Donald Pollock - The Devil All the Time

“You probably already knew that, though, didn’t you, Gary?” Sandy said. “That your middle name is right out of the Good Book?”

The boy quit chomping his gum for a moment. “We never went to church much when I was a kid,” he said.

A worried look swept across Sandy’s face, and she reached for her cigarettes on the dash. “But you been baptized, right?” she asked.

“Well, sure, we ain’t complete heathens,” the boy said. “I just don’t know any of that Bible stuff.”

“That’s good,” Sandy said, a hint of relief in her voice. “No sense takin’ chances, not with something like that. Lord, who knows where a person might end up if he wasn’t saved?”

The soldier was going home to see his mother before the army shipped him off to Germany or that new place called Vietnam, Carl couldn’t recall which now. He didn’t give a damn if he was named after some crazy sonofabitch in the New Testament, or that his girlfriend had made him promise to wear her class ring around his neck until he returned from overseas. Knowing stuff like that only complicated things later on; and so Carl found it easier to ignore the small talk, let Sandy handle all the dumb questions, the pitter-patter bullshit. She was good at it, flirting and flapping her jaws, putting them at ease. They had both come a long way since they’d first met, her, a lonely, scrawny stick of a girl waiting tables at the Wooden Spoon in Meade, eighteen years old and taking shit off customers in hopes of a quarter tip. And him? Not much better, a flabby-faced mama’s boy who had just lost his mother, with no future or friends except for what a camera might bring. He’d had no idea, as he walked into the Wooden Spoon that first night away from home, of what that meant or what to do next. The only thing he had known for sure, as he sat in the booth watching the skinny waitress finish wiping the tables off before turning out the lights, was that he needed, more than anything else in the world, to take her picture. They had been together ever since.

Of course, there were also things that Carl needed to say to the hitchhikers, but that could usually wait until after they parked the car. “Take a look at this,” he’d begin, when he pulled the camera out of the glove box, a Leica M3 35mm, and held it up for the man to see. “Cost four hundred new, but I got it for damn near nothing.” And though the sexy smile never left Sandy’s lips, she couldn’t help but feel a little bitter every time he bragged about it. She didn’t know why she had followed Carl into this life, wouldn’t even try to put such a thing into mere words, but she did know that that damn camera had never been a bargain, that it was going to cost them plenty in the end. Then she’d hear him ask the next model, in a voice that sounded almost like he was joking, “So, how would you like to have your picture took with a good-looking woman?” Even after all this time, it still amazed her that grown-up men could be so easy.

After they carried and dragged the army boy’s naked body a few yards into the woods and rolled it under some bushes heavy with purple berries, they went through his clothes and duffel bag and found nearly three hundred dollars tucked away in a pair of clean white socks. That was more money than Sandy made in a month. “The lying little weasel,” Carl said. “Remember me asking him for some gas money?” He swiped at a cloud of insects gathered around his sweaty, red face, stuck the wad of bills in his pants pocket. A pistol with a long pitted barrel lay beside him on the ground next to the camera. “Like my old mother used to say,” he went on, “you can’t trust any of them.”

“Who?” Sandy said.

“Them goddamn redheads,” he said. “Hell, they’ll spit out a lie even when the truth fits better. They just can’t help it. It’s something got fucked up in their evolution.”

Up on the main road a car with a burned-out muffler went by slowly, and Carl cocked his head and listened to the pop-pop sound until it faded away. Then he looked over at Sandy kneeling beside him, studied her face for a moment in the gray dusk. “Here, clean yourself off,” he said, handing her the boy’s T-shirt, still damp with his sweat. He pointed at her chin. “You got some splatter right there. That skinny bastard was full as a tick.”

After wiping the shirt over her face, Sandy tossed it on top of the green duffel and stood up. She buttoned her blouse with shaky hands, brushed the dirt and bits of dead leaf off her legs. Walking to the car, she bent down and examined herself in the side mirror, then reached through the window and grabbed her cigarettes off the dash. She leaned against the front bumper and lit a smoke, dug a tiny piece of gravel out of one skinned knee with a pink fingernail. “Jesus, I hate it when they cry like that,” she said. “That’s the worst.”

Carl shook his head as he flipped through the boy’s wallet one more time. “Girl, you got to get over that shit,” he said. “Them tears he shed is the kind of thing makes for a good picture. Those last couple minutes was the only time in his whole miserable life when he wasn’t faking it.”

As Sandy watched him stuff everything that belonged to the boy back into the duffel, she was tempted to ask if she could keep the girlfriend’s class ring, but decided it wasn’t worth the hassle. Carl had everything figured out, and he could turn into a raging maniac if she tried to flaunt even one little rule. Personal items had to be disposed of properly. That was Rule #4. Or maybe it was #5. Sandy could never keep the order of the rules straight, no matter how many times he tried to drill them into her head, but she would always remember that Gary Matthew Bryson loved Hank Williams and hated the army’s powdered eggs. Then her stomach growled and she wondered, just for a second, if those berries hanging over his head back there in the woods were fit to eat or not.

AN HOUR LATER, they pulled into a deserted gravel pit they had passed by earlier when Sandy and Private Bryson were still cracking jokes and making fuck-eyes at each other. She parked behind a small utility shed cobbled together out of scrap lumber and rusty sheets of tin and shut off the engine. Carl climbed out of the car with the duffel bag and a can of gasoline they always carried. A few yards past the shed, he set the bag down and sprinkled some gas on it. After he had it burning good, he went back to the car and searched the backseat with a flashlight, found a wad of gum stuck under one of the armrests. “Worse than some kid,” he said. “You’d think the military would teach them better than that. With soldiers like that one, we’ll be fucked if those Russians ever decide to invade.” He peeled the gum off carefully with his thumbnail and then returned to the fire.

Sandy sat in the car and watched him poke the flames with a stick. Orange and blue sparks hopped and fluttered and disappeared into the darkness. She scratched at some jigger bites around her ankles and worried about the burning sensation between her legs. Though she hadn’t mentioned it to Carl yet, she was pretty sure that another boy, one they had picked up in Iowa a couple of days ago, had given her some kind of infection. The doctor had already warned her that another dose or two would ruin her chances of ever having a baby, but Carl didn’t like the look of rubbers in his pictures.

When the fire died out, Carl kicked the ashes around in the gravel, then took a dirty bandanna from his back pocket and picked up the hot belt buckle and the smoking remains of the army boots. He flung them out into the middle of the gravel pit and heard a faint splash. As he stood at the edge of the deep hole, Carl thought about the way that Sandy had wrapped her arms around the army boy when she saw him set the camera down and pull the pistol out, like that was going to save him. She always tried that shit with the pretty ones, and though he couldn’t really blame her for wanting it to last a while longer, this wasn’t just some damn fuck party. To his way of thinking, it was the one true religion, the thing he’d been searching for all his life. Only in the presence of death could he feel the presence of something like God. He looked up, saw dark clouds beginning to gather in the sky. He wiped some sweat out of his eyes and started back to the car. If they were lucky, maybe it would rain tonight and wash some of the scum out of the air, cool things off a bit.