The Devil All the Time

10

THE COUPLE HAD BEEN ROAMING the Midwest for several weeks during the summer of 1965, always on the hunt, two nobodies in a black Ford station wagon purchased for one hundred dollars at a used-car lot in Meade, Ohio, called Brother Whitey’s. It was the third vehicle they had gotten off the minister in as many years. The man on the passenger’s side was turning to fat and believed in signs and had a habit of picking his decayed teeth with a Buck pocketknife. The woman always drove and wore tight shorts and flimsy blouses that showed off her pale, bony body in a way they both thought enticing. She chain-smoked any kind of menthol cigarettes she could get her hands on while he chewed on cheap black cigars that he called dog dicks. The Ford burned oil and leaked brake fluid and threatened to spill its metal guts all over the highway anytime they pushed it past fifty miles an hour. The man liked to think that it looked like a hearse, but the woman preferred limousine. Their names were Carl and Sandy Henderson, but sometimes they had other names, too.

Over the past four years, Carl had come to believe that hitchhikers were the best, and there were plenty of them on the road in those days. He called Sandy the bait, and she called him the shooter, and they both called the hitchhikers the models. That very evening, just north of Hannibal, Missouri, they had tricked and tortured and killed a young enlisted man in a wooded area thick with humidity and mosquitoes. As soon as they picked him up, the boy had kindly offered them sticks of Juicy Fruit, said he’d drive for a while if the lady needed a break. “That’ll be the goddamn day,” Carl said; and Sandy rolled her eyes at the snide tone her husband sometimes used, as if he thought he was a better class of trash than the stuff they found along the roads. Whenever he got like that, she just wanted to stop the car and tell the poor fool in the backseat to get out while he still had a chance. One of these days, she promised herself that was exactly what she was going to do, hit the brakes and knock Mister Big Shot down a notch or two.

But not tonight. The boy in the backseat was blessed with a face smooth as butter and tiny brown freckles and strawberry-colored hair, and Sandy could never resist the ones who looked like angels. “What’s your name, honey?” she asked him, after they’d gone a mile or two down the highway. She made her voice nice and easy; and when the boy looked up and their eyes met in the rearview mirror, she winked and gave him the smile that Carl had taught her, the one he’d made her practice night after night at the kitchen table until her face was ready to fall off and stick to the floor like a pie crust, a smile that hinted at every dirty possibility a young man could ever imagine.

“Private Gary Matthew Bryson,” the boy said. It sounded odd to her, him saying his full name like that, like he was up for inspection or some such shit, but she ignored it and went right on talking. She hoped he wasn’t going to be the serious type. Those kinds always made her part of the job that much harder.

“Now that’s a nice name,” Sandy said. In the mirror, she watched as a shy grin spread over his face, saw him stick a fresh piece of gum in his mouth. “Which of them you go by?” she asked.

“Gary,” he said, flipping the silver gum wrapper out the window. “That was my daddy’s name.”

“That other one, Matthew, that one’s from the Bible, ain’t it, Carl?” Sandy said.

“Hell, everything’s from the Bible,” her husband said, staring out the windshield. “Ol’ Matt, he was one of the apostles.”

“Carl used to teach Sunday school, didn’t you, baby?”

With a sigh, Carl twisted his big body around in the seat, more to take another look at the boy than anything else. “That’s right,” he said with a tight-lipped smile. “I used to teach Sunday school.” Sandy patted his knee, and he turned back around without another word and pulled a road map from the glove box.

“You probably already knew that, though, didn’t you, Gary?” Sandy said. “That your middle name is right out of the Good Book?”

The boy quit chomping his gum for a moment. “We never went to church much when I was a kid,” he said.

A worried look swept across Sandy’s face, and she reached for her cigarettes on the dash. “But you been baptized, right?” she asked.

“Well, sure, we ain’t complete heathens,” the boy said. “I just don’t know any of that Bible stuff.”

“That’s good,” Sandy said, a hint of relief in her voice. “No sense takin’ chances, not with something like that. Lord, who knows where a person might end up if he wasn’t saved?”

