The Devil All the Time

31

OCCASIONALLY, IF THE LAW GOT TOO ROUGH or the hunger bad enough, they would head inland, away from the big water that Theodore loved, so that Roy could find some work. While Roy picked fruit for a few days or weeks, Theodore sat in a lonely grove of trees or under some shady bushes waiting for his return every evening. His body was nothing but a shell now. His skin was gray as slate and his eyes weak. He passed out for no reason, complained about sharp pains that numbed his arms, and a heaviness on his chest that sometimes made him puke up his lunch meat breakfast and the half fifth of warm wine that Roy left him every morning to keep him company. Still, every night, he’d try to come alive for a couple of hours, attempt to play some music, even though his fingers didn’t work too well anymore. Roy would walk around their campfire with a jug trying to get some words started, something from the heart, while Theodore listened and picked at the guitar. They’d practice their big comeback for a while, and then Roy would collapse on top of his blanket, worn out from the day’s work in the orchard. He’d be snoring within a minute or two. If he was lucky, he’d dream about Lenora. His little girl. His angel. He’d been thinking about her more and more lately, but sleeping was as close as he could get to her.

As soon as the fire died down, the mosquitoes would dive in again, drive Theodore crazy. They didn’t bother Roy at all, and the cripple wished he had blood like that. He woke one night with them buzzing in his ears, still sitting in his wheelchair, the guitar lying on the ground in front of him. Roy was curled up like a dog on the other side of the ashes. They had been camping in the same spot for two weeks. Little piles of Theodore’s stool and vomit were scattered over the dead grass. “Lord, we may have to think about moving,” Roy had said that evening when he got back from the store down the road. He fanned his hand in front of his face. “Gettin’ mighty ripe around here.” That had been a few hours ago, in the heat of the day. But now a cool breeze, smelling faintly of the salt water forty miles away, brushed against the leaves of the trees above Theodore’s head. He leaned over and picked up the wine jug at his feet. He took a drink and capped the bottle and looked at the stars set against the black sky like the tiny chips of a shattered mirror. They reminded him of the glitter that Flapjack used to brush on his eyelids. Up around Chattahoochee one evening, he and Roy had sneaked back into the carnival just for a few minutes, a year or so after the incident with the little boy. No, the hot dog vendor told them, Flapjack wasn’t with them anymore. We were set up right outside this redneck town in Arkansas, and one night he just disappeared. Hell, we were halfway across the state the next day before anyone noticed him missing. The boss said he’d show up eventually, but he never did. You boys know how ol’ Bradford is, all business. He said Flapjack was starting to lose his funny anyway.

Theodore was so tired, so sick of it all. “We had some good times though, didn’t we, Roy?” he said out loud, but the man on the ground didn’t move. He took another drink and set the bottle on his lap. “Good times,” he repeated in a low voice. The stars blurred and faded from his sight. He dreamed of Flapjack in his clown suit and bare churches lit with smoky lanterns and loud honky-tonks with sawdust floors, and then a gentle ocean was lapping at his feet. He could feel it, the cool water. He smiled and pushed himself forward and began floating out to sea, farther than he had ever been before. He wasn’t afraid; God was calling him home, and soon his legs would work again. But in the morning, he awoke on the hard ground, disappointed that he was still alive. He reached down and felt his pants. He’d pissed himself again. Roy had already taken off for the orchard. He lay with the side of his face pressed against the dirt. He stared at a mound of his fly-covered shit a few feet away and tried to slip back into sleep, back to the water.

32

EMMA AND ARVIN WERE STANDING in front of the meat case in the grocery store in Lewisburg. It was the end of the month, and the old woman didn’t have much money, but the new preacher was arriving on Saturday. The congregation was having a potluck supper for him and his wife at the church. “You think chicken livers would be all right?” she asked after some more calculations in her head. The organs were cheapest.

“Why wouldn’t they be?” Arvin said. He would have agreed with anything by then; even pig snouts would have been fine with him. The old woman had been staring at the trays of bloody meat for twenty minutes.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Everyone says they like the way I do ’em, but—”

“All right,” Arvin said, “get them all a big steak then.”

“Pshaw,” she said. “You know I can’t afford nothing like that.”

“Then chicken livers it is,” he said, motioning for the butcher in the white apron. “Grandma, quit worrying about it. He’s just a preacher. I’d say he’s et a lot worse than that.”

That Saturday evening, Emma covered her pan of chicken livers with a clean cloth and Arvin set them carefully on the back floorboard of his car. His grandmother and Lenora were more than a little nervous; they’d been practicing their introductions all day. “Pleased to meet you,” they had repeated anytime they passed each other in the small house. He and Earskell had sat on the front porch and chuckled, but after a while, it started getting old. “Jesus Christ, boy, I can’t stand it no more,” the old man finally said. He got up from his rocker and went around the back of the house and into the woods. It took Arvin several days to get those four words out of his head, that “pleased to meet you” shit.

When they arrived at six o’clock, the gravel lot around the old church was already full of cars. Arvin carried in the pan of livers and placed them on the table near the rest of the meats. The new preacher, tall and portly, was standing in the middle of the room shaking hands and saying, “Pleased to meet you,” over and over. His name was Preston Teagardin. His longish blond hair was slicked back over his head with perfumed oil, and a big oval stone glittered on one hairy hand and a thin gold wedding band on the other. He wore shiny powder-blue pants that were too tight and ankle-high boots and a ruffled white shirt that, though it was only the first of April and still cool out, was already soaked through with sweat. Arvin figured him for thirty or so, but his wife appeared to be quite a bit younger, still in her teens perhaps. She was a slim reed of a girl with long auburn hair parted in the middle and a pale, freckled complexion. She stood a couple of feet from her husband, chomping gum and pulling at the lavender and white polka-dot skirt that kept riding up her trim, round ass. The preacher kept introducing her as “my sweet, righteous bride from Hohenwald, Tennessee.”

