The Devil All the Time

25

IT WAS A COLD FEBRUARY MORNING in the early part of 1966, Carl and Sandy’s fifth year together. The apartment was like an icebox, but Carl was afraid if he kept knocking on the landlady’s door downstairs about turning up the thermostat, he might snap and strangle her with her own filthy hairnet. He had never killed anyone in Ohio, didn’t believe in shitting in his own nest. That was Rule #2. So Mrs. Burchwell, although she deserved it more than anything, was off-limits. Sandy woke up a little before noon and headed for the living room with a blanket draped over her narrow shoulders, dragging the ends of it through the dust and dirt on the floor. She curled up on the couch in a shivering ball and waited for Carl to bring her a cup of coffee and turn the TV on. For the next several hours she smoked cigarettes and watched her soap operas and coughed. At three o’clock, Carl yelled from the kitchen that it was time to get ready for work. Sandy tended bar six nights a week, and though she was supposed to let Juanita off at four, she was always running late.

With a groan, she sat up and stabbed out her cigarette in the ashtray and flung the blanket off her shoulders. She turned off the TV, then shivered her way to the bathroom. Bending over the sink, she splashed some water around in the bowl. She dried off her face, studied herself in the mirror, tried vainly to brush the yellow stains off her teeth. With a tube of red lipstick, she made up her mouth, fixed her eyes, pulled her brown hair back in a limp ponytail. She was sore and bruised. Last night, after she closed up the bar, she let a paper mill worker who had recently lost a hand in a rewinder bend her over the pool table for twenty bucks. Her brother was watching her closely these days, ever since that goddamn phone call, but twenty bucks was twenty bucks, no matter how you looked at it. She and Carl could drive halfway across a state on that much money, or pay the electric bill for the month. It still irked her, all the crooked shit that Lee was into, and then him worried about her costing him votes. The man told her he would fork over another ten if she’d let him stick the metal hook up inside her, but Sandy told him that sounded like something he should save for his wife.

“My wife ain’t no whore,” the man said.

“Yeah, right,” Sandy shot back as she pulled down her panties. “She married you, didn’t she?” She’d held on to the twenty the whole time he pounded her. It was the hardest she’d been fucked in a long time; the old bastard was definitely going for his money’s worth. He sounded like he was going to have a heart attack, the way he was grunting and gasping for air, the cold metal hook pressed against her right hip. By the time he finished, the money was wadded up into a little ball in her hand, soaked with sweat. After he backed away, she smoothed it out on the green felt and stuck it inside her sweater. “Besides,” she said, as she walked over to unlock the door and let him out, “that thing ain’t got no more feeling than a beer can.” Sometimes, after a night like that, she wished she was back working the morning shift at the Wooden Spoon. At least Henry, the old grill cook, had been gentle. He’d been her first, right after she turned sixteen. They had lain together on the floor of the stockroom a long time that night, covered with flour from a fifty-pound bag they had knocked over. He still stopped by the bar once in a while to shoot the shit and tease her about rolling out some more pie dough.

When she came into the kitchen, Carl was sitting in front of the stove reading the newspaper for the second time that day. His fingers were gray with ink. All the burners on the stove were lit and the oven door was open. Blue flames danced behind him like miniature campfires. His pistol lay on the kitchen table, the barrel pointed toward the door. The whites of his eyes were laced with red veins, and his fat, pale, unshaven face looked like some cold and distant star in the reflection from the bare lightbulb hanging over the table. He’d spent most of the night bent over in the tiny closet in the hallway that he used as a darkroom, coaxing life into the last of the film he had saved back from the previous summer. He hated to see it end. He’d nearly cried when he developed that last photo. Next August was a long ways off.

“Those people are so screwed up,” Sandy said as she searched inside her purse for the keys to the car.

“Which people?” Carl asked, turning another page of the paper.

“Them ones on TV. They don’t know what they want.”

“Damn it, Sandy, you pay too much attention to those fuckers,” he said, glancing at the clock impatiently. “Hell, you think they give a shit about you?” She should have been at work five minutes ago. He had been waiting all day for her to leave.

“Well, if it wasn’t for the doctor, I wouldn’t watch it anymore,” she said. She was always going on about the M.D. on one of the shows, a tall, handsome man whom Carl was convinced must be the luckiest bastard on the planet. The man could fall down a rat hole and climb out with a suitcase stuffed with money and the keys to a new El Dorado. Over the years that Sandy had been watching him, he’d probably performed more miracles than Jesus. Carl couldn’t stand him, that fake movie star nose, those sixty-dollar suits.

“So whose dick did he suck today?” Carl said.

“Ha! You’re one to talk,” Sandy said, as she pulled on her coat. She was sick of always having to defend her soaps.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It means whatever you think it means,” Sandy said. “You were in that closet all night again.”

“I’ll tell you what, I’d like to meet up with that sonofabitch.”

“I bet you would,” Sandy said.

“I’d make him squeal like a goddamn pig, I swear to God!” Carl yelled as she slammed the door behind her.

A few minutes after she left, Carl quit cursing the actor and turned the stove off. He laid his head in his arms at the table and dozed off for a while. The room was dark when he woke up. He was hungry, but all he could find in the refrigerator were two moldy heels of bread and a dab of crusty pimento cheese in a plastic container. Opening the kitchen window, he tossed the bread into the front yard. A few flakes of snow drifted through the ray of light coming from the landlady’s porch. From over in the stockyards across the street, he heard somebody laugh, the metal clang of a gate being slammed shut. He realized that he hadn’t been outside in over a week.

He closed the window and walked into the living room and paced back and forth singing old religious songs and waving his arms in the air like he was leading a choir. “Bringing in the Sheaves” was one of his favorites, and he sang it several times in a row. When he was a boy, his mother used to sing it while doing the wash. She had a certain song for every chore, every heartache, every goddamn thing that happened to them after the old man died. She did laundry for rich people, got cheated half the time by the no-good bastards. Sometimes he would skip school and hide under the rotting porch with the slugs and spiders and the little that remained of the neighbor’s cat, and listen to her all day. Her voice never seemed to tire. He would ration the butter sandwich she’d packed for his lunch, sip dirty water from a rusty soup can he kept stored in the cat’s rib cage. He’d pretend it was vegetable beef or chicken noodle, but no matter how hard he tried, it always tasted like mud. He wished to hell he had bought some soup the last time he went to the store. The memory of that old can made him hungry again.

