The Devil All the Time (11 page)

Sandy sat in the car and watched him poke the flames with a stick. Orange and blue sparks hopped and fluttered and disappeared into the darkness. She scratched at some jigger bites around her ankles and worried about the burning sensation between her legs. Though she hadn’t mentioned it to Carl yet, she was pretty sure that another boy, one they had picked up in Iowa a couple of days ago, had given her some kind of infection. The doctor had already warned her that another dose or two would ruin her chances of ever having a baby, but Carl didn’t like the look of rubbers in his pictures.

When the fire died out, Carl kicked the ashes around in the gravel, then took a dirty bandanna from his back pocket and picked up the hot belt buckle and the smoking remains of the army boots. He flung them out into the middle of the gravel pit and heard a faint splash. As he stood at the edge of the deep hole, Carl thought about the way that Sandy had wrapped her arms around the army boy when she saw him set the camera down and pull the pistol out, like that was going to save him. She always tried that shit with the pretty ones, and though he couldn’t really blame her for wanting it to last a while longer, this wasn’t just some damn fuck party. To his way of thinking, it was the one true religion, the thing he’d been searching for all his life. Only in the presence of death could he feel the presence of something like God. He looked up, saw dark clouds beginning to gather in the sky. He wiped some sweat out of his eyes and started back to the car. If they were lucky, maybe it would rain tonight and wash some of the scum out of the air, cool things off a bit.

“What the hell were you doing over there?” Sandy asked.

Carl pulled a new cigar from his shirt pocket and started peeling off the wrapper. “You get in a hurry, that’s when you make a mistake.”

She held her hand out. “Just give me the fucking flashlight.”

“What you doing?”

“I got to pee, Carl,” she said. “Jesus, I’m about ready to bust, and you’re over there daydreaming.”

Carl chewed on the cigar and watched her make her way around the back of the shed. A couple of weeks on the road and she was down to nothing again, her legs like goddamn toothpicks, her ass flat
as a washboard. It would take three or four months to put some meat back on those bones. Slipping the roll of film he’d shot of her and the army boy into a small metal canister, he stuck it in the glove box with the others. By the time Sandy returned, he had loaded a new roll into the camera. She handed him the light and he stuck it under the seat. “Can we get a motel tonight?” she asked in a tired voice as she started the car.

Carl pulled the cigar out of his mouth and picked at a shred of tobacco caught between his teeth. “We need to do some driving first,” he said.

Heading south on 79, they crossed the Mississippi into Illinois on Route 50, a road they’d become mighty familiar with over the last couple of years. Sandy kept trying to hurry things, and he had to remind her several times to slow down. Wrecking the car and being pinned inside or knocked out was one of his biggest fears. Sometimes he had nightmares about it, saw himself lying handcuffed to a hospital bed trying to explain those rolls of film to the law. Just thinking about it started to fuck with the high he’d gotten off the army boy, and he reached over and twisted the knob on the radio until he found a country music station coming out of Covington. Neither of them spoke, but every once in a while, Sandy hummed along to one of the slower songs. Then she’d yawn and light another cigarette. Carl counted the bugs that splattered against the windshield, stayed ready to grab the wheel in case she nodded off.

After driving through a hundred miles of small, hushed towns and vast, dark cornfields, they came upon a run-down motel built out of pink cement blocks called the Sundowner. It was nearly one o’clock in the morning. Three cars sat in the potholed parking lot. Carl rang the buzzer several times before a light finally popped on inside the office and an elderly lady with metal curlers in her hair opened the door a crack and peered out. “That your wife in the car?” she asked, squinting past Carl at the station wagon. He looked around, could just barely make out the glow of Sandy’s cigarette in the shadows.

“You got good eyes,” he said, managing a brief smile. “Yeah, that’s her.”

“Where you all from?” the woman asked.

Carl started to say Maryland, one of the few states he hadn’t been to yet, but then remembered the tag on the front of the car. He figured the nosy old bag had already checked it out. “Up around Cleveland,” he told her.

The woman shook her head, pulled her housecoat tighter around her. “You couldn’t pay me to live in a place like that, all that robbing and killing going on.”

