The Devil All the Time

17

ARVIN WAS SENT TO LIVE WITH HIS GRANDMOTHER right after his father’s suicide, and though Emma made sure that he went to church with Lenora and her every Sunday, she never asked him to pray or sing or kneel at the altar. The welfare people from Ohio had told the old woman about the terrible summer the boy had endured while his mother was dying, and she decided not to push anything other than regular attendance on him. Knowing that Reverend Sykes was prone to be a little too zealous at times in his attempts at bringing hesitant newcomers into the fold, Emma had gone to him a couple of days after Arvin’s arrival and explained that her grandson would come into the faith his own way when he was ready. Hanging roadkill from crosses and pouring blood on logs had secretly impressed the old preacher — after all, weren’t all the famous Christians fanatical in their beliefs? — but he went ahead and agreed with Emma that maybe that wasn’t the best way to introduce a young person to the Lord. “I see what you’re getting at,” Sykes said. “No sense turning him into one of them Topperville nut jobs.” He was sitting on the church steps peeling a bruised yellow apple with a pocketknife. It was a sunny September morning. He wore his good suit coat over a pair of faded bib overalls and a white shirt starting to unravel around the collar. Lately, his chest had been hurting him, and Clifford Odell was supposed to give him a ride to a new doctor over in Lewisburg, but he hadn’t shown up yet. Sykes had overheard someone at Banner’s store say that the sawbones had gone to college for six years, and he was looking forward to meeting him. He figured a man with that much education could cure anything.

“What’s that supposed to mean, Albert?” Emma asked.

Sykes glanced up from the apple and saw the hard look the woman was giving him. It took him a moment to realize what he had said, and his wrinkled face flushed red with embarrassment. “I’m sorry, Emma,” he sputtered. “I wasn’t talking about Willard, no way. He was a good man. One of the best. Shoot, I still remember the day he got saved.”

“That’s all right,” she said. “No sense buttering up the dead, Albert. I know what my son was like. Just don’t go pestering his boy, that’s all I ask.”

LENORA, ON THE OTHER HAND, couldn’t seem to get enough of her religion. She carried a Bible with her everywhere she went, even to the outhouse, just like Helen had; and each morning, she got up before everyone else and prayed for an hour on her knees on the splintered wooden floor beside her and Emma’s bed. Although she had no memory of either of her parents, the girl directed most of the prayers that she let Emma hear on her murdered mother’s soul and most of her silent ones on some news of her missing father. The old woman had told her time and time again that it would be best to forget about Roy Laferty, but Lenora couldn’t help wondering about him. Nearly every night, she fell asleep with an image of him stepping up on the porch in a new black suit and making everything all right. It gave her a small comfort, and she allowed herself to hope that, with the Lord’s help, her father really would return someday if he was still alive. Several times a week, no matter what the weather, she visited the cemetery and read the Bible out loud, especially the Psalms, while seated on the ground next to her mother’s grave. Emma had once told her that the book of Songs was Helen’s favorite part of the Scriptures, and by the time she finished the sixth grade, Lenora knew them all by heart.

THE SHERIFF HAD LONG SINCE GIVEN UP on finding Roy and Theodore. It was as if they had turned into ghosts. Nobody was able to find a photograph or record of any kind on either of them. “Hell, even the retards up in Hungry Holler got birth certificates,” he offered as an excuse, whenever one of his constituents brought up the two’s disappearance. He didn’t mention to Emma the rumor that he’d heard right after they disappeared, that the cripple was in love with Roy, that there might have been some queer homo thing going on between them before the preacher married Helen. During the initial investigation, several people testified that Theodore had complained bitterly that the woman had taken the edge off Roy’s spiritual message. “It’s ruined many a good man, that ol’ nasty hair pie,” the cripple was heard to say after he’d had a few drinks. “Preacher, shit,” he’d go on, “all he thinks about now is getting his dick wet.” It irked the sheriff to no end that those two sodomite fools might have committed murder in his county and gotten away with it; and so he kept repeating the same old story, that in all likelihood the same maniac that butchered the Millersburg family had also killed Helen and hacked Roy and Theodore to pieces or dumped their bodies in the Greenbrier River. He told it so much that he half believed it himself at times.