He sang for several hours, his loud voice booming through the rooms, his face red and sweaty with the effort. Then, just before nine o’clock, the landlady began pounding furiously with the end of a broom handle on her ceiling below. He was in the middle of a rousing version of “Onward Christian Soldiers.” Any other time he would have ignored her, but tonight he sputtered to a stop; he was in the mood to move on to other things. But if she didn’t turn the fucking heat up soon, he’d start keeping her up until midnight. He could stand the cold easy enough, but Sandy’s constant shivering and complaining were getting on his nerves.

Going back to the kitchen, he got a flashlight from the spoon drawer and made sure the door was locked. Then he went around closing all the curtains, ended up in the bedroom. He got down on his knees and reached under the bed for a shoe box. He carried the box into the living room and turned off all the lights and settled down on the couch in the darkness. Cold air blew in around the loose windows, and he drew Sandy’s blanket over his shoulders.

With the box on his lap, he closed his eyes and reached a hand under the cardboard lid. There were over two hundred photos inside, but he pulled just one out. He rubbed his thumb slowly over the slick paper, tried to divine which image it might be, a little thing he did to make it all last longer. After making his guess, he opened his eyes and flipped the flashlight on just for a second. Click, click. A tiny taste and he set that photo to the side, closed his eyes again, and took out another. Click, click. Bare backs and bloody holes and Sandy with her legs spread. Sometimes he went through the entire box without guessing a single one of them correctly.

Once he thought he heard a noise, a car door slam, footsteps on the back stairs. He got up and tiptoed from room to room with the pistol, peeking out the windows. Then he checked the door and returned to the couch. Time seemed to shift, speed up, slow down, move back and forth like a crazy dream he kept having over and over. One second he was standing in a muddy soybean field outside of Jasper, Indiana; and the next click of the flashlight took him to the bottom of a rocky ravine north of Sugar City, Colorado. Old voices crawled through his head like worms, some bitter with curses, others still pleading for mercy. By midnight, he’d traveled through a large portion of the Midwest, relived the last moments of twenty-four strange men. He remembered everything. It was as if he resurrected them every time he brought out the box, stirred them awake and allowed them to do their own kind of singing. One last click and he decided to call it a night.

After he returned the box to its hiding place under the bed, he switched the lights back on and wiped off the blanket as best he could with her washcloth. For the next couple of hours, he sat at the kitchen table cleaning the pistol and studying his road maps and waiting on Sandy to get off work. He always felt the need for her company after a bout with the box. She had told him about the paper mill man, and he thought about that for a while, what he’d do with the hook if they ever picked up a hitchhiker like that.

He’d forgotten how hungry he was until she walked in with two cold hamburgers slathered with mustard, three bottles of beer, and the evening newspaper. While he ate, she sat opposite him and carefully added up her tips, stacking the nickels, dimes, and quarters into small, neat piles, and he recalled the way he’d acted earlier about her stupid TV show. “You did pretty good tonight,” he said, when she finally finished counting.

“Not bad for a Wednesday, I guess,” she said with a tired smile. “So what did you do today?”

He shrugged. “Oh, cleaned out the fridge, sang a few songs.”

“You didn’t piss the old lady off again, did you?”

“Just kidding,” he said. “I got some new pictures to show you.”

“Which one is it?” she asked.

“The one had that bandanna tied around his head. They turned out pretty good.”

“Not tonight,” she said. “I’d never get to sleep.” Then she pushed half the change over to him. He scooped it up and dumped it in a coffee can he kept under the sink. They were always saving for the next junker, the next roll of film, the next trip. Opening the last beer, he poured her a glass. Then he got down on his knees in front of her and pulled her shoes off, began rubbing the work out of her feet. “I shouldn’t have said anything about your damn doctor today,” he said. “You watch whatever you want.”

“It’s just something to do, baby,” Sandy said. “Takes my mind off things, you know?” He nodded, gently worked his fingers into the soft soles of her feet. “That’s the spot,” she said, stretching out her legs. Then, after she finished the beer and a last cigarette, he scooped her skinny body up and carried her giggling down the hallway and into the bedroom. He hadn’t heard her laugh in weeks. He would keep her warm tonight, that was the least he could do. It was nearly four in the morning, and somehow, with lots of luck and little regret, they had made it through another long winter day.

26

A FEW DAYS LATER, CARL DROVE SANDY TO WORK, told her he needed to get out of the apartment for a while. It had snowed several inches the night before, and that morning the sun finally managed to break through the thick, gray bank of clouds that had hovered over Ohio like some dismal, unrelenting curse for the past several weeks. Everything in Meade, even the paper mill smokestack, was sparkling and white. “Want to come in for a minute?” she asked when he pulled up in front of the Tecumseh. “I’ll buy you a beer.”

Carl looked around at the cars in the slushy parking lot. He was surprised it was so crowded in the middle of the day. He’d kept himself shut up in the apartment for so long that he didn’t think he could tolerate that many people his first time back out in the real world since before Christmas. “Ah, I think I’ll pass,” he said. “I figured I’d just ride around for a while, try to get home before dark.”

“Suit yourself,” she said, opening her car door. “Just don’t forget to pick me up tonight.”

As soon as she went inside, Carl headed straight back to the apartment on Watt Street. He sat staring out the kitchen window until the sun went down, then walked out to the car. He stuck his camera in the dash and the pistol under the seat. There was half a tank of gas in the station wagon and five dollars in his wallet that he’d taken from their travel money jar. He promised himself he wasn’t going to do anything, just drive around town a little and pretend. Sometimes, though, he wished he hadn’t ever made up those goddamn rules. Hell, around here, he could probably kill a hick every night if he wanted to. “But that’s why you got the rules in the first goddamn place, Carl,” he told himself as he started down the street. “So you don’t fuck everything up.”

As he passed by the White Cow Diner on High Street, he saw his brother-in-law standing beside his cruiser at the edge of the parking lot talking to someone sitting behind the wheel of a shiny black Lincoln. They appeared to be arguing, the way Bodecker was slinging his arms around. Carl slowed down and watched them in his rearview as long as he could. He thought about something that Sandy had said one night a couple of weeks ago, that her brother was going to end up in prison if he didn’t stop hanging around guys like Tater Brown and Bobo McDaniels. “Who the hell are they?” he had asked. He was sitting at the kitchen table unwrapping one of the cheeseburgers she had brought him from work. Someone had taken a bite out of one corner of it. He scraped the diced onion off with his penknife.