Preacher Teagardin wiped the sweat off his smooth, broad forehead with an embroidered handkerchief and mentioned a church he had worshipped at for a while down in Nashville that had real air-conditioning. It was clearly evident that he was disappointed with his uncle’s setup. Lord, there wasn’t even a single fan. By the middle of summer, this old shack would be a torture chamber. His spirits started to flag, and he was beginning to look as sleepy and bored as his wife, but then Arvin noticed him perk up considerably when Mrs. Alma Reaster came through the door with her two teenage daughters, Beth Ann and Pamela Sue, ages fourteen and sixteen. It was as if a couple of angels had fluttered into the room and alighted on the preacher’s shoulders. Try as he might, he couldn’t keep his eyes off their tanned, tight bodies in matching cream-colored dresses. Suddenly inspired, Teagardin began talking to all those around him about forming a youth group, something he’d seen used to great effect at several churches in Memphis. He was going to do his best, he vowed, to get the young people involved. “They are the lifeblood of any church,” he said. Then his wife stepped up and whispered something in his ear while staring at the Reaster girls that must have agitated him greatly, some of the congregation thought, with the way he puckered his red lips and pinched the inside of her arm. It was hard for Arvin to believe that this pussy-sniffing fat boy was any relation to Albert Sykes.

Arvin slipped outside to smoke just before Emma and Lenora ventured forward to introduce themselves to the new man. He wondered how they would react when the preacher greeted them with “Pleased to meet you.” He stood under a pear tree with a couple of farmers dressed in dungarees and shirts buttoned tight around their necks, watching a few more people hurry inside while listening to them talk about the going price of veal calves. Finally, someone came to the door and yelled, “The preacher’s ready to eat.”

The people insisted that Teagardin and his wife go first, so the chubby boy grabbed two plates and proceeded around the tables, sniffing at the food delicately and uncovering dishes and sticking his finger into this and that for just a taste, putting on a show for the two Reaster girls, who giggled and whispered to each other. Then all of the sudden, he stopped and passed his still-empty plates to his wife. The pinched mark on her arm was already beginning to turn blue. He looked toward the ceiling with his hand held up high, then pointed at Emma’s pan of chicken livers. “Friends,” he began in a loud voice, “there’s no doubt we’re all humble people here in this church this evening and you all have been awful nice to me and my sweet, young bride, and I thank ye from the bottom of my heart for the warm welcome. Now, they ain’t a one of us got all the money and fine cars and trinkets and pretty clothes that we would like to have, but friends, the poor old soul that brung in them chicken livers in that beat-up pan, well, let’s just say I’m inspired to preach on it for a minute before we set down to eat. Recall, if you can, what Jesus said to the poor in Nazareth those many centuries ago. Sure, some of us are better off than others, and I see plenty of white meat and red meat laid out on this table, and I suspect that the people who carried them platters in eat mighty good most times. But poor people got to bring what they can afford, and sometimes they can’t afford much at all; and so them organs is a sign to me, telling me that I should, as the new preacher of this church, sacrifice myself so that you all can have a share of the good meat tonight. And that’s what I’m going to do, my friends, I’m going to eat those organs, so you all can have a share of the best. Don’t worry, it’s just the way I am. I model myself on the good Lord Jesus whenever he gives me the chance, and tonight he has blessed me with another opportunity to follow in his footsteps. Amen.” Then Preacher Teagardin said something to his red-haired wife in a low voice, and she headed straight for the desserts, wobbling a little in her cardboard high heels, and filled the plates with custard pie and carrot cake and Mrs. Thompson’s sugar cookies, while he carried the pan of livers to his place at the head of one of the long plywood tables set up in the front for eating.

“Amen,” the congregation repeated. Some looked confused, while others, those who had brought some of the good meat, grinned happily. A few glanced at Emma, who stood near the back of the line with Lenora. When she felt their eyes on her, she started to swoon and the girl grabbed her by the elbow. Arvin rushed forward from where he was standing in the open doorway and helped her outside. He sat her down in a grassy spot under a tree, and Lenora brought her a glass of water. The old woman took a sip and started to cry. Arvin patted her on the shoulder. “Now, now,” he said, “don’t you worry about that pus-gutted blowhard. He probably don’t have two nickels to rub together. You want me to talk to him?”

She dabbed at her eyes with the hem of her good dress. “I never been so embarrassed in my whole life,” she said. “I could have crawled under the table.”

“You want me to take you home?”

She sniffled some more, then sighed. “I don’t know what to do.” She looked toward the door of the church. “He sure ain’t the preacher I was hoping for.”

“Hell, Grandma, that fool ain’t no preacher,” Arvin said. “He’s bad as them they got on the radio begging for money.”

“Arvin, you shouldn’t talk like that,” Lenora said. “Preacher Teagardin wouldn’t be here if the Lord hadn’t sent him.”

“Yeah, right.” He started to help his grandmother up. “You see the way he was gobbling them livers down,” he joked, trying to get her to smile. “Heck, that boy probably ain’t had nothing that good to eat in a coon’s age. That’s why he wanted them all for his own self.”

