The Devil All the Time (25 page)

“She’s gonna get up in the morning, fix us breakfast.”

“Really?”

“Yeah,” Arvin said, “really.”

And she did, biscuits and eggs and sawmill gravy, was up an hour before they stirred from their blankets on the porch. Arvin noticed that she had washed her face and changed her dress, tied a clean rag around her thin, gray hair. She didn’t say much, but when she sat down and began to fix herself a plate, he knew that he could stop worrying about her now. The next day, when the foreman got out of his pickup and pointed at his watch that it was quitting time, Arvin hurried to his car and drove by Teagardin’s again. He parked a quarter of a mile down the road and walked back, cutting through the woods. Sitting in the fork of a locust tree, he watched the preacher’s house until the sun went down. He didn’t know what he was looking for yet, but he had an idea of where to find it.

38

THREE DAYS LATER AT QUITTING TIME
, Arvin told the boss he wouldn’t be back. “Aw, come on, boy,” the foreman said. “Shit, you ’bout the best worker I got.” He spit a thick string of tobacco juice against the front tire of his pickup. “Stay two more weeks? We be finishing up by then.”

“It ain’t the job, Tom,” Arvin said. “I just got something else needs taking care of right now.”

He drove to Lewisburg and bought two boxes of 9mm bullets and stopped at the house and checked on Emma. She was in the kitchen scrubbing the linoleum floor on her hands and knees. He went to his bedroom and got the German Luger from the bottom drawer of his dresser. It was the first time he’d touched it since Earskell had asked him to put it away over a year ago. After telling his grandmother he’d be back soon, he went over to Stony Creek. He took his time cleaning the gun, then loaded eight shells into the magazine and lined up some cans and bottles. He reloaded four more times over the next hour. By the time he put it back in the glove box, the pistol felt like a part of his hand again. He had missed only three times.

On his way back home, he stopped at the cemetery. They had buried Lenora beside her mother. The monument man hadn’t put the stone up yet. He stood looking down at the dry, brown dirt that marked her place, remembering the last time he’d come here with her to see Helen’s grave. He could vaguely recall how she had tried, in her own awkward way, to flirt with him that afternoon, talking about orphans and star-crossed lovers, and he had gotten aggravated with her. If only he had paid a little more attention, he thought, if only people hadn’t made fun of her so much, maybe things wouldn’t have turned out like they did.

The next morning, he left the house at the usual time, acting as if he was going to work. Though he was certain in his gut that Teagardin was the one, he had to be sure. He began keeping track of the preacher’s every movement. Within a week, he had watched the bastard fuck Pamela Reaster three times in an old farm lane just off Ragged Ridge Road. She walked through the fields from her parents’ house to meet him there, every other day at exactly noon. Teagardin sat in his sports car and studied himself in the mirror until she arrived. After the third time he saw them meet there, Arvin spent an afternoon piling up deadwood and horseweeds to make a blind just a few yards from where the preacher parked under the shade of a tall oak tree. It was Teagardin’s custom to hustle the girl away as soon as he was finished with her. He liked to dawdle a bit alone under the tree, relieving his bladder and listening to bubble gum music on the car radio. Occasionally, Arvin heard him talking to himself, but he could never make out the words. After twenty or thirty minutes, the car would start up, and Teagardin would turn around at the end of the lane and go home.

The next week, the preacher added Pamela’s younger sister to his roster, but the meetings with Beth Ann took place inside the church. By then, Arvin had no doubts, and when he woke up Sunday morning to the sound of the church bells tolling across the holler, he decided the time had come. If he waited any longer, he was afraid he would lose his nerve. He knew Teagardin always met the older girl on Mondays. At least the horny sonofabitch was regular in his habits.

Arvin counted the money he had managed to put back over the last couple of years. He had $315 in the coffee can under his bed. He drove over to Slot Machine’s after Sunday dinner and bought a fifth of whiskey, spent the evening drinking with Earskell on the porch. “You sure are good to me, boy,” the old man said. Arvin had to swallow several times to keep from crying. He thought about tomorrow. This was the last time they would ever share a bottle.

