The Devil All the Time - Donald Ray Pollock [35]
Carl pulled the cigar out of his mouth and picked at a shred of tobacco caught between his teeth. “We need to do some driving first,” he said.
Heading south on 79, they crossed the Mississippi into Illinois on Route 50, a road they’d become mighty familiar with over the last couple of years. Sandy kept trying to hurry things, and he had to remind her several times to slow down. Wrecking the car and being pinned inside or knocked out was one of his biggest fears. Sometimes he had nightmares about it, saw himself lying handcuffed to a hospital bed trying to explain those rolls of film to the law. Just thinking about it started to fuck with the high he’d gotten off the army boy, and he reached over and twisted the knob on the radio until he found a country music station coming out of Covington. Neither of them spoke, but every once in a while, Sandy hummed along to one of the slower songs. Then she’d yawn and light another cigarette. Carl counted the bugs that splattered against the windshield, stayed ready to grab the wheel in case she nodded off.
After driving through a hundred miles of small, hushed towns and vast, dark cornfields, they came upon a run-down motel built out of pink cement blocks called the Sundowner. It was nearly one o’clock in the morning. Three cars sat in the potholed parking lot. Carl rang the buzzer several times before a light finally popped on inside the office and an elderly lady with metal curlers in her hair opened the door a crack and peered out. “That your wife in the car?” she asked, squinting past Carl at the station wagon. He looked around, could just barely make out the glow of Sandy’s cigarette in the shadows.
“You got good eyes,” he said, managing a brief smile. “Yeah, that’s her.”
“Where you all from?” the woman asked.
Carl started to say Maryland, one of the few states he hadn’t been to yet, but then remembered the tag on the front of the car. He figured the nosy old bag had already checked it out. “Up around Cleveland,” he told her.
The woman shook her head, pulled her housecoat tighter around her. “You couldn’t pay me to live in a place like that, all that robbing and killing going on.”
“You got that right,” Carl said. “I worry all the time. Too many spooks for one thing. Heck, my wife won’t hardly leave the house anymore.” Then he pulled the army boy’s money out of his pocket. “So how much for a room?” he asked.
“Six dollars,” the woman said. He wet his thumb and counted off some singles and handed them to her. She left for a moment and came back with a key on a worn and wrinkled cardboard tag. “Number seven,” she said. “Down on the end.”
The room was hot and stuffy and smelled like Black Flag. Sandy headed straight for the bathroom and Carl flipped the portable TV set on, though there wasn’t anything on the air but snow and static that time of night, not out here in the sticks anyway. Kicking off his shoes, he started to pull down the thin plaid bedspread. Six dead flies lay scattered on top of the flat pillows. He stared at them for a minute, then sat down on the edge of the bed and reached inside Sandy’s purse for one of her cigarettes. He counted the flies again, but the number didn’t change.
Looking across the room, he rested his eyes on a cheap framed picture hanging on the wall, a flowers-and-fruit piece of shit that nobody would ever remember, not one person who ever slept in this stinking room. It served no purpose that he could think of, other than to remind a person that the world was a sorry-ass place to be stuck living in. He leaned forward and set his elbows on his knees, tried to imagine one of his pictures in its place. Maybe the beatnik from Wisconsin with the little cellophane of reefer, or that big blond bastard from last year, the one who put