The Devil All the Time (16 page)

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

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

“Sure,” he said. “Why you ask that?”

“Were you really praying?”

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

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

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

“He caught me off guard.”

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

“No,” Gene said, “but he’s the one.”

“And how exactly do you know this?”

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

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

“I don’t know. Maybe I dreamed it.”

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

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

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

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

“No,” Gene said. “Not a clue.”

21

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

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

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

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

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

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

“So did you win?”

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

“Yeah?”

“He wasn’t none too happy.”

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

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

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

“What about the others?”

“Them, too.”

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

“I don’t like bullies.”

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

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

“Look, I want you to do me a favor.”

“What’s that?”

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

“Why?”

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

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

“Yeah, I know. This time anyway.”

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

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

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

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

22

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Even if it meant he killed your mother?”

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

“That’s crazy.”

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

“What about him?”

“Well, if he could come back—”

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

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

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

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