The soldier was going home to see his mother before the army shipped him off to Germany or that new place called Vietnam, Carl couldn’t recall which now. He didn’t give a damn if he was named after some crazy sonofabitch in the New Testament, or that his girlfriend had made him promise to wear her class ring around his neck until he returned from overseas. Knowing stuff like that only complicated things later on; and so Carl found it easier to ignore the small talk, let Sandy handle all the dumb questions, the pitter-patter bullshit. She was good at it, flirting and flapping her jaws, putting them at ease. They had both come a long way since they’d first met, her, a lonely, scrawny stick of a girl waiting tables at the Wooden Spoon in Meade, eighteen years old and taking shit off customers in hopes of a quarter tip. And him? Not much better, a flabby-faced mama’s boy who had just lost his mother, with no future or friends except for what a camera might bring. He’d had no idea, as he walked into the Wooden Spoon that first night away from home, of what that meant or what to do next. The only thing he had known for sure, as he sat in the booth watching the skinny waitress finish wiping the tables off before turning out the lights, was that he needed, more than anything else in the world, to take her picture. They had been together ever since.

Of course, there were also things that Carl needed to say to the hitchhikers, but that could usually wait until after they parked the car. “Take a look at this,” he’d begin, when he pulled the camera out of the glove box, a Leica M3 35mm, and held it up for the man to see. “Cost four hundred new, but I got it for damn near nothing.” And though the sexy smile never left Sandy’s lips, she couldn’t help but feel a little bitter every time he bragged about it. She didn’t know why she had followed Carl into this life, wouldn’t even try to put such a thing into mere words, but she did know that that damn camera had never been a bargain, that it was going to cost them plenty in the end. Then she’d hear him ask the next model, in a voice that sounded almost like he was joking, “So, how would you like to have your picture took with a good-looking woman?” Even after all this time, it still amazed her that grown-up men could be so easy.

After they carried and dragged the army boy’s naked body a few yards into the woods and rolled it under some bushes heavy with purple berries, they went through his clothes and duffel bag and found nearly three hundred dollars tucked away in a pair of clean white socks. That was more money than Sandy made in a month. “The lying little weasel,” Carl said. “Remember me asking him for some gas money?” He swiped at a cloud of insects gathered around his sweaty, red face, stuck the wad of bills in his pants pocket. A pistol with a long pitted barrel lay beside him on the ground next to the camera. “Like my old mother used to say,” he went on, “you can’t trust any of them.”

“Who?” Sandy said.

“Them goddamn redheads,” he said. “Hell, they’ll spit out a lie even when the truth fits better. They just can’t help it. It’s something got fucked up in their evolution.”

Up on the main road a car with a burned-out muffler went by slowly, and Carl cocked his head and listened to the pop-pop sound until it faded away. Then he looked over at Sandy kneeling beside him, studied her face for a moment in the gray dusk. “Here, clean yourself off,” he said, handing her the boy’s T-shirt, still damp with his sweat. He pointed at her chin. “You got some splatter right there. That skinny bastard was full as a tick.”

After wiping the shirt over her face, Sandy tossed it on top of the green duffel and stood up. She buttoned her blouse with shaky hands, brushed the dirt and bits of dead leaf off her legs. Walking to the car, she bent down and examined herself in the side mirror, then reached through the window and grabbed her cigarettes off the dash. She leaned against the front bumper and lit a smoke, dug a tiny piece of gravel out of one skinned knee with a pink fingernail. “Jesus, I hate it when they cry like that,” she said. “That’s the worst.”

Carl shook his head as he flipped through the boy’s wallet one more time. “Girl, you got to get over that shit,” he said. “Them tears he shed is the kind of thing makes for a good picture. Those last couple minutes was the only time in his whole miserable life when he wasn’t faking it.”

As Sandy watched him stuff everything that belonged to the boy back into the duffel, she was tempted to ask if she could keep the girlfriend’s class ring, but decided it wasn’t worth the hassle. Carl had everything figured out, and he could turn into a raging maniac if she tried to flaunt even one little rule. Personal items had to be disposed of properly. That was Rule #4. Or maybe it was #5. Sandy could never keep the order of the rules straight, no matter how many times he tried to drill them into her head, but she would always remember that Gary Matthew Bryson loved Hank Williams and hated the army’s powdered eggs. Then her stomach growled and she wondered, just for a second, if those berries hanging over his head back there in the woods were fit to eat or not.

