The Devil All the Time

by Donald Ray Pollock

  The Reds came up to bat, and Hank began thinking about Cincinnati. Sometime soon, he was going to drive down to the River City and see a doubleheader. His plan was to buy a good seat, drink beer, stuff himself with their hot dogs. He’d heard wieners tasted better in a ballpark, and he wanted to find out for himself. Cincinnati was just ninety miles or so on the other side of the Mitchell Flats, a straight shot down Route 50, but he’d never been there, hadn’t been any farther west than Hillsboro his entire twenty-two years. Hank had the feeling that his life would really begin once he made that trip. He didn’t have the details all figured out yet, but he also wanted to buy a whore after the games were over, some pretty girl who would treat him nice. He’d pay her extra to undress him, pull off his pants and shoes. He was going to buy a new shirt for the occasion, stop in at Bainbridge on his way down and get a decent haircut. He’d remove her clothes slowly, take his time with each little button or whatever it was that whores fastened their clothes with. He’d spill some whiskey on her titties and lick it off, like he heard some of the men talk about when they came in the store after having a few up at the Bull Pen. When he finally got inside her, she’d tell him to take it easy, that she wasn’t used to being with a man his size. She wouldn’t be anything like that loudmouth Mildred McDonald, the only woman he’d ever been with so far.

  “One little pop,” Mildred had told everyone at the Bull Pen, “and then nothing but smoke.” That had been over three years ago, and people still razzed him about it. The whore in Cincinnati would insist that he keep his money after he finished with her, ask him for his phone number, maybe even beg him to take her away. He figured he’d probably come back home a different person, just like Slim Gleason had when he returned from the Korean War. Before he left Knockemstiff for good, Hank thought he might even stop in at the Bull Pen and buy some of the boys a farewell beer, just to show there weren’t any hard feelings about all the jokes. In a way, he supposed, Mildred had done him a favor; he’d put away a lot of money since he’d quit going up there.

  He was half listening to the game and thinking about the dirty way Mildred had done him when he noticed someone with a flashlight walking up through Clarence’s pasture. He saw the small figure bend down and slip through the barbwire fence and head toward him. It was nearly dark now, but as the person got closer, Hank realized it was the Russell boy. He’d never seen the boy off the hill by himself before, heard his father wouldn’t allow it. But they’d buried his mother just this afternoon, and maybe that had changed things, softened the Russell man’s heart a little. The boy was wearing a white shirt and a pair of new overalls. “Hey there,” Hank said as Arvin got closer. The boy’s face was gaunt and sweaty and pale. He didn’t look good, not good at all. It looked like he had blood or something smeared on his face and clothes.

  Arvin stopped a few feet from the storekeeper and turned off the flashlight. “The store’s closed,” Hank said, “but if you need something, I can open back up.”

  “How would a person go about getting hold of the law?”

  “Well, either cause some trouble or call them on the telephone, I reckon,” Hank said.

  “Could you call ’em for me? I ain’t never used a telephone before.”

  Hank reached in his pocket and turned the radio off. The Reds were getting clobbered anyway. “What do you want with the sheriff, son?”

  “He’s dead,” the boy said.

  “Who is?”

  “My dad,” Arvin said.

  “You mean your mom, don’t you?”

  A confused look came over the boy’s face for a moment, then he shook his head. “No, my mom’s been dead three days. I’m talking about my dad.”

  Hank stood up and reached in his pants for the keys to the back door of the store. He wondered if maybe the boy had gone simple with grief. Hank remembered the rough time he’d gone through when his own mother passed. It was something a person never really got over, he knew that. He still thought about her every day. “Come on inside. You look thirsty.”

  “I ain’t got no money,” Arvin said.

  “That’s all right,” Hank said. “You can owe me.”

  They went inside and the storekeeper slid the top of the metal pop cooler open. “What kind you like?”

  The boy shrugged.

  “Here’s a root beer,” Hank said. “That’s the kind I used to drink.” He handed the boy the bottle of pop and scratched at his day-old beard. “Now your name’s Arvin, ain’t it?”

  “Yes, sir,” the boy said. He set his flashlight down on the counter and took a long drink and then another.

  “Okay, so what makes you think there’s something wrong with your daddy?”

  “His neck,” Arvin said. “He cut himself.”

  “That ain’t blood you got on you, is it?”

  Arvin looked down at his shirt and his hands. “No,” he said. “It’s pie.”

  “Where is your dad?”

  “A little ways from the house,” the boy said. “In the woods.”

  Hank reached under the counter for the phone book. “Now look,” he said, “I don’t mind calling the law for you, but don’t be fooling with me, okay? They don’t take kindly to wild-goose chases.” Just a couple of days ago, Marlene Williams had him call and report another window peeper. It was the fifth time in just two months. The dispatcher had hung up on him.

  “Why would I do that?”

  “No,” Hank said. “I guess you wouldn’t.”

