The Devil All the Time (12 page)

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 and 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 from 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.

Later that night, he awoke in a panic, his fat heart quivering in its ribbed cage like a trapped and frightened animal. According to the clock on the nightstand, he had been asleep less than an hour. He started to roll over, but then lurched out of bed and stumbled to the window, jerked the curtain open. Thank God, the station wagon was still sitting in the parking lot. “You dumb bastard,” he said to himself. Pulling on his pants, he walked across the gravel to the car in his bare feet and unlocked the door. A mass of thick clouds hovered over him. He took the six rolls of film from the dash and carried them back to the room, stuffed them inside his shoes. He’d completely forgotten about them, a clear violation of his Rule #7. Sandy muttered something in her sleep about scarecrows or some such shit. Going back to the open doorway, Carl lit another of her cigarettes and stood looking out into the night. As he cursed himself for being so careless, the clouds shifted, revealing a small patch of stars off to the east. He squinted through the cigarette smoke and started to count them, but then he stopped and closed the door. One more number, one more sign, that wouldn’t change a goddamn thing tonight.

13

THREE MEN WERE SITTING AT A TABLE
drinking beer when Bodecker entered the Tecumseh Lounge. The dark room lit up with sunlight for a brief moment, casting the sheriff’s long shadow across the floor. Then the door swung shut behind him and everything settled into gloom again. A Patsy Cline song came to a sad, quavering end on the jukebox. None of the men said a word as the sheriff walked past them toward the bar. One was a car thief and another a wife beater. They’d both spent time in his jail, waxed his cruiser on several occasions. Though he didn’t know the third man, he figured it was just a matter of time.

Bodecker sat down on a stool and waited for Juanita to finish frying a hamburger on the greasy grill. He recalled that she had served him his first whiskey in this bar not so many years ago. He’d chased after the feeling he’d gotten that night for the next seven years, but never found it again. He reached in his pocket for one of the candies, then decided to hold off. She laid the sandwich on a paper plate along with a few potato chips she scooped out of a metal lard bucket and a long pale pickle she forked from a dirty glass jar. Carrying the plate to the table, she set it down in front of the car thief. Bodecker heard one of the men say something about covering up the pool table before somebody got sick. Another one laughed and he felt his face begin to burn. “You quit that,” Juanita said in a low voice.

She went to the register and made the car thief’s change and took it back to him. “These tater chips are stale,” he told her.

“Then don’t eat ’em,” she said.

“Now, darling,” the wife beater said, “that ain’t no way to be.”

Ignoring him, Juanita lit a cigarette and walked down to the end of the bar where Bodecker sat. “Hey, stranger,” she said, “what can I get—”

“—and by God if her ass didn’t drop open like a lunch bucket,” one of the men said loudly just then, and the table erupted into laughter.

Juanita shook her head. “Can I borrow your gun?” she said to Bodecker. “Those bastards been in here since I opened up this morning.”

He watched them in the long mirror that ran behind the bar. The car thief was giggling like a schoolgirl while the wife beater mashed the potato chips on the table with his fist. The third man was leaned back in his chair with a bored expression on his face, cleaning his fingernails with a matchstick. “I could run ’em out if you want,” Bodecker said.

“Nah, that’s okay,” she said. “They’d just come back later wanting to give me some more grief.” She blew smoke out of the side of her mouth and half smiled. She hoped her boy wasn’t in trouble again. The last time, she’d had to borrow two weeks’ pay to get him out of jail, all over five record albums he’d stuck down his pants at the Woolworth’s. Merle Haggard or Porter Wagoner, that would have been bad enough, but Gerry and the Pacemakers? Herman’s Hermits? The Zombies? Thank God his father was dead, that’s all she could say. “So what can I do you for?”

Bodecker gazed for a moment at the bottles lined up behind the bar. “You got any coffee?”