The Devil All the Time - Donald Ray Pollock [38]
They hadn’t driven very far when the boy started chanting in a high-pitched voice, “California, here I come, California, here I come”; and she knew that Carl was going to be extra mean to this one because they just wanted to forget all about that goddamn place. At a gas station outside of Ames, she’d filled the car with gas and bought two bottles of orange screwdriver, thinking that might quiet the boy down some; but once he got a couple of sips in him, he started singing along to the radio, and that made things even worse. After the scarecrow squawked his sorry way through five or six songs, Carl leaned over to her and said, “By God, this bastard’s gonna pay.”
“I think he might be retarded or something,” she said in a low voice, hoping Carl might let him go because he was superstitious that way.
Carl glanced back at the boy, then turned around and shook his head. “He’s just stupid is all. Or a goddamn nutcase. There’s a difference, you know.”
“Well, at least turn the radio off,” she suggested. “No sense egging him on.”
“Fuck it, let him have his fun,” Carl said. “I’ll take the songbird out of him directly.”
She dropped the candy wrapper on the floor and ran some more hot water. She hadn’t argued at the time, but she wished to God now she hadn’t touched the boy. She lathered up the washcloth and pushed the end of it inside her, squeezed her legs together. Out in the other room, Carl was talking to himself, but that usually didn’t mean anything, especially right after they had finished with another model. Then he got a little louder, and she reached up and made sure the door was locked, just in case.
With the Iowa boy, they had parked at the edge of a garbage dump, and Carl had taken the camera out and started his spiel while he and the boy finished off the second bottle of screwdriver. “My wife loves to play around, but I’m just too damn old to get it up anymore,” he told the boy that afternoon. “You know what I mean?”
Sandy had puffed on her cigarette, watched the scarecrow in the rearview mirror. He rocked back and forth, grinning wildly and nodding his head to everything that Carl said, his eyes blank as pebbles. For a moment, she thought she was going to vomit. It was more nerves than anything else, and the sick feeling passed quickly, like it always did. Then Carl suggested that they get out of the car, and while he spread a blanket on the ground, she reluctantly began taking off her clothes. The boy started up his damn singing again, but she put her finger to her lips and told him to be quiet for a little while. “Let’s have some fun now,” she said, forcing a smile and patting a spot next to her on the blanket.
It took the Iowa boy longer than most to realize what was happening, but even then he didn’t struggle too much. Carl took his time and managed at least twenty photos of junk sticking out of various places: lightbulbs and clothes hangers and soup cans. The light was starting to fade by the time he set the camera down and finished things off. He wiped his hands and knife on the boy’s shirt, then walked around until he found a discarded Westinghouse refrigerator half buried in the trash. With the shovel from the car, he cleared the top off and pried the door open while Sandy went through the boy’s pants. “That’s it?” Carl said when she handed him a plastic