Donald Pollock - The Devil All the Time

“No, I’m gonna hang around here awhile,” she said. “Maybe someone worth a shit will show up.”

Hank flipped his cigarette into the gravel lot and took another drink of beer. He liked to tell himself that things had turned out for the best in the end. Although he wasn’t a spiteful person, not at all, he had to admit that he got some satisfaction out of knowing that Mildred was now hooked up with a big-bellied boy named Jimmy Jack who rode an old Harley and kept her penned up on his back porch in a plywood doghouse when he wasn’t selling her ass out behind one of the bars in town. People said she’d do anything you could think of for fifty cents. Hank had seen her in Meade this past Fourth of July, standing by the door outside Dusty’s Bar with a black eye, holding the biker’s leather helmet. The best years of Mildred’s life were behind her now, and his own were just getting ready to begin. The woman he was going to pick up in Cincinnati would be a hundred times finer than any old Mildred McDonald. A year or two after he moved away from here, he probably wouldn’t even be able to recall her name. He rubbed a hand over his face and looked over, saw the Russell boy watching him. “Damn, was I talking to myself?” he asked the boy.

“Not really,” Arvin said.

“Hard to tell when that deputy will show up,” Hank said. “They don’t much like to come out here.”

“Who’s Mildred?” Arvin asked.

LEE BODECKER’S SHIFT WAS NEARLY OVER when the call came through on the radio. Another twenty minutes and he would have been picking up his girlfriend and heading out Bridge Street to Johnny’s Drive-in. He was starving. Every night, after he got off, he and Florence drove to either Johnny’s or the White Cow or the Sugar Shack. He liked to go all day without eating, then wolf down cheeseburgers and fries and milk shakes; and finish things off with a couple of ice-cold beers down along the River Road, leaned back in his seat while Florence jacked him off into her empty Pepsi cup. She had a grip like an Amish milk maiden. The entire summer had been a succession of almost perfect nights. She was saving the good stuff for the honeymoon, which suited Bodecker just fine. At twenty-one years old, he was just six months out of the peacetime army, and in no hurry to be tied down with a family. Although he had been a deputy only four months, he could already see a lot of advantages to being the law in a place as backward as Ross County, Ohio. There was money to be made if a man was careful and not get the big head, like his boss had done. Nowadays, Sheriff Hen Matthews had a picture of his round, stupid puss on the front page of the Meade Gazette three or four times a week, often for no conceivable reason. Citizens were starting to joke about it. Bodecker was already planning his campaign strategy. All he had to do was get some dirt on Matthews before the next election, and he could move Florence into one of the new houses they were building on Brewer Heights when they finally tied the knot. He had heard that every single one of them had two bathrooms.

He turned the cruiser around on Paint Street near the paper mill and headed out Huntington Pike toward Knockemstiff. Three miles out of town, he passed by the little house in Brownsville where he lived with his sister and mother. A light was on in the living room. He shook his head and reached in his shirt pocket for a cigarette. He was paying most of the bills right now, but he had made it clear to them when he came back from the service that they couldn’t depend on him much longer. His father had left them years ago, just went off to the shoe factory one morning and never returned. Recently, they had heard a rumor that he was living in Kansas City, working in a pool room, which made sense if you had ever known Johnny Bodecker. The only time the man ever smiled was when he was busting a rack of balls or running a table. The news had been a big disappointment to his son; nothing would have made Bodecker happier than discovering that the fucker was still earning his keep somewhere stitching soles onto loafers in a dingy red-brick building lined with high, dirty windows. Occasionally, when he was driving around on patrol and things were quiet, Bodecker imagined his father returning to Meade for a visit. In his fantasy, he followed the old man out into the country away from any witnesses and arrested him on a phony charge. Then he beat the shit out of him with a nightstick or the butt of his revolver before taking him to Schott’s Bridge and pushing him over the rail. It was always a day or so after a heavy rain and Paint Creek would be up, the water swift and deep on its way east to the Scioto River. Sometimes he let him drown; other times he allowed him to swim to the muddy bank. It was a good way to pass the time.

He took a drag off the cigarette as his thoughts drifted from his father to his sister, Sandy. Though she had just turned sixteen, Bodecker had already found her a job waiting tables in the evening at the Wooden Spoon. He had pulled over the owner of the diner a few weeks ago for driving drunk, the man’s third time in a year, and one thing had led to another. Before he knew it, he was a hundred dollars richer and Sandy had work. She was as bashful and anxious around people as a possum caught out in daylight, always had been, and Bodecker didn’t doubt that learning to deal with customers those first couple of weeks had been torture for her, but the owner had told him yesterday morning that she seemed to be getting the hang of it now. On nights when he couldn’t pick her up after work, the cook, a thickset man with sleepy blue eyes who liked to draw risqué pictures of cartoon characters on his white paper chef’s hat, had been giving her a ride home, and that worried him a little, mostly because Sandy was inclined to go along with whatever anyone asked her to do. Not once had Bodecker ever heard her speak up for herself, and like a lot of things, he blamed their father for that. But still, he told himself, it was time she began learning how to make her own way in the world. She couldn’t hide in her room and daydream the rest of her life; and the sooner she started bringing in some money, the sooner he could get out. A few days ago, he had gone so far as to suggest to his mother that she let Sandy quit school and work full-time, but the old lady wouldn’t hear of it. “Why not?” he asked. “Once someone finds out how easy she is, she’s bound to get knocked up anyway, so what does it matter if she knows algebra or not?” She didn’t offer a reason, but now that he had planted the seed, he knew he just had to wait a day or two before bringing it up again. It might take a while, but Lee Bodecker always got what he wanted.

Lee made a right onto Black Run Road and drove to Maude’s grocery. The storekeeper was sitting on the bench out front drinking a beer and talking to some young boy. Bodecker got out of the cruiser with his flashlight. The storekeeper was a sad, worn-out-looking fucker, even though the deputy figured they were roughly the same age. Some people were born just so they could be buried; his mother was like that, and he’d always figured that’s why the old man had left, though he hadn’t been any great prize himself. “Well, what we got this time?” Bodecker asked. “I hope it ain’t another one of those goddamn window peepers you keep calling about.”

Hank leaned over and spit on the ground. “I wish it was,” he said, “but no, it’s about this boy’s daddy.”

Bodecker trained the flashlight on the skinny, dark-haired boy. “Well, what is it, son?” he said.

“He’s dead,” Arvin said, putting a hand up to block the light shining in his face.

“And they just buried his poor mother today,” Hank said. “It’s a damn shame, it is.”