The Devil All the Time

by Donald Ray Pollock

  He mashed the cigarette out in the ashtray and looked back down at the pillow. Six was the number of models they had worked with this trip; and six was what the old bitch had charged him for the room; and now here were six poisoned flies lying in his bed. The lingering stench of the bug spray began to burn his eyes and he dabbed at them with the end of the bedspread. “And what do these three sixes mean, Carl?” he asked himself out loud. Pulling out his knife, he fiddled with a hole in one of his molars while searching his mind for a suitable answer, one that avoided the most obvious implication of those three numbers, the biblical sign that his crazy old mother would have gleefully pointed out to him if she were still alive. “It means, Carl,” he finally said, snapping his penknife shut, “that it’s time to head home.” And with a sweep of his hand, he brushed the tiny winged corpses off onto the dirty carpet and flipped the pillows over.

  11

  EARLIER THAT SAME DAY, BACK IN MEADE, OHIO, Sheriff Lee Bodecker sat at his desk in an oak swivel chair eating a chocolate bar and looking through some paperwork. He hadn’t had a drink of alcohol, not even a lousy beer, in two months, and his wife’s doctor had told her that sweets would take the edge off. Florence had spread candy all over the house, even stuck hardtack under his pillow. Sometimes he woke himself up at night crunching on it, his throat sticky as flypaper. If it weren’t for the red sleeping capsules, he never would get any rest. The worry in her voice, the way she babied him now, it made him sick to think of how he’d let himself go. Although county elections were still over a year away, Hen Matthews was proving himself to be a sore loser. His former boss was already playing dirty, spreading shit about lawmen who can’t catch crooks any better than they can hold their liquor. But every candy bar Bodecker ate made him want ten more, and his belly was starting to hang over his belt like a peck sack of dead bullfrogs. If he kept it up, by the time he had to start campaigning again he’d be as sloppy fat as his pig-faced brother-in-law, Carl.

  The telephone rang, and before he had a chance to say hello, an old woman’s reedy voice on the other end asked, “You the sheriff?”

  “That’s me,” Bodecker said.

  “You got a sister works at the Tecumseh?”

  “Maybe,” Bodecker said. “I ain’t talked to her lately.” From the tone of the woman’s voice, he could tell that this wasn’t a friendly call. He set the rest of the candy bar down on top of the paperwork. These days, talk of his sister made Lee nervous. Back in 1958, when he had come home from the army, he would have busted a gut laughing if someone had suggested that shy, skinny Sandy was going to turn out wild, but that was before she met up with Carl. Now he hardly recognized her. Several years back, Carl had talked her into quitting her job at the Wooden Spoon and moving to California. Though they were gone only a couple of weeks, when she returned something about her was different. She took a job tending bar at the Tecumseh, the roughest joint in town. Now she walked around in short skirts that barely covered her ass, her face painted up like one of the whores he had run off Water Street when he first got elected. “Been too busy chasing bad guys,” he joked, trying to lighten the caller’s mood a little. He glanced down and noticed a scuff mark on the toe of one of his new brown boots. He spit on his thumb and leaned over and tried to wipe it out.

  “Oh, I bet you have,” the woman said.

  “You got some kind of problem?” Bodecker said.

  “I sure do,” the woman said viciously. “That sister of yours, she’s been peddling her ass right out the back door of that filthy place for over a year now, but as far as I can see, Sheriff, you ain’t never lifted a hand to stop it. Hard to tell how many good marriages she’s broke up. Like I told Mr. Matthews just this morning, it makes a person wonder how you ever got elected, you havin’ family like that.”

  “Who the hell is this?” Bodecker said, leaning forward in his chair.

  “Ha!” the woman said. “I ain’t falling for that. I know how the law operates in Ross County.”

  “We operate just fine,” Bodecker said.

  “That ain’t what Mr. Matthews says.” And with that, she hung up.

