The Devil All the Time (15 page)

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. Every couple of minutes, he’d stop preaching and pull a squirming worm or crunchy roach or slimy slug out of an old bait bucket and chew on it like a piece of candy. Business picked up after that.
Depending on the crowd, they did four, sometimes five shows every evening, alternating with the Flamingo Lady every forty-five minutes. At the end of each show, Roy would quickly step out behind the tent to regurgitate the bugs and Theodore would follow in his wheelchair. While waiting to go on again, they smoked and sipped from a bottle, half listened to the drunks inside whoop and holler and try to coax the fake bird into stripping off her plumes.

By 1963, they had been with this particular carnival, Billy Bradford Family Amusements, for almost four years, traveling from one end of the hot, humid South to the other from early spring until late fall in a retired school bus packed with moldering canvas and folding chairs and metal poles, always setting up in dusty, pig-shit towns where the locals thought a couple of creaky whirly rides and some toothless, flea-bitten jungle cats along with a tattered freak show was high-class entertainment. On a good night, Roy and Theodore could make twenty or thirty bucks. The Flamingo Lady and Flapjack the Clown got most of what they didn’t spend on booze or bugs or at the hot dog stand. 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.

19

ON ARVIN’S FIFTEENTH BIRTHDAY
, Uncle Earskell handed him a pistol wrapped in a soft cloth along with a dusty box of shells. “This was your daddy’s,” the old man told him. “It’s a German Luger. Brought it back from the war. I figure he’d want you to have it.” The old man had never had any use for handguns, and so he’d hid it away under a floorboard in the smokehouse right after Willard left for Ohio. The only time he’d touched it since was to clean it occasionally. Seeing the elated look on the boy’s face, he was glad now he’d never broken down and sold it. They had just finished supper, and there was one piece of fried rabbit left on the platter in the middle of the table. Earskell debated whether or not to save the haunch for his breakfast, then picked it up and started gnawing on it.

Arvin unwrapped the cloth carefully. The only gun his father had kept at home was a .22 rifle, and Willard never allowed him to touch it, let alone shoot it. Earskell, on the other hand, had handed the boy a 16-gauge Remington and took him to the woods just three or four weeks after he came to live with them. “In this house, you better know how to handle a gun unless you want to starve to death,” the old man had told him.

“But I don’t want to shoot anything,” Arvin said that day, when Earskell stopped and pointed out two gray squirrels jumping back and forth on some branches high in a hickory tree.

“Didn’t I see you eatin’ a pork chop this morning?”

“Yeah.”

The old man shrugged his shoulders. “Somebody had to kill that hog and butcher it, didn’t they?”

“I guess so.”

Earskell lifted his own shotgun then and fired. One of the squirrels
fell to the ground, and the old man started toward it. “Just try not to tear ’em up too bad,” he said over his shoulder. “You want to have something left to put in the pan.”

The coat of oil made the Luger shine like new in the wavering light cast from the kerosene lamps hanging at both ends of the room. “I never did hear him talk about it,” Arvin said, lifting the gun up by the grip and pointing it toward the window. “About being in the service, I mean.” There had been quite a few things his mother had warned him about when it came to his father, and asking questions about what he had seen in the war was high on the list.

“Yeah, I know,” Earskell said. “I remember when he got back, I wanted him to tell me about the Japs, but anytime I brought it up, he’d start in about your mother again.” He finished the rabbit and laid the bone on his plate. “Hell, I don’t think he even knew her name at the time. Just saw her waiting tables in some eatin’ place when he was coming home.”

“The Wooden Spoon,” Arvin said. “He took me there once after she got sick.”

“I think he saw some rough things over on them islands,” the old man said. He looked around for a rag, then wiped his hands on the front of his overalls. “I never did find out if they ate their dead or not.”

Arvin bit his lip and swallowed hard. “This is the best present I ever got.”