It was a beautiful evening, cooler than it had been for several months. He went inside and got Emma, and she sat with them for a while with her Bible and a glass of ice tea. She hadn’t been back to
the Coal Creek Church of the Holy Ghost Sanctified since the night that Lenora died. “I think fall’s going to come early this year,” she said, marking her place in the book with a bony finger and gazing out across the road at the leaves already beginning to turn rust-colored. “We’re going to have to start thinking about getting some wood in before long, ain’t we, Arvin?”

He looked over at her. She was still staring at the trees on the hillside. “Yeah,” he said. “Be cold before you know it.” He hated himself for deceiving her, pretending everything was going to be all right. He wanted so much to be able to tell them goodbye, but they would be better off not knowing anything if the law came hunting for him. That night, after they went to bed, he packed some clothes in a gym bag and put it in the trunk of his car. He leaned on the porch railing and listened to the faint rumble of a coal train over the next swath of hills heading north. Going back inside, he stuck a hundred dollars in the tin box that Emma kept her needles and thread in. He didn’t sleep any that night, and in the morning he just drank some coffee for breakfast.

He had been sitting in the blind for two hours when the Reaster girl came hurrying across the field, maybe fifteen minutes early. She appeared worried, kept looking at her wristwatch. When Teagardin showed up, easing his car down the rutted road slowly, she didn’t jump in like she had always done in the past. Instead, she stood a few feet away and waited for him to shut the engine off. “Well, get in, honey,” Arvin heard the preacher say. “I got a full sack for you.”

“I ain’t staying,” she said. “We got problems.”

“What do you mean?”

“You were supposed to keep your hands off my sister,” the girl said.

“Oh, shit, Pamela, that didn’t mean anything.”

“No, you don’t understand,” she said. “She told Mother about it.”

“When?”

“About an hour ago. I didn’t think I was going to be able to get away.”

“That little bitch,” Teagardin cursed. “I hardly touched her.”

“That ain’t the way she tells it,” Pamela said. She looked toward the road nervously.

“What did she say exactly?”

“Believe me, Preston, she told everything. She got scared because the bleeding won’t stop.” The girl pointed her finger at him. “You better hope you didn’t do something so she can’t have kids.”

“Shit,” Teagardin said. He got out of the car and paced back and forth for several minutes, his hands clasped behind his back like a general in his tent planning a counterattack. He took a silk handkerchief out of his pants pocket and patted his mouth. “What do you think your old lady will do?” he finally said.

“Well, knowing her, after she takes Beth Ann to the hospital, the first thing she’ll do is call the fucking sheriff. And just so you know, he’s my mom’s cousin.”

Teagardin placed his hands on the girl’s shoulders and looked into her eyes. “But you haven’t said anything about us, right?”

“You think I’m crazy? I’d rather die first.”

Teagardin let go of her and leaned against the car. He looked out over the field before them. He wondered why nobody was farming it anymore. He imagined an old two-story house in ruins, some rusted pieces of antique machinery sitting in the weeds, maybe a hand-dug well of cool, clean water, covered over with rotten boards. Just for a moment, he pictured himself fixing the place back up, settling down to a simple life, preaching on Sundays and working the farm with callused hands through the week, reading good books out on the porch in the evenings after a nice supper, some tender babes playing in the shaded yard. He heard the girl say she was leaving, and when he finally turned to look, she was gone. Then he considered the possibility that perhaps Pamela was lying to him, trying to scare him into keeping off her little sister. He wouldn’t put anything past her, but if what she said was true, he had only an hour or two at best to pack and get out of Greenbrier County. He was just getting ready to start the car when he heard a voice say, “You ain’t much of a preacher, are you?”

Teagardin looked up and saw the Russell boy standing right outside the door of the car pointing a pistol of some kind at him. He’d
never owned a gun, and the only thing he knew about them was that they usually caused trouble. The boy looked bigger up close. Not an ounce of fat on him, he noticed, dark hair, green eyes. He wondered what Cynthia would think of him. Though he knew it was ridiculous, with all the young pussy he was getting, he felt a pang of jealousy just then. It was sad to realize that he’d never look anything like this boy. “What the hell are you doing?” the preacher said.

“Been watching you screw that Reaster girl that just left. And if you try to start that car, I’m gonna blow your fucking hand off.”