THOUGH ARVIN NEVER CAUSED HER any serious trouble, Emma could easily see Willard in him, especially when it came to the fighting. By the time he was fourteen, he had been kicked out of school several times for using his fists. Pick your own time, he remembered his father telling him, and Arvin learned that lesson well, catching whoever his enemy happened to be at the moment alone and unaware in the restroom or stairwell or under the bleachers in the gymnasium. For the most part, however, he was known throughout Coal Creek for his easygoing ways, and to his credit, most of the scraps he got caught up in were because of Lenora, defending her from bullies who made fun of her pious manner and pinched face and that damn bonnet she insisted on wearing. Though just a few months younger than Arvin, she already seemed dried up, a pale winter spud left too long in the furrow. He loved her like his own sister, but it could be embarrassing, walking into the schoolhouse in the morning with her following meekly on his heels. “She ain’t never gonna make cheerleader, that’s for sure,” he told Uncle Earskell. He wished to hell his grandmother had never given her the black-and-white photograph of Helen standing under the apple tree behind the church in a long, shapeless dress with a ruffled hat covering her head. As far as he was concerned, Lenora certainly didn’t need any new ideas on how to make herself look more like the shade of her pitiful mother.

WHENEVER EMMA ASKED HIM about the fighting, Arvin always thought of his father and that damp fall day long ago when he had defended Charlotte’s honor in the Bull Pen parking lot. Though it was the best day he ever remembered spending with Willard, he never told anybody about it, or, for that matter, mentioned any of the bad days that soon followed. Instead, he would simply say to her, his father’s voice echoing faintly in his head, “Grandma, there’s a lot of no-good sonsofbitches out there.”

“My Lord, Arvin, why do you keep saying that?”

“Because it’s true.”

“Well, maybe you should try praying for them then,” she’d suggest. “That wouldn’t hurt none, would it?” It was times like this when she regretted ever telling Reverend Sykes to leave the boy to find the path to God on his own terms. As far as she could tell, Arvin was always on the verge of heading the other direction.

He rolled his eyes; that was her advice for everything. “Maybe not,” he said, “but Lenora already does enough of that for the both of us, and I don’t see where it’s doing her much good.”

18

THEY SHARED A TENT DOWN AT THE END of the midway with the Flamingo Lady, a rail-thin woman with the longest nose Roy had ever seen on a human being. “She ain’t really a bird, is she?” Theodore asked him after the first time they met her, his usual brash voice turned timid and shaky. Her strange appearance had frightened him. They had worked with freaks before, but nothing that looked quite like this one.

“No,” Roy assured him. “She’s just putting on a show.”

“I didn’t think so,” the cripple said, relieved to find out that she wasn’t real. He looked over and noticed Roy checking out her ass as she walked toward her trailer. “Hard to tell what kind of diseases something like that’s got,” he added, his cockiness quickly returning once he was satisfied she was out of hearing range. “Women like that, they’ll fuck a dog or a donkey or anything else for a buck or two.”

The Flamingo Lady’s wild, bushy hair was dyed pink, and she wore a bikini that had ragged pigeon feathers glued to the flesh-colored material. Her act consisted mostly of standing on one leg in a little rubber swimming pool filled with dirty water while preening herself with her pointy beak. A record player sat on a table behind her playing slow, sad violin music that sometimes made her cry if she had accidentally taken too many of her nerve pills that day. Just as he had feared, Theodore figured out after a couple of months that Roy was tapping it, though try as he might, he could never actually catch them in the filthy act. “That ugly bitch is gonna hatch an egg one of these days,” he railed at Roy, “and I’d bet a dollar to a doughnut the goddamn chick will look just like you.” Sometimes he cared; sometimes he didn’t. It depended on how he and Flapjack the Clown were getting along at the moment. Flapjack had come to Theodore wanting to learn a few chords on the guitar, but then he’d showed the cripple how to play the skin flute instead. Roy once made the mistake of pointing out to his cousin that what he and the clown were doing was an abomination in the eyes of God. Theodore had set his guitar down on the sawdust floor and spit some brown juice in a paper cup. He’d recently taken to chewing tobacco. It made him a little sick to his stomach, but Flapjack liked the way it made his breath smell. “Damn, Roy, if you ain’t a good one to talk, you crazy bastard,” he said.

“What the hell does that mean? I ain’t no peter puffer.”

“Maybe not, but you sure as hell murdered your old lady with that screwdriver, didn’t you? You ain’t forgot about that, have you?”

“I ain’t forgot,” Roy said.

“Well then, you figure the Lord thinks any worse of me than He does of you?”

