The Devil All the Time

by Donald Ray Pollock

The worry in her voice, the way she babied him now, it made him sick to think of how he’d let himself 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.

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.

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.

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.

Lately, he was beginning to worry that he was turning into some kind of fairy, and he suspected that Sandy thought the same thing.

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.

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.

There’d been a coffee can full of them right inside the door of the shed, like the Devil had set them there knowing that Carl was going to show up some day.

For the most part, he didn’t give a damn how Sandy carried on her sorry life, but she wasn’t going to peddle her snatch in Ross County, not as long as he was sheriff.

People are like dogs: once they start digging, they don’t want to stop.

But he’d let his greed get the best of him, and now he was stuck in it for the long haul.

She was only twenty-five, but her brown hair was already beginning to show traces of gray. Carl worried about her teeth, which had always been her best feature. They were stained an ugly yellow from all the cigarettes. He’d noticed, too, that her breath was bad all the time now, regardless of how many mints she consumed. Something was starting to rot inside her mouth, he was sure of it.

The signs were so clear to him last night, but now he wasn’t so sure. One more model would jinx the three sixes, but they could drive for a week and not find another who looked like that boy. He knew better than to fuck with the signs, but then he recalled that seven was the number of their room last night. And not a single car had passed by since the boy left. He was out there right now, looking for a ride in the hot sun.

Hanging roadkill from crosses and pouring blood on logs had secretly impressed the old preacher—after all, weren’t all the famous Christians fanatical in their beliefs?—but he went ahead and agreed with Emma that maybe that wasn’t the best way to introduce a young person to the Lord.

He figured a man with that much education could cure anything.

He was a good man. One of the best. Shoot, I still remember the day he got saved.”

LENORA, ON THE OTHER HAND, couldn’t seem to get enough of her religion. She carried a Bible with her everywhere she went, even to the outhouse, just like Helen had; and each morning, she got up before everyone else and prayed for an hour on her knees on the splintered wooden floor beside her and Emma’s bed.

It gave her a small comfort, and she allowed herself to hope that, with the Lord’s help, her father really would return someday if he was still alive.

He didn’t mention to Emma the rumor that he’d heard right after they disappeared, that the cripple was in love with Roy, that there might have been some queer homo thing going on between them before the preacher married Helen.

It irked the sheriff to no end that those two sodomite fools might have committed murder in his county and gotten away with it; and so he kept repeating the same old story, that in all likelihood the same maniac that butchered the Millersburg family had also killed Helen and hacked Roy and Theodore to pieces or dumped their bodies in the Greenbrier River. He told it so much that he half believed it himself at times.

THOUGH ARVIN NEVER CAUSED HER any serious trouble, Emma could easily see Willard in him, especially when it came to the fighting.

Though just a few months younger than Arvin, she already seemed dried up, a pale winter spud left too long in the furrow.

As far as he was concerned, Lenora certainly didn’t need any new ideas on how to make herself look more like the shade of her pitiful mother.

Though it was the best day he ever remembered spending with Willard, he never told anybody about it, or, for that matter, mentioned any of the bad days that soon followed. Instead, he would simply say to her, his father’s voice echoing faintly in his head, “Grandma, there’s a lot of no-good sonsofbitches out there.” “My Lord, Arvin, why do you keep saying that?” “Because it’s true.”

It was times like this when she regretted ever telling Reverend Sykes to leave the boy to find the path to God on his own terms. As far as she could tell, Arvin was always on the verge of heading the other direction.

They had worked with freaks before, but nothing that looked quite like this one.

“Hard to tell what kind of diseases something like that’s got,” he added, his cockiness quickly returning once he was satisfied she was out of hearing range. “Women like that, they’ll fuck a dog or a donkey or anything else for a buck or two.”

Roy once made the mistake of pointing out to his cousin that what he and the clown were doing was an abomination in the eyes of God. Theodore had set his guitar down on the sawdust floor and spit some brown juice in a paper cup. He’d recently taken to chewing tobacco. It made him a little sick to his stomach, but Flapjack liked the way it made his breath smell. “Damn, Roy, if you ain’t a good one to talk, you crazy bastard,” he said.

According to what he had read in a pamphlet that he had found under a pillow in a Salvation Army shelter one time, a man laying with another man was probably equal to killing your wife, but Roy wasn’t sure if it was any worse or not. The manner in which the weight of certain sins was calculated sometimes confused him.