  Slamming the receiver down, Bodecker pushed back his chair and stood up. He glanced at his watch and grabbed his keys off the top of the file cabinet. Just as he got to the door, he stopped and turned back to the desk. He rummaged around in the top drawer, found an open bag of butterscotch balls. He stuck a handful of them in his pocket.

  As Bodecker passed by the front desk on his way out, the dispatcher, a young man with bulging green eyes and a flattop haircut, looked up from a dirty magazine he was reading. “Everything all right, Lee?” he asked.

  His big face red with aggravation, the sheriff continued on without a word, then paused at the door and looked back. The dispatcher was holding the magazine up to the overhead light now, studying some naked female form tightly bound in leather straps and nylon rope, a balled-up pair of panties stuck in her mouth. “Willis,” Bodecker said, “don’t you let somebody walk in here and catch you looking at that damn cock book, you hear? I got enough people on my ass as it is.”

  “Sure, Lee,” the dispatcher said. “I’ll be careful.” He started to turn another page.

  “Jesus Christ, man, can’t you take a hint?” Bodecker yelled. “Put that goddamn thing away.”

  As he drove over to the Tecumseh, he sucked on one of the butterscotch balls and thought about what the woman on the phone had said about Sandy whoring. Though he suspected that Matthews had put her up to the call just to fuck with him, he had to admit that he wouldn’t be that surprised to find out it was true. A couple of banged-up beaters sat in the parking lot, along with an Indian motorcycle crusted over with dried mud. He took off his hat and badge and locked them in the trunk. The last time he’d been here, at the beginning of the summer, he had puked Jack Daniel’s all over the pool table. Sandy had run everyone out early and closed the place up. He had lain on the sticky floor among the cigarette butts and hockers and spilled beer while she soaked up his mess off the green felt with towels. She then set a small fan down on the dry end of the table and turned it on. “Leroy’s gonna shit when he sees this,” she said, her hands on her skinny hips.

  “Fuck that sumbitch,” Bodecker mumbled.

  “Yeah, that’s easy for you to say,” Sandy said, as she helped him get up off the floor and into a chair. “You don’t have to work for the prick.”

  “I’ll shut the goddamn place down,” Bodecker said, flailing his arms wildly at the air. “I swear I will.”

  “Just settle down, big brother,” she said. She wiped his face off with a soft, wet rag and fixed him a cup of instant coffee. Just as Bodecker started to take a sip, he dropped the cup. It shattered on the floor. “Jesus, I should have known better,” Sandy said. “Come on, I better get you home.”

  “What kind of goddamn junker you drivin’ now?” he slurred as she helped him into the front seat of her car.

  “Honey, this ain’t no junker,” she said.

  He looked around inside the station wagon, tried to focus his eyes. “What the fuck is it then?” he said.

  “It’s a limousine,” Sandy said.

  12

  IN THE MOTEL BATHROOM, Sandy ran the tub full of water and peeled the wrapper off one of the candy bars she kept in her makeup bag for those days when Carl refused to stop and eat. He could go days without food when they were traveling, never thinking about anything but finding the next model. He could suck on those damn cigars and run that dirty knife through his fangs all he wanted, but she wasn’t about to go to bed hungry.

  The hot water relieved the itching between her legs, and she leaned back and closed her eyes as she nibbled on the Milky Way. The day they came across the Iowa boy, she had gotten off the main highway looking for a place to pull over and take a nap when he jumped up out of a soybean field looking like a scarecrow. As soon as the boy stuck his thumb out, Carl slapped his hands together and said, “Here we go.” The hitchhiker was covered with mud and shit a
nd bits of straw like he’d slept in a barnyard. Even with all the windows down, the rotten smell of him filled the car. Sandy knew it was hard to stay clean out on the road, but the scarecrow was the worst they’d ever picked up. Setting the candy bar on the edge of the tub, she took a deep breath and dunked her head under the water, listened to the faraway sound of her heart beating, tried to imagine it stopping forever.