Roy hesitated for a minute before answering. According to what he had read in a pamphlet that he had found under a pillow in a Salvation Army shelter one time, a man laying with another man was probably equal to killing your wife, but Roy wasn’t sure if it was any worse or not. The manner in which the weight of certain sins was calculated sometimes confused him. “No, I don’t reckon,” he finally said.

“Then I suggest you stick to your pink-haired crow or pelican or whatever the hell she is and leave me and Flapjack the fuck alone,” Theodore said, digging the wet wad of chew out of his mouth and slinging it toward the Flamingo Lady’s wading pool. They both heard a tiny splash. “We ain’t hurting nobody.”

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.

Ignoring her, Gene said, “Russell, after I get done with you, I might just take your little girlfriend out for a nice long ride. She ain’t no beauty queen, but I gotta say, she’s not nearly as bad as that rat-faced sister of yours.” He stood over the table with his fists clenched, waiting for Arvin to leap up and start swinging, then watched dumbfounded as the boy closed his eyes and put his hands together. “You got to be shittin’ me.” Gene looked around the crowded lunchroom. The gym teacher, a burly man with a red beard who wrestled for extra money in Huntington and Charleston on the weekends, was scowling at him. The rumor around the school was that he’d never been pinned, and that he won all his matches because he hated everybody and everything in West Virginia. Even Gene was afraid of him. Leaning over, he said to Arvin in a low voice, “Don’t think praying’s gonna get you out of this, motherfucker.”

After Gene walked away, Arvin opened his eyes and took a drink from a carton of chocolate milk. “Are you all right?” Mary said.

“Sure,” he said. “Why you ask that?”

“Were you really praying?”

“I was,” he said, nodding his head. “Praying for the right time.”

He finally caught Dinwoodie a week later in his old man’s garage changing a spark plug in his ’56 Chevy. By then, Arvin had collected a dozen paper bags. Gene’s head was tightly encased in them when his younger brother found him several hours later. The doctor said he was lucky that he hadn’t suffocated. “Arvin Russell,” Gene told the sheriff after he came to his senses. He’d spent the last twelve hours in the hospital believing that he was running dead last in a race at the Indy 500. It had been the longest night of his life; every time he stomped the accelerator, the car slowed down to a crawl. The roar of the engines passing him by was still ringing in his ears.

“Arvin Russell?” the sheriff, a hint of doubt in his voice. “I know that boy likes to scrap, but hell, son, you twice as big as he is.”

“He caught me off guard.”

“So you seen him before he put that knot on your head?” the sheriff asked.

“No,” Gene said, “but he’s the one.”

“And how exactly do you know this?”

Gene’s father was leaning against the wall watching his son with sullen, bloodshot eyes. The boy could smell the Wild Irish Rose wafting off his old man clear across the room. Carl Dinwoodie wasn’t too bad if he stuck to beer, but when he got on the wine, he could be downright dangerous. This might come back to bite me in the ass if I’m not careful, Gene thought. His mother went to the same church as the Russell bunch. His father would kick the shit out of him all over again if he heard he’d been harassing that little Lenora bitch. “I could be wrong,” Gene said.

“Why did you say the Russell boy did it then?” the sheriff said.

“I don’t know. Maybe I dreamed it.”

Over in the corner, Gene’s father made a sound like a dog retching, then said, “Nineteen years old and still in school. What you think about that, Sheriff? Worthless as tits on a boar hog, ain’t he?”

“Who we talking about?” the sheriff said, a puzzled look on his face.

“That no-account thing laying right there in that bed, that’s who,” Carl said, then turned and staggered out the door.

The sheriff looked back to the boy. “Well, any idea why whoever did do it put them sacks over your head like that?”

“No,” Gene said. “Not a clue.”

21

“WHAT YOU GOT THERE?” Earskell said, as Arvin stepped up onto the porch. “I heard you over in there shooting that pop gun.” His cataracts were getting worse every week, like dirty curtains being slowly pulled shut in an already dim room. A couple more months and he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to drive anymore. Getting old was next to the worst goddamn thing that had ever happened to him. Lately, he’d been thinking about Alice Louise Berry more and more. They had both missed out on a lot, her dying so young.

Arvin held up three red squirrels. He had his father’s pistol stuck in the waistband of his pants. “We’ll eat good tonight,” he said. Emma had served nothing but beans and fried potatoes for four days now. Things always got lean toward the end of the month, before her pension check came. Both he and the old man were starving for some meat.