AN HOUR LATER, they pulled into a deserted gravel pit they had passed by earlier when Sandy and Private Bryson were still cracking jokes and making fuck-eyes at each other. She parked behind a small utility shed cobbled together out of scrap lumber and rusty sheets of tin and shut off the engine. Carl climbed out of the car with the duffel bag and a can of gasoline they always carried. A few yards past the shed, he set the bag down and sprinkled some gas on it. After he had it burning good, he went back to the car and searched the backseat with a flashlight, found a wad of gum stuck under one of the armrests. “Worse than some kid,” he said. “You’d think the military would teach them better than that. With soldiers like that one, we’ll be fucked if those Russians ever decide to invade.” He peeled the gum off carefully with his thumbnail and then returned to the fire.

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.

The hot water relieved the itching between her legs, and she leaned back and closed her eyes as she nibbled on the Milky Way. The day they came across the Iowa boy, she had gotten off the main highway looking for a place to pull over and take a nap when he jumped up out of a soybean field looking like a scarecrow. As soon as the boy stuck his thumb out, Carl slapped his hands together and said, “Here we 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. Setting the candy bar on the edge of the tub, 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.

They hadn’t driven very far when the boy started chanting in a high-pitched voice, “California, here I come, California, here I come”; and she knew that Carl was going to be extra mean to this one because they just wanted to forget all about that goddamn place. At a gas station outside of Ames, she’d filled the car with gas and bought two bottles of orange screwdriver, thinking that might quiet the boy down some; but once he got a couple of sips in him, he started singing along to the radio, and that made things even worse. After the scarecrow squawked his sorry way through five or six songs, Carl leaned over to her and said, “By God, this bastard’s gonna pay.”

“I think he might be retarded or something,” she said in a low voice, hoping Carl might let him go because he was superstitious that way.

Carl glanced back at the boy, then turned around and shook his head. “He’s just stupid is all. Or a goddamn nutcase. There’s a difference, you know.”

“Well, at least turn the radio off,” she suggested. “No sense egging him on.”

“Fuck it, let him have his fun,” Carl said. “I’ll take the songbird out of him directly.”

She dropped the candy wrapper on the floor and ran some more hot water. 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. Out in the other room, Carl was talking to himself, but that usually didn’t mean anything, especially right after they had finished with another model. Then he got a little louder, and she reached up and made sure the door was locked, just in case.

With the Iowa boy, they had parked at the edge of a garbage dump, and Carl had taken the camera out and started his spiel while he and the boy finished off the second bottle of screwdriver. “My wife loves to play around, but I’m just too damn old to get it up anymore,” he told the boy that afternoon. “You know what I mean?”

Sandy had puffed on her cigarette, watched the scarecrow in the rearview mirror. He rocked back and forth, grinning wildly and nodding his head to everything that Carl said, his eyes blank as pebbles. For a moment, she thought she was going to vomit. It was more nerves than anything else, and the sick feeling passed quickly, like it always did. Then Carl suggested that they get out of the car, and while he spread a blanket on the ground, she reluctantly began taking off her clothes. The boy started up his damn singing again, but she put her finger to her lips and told him to be quiet for a little while. “Let’s have some fun now,” she said, forcing a smile and patting a spot next to her on the blanket.

It took the Iowa boy longer than most to realize what was happening, but even then he didn’t struggle too much. Carl took his time and managed at least twenty photos of junk sticking out of various places: lightbulbs and clothes hangers and soup cans. The light was starting to fade by the time he set the camera down and finished things off. He wiped his hands and knife on the boy’s shirt, then walked around until he found a discarded Westinghouse refrigerator half buried in the trash. With the shovel from the car, he cleared the top off and pried the door open while Sandy went through the boy’s pants. “That’s it?” Carl said when she handed him a plastic whistle and an Indian head penny.

“What did you expect?” she said. “He don’t even have a billfold.” She glanced inside the icebox. The walls were covered with a thin coat of green mold, and a mason jar of gooey, gray jam lay smashed in one corner. “Jesus, you going to put him in there?”

“I’d say he’s slept in worse places,” Carl said.

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. He squatted down and aimed the camera. “That’s a good one,” he said, after he clicked the shutter. “Real sweet.” Then he stood up and stuck the boy’s whistle in his mouth. “Go ahead and shut the goddamn thing. He can dream about California all he wants now.” With the shovel, he began spreading trash over the top of the metal tomb.