“They run everything from Circleville clear down to Portsmouth,” she told him. “Everything that’s illegal anyway.”

“Right,” Carl said. “And how do you happen to know this?” She was always coming home with another bullshit story some drunk had fed her. Last week she had talked to someone who was in on the Kennedy assassination. Sometimes it irritated the shit out of Carl that she could be so gullible, but then again, he knew that was probably one of the main reasons she had stuck with him all this time.

“Well, because this guy stopped in the bar today right after Juanita left and handed me an envelope to give to Lee.” She lit a cigarette and blew some smoke toward the stained ceiling. “It was plumb full of money, and it wasn’t all singles, either. There must have been four or five hundred dollars in there, maybe more.”

“Jesus Christ, did you take any of it?”

“You gotta be kidding me, right? These ain’t the kind of people you steal from.” She picked up one of the french fries from the greasy cardboard container sitting in front of Carl, dabbed it into a glob of ketchup. All evening, she had thought about hopping in the car and taking off with the envelope.

“But he’s your brother, goddamn it. He ain’t gonna do nothing to you.”

“Shit, Carl, the way Lee is now, I doubt if he would think twice about getting rid of us. At least not you anyway.”

“Well, what did you do with it then? You still got it on you?”

“Hell no. When he came in I just gave it to him and played dumb.” She looked at the french fry in her hand, dropped it in the ashtray. “He still didn’t seem none too happy, though,” she said.

Still thinking about his brother-in-law, Carl turned onto Vine Street. Every time he ran into Lee, which, thank God, wasn’t that often, the sonofabitch asked him, “So where you working, Carl?” He’d give anything to see his ass caught in a jam he couldn’t get out of by flashing that big fucking badge around. Up ahead, he saw two boys, maybe fifteen or sixteen years old, moving slowly along the sidewalk. He pulled over and shut off the engine, rolled down the window and took several gulps of the cold air. He watched them split up at the end of the block, one going east, the other west. He rolled down the passenger’s-side window and started the car, drove to the stop sign and made a right.

“Hey,” Carl said, when he pulled up beside the skinny boy wearing a dark blue jacket with Meade High School stitched on the back of it in white. “You need a ride?”

The boy stopped and looked at the driver behind the wheel of the dumpy station wagon. The man’s sweaty face was shiny in the glare from the streetlight. A brown stubble covered his fat jowls and neck. His eyes were beady and cruel, like a rodent’s. “What’d you say?” the boy asked.

“I’m just riding around,” Carl said. “Maybe we could go get some beer.” He swallowed and caught himself before he started begging.

The boy smirked. “You got the wrong guy, mister,” he said. “I ain’t built that way.” Then he started walking again, faster this time.

“Fuck you then,” Carl said under his breath. He sat in the car and watched the boy disappear into a house a few doors down. Though a little disappointed, he was mostly relieved. He knew he wouldn’t have been able to stop himself if he got the punk in the car. He could almost picture it, the little bastard lying in the snow turned inside out. Someday, he thought, he was going to have to do a winter scene.

He drove back to the White Cow Diner, saw that Bodecker was gone now. He parked the car and went inside, sat at the counter and ordered a cup of coffee. His hands were still shaking. “Damn, it’s cold out,” he said to the waitress, a tall, skinny girl with a red nose.

“That’s Ohio for you,” she said.

“I’m not used to it,” Carl said.

“Oh, so you ain’t from around here?”

“No,” Carl said, taking a sip of the coffee and pulling out one of his dog dicks. “I’m passing through from California.” Then he frowned and looked down at the cigar. He wasn’t sure why he said that, unless maybe he wanted to impress the girl. The mere mention of the state usually made him sick. He and Sandy had moved out there just a few weeks after they got married. Carl had thought he would find success there, taking photographs of movie stars and beautiful people, getting Sandy some work as a model, but instead they ended up broke and hungry, and he finally sold her to two men he met outside a fly-by-night talent agency who wanted to make a dirty movie. She had refused at first, but that night, after he plied her with vodka and promises, they drove their old beater up into the foggy Hollywood Hills, came to a small, dark cottage with newspapers taped over the windows. “This might be our big break,” Carl said as he led her to the door. “Make some connections.”

Besides the two men he’d made the deal with, there were seven or eight others standing along the lemon yellow walls of the living room, bare except for a movie camera on a tripod and a double bed covered with wrinkled sheets. A man handed Carl a drink and another asked Sandy to take her clothes off in a gentle voice. A couple of them took photographs as she stripped. Nobody said a word. Then somebody clapped his hands and the bathroom door swung open. A midget with a shaved head that was way too big for his body led a tall, dazed-looking man out into the room. The midget wore nice slacks rolled up several inches above his pointy Italian shoes and a Hawaiian shirt, but the big man was buck naked, a long, blue-veined penis as big around as a coffee cup dangling between his tanned, muscular legs. When she saw the grinning midget unhook the leash from the dog collar around the man’s neck, Sandy rolled off the bed and started grabbing frantically for her clothes. Carl stood up and said, “Sorry, boys, the lady’s changed her mind.”

“Get that cocksucker out of here,” the one behind the movie camera growled. Before Carl knew what was happening, three men had dragged him out the door and put him in his car. “Now you wait here or she’s going to get hurt real bad,” one of them told him. He chewed on his cigar and watched shadows move back and forth behind the covered windows, tried to convince himself that everything was going to be all right. After all, it was the movie business, couldn’t be anything too serious go wrong. Two hours later, the front door opened and the same three men carried Sandy out to the car, tossed her in the backseat. One of them came around to the driver’s side and handed Carl twenty dollars. “This ain’t right,” Carl said. “The agreement was for two hundred.”

“Two hundred? Shit, she wasn’t worth ten. Once that big sonofabitch got it in her ass, she passed out and laid there like a dead fish.”

Carl turned and looked at Sandy lying on the seat. She was starting to come to a little. They had put her blouse on backward. “Bullshit,” he said. “I want to talk to them guys I made the deal with.”

“You mean Jerry and Ted? Hell, they left an hour ago,” the man said.

“I’ll call the law, that’s what I’ll do,” Carl said.

