Donald Pollock - The Devil All the Time

Still, it surprised him when the woman turned off the highway and the man asked him straight out if he would be interested in fucking his wife while he took a few photographs. He hadn’t seen that one coming, but he played it cool. Jamie wasn’t really into women, especially ugly ones; but if he could talk the fat man into taking his clothes off too, stealing the car should be a piece of cake. He’d never had his own set of wheels before. He told the man, sure, he was interested, that is, if they were willing to pay for it. He looked past the man out the windshield smeared with the guts of dead insects. They were on a gravel road now. The woman had slowed down to a crawl and was evidently looking for a place to park.

“I thought your kind believed in that free love shit,” the man said. “That’s what Walter Cronkite said on the news the other night.”

“A boy’s still got to make a living, right?” Jamie said.

“I guess that’s fair enough. How’s twenty bucks sound?” The woman put the car in park and shut off the engine. They were sitting at the edge of a soybean field.

“Heck, I’ll take you both on for twenty dollars,” Jamie said with a smile.

“Both of us?” The fat man turned and looked at him with cold, gray eyes. “It sounds like you think I’m pretty.” The woman gave a little giggle.

Jamie shrugged. He wondered if they would still be laughing when he drove away in their car. “I’ve had worse,” he said.

“Oh, I doubt that,” the man said, shoving his car door open.

“YOU ONLY BROUGHT THE ONE SHIRT?” Sandy asked him. They had been on the road six days, and had worked with two models, the kid with all the hair and a man with a harmonica who thought he was going to Nashville to become a country music star, that is, right up until a few minutes after they listened to him completely butcher Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire,” which happened to be Carl’s favorite song that summer.

“Yeah,” Carl said.

“Okay, we’re gonna have to do some laundry,” she said.

“Why?”

“You stink, that’s why.”

They came across a Laundromat in a small town in South Carolina a couple of hours later. Sandy made him take the shirt off. She carried a grocery bag of dirty clothes in and put them in a washer. He sat on a bench out front, watching the occasional car drive past and chewing on a cigar, his saggy tits nearly hanging to his fishy-white paunch. Sandy came out and sat on the other end of the bench and hid behind her sunglasses. Her blouse was plastered to her back with sweat. She rested her head against the building and shut her eyes.

“What we did was the best thing that could have happened to him,” Carl said.

Jesus, Sandy thought, he’s still talking about that fucker with the mouth harp. He had been yapping about him all morning. “I’ve already heard it,” she said.

“I’m just saying, for one, he couldn’t sing worth a shit. And he had, what, maybe three fucking teeth in his head? You ever look at them country music stars? Those people got expensive teeth. No, they would have laughed him right out of town, and then he would have went home and knocked up some old cow and been tied down by a bunch of brats, and that would have been the end of it.”

“The end of what?” Sandy said.

“The end of his dream, that’s what. Maybe he couldn’t see it last night, but I did that boy a big favor. He died with that dream still alive in his head.”

“Jesus, Carl, what the hell’s got into you?” She heard the washer stop and stood up, held out her hand. “Give me a quarter for the dryer.”

He handed her some change, then bent down and untied his shoes, kicked them off. He wasn’t wearing any socks. He was down to his trousers now. Taking his pocketknife out, he started cleaning his toenails. Two young boys, maybe nine or ten years old, came speeding around the corner on bicycles just as he smeared a gob of gray gunk on the seat of the bench. They both waved to him and smiled when he looked up. Just for a second, they made him wish, as they flew by pumping their legs and laughing as if they didn’t have a care in the world, that he was somebody else.

ON THEIR TWELFTH DAY OUT, ONE GOT AWAY. That had never happened before. He was an ex-con named Danny Murdock, the fourth model they had picked up this trip. On his right forearm, he had a tattoo of two scaly serpents wrapped around a tombstone that Carl imagined doing something special with once they had him down. They had been riding around all afternoon drinking beer and sharing a jumbo bag of pork rinds and getting him relaxed. They found a spot to park along a long, narrow lake just a mile or so inside the Sumter National Forest. As soon as Sandy shut the engine off, Danny flung the door open and got out of the car. He stretched and yawned, then started ambling toward the water, shucking off his clothes as he went. “What are you doing?” Carl yelled.

Danny tossed his shirt on the ground and turned to look back at them. “Hey, I got no problem giving your old lady the cock, but let me get cleaned up first,” he said, jerking his underwear down. “I’m warning you, though, ol’ buddy, I get past the used part, she ain’t gonna be happy with your ass no more.”

“Boy, he’s got a mouth on him, don’t he?” Sandy said, as she walked around the front of the station wagon. She leaned against the fender and watched the man jump into the water.

Carl set the camera on the hood and smiled. “Not for long, he ain’t.” They shared another beer and watched him swim, arms pumping and feet kicking, out to the middle of the lake and then roll over on his back.

“I gotta say, that looks like fun,” Sandy said. She kicked off her sandals and spread the blanket on the grass.

“Shit, hard to tell what’s in that mud hole,” Carl said. He opened another beer, tried to enjoy being out of the stinking car for a while. Eventually though, his patience with the swimmer wore thin. He had been out there playing over an hour. He went to the edge of the beach and started yelling and motioning for Danny to come in, and each time the man dove under and came back up whooping and splashing water like some schoolboy, Carl got a little more pissed. When Danny finally walked up out of the lake grinning with his dick hanging halfway to his knees and the evening sun sparkling all over his wet skin, Carl pulled the gun out of his pocket and said, “Are you clean enough yet?”

“What the hell?” the man said.

Carl motioned with the gun. “Goddamn it, get over there on that blanket like we talked about. Shit, we’re losing the light here.” He looked back at Sandy and nodded. She reached behind her head and started to undo her ponytail.

“Go fuck yourself!” Carl heard the man yell.

By the time he realized what was happening, Danny Murdock was already bolting into the woods on the other side of the road. Carl fired twice wildly and took after him. Slipping and stumbling, he went deep into the woods, until he was afraid he’d never find his way back to the car. He stopped and listened, but couldn’t hear a thing except for the sound of his own raspy breathing. He was too fat and slow to be chasing anyone, let alone a long-legged prick who had bragged to them all afternoon about outrunning three squad cars on foot through downtown Spartanburg the week before. By then, it was near dusk, and he suddenly realized that the man might have circled back around to where Sandy was waiting at the car. But even with blanks in her gun, he should have heard a shot, that is, unless the fucker took her by surprise. Goddamn that sneaking sonofabitch. He hated going back to the car empty-handed. Sandy would never let him hear the end of it. He hesitated a second, then pointed the pistol up in the air and fired twice.