Donald Pollock - The Devil All the Time

“So your daddy’s dead, is he?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Is that blood you got on your face?”

“No,” Arvin said. “Somebody gave us a pie.”

“This ain’t some joke, is it? You know I’ll take you to jail if it is.”

“Why you all think I’m lying?” Arvin said.

Bodecker looked at the storekeeper. Hank shrugged and turned his beer up and drained it. “They live at the top of Baum Hill,” he said. “Arvin here, he can show you.” Then he stood up and belched and headed around the side of the store.

“I might have some questions for you later on,” Bodecker called out.

“It’s a goddamn shame, that’s all I can tell you,” he heard Hank say.

Bodecker put Arvin in the front seat of the cruiser and drove up Baum Hill. At the top, he turned down a narrow dirt lane lined with trees that the boy pointed out. He slowed the car down to a crawl. “I never been back this way before,” the deputy said. He reached down and quietly unsnapped his holster.

“Ain’t nobody new been back here in a long time,” Arvin said. Looking out the side window into the dark woods, he realized that he’d left his light in the store. He hoped the storekeeper didn’t sell it before he got back down there. He glanced over at the brightly lit instrument panel. “You gonna turn the siren on?”

“No sense in scaring someone.”

“There’s nobody left to scare,” Arvin said.

“So this where you live?” Bodecker asked as they pulled up to the small, square house. There were no lights on, no sign that anyone lived here at all except for a rocking chair on the porch. The grass was at least a foot high in the yard. Off to the left was an old barn. Bodecker parked behind a rusted-out pickup. Just your typical hillbilly trash, he thought. Hard to tell what kind of mess he was getting into. His empty stomach gurgled like a broken commode.

Arvin got out without answering and stood in front of the cruiser waiting for the deputy. “This way,” he said. He turned and started around the corner of the house.

“How far is it?” Bodecker asked.

“Not too far. Maybe ten minutes.”

Bodecker flipped on his flashlight and followed behind the boy along the edge of an overgrown field. They entered the woods and went several hundred feet down a well-worn path. The boy suddenly stopped and pointed ahead into the darkness. “He’s right there,” Arvin said.

The deputy trained his light on a man, dressed in a white shirt and dress pants, crumpled loosely over a log. He took a few steps closer, could make out a gash in the man’s neck. The front of his shirt was soaked in blood. He sniffed the air and gagged. “My God, how long he been laying here like this?”

Arvin shrugged. “Not long. I fell asleep for a little while and there he was.”

Bodecker pinched his nostrils together, tried to breathe through his mouth. “What the hell is that smell then?”

“That’s them up there,” Arvin said, pointing into the trees.

Bodecker lifted his flashlight. Animals in various states of decay hung all around them, some in the branches and others from tall wooden crosses. A dead dog with a leather collar around its neck was nailed up high to one of the crosses like some kind of hideous Christlike figure. The head of a deer lay at the foot of another. Bodecker fumbled with his gun. “Goddamn it, boy, what the hell is this?” he said, turning the light back on Arvin just as a white, squirming maggot dropped onto the boy’s shoulder. He brushed it off as casually as someone would a leaf or a seed. Bodecker waved his revolver around as he started to back away.

“It’s a prayer log,” Arvin said, his voice barely a whisper now.

“What? A prayer log?”

Arvin nodded, staring at his father’s body. “But it don’t work,” he said.

THE COUPLE HAD BEEN ROAMING the Midwest for several weeks during the summer of 1965, always on the hunt, two nobodies in a black Ford station wagon purchased for one hundred dollars at a used-car lot in Meade, Ohio, called Brother Whitey’s. It was the third vehicle they had gotten off the minister in as many years. The man on the passenger’s side was turning to fat and believed in signs and had a habit of picking his decayed teeth with a Buck pocketknife. The woman always drove and wore tight shorts and flimsy blouses that showed off her pale, bony body in a way they both thought enticing. She chain-smoked any kind of menthol cigarettes she could get her hands on while he chewed on cheap black cigars that he called dog dicks. The Ford burned oil and leaked brake fluid and threatened to spill its metal guts all over the highway anytime they pushed it past fifty miles an hour. The man liked to think that it looked like a hearse, but the woman preferred limousine. Their names were Carl and Sandy Henderson, but sometimes they had other names, too.

Over the past four years, Carl had come to believe that hitchhikers were the best, and there were plenty of them on the road in those days. He called Sandy the bait , and she called him the shooter , and they both called the hitchhikers the models . That very evening, just north of Hannibal, Missouri, they had tricked and tortured and killed a young enlisted man in a wooded area thick with humidity and mosquitoes. As soon as they picked him up, the boy had kindly offered them sticks of Juicy Fruit, said he’d drive for a while if the lady needed a break. “That’ll be the goddamn day,” Carl said; and Sandy rolled her eyes at the snide tone her husband sometimes used, as if he thought he was a better class of trash than the stuff they found along the roads. Whenever he got like that, she just wanted to stop the car and tell the poor fool in the backseat to get out while he still had a chance. One of these days, she promised herself that was exactly what she was going to do, hit the brakes and knock Mister Big Shot down a notch or two.

But not tonight. The boy in the backseat was blessed with a face smooth as butter and tiny brown freckles and strawberry-colored hair, and Sandy could never resist the ones who looked like angels. “What’s your name, honey?” she asked him, after they’d gone a mile or two down the highway. She made her voice nice and easy; and when the boy looked up and their eyes met in the rearview mirror, she winked and gave him the smile that Carl had taught her, the one he’d made her practice night after night at the kitchen table until her face was ready to fall off and stick to the floor like a pie crust, a smile that hinted at every dirty possibility a young man could ever imagine.

“Private Gary Matthew Bryson,” the boy said. It sounded odd to her, him saying his full name like that, like he was up for inspection or some such shit, but she ignored it and went right on talking. She hoped he wasn’t going to be the serious type. Those kinds always made her part of the job that much harder.

“Now that’s a nice name,” Sandy said. In the mirror, she watched as a shy grin spread over his face, saw him stick a fresh piece of gum in his mouth. “Which of them you go by?” she asked.

“Gary,” he said, flipping the silver gum wrapper out the window. “That was my daddy’s name.”

“That other one, Matthew, that one’s from the Bible, ain’t it, Carl?” Sandy said.

“Hell, everything’s from the Bible,” her husband said, staring out the windshield. “Ol’ Matt, he was one of the apostles.”

“Carl used to teach Sunday school, didn’t you, baby?”

With a sigh, Carl twisted his big body around in the seat, more to take another look at the boy than anything else. “That’s right,” he said with a tight-lipped smile. “I used to teach Sunday school.” Sandy patted his knee, and he turned back around without another word and pulled a road map from the glove box.