The Devil All the Time

by Donald Ray Pollock

  “My wife ain’t no whore,” the man said.

  “Yeah, right,” Sandy shot back as she pulled down her panties. “She married you, didn’t she?” She’d held on to the twenty the whole time he pounded her. It was the hardest she’d been fucked in a long time; the old bastard was definitely going for his money’s worth. He sounded like he was going to have a heart attack, the way he was grunting and gasping for air, the cold metal hook pressed against her right hip. By the time he finished, the money was wadded up into a little ball in her hand, soaked with sweat. After he backed away, she smoothed it out on the green felt and stuck it inside her sweater. “Besides,” she said, as she walked over to unlock the door and let him out, “that thing ain’t got no more feeling than a beer can.” Sometimes, after a night like that, she wished she was back working the morning shift at the Wooden Spoon. At least Henry, the old grill cook, had been gentle. He’d been her first, right after she turned sixteen. They had lain together on the floor of the stockroom a long time that night, covered with flour from a fifty-pound bag they had knocked over. He still stopped by the bar once in a while to shoot the shit and tease her about rolling out some more pie dough.

  When she came into the kitchen, Carl was sitting in front of the stove reading the newspaper for the second time that day. His fingers were gray with ink. All the burners on the stove were lit and the oven door was open. Blue flames danced behind him like miniature campfires. His pistol lay on the kitchen table, the barrel pointed toward the door. The whites of his eyes were laced with red veins, and his fat, pale, unshaven face looked like some cold and distant star in the reflection from the bare lightbulb hanging over the table. He’d spent most of the night bent over in the tiny closet in the hallway that he used as a darkroom, coaxing life into the last of the film he had saved back from the previous summer. He hated to see it end. He’d nearly cried when he developed that last photo. Next August was a long ways off.

  “Those people are so screwed up,” Sandy said as she searched inside her purse for the keys to the car.

  “Which people?” Carl asked, turning another page of the paper.

  “Them ones on TV. They don’t know what they want.”

  “Damn it, Sandy, you pay too much attention to those fuckers,” he said, glancing at the clock impatiently. “Hell, you think they give a shit about you?” She should have been at work five minutes ago. He had been waiting all day for her to leave.

  “Well, if it wasn’t for the doctor, I wouldn’t watch it anymore,” she said. She was always going on about the M.D. on one of the shows, a tall, handsome man whom Carl was convinced must be the luckiest bastard on the planet. The man could fall down a rat hole and climb out with a suitcase stuffed with money and the keys to a new El Dorado. Over the years that Sandy had been watching him, he’d probably performed more miracles than Jesus. Carl couldn’t stand him, that fake movie star nose, those sixty-dollar suits.

  “So whose dick did he suck today?” Carl said.

  “Ha! You’re one to talk,” Sandy said, as she pulled on her coat. She was sick of always having to defend her soaps.

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “It means whatever you think it means,” Sandy said. “You were in that closet all night again.”

  “I’ll tell you what, I’d like to meet up with that sonofabitch.”

  “I bet you would,” Sandy said.

  “I’d make him squeal like a goddamn pig, I swear to God!” Carl yelled as she slammed the door behind her.

  A few minutes after she left, Carl quit cursing the actor and turned the stove off. He laid his head in his arms at the table and dozed off for a while. The room was dark when he woke up. He was hungry, but all he could find in the refrigerator were two moldy heels of bread and a dab of crusty pimento cheese in a plastic container. Opening the kitchen window, he tossed the bread into the front yard. A few flakes of snow drifted through the ray of light coming from the landlady’s porch. From over in the stockyards across the street, he heard somebody laugh, the metal clang of a gate being slammed shut. He realized that he hadn’t been outside in over a week.