“No, you won’t,” the man said, shaking his head. Then he reached through the window and grabbed Carl by the throat and squeezed. “In fact, if you don’t quit your bitching and get the hell out of here, I’m going to take you back inside and turn ol’ Frankie loose on your chubby ass. Let him and Tojo make another hundred.” As the man walked back toward the house, Carl heard him say over his shoulder, “And don’t try bringing her back. She ain’t got what it takes for this business.”

The next morning, Carl went out and bought an ancient-looking Smith & Wesson.38 at a pawnshop with the twenty dollars the porno man had given him. “How do I know this thing even works?” he asked the pawnbroker.

“Follow me,” the man said. He took Carl into a back room and fired two bullets into a barrel filled with sawdust and old magazines. “They quit making this model in 1940 or thereabouts, but it’s still a damn good gun.”

He went back to the Blue Star Motel, where Sandy was soaking in a tub of hot water and Epsom salts. Showing her the gun, he swore that he was going to plug the two bastards who had set them up; but then he went down the street and sat on a bench in a park the rest of the day thinking about killing himself instead. Something broke in him that day. For the first time, he could see that his whole life added up to absolutely nothing. The only thing he knew how to do was work a camera, but who needed another fat guy with thin hair taking boring pictures of whiny, red-faced babies and sluts in their prom dresses and grim-faced married couples celebrating twenty-five years of misery? When he returned to their room that night, she was already asleep.

They headed back to Ohio the next afternoon. He drove and she sat on the pillows they had stolen from the motel room. He found that he had a hard time looking her in the eye, and they barely said two words to each other all the way across the desert and into Colorado. As they started up into the Rockies, the bleeding finally stopped and she told him that she would rather drive than sit there thinking about being raped by that midget’s doped-up slave while all those men cracked jokes about her. When she got behind the wheel, she lit a cigarette and turned the radio on. They were down to their last four dollars. A couple of hours later, they picked up a man smelling of gin thumbing his way back to his mother’s house in Omaha. He told them that he had lost everything, including his car, in a whorehouse — just a house trailer, really, with three broads working shifts, an aunt and her two nieces — out in the sand north of Reno. “Pussy,” the man said. “It’s always been a problem for me.”

“So it’s like some kind of sickness gets hold of you?” Carl said.

“Buddy, you sound like that head doctor I had to talk to one time.” They rode along in silence for a few minutes, then the man leaned forward and laid his arms casually on the top of the front seat. He offered them a drink from a flask, but neither of them were in the mood for a party. Carl opened up the dash to take the camera out. He was thinking that he might as well take some nature shots. Good chance he would never see these mountains again. “This your wife?” the man asked, after he scooted back again in his seat.

“Yeah,” Carl said.

“I’ll tell you what, friend. I don’t know what your situation is, but I’ll give you twenty bucks for a quickie with her. To tell you the truth, I don’t think I can last to Omaha.”

“That’s it,” Sandy said. She hit the brakes and flipped the turn signal on. “I’ve had my fill of motherfuckers like you.”

Carl glanced down at the pistol in the glove box half hid under a map. “Wait a minute,” he said to Sandy in a low voice. He turned and looked at the man, nice clothes, black hair, olive complexion, high cheekbones. A hint of cologne mixed with the smell of the gin. “I thought you lost all your money.”

“Well, I did, all I had anyway, but I called Mom when I got to Vegas. She wouldn’t buy me another set of wheels this time, but she did send me a few dollars to get home on. She’s good about stuff like that.”

“How about fifty?” Carl said. “You got that much?”

“Carl!” Sandy screeched. She was on the verge of telling him that he could get his fucking ass out, too, when she saw him slip the gun out of the dash. She turned her eyes back to the road and brought the car back up to cruising speed.

“Boy, I don’t know,” the man said, scratching his chin. “Sure, I got it, but fifty bucks oughta buy some fireworks, you know what I mean? You care to throw in some extras?”

“Sure, anything you want,” Carl said, his mouth turning dry as his heart started beating faster. “We’ll just have to find somewhere private to pull over.” He sucked in his gut and slid the gun down in his pants.

A week later, when he finally got up the nerve to develop the photographs he’d taken that day, Carl knew with the first glimpse, with a certainty that he had never felt before, that the beginning of his life’s work was staring back at him in that shallow pan of fixer. Though it hurt him to see Sandy once again with her arms wrapped around the whore hound’s neck in the throes of her first real orgasm, he knew he would never be able to stop. And the humiliation he had felt in California? He vowed that would never happen again. The next summer they went out on their first hunt.

The waitress waited until Carl lit the cigar, then asked, “So what do you do out there?”

“I’m a photographer. Movie stars mostly.”

“Really? You ever took any pictures of Tab Hunter?”

“No, can’t say that I have,” Carl said, “but I bet he’d be a nice one to work with.”

27

WITHIN A FEW DAYS, Carl was a regular at the White Cow. It felt good to be out among people again after spending so much of the winter holed up in the apartment. When the waitress asked him when he was heading back to California, he told her that he had decided to stay put for a while, take a break from all the Hollywood crap. One evening he was sitting at the counter when a couple of men who looked to be in their sixties pulled up in a long black El Dorado. They parked just a few feet from the front door and strutted inside. One was dressed in a Western outfit trimmed in sparkling sequins. His potbelly pushed against a belt buckle designed to look like a Winchester rifle, and he walked bowlegged, as if, Carl thought, he had either just gotten off a mighty wide horse or was hiding a cucumber up his ass. The other wore a dark blue suit, decorated across the front with various badges and patriotic ribbons, and a square VFW cap at a jaunty angle. Both of their faces were flushed red with strong drink and arrogance. Carl recognized the cowboy from the newspaper, a Republican loudmouth on the city council, always complaining at the monthly meetings about the degenerate, wide-open sex scene in the Meade city park. Though Carl had driven through there a hundred times at night, the hottest thing he’d ever encountered was a couple of gawky teenagers attempting a kiss in front of the little World War II memorial.

The two men sat down in a booth and ordered coffee. After the waitress served them, they began talking about a man with long hair they had seen walking down the sidewalk on their way over from the American Legion. “Never thought I’d see anything like that around here,” the suit said.

“You just wait,” the cowboy said. “If something ain’t done, they’ll be thick as fleas on a monkey’s ass within a year or two.” He took a sip of his coffee. “I got a niece lives in New York City, and that boy of hers looks just like a girl, hair clear down over his ears. I keep telling her, you send him to me, I’ll straighten his ass out, but she won’t do it. Says I’d be too rough on him.”

