Donald Pollock - The Devil All the Time

WHEN OHIO STARTED TO TURN WARM and green again, Carl began seriously planning the next trip. He was considering the South this time, give the Midwest a break. He spent evenings studying his road atlas: Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia, the Carolinas. Fifteen hundred miles a week, that’s what he always planned for. Though they usually traded cars around the time the peonies bloomed, he had decided that the station wagon was in good enough shape for one more outing. And Sandy wasn’t bringing home the money she used to when she was whoring regular. Lee had taken care of that.

Lying in bed late one Thursday night, Sandy said, “I been thinking about that gun, Carl. Maybe you’re right.” Though she hadn’t mentioned it, she’d also been doing a lot of thinking about the waitress at the White Cow. She’d even stopped in there once, ordered a milk shake, checked the girl out. She wished Lee had never told her. What bothered her most was the way the girl reminded Sandy of herself right before Carl walked into her life: nervous and shy and eager to please. Then, a few nights ago, pouring a drink for a man she had recently fucked for free, she couldn’t help but notice that he wouldn’t even give her a second glance now. As she watched the man leave a few minutes later with some toothy bimbo in a fake fur jacket, it occurred to her that maybe Carl was looking for her replacement. It hurt to think he’d turn on her like that, but then why should he be any different from any of the other bastards she had known? She hoped she was wrong, but having her own gun might not be such a bad idea.

Carl didn’t say anything. He had been staring miserably at the ceiling, wishing the landlady was dead. It surprised him, Sandy mentioning the gun after all this time, but maybe she had just come to her senses. Who in the hell wouldn’t want to carry a gun doing the shit they did? He rolled over, tossed his share of the bedsheet off his fat legs. It was sixty fucking degrees outside at three in the morning, and the old bitch still had the thermostat cranked up. He was certain that she did it on purpose. They’d had words again the other day about his singing at night. He got up and opened the window, stood there letting the slight breeze cool him off. “What made you change your mind?” he finally asked.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “Like you said, you never know what might happen, right?”

He stared out into the darkness, rubbed the stubble on his face. He dreaded getting back in the bed. His side was soaked with sweat. Maybe he’d sleep on the floor tonight by the window, he thought. He leaned down near the ripped screen and took several deep breaths. Damn, he felt like he was suffocating. “She’s just doing it for spite, goddamn it.”

“What?”

“Leaving the fuckin’ heat on,” he said.

Sandy rose up on her elbows and looked at his dark form crouched by the window, like some brooding, mythical beast about to spread its wings and take off in flight. “But you’ll show me how to shoot it, won’t you?”

“Sure,” Carl said. “That’s no big deal.” He heard her strike a match behind him, take a drag off a cigarette. He turned back toward the bed. “We’ll take it out somewhere on your day off, let you fire a few rounds.”

On Sunday they left the apartment around noon and drove to the top of Reub Hill and down the other side. He made a left into a muddy lane and stopped when they got to the trash dump at the end. “How do you know about this place?” Sandy asked. Before Carl came along, she had spent more than a few nights getting screwed back here by boys she didn’t care to remember now. Always, she had hoped that if she put out for this next one, he’d treat her like his girlfriend, maybe take her to one of the dances at the Winter Garden or the Armory, but that had never happened. As soon as they got a nut, they were done with her. A couple of them even took her tip money and made her walk home. She looked out her window and saw, lying in the ditch, a used rubber stretched down over the top of a Boone’s Farm bottle. Boys used to call the place Train Lane; from the looks of things, she figured they still did. Now that she thought about it, she had never been to a dance in her life.

“Just saw it when I was out driving around one day,” he said. “Reminded me of that place in Iowa.”

“You mean with the Scarecrow?”

“Yeah,” Carl said. “Ol’ California, here I come, that cocksucker.” He reached across her and opened the glove compartment, grabbed the.22 and a box of shells. “Come on, let’s see what you got.”

He loaded the gun and set up a few rusty tin cans on top of a soggy, stained mattress. Then he walked back to the front of the car and fired off six shots at thirty feet or so. He knocked four cans over. After he showed her again how to load it, he handed the gun to her. “The fucker goes a little to the left,” he said, “but that’s okay. Don’t try to aim so much as point, like you’d do with your finger. And just take a breath and squeeze the trigger as you let it out.”

Sandy held the pistol in both hands and sighted down the barrel. She closed her eyes and pulled the trigger. “Don’t shut your eyes,” Carl said. She fired off the next five rounds as fast as she could. She put several holes in the mattress. “Well, you’re gettin’ closer,” he said. He handed her the box of shells. “You load this time.” He pulled out a cigar and lit it. When she hit the first can, she squealed like a little girl who’d found the prize Easter egg. She missed the next one, then plugged another. “Not bad,” he said. “Here, let me see it.”

He had just finished loading the gun again when they heard a pickup coming fast down the lane toward them. The truck stopped with a lurch a few yards away, and a middle-aged, gaunt-faced man got out. He wore a pair of blue dress pants and a white shirt, polished black shoes. Probably been stuck in church all morning, sitting in a pew with his fat-ass wife, Carl thought. Getting ready to eat some fried chicken now, take a nap if the old bag would shut her mouth for a few minutes. Then back to work in the morning, hard at it. You had to almost admire someone who had the wherewithal to stick with something like that. “Who gave you permission to shoot out here?” the man said. The rough tone of his voice indicated he was none too happy.

“Nobody.” Carl looked around and then shrugged. “Shit, buddy, it’s just a dump.”

“It’s my land is what it is,” the man said.

“We’re just getting in some target practice, that’s all,” Carl said. “Trying to teach my wife how to defend herself.”

The man shook his head. “I don’t allow no shooting on my land. Hell, boy, I got cattle over in there. Besides that, don’t you know it’s the Lord’s Day?”

Carl heaved a sigh and cast a look at the brown fields that surrounded the dump. There wasn’t a cow in sight anywhere. The sky was a low canopy of endless, immovable gray. Even this far out of town, he could detect the acrid smell of the paper mill in the air. “Okay, I get the hint.” He watched as the farmer headed back to his truck, shaking his gray head. “Hey, mister,” Carl suddenly called out.

The farmer stopped and spun around. “What now?”

“I was wondering,” Carl said, taking a few steps toward him. “Would you mind if I took your picture?”

“Carl,” Sandy said, but he waved his hand for her to keep quiet.

“What the hell you want to do that for?” the man said.

“Well, I’m a photographer,” Carl said. “I just think you’d make a good picture. Heck, maybe I could sell it to a magazine or something. I always keep my eyes peeled for fine subjects like yourself.”