The water grew cold, and she stepped out of the tub. She brushed her teeth and smeared some cold cream on her face and ran a comb through her wet hair. The army boy had been the best she’d had in a long time, and she planned to go to sleep tonight thinking about him. Anything to chase that damn scarecrow out of her head. When she came out of the bathroom in her yellow nightgown, Carl was lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling. It had been a week, she figured, since he’d bathed. She lit a cigarette and told him that he wasn’t sleeping with her unless he washed the smell of those boys off.

“They’re called models, not boys,” he said. He rose up and swung his heavy legs off the bed. “How many times I got to tell you that?”

“I don’t care what they’re called,” Sandy said. “That’s a clean bed.”

Carl glanced down at the flies on the rug. “Yeah, that’s what you think,” he said, heading for the bathroom. He peeled off his grimy clothes and sniffed himself. He happened to like the way he smelled, but maybe he should be more careful. Lately, he was beginning to worry that he was turning into some kind of fairy, and he suspected that Sandy thought the same thing. He tested the shower water with his hand, then stepped into the tub. He rubbed the bar of soap over his hairy, bloated body. Beating off to the photos wasn’t a good sign, he knew that, but sometimes he couldn’t help it. It was hard for him when they were back home, sitting alone in that crummy apartment night after night while Sandy was pouring drinks in the bar.

As he dried himself off, he tried to recall the last time they had made love. Last spring maybe, though he couldn’t be sure. He tried to imagine Sandy young and fresh again, before all their shit started. Of course, he had soon found out about the cook who had taken her cherry and the one-nighters with the pimple-faced punks, but still, there was an air of innocence about her back then. Perhaps, he sometimes thought, that was because he didn’t have that much experience himself when he first met her. Sure, he’d slept with a few whores — the neighborhood had been full of them — but he’d only been in his mid-twenties when his mother had the stroke that left her paralyzed and practically speechless. By then, there hadn’t been any boyfriends banging on her door for several years, and so Carl was stuck with looking after her. 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. Instead, he began applying himself to recording her long downward slide on film, a new photo of her shriveled-up body twice a week for the next thirteen years. Eventually, she got used to it. Then one morning he found her dead. He sat on the edge of the bed and tried to eat the egg he’d mashed up for her breakfast, but he couldn’t get it down. Three days later, he tossed the first shovelful of dirt on her coffin.

Besides his camera, he had $217 left after paying for her funeral and a rickety Ford that would run only in dry weather. The odds of the car ever making it across the United States were slim to none, but he had dreamed of a new life almost as long as he had been alive, and now his best and last excuse was finally at peace in St. Margaret’s Cemetery. And so, on the day before the rent ran out, he boxed up the curling stacks of sickbed photos and set them by the curb for the garbage truck. Then he drove west from Parson’s Avenue to High Street and headed out of Columbus. His destination was Hollywood, but he had no sense of direction in those days, and somehow that evening he ended up in Meade, Ohio, and the Wooden Spoon. Looking back on it, Carl was convinced that fate had steered him there, but sometimes, when he remembered the soft, sweet Sandy of five years ago, he almost wished he had never stopped.

Shaking himself from his reverie, he squeezed some toothpaste into his mouth with one hand while fondling himself with the other. It took a few minutes, but finally he was ready. He walked out of the bathroom naked and a bit apprehensive, the purple tip of his hard-on pressing against his sagging, stretch-marked belly.

But Sandy was already asleep; and when he reached out and touched her shoulder, she opened her eyes and groaned. “I don’t feel good,” she said, turning over and curling up on the other side of the bed. Carl stood over her for a couple of minutes, breathing through his mouth, feeling the blood leave him. Then he turned the light off and went back into the bathroom. Fuck it, she didn’t give a damn that he was asking for something important tonight. He sat down on the commode, and his hand fell between his legs. He saw the army boy’s smooth, white body, and he picked up the wet washcloth off the floor and bit down on it. The sharp end of the leafy branch had initially been too big to fit in the bullet hole, but Carl had worked it back and forth until it stayed erect, looking like a young tree sprouting from Private Bryson’s muscled chest. After he finished, he stood up and spit the washcloth into the sink. 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.