Teagardin let go of the ignition key. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, boy. I didn’t touch her. All we did was talk.”

“Maybe not today, but you been plowing her pretty steady.”

“What? You been spying on me?” Maybe the boy was one of those voyeurs, he thought, recalling the term from his collection of nudist magazines.

“I know every fuckin’ move you’ve made for the last two weeks.”

Teagardin looked out the windshield toward the big oak at the end of the lane. He wondered if it could be true. In his head, he counted the number of times he’d been here with Pamela over the last couple of weeks. At least six. That was bad enough, but at the same time he felt a little relieved. At least the boy hadn’t seen him banging his sister. Hard to tell what the crazy hillbilly might have done. “It ain’t what it looks like,” he said.

“What is it then?” Arvin asked. He flipped the safety off the gun.

Teagardin started to explain that the little slut wouldn’t leave him alone, but then he reminded himself to be careful with his words. He considered the possibility that maybe this hoodlum had a crush on Pamela. Perhaps that’s what this was all about. Jealousy. He tried to recall what Shakespeare had written about it, but the words wouldn’t come to him. “Say, ain’t you Mrs. Russell’s grandson?” the preacher asked. He looked down at the clock on the dash. He could have been halfway home by now. Rivulets of greasy sweat began to run down his pink, clean-shaven face.

“That’s right,” Arvin said. “And Lenora Laferty was my sister.”

Teagardin turned his head slowly, his eyes focused on the boy’s
belt buckle. Arvin could almost see the wheels spinning inside his head, watched him swallow several times. “That was a shame, what that poor girl did,” the preacher said. “I pray for her soul every night.”

“You pray for the baby’s, too?”

“Now you got it all wrong there, my friend. I didn’t have nothing to do with that.”

“Do with what?”

The man squirmed around in the car’s tight seat, glanced at the German Luger. “She came to me, said she wanted to make a confession, told me she was with child. I promised her I wouldn’t tell anybody.”

Arvin took a step back and said, “I’ll bet you did, you fat sonofabitch.” Then he fired three shots, blew out the tires on the driver’s side and put the last one through the back door.

“Stop!” Teagardin yelled. “Stop, goddamn it!” He threw his hands up.

“No more lies,” Arvin said, moving forward and jamming the pistol against the preacher’s temple. “I know you was the one got her that way.”

Teagardin jerked his head away from the gun. “Okay,” he said. He took a deep breath. “I swear, I was going to take care of everything, I really was, and then … and then the next thing I know she’d done herself in. She was crazy.”

“No,” Arvin said, “she was just lonely.” He pressed the barrel against the back of Teagardin’s head. “But don’t worry, I ain’t gonna make you suffer like she did.”

“Now hold on here, goddamn it. Jesus Christ, man, you wouldn’t kill a preacher, would you?”

“You ain’t no preacher, you worthless piece of shit,” Arvin said.

Teagardin began crying, true tears running down his face for the first time since he was a little boy. “Let me pray first,” he sobbed. He started to put his hands together.

“I already did it for you,” Arvin said. “Put in one of them special requests you fuckers are always talking about, asked Him to send you straight to hell.”

“No,” Teagardin said, right before the gun went off. A fragment of the bullet came out right above his nose and landed with a ping on the dashboard. His big body pitched forward, and his face banged against the steering wheel. His left foot kicked the brake pedal a couple of times. Arvin waited until he stopped moving, then reached inside and picked the sticky shell fragment up off the dash and threw it into the weeds. He regretted shooting those other rounds off now, but there wasn’t time to dig around for them. He hurriedly scattered the blind that he’d built and picked up the can he’d used for his cigarette butts. In five minutes, he was back at his car. He tossed the butt can in the ditch. As he stuck the German Luger up under the dash, he suddenly thought of Teagardin’s young wife. She was probably sitting over in their little house right now, waiting for him to get home, the same as Emma would be doing for him tonight. He leaned back in the seat and shut his eyes for a moment, tried to think of other things. He started the engine and drove out to the end of Ragged Ridge, made a left toward Route 60. The way he had it figured, he could be in Meade, Ohio, sometime tonight if he didn’t stop. He hadn’t planned any further ahead than that.