33

PRESTON TEAGARDIN WAS LYING ON THE COUCH reading his old college psychology book in the house the congregation had rented for his wife and him. It was a little square box with four dirty windows and an outhouse surrounded by weeping willows at the end of a dirt path. The leaky gas stove was full of mummified mice, and the cast-off furniture they had provided smelled like dog or cat or some other dirty creature. My God, with the way the people around here lived he wouldn’t have been surprised if it wasn’t hog. Though he’d been in Coal Creek only two weeks, he already despised the place. He kept trying to look upon his assignment in this outpost in the sticks as some sort of spiritual test coming directly from the Lord, but it was more his mother’s doing than anything else. Oh, yes, she had fucked him royally, shoved it right up his ass, the old shrew. Not a penny more allowance until he showed his mettle, she had said after finally finding out — the same week she was getting ready to attend the graduation ceremony — that he had dropped out of Heavenly Reach Bible College at the end of his first semester. And then, just a day or so later, her sister had called and told her that Albert was sick. What perfect timing. She’d volunteered her son without even asking him.

The psychology course he’d taken with Dr. Phillips was the only good thing that came out of his college experience. What the hell did a degree from a place like Heavenly Reach mean in a world of Ohio Universities and Harvard Colleges anyway? Might as well have purchased a diploma through one of those mail-order places advertised in the backs of comic books. He’d wanted to go to a regular university and study law, but no, not with her money. She wanted him to be a humble preacher, like her brother-in-law, Albert. She was afraid she’d spoiled him, she said. She said all kinds of shit, insane shit, but what she really wanted, Preston understood, was to keep him dependent on her, tied to her apron strings, so he’d always have to kiss her ass. He had always been good at figuring people out, their petty wants and desires, especially teenage girls.

Cynthia was one of his first major successes. She was only fifteen years old when he helped one of his teachers at Heavenly Reach dunk her in Flat Fish Creek during a baptism service. That same evening, he fucked her dainty little ass under some rosebushes on the college grounds, and within a year he had married her so that he could work on her without her parents sticking their noses in. In the last three years, he’d taught her all the things he imagined a man might be able to do with a woman. He couldn’t begin to add up the hours it had taken him, but she was trained as well as any dog now. All he had to do was snap his fingers and her mouth would start watering for what he liked to refer to as his “staff.”

He looked over at her in her underwear, curled up in the greasy easy chair that had come with the dump, her silky-haired gash pressed tight against the thin yellow material. She was squinting at an article about the Dave Clark Five in a Hit Parader magazine, trying to sound out the words. Someday, he thought, if he kept her, he would have to teach her how to read. He had discovered lately that he could last twice as long if one of his young conquests read from the Good Book while he nailed her from behind. Preston loved the way they panted holy passages, the way they began to stutter and arch their backs and struggle not to lose their place — for he could become very upset when they got the words wrong — right before his staff exploded. But Cynthia? Shit, a brain-damaged second-grader from the darkest holler in Appalachia could read better. Whenever his mother mentioned that her son, Preston Teagardin, with four years of high school Latin under his belt, had ended up married to an illiterate from Hohenwald, she nearly had another breakdown.

So it was debatable, keeping Cynthia. Sometimes he would glance over at her and, for a second or two, not even be able to recall her name. Gaped open and numb from his many experiments, what had once been fresh and tight was a faded memory now, and so, too, was the excitement she used to arouse in him. His biggest problem with Cynthia, though, was that she no longer believed in Jesus. Preston could abide just about anything but not that. He needed for a woman to believe that she was doing wrong when she lay with him, that she was in imminent danger of going to hell. How could he get turned on by someone who didn’t understand the desperate battle raging between good and evil, purity and lust? Every time he fucked some young girl, Preston felt guilty, felt as if he was drowning in it, at least for a long minute or two. To him, such emotion proved that he still had a chance of going to heaven, regardless of how corrupt and cruel he might be, that is, if he repented his wretched, whoring ways before he took his last breath. It all came down to a matter of timing, which, of course, made things all that much more exciting. Cynthia, though, didn’t seem to care one way or another. Nowadays, fucking her was like sticking his staff in a greasy, soulless doughnut.

But you take that Laferty girl, Preston thought, turning another page in the psychology book and rubbing his half-hard cock through his pajamas, Lord, that girl was a believer. He’d been watching her closely in church the past two Sundays. True, she wasn’t much to look at, but he’d had worse down in Nashville when he volunteered that month at the poor house. He reached over and took a saltine from a pack on the coffee table, crammed it in his mouth. He let it lie on his tongue like a host and melt, turn into a soggy, tasteless glob. Yes, Miss Lenora Laferty would do for now, at least until he could get his hands on one of the Reaster girls. He’d put a smile on that sad, crimped face of hers once he got that faded dress off. According to the church gossips, at one time her father had been a preacher around this county, but then — at least the way they told it — he’d murdered the girl’s mother and disappeared. Left poor little Lenora just a babe with the old lady who’d gotten so tore up about those chicken livers. This girl, he predicted, was going to be so easy.

He swallowed the cracker, and a little spark of happiness suddenly swept through his body, ran from the top of his blond head down his legs and into his toes. Thank God, thank God, his mother had decided all those years ago that he was going to be a preacher. All the fresh young meat a man could stand if he played his cards right. The old bag had curled his hair every morning and taught him good hygiene and made him practice his facial expressions in the mirror. She’d studied the Bible with him every night and drove him around to different churches and kept him in nice clothes. Preston had never played baseball, but he could cry on cue; he’d never been in a fist-fight, but he could recite the book of Revelation in his sleep. So, yes, goddamn it, he’d do what she had asked, help out her sick, sad-sack brother-in-law for a while, live in this shit hole of a house, and even pretend to like it. He’d show her his “mettle,” by God. And then, when Albert got back on his feet, he’d ask her for the money. He’d probably have to deceive her, feed her some bullshit story, but he’d feel at least a pang of guilt, so that was all right. Anything to get to the West Coast. It was his new obsession. He’d been hearing stuff on the news lately. There was something going on out there that he needed to witness. Free love and runaway girls living in the streets with flowers stuck in their matted hair. Easy pickings for a man blessed with his abilities.