Later that night, he awoke in a panic, his fat heart quivering in its ribbed cage like a trapped and frightened animal. According to the clock on the nightstand, he had been asleep less than an hour. He started to roll over, but then lurched out of bed and stumbled to the window, jerked the curtain open. Thank God, the station wagon was still sitting in the parking lot. “You dumb bastard,” he said to himself. Pulling on his pants, he walked across the gravel to the car in his bare feet and unlocked the door. A mass of thick clouds hovered over him. He took the six rolls of film from the dash and carried them back to the room, stuffed them inside his shoes. He’d completely forgotten about them, a clear violation of his Rule #7. Sandy muttered something in her sleep about scarecrows or some such shit. Going back to the open doorway, Carl lit another of her cigarettes and stood looking out into the night. As he cursed himself for being so careless, the clouds shifted, revealing a small patch of stars off to the east. He squinted through the cigarette smoke and started to count them, but then he stopped and closed the door. One more number, one more sign, that wouldn’t change a goddamn thing tonight.

13

THREE MEN WERE SITTING AT A TABLE drinking beer when Bodecker entered the Tecumseh Lounge. The dark room lit up with sunlight for a brief moment, casting the sheriff’s long shadow across the floor. Then the door swung shut behind him and everything settled into gloom again. A Patsy Cline song came to a sad, quavering end on the jukebox. None of the men said a word as the sheriff walked past them toward the bar. One was a car thief and another a wife beater. They’d both spent time in his jail, waxed his cruiser on several occasions. Though he didn’t know the third man, he figured it was just a matter of time.

Bodecker sat down on a stool and waited for Juanita to finish frying a hamburger on the greasy grill. He recalled that she had served him his first whiskey in this bar not so many years ago. He’d chased after the feeling he’d gotten that night for the next seven years, but never found it again. He reached in his pocket for one of the candies, then decided to hold off. She laid the sandwich on a paper plate along with a few potato chips she scooped out of a metal lard bucket and a long pale pickle she forked from a dirty glass jar. Carrying the plate to the table, she set it down in front of the car thief. Bodecker heard one of the men say something about covering up the pool table before somebody got sick. Another one laughed and he felt his face begin to burn. “You quit that,” Juanita said in a low voice.

She went to the register and made the car thief’s change and took it back to him. “These tater chips are stale,” he told her.

“Then don’t eat ’em,” she said.

“Now, darling,” the wife beater said, “that ain’t no way to be.”

Ignoring him, Juanita lit a cigarette and walked down to the end of the bar where Bodecker sat. “Hey, stranger,” she said, “what can I get—”

“—and by God if her ass didn’t drop open like a lunch bucket,” one of the men said loudly just then, and the table erupted into laughter.

Juanita shook her head. “Can I borrow your gun?” she said to Bodecker. “Those bastards been in here since I opened up this morning.”

He watched them in the long mirror that ran behind the bar. The car thief was giggling like a schoolgirl while the wife beater mashed the potato chips on the table with his fist. The third man was leaned back in his chair with a bored expression on his face, cleaning his fingernails with a matchstick. “I could run ’em out if you want,” Bodecker said.

“Nah, that’s okay,” she said. “They’d just come back later wanting to give me some more grief.” She blew smoke out of the side of her mouth and half smiled. She hoped her boy wasn’t in trouble again. The last time, she’d had to borrow two weeks’ pay to get him out of jail, all over five record albums he’d stuck down his pants at the Woolworth’s. Merle Haggard or Porter Wagoner, that would have been bad enough, but Gerry and the Pacemakers? Herman’s Hermits? The Zombies? Thank God his father was dead, that’s all she could say. “So what can I do you for?”

Bodecker gazed for a moment at the bottles lined up behind the bar. “You got any coffee?”

“Just instant,” she said. “Don’t get many coffee drinkers in here.”

He made a face. “That stuff hurts my stomach,” he said. “How about a Seven-Up?”

After Juanita set the bottle of pop down in front of him, Bodecker lit a cigarette and said, “So Sandy ain’t come in yet, huh?”

“Ha,” Juanita said. “I wish. She’s been gone over two weeks now.”

“What? She quit?”

“No, nothing like that,” the barmaid said. “She’s on vacation.”

“Again?”

“I don’t know how they do it,” Juanita said, lightening up, relieved that his visit didn’t seem to have anything to do with her son. “I don’t reckon they stay any place fancy, but I barely make enough here to pay the rent on that ol’ trailer I live in. And you know damn well Carl ain’t paying for none of it.”

