The Devil All the Time (17 page)

Leaning back in the rocker, Arvin wondered who was living in his old house now, wondered if the storekeeper still stayed by himself in that little camper and if Janey Wagner was knocked up by now. “Stink finger,” he muttered to himself. He thought again about the way the deputy named Bodecker had locked him in the back of the patrol car after he had led him to the prayer log, like the lawman was afraid of him, a ten-year-old kid with blueberry pie on his face. They had put him in an empty cell that night, not knowing what else to do with him, and the welfare lady had showed up the next afternoon with some of his clothes and his grandmother’s address. Holding the bottle up, he saw that there was maybe two inches left in the bottom. He stuck it under the chair for Earskell in the morning.

23

REVEREND SYKES COUGHED A LITTLE
, and the congregation of the Coal Creek Church of the Holy Ghost Sanctified watched a trickle of bright blood run down his chin and drip onto his shirt. He kept preaching, though, gave the people a decent sermon about helping your neighbor; but then at the end he announced that he was stepping down. “Temporary,” he said. “Just till I get to feeling better.” He said that his wife had a nephew down in Tennessee who had just graduated from one of those Bible colleges. “He claims he wants to work with poor people,” Sykes went on. “I figure he must be a Democrat.” He grinned, hoping for a laugh to lighten the mood a little, but the only sound he heard was a couple of women in the back near the door crying with his wife. He realized now that he should have made her stay home today.

Taking a careful breath, he cleared his throat. “I ain’t seen him since he was a boy, but his mother says he’s all right. Him and his wife should be here in two weeks, and like I said, he’s just gonna help out for a while. I know he ain’t from around here, but try to make him feel welcome anyway.” Sykes started to weave a bit and grabbed hold of the pulpit to steady himself. He pulled the empty Five Brothers pack from his pocket and held it up. “Just in case any of you need it, I’m gonna hand this over to him.” A hacking fit came over him then, bent him double, but this time he managed to cover his mouth with his handkerchief and hide the blood. When he got his breath back, he rose up and looked around, his face red and sweaty with the strain of it all. He was too embarrassed to tell them that he was dying. The black lung that he’d been fighting for years had finally gotten the better of him. Within the next few weeks or months, according to the doctor, he’d be meeting his Maker. Sykes couldn’t honestly say that he
was actually looking forward to it, but he knew that he’d had a better life than most men. After all, hadn’t he lived forty-two years longer than those poor wretches who had died in the mine cave-in that had pointed him toward his calling? Yes, he’d been a lucky man. He wiped a tear from his eye and shoved the bloody rag in his pants pocket. “Well,” he said, “no sense keeping you folks any longer. That’s all I got.”

24

ROY LIFTED THEODORE OUT OF THE WHEELCHAIR
and carried him across the dirty sand. They were at the north end of a public beach in St. Petersburg, a little south of Tampa. The cripple’s useless legs swung back and forth like a rag doll’s. He was rank with the smell of piss, and Roy had noticed that he wasn’t using his milk bottle anymore, just soaking his rotten dungarees whenever he needed to go. He had to set Theodore down several times and rest, but he finally got him to the edge of the water. Two stout women wearing wide-brimmed hats rose up and looked over at them, then hurriedly gathered up their towels and lotions and headed for the parking lot. Roy went back to the chair and got their supper, two fifths of White Port and a package of boiled ham. They had lifted it from a grocery store a couple of blocks away right after a truck driver hauling oranges let them out. “Didn’t we spend some time locked up here once?” Theodore asked.

Roy swallowed the last slice of meat and nodded. “Three days, I think.” The cops had picked them up for vagrancy just before dark. They had been preaching on a street corner. America was getting as bad as Russia, a thin, balding man yelled at them as they were escorted past his cell to their own that night. Why could the police throw a man in jail just because he didn’t have any money or an address? What if the man didn’t want any goddamn money or a fuckin’ address? Where was all this freedom they bragged about? The cops took the protestor out of the block every morning and made him carry a stack of telephone books up and down the stairs all day. According to some of the other prisoners, the man had been arrested for vagrancy twenty-two times just in the past year, and they were sick of feeding the Communist bastard. If nothing else, they were going to make him sweat for his bologna and grits.

“I can’t remember,” Theodore said. “What was the jail like?”

“Not bad,” Roy said. “I believe they gave out coffee for dessert.” The second night they were there, the cops brought in a big, hulking brute with a carved-up face called the Zit-Eater. Right before bedtime, they stuck him in the cell down at the end of the hall with the Communist. Everyone in the jail had heard about the Zit-Eater except for Roy and Theodore. He was famous up and down the Gulf Coast. “Why do they call him that?” Roy had asked the paper hanger with the handlebar mustache in the cell next to theirs.

“Because the fucker gets you down and pops your pimples if you got any,” the man said. He twisted the waxed ends of his black mustache. “Lucky for me I’ve always had a nice complexion.”

“What the hell does he do that for?”

“He likes to eat ’em,” another man said, from a cell across the way. “Some claim he’s a cannibal, got leftovers buried all over Florida, but I don’t buy it. He just likes to get attention, that’s what I think.”

“Jesus, someone oughta kill a sonofabitch like that,” Theodore said. He glanced at the acne scars on Roy’s face.

