This wasn’t here yesterday,” Arvin said.
“I run over a groundhog last night,” Willard said. “Went ahead and bled him out when I got home.”
“A groundhog? Boy, he must have been a big one.”
Willard grinned as he dropped to his knees. “Yeah, he was. He was a big fat bastard.”
7
EVEN WITH THE SACRIFICE OF THE LAWYER, Charlotte’s bones began breaking a couple of weeks later, little sickening pops that made her scream and claw gashes in her arms. She passed out from the pain whenever Willard tried to move her. A festering bedsore on her backside spread until it was the size of a plate. Her room smelled as rank and fetid as the prayer log. It hadn’t rained in a month, and there was no letup from the heat. Willard purchased more lambs at the stockyard, poured buckets of blood around the log until their shoes sank over the tops in the muddy slop. One morning while he was out, a lame and starving mutt with soft white fur ventured up to the porch timidly with its tail between its legs. Arvin fed it some scraps from the refrigerator, had already named it Jack by the time his father got home. Without a word, Willard walked into the house and came back out with his rifle. He shoved Arvin away from the dog, then shot it between the eyes while the boy begged him not to do it. He dragged it into the woods and nailed it to one of the crosses. Arvin stopped speaking to him after that. He listened to the moans of his mother while Willard drove around looking for more sacrifices. School was getting ready to start again, and he hadn’t been off the hill a single time all summer. He found himself wishing that his mother would die.
A few nights later, Willard rushed into Arvin’s bedroom and jerked him awake. “Get over to the log now,” he said. The boy sat up, looked around with a confused look. The hall light was on. He could hear his mother gasping and wheezing for breath in the room across the hall. Willard shook him again. “Don’t you quit praying until I come and get you. Make Him hear you, you understand?” Arvin threw on his clothes and started jogging across the field. He thought about wishing her dead, his own mother. He ran faster.
By three in the morning, his throat was raw and blistered. His father came once and dumped a bucket of water on his head, implored him to keep praying. But though Arvin kept screaming for the Lord’s mercy, he didn’t feel anything and none came. Some of the people down in Knockemstiff closed their windows, even with the heat. Others kept a light on the rest of the night, offered prayers of their own. Snook Haskins’s sister, Agnes, sat in her chair listening to that pitiful voice and thinking of the ghost husbands that she had buried in her head. Arvin looked up at the dead hound, its vacant eyes staring across the dark woods, its belly bloated and near bursting. “Can you hear me, Jack?” he said.
Right before dawn, Willard covered his dead wife with a clean white sheet and walked across the field, numb with loss and despair. He slipped up behind Arvin silently, listened to the boy’s prayers for a minute or two, barely a choked whisper now. He looked down, realized with disgust that he was gripping his open penknife in his hand. He shook his head and put it away. “Come on, Arvin,” he said, his voice gentle with his son for the first time in weeks. “It’s over. Your mom’s gone.”
Charlotte was buried two days later in the little cemetery outside of Bourneville. On the way home from the funeral, Willard said, “I’m thinking we might take us a little trip. Go down and visit your grandma in Coal Creek. Maybe stay for a while. You can meet Uncle Earskell, and that girl they got living with them would be just a little younger than you. You’ll like it there.” Arvin didn’t say anything. He still hadn’t gotten over the dog, and he was certain there was no way to get over his mother. All along, Willard had promised that if they prayed hard enough, she would be all right. When they arrived home, they found a blueberry pie wrapped in newspaper on the porch by the door. Willard wandered off into the field behind the house. Arvin went inside and took off his good clothes and lay down on the bed.
When he woke several hours later, Willard was still gone, which suited the boy fine. Arvin ate half the pie and put the rest in the icebox. He went out on the porch and sat in his mother’s rocking chair and watched the evening sun sink behind the row of evergreens west of the house. He thought about her first night under the ground. How dark it must be there. He’d overheard an old man standing off under a tree leaning on a shovel telling Willard that death was either a long journey or a long sleep, and though his father had scowled and turned away, Arvin thought that sounded all right. He hoped for his mother’s sake that it was a little of both. There had been only a handful of people at the funeral: a woman his mother used to work with at the Wooden Spoon, and a couple of old ladies from the church in Knockemstiff. There was supposed to be a sister somewhere out west, but Willard didn’t know how to get in touch with her. Arvin had never been to a funeral before, but he had a feeling that it hadn’t been much of one.