Earskell leaned forward in his chair. “You surely didn’t get those with that German piece of shit, did you?” Secretly, he was proud of the way the boy could handle the Luger, but he still didn’t think much of handguns. He’d rather have a pepper gun or a rifle any day.

“It ain’t a bad gun,” Arvin said. “You just got to know how to shoot it.” It was the first time the old man had ridiculed the pistol in quite a while.

Earskell laid down the implement catalog he’d been peering through all morning and pulled his penknife out of his pocket. “Well, go fetch us something to put ’em in, and I’ll help you clean ’em.”

Arvin pulled the skins off the squirrels while the old man held them by their front legs. They gutted the carcasses on a sheet of newspaper and cut the heads and feet off and laid the bloody meat in a pan of salted water. After they finished, Arvin folded up the mess in the paper and carried it out to the edge of the yard. Earskell waited until he came back up on the porch, then pulled a pint out of his pocket and took a drink. Emma had asked him to talk to the boy. She was at her wit’s end after hearing about the latest incident. He wiped his mouth and said, “Played cards over at Elder Stubb’s garage last night.”

“So did you win?”

“No, not really,” Earskell said. He stretched his legs out, looked down at his battered shoes. He was going to have to try mending them again. “Saw Carl Dinwoodie there.”

“Yeah?”

“He wasn’t none too happy.”

Arvin sat down on the other side of his great-uncle in a creaky cast-off kitchen chair held together with baling wire. He studied the gray woods across the road and chewed at the inside of his mouth for a minute. “He pissed off about Gene?” he asked. It had been over a week since he’d bagged the sonofabitch.

“A little maybe, but I think he’s more ticked off about the hospital bill he’s gonna have to pay.” Earskell looked down at the squirrels floating in the pan. “So what happened?”

Though Arvin didn’t ever see the point of offering up any details to his grandmother for beating the shit out of someone, mostly because he didn’t want to upset her, he knew the old man wouldn’t be satisfied with anything other than the facts. “He’s been teasing Lenora, him and a couple of his candy-ass buddies,” he said. “Calling her names, shit like that. So I fixed his wagon for him.”

“What about the others?”

“Them, too.”

Earskell heaved a long sigh, scratched at the whiskers on his neck. “You think maybe you should have held back just a little bit? Boy, I understand what you’re saying, but still, you can’t go sending people to the hospital over some name-calling. Puttin’ a couple knots on his head is one thing, but from what I hear, you hurt him pretty bad.”

“I don’t like bullies.”

“Jesus Christ, Arvin, you going to meet lots of people you might not take a liking to.”

“Maybe so, but I bet he won’t pick on Lenora anymore.”

“Look, I want you to do me a favor.”

“What’s that?”

“Stick that Luger away in a drawer and forget about it for now.”

“Why?”

“Handguns ain’t made for hunting. They’re for killin’ people.”

“But I didn’t shoot the bastard,” Arvin said. “I beat him up.”

“Yeah, I know. This time anyway.”

“What about them squirrels? I hit every one of them in the head. You can’t do that with no shotgun.”

“Just put it up for a while, okay? Use the rifle if you want to go after some game.”

The boy studied the floor of the porch for a moment, then looked up at the old man with narrowed, suspicious eyes. “He get mouthy with you?”

“You mean Carl?” Earskell asked. “No, he knows better than that.” He didn’t see any sense in telling Arvin that he had drawn a royal flush on the last and biggest pot of the night, or that he had folded so that Carl could take the money home with two pissy pair. Though he knew it had been the right thing to do, it still made him half sick thinking about it. There must have been two hundred dollars in that kitty. He just hoped the boy’s doctor got a chunk of it.

22

ARVIN WAS LEANING AGAINST THE ROUGH RAIL of the porch late on a clear Saturday night in March looking at the stars hanging over the hills in all their distant mystery and solemn brilliance. He and Hobart Finley and Daryl Kuhn, his two closest friends, had bought a jug earlier that evening from Slot Machine, a one-armed bootlegger who operated over on Hungry Holler, and he was still sipping on it. The wind had a bite to it, but the whiskey kept him warm enough. He heard Earskell inside the house moan and mutter something in his sleep. In the good weather, the old man slept in a drafty lean-to he had nailed on the back of his sister’s house when he moved in a few years ago, but once it turned cold out, he lay on the floor next to the wood stove on a pallet made up of scratchy, homespun blankets that smelled like kerosene and mothballs. Down the hill, parked in the pull-off behind Earskell’s Ford was Arvin’s prized possession, a blue 1954 Chevy Bel Air with a loose transmission. It had taken him four years doing whatever kind of work he could get — chopping firewood, building fence, picking apples, slopping hogs — to save enough money to buy it.

