The Devil All the Time - Donald Ray Pollock [39]
“What did you expect?” she said. “He don’t even have a billfold.” She glanced inside the icebox. The walls were covered with a thin coat of green mold, and a mason jar of gooey, gray jam lay smashed in one corner. “Jesus, you going to put him in there?”
“I’d say he’s slept in worse places,” Carl said.
They folded the boy double and crammed him inside the refrigerator, then Carl insisted on one last photo, one of Sandy in her red panties and bra getting ready to close the door. He squatted down and aimed the camera. “That’s a good one,” he said, after he clicked the shutter. “Real sweet.” Then he stood up and stuck the boy’s whistle in his mouth. “Go ahead and shut the goddamn thing. He can dream about California all he wants now.” With the shovel, he began spreading trash over the top of the metal tomb.
The water grew cold, and she stepped out of the tub. She brushed her teeth and smeared some cold cream on her face and ran a comb through her wet hair. The army boy had been the best she’d had in a long time, and she planned to go to sleep tonight thinking about him. Anything to chase that damn scarecrow out of her head. When she came out of the bathroom in her yellow nightgown, Carl was lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling. It had been a week, she figured, since he’d bathed. She lit a cigarette and told him that he wasn’t sleeping with her unless he washed the smell of those boys off.
“They’re called models, not boys,” he said. He rose up and swung his heavy legs off the bed. “How many times I got to tell you that?”
“I don’t care what they’re called,” Sandy said. “That’s a clean bed.”
Carl glanced down at the flies on the rug. “Yeah, that’s what you think,” he said, heading for the bathroom. He peeled off his grimy clothes and sniffed himself. He happened to like the way he smelled, but maybe he should be more careful. Lately, he was beginning to worry that he was turning into some kind of fairy, and he suspected that Sandy thought the same thing. He tested the shower water with his hand, then stepped into the tub. He rubbed the bar of soap over his hairy, bloated body. Beating off to the photos wasn’t a good sign, he knew that, but sometimes he couldn’t help it. It was hard for him when they were back home, sitting alone in that crummy apartment night after night while Sandy was pouring drinks in the bar.
As he dried himself off, he tried to recall the last time they had made love. Last spring maybe, though he couldn’t be sure. He tried to imagine Sandy young and fresh again, before all their shit started. Of course, he had soon found out about the cook who had taken her cherry and the one-nighters with the pimple-faced punks, but still, there was an air of innocence about her back then. Perhaps, he sometimes thought, that was because he didn’t have that much experience himself when he first met her. Sure, he’d slept with a few whores—the neighborhood had been full of them—but he’d only been in his mid-twenties when his mother had the stroke that left her paralyzed and practically speechless. By then, there hadn’t been any boyfriends banging on her door for several years, and so Carl was stuck with looking after her. For the first several months, he considered pressing a pillow over her twisted face and freeing them both, but she was his mother after all. Instead, he began applying himself to recording her long downward slide on film, a new photo of her shriveled-up body twice a week for the next thirteen years. Eventually, she got used to it. Then one morning he found her dead. He sat on the edge of the bed and tried to eat the egg he’d mashed up for her breakfast, but he couldn’t get it down. Three days later, he tossed the first shovelful of dirt on her coffin.
Besides his camera, he had $217 left after paying for her funeral and a rickety Ford that would run only in dry weather. The odds of the car ever making it across the United States were slim to none, but he had dreamed of a new life almost as long as he had been alive, and now his best and last excuse was finally