  They hadn’t driven very far when the boy started chanting in a high-pitched voice, “California, here I come, California, here I come”; and she knew that Carl was going to be extra mean to this one because they just wanted to forget all about that goddamn place. At a gas station outside of Ames, she’d filled the car with gas and bought two bottles of orange screwdriver, thinking that might quiet the boy down some; but once he got a couple of sips in him, he started singing along to the radio, and that made things even worse. After the scarecrow squawked his sorry way through five or six songs, Carl leaned over to her and said, “By God, this bastard’s gonna pay.”

  “I think he might be retarded or something,” she said in a low voice, hoping Carl might let him go because he was superstitious that way.

  Carl glanced back at the boy, then turned around and shook his head. “He’s just stupid is all. Or a goddamn nutcase. There’s a difference, you know.”

  “Well, at least turn the radio off,” she suggested. “No sense egging him on.”

  “Fuck it, let him have his fun,” Carl said. “I’ll take the songbird out of him directly.”

  She dropped the candy wrapper on the floor and ran some more hot water. She hadn’t argued at the time, but she wished to God now she hadn’t touched the boy. She lathered up the washcloth and pushed the end of it inside her, squeezed her legs together. Out in the other room, Carl was talking to himself, but that usually didn’t mean anything, especially right after they had finished with another model. Then he got a little louder, and she reached up and made sure the door was locked, just in case.

  With the Iowa boy, they had parked at the edge of a garbage dump, and Carl had taken the camera out and started his spiel while he and the boy finished off the second bottle of screwdriver. “My wife loves to play around, but I’m just too damn old to get it up anymore,” he told the boy that afternoon. “You know what I mean?”

  Sandy had puffed on her cigarette, watched the scarecrow in the rearview mirror. He rocked back and forth, grinning wildly and nodding his head to everything that Carl said, his eyes blank as pebbles. For a moment, she thought she was going to vomit. It was more nerves than anything else, and the sick feeling passed quickly, like it always did. Then Carl suggested that they get out of the car, and while he spread a blanket on the ground, she reluctantly began taking off her clothes. The boy started up his damn singing again, but she put her finger to her lips and told him to be quiet for a little while. “Let’s have some fun now,” she said, forcing a smile and patting a spot next to her on the blanket.

  It took the Iowa boy longer than most to realize what was happening, but even then he didn’t struggle too much. Carl took his time and managed at least twenty photos of junk sticking out of various places: lightbulbs and clothes hangers and soup cans. The light was starting to fade by the time he set the camera down and finished things off. He wiped his hands and knife on the boy’s shirt, then walked around until he found a discarded Westinghouse refrigerator half buried in the trash. With the shovel from the car, he cleared the top off and pried the door open while Sandy went through the boy’s pants. “That’s it?” Carl said when she handed him a plastic whistle and an Indian head penny.

  “What did you expect?” she said. “He don’t even have a billfold.” She glanced inside the icebox. The walls were covered with a thin coat of green mold, and a mason jar of gooey, gray jam lay smashed in one corner. “Jesus, you going to put him in there?”

  “I’d say he’s slept in worse places,” Carl said.

  They folded the boy double and crammed him inside the refrigerator, then Carl insisted on one last photo, one of Sandy in her red panties and bra getting ready to close the door. He squatted down and aimed the camera. “That’s a good one,” he said, after he clicked the shutter. “Real sweet.” Then he stood up and stuck the boy’s whistle in his mouth. “Go ahead and shut the goddamn thing. He can dream about California all he wants now.” With the shovel, he began spreading trash over the top of the metal tomb.

  The water grew cold, and she stepped out of the tub. She brushed her teeth and smeared some cold cream on her face and ran a comb through her wet hair. The army boy had been the best she’d had in a long time, and she planned to go to sleep tonight thinking about him. Anything to chase that damn scarecrow out of her head. When she came out of the bathroom in her yellow nightgown, Carl was lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling. It had been a week, she figured, since he’d bathed. She lit a cigarette and told him that he wasn’t sleeping with her unless he washed the smell of those boys off.