  He closed the window and walked into the living room and paced back and forth singing old religious songs and waving his arms in the air like he was leading a choir. “Bringing in the Sheaves” was one of his favorites, and he sang it several times in a row. When he was a boy, his mother used to sing it while doing the wash. She had a certain song for every chore, every heartache, every goddamn thing that happened to them after the old man died. She did laundry for rich people, got cheated half the time by the no-good bastards. Sometimes he would skip school and hide under the rotting porch with the slugs and spiders and the little that remained of the neighbor’s cat, and listen to her all day. Her voice never seemed to tire. He would ration the butter sandwich she’d packed for his lunch, sip dirty water from a rusty soup can he kept stored in the cat’s rib cage. He’d pretend it was vegetable beef or chicken noodle, but no matter how hard he tried, it always tasted like mud. He wished to hell he had bought some soup the last time he went to the store. The memory of that old can made him hungry again.

  He sang for several hours, his loud voice booming through the rooms, his face red and sweaty with the effort. Then, just before nine o’clock, the landlady began pounding furiously with the end of a broom handle on her ceiling below. He was in the middle of a rousing version of “Onward Christian Soldiers.” Any other time he would have ignored her, but tonight he sputtered to a stop; he was in the mood to move on to other things. But if she didn’t turn the fucking heat up soon, he’d start keeping her up until midnight. He could stand the cold easy enough, but Sandy’s constant shivering and complaining were getting on his nerves.

  Going back to the kitchen, he got a flashlight from the spoon drawer and made sure the door was locked. Then he went around closing all the curtains, ended up in the bedroom. He got down on his knees and reached under the bed for a shoe box. He carried the box into the living room and turned off all the lights and settled down on the couch in the darkness. Cold air blew in around the loose windows, and he drew Sandy’s blanket over his shoulders.

  With the box on his lap, he closed his eyes and reached a hand under the cardboard lid. There were over two hundred photos inside, but he pulled just one out. He rubbed his thumb slowly over the slick paper, tried to divine which image it might be, a little thing he did to make it all last longer. After making his guess, he opened his eyes and flipped the flashlight on just for a second. Click, click. A tiny taste and he set that photo to the side, closed his eyes again, and took out another. Click, click. Bare backs and bloody holes and Sandy with her legs spread. Sometimes he went through the entire box without guessing a single one of them correctly.

  Once he thought he heard a noise, a car door slam, footsteps on the back stairs. He got up and tiptoed from room to room with the pistol, peeking out the windows. Then he checked the door and returned to the couch. Time seemed to shift, speed up, slow down, move back and forth like a crazy dream he kept having over and over. One second he was standing in a muddy soybean field outside of Jasper, Indiana; and the next click of the flashlight took him to the bottom of a rocky ravine north of Sugar City, Colorado. Old voices crawled through his head like worms, some bitter with curses, others still pleading for mercy. By midnight, he’d traveled through a large portion of the Midwest, relived the last moments of twenty-four strange men. He remembered everything. It was as if he resurrected them every time he brought out the box, stirred them awake and allowed them to do their own kind of singing. One last click and he decided to call it a night.

  After he returned the box to its hiding place under the bed, he switched the lights back on and wiped off the blanket as best he could with her washcloth. For the next couple of hours, he sat at the kitchen table cleaning the pistol and studying his road maps and waiting on Sandy to get off work. He always felt the need for her company after a bout with the box. She had told him about the paper m
ill man, and he thought about that for a while, what he’d do with the hook if they ever picked up a hitchhiker like that.

  He’d forgotten how hungry he was until she walked in with two cold hamburgers slathered with mustard, three bottles of beer, and the evening newspaper. While he ate, she sat opposite him and carefully added up her tips, stacking the nickels, dimes, and quarters into small, neat piles, and he recalled the way he’d acted earlier about her stupid TV show. “You did pretty good tonight,” he said, when she finally finished counting.

  “Not bad for a Wednesday, I guess,” she said with a tired smile. “So what did you do today?”

  He shrugged. “Oh, cleaned out the fridge, sang a few songs.”

  “You didn’t piss the old lady off again, did you?”

  “Just kidding,” he said. “I got some new pictures to show you.”

  “Which one is it?” she asked.

  “The one had that bandanna tied around his head. They turned out pretty good.”