“You got that right,” Carl said. “I worry all the time. Too many spooks for one thing. Heck, my wife won’t hardly leave the house anymore.” Then he pulled the army boy’s money out of his pocket. “So how much for a room?” he asked.

“Six dollars,” the woman said. He wet his thumb and counted off some singles and handed them to her. She left for a moment and came back with a key on a worn and wrinkled cardboard tag. “Number seven,” she said. “Down on the end.”

The room was hot and stuffy and smelled like Black Flag. Sandy headed straight for the bathroom and Carl flipped the portable TV set on, though there wasn’t anything on the air but snow and static that time of night, not out here in the sticks anyway. Kicking off his shoes, he started to pull down the thin plaid bedspread. Six dead flies lay scattered on top of the flat pillows. He stared at them for a minute, then sat down on the edge of the bed and reached inside Sandy’s purse for one of her cigarettes. He counted the flies again, but the number didn’t change.

Looking across the room, he rested his eyes on a cheap framed picture hanging on the wall, a flowers-and-fruit piece of shit that nobody would ever remember, not one person who ever slept in this stinking room. It served no purpose that he could think of, other than to remind a person that the world was a sorry-ass place to be stuck living in. He leaned forward and set his elbows on his knees, tried to imagine one of his pictures in its place. Maybe the beatnik from Wisconsin with the little cellophane of reefer, or that big blond bastard from last year, the one who put up such a fight. Of course, some were better than others, even Carl would admit that; but one thing that he
knew for certain: whoever looked at one of his photos, even one of the lousy ones from three or four years ago, they would never forget it. He’d bet the army boy’s wad of greenbacks on that.

He mashed the cigarette out in the ashtray and looked back down at the pillow. Six was the number of models they had worked with this trip; and six was what the old bitch had charged him for the room; and now here were six poisoned flies lying in his bed. The lingering stench of the bug spray began to burn his eyes and he dabbed at them with the end of the bedspread. “And what do these three sixes mean, Carl?” he asked himself out loud. Pulling out his knife, he fiddled with a hole in one of his molars while searching his mind for a suitable answer, one that avoided the most obvious implication of those three numbers, the biblical sign that his crazy old mother would have gleefully pointed out to him if she were still alive. “It means, Carl,” he finally said, snapping his penknife shut, “that it’s time to head home.” And with a sweep of his hand, he brushed the tiny winged corpses off onto the dirty carpet and flipped the pillows over.

11

EARLIER THAT SAME DAY, BACK IN MEADE, OHIO
, Sheriff Lee Bodecker sat at his desk in an oak swivel chair eating a chocolate bar and looking through some paperwork. He hadn’t had a drink of alcohol, not even a lousy beer, in two months, and his wife’s doctor had told her that sweets would take the edge off. Florence had spread candy all over the house, even stuck hardtack under his pillow. Sometimes he woke himself up at night crunching on it, his throat sticky as flypaper. If it weren’t for the red sleeping capsules, he never would get any rest. The worry in her voice, the way she babied him now, it made him sick to think of how he’d let himself go. Although county elections were still over a year away, Hen Matthews was proving himself to be a sore loser. His former boss was already playing dirty, spreading shit about lawmen who can’t catch crooks any better than they can hold their liquor. But every candy bar Bodecker ate made him want ten more, and his belly was starting to hang over his belt like a peck sack of dead bullfrogs. If he kept it up, by the time he had to start campaigning again he’d be as sloppy fat as his pig-faced brother-in-law, Carl.

The telephone rang, and before he had a chance to say hello, an old woman’s reedy voice on the other end asked, “You the sheriff?”

“That’s me,” Bodecker said.

“You got a sister works at the Tecumseh?”

“Maybe,” Bodecker said. “I ain’t talked to her lately.” From the tone of the woman’s voice, he could tell that this wasn’t a friendly call. He set the rest of the candy bar down on top of the paperwork. These days, talk of his sister made Lee nervous. Back in 1958, when he had come home from the army, he would have busted a gut laughing if someone had suggested that shy, skinny Sandy was going to turn out
wild, but that was before she met up with Carl. Now he hardly recognized her. Several years back, Carl had talked her into quitting her job at the Wooden Spoon and moving to California. Though they were gone only a couple of weeks, when she returned something about her was different. She took a job tending bar at the Tecumseh, the roughest joint in town. Now she walked around in short skirts that barely covered her ass, her face painted up like one of the whores he had run off Water Street when he first got elected. “Been too busy chasing bad guys,” he joked, trying to lighten the caller’s mood a little. He glanced down and noticed a scuff mark on the toe of one of his new brown boots. He spit on his thumb and leaned over and tried to wipe it out.

