The Devil All the Time - Donald Ray Pollock [15]
“We?”
“Well, yeah,” Theodore said, “you gonna need a guitar player, ain’t you?” For a long time he had dreamed of going to Florida, living by the ocean. It was hard to live the crippled life surrounded by all these lousy hills and trees.
“But what about her?” Roy said, pointing at Helen’s body.
“You gonna have to bury her deep, brother,” Theodore said. “I put a shovel in the boot just in case things didn’t turn out like you expected.”
“And Lenora?”
“Believe me, that baby will be better off with the old lady,” Theodore said. “You don’t want your kid growing up running from the law, do you?” He looked up through the trees. The sun had disappeared behind a wall of dark clouds, and the sky had turned the color of ash. The damp smell of rain was in the air. From over around Rocky Gap came a slow, faint rumble of thunder. “Now you better start digging before we get soaked.”
WHEN EARSKELL CAME IN THAT NIGHT, Emma was sitting in a chair by the window rocking Lenora. It was nearly eleven o’clock, and the storm was just starting to ease off. “Helen told me they wouldn’t be gone but a couple hours,” the old woman said. “She only left one bottle of milk.”
“Aw, you know them preachers,” Earskell said. “They probably went out and got on a good one. Hell, from what I hear, that crippled boy could drink me under the table.”
Emma shook her head. “I wish we had a phone. There’s something about this just don’t feel right to me.”
The old man peered down at the sleeping infant. “Poor little thing,” he said. “She looks just like her mother, don’t she?”
4
WHEN ARVIN WAS FOUR YEARS OLD, Willard decided that he didn’t want his son growing up in Meade around all the degenerates. They had been living in Charlotte’s old apartment above the dry cleaners ever since they had gotten married. It seemed to him as if every pervert in southern Ohio was located in Meade. Lately, the newspaper was filled with their sick shenanigans. Just two days ago a man named Calvin Claytor had been arrested in the Sears and Roebuck with a foot of Polish sausage tied to his thigh. According to the Meade Gazette, the suspect, dressed only in ripped coveralls, was caught brushing up against elderly women in what the reporter described as a “lewd and aggressive manner.” As far as Willard was concerned, that Claytor sonofabitch was even worse than the retired state representative the sheriff caught parked along the highway on the outskirts of town with a chicken stuck to his privates, a Rhode Island Red that he’d purchased for fifty cents from a nearby farm. They’d had to take him to the hospital to cut it off. People said that the deputy, out of respect for the other patients or maybe the victim, had covered the hen with his uniform jacket when they marched the man into the ER. “That’s somebody’s mother the bastard was doing that to,” Willard told Charlotte.
“Which one?” she asked. She was standing at the stove stirring a pot of spaghetti.
“Jesus, Charlotte, the sausage man,” he said. “They oughta cram that thing down his throat.”
“I don’t know,” his wife said. “I don’t see that being as bad as someone messing with animals.”
He looked over at Arvin, sitting on the floor rolling a toy truck back and forth. From all indications, the country was going to hell in a hurry. Two months ago, his mother had written him that they had finally found Helen Laferty’s body, what little was left of it anyway, buried in the woods a few miles from Coal Creek. He had read the letter every night for a week. Charlotte had noticed that Willard started becoming increasingly upset about the news in the paper right after that. Though Roy and Theodore were the prime suspects, there hadn’t been a sign of them anywhere for almost three years, so the sheriff still couldn’t rule out that they might have also been murdered and dumped elsewhere. “We don’t know,