  After he made the call, he and Arvin went out the back door and Hank picked up his beers. They walked around and sat down on the bench in front of the store. A cloud of moths fluttered around the security light that stood over the gas pumps. Hank thought about the beating the boy’s daddy had given Lucas Hayburn last year. Not that he probably didn’t deserve it, but Lucas hadn’t been right since. Just yesterday, he had sat on this bench all morning bent over with a gob of spit hanging from his mouth. Hank opened another beer and lit a smoke. He hesitated a second, then offered the boy one from his pack.

  Arvin shook his head and took another drink of the pop. “They ain’t pitching horseshoes tonight,” he said after a couple of minutes.

  Hank looked up the holler, saw the lights on at the Bull Pen. Four or five cars were parked in the yard. “Must be taking a break,” the storekeeper said, leaning back against the wall of the store and stretching his legs out. He and Mildred had gone to the hog barn over at Platter’s Pasture. She said she liked the rich smell of the pig manure, liked to imagine things a little different than most girls.

  “What is it you like to imagine?” Hank had asked her, a little worry in his voice. For years, he had listened to boys and men talk about getting laid, but not once had any of them said anything about hog shit.

  “That ain’t none of your business what’s in my head,” she told him. Her chin was sharp as a hatchet, her eyes like lusterless gray marbles. Her only redeeming feature was the thing between her legs, which some had said reminded them of a snapping turtle.

  “Okay,” Hank said.

  “Let’s see what you got,” Mildred said, tugging at his zipper and pulling him down in the dirty straw.

  After his miserable performance, she shoved him off and said, “Jesus Christ, I should have just played with myself.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “You just had me worked up. It’ll be better next time.”

  “Ha! I doubt very much they’ll be a next time, Bub,” she said.

  “Well, don’t you at least want a ride home?” he’d asked as he was leaving. It was nearly midnight. The two-room shack she lived in with her parents over in Nipgen was a couple of hours away if she walked it.

  “No, I’m gonna hang around here awhile,” she said. “Maybe someone worth a shit will show up.”

  Hank flipped his cigarette into the gravel lot and took another drink of beer. He liked to tell himself that things had turned out for the best in the end. Although he wasn’t a spiteful person, not at all, he had to admit that
he got some satisfaction out of knowing that Mildred was now hooked up with a big-bellied boy named Jimmy Jack who rode an old Harley and kept her penned up on his back porch in a plywood doghouse when he wasn’t selling her ass out behind one of the bars in town. People said she’d do anything you could think of for fifty cents. Hank had seen her in Meade this past Fourth of July, standing by the door outside Dusty’s Bar with a black eye, holding the biker’s leather helmet. The best years of Mildred’s life were behind her now, and his own were just getting ready to begin. The woman he was going to pick up in Cincinnati would be a hundred times finer than any old Mildred McDonald. A year or two after he moved away from here, he probably wouldn’t even be able to recall her name. He rubbed a hand over his face and looked over, saw the Russell boy watching him. “Damn, was I talking to myself?” he asked the boy.

  “Not really,” Arvin said.

  “Hard to tell when that deputy will show up,” Hank said. “They don’t much like to come out here.”

  “Who’s Mildred?” Arvin asked.

  9

  LEE BODECKER’S SHIFT WAS NEARLY OVER when the call came through on the radio. Another twenty minutes and he would have been picking up his girlfriend and heading out Bridge Street to Johnny’s Drive-in. He was starving. Every night, after he got off, he and Florence drove to either Johnny’s or the White Cow or the Sugar Shack. He liked to go all day without eating, then wolf down cheeseburgers and fries and milk shakes; and finish things off with a couple of ice-cold beers down along the River Road, leaned back in his seat while Florence jacked him off into her empty Pepsi cup. She had a grip like an Amish milk maiden. The entire summer had been a succession of almost perfect nights. She was saving the good stuff for the honeymoon, which suited Bodecker just fine. At twenty-one years old, he was just six months out of the peacetime army, and in no hurry to be tied down with a family. Although he had been a deputy only four months, he could already see a lot of advantages to being the law in a place as backward as Ross County, Ohio. There was money to be made if a man was careful and not get the big head, like his boss had done. Nowadays, Sheriff Hen Matthews had a picture of his round, stupid puss on the front page of the Meade Gazette three or four times a week, often for no conceivable reason. Citizens were starting to joke about it. Bodecker was already planning his campaign strategy. All he had to do was get some dirt on Matthews before the next election, and he could move Florence into one of the new houses they were building on Brewer Heights when they finally tied the knot. He had heard that every single one of them had two bathrooms.