The mustache shook his head. “He’d be a hard one to kill,” he said. “You ever see one of them retards that can carry a car on his back? They had one of ’em at this alligator farm where I worked one summer down by Naples. You couldn’t have stopped that bastard with a machine gun once he got started. The Zit-Eater, he’s like that.” Then they heard some commotion down at the end of the hall. Evidently, the Communist wasn’t going to give up easy, and that cheered Roy and Theodore a little, but after a couple of minutes all they could hear was his crying.

The next morning, three broad-chested men in white coats came in with billy clubs and hauled the Zit-Eater away in a straitjacket to a nuthouse on the other side of town. The Communist quit bitching about the law after that, didn’t complain once about the fresh squeeze marks on his face or the blisters on his feet, just carried his phone books up and down the stairs like he was thankful they’d given him some meaningful work to do.

Theodore sighed, looked out over the blue gulf, the water smooth
as a pane of glass that day. “That sounds nice, coffee for dessert. Maybe we could let them take us in, get a little break.”

“Shit, Theodore, I don’t want to spend the night in jail.” Roy kept one eye on the new wheelchair. He’d slipped into an old folks’ home a couple of days ago and borrowed it after the wheels on the last one gave out. He wondered how many miles he had pushed Theodore since they had left West Virginia. Though he wasn’t good with numbers, he estimated it had to be up around a million by now.

“I’m tired, Roy.”

Theodore hadn’t been acting right since he cost them the job with the carnival the summer before. A young boy, maybe five or six years old, eating a cardboard scoop of cotton candy, had wandered into the back of the tent while Roy was out front trying to drum up some customers. Theodore swore that the boy asked for help in zipping his pants up, but not even Roy could buy that one. Within minutes, Billy Bradford had loaded them up in his Cadillac and dumped them a few miles out in the country. They didn’t even get a chance to say their goodbyes to Flapjack or the Flamingo Lady; and though they had tried to get on with several other outfits since then, word of the crippled pedophile and his bug-eating buddy had spread fast among the carny owners. “Want me to go get your guitar?” Roy asked.

“Nah,” Theodore said. “I ain’t got no music in me today.”

“You sick?”

“I don’t know,” the crippled boy said. “It’s like there’s never no letup.”

“Want one of them oranges the trucker gave us?”

“Hell no. I’ve et enough of them damn things to last me till the Judgment Day. They still give me the shits.”

“I could drop you off at the hospital,” Roy said. “Come back for you in a day or two.”

“Hospitals, they worse than jails.”

“Want me to pray over you?”

Theodore laughed. “Ha. That’s a good one, Roy.”

“Maybe that’s what’s wrong with you. You don’t believe no more.”

“Don’t start in on that shit again,” Theodore said. “I’ve served the Lord in various capacities. And I got the legs to prove it.”

“You just need some rest,” Roy said. “We’ll find us a good tree to sleep under before dark.”

“It still sounds mighty nice. Them passing out coffee for dessert.”

“Jesus, you want a cup of coffee, I’ll go get you one. We still got some change left.”

“I wish we was still with the carnival,” Theodore sighed. “That was the best we ever had it.”

“Yeah, well, you should have kept your hands off that kid if that’s the way you feel.”

Theodore picked up a pebble and threw it in the water. “It makes you wonder, don’t it?”

“What’s that?” Roy asked.

“I don’t know,” the cripple said with a shrug. “Just makes you wonder, that’s all.”

25

IT WAS A COLD FEBRUARY MORNING
in the early part of 1966, Carl and Sandy’s fifth year together. The apartment was like an icebox, but Carl was afraid if he kept knocking on the landlady’s door downstairs about turning up the thermostat, he might snap and strangle her with her own filthy hairnet. He had never killed anyone in Ohio, didn’t believe in shitting in his own nest. That was Rule #2. So Mrs. Burchwell, although she deserved it more than anything, was off-limits. Sandy woke up a little before noon and headed for the living room with a blanket draped over her narrow shoulders, dragging the ends of it through the dust and dirt on the floor. She curled up on the couch in a shivering ball and waited for Carl to bring her a cup of coffee and turn the TV on. For the next several hours she smoked cigarettes and watched her soap operas and coughed. At three o’clock, Carl yelled from the kitchen that it was time to get ready for work. Sandy tended bar six nights a week, and though she was supposed to let Juanita off at four, she was always running late.

With a groan, she sat up and stabbed out her cigarette in the ashtray and flung the blanket off her shoulders. She turned off the TV, then shivered her way to the bathroom. Bending over the sink, she splashed some water around in the bowl. She dried off her face, studied herself in the mirror, tried vainly to brush the yellow stains off her teeth. With a tube of red lipstick, she made up her mouth, fixed her eyes, pulled her brown hair back in a limp ponytail. She was sore and bruised. Last night, after she closed up the bar, she let a paper mill worker who had recently lost a hand in a rewinder bend her over the pool table for twenty bucks. Her brother was watching her closely these days, ever since that goddamn phone call, but twenty bucks was twenty bucks, no matter how you looked at it. She and Carl could
drive halfway across a state on that much money, or pay the electric bill for the month. It still irked her, all the crooked shit that Lee was into, and then him worried about her costing him votes. The man told her he would fork over another ten if she’d let him stick the metal hook up inside her, but Sandy told him that sounded like something he should save for his wife.

“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.