Preston marked his place in the book with his uncle’s old tobacco sack and closed the book. Five Brothers? Jesus, what sort of person would put their faith in something like that? He’d nearly laughed in Albert’s face when the old man told him it had the power to heal. He looked over at Cynthia, half asleep now, a string of drool hanging from her chin. He snapped his fingers and her eyes popped open. She frowned and tried to shut her eyes again, but it was impossible. She did her best to resist, but then got up from her chair and knelt at the side of the couch. Preston pulled down his pajama bottoms, spread his fat, hairy legs a bit. As she began to swallow him, he said a little prayer to himself: Lord, just give me six months in California, then I’ll come home and fly right, settle down with a flock of good people, I swear on my mother’s grave. He pushed Cynthia’s head down farther, heard her begin to gag and choke. Then her throat muscles relaxed and she quit fighting it. He held her there until her face turned scarlet and then purple from lack of air. He liked it that way, he surely did. Look at her go.

34

ONE DAY ON HER WAY HOME FROM SCHOOL, Lenora stopped at the Coal Creek Church of the Holy Ghost Sanctified. The front door was opened wide and Preacher Teagardin’s ratty English sports car — a gift from his mother when he’d first gone off to Heavenly Reach — was sitting in the shade, same as yesterday and the day before. It was a warm afternoon in the middle of May. She had ducked Arvin, watched from inside the schoolhouse until he gave up waiting and left without her. She stepped inside the church and let her eyes adjust to the gloom. The new preacher was sitting on one of the benches halfway down the aisle. It looked as if he was praying. She waited until she heard him say, “Amen,” and then she began moving slowly forward.

Teagardin felt her presence behind him. He had been waiting patiently on Lenora for three weeks now. He’d come to the church nearly every day and opened the door around the time the school let out. Most days he saw her ride past in that piece-of-shit Bel Air with that half brother or whatever he was, but once or twice he’d seen her walking home by herself. He heard her soft steps on the rough wood floor. He could smell her Juicy Fruit breath as she got closer; he had the nose of a bloodhound when it came to young women and their different odors. “Who is it?” he said, raising his head.

“It’s Lenora Laferty, Preacher Teagardin.”

He crossed himself and turned to her with a smile. “Well, what a surprise,” he said. Then he peered at her more closely. “Girl, you look like you been crying.”

“It’s nothing,” she said, shaking her head. “Just some kids at school. They like to tease.”

He looked past her for a moment, searching for a suitable response. “I suspect they just jealous,” he said. “Envy tends to bring out the worst in people, especially the young ones.”

“I doubt if that’s it,” she said.

“How old are you, Lenora?”

“Almost seventeen.”

“I remember when I was that age,” he said. “There I was, full of the Lord, and the other kids making fun of me day and night. It was awful, the horrible notions that ran through my head.”

She nodded and sat down on the bench across from him. “What did you do about it?” she asked.

He ignored her question, appeared to be deep in thought. “Yes, that was a rough time,” he finally said with a long sigh. “Thank God it’s over.” Then he smiled again. “You got anywhere you have to be for the next couple hours?”

“No, not really,” she said.

Teagardin stood up, took hold of her hand. “Well, then, I think it’s about time you and me take a ride.”

TWENTY MINUTES LATER, they were parked on an old farm lane that he’d been checking out ever since his arrival in Coal Creek. It had once led to some hay fields a mile or so off the main road, but the land was now overgrown with Johnson grass and thick brush. His tire tracks were the only ones he’d seen on it for the past two weeks. It was a safe spot to bring someone. When he shut the car off, he said a little prayer, then laid his warm, meaty hand on Lenora’s knee and told her just what she wanted to hear. Hell, every one of them wanted to hear pretty much the same thing anyway, even the ones full of Jesus. He wished that she had resisted a little bit more, but she was easy, just like he had predicted. Even so, as many times as he’d done this, all the time he was peeling her clothes off, he could hear every bird, every insect, every animal that moved in the woods for what seemed like miles. It was always like that the first time with a new one.

When he finished, Preston reached down and grabbed her gray, dingy panties lying on the floorboard. He wiped the blood off himself and handed them to her. He swatted at a fly buzzing around his crotch, then tugged up his brown slacks and buttoned his white shirt as he watched her struggle back into her long dress. “You ain’t gonna tell no one, are you?” he said. Already, he wished he’d stayed home and read his psychology book, maybe even attempted cutting the grass with the push mower Albert had sent over after Cynthia stepped on a black snake curled up in front of the outhouse. Unfortunately, he had never been one of those men adept at physical labor. Just thinking about shoving that mower around and around that rocky yard made him feel a little nauseous.

“No,” she said. “I’d never do that. I promise.”

“That’s good. Some people might not understand. And I sincerely believe that a person’s relationship with their preacher should be a private thing.”

“Did you mean what you said?” she asked him bashfully.

He struggled to recall which bullshit line he had used on her. “Well, sure I did.” His throat was parched. Maybe he’d drive over to Lewisburg and have a cold beer to celebrate busting open another virgin. “By the time we get done,” he said, “them boys at your school won’t be able to take their eyes off you. It just takes some breaking in for some girls, that’s all. But I can tell you one of them that just gets prettier as they get older. You should thank the Lord for that. Yep, you got some sweet years ahead of you, Miss Lenora Laferty.”