The banner outside the tent read THE PROPHET AND THE PICKER. Roy delivered his grisly version of the End Times while Theodore provided the background music. It cost a quarter to get inside the tent, and convincing people that religion could be entertaining was tough when just a few yards away were a number of other more exciting and less serious distractions, so Roy came up with the idea of eating insects during his sermon, a slightly different take on his old spider act.

West Virginia seemed like a million miles away, and the two fugitives couldn’t imagine the arm of the law in Coal Creek ever stretching that far. It had been nearly fourteen years since they had buried Helen and fled south. They didn’t even bother to change their names anymore.

“In this house, you better know how to handle a gun unless you want to starve to death,” the old man had told him.

“So what did you wish for?” Lenora asked. She hoped it had something to do with the Lord, but the way Arvin was, she wasn’t going to hold her breath. Every night, she prayed that he would wake up with a love for Jesus Christ glowing in his heart. She hated to think that he was going to end up in hell like that Elvis Presley and all those other sinners he listened to on the radio.

From living with his father, Arvin had learned that you didn’t pry too much into other people’s affairs. Everyone had things they didn’t want to talk about, including himself.

Lenora had shut her eyes tight and begun praying. Tears were running down her pink face.

“Don’t think praying’s gonna get you out of this, motherfucker.”

Earlier that day, Arvin had driven Lenora to the cemetery to visit her mother’s grave. Though he would never admit it, the only reason he went to the graveyard with her now was because he hoped she might recall some buried memory about her daddy or the cripple he ran with. He had become fascinated with the riddle of their disappearance. Although Emma and many others in Greenbrier County seemed convinced that the two were alive and well, Arvin found it hard to believe that two bastards as nutty as Roy and Theodore were purported to be could have vanished into thin air and never be heard from again. If it was that easy, he figured a lot more people would do it. He’d wished many times that his father had taken that route.

“Don’t you think it’s funny how we both ended up orphans and living in the same house like we do?” Lenora had said after they entered the cemetery. She set her Bible down on a nearby tombstone and loosened her bonnet a bit and pulled it back. “It’s almost like everything happened so we’d meet each other.”

A small winged but faceless angel was carved into each top corner.

It made him uneasy when Lenora talked like that, and she had been doing it a lot more since she’d turned sixteen. They might not have been blood relation, but it made him squeamish to think of her any other way than as his sister. Though he realized the odds weren’t good, he kept hoping she might find a boyfriend before she said something really stupid.

A dog barked somewhere over the next knob, and his thoughts wandered to Jack, the poor harmless mutt that his father had killed just for some more lousy blood. That had been one of the worst days of that summer, the way he remembered it, almost as bad as the night his mother died. Soon, Arvin promised himself, he was going to go back to the prayer log and see if the dog’s bones were still there. He wanted to bury them proper, do what he could to make up for some of what his crazy father had done. If he lived to be a hundred, he vowed, he would never forget Jack.

As Lenora ignored his questions that morning about her father and kept on blabbing about fate and star-crossed lovers and all that other romance shit she read about in books checked out from the school library, he’d realized that he should have stayed home and worked on the Bel Air.

As far as everyone around here’s concerned, you daddy’s still alive and kicking. Hell, he might pop over the hill any day now dancing a jig.” “I hope so,” she’d said. “I pray every day that he will.” “Even if it meant he killed your mother?” “I don’t care,” she said. “I’ve already forgiven him. We could start all over.”

They lowered their voices a bit, but Carl could still hear them talking about the way they used to hang niggers, how someone needed to start lynching again, even if it was goddamn hard work, but with the longhairs this time.

She liked to smoke them, she had confessed to him one night, crush them and put the powder in a cigarette. Small-town dope, Carl had thought, and he had to restrain himself from laughing at her, this poor stupid girl.

“The Democrats gonna be the ruination of this country,” the cowboy said. “What we need to do, Bus, is start our own little army. Kill a few of them and the rest will get the idea.” “You mean the Democrats or the longhairs, J.R.?” “Well, we’d start with the sissies first,” the cowboy said. “Remember that crazy sonofabitch had that chicken stuck to him out on the highway that time? Bus, I guarantee you these longhairs is going to be ten times worse than that.”

Carl didn’t say anything, but he wondered what it would be like to kill a couple of dried-up fuckers like them. For a moment, he thought about following them when they left, have them screw each other just for starters.

Though he’d been in Coal Creek only two weeks, he already despised the place.

He kept trying to look upon his assignment in this outpost in the sticks as some sort of spiritual test coming directly from the Lord, but it was more his mother’s doing than anything else.