  “They’re called models, not boys,” he said. He rose up and swung his heavy legs off the bed. “How many times I got to tell you that?”

  “I don’t care what they’re called,” Sandy said. “That’s a clean bed.”

  Carl glanced down at the flies on the rug. “Yeah, that’s what you think,” he said, heading for the bathroom. He peeled off his grimy clothes and sniffed himself. He happened to like the way he smelled, but maybe he should be more careful. Lately, he was beginning to worry that he was turning into some kind of fairy, and he suspected that Sandy thought the same thing. He tested the shower water with his hand, then stepped into the tub. He rubbed the bar of soap over his hairy, bloated body. Beating off to the photos wasn’t a good sign, he knew that, but sometimes he couldn’t help it. It was hard for him when they were back home, sitting alone in that crummy apartment night after night while Sandy was pouring drinks in the bar.

  As he dried himself off, he tried to recall the last time they had made love. Last spring maybe, though he couldn’t be sure. He tried to imagine Sandy young and fresh again, before all their shit started. Of course, he had soon found out about the cook who had taken her cherry and the one-nighters with the pimple-faced punks, but still, there was an air of innocence about her back then. Perhaps, he sometimes thought, that was because he didn’t have that much experience himself when he first met her. Sure, he’d slept with a few whores—the neighborhood had been full of them—but he’d only been in his mid-twenties when his mother had the stroke that left her paralyzed and practically speechless. By then, there hadn’t been any boyfriends banging on her door for several years, and so Carl was stuck with looking after her. For the first several months, he considered pressing a pillow over her twisted face and freeing them both, but she was his mother after all. Instead, he began applying himself to recording her long downward slide on film, a new photo of her shriveled-up body twice a week for the next thirteen years. Eventually, she got used to it. Then one morning he found her dead. He sat on the edge of the bed and tried to eat the egg he’d mashed up for her breakfast, but he couldn’t get it down. Three days later, he tossed the first shovelful of dirt on her coffin.

  Besides his camera, he had $217 left after paying for her funeral and a rickety Ford that would run only in dry weather. The odds of the car ever making it across the United States were slim to none, but he had dreamed of a new life almost as long as he had been alive, and now his best and last excuse was finally at peace in St. Margaret’s Cemetery. And so, on the day before the rent ran out, he boxed up the curling stacks of sickbed photos and set them by the curb for the garbage truck. Then he drove west from Parson’s Avenue to High Street and headed out of Columbus. His destination was Hollywood, but he had no sense of direction in those days, and somehow that evening he ended up in Meade, Ohio, and the Wooden Spoon. Looking back on it, Carl was convinced that fate had steered him there, but sometimes, when he remembered the soft, sweet Sandy of five years ago, he almost wished he had never stopped.

  Shaking himself fr
om his reverie, he squeezed some toothpaste into his mouth with one hand while fondling himself with the other. It took a few minutes, but finally he was ready. He walked out of the bathroom naked and a bit apprehensive, the purple tip of his hard-on pressing against his sagging, stretch-marked belly.

  But Sandy was already asleep; and when he reached out and touched her shoulder, she opened her eyes and groaned. “I don’t feel good,” she said, turning over and curling up on the other side of the bed. Carl stood over her for a couple of minutes, breathing through his mouth, feeling the blood leave him. Then he turned the light off and went back into the bathroom. Fuck it, she didn’t give a damn that he was asking for something important tonight. He sat down on the commode, and his hand fell between his legs. He saw the army boy’s smooth, white body, and he picked up the wet washcloth off the floor and bit down on it. The sharp end of the leafy branch had initially been too big to fit in the bullet hole, but Carl had worked it back and forth until it stayed erect, looking like a young tree sprouting from Private Bryson’s muscled chest. After he finished, he stood up and spit the washcloth into the sink. As he stared at his panting reflection in the mirror, Carl realized that there was a good chance he and Sandy would never make love again, that they were worse off than he had ever imagined.