35

AT THE END OF MAY, ARVIN GRADUATED from Coal Creek High School, along with nine other seniors. The following Monday, he went to work for a construction crew that was putting a new coat of blacktop on the Greenbrier County stretch of Route 60. A neighbor across the knob named Clifford Baker had gotten him on. He and Arvin’s father used to raise hell together before the war, and Baker figured the boy deserved a break as much as anyone. It was a good-paying job, nearly union wages, and though he was designated a laborer, supposedly the worst job on the crew, Earskell had worked Arvin harder in the garden patch behind the house. The day he got his first check, he picked up two fifths of good whiskey from Slot Machine for the old man, ordered Emma a ringer washer from the Sears catalog, and bought Lenora a new dress for church at Mayfair’s, the priciest store in three counties.

While the girl was trying to find something that fit, Emma said, “My Lord, I hadn’t noticed before, but you sure are starting to fill out.” Lenora turned back to the mirror and smiled. She had always been straight up and down, no hips, no chest. Last winter, someone had taped a picture from Life magazine of a heap of concentration camp victims to her locker, wrote in ink, “Lenora Laferty,” with an arrow pointing to the third corpse from the left. If it hadn’t been for Arvin, she wouldn’t have even bothered to take the picture down. But she was finally starting to look like a woman, just like Preacher Teagardin had promised. She was meeting him three, four, sometimes five afternoons a week now. She felt bad every time they did it, but she couldn’t tell him no. It was the first time she had ever realized just how powerful sin could be. No wonder it was so hard for people to get into heaven. Each time they met, Preston had something new he wanted to try. Yesterday, he’d brought a tube of his wife’s lipstick. “I know it sounds silly, with what we been doing,” she said timidly, “but I don’t think a woman should paint her face. You ain’t mad, are you?”

“Well, heck no, darling, that’s all right,” he told her. “Shoot, I admire your beliefs. I wish that wife of mine loved Jesus like you do.” Then he grinned and pushed her dress up, hooked his thumb over the top of her panties and pulled them down. “Besides, I was thinking about painting something else anyway.”

ONE EVENING, AS SHE WASHED THE SUPPER DISHES, Emma looked out the window and saw Lenora coming out of the woods across the road from the house. They had waited on her a few minutes, then went ahead and ate. “That girl sure is spending a lot of time in them woods lately,” the old woman said. Arvin was leaned back in his chair drinking the last of the coffee and watching Earskell try to roll a smoke. The old man was bent over the table, a look of intense concentration on his lined face. Arvin watched his fingers tremble, wondered if his great-uncle was beginning to slip a little.

“Knowing her,” Arvin said, “she’s probably out talkin’ to butterflies.”

Emma watched the girl scramble up the bank toward the porch. She looked like she had been running, the way her face was flushed. The old woman had noticed a big change in the girl the last few weeks. One day she was happy, the next day filled with despair. A lot of girls went a little crazy for a while when the blood started flowing, Emma reasoned, but Lenora had gone through all that two years ago. She still saw her studying her Bible, though; and she seemed to love going to church more than she ever did, even though Preacher Teagardin couldn’t hold a candle to Albert Sykes when it came to giving a good sermon. At times, Emma wondered if the man really cared at all about preaching the Gospel, the way he kept losing his train of thought, like he had other things on his mind. There she was, she realized, getting all stirred up about those chicken livers again. She would have to pray on it again tonight when she went to bed. She turned and looked at Arvin. “You don’t figure she might have her a beau, do you?”

“Who? Lenora?” he said, and then rolled his eyes as if it was one of the most ridiculous things he’d ever heard. “I don’t think you need to worry about that, Grandma.” He glanced over and saw that Earskell had made a mess of his cigarette, was just sitting there with his mouth open, staring at the makings on the table. Reaching over for the little sack of tobacco and the papers, the boy began rolling the old man a new one.

“Looks ain’t everything,” Emma said harshly.

“That’s not what I’m saying,” he sputtered, ashamed that he had joked about the girl. There were already too many people doing that. It suddenly dawned on him that he wouldn’t be at school anymore to keep them off her back. She was going to have a rough row to hoe next fall. “I just don’t think there’s any boys around here she’d be interested in, that’s all.”

The front screen door opened and closed with a squeak, and then they heard Lenora humming a song. Emma listened closely, recognized it as “Poor Pilgrim of Sorrow.” Satisfied for now, she dipped her hands in the lukewarm water, began scrubbing on a skillet. Arvin turned his attention back to the cigarette. He licked the paper and gave it another twist, then handed it to Earskell. The old man smiled and fumbled in his shirt pocket for a match. He searched a long time before he found one.

36

BY THE MIDDLE OF AUGUST, Lenora knew she was in trouble. She had missed her period twice and the dress that Arvin had bought her would hardly fit anymore. Teagardin had broken it off a couple of weeks before. He told her that he was afraid if he kept meeting her, his wife was going to find out, perhaps even the congregation. “Ain’t neither one of us wants that to happen, right?” he said. She walked by the church several days before she found him there, the door propped open and his little car sitting under the shade tree. He was sitting in the shadows near the front, his head bowed when she stepped inside, just like that day when she first came to him, three months ago, only this time he didn’t smile when he turned around and saw who it was. “You ain’t supposed to be here,” Teagardin said, though he wasn’t totally surprised. Some of them just can’t quit it all at once.