Bodecker took a sip of the pop and thought again about the phone call. So it probably was true, but if Sandy’s been tricking for over a year, like the bitch said, why in the hell hadn’t he heard about it before now? Maybe it was a good thing he had taken the pledge. The whiskey had evidently started turning his brain to mush. Then he glanced over at the pool table and considered other things he might have been careless about the past few months. A sudden cold chill swept over him. He had to swallow several times to keep the 7-Up from coming back up. “When she coming back?” he asked.

“She told Leroy she’d be home by the end of this week. I sure hope so. The tight ass won’t hire no extra help.”

“You got any idea where they were going?”

“It’s hard to tell about that girl,” Juanita said with a shrug. “She was talking about Virginia Beach, but I just can’t picture Carl sunning himself by some ocean for two weeks, can you?”

Bodecker shook his head. “To tell you the truth, I can’t picture that sonofabitch doing anything.” Then he stood up and laid a dollar on the bar. “Look,” he said, “when she gets back, tell her I need to talk to her, okay?”

“Sure, Lee, I’ll do that,” the barmaid said.

After he walked out the door, one of the men yelled, “Hey, Juanita, have you heard what Hen Matthews been saying about that big-headed bastard?”

14

A CAR DOOR SLAMMED in the parking lot. Carl opened his eyes, looked across the room at the flowers and fruit on the wall. The clock said it was still early morning, but he was already covered in sweat. He got out of bed and went to the bathroom, emptied his bladder. He didn’t comb his hair or brush his teeth or wash his face. He dressed in the same clothes he’d worn for the past week, his purple shirt, a baggy pair of shiny, gray suit pants. Sticking the film canisters in his pockets, he sat on the edge of a chair and put his shoes on. He thought about waking Sandy up so they could get a move on, but then decided to let her rest. They’d slept in the car the past three nights. He figured he owed her that, and besides, they were going home anyway. No reason to hurry now.

While he waited for her to wake up, Carl chewed on a cigar and took the army boy’s wad of money out of his pocket. As he counted it again, he remembered a time the year before when they were cutting across the lower end of Minnesota. They were clinging to their last three dollars when the radiator on this ’49 Chevy coupe they were traveling in that summer blew a hole. He managed to temporarily seal the leak with a can of black pepper he carried for just such an emergency, a trick he’d heard about at a truck stop one time. They found a hick gas station a mile or so off the highway before it busted open again, ended up spending the bigger part of a day waiting around while some grease monkey with a pack of Red Man hanging out of his back pocket kept promising to fix it as soon as he finished a tune-up his boss wanted done yesterday. “Won’t be long now, mister,” he told Carl every fifteen fucking minutes. Sandy didn’t help matters any. She parked her ass on a bench right outside the garage door and filed her nails and teased the poor bastard with glimpses of her pink underwear until he didn’t know whether to shit or go blind, she had him so tore up.

Carl finally threw up his hands in disgust and got the rolls of film out of the glove box and locked himself in the restroom behind the station. He sat for several hours in that stinking sweatbox thumbing through a pile of ragged detective magazines stacked on the damp floor next to the filthy, crusted commode. Every once in a while, he heard the little bell ring around front, announcing another gas customer. A brown cockroach crawled sluggishly up the wall. He lit one of his dog dicks, thinking that might help move his bowels, but his insides were like cement. The best he could do was dribble a little blood now and then. His fat thighs grew numb. At one point, someone pounded on the door, but he wasn’t about to give up his seat just so some no-good sonofabitch could wash his dainty hands.

He was about to wipe his bloody ass when he came across the article in a soggy copy of True Crime. He settled back down on the commode, flicked the ash off his cigar. The detective being interviewed in the story said that two male bodies had been found, one stuffed in a culvert near Red Cloud, Nebraska, and the other nailed to the floor of a shed on an abandoned farm outside Seneca, Kansas. “We’re talking within a hundred miles of each other,” the detective pointed out. Carl looked at the date on the cover of the magazine: November 1964. Hell, the story was already nine months old. He read the three pages over carefully five times. Though he refused to offer any specifics, the detective suggested there was a good chance the two murders were connected because of the nature of the crimes. So, judging from the condition of the remains, we’re looking at the summer of 1963, thereabouts anyway, he said. “Well, at least you got the year right,” Carl muttered to himself. That was their third time out, when they got those two. One was a runaway husband hoping to find a new beginning in Alaska and the other a tramp they’d seen scrounging for something to eat in a trash can behind a veterinarian’s office. Those spikes had made for a damn good picture. 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.