  He turned the cruiser around on Paint Street near the paper mill and headed out Huntington Pike toward Knockemstiff. Three miles out of town, he passed by the little house in Brownsville where he lived with his sister and mother. A light was on in the living room. He shook his head and reached in his shirt pocket for a cigarette. He was paying most of the bills right now, but he had made it clear to them when he came back from the service that they couldn’t depend on him much longer. His father had left them years ago, just went off to the shoe factory one morning and never returned. Recently, they had heard a rumor that he was living in Kansas City, working in a pool room, which made sense if you had ever known Johnny Bodecker. The only time the man ever smiled was when he was busting a rack of balls or running a table. The news had been a big disappointment to his son; nothing would have made Bodecker happier than discovering that the fucker was still earning his keep somewhere stitching soles onto loafers in a dingy red-brick building lined with high, dirty windows. Occasionally, when he was driving around on patrol and things were quiet, Bodecker imagined his father returning to Meade for a visit. In his fantasy, he followed the old man out into the country away from any witnesses and arrested him on a phony charge. Then he beat the shit out of him with a nightstick or the butt of his revolver before taking him to Schott’s Bridge and pushing him over the rail. It was always a day or so after a heavy rain and Paint Creek would be up, the water swift and deep on its way east to the Scioto River. Sometimes he let him drown; other times he allowed him to swim to the muddy bank. It was a good way to pass the time.

  He took a drag off the cigarette as his thoughts drifted from his father to his sister, Sandy. Though she had just turned sixteen, Bodecker had already found her a job waiting tables in the evening at the Wooden Spoon. He had pulled over the owner of the diner a few weeks ago for driving drunk, the man’s third time in a year, and one thing had led to another. Before he knew it, he was a hundred dollars richer and Sandy had work. She was as bashful and anxious around people as a possum caught out in daylight, always had been, and Bodecker didn’t doubt that learning to deal with customers those first couple of weeks had been torture for her, but the owner had told him yesterday morning that she seemed to be getting the hang of it now. On nights when he couldn’t pick her up after work, the cook, a thickset man with sleepy blue eyes who liked to draw risqué pictures of cartoon characters on his white paper chef’s hat, had been giving her a ride home, and that worried him a little, mostly because Sandy was inclined to go along with whatever anyone asked her to do. Not once had Bodecker ever heard her speak up for herself, and like a lot of things, he blamed their father for that. But still, he told himself, it was time she began learning how to make her own way in the world. She couldn’t hide in her room and daydream the rest of her life; and the sooner she started bringing in some money, the sooner he could get out. A few days ago, he had gone so far as to suggest to his mother that she let Sandy quit school and work full-time, but the old lady wouldn’t hear of it. “Why not?” he asked. “Once someone finds out how easy she is, she’s bound to get knocked up anyway, so what does it matter if she knows algebra or not?” She didn’t offer a reason, but now that he had planted the seed, he knew he just had to wait a day or two before bringing it up again. It might take a while, but Lee Bodecker always got what he wanted.

  Lee made a right onto Black Run Road and drove to Maude’s grocery. The storekeeper was sitting on the bench out front drinking a beer and talking to some young boy. Bodecker got out of the cruiser with his flashlight. The storekeeper was a sad, worn-out-looking fucker, even though the deputy figured they were roughly the same age. Some people were born just so they could be buried; his mother was like that, and he’d always figured that’s why the old man had left, though he hadn’t been any great prize himself. “Well, what we got this time?” Bodecker asked. “I hope it ain’t another one of those goddamn window peepers you keep calling about.”

  Hank leaned over and spit on the ground. “I wish it was,” he said, “but no, it’s about this boy’s daddy.”

  Bodecker trained the flashlight on the skinny, dark-haired boy. “Well, what is it, son?” he said.

  “He’s dead,” Arvin said, putting a hand up to block the light shining in his face.

  “And they just buried his poor mother today,” Hank said. “It’s a damn shame, it is.”

  “So your daddy’s dead, is he?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Is that blood you got on your face?”

  “No,” Arvin said. “Somebody gave us a pie.”

  “This ain’t some joke, is it? You know I’ll take you to jail if it is.”

  “Why you all think I’m lying?” Arvin said.

  Bodecker looked at the storekeeper. Hank shrugged and turned his beer up and drained it. “They live at the top of Baum Hill,” he said. “Arvin here, he can show you.” Then he stood up and belched and headed around the side of the store.

  “I might have some questions for you later on,” Bodecker called out.

  “It’s a goddamn shame, that’s all I can tell you,” he heard Hank say.

  Bodecker put Arvin in the front seat of the cruiser and drove up Baum Hill. At the top, he turned down a narrow dirt lane lined with trees that the boy pointed out. He slowed the car down to a crawl. “I never been back this way before,” the deputy said. He reached down and quietly unsnapped his holster.

  “Ain’t
nobody new been back here in a long time,” Arvin said. Looking out the side window into the dark woods, he realized that he’d left his light in the store. He hoped the storekeeper didn’t sell it before he got back down there. He glanced over at the brightly lit instrument panel. “You gonna turn the siren on?”

  “No sense in scaring someone.”

  “There’s nobody left to scare,” Arvin said.

  “So this where you live?” Bodecker asked as they pulled up to the small, square house. There were no lights on, no sign that anyone lived here at all except for a rocking chair on the porch. The grass was at least a foot high in the yard. Off to the left was an old barn. Bodecker parked behind a rusted-out pickup. Just your typical hillbilly trash, he thought. Hard to tell what kind of mess he was getting into. His empty stomach gurgled like a broken commode.