He couldn’t help but notice the way the girl’s tits pressed against the top of her dress now. He had seen it time after time, the way their young bodies filled out once they started getting it regular. Glancing at his watch, he saw that he had a few extra minutes. Maybe he should give her one last good fuck, he was thinking, when Lenora blurted out, her voice cracking and hysterical, that she was carrying his baby. He jumped up with a start, then hurried to the front door and closed it. He looked down at his hands, thick but soft as a woman’s. He wondered, in the time it took him to draw a deep breath, if he could strangle her with them, but he knew damn well he didn’t have the guts for that sort of business. Besides, if he were to accidentally get caught, prison, especially some loathsome dungeon in West Virginia, would be much too harsh for a delicate person such as himself. There had to be another way. He had to think fast, though. He considered her situation, a poor orphan girl knocked up and half out of her mind with worry. All these thoughts ran through his head while he took his time locking the door. Then he walked to the front of the church where she sat on one of the benches, tears running down her quivering face. He decided to begin talking, which was what he did best. He told her that he had heard of cases like hers, where the person was so deluded and sick over something they had done, some sin they had committed that was so terrible, that they started imagining things. Why, he’d read about people, just common folks, some of them barely able to write their own name, who became convinced that they were the president or the pope or even some famous movie star. Those kinds, Teagardin warned in a sad voice, usually ended up in a nuthouse, getting raped by the orderlies and forced to eat their own waste.

Lenora had quit sobbing by then. She wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her dress. “I don’t understand what you’re talking about,” she said. “I’m pregnant with your baby.”

He held out his hands, heaved a sigh. “That’s part of it, the book says, not understanding. But you think about it. How could I be the daddy? I’ve never touched you, not once. Look at you. I’ve got a wife sitting at home that’s a hundred times as pretty and she’ll do anything I ask, and I do mean anything.”

She looked up with a dumbfounded expression on her face. “You’re saying you don’t remember all the things we did in your car?”

“I’m saying that you must be crazy to come into the Lord’s house and talk such trash. You think anyone’s gonna believe you over me? I’m a preacher.” Jesus, he thought, standing there looking down at this red-nosed, sniveling little hag, why hadn’t he just held out and waited until the Reaster girl came around. Pamela had proved to be the finest piece he’d had since the early days with Cynthia.

“But you’re the father,” Lenora said in a soft, numb voice. “Hasn’t been nobody else.”

Teagardin looked at his watch again. He had to get rid of this wench fast, or his whole afternoon was going to be ruined. “My advice to you, girl,” he said, his voice turning low and hateful, “is you figure some way to get rid of it, that is, if you even are knocked up like you say. It would just be some little bastard with a whore for a mother if you keep it. If nothing else, think of that poor old woman who’s raised you, brings you to church here every Sunday. She’ll die from the shame of it all. Now you get on out before you cause any more trouble.”

Lenora didn’t say another word. She looked at the wooden cross hanging on the wall behind the altar, then stood up. Teagardin unlocked the door and held it open, a scowl etched on his face, and she walked past him with her head down. She heard the door quickly close behind her. Though she felt faint, she managed to walk a couple hundred yards before she collapsed under a tree a few feet from the edge of the gravel road. She could still see the church, the one she had gone to all her life. She had felt the presence of God there many times, but not once, it occurred to her now, since the new preacher had arrived. A few minutes later, she watched Pamela Reaster come up the other end of the road and go inside, a look of happiness spread across her pretty face.

That evening, after supper, Arvin drove Emma to the church for the Thursday night service. Lenora had pleaded sick, said her head felt like it was splitting open. She hadn’t touched her food. “Well, you don’t look good, that’s for sure,” Emma said, feeling the girl’s cheek for fever. “You go ahead and stay home tonight. I’ll have ’em say a prayer for you.” Lenora waited in her bedroom until she heard Arvin’s car start up, then made sure Earskell was still asleep in his rocker on the porch. She went out to the smokehouse and opened the door. She stood and waited until her eyes adjusted to the gloom. She found a length of rope coiled in a corner behind some minnow traps and tied a crude noose on one end. Then she moved an empty lard bucket over to the center of the small shed. She stepped up on it and wrapped the other end of the rope seven or eight times around one of the support beams. Then she hopped off the bucket and closed the door. It was dark in the shed now.

Stepping back up on the metal bucket, she put the noose around her neck and tightened it. A trickle of sweat ran down her face, and she caught herself thinking that she should do this out in the sunlight, in the warm summer air, maybe even wait another day or two. Perhaps Preston would change his mind. That’s what she would do, she thought. He couldn’t have meant what he said. He was upset, that’s all. She started to loosen the noose and the lard bucket began to wobble. Then her foot slipped and the bucket rolled away and left her dangling in the air. She had dropped only a few inches, not nearly enough to break her neck clean. She could almost touch her toes to the floor, just another inch or so. Kicking her legs, she grabbed hold of the rope, tried her best to raise herself up to the beam, but she didn’t have enough strength. She tried to yell out, but the choking sounds wouldn’t carry beyond the shed door. As the rope slowly squeezed her windpipe shut, she became more frantic, clawing at her neck with her fingernails. Her face turned purple. She was vaguely aware of urine running down her legs. The blood vessels in her eyes began to burst, and everything got darker and darker. No, she thought, no. I can have this baby, God. I can just leave this place, go away like my daddy did. I can just disappear.

37

A WEEK OR SO AFTER THE FUNERAL, Tick Thompson, the new sheriff of Greenbrier County, was waiting at Arvin’s car when the boy got off work. “I need to talk to you, Arvin,” the lawman said. “It’s about Lenora.” He had been one of the men who helped carry her body out of the smokehouse after Earskell saw the door unlatched and found her. He’d been called to a few suicides over the years, mostly men, though, blowing their brains out over some woman or a bad business deal, never a young girl hanging herself. When he’d asked, right after the ambulance pulled away that evening, Emma and the boy both said she had actually seemed happier lately. There was something about it that didn’t add up. He hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep all week.

