Donald Pollock - The Devil All the Time

She was standing by the open driver’s door holding the.22 in her hands when he came crashing through the brush at the edge of the road, red-faced and panting. “We got to get out of here,” he yelled. He grabbed the blanket they had spread on the ground behind the car and hurried over and scooped up the man’s clothes and shoes out of the grass. He tossed them in the backseat and climbed in the front.

“Jesus, Carl, what happened?” she said as she started the car.

“Don’t worry, I got the bastard,” he said. “Put two through his stupid head.”

She looked over at him. “You chased that fucker down?”

He heard the doubt in her voice. “Be quiet for a minute,” he said. “I got to think.” He pulled out a map and studied it for a minute or so, tracing his finger back and forth. “The way it looks we’re maybe ten miles from the border. Just turn around and make a left where we came in, and we oughta run into the highway.”

“I don’t believe you,” she said.

“What?”

“That guy took off like a deer. Ain’t no way you caught up with him.”

Carl took a couple of deep breaths. “He was hiding under a log. I damn near stepped on him.”

“What’s the hurry then?” she said. “Let’s go back and take some pictures.”

Carl laid the.38 on the dash and pulled his shirt up, wiped the sweat off his face. His heart was still beating like a hammer in his chest. “Sandy, just drive the goddamn car, okay?”

“He got away, didn’t he?”

He looked out the passenger window into the darkening woods. “Yeah, the bastard got away.”

She put the car in drive. “Don’t lie to me no more, Carl,” she said. “And another thing, while we’re on the subject, if I hear about you messing around with that little cunt at the White Cow again, you’re gonna be sorry.” Then she pressed her foot to the accelerator, and twenty minutes later, they crossed the state line into Georgia.

LATER THAT NIGHT, SANDY PARKED at the edge of a truck stop a few miles south of Atlanta. She ate a piece of beef jerky and crawled in the backseat to sleep. Around three AM, it began to rain. Carl sat in the front and listened to it beat on top of the car and thought about the ex-con. There’s a lesson to be learned from this, he thought. He had just turned his back on the cowardly fucker for a second, but that had been long enough to screw everything up. He pulled the man’s clothes from underneath the seat and started going through them. He found a broken switchblade and a Greenwood, South Carolina, address written inside a matchbook and eleven dollars in his wallet. Underneath the address were the words GOOD HEAD. He put the money in his pocket and rolled everything else up into a ball, then walked across the lot and tossed it in a trash barrel.

The rain was still coming down when she woke the next morning. Eating breakfast with Sandy at the truck stop, he wondered if any of the drivers sitting around them had ever killed a hitchhiker. It would be an excellent job for that sort of thing if a person was so inclined. As they started on their third cup of coffee, the rain let up and the sun popped out like a big, festering boil in the sky. By the time they paid the bill, wisps of steam were already rising up off the blacktopped parking lot. “About what happened yesterday,” Carl said, as they walked back to the car, “I shouldn’t have done that.”

“Like I said,” Sandy told him, “don’t lie to me no more. We get caught, it’s my ass in the sling just as much as yours.”

Carl thought again about the blanks he’d stuck in her gun, but decided it would be better not to say anything about that. They would be home soon, and he could replace them without her ever knowing. “Ain’t nobody gonna catch us,” he said.

“Yeah, well, you probably didn’t think one would ever get away, either.”

“Don’t worry,” he said, “that won’t ever happen again.”

They drove around Atlanta and stopped in a place called Roswell for gas. They had twenty-four dollars and some change to get home on. Just as Carl was getting back in the station wagon after paying the cashier, a gaunt man in a worn black suit timidly approached. “You wouldn’t be headin’ north by any chance, would you?” he asked. Carl went ahead and picked his cigar up out of the ashtray before he turned to look the man over. The suit was several sizes too big. The cuffs of the pants were turned up several times to keep them from dragging on the ground. He could see a little paper price tag still attached to the sleeve of the coat. The man was packing a flimsy bedroll; and though he could have easily passed for sixty, Carl figured the wayfarer at least a few years younger than that. For some reason, he reminded Carl of a preacher, one of the real ones that you seldom run into anymore: not one of those greedy, sweet-smelling bastards just out to take people’s money and make a fat fucking living off God, but a man who truly believed in the teachings of Jesus. On second thought, that was probably taking things a bit too far; the old boy was probably just another bum.

“Might be,” Carl said. He looked over at Sandy for some indication that she was on board, but she just shrugged and put her sunglasses back on. “Where you going?”

“Coal Creek, West Virginia.”

Carl thought about the one who got away last night. That big-dicked sonofabitch was going to leave a bad taste in his mouth for a long time. “Aw, hell, why not?” he told the man. “Get in the back.”

Once they pulled out on the highway, the man said, “Mister, I do appreciate this. My poor feet are ’bout wore out.”

“Been having trouble getting rides, huh?”

“I’ve did more walking than riding, I can tell you that.”

“Yeah,” Carl said, “I don’t understand people who won’t pick up strangers. That should be a good thing, helping someone out.”

“You sound like you a Christian,” the man said.

Sandy choked back a laugh, but Carl ignored her. “In some ways, I suppose,” he told the man. “But I have to admit, I don’t follow it quite as close as I used to.”

The man nodded and stared out the window. “It’s hard to live a good life,” he said. “It seems like the Devil don’t ever let up.”

“What’s your name, honey?” Sandy asked. Carl glanced at her and smiled, then reached over and touched her leg. He’d been afraid, after the way he fucked up last night, that she was going to be a first-class bitch the rest of the trip.

“Roy,” the man said, “Roy Laferty.”

“So what’s in West Virginia, Roy?” she said.

“Going home to see my little girl.”

“That’s nice,” Sandy said. “When did you see her last?”

Roy thought for a minute. Lord, he’d never felt so tired. “It’s been seventeen years almost.” Riding in the car was making him sleepy. He hated to be impolite, but as hard as he tried, he couldn’t keep his eyes open.

“What you been doing away from home that long?” Carl said. After waiting for a minute or so for the man to answer, he turned around and looked in the backseat. “Shit, he’s passed out,” he told Sandy.

“Just let him be for now,” she said. “And as far as me actually fucking him, you can forget that. He smells worse than you do.”

“All right, all right,” Carl said, pulling the Georgia highway map out of the glove box. Thirty minutes later, he pointed at an exit ramp, told Sandy to take it. They drove two or three miles down a dusty clay road, eventually found a pull-off littered with party trash and a busted-up piano. “This is gonna have to do,” Carl said, stepping out of the car. He opened the hitcher’s door and shook his shoulder. “Hey there, buddy,” he said, “come on, I want to show you something.”