The Devil All the Time (22 page)

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.