Donald Pollock - The Devil All the Time

With a groan, she sat up and stabbed out her cigarette in the ashtray and flung the blanket off her shoulders. She turned off the TV, then shivered her way to the bathroom. Bending over the sink, she splashed some water around in the bowl. She dried off her face, studied herself in the mirror, tried vainly to brush the yellow stains off her teeth. With a tube of red lipstick, she made up her mouth, fixed her eyes, pulled her brown hair back in a limp ponytail. She was sore and bruised. Last night, after she closed up the bar, she let a paper mill worker who had recently lost a hand in a rewinder bend her over the pool table for twenty bucks. Her brother was watching her closely these days, ever since that goddamn phone call, but twenty bucks was twenty bucks, no matter how you looked at it. She and Carl could drive halfway across a state on that much money, or pay the electric bill for the month. It still irked her, all the crooked shit that Lee was into, and then him worried about her costing him votes. The man told her he would fork over another ten if she’d let him stick the metal hook up inside her, but Sandy told him that sounded like something he should save for his wife.

“My wife ain’t no whore,” the man said.

“Yeah, right,” Sandy shot back as she pulled down her panties. “She married you, didn’t she?” She’d held on to the twenty the whole time he pounded her. It was the hardest she’d been fucked in a long time; the old bastard was definitely going for his money’s worth. He sounded like he was going to have a heart attack, the way he was grunting and gasping for air, the cold metal hook pressed against her right hip. By the time he finished, the money was wadded up into a little ball in her hand, soaked with sweat. After he backed away, she smoothed it out on the green felt and stuck it inside her sweater. “Besides,” she said, as she walked over to unlock the door and let him out, “that thing ain’t got no more feeling than a beer can.” Sometimes, after a night like that, she wished she was back working the morning shift at the Wooden Spoon. At least Henry, the old grill cook, had been gentle. He’d been her first, right after she turned sixteen. They had lain together on the floor of the stockroom a long time that night, covered with flour from a fifty-pound bag they had knocked over. He still stopped by the bar once in a while to shoot the shit and tease her about rolling out some more pie dough.

When she came into the kitchen, Carl was sitting in front of the stove reading the newspaper for the second time that day. His fingers were gray with ink. All the burners on the stove were lit and the oven door was open. Blue flames danced behind him like miniature campfires. His pistol lay on the kitchen table, the barrel pointed toward the door. The whites of his eyes were laced with red veins, and his fat, pale, unshaven face looked like some cold and distant star in the reflection from the bare lightbulb hanging over the table. He’d spent most of the night bent over in the tiny closet in the hallway that he used as a darkroom, coaxing life into the last of the film he had saved back from the previous summer. He hated to see it end. He’d nearly cried when he developed that last photo. Next August was a long ways off.

“Those people are so screwed up,” Sandy said as she searched inside her purse for the keys to the car.

“Which people?” Carl asked, turning another page of the paper.

“Them ones on TV. They don’t know what they want.”

“Damn it, Sandy, you pay too much attention to those fuckers,” he said, glancing at the clock impatiently. “Hell, you think they give a shit about you?” She should have been at work five minutes ago. He had been waiting all day for her to leave.

“Well, if it wasn’t for the doctor, I wouldn’t watch it anymore,” she said. She was always going on about the M.D. on one of the shows, a tall, handsome man whom Carl was convinced must be the luckiest bastard on the planet. The man could fall down a rat hole and climb out with a suitcase stuffed with money and the keys to a new El Dorado. Over the years that Sandy had been watching him, he’d probably performed more miracles than Jesus. Carl couldn’t stand him, that fake movie star nose, those sixty-dollar suits.

“So whose dick did he suck today?” Carl said.

“Ha! You’re one to talk,” Sandy said, as she pulled on her coat. She was sick of always having to defend her soaps.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It means whatever you think it means,” Sandy said. “You were in that closet all night again.”

“I’ll tell you what, I’d like to meet up with that sonofabitch.”

“I bet you would,” Sandy said.

“I’d make him squeal like a goddamn pig, I swear to God!” Carl yelled as she slammed the door behind her.

A few minutes after she left, Carl quit cursing the actor and turned the stove off. He laid his head in his arms at the table and dozed off for a while. The room was dark when he woke up. He was hungry, but all he could find in the refrigerator were two moldy heels of bread and a dab of crusty pimento cheese in a plastic container. Opening the kitchen window, he tossed the bread into the front yard. A few flakes of snow drifted through the ray of light coming from the landlady’s porch. From over in the stockyards across the street, he heard somebody laugh, the metal clang of a gate being slammed shut. He realized that he hadn’t been outside in over a week.

He closed the window and walked into the living room and paced back and forth singing old religious songs and waving his arms in the air like he was leading a choir. “Bringing in the Sheaves” was one of his favorites, and he sang it several times in a row. When he was a boy, his mother used to sing it while doing the wash. She had a certain song for every chore, every heartache, every goddamn thing that happened to them after the old man died. She did laundry for rich people, got cheated half the time by the no-good bastards. Sometimes he would skip school and hide under the rotting porch with the slugs and spiders and the little that remained of the neighbor’s cat, and listen to her all day. Her voice never seemed to tire. He would ration the butter sandwich she’d packed for his lunch, sip dirty water from a rusty soup can he kept stored in the cat’s rib cage. He’d pretend it was vegetable beef or chicken noodle, but no matter how hard he tried, it always tasted like mud. He wished to hell he had bought some soup the last time he went to the store. The memory of that old can made him hungry again.

He sang for several hours, his loud voice booming through the rooms, his face red and sweaty with the effort. Then, just before nine o’clock, the landlady began pounding furiously with the end of a broom handle on her ceiling below. He was in the middle of a rousing version of “Onward Christian Soldiers.” Any other time he would have ignored her, but tonight he sputtered to a stop; he was in the mood to move on to other things. But if she didn’t turn the fucking heat up soon, he’d start keeping her up until midnight. He could stand the cold easy enough, but Sandy’s constant shivering and complaining were getting on his nerves.

Going back to the kitchen, he got a flashlight from the spoon drawer and made sure the door was locked. Then he went around closing all the curtains, ended up in the bedroom. He got down on his knees and reached under the bed for a shoe box. He carried the box into the living room and turned off all the lights and settled down on the couch in the darkness. Cold air blew in around the loose windows, and he drew Sandy’s blanket over his shoulders.

With the box on his lap, he closed his eyes and reached a hand under the cardboard lid. There were over two hundred photos inside, but he pulled just one out. He rubbed his thumb slowly over the slick paper, tried to divine which image it might be, a little thing he did to make it all last longer. After making his guess, he opened his eyes and flipped the flashlight on just for a second. Click, click . A tiny taste and he set that photo to the side, closed his eyes again, and took out another. Click, click . Bare backs and bloody holes and Sandy with her legs spread. Sometimes he went through the entire box without guessing a single one of them correctly.