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

“Don’t you think it’s funny how we both ended up orphans and living in the same house like we do?” Lenora had said after they entered the cemetery. She set her Bible down on a nearby tombstone and loosened her bonnet a bit and pulled it back. “It’s almost like everything happened so we’d meet each other.” She was standing next to her mother’s place looking down at the square marker lying flat to the ground: HELEN HATTON LAFERTY 1926–1948. A small winged but faceless angel was carved into each top corner. Arvin had pushed spit between his teeth and glanced around at the dead remains of last year’s flowers on the other graves, the clumps of grass and rusty wire fence that surrounded the cemetery. It made him uneasy when Lenora talked like that, and she had been doing it a lot more since she’d turned sixteen. They might not have been blood relation, but it made him squeamish to think of her any other way than as his sister. Though he realized the odds weren’t good, he kept hoping she might find a boyfriend before she said something really stupid.

He weaved a little as he moved from the edge of the porch over to Earskell’s rocking chair and sat down. He started thinking about his parents, and his throat got tight and dry all of the sudden. He loved whiskey, but sometimes it brought on a deep sadness that only sleep would erase. He felt like crying, but lifted the bottle and took another drink instead. A dog barked somewhere over the next knob, and his thoughts wandered to Jack, the poor harmless mutt that his father had killed just for some more lousy blood. That had been one of the worst days of that summer, the way he remembered it, almost as bad as the night his mother died. Soon, Arvin promised himself, he was going to go back to the prayer log and see if the dog’s bones were still there. He wanted to bury them proper, do what he could to make up for some of what his crazy father had done. If he lived to be a hundred, he vowed, he would never forget Jack.

Sometimes he wondered if perhaps he was just envious that Lenora’s father might still be alive while his was dead. He had read all the faded newspaper accounts, had even gone out combing the woods where Helen’s corpse had been found, hoping to discover some piece of evidence that would prove everybody wrong: a shallow pit with two skeletons slowly rising side by side up through the earth, or a rusty wheelchair pocked with bullet holes hidden deep in an overlooked gully. But the only things he’d ever come across were two spent shotgun shells and a Spearmint gum wrapper. As Lenora ignored his questions that morning about her father and kept on blabbing about fate and star-crossed lovers and all that other romance shit she read about in books checked out from the school library, he’d realized that he should have stayed home and worked on the Bel Air. It hadn’t run right since the day he bought it.

“Damn it, Lenora, stop talking that nonsense,” Arvin had told her. “Besides, you might not even be an orphan. As far as everyone around here’s concerned, you daddy’s still alive and kicking. Hell, he might pop over the hill any day now dancing a jig.”

“I hope so,” she’d said. “I pray every day that he will.”

“Even if it meant he killed your mother?”

“I don’t care,” she said. “I’ve already forgiven him. We could start all over.”

“That’s crazy.”

“No, it’s not. What about your father?”

“What about him?”

“Well, if he could come back—”

“Girl, just shut up about it.” Arvin started toward the cemetery gate. “We both know that ain’t gonna happen.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice breaking into a sob.

Taking a deep breath, Arvin stopped and turned around. Sometimes it seemed as if she spent half of her life crying. He held his car keys in his hand. “Look, if you want a ride, come on.”

When he got home, he cleaned the Bel Air’s carburetor with a wire brush dipped in gasoline, then left again right after supper to pick up Hobart and Daryl. He had been down all week, thinking about Mary Jane Turner, and he felt the need to get good and sloshed. Her father hadn’t taken long to decide that life in the merchant marine was a hell of a lot easier than plowing rocks and worrying about whether it rained enough or not, and so he had packed his family up and headed for Baltimore and a new ship the previous Sunday morning. Though Arvin had kept after her from their first date, he was glad now that Mary hadn’t let him in her pants. Saying goodbye had been hard enough as it was. “Please,” he’d asked as they stood at her front door the night before she left; and she had smiled and stood on her tiptoes and one last time whispered dirty words in his ear. He and Hobart and Daryl had pooled their money together for the bottle and a twelve-pack and a couple of packs of Pall Malls and a tank of gas. Then they drove up and down the dull streets of Lewisburg until midnight listening to the radio fade in and out and blowing off about what they were going to do after high school, until their voices turned as rough as gravel from all the smoke and whiskey and grandiose plans for the future.

