Donald Pollock - The Devil All the Time

The man looked past Carl at Sandy standing beside the station wagon. She was lighting a cigarette. He didn’t approve of women who smoked. Most of them he’d known were trash, but he figured a man who took pictures for a living probably couldn’t get anything decent. Hard to tell where he had picked her up. A few years ago, he’d found a woman named Mildred McDonald in his hog barn, half naked and sucking on a cancer stick. She had told him she was waiting on a man, just as casual as anything, then tried to get him to lie with her in the filth. He glanced at the gun Carl was holding in his hand, noticed that his finger was still on the trigger. “You better go ahead and get out of here,” the man said, then started walking fast toward his truck.

“What you gonna do?” Carl said. “Call the law?” He glanced back at Sandy and winked.

The man opened the door and reached inside the cab. “Hell, boy, I don’t need a crooked sheriff to take care of you.”

Hearing that, Carl began to laugh, but then he looked around and saw the farmer standing behind the door of the truck with a rifle pointed at him through the open window. He had a wide grin on his weathered face. “That’s my brother-in-law you’re talking about,” Carl told him, his voice turning serious.

“Who? Lee Bodecker?” The man turned his head and spit. “I wouldn’t go around braggin’ about that if I was you.”

Carl stood there in the middle of the lane staring at the farmer. He heard the squeak of a door behind him as Sandy got in the car and slammed it shut. For a second, he imagined just raising the pistol up and having it out with the bastard, a regular shootout. His hand began shaking a little, and he took a deep breath to try to calm himself. Then he thought about the future. There was always the next hunt. Just a few more weeks and he and Sandy would be on the road again. Ever since he’d heard the Republicans talking in the White Cow, he’d been thinking about killing one of those longhairs. According to the news he’d seen on the TV lately, the country was heading for turmoil; and he wanted to be around to see it. Nothing would please him more than to watch the whole shithouse go up in flames someday. And Sandy had been eating better lately, was starting to fill out again. She was losing her looks fast — they never had gotten her teeth fixed — but they still had a couple of good years left. No sense throwing that away just because some stupid-ass farmer had a hard-on. As soon as he made his decision, his hand stopped twitching. He turned and started toward the station wagon.

“And don’t ever let me catch you back here again, understand?” Carl heard the man yell as he got in the front seat and handed Sandy her pistol. He looked around one more time as he cranked the engine, but he still didn’t see any fucking cows.

OCCASIONALLY, IF THE LAW GOT TOO ROUGH or the hunger bad enough, they would head inland, away from the big water that Theodore loved, so that Roy could find some work. While Roy picked fruit for a few days or weeks, Theodore sat in a lonely grove of trees or under some shady bushes waiting for his return every evening. His body was nothing but a shell now. His skin was gray as slate and his eyes weak. He passed out for no reason, complained about sharp pains that numbed his arms, and a heaviness on his chest that sometimes made him puke up his lunch meat breakfast and the half fifth of warm wine that Roy left him every morning to keep him company. Still, every night, he’d try to come alive for a couple of hours, attempt to play some music, even though his fingers didn’t work too well anymore. Roy would walk around their campfire with a jug trying to get some words started, something from the heart, while Theodore listened and picked at the guitar. They’d practice their big comeback for a while, and then Roy would collapse on top of his blanket, worn out from the day’s work in the orchard. He’d be snoring within a minute or two. If he was lucky, he’d dream about Lenora. His little girl. His angel. He’d been thinking about her more and more lately, but sleeping was as close as he could get to her.

As soon as the fire died down, the mosquitoes would dive in again, drive Theodore crazy. They didn’t bother Roy at all, and the cripple wished he had blood like that. He woke one night with them buzzing in his ears, still sitting in his wheelchair, the guitar lying on the ground in front of him. Roy was curled up like a dog on the other side of the ashes. They had been camping in the same spot for two weeks. Little piles of Theodore’s stool and vomit were scattered over the dead grass. “Lord, we may have to think about moving,” Roy had said that evening when he got back from the store down the road. He fanned his hand in front of his face. “Gettin’ mighty ripe around here.” That had been a few hours ago, in the heat of the day. But now a cool breeze, smelling faintly of the salt water forty miles away, brushed against the leaves of the trees above Theodore’s head. He leaned over and picked up the wine jug at his feet. He took a drink and capped the bottle and looked at the stars set against the black sky like the tiny chips of a shattered mirror. They reminded him of the glitter that Flapjack used to brush on his eyelids. Up around Chattahoochee one evening, he and Roy had sneaked back into the carnival just for a few minutes, a year or so after the incident with the little boy. No, the hot dog vendor told them, Flapjack wasn’t with them anymore. We were set up right outside this redneck town in Arkansas, and one night he just disappeared. Hell, we were halfway across the state the next day before anyone noticed him missing. The boss said he’d show up eventually, but he never did. You boys know how ol’ Bradford is, all business. He said Flapjack was starting to lose his funny anyway.

Theodore was so tired, so sick of it all. “We had some good times though, didn’t we, Roy?” he said out loud, but the man on the ground didn’t move. He took another drink and set the bottle on his lap. “Good times,” he repeated in a low voice. The stars blurred and faded from his sight. He dreamed of Flapjack in his clown suit and bare churches lit with smoky lanterns and loud honky-tonks with sawdust floors, and then a gentle ocean was lapping at his feet. He could feel it, the cool water. He smiled and pushed himself forward and began floating out to sea, farther than he had ever been before. He wasn’t afraid; God was calling him home, and soon his legs would work again. But in the morning, he awoke on the hard ground, disappointed that he was still alive. He reached down and felt his pants. He’d pissed himself again. Roy had already taken off for the orchard. He lay with the side of his face pressed against the dirt. He stared at a mound of his fly-covered shit a few feet away and tried to slip back into sleep, back to the water.

EMMA AND ARVIN WERE STANDING in front of the meat case in the grocery store in Lewisburg. It was the end of the month, and the old woman didn’t have much money, but the new preacher was arriving on Saturday. The congregation was having a potluck supper for him and his wife at the church. “You think chicken livers would be all right?” she asked after some more calculations in her head. The organs were cheapest.

“Why wouldn’t they be?” Arvin said. He would have agreed with anything by then; even pig snouts would have been fine with him. The old woman had been staring at the trays of bloody meat for twenty minutes.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Everyone says they like the way I do ’em, but—”

“All right,” Arvin said, “get them all a big steak then.”