Donald Pollock - The Devil All the Time

“If it’s money you want,” Arvin said, “I got a little bit.” He eased the safety off the gun. “You can have it.”

“Being nice now, huh?” Carl said. He spat in the grass. “I’ll tell you what, you little cocksucker, you just hang on to that money for right now. Sandy and me will sort it out after we take my goddamn pictures.”

“Better go ahead and do what he says, Billy,” Sandy said. “He can get pretty excited if things don’t go his way.” When she glanced back at him and smiled with all her rotten teeth, Arvin nodded to himself and shoved his door open. Before it registered in Carl’s mind what the boy held in his hand, the first blast had torn through his stomach. The force of the bullet started to spin him around. He staggered back three or four feet and caught himself. He tried to raise his gun and aim at the boy, but then another round hit him in the chest. He landed on his back in the weeds with a heavy thump. Though he could still feel the.38 in his hand, his fingers wouldn’t work. Somewhere far off, he could hear Sandy’s voice. It sounded like she was saying his name over and over again: Carl, Carl, Carl. He wanted to answer her, thought that if he just rested a minute, he could still straighten this mess out. Something cold began to crawl over him. He felt his body start to sink into a hole that seemed to be opening up beneath him in the ground, and it scared him, that feeling, the way it sucked the breath right out of him. Gritting his teeth, he fought to climb out before he sank in too deep. He felt himself rising. Yes, by God, he could still fix things, and then they would quit. He saw those two little boys on their bicycles riding by waving at him. No more pictures, he wanted to tell Sandy, but he was having trouble finding the air. Then something with huge black wings settled on top of him, pushing him down again, and even though he grabbed frantically at the grass and dirt with his left hand to keep from slipping, he couldn’t stop himself this time.

When the woman started screaming the man’s name, Arvin turned and saw her in the front seat digging something out of her purse. “Don’t do that,” he said, shaking his head. He stepped back from the car and pointed the Luger at her. “I’m begging you.” Black streaks of mascara were running down her face. She cried the man’s name one more time, and then stopped. Taking several deep breaths, she stared at the soles of Carl’s shoes while she quieted down. One of them, she noticed, had a hole in it as big around as a fifty-cent piece. He hadn’t mentioned it the whole trip. “Please, lady,” Arvin said when he saw her smile.

“Fuck it,” she said quietly, just before she drew a pistol up over the seat and fired. Though she aimed directly at the middle of the boy’s body, he just stood there. Frantically, she pulled the hammer back again with her thumbs, but before she could get off the second round, Arvin shot her in the neck. The.22 dropped to the floorboards as the bullet knocked her against the driver’s-side door. Pressing her hands against her throat, she tried to stop the red stream that was spurting from the wound. She began to choke, and coughed a gush of blood out on the seat. Her eyes settled on his face. They grew big for a few seconds and then slowly closed. Arvin listened to her take a few ragged breaths and then one last sticky heave. He couldn’t believe that the woman had missed him. Jesus Christ, she was so close.

He sat down on the edge of the backseat and puked a little in the grass between his feet. A numbing despair began to settle over him, and he tried to shake it off. He stepped out into the dirt road and paced around in a circle. He put the Luger back in his pants and knelt down beside the man. He reached underneath him and pulled the wallet out of his back pocket and glanced through it quickly. He didn’t see any driver’s license, but he found a photograph behind some paper money. Suddenly he felt sick all over again. It was a picture of the woman cradling a dead man in her arms like a baby. She was wearing only a black bra and panties. There was what appeared to be a bullet hole above the man’s right eye. She was looking down at him with a hint of sorrow on her face.

Arvin put the photograph in his shirt pocket and dropped the wallet on the fat man’s chest. Then he opened the glove compartment, finding nothing but road maps and rolls of film. He listened again for any cars coming, wiped the sweat out of his eyes. “Think, goddamn it, think,” he told himself. But the only thing he knew for sure was that he had to get out of this place fast. Picking up his gym bag, he took off walking west through the parched rows of corn. He was twenty yards out in the field when he stopped and turned around. He hurried back to the car and took two of the film canisters out of the glove box, stuck them in his pants pocket. Then he got a shirt out of his bag and wiped off everything that he might have touched. The insects resumed their humming.

HE DECIDED TO STAY OFF THE ROADS, and it was after midnight when Arvin finally walked into Meade. In the middle of town, right off Main Street, he found a squat brick motel called the Scioto Inn that still had its VACANCY sign on. He had never stayed in a motel before. The clerk, a boy not much older than himself, was gazing wearily at an old movie, Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy , on a small black-and-white TV sitting in the corner. The room was five bucks a night. “We change the towels every other day,” the clerk said.

In his room, Arvin stripped off his clothes and stood in the shower for a long time trying to get clean. Nervous and exhausted, he lay down on top of the bedspread and sipped a pint of whiskey. He was goddamn glad he’d remembered to bring it along. He noticed on the wall a small picture of Jesus hanging from the cross. When he got up to take a leak, he turned the picture over. It reminded him too much of the one in his grandmother’s kitchen. By three o’clock in the morning, he was drunk enough to go to sleep.

He woke around ten the next morning after dreaming about the woman. In the dream, she fired the pistol at him just like she did yesterday afternoon, only this time she hit him squarely in the forehead, and he was the one who died instead of her. The other details were vague, but he thought maybe she took his picture. He almost wished that had happened as he went to the window and peeked out the curtain, half expecting the parking lot to be filled with police cruisers. He watched the traffic go by on Bridge Street while he smoked a cigarette, then he took another shower. After he got dressed, he went over to the office and asked if he could keep the room another day. The boy from last night was still on duty. He was half asleep, listlessly chewing a wad of pink bubble gum. “You must put in a lot of hours,” Arvin said.

The boy yawned and nodded, rang up another night in the register. “Don’t I know it,” he said. “My old man owns the place, so I’m pretty much his slave when I’m not in college.” He handed back the change from a twenty. “Better than getting shipped off to Vietnam, though.”

“Yeah, I expect so,” Arvin said. He put the loose bills in his wallet. “Used to be an eating place around here called the Wooden Spoon. Is it still in business?”

“Sure.” The boy walked over to the door and pointed up the street. “Just walk over there to the light and turn left. You’ll see it across from the bus station. They got good chili.”

He stood outside the door of the Wooden Spoon a few minutes, looking across at the bus station trying to imagine his father getting off a Greyhound and seeing his mother for the first time, over twenty years ago. Once inside, he ordered ham and eggs and toast. Though he hadn’t eaten anything since the candy bar yesterday afternoon, he found that he wasn’t very hungry. Eventually the old, wrinkled waitress came over and picked up his plate without a word. She barely looked at him, but when he got up, he left her a dollar tip anyway.