They lowered their voices a bit, but Carl could still hear them talking about the way they used to hang niggers, how someone needed to start lynching again, even if it was goddamn hard work, but with the longhairs this time. “Stretch a few of their dirty necks,” the cowboy said. “That will wake ’em up, by God. At least keep ’em out of these parts.”

Carl could smell their aftershave clear across the diner. He stared at the sugar bowl in front of him on the counter and tried to imagine their lives, the irrevocable steps they had taken to get to where they were on this cold, dark night in Meade, Ohio. It was electric, the sensation that went through him just then, the awareness he had of his own short time on this earth and what he had done with it, and these two old fucks and their connection to it all. It was the same sort of feeling he got with the models. They had chosen one ride or one direction over another, and they had ended up in his and Sandy’s car. Could he explain it? No, he couldn’t explain it, but he sure as hell could feel it. The mystery, that’s all Carl could ever say. Tomorrow, he knew, it wouldn’t mean anything. The feeling would be gone until the next time. Then he heard water running in the sink back in the kitchen, and the clear image of a soggy grave he’d once dug on a starry night rose to the surface of his memory — he’d dug in a wet spot, and a half-moon, high in the sky and as white as new snow, had bobbed and settled on top of the water seeping into the bottom of the hole and he had never seen anything so beautiful — and he tried to hold on to the image because he hadn’t thought about it for a while, but the old men’s voices broke in again and disturbed his peace.

His head began to ache a little and he asked the young waitress for one of the aspirins he knew she kept in her purse. She liked to smoke them, she had confessed to him one night, crush them and put the powder in a cigarette. Small-town dope, Carl had thought, and he had to restrain himself from laughing at her, this poor stupid girl. She handed him two tablets with a wink, Jesus, like she was passing him a shot of morphine or something. He smiled at her and thought again about taking her out for a trial run, watch a hitcher get his jollies with her while he took some pictures and assured her that this was the way all models got their start. No doubt she’d believe him. He’d told her some pretty wild stories, and she didn’t act embarrassed anymore. Then he swallowed the aspirins and turned a bit on his stool so he could hear the two old men better.

“The Democrats gonna be the ruination of this country,” the cowboy said. “What we need to do, Bus, is start our own little army. Kill a few of them and the rest will get the idea.”

“You mean the Democrats or the longhairs, J.R.?”

“Well, we’d start with the sissies first,” the cowboy said. “Remember that crazy sonofabitch had that chicken stuck to him out on the highway that time? Bus, I guarantee you these longhairs is going to be ten times worse than that.”

Carl took a sip of his coffee and listened while the two men fantasized about a private militia. It would be their final contribution to the country before they died. They would gladly sacrifice themselves if need be. It was their duty as citizens. Then Carl heard one of them say loudly, “What the hell you looking at?”

They were both staring at him. “Nothing,” Carl said. “Just drinking my coffee.”

The cowboy winked at the suit and asked, “What you think, boy? You like them longhairs?”

“I don’t know,” Carl said.

“Shit, J.R., he’s probably got one at home waiting on him,” the suit joked.

“Yeah, he don’t have the grit for what we need,” the cowboy said, turning back to his coffee. “Shit, probably never even served in the military. Soft as a doughnut, that boy.” He shook his head. “Whole damn country’s gettin’ like that.”

Carl didn’t say anything, but he wondered what it would be like to kill a couple of dried-up fuckers like them. For a moment, he thought about following them when they left, have them screw each other just for starters. He bet he could have that cowboy shitting in the suit’s little hat by the time he got serious. Those two pricks could look at Carl Henderson and regard him as a nothing all they wanted, he didn’t care. They could blow off from now until doomsday about the killing they would like to do, but neither of them had the guts for it. In fifteen minutes he could have them both begging for a seat in hell. There were things he could do that would make them eat each other’s fingers for just two minutes of relief. All he had to do was make the decision. He took another sip of his coffee, looked out the window at the Cadillac, the foggy street. Sure, just an old fat boy, boss. Soft as a fucking doughnut.

The cowboy lit another cigarette and coughed up some brown gunk that he spit in the ashtray. “Turn one of them goddamn things into a pet, that’s what I’d like to do,” he said, wiping his mouth on a paper napkin the other handed him.

“Would you want it to be a man or a woman, J.R.?”

“Hell, they look the same, don’t they?”

The suit grinned. “What would you feed it?”

“You know damn well what I’d feed it, Bus,” the cowboy said, and they both laughed.

Carl turned back around. He had never thought of that before. A pet. Keeping such a thing wasn’t possible right now, but maybe someday. See, he thought to himself, there was always something new and exciting to look forward to, even in this life. Except for the weeks they were out on the hunt, he always had a hard time staying upbeat, but then something would happen that would remind him that it wasn’t all shit. Of course, to even consider turning a model into some sort of pet, they would have to move out of town, get a place out in the sticks. You’d need a basement or, at the very least, some sort of outbuilding close to the house, a toolshed or a barn. Maybe he could eventually train it to do his bidding, though he doubted, even at the same time he was considering it, that he’d have the patience. Just trying to keep Sandy in line was hard enough.

28

BODECKER WALKED INTO THE TECUMSEH one afternoon near the end of February, right after Sandy started her shift, and ordered a Coke. Nobody else was in the bar. She poured it for him without saying a word, then turned back to the sink behind the bar where she was cleaning dirty beer mugs and shot glasses left over from last night. He noticed the dark circles around her eyes and the gray streaks in her hair. She didn’t look like she weighed ninety pounds, the loose way her jeans hung on her. He blamed Carl for the way she’d gone downhill. Bodecker hated the thought of that fat sonofabitch living off her like he did. Though he and Sandy hadn’t been what you’d call close in years, she was still his sister. She had just turned twenty-four her last birthday, five years younger than himself. The way she looked today she’d have a hard time passing for forty.

Lee moved to a stool down at the end of the bar so he could watch the door. Ever since that night he’d had to come in the bar and pick up that bag of money — the dumbest fucking thing that Tater Brown had pulled on him so far, and the bastard had heard about it, too — Sandy had hardly spoken to him. It bothered him, at least a little when he took the time to consider it, that she would think badly of him. He figured she was still pissed off because of all the hell he’d raised about her selling her ass out of the back of this dump. He turned to look at her. The place was dead, the only sound that of glasses clinking together in the water as she picked one up to wash it. Fuck it, he thought. He began talking, mentioned that Carl sure was spending a lot of time talking to a young waitress at the White Cow while she was stuck here serving drinks to pay the bills.