  “Not tonight,” she said. “I’d never get to sleep.” Then she pushed half the change over to him. He scooped it up and dumped it in a coffee can he kept under the sink. They were always saving for the next junker, the next roll of film, the next trip. Opening the last beer, he poured her a glass. Then he got down on his knees in front of her and pulled her shoes off, began rubbing the work out of her feet. “I shouldn’t have said anything about your damn doctor today,” he said. “You watch whatever you want.”

  “It’s just something to do, baby,” Sandy said. “Takes my mind off things, you know?” He nodded, gently worked his fingers into the soft soles of her feet. “That’s the spot,” she said, stretching out her legs. Then, after she finished the beer and a last cigarette, he scooped her skinny body up and carried her giggling down the hallway and into the bedroom. He hadn’t heard her laugh in weeks. He would keep her warm tonight, that was the least he could do. It was nearly four in the morning, and somehow, with lots of luck and little regret, they had made it through another long winter day.

  26

  A FEW DAYS LATER, CARL DROVE SANDY TO WORK, told her he needed to get out of the apartment for a while. It had snowed several inches the night before, and that morning the sun finally managed to break through the thick, gray bank of clouds that had hovered over Ohio like some dismal, unrelenting curse for the past several weeks. Everything in Meade, even the paper mill smokestack, was sparkling and white. “Want to come in for a minute?” she asked when he pulled up in front of the Tecumseh. “I’ll buy you a beer.”

  Carl looked around at the cars in the slushy parking lot. He was surprised it was so crowded in the middle of the day. He’d kept himself shut up in the apartment for so long that he didn’t think he could tolerate that many people his first time back out in the real world since before Christmas. “Ah, I think I’ll pass,” he said. “I figured I’d just ride around for a while, try to get home before dark.”

  “Suit yourself,” she said, opening her car door. “Just don’t forget to pick me up tonight.”

  As soon as she went inside, Carl headed straight back to the apartment on Watt Street. He sat staring out the kitchen window until the sun went down, then walked out to the car. He stuck his camera in the dash and the pistol under the seat. There was half a tank of gas in the station wagon and five dollars in his wallet that he’d taken from their travel money jar. He promised himself he wasn’t going to do anything, just drive around town a little and pretend. Sometimes, though, he wished he hadn’t ever made up those goddamn rules. Hell, around here, he could probably kill a hick every night if he wanted to. “But that’s why you got the rules in the first goddamn place, Carl,” he told himself as he started down the street. “So you don’t fuck everything up.”

  As he passed by the White Cow Diner on High Street, he saw his brother-in-law standing beside his cruiser at the edge of the parking lot talking to someone sitting behind the wheel of a shiny black Lincoln. They appeared to be arguing, the way Bodecker was slinging his arms around. Carl slowed down and watched them in his rearview as long as he could. He thought about something that Sandy had said one night a couple of weeks ago, that her brother was going to end up in prison if he didn’t stop hanging around guys like Tater Brown and Bobo McDaniels. “Who the hell are they?” he had asked. He was sitting at the kitchen table unwrapping one of the cheeseburgers she had brought him from work. Someone had taken a bite out of one corner of it. He scraped the diced onion off with his penknife.

  “They run everything from Circleville clear down to Portsmouth,” she told him. “Everything that’s illegal anyway.”

  “Right,” Carl said. “And how do you happen to know this?” She was always coming home with another bullshit story some drunk had fed her. Last week she had talked to someone who was in on the Kennedy assassination. Sometimes it irritated the shit out of Carl that she could be so gullible, but then again, he knew that was probably one of the main reasons she had stuck with him all this time.

  “Well, because this guy stopped in the bar today right after Juanita left and handed me an envelope to give to Lee.” She lit a cigarette and blew some smoke toward the stained ceiling. “It was plumb full of money, and it wasn’t all singles, either. There must have been four or five hundred dollars in there, maybe more.”

  “Jesus Christ, did you take any of it?”

  “You gotta be kidding me, right? These ain’t the kind of people you steal from.” She picked up one of the french fries from the greasy cardboard container sitting in front of Carl, dabbed it into a glob of ketchup. All evening, she had thought about hopping in the car and taking off with the envelope.

  “But he’s your brother, goddamn it. He ain’t gonna do nothing to you.”