Arvin tossed his lunch bucket in the front seat of the Bel Air. “What about her?”

“I figured it might be best to tell you instead of your grandmother. From what I hear, she’s not taking things too good.”

“Tell me what?”

The sheriff took his hat off, held it in his hands. He waited until a couple of other men walked by and got in their vehicles, then cleared his throat. “Well, hell, I don’t know how to say it, Arvin, other than just say it. Did you know Lenora was carrying a baby?”

Arvin stared at him for a long minute, a puzzled look on his face. “That’s bullshit,” he finally said. “Some sonofabitch is lying.”

“I know how you must feel, I really do, but I just came from the coroner’s office. Though ol’ Dudley might be a drunk, he ain’t no liar. Near as he can figure it, she was about three months along.”

The boy turned away from the sheriff and reached in his back pocket for a dirty rag, wiped his eyes. “Jesus,” he said, struggling to keep his upper lip from quivering.

“Do you think your grandmother knew?”

Shaking his head, Arvin took a deep breath and exhaled it slowly, then said, “Sheriff, my grandma would die if she heard that.”

“Well, did Lenora have a boyfriend, someone she was seeing?” the sheriff asked.

Arvin thought about the night, just a few weeks ago, when Emma had asked that same question. “None that I know of. Hell, she was the most religious person I ever seen.”

Tick put his hat back on. “Look, here’s the way I see it,” he said. “Ain’t nobody has to know about this but you, me, and Dudley, and he won’t say nothing, I guarantee it. So we’ll just keep it quiet for now. How does that sound?”

Swiping at his eyes again, Arvin nodded. “I’d appreciate that,” he said. “It’s been bad enough everyone knowing what she did to herself. Hell, we couldn’t even get that new preacher to—” His face suddenly grew dark, and he looked away toward Muddy Creek Mountain in the distance.

“What is it, son?”

“Ah, nothing,” Arvin said, looking back at the sheriff. “We couldn’t get him to say no words at the funeral, that’s all.”

“Well, some people have strong views on things like that.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“So you got no idea who she might have been messing with?”

“Lenora stayed to herself mostly,” the boy said. “Besides, what could you do about it anyway?”

Tick shrugged. “Not much, I expect. Maybe I shouldn’t have said nothing.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean no disrespect,” Arvin said. “And I’m glad you told me. At least now I know why she did it.” He stuck the rag back in his pocket and shook Tick’s hand. “And thanks for thinking about my grandma, too.”

He watched the sheriff pull away, then got in his car and drove the fifteen miles back to Coal Creek. He played the radio as loud as it would go and stopped at the bootlegger’s shack in Hungry Holler and bought two pints of whiskey. When he got home, he went in and checked on Emma. She hadn’t been out of bed all week as far as he knew. She was starting to smell bad. He got her a glass of water and made her drink a little. “Look, Grandma,” he said to her, “I expect you to get out of bed in the morning and fix me and Earskell breakfast, okay?”

“Just let me lay here,” she said. She rolled over on her side, closed her eyes.

“One more day, that’s it,” he told her. “I’m not kidding around.” He went in the kitchen and fried some potatoes, fixed bologna sandwiches for him and Earskell. After they ate, Arvin washed up the skillet and plates and looked in on Emma again. Then he took the two pints out on the porch and handed one to the old man. He sat down in a chair and finally allowed himself to consider what the sheriff had told him. Three months along. For sure, it hadn’t been some boy from around here got Lenora pregnant. Arvin knew everybody, and he knew what they thought about her. The only place she liked to go was church. He thought back to when the new preacher first arrived. That would have been April, a little over four months ago. He recalled the way Teagardin got all excited when the two Reaster girls walked in the night of the potluck. Other than himself, nobody had seemed to notice except the young wife. Lenora had even put her bonnets away not long after Teagardin showed up. He had thought she was finally sick of being made fun of at school, but maybe she had another reason.

He shook two cigarettes out of his pack and lit them, handed one to Earskell. The day before the funeral, Teagardin told some of the church members that he didn’t feel comfortable preaching over a suicide. Instead, he asked his poor sick uncle to say a few words in his place. Two men had carried Albert in on a wooden kitchen chair. It was the hottest day of the year, and the church was like a furnace, but the old man had risen to the occasion. A couple of hours later, Arvin went out driving around on the back roads, which was what he always did now when things didn’t make any sense. He passed by Teagardin’s house, saw the preacher walking to the outhouse in a pair of bedroom slippers and a floppy, pink hat like a woman might wear. His wife was sunbathing in a bikini, stretched out on a blanket in the weedy, overgrown yard.

“Damn, it’s hot,” Earskell said.

“Yeah,” Arvin said after a minute or two. “Maybe we ought to sleep out here tonight.”

“I don’t see how Emma stands it in that bedroom. It’s like an oven back there.”

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

“Really?”

“Yeah,” Arvin said, “really.”

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

38

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What do you mean?”

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

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

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

“When?”

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

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

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

“What did she say exactly?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You pray for the baby’s, too?”

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

“Do with what?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Four hours later, about fifty miles outside of Charleston, West Virginia, the Bel Air began making a thumping noise underneath. He managed to get off the highway and into a filling station lot before the transmission went out completely. He got down on his hands and knees and watched the last of the fluid drip from the casing. “Motherfucker,” he said. Just as he started to get up, a thin man in baggy blue coveralls came out and asked if he needed any help. “Not unless you got a transmission you can put in this thing,” Arvin said.