Sandy set the glass in the plastic drainer and dried off her hands while she thought of something to say. Carl had been driving her to work an awful lot lately, but that was none of Lee’s business. What would he do with some girl anyway? The only time Carl got hard anymore was when he looked at his photographs. “So what?” she finally said. “He gets lonely.”

“Yeah, he lies a lot, too,” Bodecker said. Just the other evening, he had seen Sandy’s black station wagon sitting at the White Cow. He parked across the street and watched his brother-in-law flap his jaws with the skinny waitress. They looked like they were having a good time together, and he’d gotten curious. After Carl left, he went in and sat down at the counter, asked for a cup of coffee. “That guy that just left,” he said. “You happen to know his name?”

“You mean Bill?”

“Bill, huh?” Bodecker said, trying not to smile. “He a friend of yours?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “We get along all right.”

Bodecker pulled a little notebook and a pencil out of his shirt pocket, pretended to write something down. “Quit the horse shit and tell me what you know about him.”

“Am I in some kind of trouble?” she asked. She stuck a strand of hair in her mouth, started shuffling nervously back and forth.

“Not if you talk, you ain’t.”

After listening to the girl repeat a few of Carl’s stories, Bodecker glanced at his watch and stood up. “That’s enough for now,” he said, putting the notebook back in his pocket. “It don’t sound like he’s the one we’re looking for.” He thought for a moment, looked at the girl. She was still nibbling on her hair. “How old are you?” he said.

“Sixteen.”

“This Bill ever ask you to pose for any pictures?”

The girl’s face turned red. “No,” she said.

“The first time he starts talkin’ that kind of stuff, you call me, okay?” If Carl hadn’t been the one trying to fuck the girl, he wouldn’t have even bothered. But the sonofabitch had ruined his sister, and Bodecker couldn’t forget about it, no matter how often he told himself it wasn’t any of his business. It just kept eating at him, like a cancer. The best he could do right now was let Sandy know about this little waitress. But someday he still wanted to make Carl pay big-time. It wouldn’t be that hard, he thought, not much different from castrating a hog.

He had left the diner after questioning the girl and drove out to the state park by the prison and waited for Tater Brown to bring him some money. The dispatcher squawked something on the radio about a hit-and-run on the Huntington Pike, and Bodecker reached over and turned the volume down. A few days ago, he had done another job for Tater, used his badge to flush a man named Coonrod from an old shack where he was hiding out along the Paint Creek bottoms. Handcuffed in the backseat, he thought the sheriff was taking him to town for questioning until the cruiser stopped along the gravel road at the top of Reub Hill. Bodecker didn’t say a word, just yanked him out of the car by the metal bracelets and half dragged him into the woods a hundred yards or so. Just as Coonrod switched from yelling about his rights to pleading for mercy, Bodecker stepped behind him and shot him in the back of the head. Now Tater owed him five thousand dollars, a thousand more than the sheriff had charged him the first time. The sadist had beat up one of the better whores who worked upstairs in Tater’s strip club, tried to extract her womb with a toilet plunger. It had cost the gangster another three hundred at the hospital to have everything pushed back inside her. The only one who ended up making out on the deal was Bodecker.

Sandy sighed and said, “Okay, Lee, what the fuck are you talking about?”

Bodecker tipped his glass up, started chewing on some ice. “Well, according to this girl, your hubby’s name is Bill and he’s a big-shot photographer from California. Told her he’s good buddies with a bunch of movie stars.”

Sandy turned back to the sink, dipped a couple more dirty glasses in the lukewarm water. “He was probably just messing with her. Sometimes Carl likes to bullshit people for fun, just to see how they’ll react.”

“Well, from what I’ve seen, he’s getting a pretty good reaction. I gotta say, I never thought the fat bastard had it in him.”

Sandy threw down her drying rag and turned around. “What the hell you doing? Spying on him?”

“Hey, I wasn’t trying to tick you off,” Bodecker said. “I figured you’d want to know.”

“You never did like Carl,” she said.

“Jesus Christ, Sandy, he had you whorin’ for him.”

She rolled her eyes. “Like you don’t do nothing wrong.”

Bodecker put his sunglasses on and forced a smile, showed Sandy his big white teeth. “But I’m the law around here, girl. You gonna find out that makes all the difference.” He threw a five-dollar bill on the bar and walked out the door and got into his cruiser. He sat there for a few minutes, staring through the windshield at the run-down trailers in Paradise Acres, the mobile-home court that sat next to the bar. Then he laid his head back against the seat. It had been a week and so far nobody had reported the plunger bastard missing. He thought maybe he’d buy Charlotte a new car with part of the money. He wanted so much to close his eyes for a few minutes, but falling asleep out in the open wasn’t a good idea these days. The shit was starting to get deep. He wondered how long it would be before he had to kill Tater or, for that matter, before some sonofabitch decided to kill him.

29

ON A SUNDAY MORNING, Carl fixed some pancakes for Sandy, her favorite food. She’d come home drunk the night before in one of her sad-ass moods. Whenever she got tangled up in all those worthless feelings again, there was little he could say or do to make things better. She just had to work it out herself. A couple of nights of drinking and whining about it and she’d come back around. Carl knew Sandy better than she knew herself. Tomorrow night, or maybe the next, she would fuck one of her patrons after the bar closed, some crew-cut country boy with a wife and three or four snot-nosed kids at home. He’d tell Sandy that he wished he had met her before he ever married the old sow, that she was the sweetest piece he’d ever had, and then everything would be fine and dandy until the next time she got the blues.

Beside her plate he had laid a.22 pistol. He had bought it a few days ago for ten dollars from an elderly man he’d met at the White Cow. The poor sonofabitch was afraid that he would shoot himself if he kept the gun around. His wife had passed away last fall. He had treated her badly, he admitted, even when she was lying on her deathbed; but now he was so lonely, he couldn’t stand it. He told all this to Carl and the teenage waitress while icy snow pinged against the plate-glass windows of the diner and the wind shook the metal sign out by the street. The old man wore a long overcoat that smelled of wood smoke and Vicks VapoRub and a blue watch cap speckled with lint pulled down tight on his head. While he was confessing, it occurred to Carl that it might be good for Sandy to have her own weapon when they went out hunting, just as a backup in case something ever went haywire. He wondered why he hadn’t thought of it before. Though he was always careful, even the best fucked up sometimes. He had felt good about buying the gun, thought maybe it meant that he was getting wiser.

