Donald Pollock - The Devil All the Time

Sandy sighed and said, “Okay, Lee, what the fuck are you talking about?”

Bodecker tipped his glass up, started chewing on some ice. “Well, according to this girl, your hubby’s name is Bill and he’s a big-shot photographer from California. Told her he’s good buddies with a bunch of movie stars.”

Sandy turned back to the sink, dipped a couple more dirty glasses in the lukewarm water. “He was probably just messing with her. Sometimes Carl likes to bullshit people for fun, just to see how they’ll react.”

“Well, from what I’ve seen, he’s getting a pretty good reaction. I gotta say, I never thought the fat bastard had it in him.”

Sandy threw down her drying rag and turned around. “What the hell you doing? Spying on him?”

“Hey, I wasn’t trying to tick you off,” Bodecker said. “I figured you’d want to know.”

“You never did like Carl,” she said.

“Jesus Christ, Sandy, he had you whorin’ for him.”

She rolled her eyes. “Like you don’t do nothing wrong.”

Bodecker put his sunglasses on and forced a smile, showed Sandy his big white teeth. “But I’m the law around here, girl. You gonna find out that makes all the difference.” He threw a five-dollar bill on the bar and walked out the door and got into his cruiser. He sat there for a few minutes, staring through the windshield at the run-down trailers in Paradise Acres, the mobile-home court that sat next to the bar. Then he laid his head back against the seat. It had been a week and so far nobody had reported the plunger bastard missing. He thought maybe he’d buy Charlotte a new car with part of the money. He wanted so much to close his eyes for a few minutes, but falling asleep out in the open wasn’t a good idea these days. The shit was starting to get deep. He wondered how long it would be before he had to kill Tater or, for that matter, before some sonofabitch decided to kill him.

ON A SUNDAY MORNING, Carl fixed some pancakes for Sandy, her favorite food. She’d come home drunk the night before in one of her sad-ass moods. Whenever she got tangled up in all those worthless feelings again, there was little he could say or do to make things better. She just had to work it out herself. A couple of nights of drinking and whining about it and she’d come back around. Carl knew Sandy better than she knew herself. Tomorrow night, or maybe the next, she would fuck one of her patrons after the bar closed, some crew-cut country boy with a wife and three or four snot-nosed kids at home. He’d tell Sandy that he wished he had met her before he ever married the old sow, that she was the sweetest piece he’d ever had, and then everything would be fine and dandy until the next time she got the blues.

Beside her plate he had laid a.22 pistol. He had bought it a few days ago for ten dollars from an elderly man he’d met at the White Cow. The poor sonofabitch was afraid that he would shoot himself if he kept the gun around. His wife had passed away last fall. He had treated her badly, he admitted, even when she was lying on her deathbed; but now he was so lonely, he couldn’t stand it. He told all this to Carl and the teenage waitress while icy snow pinged against the plate-glass windows of the diner and the wind shook the metal sign out by the street. The old man wore a long overcoat that smelled of wood smoke and Vicks VapoRub and a blue watch cap speckled with lint pulled down tight on his head. While he was confessing, it occurred to Carl that it might be good for Sandy to have her own weapon when they went out hunting, just as a backup in case something ever went haywire. He wondered why he hadn’t thought of it before. Though he was always careful, even the best fucked up sometimes. He had felt good about buying the gun, thought maybe it meant that he was getting wiser.

You’d have to shoot someone in the eye or stick it directly in their ear to ever kill anyone with a.22, but it would still be better than nothing. He’d done that once with a college boy, stuck a gun in his ear, some curly-haired Purdue prick who had snickered when Sandy told him that she’d once dreamed of going to beauty college, but then she ended up tending bar and everything had turned out just the way it was supposed to. Carl had found a book in the boy’s coat pocket after he tied him up, The Poems of John Keats . He tried asking the fucker nice what his favorite rhyme was, but by then the smart-aleck bastard had shit his pants and had a hard time concentrating. He opened the book to a poem and started reading it while the boy cried for his life, Carl’s voice getting louder and louder to drown out the other’s pleading until he came to the last line, which he has forgotten now, some bullshit about love and fame that he had to admit made the hair stand up on his arms at the time. Then he pulled the trigger and a wad of wet, gray brains shot out the other side of the college boy’s head. After he fell over, blood pooled in the sockets of his eyeballs like little lakes of fire, which made a hell of a picture, but that was with the.38, not some goddamn peashooter.22. Carl was sure that if he could show the smelly geezer the picture of the boy, the sad sack would think twice about ever doing himself in, at least not with a gun. The waitress had thought Carl was pretty slick the way he got the pistol away from the old man before he hurt himself. He could have fucked her that night in the backseat of the station wagon if he’d wanted to, the way she kept going on about how wonderful he was. There was a time a few years ago when he would have been all over that little bitch, but something like that just didn’t hold much appeal these days.

“What’s this?” Sandy said when she saw the pistol beside her plate.

“It’s just in case something ever goes wrong.”

She shook her head, pushed the gun across to his side of the table. “That’s your job, making sure that never happens.”

“I’m just saying—”

“Look, if you ain’t got the balls for it anymore, just say so. Jesus Christ, at least let me know before you get us both killed,” Sandy said.

“I told you before, I don’t like that kind of mouth,” he said. He looked at the stack of pancakes getting cold. She hadn’t touched them. “And you’re going to eat those goddamn griddle cakes, too, you hear me?”

“Fuck you,” she said. “I’ll eat what I want.” She stood up and he watched her take her coffee into the living room, heard the TV come on. He picked up the.22 and aimed it at the wall that divided the kitchen from the couch that she had no doubt plopped her skinny ass down on. He stood there for a couple of minutes, wondering if he could make the shot, then put the gun in a drawer. They spent the rest of the cold morning silently watching a Tarzan movie marathon on Channel 10, and then Carl went to the Big Bear and bought a gallon of vanilla ice cream and an apple pie. She’d always liked the sweets. If he had to, he’d force it down her, he thought as he paid the clerk.

Many years ago, he’d heard one of his mother’s boyfriends say that, back in the old days, a man could sell his wife if he got hard up or sick of her, drag her ass to the town market with a horse collar clamped tight around her lousy neck. Making Sandy choke on a little ice cream wouldn’t be that big a deal. Sometimes they didn’t know what was best for them. His mother sure didn’t. A man named Lyndon Langford, the smartest of the long line of bastards she had gotten messed up with during her time on earth, a factory worker in the GM plant in Columbus who sometimes read real books when he was trying to stay off the sauce, had given little Carl his first lessons in photography. Just remember, Lyndon had once told him, most people love to have their picture taken. They’ll do damn near anything you want if you point a camera at them. He would never forget the first time he saw his mother’s naked body, in one of Lyndon’s pictures, tied to her bed with extension cords, a cardboard box over her head with two holes cut in it for her eyes. Still, he was a halfway decent man when he wasn’t drinking. Then Carl fucked everything up by eating a slice of the deli ham that Lyndon kept in their icebox for the nights when he stayed over. His mother never forgave him for it, either.