The Devil All the Time - Donald Ray Pollock [18]
“Shit, I’d bend that sweet little thing over, and I’d …”
“Ha!” Bernie Hill said. “You ol’ dog, I bet you’ve already busted it open.”
Henry picked a club from his bag. He sighed and looked dreamily down the fairway, placing one hand over his heart. “Boys, I promised her I wouldn’t tell.”
Later, after they’d returned to the clubhouse, a man named Carter Oxley walked up to the fat, sweating lawyer in the bar and said, “You might want to watch what you say about that woman.”
Henry turned and frowned. Oxley was a new man at the Meade Country Club, an engineer who had worked himself up to the #2 position at the paper mill. Bernie Hill had brought him along to be part of their foursome. He hadn’t said two words the entire game. “What woman?” Henry said.
“You were talking about a man named Willard Russell out there, right?”
“Yeah, Russell’s his name. So?”
“Buddy, it’s no skin off my back, but he damn near killed a man with his fists last fall for talking trash about his wife. The one he beat up still ain’t right, sits around with a coffee can hanging from his neck to catch his slobbers. You might want to think about that.”
“You sure we’re talking about the same guy? The one I know wouldn’t say shit if he had a mouthful.”
Oxley shrugged. “Maybe he’s just the quiet type. Those are the ones you got to watch.”
“How do you know all this?”
“You’re not the only one who owns land out in Knockemstiff.”
Henry pulled a gold cigarette case from his pocket and offered the new man a smoke. “What else do you know about him?” he asked. That morning Edith had told him that she thought they should buy the gardener a pickup truck. She was standing at the kitchen window eating a fluffy pastry. Henry couldn’t help noticing that the top of it was covered with chocolate icing. How appropriate, he thought, the fucking whore. He was glad, though, to see that she was putting on weight. Before long, her ass would be as wide as an ax handle. Let the grass-cutting bastard pound it then. “It doesn’t have to be a new one,” she told him. “Just something he can get around in. Willie’s feet are too big for him to be walking to work all the time.” She reached in the bag for another pastry. “My God, Henry, they’re twice as long as yours.”
5
EVER SINCE THE FIRST OF THE YEAR, Charlotte’s insides had been giving her fits. She kept telling herself it was just the flux, maybe indigestion. Her mother had suffered greatly from ulcers, and Charlotte remembered the woman eating nothing but plain toast and rice pudding the last few years of her life. She cut back on the grease and pepper, but it didn’t seem to help. Then in April, she began bleeding a little. She spent hours lying on top of the bed when Arvin and Willard were gone, and the cramps eased considerably if she curled up on her side and stayed still. Worried about hospital bills and spending all the money they had saved for the house, she kept her pain a secret, foolishly hoping that whatever ailed her would go away, heal itself. After all, she was only thirty years old, too young for it to be anything serious. But by the middle of May, the spotty bleeding had become a steady trickle, and to dull the pain she’d taken to sneaking drinks from the gallon of Old Crow that Willard kept under the kitchen sink. Near the end of that month, right before school let out for the summer, Arvin found her passed out on the kitchen floor in a puddle of watery blood. A pan of biscuits was burning in the oven. They didn’t have a phone, so he propped her head up with a pillow and cleaned up the mess as best he could. Sitting down on the floor beside her, he listened to her shallow breathing and prayed it wouldn’t stop. She was still unconscious when his father came home from work that evening. As the doctor told Willard a couple of days later, it was too late by that time. Someone was always dying somewhere, and in the summer of 1958, the year that Arvin Eugene Russell counted himself ten years old, it was his mother’s turn.
AFTER TWO WEEKS IN THE HOSPITAL, Charlotte raised up