Donald Pollock - The Devil All the Time

“Hey,” Carl said, when he pulled up beside the skinny boy wearing a dark blue jacket with Meade High School stitched on the back of it in white. “You need a ride?”

The boy stopped and looked at the driver behind the wheel of the dumpy station wagon. The man’s sweaty face was shiny in the glare from the streetlight. A brown stubble covered his fat jowls and neck. His eyes were beady and cruel, like a rodent’s. “What’d you say?” the boy asked.

“I’m just riding around,” Carl said. “Maybe we could go get some beer.” He swallowed and caught himself before he started begging.

The boy smirked. “You got the wrong guy, mister,” he said. “I ain’t built that way.” Then he started walking again, faster this time.

“Fuck you then,” Carl said under his breath. He sat in the car and watched the boy disappear into a house a few doors down. Though a little disappointed, he was mostly relieved. He knew he wouldn’t have been able to stop himself if he got the punk in the car. He could almost picture it, the little bastard lying in the snow turned inside out. Someday, he thought, he was going to have to do a winter scene.

He drove back to the White Cow Diner, saw that Bodecker was gone now. He parked the car and went inside, sat at the counter and ordered a cup of coffee. His hands were still shaking. “Damn, it’s cold out,” he said to the waitress, a tall, skinny girl with a red nose.

“That’s Ohio for you,” she said.

“I’m not used to it,” Carl said.

“Oh, so you ain’t from around here?”

“No,” Carl said, taking a sip of the coffee and pulling out one of his dog dicks. “I’m passing through from California.” Then he frowned and looked down at the cigar. He wasn’t sure why he said that, unless maybe he wanted to impress the girl. The mere mention of the state usually made him sick. He and Sandy had moved out there just a few weeks after they got married. Carl had thought he would find success there, taking photographs of movie stars and beautiful people, getting Sandy some work as a model, but instead they ended up broke and hungry, and he finally sold her to two men he met outside a fly-by-night talent agency who wanted to make a dirty movie. She had refused at first, but that night, after he plied her with vodka and promises, they drove their old beater up into the foggy Hollywood Hills, came to a small, dark cottage with newspapers taped over the windows. “This might be our big break,” Carl said as he led her to the door. “Make some connections.”

Besides the two men he’d made the deal with, there were seven or eight others standing along the lemon yellow walls of the living room, bare except for a movie camera on a tripod and a double bed covered with wrinkled sheets. A man handed Carl a drink and another asked Sandy to take her clothes off in a gentle voice. A couple of them took photographs as she stripped. Nobody said a word. Then somebody clapped his hands and the bathroom door swung open. A midget with a shaved head that was way too big for his body led a tall, dazed-looking man out into the room. The midget wore nice slacks rolled up several inches above his pointy Italian shoes and a Hawaiian shirt, but the big man was buck naked, a long, blue-veined penis as big around as a coffee cup dangling between his tanned, muscular legs. When she saw the grinning midget unhook the leash from the dog collar around the man’s neck, Sandy rolled off the bed and started grabbing frantically for her clothes. Carl stood up and said, “Sorry, boys, the lady’s changed her mind.”

“Get that cocksucker out of here,” the one behind the movie camera growled. Before Carl knew what was happening, three men had dragged him out the door and put him in his car. “Now you wait here or she’s going to get hurt real bad,” one of them told him. He chewed on his cigar and watched shadows move back and forth behind the covered windows, tried to convince himself that everything was going to be all right. After all, it was the movie business, couldn’t be anything too serious go wrong. Two hours later, the front door opened and the same three men carried Sandy out to the car, tossed her in the backseat. One of them came around to the driver’s side and handed Carl twenty dollars. “This ain’t right,” Carl said. “The agreement was for two hundred.”

“Two hundred? Shit, she wasn’t worth ten. Once that big sonofabitch got it in her ass, she passed out and laid there like a dead fish.”

Carl turned and looked at Sandy lying on the seat. She was starting to come to a little. They had put her blouse on backward. “Bullshit,” he said. “I want to talk to them guys I made the deal with.”

“You mean Jerry and Ted? Hell, they left an hour ago,” the man said.

“I’ll call the law, that’s what I’ll do,” Carl said.

“No, you won’t,” the man said, shaking his head. Then he reached through the window and grabbed Carl by the throat and squeezed. “In fact, if you don’t quit your bitching and get the hell out of here, I’m going to take you back inside and turn ol’ Frankie loose on your chubby ass. Let him and Tojo make another hundred.” As the man walked back toward the house, Carl heard him say over his shoulder, “And don’t try bringing her back. She ain’t got what it takes for this business.”

The next morning, Carl went out and bought an ancient-looking Smith & Wesson.38 at a pawnshop with the twenty dollars the porno man had given him. “How do I know this thing even works?” he asked the pawnbroker.

“Follow me,” the man said. He took Carl into a back room and fired two bullets into a barrel filled with sawdust and old magazines. “They quit making this model in 1940 or thereabouts, but it’s still a damn good gun.”

He went back to the Blue Star Motel, where Sandy was soaking in a tub of hot water and Epsom salts. Showing her the gun, he swore that he was going to plug the two bastards who had set them up; but then he went down the street and sat on a bench in a park the rest of the day thinking about killing himself instead. Something broke in him that day. For the first time, he could see that his whole life added up to absolutely nothing. The only thing he knew how to do was work a camera, but who needed another fat guy with thin hair taking boring pictures of whiny, red-faced babies and sluts in their prom dresses and grim-faced married couples celebrating twenty-five years of misery? When he returned to their room that night, she was already asleep.

They headed back to Ohio the next afternoon. He drove and she sat on the pillows they had stolen from the motel room. He found that he had a hard time looking her in the eye, and they barely said two words to each other all the way across the desert and into Colorado. As they started up into the Rockies, the bleeding finally stopped and she told him that she would rather drive than sit there thinking about being raped by that midget’s doped-up slave while all those men cracked jokes about her. When she got behind the wheel, she lit a cigarette and turned the radio on. They were down to their last four dollars. A couple of hours later, they picked up a man smelling of gin thumbing his way back to his mother’s house in Omaha. He told them that he had lost everything, including his car, in a whorehouse — just a house trailer, really, with three broads working shifts, an aunt and her two nieces — out in the sand north of Reno. “Pussy,” the man said. “It’s always been a problem for me.”

“So it’s like some kind of sickness gets hold of you?” Carl said.

“Buddy, you sound like that head doctor I had to talk to one time.” They rode along in silence for a few minutes, then the man leaned forward and laid his arms casually on the top of the front seat. He offered them a drink from a flask, but neither of them were in the mood for a party. Carl opened up the dash to take the camera out. He was thinking that he might as well take some nature shots. Good chance he would never see these mountains again. “This your wife?” the man asked, after he scooted back again in his seat.