  “Shit, Carl, the way Lee is now, I doubt if he would think twice about getting rid of us. At least not you anyway.”

  “Well, what did you do with it then? You still got it on you?”

  “Hell no. When he came in I just gave it to him and played dumb.” She looked at the french fry in her hand, dropped it in the ashtray. “He still didn’t seem none too happy, though,” she said.

  Still thinking about his brother-in-law, Carl turned onto Vine Street. Every time he ran into Lee, which, thank God, wasn’t that often, the sonofabitch asked him, “So where you working, Carl?” He’d give anything to see his ass caught in a jam he couldn’t get out of by flashing that big fucking badge around. Up ahead, he saw two boys, maybe fifteen or sixteen years old, moving slowly along the sidewalk. He pulled over and shut off the engine, rolled down the window and took several gulps of the cold air. He watched them split up at the end of the block, one going east, the other west. He rolled down the passenger’s-side window and started the car, drove to the stop sign and made a right.

  “Hey,” Carl said, when he pulled up beside the skinny boy wearing a dark blue jacket with Meade High School stitched on the back of it in white. “You need a ride?”

  The boy stopped and looked at the driver behind the wheel of the dumpy station wagon. The man’s sweaty face was shiny in the glare from the streetlight. A brown stubble covered his fat jowls and neck. His eyes were beady and cruel, like a rodent’s. “What’d you say?” the boy asked.

  “I’m just riding around,” Carl said. “Maybe we could go get some beer.” He swallowed and caught himself before he started begging.

  The boy smirked. “You got the wrong guy, mister,” he said. “I ain’t built that way.” Then he started walking again, faster this time.

  “Fuck you then,” Carl said under his breath. He sat in the car and watched the boy disappear into a house a few doors down. Though a little disappointed, he was mostly relieved. He knew he wouldn’t have been able to stop himself if he got the punk in the car. He could almost picture it, the little bastard lying in the snow turned inside out. Someday, he thought, he was going to have to do a winter scene.

  He drove back to the White Cow Diner, saw that Bodecker was gone now. He parked the car and went insi
de, sat at the counter and ordered a cup of coffee. His hands were still shaking. “Damn, it’s cold out,” he said to the waitress, a tall, skinny girl with a red nose.

  “That’s Ohio for you,” she said.

  “I’m not used to it,” Carl said.

  “Oh, so you ain’t from around here?”

  “No,” Carl said, taking a sip of the coffee and pulling out one of his dog dicks. “I’m passing through from California.” Then he frowned and looked down at the cigar. He wasn’t sure why he said that, unless maybe he wanted to impress the girl. The mere mention of the state usually made him sick. He and Sandy had moved out there just a few weeks after they got married. Carl had thought he would find success there, taking photographs of movie stars and beautiful people, getting Sandy some work as a model, but instead they ended up broke and hungry, and he finally sold her to two men he met outside a fly-by-night talent agency who wanted to make a dirty movie. She had refused at first, but that night, after he plied her with vodka and promises, they drove their old beater up into the foggy Hollywood Hills, came to a small, dark cottage with newspapers taped over the windows. “This might be our big break,” Carl said as he led her to the door. “Make some connections.”

  Besides the two men he’d made the deal with, there were seven or eight others standing along the lemon yellow walls of the living room, bare except for a movie camera on a tripod and a double bed covered with wrinkled sheets. A man handed Carl a drink and another asked Sandy to take her clothes off in a gentle voice. A couple of them took photographs as she stripped. Nobody said a word. Then somebody clapped his hands and the bathroom door swung open. A midget with a shaved head that was way too big for his body led a tall, dazed-looking man out into the room. The midget wore nice slacks rolled up several inches above his pointy Italian shoes and a Hawaiian shirt, but the big man was buck naked, a long, blue-veined penis as big around as a coffee cup dangling between his tanned, muscular legs. When she saw the grinning midget unhook the leash from the dog collar around the man’s neck, Sandy rolled off the bed and started grabbing frantically for her clothes. Carl stood up and said, “Sorry, boys, the lady’s changed her mind.”