As the darkness spread across the overgrown yard, Arvin got up and walked around the side of the house and called out for his father several times. He waited a few minutes, thought about just going back to bed. But then he went inside and got the flashlight from the kitchen drawer. After looking in the barn, he started toward the prayer log. Neither of them had been there in the three days since his mother had passed. The night was coming on quick now. Bats swooped after insects in the field, a nightingale watched him from its nest beneath a bower of honeysuckle. He hesitated, then entered the woods and followed the path. Stopping at the edge of the clearing, he shined the light around. He could see Willard kneeling at the log. The rotten stench hit him, and he thought he might get sick. He could taste the pie starting to come up in his throat. “I’m not doing that no more,” he told his father in a loud voice. He knew it was bound to cause trouble, but he didn’t care. “I ain’t praying.”
He waited a minute or so for a reply, and then said, “You hear me?” He stepped closer to the log, kept the light shining on Willard’s kneeling form. Then he touched his father’s shoulder and the penknife dropped to the ground. Willard’s head lolled to one side and exposed the bloody gash he’d cut from ear to ear across his throat. Blood ran down the side of the log and dripped onto his suit pants. A slight breeze blew down over the hill and cooled the sweat on the back of Arvin’s neck. Branches creaked overhead. A tuft of white fur floated through the air. Some of the bones hanging from the wires and nails gently tapped against one another, sounding like some sad, hollow music.
Through the trees, Arvin could see a few lights glimmering in Knockemstiff. He heard a car door slam somewhere down there, then a single horseshoe clang against a metal peg. He stood waiting for the next pitch, but none came. It seemed like a thousand years had passed since the morning the two hunters had come up behind Willard and him here. He felt guilty and ashamed that he wasn’t crying, but there were no tears left. His mother’s long dying had left him dry. Not knowing what else to do, he stepped around Willard’s body and pointed the flashlight ahead of him. He began making his way down through the woods.
8
AT EXACTLY NINE O’CLOCK THAT EVENING, Hank Bell stuck the CLOSED sign in the front window of Maude’s store and turned off the lights. He went behind the counter and got a six-pack of beer from the bottom of the meat case, then stepped out the back door. In his front shirt pocket was a little transistor radio. He sat down in a lawn chair and opened a beer and lit a cigarette. He had lived in a camper behind the concrete-block building for four years now. Reaching into his pocket, he turned the radio on just as the announcer reported that the Reds were down by three runs in the sixth inning. They were playing out on the West Coast. Hank estimated it was just after five o’clock there. The way time worked, that was a funny thing, he thought.
He looked over at the little cigar tree he’d planted the first year he worked at the store. It had grown nearly five feet since then. It was a start he’d gotten from th
He watched a silvery-gray mist a couple of feet high move slowly up from Black Run Creek and cover the flat, rocky field behind the store, part of Clarence Myers’s cow pasture. It was his favorite part of the day, right after the sun went down and right before the long shadows disappeared. He could hear some boys whooping and yelling on the concrete bridge out in front of the store whenever a car drove by. A few of them hung there almost every night, regardless of the weather. Poor as snakes, every one of them. All they desired out of life was a car that would run and a hot piece of ass. He thought that sounded nice in a way, just going through your entire life with no more expectations than that. Sometimes he wished he weren’t so ambitious.
The praying on top of the hill had finally stopped three nights ago. Hank tried not to think about the poor woman dying up there, closed up in that room, like people were saying, while the Russell man and his boy went half insane. Hell, they’d damn near driven the entire holler crazy at times, the way they went on every morning and every evening for hours. From what he’d heard, it sounded more like they were practicing some sort of voodoo instead of anything Christian. Two of the Lynch boys had come across some dead animals hanging in the trees up there a couple of weeks ago; and then one of their hounds turned up missing. Lord, the world was getting to be an awful place. Just yesterday, he’d read in the newspaper that Henry Dunlap’s wife and her black lover had been arrested on suspicion of killing him. The law had yet to find the body, but Hank thought her lying with a Negro was damn near proof that they’d done it. Everybody knew the lawyer; he owned land all over Ross County, used to stop in the store once in a while sniffing around for moonshine to impress some of his big-shot friends. From what Hank had seen of the man, he probably deserved killing, but why didn’t the woman just get a divorce and move up to White Heaven with the coloreds? People didn’t use their brains anymore. It’s a wonder the lawyer didn’t have her killed first, that is, if he knew about the boyfriend. Nobody would have blamed him for that, but now he was dead and probably better off. It would have been a hell of a thing to have to live with, everyone knowing your wife ran around with a black man.