He cleaned himself off and wiped his sweaty hands on his pants. He tore the story out of the magazine and folded it, stuck the pages in his wallet. Whistling a little tune, he wet his comb in the sink and slicked back his thin, graying hair, squeezed a couple of whore bumps on his face. He found the grease monkey talking to Sandy in a low voice inside the garage. He had one skinny leg pressed up against hers. “Jesus Christ, it’s about time,” she said, when she looked up and saw him.

Ignoring her, Carl asked the mechanic, “Did you get it fixed?”

The man stepped away from Sandy, nervously stuck his greasy hands in the pockets of his coveralls. “I think so,” he said. “I filled her up with water, and she’s holdin’ so far.”

“What else did you fill up?” Carl said, eyeing him suspiciously.

“Nothing, not a thing, mister.”

“Did you let it run awhile?”

“We ran it for ten minutes,” Sandy said. “While you was back there in the can doing whatever you was doing.”

“All right,” Carl said. “What we owe you?”

The mechanic scratched his head, pulled out his pack of chew. “Oh, I don’t know. Does five bucks sound all right?”

“Five bucks?” Carl said. “Hell, man, the way you been playing around with my ol’ lady? She’s gonna be sore for a week. I’ll be damn lucky if you didn’t knock her up.”

“Four?” the mechanic said.

“Listen to this shit,” Carl said. “You like to take advantage, don’t you?” He glanced over at Sandy and she winked. “Okay, you throw in a couple of bottles of cold pop, I’ll give you two dollars, but that’s my final offer. My wife ain’t just some cheap whore.”

It was late in the evening by the time they drove out of there, and they slept in the car that night along a quiet country road. They shared a can of potted meat, using Carl’s penknife for a spoon; and then Sandy climbed over the backseat and said good night. A short while later, just as he was starting to nod off in the front, a sharp spasm shot through Carl’s guts and he fumbled for the door handle. Bolting from the car, he climbed over a drainage ditch that ran alongside the road. He jerked his pants down just in time, emptied a week’s worth of nerves and junk into the weeds while holding on to the trunk of a pawpaw tree. After he cleaned himself off with some dead leaves, he stood outside the car in the moonlight and read the magazine story one more time. Then he took his lighter out and set it aflame. He decided not to mention it to Sandy. Sometimes she had a big mouth, and he didn’t like to worry about what he might have to do to it on down the road.

15

THE DAY AFTER TALKING TO THE BARMAID at the Tecumseh, Bodecker drove over to the apartment where his sister and her husband lived on the east side of town. 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. Fucking around on Carl was one thing — hell, he couldn’t blame her for that — but working it for money was something else entirely. Although Hen Matthews would try to shame him with dirt like that come election time, Bodecker was worried about it for other reasons. People are like dogs: once they start digging, they don’t want to stop. First, it would just be that the sheriff had a whore for a sister, but eventually someone would find out about his dealings with Tater Brown; and after that, all the bribes and other shit that had piled up since he had first pinned on a badge. Looking back on it, he should have busted that thieving, pimp sonofabitch when he had a chance. A big arrest like that might have nearly wiped his slate clean. But he’d let his greed get the best of him, and now he was stuck in it for the long haul.

Parked in front of the shabby duplex, he watched a flatbed truck bulging with cattle turn into the stockyards across the street. The tangy smell of manure hung heavy in the hot August air. The old beater Sandy had hauled him home in that last night before he took the pledge was nowhere to be seen, but he got out of the cruiser anyway. He was pretty certain it had been a station wagon. He walked around the side of the house and climbed the rickety stairs that led to their door on the second floor. At the top was a little landing that Sandy called the patio. A sack of garbage lay overturned in one corner, green flies crawling over egg shells and coffee grounds and wadded-up hamburger wrappers. Next to the wooden railing sat a padded kitchen chair and underneath it a coffee can half full of cigar butts. Carl and Sandy were worse than the coloreds up on White Heaven and the holler trash out in Knockemstiff, he thought, the way the two of them lived. God, how he hated slobs. The prisoners in the county jail took turns washing his cruiser every morning; the creases in his khaki pants were as sharp as knives. He kicked an empty Dinty Moore can out of the way and knocked on the door, but nobody answered.