You’d have to shoot someone in the eye or stick it directly in their ear to ever kill anyone with a.22, but it would still be better than nothing. He’d done that once with a college boy, stuck a gun in his ear, some curly-haired Purdue prick who had snickered when Sandy told him that she’d once dreamed of going to beauty college, but then she ended up tending bar and everything had turned out just the way it was supposed to. Carl had found a book in the boy’s coat pocket after he tied him up, The Poems of John Keats. He tried asking the fucker nice what his favorite rhyme was, but by then the smart-aleck bastard had shit his pants and had a hard time concentrating. He opened the book to a poem and started reading it while the boy cried for his life, Carl’s voice getting louder and louder to drown out the other’s pleading until he came to the last line, which he has forgotten now, some bullshit about love and fame that he had to admit made the hair stand up on his arms at the time. Then he pulled the trigger and a wad of wet, gray brains shot out the other side of the college boy’s head. After he fell over, blood pooled in the sockets of his eyeballs like little lakes of fire, which made a hell of a picture, but that was with the.38, not some goddamn peashooter.22. Carl was sure that if he could show the smelly geezer the picture of the boy, the sad sack would think twice about ever doing himself in, at least not with a gun. The waitress had thought Carl was pretty slick the way he got the pistol away from the old man before he hurt himself. He could have fucked her that night in the backseat of the station wagon if he’d wanted to, the way she kept going on about how wonderful he was. There was a time a few years ago when he would have been all over that little bitch, but something like that just didn’t hold much appeal these days.

“What’s this?” Sandy said when she saw the pistol beside her plate.

“It’s just in case something ever goes wrong.”

She shook her head, pushed the gun across to his side of the table. “That’s your job, making sure that never happens.”

“I’m just saying—”

“Look, if you ain’t got the balls for it anymore, just say so. Jesus Christ, at least let me know before you get us both killed,” Sandy said.

“I told you before, I don’t like that kind of mouth,” he said. He looked at the stack of pancakes getting cold. She hadn’t touched them. “And you’re going to eat those goddamn griddle cakes, too, you hear me?”

“Fuck you,” she said. “I’ll eat what I want.” She stood up and he watched her take her coffee into the living room, heard the TV come on. He picked up the.22 and aimed it at the wall that divided the kitchen from the couch that she had no doubt plopped her skinny ass down on. He stood there for a couple of minutes, wondering if he could make the shot, then put the gun in a drawer. They spent the rest of the cold morning silently watching a Tarzan movie marathon on Channel 10, and then Carl went to the Big Bear and bought a gallon of vanilla ice cream and an apple pie. She’d always liked the sweets. If he had to, he’d force it down her, he thought as he paid the clerk.

Many years ago, he’d heard one of his mother’s boyfriends say that, back in the old days, a man could sell his wife if he got hard up or sick of her, drag her ass to the town market with a horse collar clamped tight around her lousy neck. Making Sandy choke on a little ice cream wouldn’t be that big a deal. Sometimes they didn’t know what was best for them. His mother sure didn’t. A man named Lyndon Langford, the smartest of the long line of bastards she had gotten messed up with during her time on earth, a factory worker in the GM plant in Columbus who sometimes read real books when he was trying to stay off the sauce, had given little Carl his first lessons in photography. Just remember, Lyndon had once told him, most people love to have their picture taken. They’ll do damn near anything you want if you point a camera at them. He would never forget the first time he saw his mother’s naked body, in one of Lyndon’s pictures, tied to her bed with extension cords, a cardboard box over her head with two holes cut in it for her eyes. Still, he was a halfway decent man when he wasn’t drinking. Then Carl fucked everything up by eating a slice of the deli ham that Lyndon kept in their icebox for the nights when he stayed over. His mother never forgave him for it, either.

30

WHEN OHIO STARTED TO TURN WARM and green again, Carl began seriously planning the next trip. He was considering the South this time, give the Midwest a break. He spent evenings studying his road atlas: Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia, the Carolinas. Fifteen hundred miles a week, that’s what he always planned for. Though they usually traded cars around the time the peonies bloomed, he had decided that the station wagon was in good enough shape for one more outing. And Sandy wasn’t bringing home the money she used to when she was whoring regular. Lee had taken care of that.

Lying in bed late one Thursday night, Sandy said, “I been thinking about that gun, Carl. Maybe you’re right.” Though she hadn’t mentioned it, she’d also been doing a lot of thinking about the waitress at the White Cow. She’d even stopped in there once, ordered a milk shake, checked the girl out. She wished Lee had never told her. What bothered her most was the way the girl reminded Sandy of herself right before Carl walked into her life: nervous and shy and eager to please. Then, a few nights ago, pouring a drink for a man she had recently fucked for free, she couldn’t help but notice that he wouldn’t even give her a second glance now. As she watched the man leave a few minutes later with some toothy bimbo in a fake fur jacket, it occurred to her that maybe Carl was looking for her replacement. It hurt to think he’d turn on her like that, but then why should he be any different from any of the other bastards she had known? She hoped she was wrong, but having her own gun might not be such a bad idea.

Carl didn’t say anything. He had been staring miserably at the ceiling, wishing the landlady was dead. It surprised him, Sandy mentioning the gun after all this time, but maybe she had just come to her senses. Who in the hell wouldn’t want to carry a gun doing the shit they did? He rolled over, tossed his share of the bedsheet off his fat legs. It was sixty fucking degrees outside at three in the morning, and the old bitch still had the thermostat cranked up. He was certain that she did it on purpose. They’d had words again the other day about his singing at night. He got up and opened the window, stood there letting the slight breeze cool him off. “What made you change your mind?” he finally asked.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “Like you said, you never know what might happen, right?”

He stared out into the darkness, rubbed the stubble on his face. He dreaded getting back in the bed. His side was soaked with sweat. Maybe he’d sleep on the floor tonight by the window, he thought. He leaned down near the ripped screen and took several deep breaths. Damn, he felt like he was suffocating. “She’s just doing it for spite, goddamn it.”

“What?”

“Leaving the fuckin’ heat on,” he said.

Sandy rose up on her elbows and looked at his dark form crouched by the window, like some brooding, mythical beast about to spread its wings and take off in flight. “But you’ll show me how to shoot it, won’t you?”