Just then, Emma entered the kitchen carrying a plain yellow cake in a small pan. A single candle was planted in the middle of it. Lenora followed behind dressed in the long blue dress and bonnet that she usually wore only to church. She held a box of matches in one hand and her cracked leather Bible in the other. “What’s that?” Emma said when she saw Arvin holding the Luger.

“That’s Willard’s gun he give me,” Earskell said. “I figured it was time to pass it on to the boy.”

“Oh, my,” Emma said. She set the cake down on the table and grabbed up the hem of her checkered apron to wipe back a tear. Seeing the gun reminded her once again of her son and the promise she’d failed to keep all those years ago. Sometimes she couldn’t help but
wonder if they would all still be alive today if she had only convinced Willard to stay here and marry Helen.

Everyone was silent for a moment, almost as if they knew what the old woman was thinking. Then Lenora struck a match and said in a singsong voice, “Happy birthday, Arvin.” She lit the candle, the same one they had used to celebrate her fourteenth birthday a few months ago.

“It ain’t much use for anything,” Earskell went on, ignoring the cake and nodding at the gun. “You got to be right up on something to hit it.”

“Go ahead, Arvin,” Lenora said.

“Might as well throw a rock,” the old man joked.

“Arvin?”

“The shotgun will do you more good.”

“Make your wish before the candle burns out,” Emma said.

“Them’s nine-millimeter shells,” Earskell pointed out. “Banner don’t carry them at the store, but he can order them special.”

“Better hurry!” Lenora yelled.

“Okay, okay,” the boy said, setting the gun down on the cloth. He bent down and blew out the tiny flame.

“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.

“Now you know better than to ask that,” Emma said.

“That’s all right, Grandma,” Arvin said. “I wished that I could take you all back to Ohio and show you where we lived. It was nice, up there on the hill. At least it was before Mom took sick.”

“Did I ever tell you about the time I lived in Cincinnati?” Earskell said.

Arvin looked at the two women and winked. “No,” he said, “I don’t recall it.”

“Lord, not again,” Emma muttered, while Lenora, smiling to herself, lifted the stub of the candle off the cake and put it in the matchbox.

“Yep, followed me a girl up there,” the old man said. “She was from over on Fox Knob, was raised right next to the Riley place. Her house ain’t there no more. Wanted to go to secretary school. I wasn’t much older than you are now.”

“Who wanted to go to secretary school,” Arvin asked, “you or the girl?”

“Ha! Her did,” Earskell said. He took a long breath, then slowly let it out. “Her name was Alice Louise Berry. You remember her, don’t you, Emma?”

“Yes, I do, Earskell.”

“So why didn’t you stay?” Arvin said, without thinking. Though he had heard parts of the story a hundred times, he’d never before asked the old man why he had ended up back in Coal Creek. 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. In the five years since his parents had passed, he had never once mentioned the hard feelings he held against Willard for leaving him. Now he felt like an ass for opening his mouth and putting the old man on the spot. He began wrapping the pistol back up in the cloth.

Earskell peered across the room with dim, cloudy eyes as if he was searching for the answer in the flowered wallpaper, though he knew the reason well enough. Alice Louise Berry had died in the influenza epidemic of 1918, along with 3 million or so other poor souls, just a few weeks after starting her classes at the Gilmore Sanderson Secretarial School. If only they had stayed in the hills, Earskell often thought, she might still be alive. But Alice always had big dreams, which was one of the things he had loved about her, and he was glad that he hadn’t tried to talk her out of it. He was certain those days they spent in Cincinnati among the tall buildings and crowded streets before she took the fever were the happiest ones of her life. His, too, for that matter. After a minute or so, he blinked away the memories and said, “That sure looks like a dandy cake.”

Emma took up her knife and cut it into four pieces, one for each of them.