As he started to leave, he heard a sliver of music coming from somewhere close by. Looking over the railing, he saw a chubby woman in a flowered swimsuit lying on a yellow blanket in the yard next door. The rusted frames and parts of old motorcycles were scattered around her in the tall grass. Her brown hair was pinned on top of her head, and she held a tiny transistor radio in her hand. She was slathered with baby oil, shiny as a new penny in the bright sun. He watched as she twisted the dial around searching for another station, heard the faint twang of some hillbilly song about heartbreak. Then she set the radio on the edge of the blanket and closed her eyes. Her slick belly rose and fell. She turned over, then raised her head and glanced around. Satisfied that no one was watching, she undid the top of the bathing suit. After a moment’s hesitation, she reached down and tugged the lower half up to reveal three or four inches of the white cheeks of her ass.

Bodecker lit a cigarette and started back down the stairs. He imagined his brother-in-law sitting out here in the sun sweating buckets and trying to get his eyes full. It was easy enough to do, the way the woman lay spread out there for anybody to see. Taking pictures seemed to be the only thing that Carl thought about, and Bodecker wondered if he ever took any of the neighbor without her knowing it. Though he wasn’t sure, he figured there was a law against shit like that. And if there wasn’t, there sure as hell ought to be.

16

BY THE TIME THEY LEFT THE SUNDOWNER, it was noon. Sandy had woken up at eleven, then spent an hour in the bathroom getting ready. 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. Once they got back home, he needed to get her to a dentist. He hated to think of the expense, but a nice smile was an important part of his photographs, providing a needed contrast to all the pain and suffering. Though he’d tried time and time again, Carl had yet to get one of the models to fake even a little smirk once he took the gun out and started on them. “Girl, I know sometimes it’s hard, but I need you to look happy if these are gonna turn out good,” he told Sandy, whenever he’d done something to one of the men that upset her. “Just think of that Mona Lisa picture. Pretend you’re her hanging up on the wall in that museum.”

They hadn’t driven but a few miles when Sandy braked suddenly and pulled into a little diner called the Tiptop. It was shaped somewhat like a wigwam and painted different shades of red and green. The parking lot was nearly full. “What the hell are you doing?” Carl said.

Sandy shut off the engine, stepped out of the car, went around to the passenger’s side. “I ain’t drivin’ another mile until I get some real food,” she said. “I been eating nothing but candy for three days. Shit, my teeth are getting loose.”

“Jesus Christ, we just got on the road,” Carl said, as she turned and started walking toward the diner door. “Hold up,” he yelled. “I’m coming.”

After locking the car, he followed her inside and they found a booth near a window. The waitress brought two cups of coffee and a ragged menu spattered with ketchup. Sandy ordered French toast and Carl asked for a side of crisp bacon. She put her sunglasses on, watched a man in a stained apron try to install a new roll of paper in the cash register. The place reminded her of the Wooden Spoon. Carl looked around the crowded room, farmers and old people mostly, a couple of haggard salesmen studying a list of prospects. Then he noticed a young man, early twenties maybe, sitting at the counter eating a piece of lemon meringue pie. Sturdy build, thick, wavy hair. A backpack with a small American flag sewn on it leaned against the stool beside him.

“So?” Carl said, after the waitress brought the food. “You feeling any better today?” As he talked, he kept one bloodshot eye on the man at the counter, the other on their car.

Sandy swallowed and shook her head. She poured some more syrup on the French toast. “That’s something we need to talk about,” she said.

“What is it?” he asked, pulling the burnt rind off a slice of the bacon and sticking it in his mouth. Then he took a cigarette from her pack and rolled it between his fingers. He shoved what remained on his plate over to her.

She took a sip of her coffee, glanced at the table of people next to them. “It can wait,” she said.

The man at the counter stood up and handed the waitress some money. Then he slung the backpack over his shoulder with a weary groan and went out the door with a toothpick stuck in his mouth. Carl watched him go to the edge of the road and try to thumb a passing car. The car went on without stopping, and the man started walking west at a lazy pace. Carl turned to Sandy, nodded toward the window. “Yeah, I seen him,” she said. “Big deal. They’re all over the place. They’re like cockroaches.”

Carl watched the road for traffic while Sandy finished eating. He thought about his decision to head home today. 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.

“Okay,” Sandy said, wiping her mouth with a paper napkin, “I can drive now.” She got up and reached for her purse. “Better not keep the fucker waiting.”