“Sure,” Carl said. “That’s no big deal.” He heard her strike a match behind him, take a drag off a cigarette. He turned back toward the bed. “We’ll take it out somewhere on your day off, let you fire a few rounds.”

On Sunday they left the apartment around noon and drove to the top of Reub Hill and down the other side. He made a left into a muddy lane and stopped when they got to the trash dump at the end. “How do you know about this place?” Sandy asked. Before Carl came along, she had spent more than a few nights getting screwed back here by boys she didn’t care to remember now. Always, she had hoped that if she put out for this next one, he’d treat her like his girlfriend, maybe take her to one of the dances at the Winter Garden or the Armory, but that had never happened. As soon as they got a nut, they were done with her. A couple of them even took her tip money and made her walk home. She looked out her window and saw, lying in the ditch, a used rubber stretched down over the top of a Boone’s Farm bottle. Boys used to call the place Train Lane; from the looks of things, she figured they still did. Now that she thought about it, she had never been to a dance in her life.

“Just saw it when I was out driving around one day,” he said. “Reminded me of that place in Iowa.”

“You mean with the Scarecrow?”

“Yeah,” Carl said. “Ol’ California, here I come, that cocksucker.” He reached across her and opened the glove compartment, grabbed the.22 and a box of shells. “Come on, let’s see what you got.”

He loaded the gun and set up a few rusty tin cans on top of a soggy, stained mattress. Then he walked back to the front of the car and fired off six shots at thirty feet or so. He knocked four cans over. After he showed her again how to load it, he handed the gun to her. “The fucker goes a little to the left,” he said, “but that’s okay. Don’t try to aim so much as point, like you’d do with your finger. And just take a breath and squeeze the trigger as you let it out.”

Sandy held the pistol in both hands and sighted down the barrel. She closed her eyes and pulled the trigger. “Don’t shut your eyes,” Carl said. She fired off the next five rounds as fast as she could. She put several holes in the mattress. “Well, you’re gettin’ closer,” he said. He handed her the box of shells. “You load this time.” He pulled out a cigar and lit it. When she hit the first can, she squealed like a little girl who’d found the prize Easter egg. She missed the next one, then plugged another. “Not bad,” he said. “Here, let me see it.”

He had just finished loading the gun again when they heard a pickup coming fast down the lane toward them. The truck stopped with a lurch a few yards away, and a middle-aged, gaunt-faced man got out. He wore a pair of blue dress pants and a white shirt, polished black shoes. Probably been stuck in church all morning, sitting in a pew with his fat-ass wife, Carl thought. Getting ready to eat some fried chicken now, take a nap if the old bag would shut her mouth for a few minutes. Then back to work in the morning, hard at it. You had to almost admire someone who had the wherewithal to stick with something like that. “Who gave you permission to shoot out here?” the man said. The rough tone of his voice indicated he was none too happy.

“Nobody.” Carl looked around and then shrugged. “Shit, buddy, it’s just a dump.”

“It’s my land is what it is,” the man said.

“We’re just getting in some target practice, that’s all,” Carl said. “Trying to teach my wife how to defend herself.”

The man shook his head. “I don’t allow no shooting on my land. Hell, boy, I got cattle over in there. Besides that, don’t you know it’s the Lord’s Day?”

Carl heaved a sigh and cast a look at the brown fields that surrounded the dump. There wasn’t a cow in sight anywhere. The sky was a low canopy of endless, immovable gray. Even this far out of town, he could detect the acrid smell of the paper mill in the air. “Okay, I get the hint.” He watched as the farmer headed back to his truck, shaking his gray head. “Hey, mister,” Carl suddenly called out.

The farmer stopped and spun around. “What now?”

“I was wondering,” Carl said, taking a few steps toward him. “Would you mind if I took your picture?”

“Carl,” Sandy said, but he waved his hand for her to keep quiet.

“What the hell you want to do that for?” the man said.

“Well, I’m a photographer,” Carl said. “I just think you’d make a good picture. Heck, maybe I could sell it to a magazine or something. I always keep my eyes peeled for fine subjects like yourself.”

The man looked past Carl at Sandy standing beside the station wagon. She was lighting a cigarette. He didn’t approve of women who smoked. Most of them he’d known were trash, but he figured a man who took pictures for a living probably couldn’t get anything decent. Hard to tell where he had picked her up. A few years ago, he’d found a woman named Mildred McDonald in his hog barn, half naked and sucking on a cancer stick. She had told him she was waiting on a man, just as casual as anything, then tried to get him to lie with her in the filth. He glanced at the gun Carl was holding in his hand, noticed that his finger was still on the trigger. “You better go ahead and get out of here,” the man said, then started walking fast toward his truck.

“What you gonna do?” Carl said. “Call the law?” He glanced back at Sandy and winked.

The man opened the door and reached inside the cab. “Hell, boy, I don’t need a crooked sheriff to take care of you.”

Hearing that, Carl began to laugh, but then he looked around and saw the farmer standing behind the door of the truck with a rifle pointed at him through the open window. He had a wide grin on his weathered face. “That’s my brother-in-law you’re talking about,” Carl told him, his voice turning serious.

“Who? Lee Bodecker?” The man turned his head and spit. “I wouldn’t go around braggin’ about that if I was you.”

Carl stood there in the middle of the lane staring at the farmer. He heard the squeak of a door behind him as Sandy got in the car and slammed it shut. For a second, he imagined just raising the pistol up and having it out with the bastard, a regular shootout. His hand began shaking a little, and he took a deep breath to try to calm himself. Then he thought about the future. There was always the next hunt. Just a few more weeks and he and Sandy would be on the road again. Ever since he’d heard the Republicans talking in the White Cow, he’d been thinking about killing one of those longhairs. According to the news he’d seen on the TV lately, the country was heading for turmoil; and he wanted to be around to see it. Nothing would please him more than to watch the whole shithouse go up in flames someday. And Sandy had been eating better lately, was starting to fill out again. She was losing her looks fast — they never had gotten her teeth fixed — but they still had a couple of good years left. No sense throwing that away just because some stupid-ass farmer had a hard-on. As soon as he made his decision, his hand stopped twitching. He turned and started toward the station wagon.

“And don’t ever let me catch you back here again, understand?” Carl heard the man yell as he got in the front seat and handed Sandy her pistol. He looked around one more time as he cranked the engine, but he still didn’t see any fucking cows.