“She went out on ye, huh?”

“It’s shot,” Arvin said.

“Where you headed?”

“Michigan.”

“You welcome to use the phone if you want to call someone,” the man said.

“Ain’t no one to call.” As soon as he said it, Arvin realized how true that statement really was. He thought for a minute. Though he hated the thought of giving the Bel Air up, he had to keep moving. He was going to have to make a sacrifice. He turned to the man and tried to smile. “How much would you give me for her?” he asked. The man glanced at the car and shook his head. “I got no use for it.”

“The engine’s good. I just changed the points and plugs a couple days ago.”

The man began walking the Chevy, kicking the tires, checking for putty. “I don’t know,” he said, rubbing the gray stubble on his chin.

“How about fifty bucks?” Arvin said.

“It ain’t hot, is it?”

“The title’s in my name.”

“I’ll give you thirty.”

“Is that the best you can do?”

“Sonny, I got five kids at home,” the man said.

“Okay, it’s yours,” Arvin said. “Just let me get my stuff.” He watched the man go back inside the station. He took his bag out of the trunk and then sat down in the car one last time. The day he’d bought it, he and Earskell had burned up a whole tank of gas riding around, drove clear over to Beckley and back. He had a sudden feeling that he was going to lose a lot more before this was over. Reaching under the dash, he got the Luger, stuck it in his waistband. Then he took the title and a box of shells from the glove compartment. When he went inside, the man laid the thirty dollars on the counter. Arvin signed the title and dated it, then put the money in his wallet. He bought a Zagnut and a bottle of RC Cola. It was the first he’d eaten or drunk since the coffee that morning in his grandmother’s kitchen. He looked out the window at the endless stream of cars going by on the highway while he chewed on the candy bar. “You ever hitchhike?” he asked the man.

39

ROY FINISHED PICKING ORANGES THAT DAY around five o’clock and collected his pay, which was thirteen dollars. He went to the store at the intersection and bought half a pound of pickle loaf and half a pound of cheese and a loaf of rye bread and two packs of Chesterfields and three fifths of White Port. It was nice getting paid every day. He felt like a rich man walking back to the spot where he and Theodore were camping. The boss was the best one he’d ever had, and Roy had been picking steady for three weeks. The man had told him today that there was maybe only another four or five days of work left. Theodore would be glad to hear that. He wanted to get back to the ocean awful bad. They had put away almost a hundred dollars in the last month, more money than they had had in a long, long time. Their plan was to buy some decent clothes and start preaching again. Roy thought they could find a couple of suits at the Goodwill for maybe ten or twelve bucks. Theodore couldn’t play the guitar like he used to, but they could get along all right.

Roy crossed a drainage ditch and headed for their campsite under a small stand of stunted magnolia trees. He saw Theodore asleep on the ground next to his wheelchair, his guitar lying beside him. Roy shook his head and pulled out one of the bottles of wine and a pack of the smokes. He sat down on a stump and took a drink before he lit a cigarette. He had killed half the fifth before he finally noticed that the cripple’s face was crawling with ants. Rushing to his side, Roy rolled him over on his back. “Theodore? Hey, come on, buddy, wake up,” Roy pleaded, shaking him and slapping at the bugs. “Theodore?”

As soon as he tried to lift the man, Roy knew that he was dead, but he still struggled for fifteen minutes to get him back up in the wheelchair. He began pushing him through the sandy soil toward the highway, but went only a few feet before he stopped. The authorities would ask a lot of questions, he thought, as he watched a fancy car pass by in the distance. He looked around at the campsite. Maybe it would be better just to stay here. Theodore loved the ocean, but he liked the shade, too. And this grove of trees was as much a home as anything they’d had since their days with Bradford Amusements.

Roy sat down on the ground beside the wheelchair. They had done a lot of bad things over the years, and he spent the next several hours praying for the cripple’s soul. He hoped someone would do the same for him when it came his time. Around sundown, he finally got up and fixed himself a sandwich. He ate part of it and tossed the rest in the weeds. Halfway through another cigarette, it dawned on him that he didn’t have to run anymore. He could go back home now, turn himself in. They could do whatever they wanted to, as long as he got to see Lenora one more time. Theodore had never been able to understand that, how Roy could miss somebody he didn’t really know. It was true that he could barely recall what his little girl’s face had looked like, but even so, he had wondered a thousand times how her life had turned out. By the time he finished the smoke, he was already rehearsing some words he would say to her.

That night, he got drunk with his old friend one last time. He built a fire and talked to Theodore like he was still alive, told the same stories over again, the ones about Flapjack, and the Flamingo Lady, and the Zit-Eater, and all those other lost souls they had run into on the road. Several times he caught himself waiting on Theodore to laugh or add something that he’d forgotten. After a few hours, there were no more tales to tell, and Roy felt lonelier than he had ever felt in his life. “Hell of a long way from Coal Creek, ain’t it, boy?” was the last thing he said before he lay down on his blanket.

He woke right before dawn. He wet a rag with some water from the gallon jug they always kept tied to the back of the wheelchair. He wiped the grime off Theodore’s face and combed his hair, pressed his eyes shut with his thumb. There was a splash of wine left in the last bottle and he set it in the cripple’s lap, placed his ragged straw hat on his head. Then Roy wrapped his few belongings in a blanket and stood with his hand on the dead man’s shoulder. He closed his eyes and said a few more words. He realized that he would never preach again, but that was all right. He’d never been much good at it anyway. Most people just wanted to hear the cripple play. “I wish you was going with me, Theodore,” Roy said. By the time he managed to catch a ride, he was already two miles down the road.