20

ONE DAY ARVIN WENT LOOKING FOR LENORA
after school let out and found her backed up against the trash incinerator next to the bus garage, surrounded by three boys. As he walked up behind them, he heard Gene Dinwoodie tell her, “Hell, you’re so damn ugly I’d have to put a sack over your head before I could get a hard-on.” The other two, Orville Buckman and Tommy Matson, laughed and squeezed in closer to her. They were seniors who had been held back a year or two, and all of them were bigger than Arvin. They spent most of their time at school sitting in the shop building trading dirty jokes with the worthless industrial arts teacher and smoking Bugler. Lenora had shut her eyes tight and begun praying. Tears were running down her pink face. Arvin got only a couple of licks in on Dinwoodie before the others tackled him to the ground and took turns punching him. While he was lying in the gravel, he thought, as he often did when in the middle of a fight, of the hunter that his father had beaten so badly that day in the outhouse mud. But unlike that man, Arvin never gave up. They might have killed him if the janitor hadn’t come along with a cart of cardboard boxes to burn. His head ached for a week, and he had trouble reading the blackboard for several more.

Though it took him almost two months, Arvin managed to catch each of them alone. One evening right before dark, he followed Orville Buckman to Banner’s store. He stood behind a tree a hundred yards down the road and watched the boy come back out swigging a pop and eating the last of a Little Debbie. Just as Orville started past him with the bottle tipped up to take another drink, Arvin stepped out into the road. He smacked the bottom of the Pepsi bottle with the palm of his hand and sent the glass neck halfway down the big boy’s throat, breaking two of his rotten front teeth off. By the time Orville
realized what had hit him, the fight was pretty much finished except for the blow that put his lights out. An hour later, he woke up lying in the ditch along the road choking on blood and a paper sack over his head.

A couple of weeks later, Arvin drove Earskell’s old Ford over to the Coal Creek High School basketball game. They were playing the team from Millersburg, which always brought a big turnout. He sat in the car smoking Camel cigarettes and watching the front door for Tommy Matson to show his face. It was drizzling rain, a chilly, dark Friday night in early November. Matson liked to think of himself as the school cock-hound, was always bragging about the pussy he picked up at the games while their stupid boyfriends scrambled up and down the gym floor chasing a rubber ball. Right before halftime, just as Arvin flipped another butt out the window, he saw his next target walk outside with his arm around a freshman girl named Susie Cox and head to the row of school buses parked in the back of the lot. Arvin got out of the Ford carrying a tire iron and followed them. He watched Matson open the rear door of one of the yellow buses and help Susie up inside. After waiting a few minutes, Arvin twisted the handle on the door and let it swing open with a raspy squeak. “What was that?” he heard the girl say.

“Nothing,” Matson told her. “I must not got it shut all the way. Now come on, girl, let’s get them bloomers off.”

“Not until you close that door,” she said.

“Goddamn it,” Matson grumbled, raising up off her. “You better be worth it.” He walked down the narrow aisle holding his pants up with one hand.

When he leaned out to grab the latch and pull the door back, Arvin swung the tire iron and hit Matson across the kneecaps, toppling him out of the bus. “Jesus!” he yelled when he hit the gravel, landing hard on his right shoulder. Swinging the tire iron again, Arvin cracked two of his ribs, then kicked him until he stopped trying to get up. He took a paper bag out of his jacket and knelt down beside the moaning boy. Grabbing hold of Matson’s curly hair, he pulled his head up. The girl inside the bus didn’t make a peep.

The next Monday at school, Gene Dinwoodie walked up to Arvin in the cafeteria and said, “I’d like to see you try and put a sack over my head, you sonofabitch.”

Arvin was sitting at a table with Mary Jane Turner, a new girl at the school. Her father had grown up in Coal Creek, then spent fifteen years in the merchant marine before returning home to claim his inheritance, a run-down farm on the side of a hill that his grandfather had left him. The redheaded girl could curse like a sailor when the opportunity presented itself, and though Arvin wasn’t sure why, he liked that a lot, especially when they were making out. “Leave us alone, you dumb prick,” she said, glaring scornfully at the tall boy standing over them. Arvin smiled.