Leaning back in the rocker, Arvin wondered who was living in his old house now, wondered if the storekeeper still stayed by himself in that little camper and if Janey Wagner was knocked up by now. “Stink finger,” he muttered to himself. He thought again about the way the deputy named Bodecker had locked him in the back of the patrol car after he had led him to the prayer log, like the lawman was afraid of him, a ten-year-old kid with blueberry pie on his face. They had put him in an empty cell that night, not knowing what else to do with him, and the welfare lady had showed up the next afternoon with some of his clothes and his grandmother’s address. Holding the bottle up, he saw that there was maybe two inches left in the bottom. He stuck it under the chair for Earskell in the morning.

23

REVEREND SYKES COUGHED A LITTLE, and the congregation of the Coal Creek Church of the Holy Ghost Sanctified watched a trickle of bright blood run down his chin and drip onto his shirt. He kept preaching, though, gave the people a decent sermon about helping your neighbor; but then at the end he announced that he was stepping down. “Temporary,” he said. “Just till I get to feeling better.” He said that his wife had a nephew down in Tennessee who had just graduated from one of those Bible colleges. “He claims he wants to work with poor people,” Sykes went on. “I figure he must be a Democrat.” He grinned, hoping for a laugh to lighten the mood a little, but the only sound he heard was a couple of women in the back near the door crying with his wife. He realized now that he should have made her stay home today.

Taking a careful breath, he cleared his throat. “I ain’t seen him since he was a boy, but his mother says he’s all right. Him and his wife should be here in two weeks, and like I said, he’s just gonna help out for a while. I know he ain’t from around here, but try to make him feel welcome anyway.” Sykes started to weave a bit and grabbed hold of the pulpit to steady himself. He pulled the empty Five Brothers pack from his pocket and held it up. “Just in case any of you need it, I’m gonna hand this over to him.” A hacking fit came over him then, bent him double, but this time he managed to cover his mouth with his handkerchief and hide the blood. When he got his breath back, he rose up and looked around, his face red and sweaty with the strain of it all. He was too embarrassed to tell them that he was dying. The black lung that he’d been fighting for years had finally gotten the better of him. Within the next few weeks or months, according to the doctor, he’d be meeting his Maker. Sykes couldn’t honestly say that he was actually looking forward to it, but he knew that he’d had a better life than most men. After all, hadn’t he lived forty-two years longer than those poor wretches who had died in the mine cave-in that had pointed him toward his calling? Yes, he’d been a lucky man. He wiped a tear from his eye and shoved the bloody rag in his pants pocket. “Well,” he said, “no sense keeping you folks any longer. That’s all I got.”

24

ROY LIFTED THEODORE OUT OF THE WHEELCHAIR and carried him across the dirty sand. They were at the north end of a public beach in St. Petersburg, a little south of Tampa. The cripple’s useless legs swung back and forth like a rag doll’s. He was rank with the smell of piss, and Roy had noticed that he wasn’t using his milk bottle anymore, just soaking his rotten dungarees whenever he needed to go. He had to set Theodore down several times and rest, but he finally got him to the edge of the water. Two stout women wearing wide-brimmed hats rose up and looked over at them, then hurriedly gathered up their towels and lotions and headed for the parking lot. Roy went back to the chair and got their supper, two fifths of White Port and a package of boiled ham. They had lifted it from a grocery store a couple of blocks away right after a truck driver hauling oranges let them out. “Didn’t we spend some time locked up here once?” Theodore asked.

Roy swallowed the last slice of meat and nodded. “Three days, I think.” The cops had picked them up for vagrancy just before dark. They had been preaching on a street corner. America was getting as bad as Russia, a thin, balding man yelled at them as they were escorted past his cell to their own that night. Why could the police throw a man in jail just because he didn’t have any money or an address? What if the man didn’t want any goddamn money or a fuckin’ address? Where was all this freedom they bragged about? The cops took the protestor out of the block every morning and made him carry a stack of telephone books up and down the stairs all day. According to some of the other prisoners, the man had been arrested for vagrancy twenty-two times just in the past year, and they were sick of feeding the Communist bastard. If nothing else, they were going to make him sweat for his bologna and grits.

“I can’t remember,” Theodore said. “What was the jail like?”