“Oh, I bet you have,” the woman said.

“You got some kind of problem?” Bodecker said.

“I sure do,” the woman said viciously. “That sister of yours, she’s been peddling her ass right out the back door of that filthy place for over a year now, but as far as I can see, Sheriff, you ain’t never lifted a hand to stop it. Hard to tell how many good marriages she’s broke up. Like I told Mr. Matthews just this morning, it makes a person wonder how you ever got elected, you havin’ family like that.”

“Who the hell is this?” Bodecker said, leaning forward in his chair.

“Ha!” the woman said. “I ain’t falling for that. I know how the law operates in Ross County.”

“We operate just fine,” Bodecker said.

“That ain’t what Mr. Matthews says.” And with that, she hung up.

Slamming the receiver down, Bodecker pushed back his chair and stood up. He glanced at his watch and grabbed his keys off the top of the file cabinet. Just as he got to the door, he stopped and turned back to the desk. He rummaged around in the top drawer, found an open bag of butterscotch balls. He stuck a handful of them in his pocket.

As Bodecker passed by the front desk on his way out, the dispatcher, a young man with bulging green eyes and a flattop haircut, looked up from a dirty magazine he was reading. “Everything all right, Lee?” he asked.

His big face red with aggravation, the sheriff continued on without a word, then paused at the door and looked back. The dispatcher
was holding the magazine up to the overhead light now, studying some naked female form tightly bound in leather straps and nylon rope, a balled-up pair of panties stuck in her mouth. “Willis,” Bodecker said, “don’t you let somebody walk in here and catch you looking at that damn cock book, you hear? I got enough people on my ass as it is.”

“Sure, Lee,” the dispatcher said. “I’ll be careful.” He started to turn another page.

“Jesus Christ, man, can’t you take a hint?” Bodecker yelled. “Put that goddamn thing away.”

As he drove over to the Tecumseh, he sucked on one of the butterscotch balls and thought about what the woman on the phone had said about Sandy whoring. Though he suspected that Matthews had put her up to the call just to fuck with him, he had to admit that he wouldn’t be that surprised to find out it was true. A couple of banged-up beaters sat in the parking lot, along with an Indian motorcycle crusted over with dried mud. He took off his hat and badge and locked them in the trunk. The last time he’d been here, at the beginning of the summer, he had puked Jack Daniel’s all over the pool table. Sandy had run everyone out early and closed the place up. He had lain on the sticky floor among the cigarette butts and hockers and spilled beer while she soaked up his mess off the green felt with towels. She then set a small fan down on the dry end of the table and turned it on. “Leroy’s gonna shit when he sees this,” she said, her hands on her skinny hips.

“Fuck that sumbitch,” Bodecker mumbled.

“Yeah, that’s easy for you to say,” Sandy said, as she helped him get up off the floor and into a chair. “You don’t have to work for the prick.”

“I’ll shut the goddamn place down,” Bodecker said, flailing his arms wildly at the air. “I swear I will.”

“Just settle down, big brother,” she said. She wiped his face off with a soft, wet rag and fixed him a cup of instant coffee. Just as Bodecker started to take a sip, he dropped the cup. It shattered on the floor. “Jesus, I should have known better,” Sandy said. “Come on, I better get you home.”

“What kind of goddamn junker you drivin’ now?” he slurred as she helped him into the front seat of her car.

“Honey, this ain’t no junker,” she said.

He looked around inside the station wagon, tried to focus his eyes. “What the fuck is it then?” he said.

“It’s a limousine,” Sandy said.

12

IN THE MOTEL BATHROOM
, Sandy ran the tub full of water and peeled the wrapper off one of the candy bars she kept in her makeup bag for those days when Carl refused to stop and eat. He could go days without food when they were traveling, never thinking about anything but finding the next model. He could suck on those damn cigars and run that dirty knife through his fangs all he wanted, but she wasn’t about to go to bed hungry.