Donald Pollock: The Devil All the Time

An hour or so later, Arvin was awakened by his father’s voice in the kitchen. He jumped off the bed and smoothed the wrinkles out of the wool blanket, then went to the door and pressed his ear against it. He heard Willard ask Charlotte if she needed anything from the store. “I got to gas up the truck for work,” he told her. When he heard his father’s footsteps in the hall, Arvin moved quickly away from the door and across the room. He was standing by the window pretending to study an arrowhead he’d picked up from the small collection of treasures he had lying on the sill. The door opened. “Let’s take a ride,” Willard said. “No sense you sitting in here like a house cat all day.”

As they walked out the front door, Charlotte yelled from the kitchen, “Don’t forget the sugar.” They got in the pickup and drove out to the end of their rutted lane and then turned down Baum Hill Road. At the stop sign, Willard made a left onto the stretch of paved road that cut through the middle of Knockemstiff. Though the trip to Maude’s store never took more than five minutes, it always seemed to Arvin as if he had entered another country when they came off the Flats. At the Patterson place, a group of boys, some younger than himself, stood in the open doorway of a dilapidated garage passing cigarettes back and forth and taking turns punching a gutted deer carcass that hung from a joist. One of the boys whooped and took a couple of swings at the chilly air as they drove past, and Arvin scooted down in his seat a little. In front of Janey Wagner’s house, a pink baby crawled around in the yard under a maple tree. Janey was standing on the sagging porch pointing at the baby and yelling through a broken window patched with cardboard at someone inside. She was wearing the same outfit she wore to school every day, a red plaid skirt and a frayed white blouse. Though she was only a grade ahead of Arvin in school, Janey always sat in the rear of the bus with the older boys on the way home. He’d heard some of the other girls say that they allowed her back there because she’d spread her legs and let them play stink finger with her snatch. He hoped that maybe someday, when he was a little older, he would find out exactly what that meant.

Instead of stopping at the store, Willard made a sharp right up the gravel road called Shady Glen. He gave the truck some gas and whirled into the bald, muddy yard that surrounded the Bull Pen. It was littered with bottle caps and cigarette butts and beer cartons. An ex-railroader spotted with warty skin cancers named Snooks Snyder lived there with his sister, Agatha, an old maid who sat in an upstairs window all day dressed in black and pretending to be a grieving widow. Snooks sold beer and wine out of the front of the house, and, if your face was even vaguely familiar, something with a lot more kick out the back. For his customers’ convenience, several picnic tables were set up under some tall sycamores off to the side of the house, along with a horseshoe pit and an outhouse that always appeared on the verge of collapse. The two men that Arvin had seen in the woods that morning were sitting on top of one of the tables drinking beer, their shotguns leaning against a tree behind them.

With the truck still rolling to a stop, Willard pushed the door open and leaped out. One of the hunters stood up and threw a bottle that glanced off the truck’s windshield and landed with a clatter in the road. Then the man turned and started running, his filthy coat flapping behind him and his bloodshot eyes looking around wildly at the big man chasing him. Willard caught up and shoved him down into the greasy slop pooled in front of the outhouse door. Rolling him over, he pinned the man’s skinny shoulders with his knees and began pounding his bearded face with his fists. The other hunter grabbed one of the guns and hurried to a green Plymouth, a brown paper sack under his arm. He sped away, bald tires slinging gravel all the way past the church.

After a couple of minutes, Willard stopped beating the man. He shook the sting out of his hands and took a deep breath, then walked over to the table where the men had been sitting. He picked up the shotgun propped against the tree, unloaded two red shells, then swung it like a ball bat against the sycamore until it shattered into several pieces. As he turned and started for the truck, he glanced over and saw Snooks Snyder standing in the doorway with a stubby pistol pointed at him. He took a few steps toward the porch. “Old man, you want some of what he got,” Willard said in a loud voice, “you just step on out here. I’ll stick that gun clear up your ass.” He stood waiting until Snooks closed the door.

When he got back inside the pickup, Willard reached under the seat for a rag and wiped the traces of blood off his hands. “You remember what I told you the other day?” he asked Arvin.

“About them boys on the bus?”

“Well, that’s what I meant,” Willard said, nodding over at the hunter. He tossed the rag out the window. “You just got to pick the right time.”

“Yes, sir,” Arvin said.

“They’s a lot of no-good sonofabitches out there.”

“More than a hundred?”

Willard laughed a little and put the truck in gear. “Yeah, at least that many.” He started to ease the clutch out. “I’m thinking it best if we keep this between us, okay? No sense gettin’ your mom all upset.”

“No, she don’t need that.”

“Good,” Willard said. “Now how about I buy you a candy bar?”

For a long time, Arvin would often think of that as the best day he ever spent with his father. After supper that evening, he followed Willard back over to the prayer log. The moon was rising by the time they got there, a sliver of ancient and pitted bone accompanied by a single, shimmering star. They knelt down and Arvin glanced over at his father’s skinned knuckles. When she’d asked, Willard had told Charlotte that he’d hurt his hand changing a flat tire. Arvin had never heard his father lie before, but he felt certain that God would forgive him. In the still, darkening woods, the sounds traveling up the hill from the holler were especially clear that night. Down at the Bull Pen, the clanging of the horseshoes against the metal pegs sounded almost like church bells ringing, and the wild hoots and jeers of the drunks reminded the boy of the hunter lying bloody in the mud. His father had taught that man a lesson he’d never forget; and the next time somebody messed with him, Arvin was going to do the same. He closed his eyes and began to pray.

IT WAS A WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON in the fall of 1945, not long after the war had ended. The Greyhound made its regular stop in Meade, Ohio, a little paper-mill town an hour south of Columbus that smelled like rotten eggs. Strangers complained about the stench, but the locals liked to brag that it was the sweet smell of money. The bus driver, a soft, sawed-off man who wore elevated shoes and a limp bow tie, pulled in the alley beside the depot and announced a forty-minute break. He wished he could have a cup of coffee, but his ulcer was acting up again. He yawned and took a swig from a bottle of pink medicine he kept on the dashboard. The smokestack across town, by far the tallest structure in this part of the state, belched forth another dirty brown cloud. You could see it for miles, puffing like a volcano about to blow its skinny top.

Leaning back in his seat, the bus driver pulled his leather cap down over his eyes. He lived right outside of Philadelphia, and he thought that if he ever had to live in a place like Meade, Ohio, he’d go ahead and shoot himself. You couldn’t even find a bowl of lettuce in this town. All that people seemed to eat here was grease and more grease. He’d be dead in two months eating the slop they did. His wife told her friends that he was delicate, but there was something about the tone of her voice that sometimes made him wonder if she was really being sympathetic. If it hadn’t been for the ulcer, he would have gone off to fight with the rest of the men. He’d have slaughtered a whole platoon of Germans and shown her just how goddamn delicate he was. The biggest regret was all the medals he’d missed out on. His old man once got a certificate from the railroad for not missing a single day of work in twenty years, and had pointed it out to his sickly son every time he’d seen him for the next twenty. When the old man finally croaked, the bus driver tried to talk his mother into sticking the certificate in the casket with the body so he wouldn’t have to look at it anymore. But she insisted on leaving it displayed in the living room as an example of what a person could attain in this life if he didn’t let a little indigestion get in his way. The funeral, an event the bus driver had looked forward to for a long time, had nearly been ruined by all the arguing over that crummy scrap of paper. He would be glad when all the discharged soldiers finally reached their destinations so he wouldn’t have to look at the dumb bastards anymore. It wore on you after a while, other people’s accomplishments.