“Not bad,” Roy said. “I believe they gave out coffee for dessert.” The second night they were there, the cops brought in a big, hulking brute with a carved-up face called the Zit-Eater. Right before bedtime, they stuck him in the cell down at the end of the hall with the Communist. Everyone in the jail had heard about the Zit-Eater except for Roy and Theodore. He was famous up and down the Gulf Coast. “Why do they call him that?” Roy had asked the paper hanger with the handlebar mustache in the cell next to theirs.

“Because the fucker gets you down and pops your pimples if you got any,” the man said. He twisted the waxed ends of his black mustache. “Lucky for me I’ve always had a nice complexion.”

“What the hell does he do that for?”

“He likes to eat ’em,” another man said, from a cell across the way. “Some claim he’s a cannibal, got leftovers buried all over Florida, but I don’t buy it. He just likes to get attention, that’s what I think.”

“Jesus, someone oughta kill a sonofabitch like that,” Theodore said. He glanced at the acne scars on Roy’s face.

The mustache shook his head. “He’d be a hard one to kill,” he said. “You ever see one of them retards that can carry a car on his back? They had one of ’em at this alligator farm where I worked one summer down by Naples. You couldn’t have stopped that bastard with a machine gun once he got started. The Zit-Eater, he’s like that.” Then they heard some commotion down at the end of the hall. Evidently, the Communist wasn’t going to give up easy, and that cheered Roy and Theodore a little, but after a couple of minutes all they could hear was his crying.

The next morning, three broad-chested men in white coats came in with billy clubs and hauled the Zit-Eater away in a straitjacket to a nuthouse on the other side of town. The Communist quit bitching about the law after that, didn’t complain once about the fresh squeeze marks on his face or the blisters on his feet, just carried his phone books up and down the stairs like he was thankful they’d given him some meaningful work to do.

Theodore sighed, looked out over the blue gulf, the water smooth as a pane of glass that day. “That sounds nice, coffee for dessert. Maybe we could let them take us in, get a little break.”

“Shit, Theodore, I don’t want to spend the night in jail.” Roy kept one eye on the new wheelchair. He’d slipped into an old folks’ home a couple of days ago and borrowed it after the wheels on the last one gave out. He wondered how many miles he had pushed Theodore since they had left West Virginia. Though he wasn’t good with numbers, he estimated it had to be up around a million by now.

“I’m tired, Roy.”

Theodore hadn’t been acting right since he cost them the job with the carnival the summer before. A young boy, maybe five or six years old, eating a cardboard scoop of cotton candy, had wandered into the back of the tent while Roy was out front trying to drum up some customers. Theodore swore that the boy asked for help in zipping his pants up, but not even Roy could buy that one. Within minutes, Billy Bradford had loaded them up in his Cadillac and dumped them a few miles out in the country. They didn’t even get a chance to say their goodbyes to Flapjack or the Flamingo Lady; and though they had tried to get on with several other outfits since then, word of the crippled pedophile and his bug-eating buddy had spread fast among the carny owners. “Want me to go get your guitar?” Roy asked.

“Nah,” Theodore said. “I ain’t got no music in me today.”

“You sick?”

“I don’t know,” the crippled boy said. “It’s like there’s never no letup.”

“Want one of them oranges the trucker gave us?”

“Hell no. I’ve et enough of them damn things to last me till the Judgment Day. They still give me the shits.”

“I could drop you off at the hospital,” Roy said. “Come back for you in a day or two.”

“Hospitals, they worse than jails.”

“Want me to pray over you?”

Theodore laughed. “Ha. That’s a good one, Roy.”

“Maybe that’s what’s wrong with you. You don’t believe no more.”

“Don’t start in on that shit again,” Theodore said. “I’ve served the Lord in various capacities. And I got the legs to prove it.”

“You just need some rest,” Roy said. “We’ll find us a good tree to sleep under before dark.”

“It still sounds mighty nice. Them passing out coffee for dessert.”

“Jesus, you want a cup of coffee, I’ll go get you one. We still got some change left.”

“I wish we was still with the carnival,” Theodore sighed. “That was the best we ever had it.”

“Yeah, well, you should have kept your hands off that kid if that’s the way you feel.”

Theodore picked up a pebble and threw it in the water. “It makes you wonder, don’t it?”

“What’s that?” Roy asked.

“I don’t know,” the cripple said with a shrug. “Just makes you wonder, that’s all.”