The Devil All the Time - Donald Ray Pollock [26]
Through the trees, Arvin could see a few lights glimmering in Knockemstiff. He heard a car door slam somewhere down there, then a single horseshoe clang against a metal peg. He stood waiting for the next pitch, but none came. It seemed like a thousand years had passed since the morning the two hunters had come up behind Willard and him here. He felt guilty and ashamed that he wasn’t crying, but there were no tears left. His mother’s long dying had left him dry. Not knowing what else to do, he stepped around Willard’s body and pointed the flashlight ahead of him. He began making his way down through the woods.
8
AT EXACTLY NINE O’CLOCK THAT EVENING, Hank Bell stuck the CLOSED sign in the front window of Maude’s store and turned off the lights. He went behind the counter and got a six-pack of beer from the bottom of the meat case, then stepped out the back door. In his front shirt pocket was a little transistor radio. He sat down in a lawn chair and opened a beer and lit a cigarette. He had lived in a camper behind the concrete-block building for four years now. Reaching into his pocket, he turned the radio on just as the announcer reported that the Reds were down by three runs in the sixth inning. They were playing out on the West Coast. Hank estimated it was just after five o’clock there. The way time worked, that was a funny thing, he thought.
He looked over at the little cigar tree he’d planted the first year he worked at the store. It had grown nearly five feet since then. It was a start he’d gotten from the tree that stood in the front yard of the house he and his mother had lived in before she passed, and he lost the place to the bank. He wasn’t sure why he’d planted it. A couple more years at the most, and he was planning on leaving Knockemstiff. He talked about it to any customer who would listen. Every week, he saved back a little bit from the thirty dollars Maude paid him. Some days he thought he’d move up north, and other times he decided the South might be best. But there was plenty of time to decide where to go. He was still a young man.
He watched a silvery-gray mist a couple of feet high move slowly up from Black Run Creek and cover the flat, rocky field behind the store, part of Clarence Myers’s cow pasture. It was his favorite part of the day, right after the sun went down and right before the long shadows disappeared. He could hear some boys whooping and yelling on the concrete bridge out in front of the store whenever a car drove by. A few of them hung there almost every night, regardless of the weather. Poor as snakes, every one of them. All they desired out of life was a car that would run and a hot piece of ass. He thought that sounded nice in a way, just going through your entire life with no more expectations than that. Sometimes he wished he weren’t so ambitious.
The praying on top of the hill had finally stopped three nights ago. Hank tried not to think about the poor woman dying up there, closed up in that room, like people were saying, while the Russell man and his boy went half insane. Hell, they’d damn near driven the entire holler crazy at times, the way they went on every morning and every evening for hours. From what he’d heard, it sounded more like they were practicing some sort of voodoo instead of anything Christian. Two of the Lynch boys had come across some dead animals hanging in the trees up there a couple of weeks ago; and then one of their hounds turned up missing. Lord, the world was getting to be an awful place. Just yesterday, he’d read in the newspaper that Henry Dunlap’s wife and her black lover had been arrested on suspicion of killing him. The law had yet to find the body, but Hank thought her lying with a Negro was damn near proof that they’d done it. Everybody knew