The Devil All the Time - Donald Ray Pollock [31]
“I might have some questions for you later on,” Bodecker called out.
“It’s a goddamn shame, that’s all I can tell you,” he heard Hank say.
Bodecker put Arvin in the front seat of the cruiser and drove up Baum Hill. At the top, he turned down a narrow dirt lane lined with trees that the boy pointed out. He slowed the car down to a crawl. “I never been back this way before,” the deputy said. He reached down and quietly unsnapped his holster.
“Ain’t nobody new been back here in a long time,” Arvin said. Looking out the side window into the dark woods, he realized that he’d left his light in the store. He hoped the storekeeper didn’t sell it before he got back down there. He glanced over at the brightly lit instrument panel. “You gonna turn the siren on?”
“No sense in scaring someone.”
“There’s nobody left to scare,” Arvin said.
“So this where you live?” Bodecker asked as they pulled up to the small, square house. There were no lights on, no sign that anyone lived here at all except for a rocking chair on the porch. The grass was at least a foot high in the yard. Off to the left was an old barn. Bodecker parked behind a rusted-out pickup. Just your typical hillbilly trash, he thought. Hard to tell what kind of mess he was getting into. His empty stomach gurgled like a broken commode.
Arvin got out without answering and stood in front of the cruiser waiting for the deputy. “This way,” he said. He turned and started around the corner of the house.
“How far is it?” Bodecker asked.
“Not too far. Maybe ten minutes.”
Bodecker flipped on his flashlight and followed behind the boy along the edge of an overgrown field. They entered the woods and went several hundred feet down a well-worn path. The boy suddenly stopped and pointed ahead into the darkness. “He’s right there,” Arvin said.
The deputy trained his light on a man, dressed in a white shirt and dress pants, crumpled loosely over a log. He took a few steps closer, could make out a gash in the man’s neck. The front of his shirt was soaked in blood. He sniffed the air and gagged. “My God, how long he been laying here like this?”
Arvin shrugged. “Not long. I fell asleep for a little while and there he was.”
Bodecker pinched his nostrils together, tried to breathe through his mouth. “What the hell is that smell then?”
“That’s them up there,” Arvin said, pointing into the trees.
Bodecker lifted his flashlight. Animals in various states of decay hung all around them, some in the branches and others from tall wooden crosses. A dead dog with a leather collar around its neck was nailed up high to one of the crosses like some kind of hideous Christlike figure. The head of a deer lay at the foot of another. Bodecker fumbled with his gun. “Goddamn it, boy, what the hell is this?” he said, turning the light back on Arvin just as a white, squirming maggot dropped onto the boy’s shoulder. He brushed it off as casually as someone would a leaf or a seed. Bodecker waved his revolver around as he started to back away.
“It’s a prayer log,” Arvin said, his voice barely a whisper now.
“What? A prayer log?”
Arvin nodded, staring at his father’s body. “But it don’t work,” he said.
10
THE COUPLE HAD BEEN ROAMING the Midwest for several weeks during the summer of 1965, always on the hunt, two nobodies in a black Ford station wagon purchased for one hundred dollars at a used-car lot in Meade, Ohio, called Brother Whitey’s. It was the third vehicle they had gotten off the minister in as many years. The man on the passenger’s side was turning to fat and believed in signs and had a habit of picking his decayed teeth with a Buck pocketknife. The woman always drove and wore tight shorts and flimsy blouses that showed off her pale, bony body in a way they both thought enticing. She chain-smoked any kind of menthol cigarettes she could get her hands on while he chewed on cheap black cigars that he called dog dicks. The Ford burned oil and leaked brake