The Devil All the Time - Donald Ray Pollock [42]
“Sure, Lee, I’ll do that,” the barmaid said.
After he walked out the door, one of the men yelled, “Hey, Juanita, have you heard what Hen Matthews been saying about that big-headed bastard?”
14
A CAR DOOR SLAMMED in the parking lot. Carl opened his eyes, looked across the room at the flowers and fruit on the wall. The clock said it was still early morning, but he was already covered in sweat. He got out of bed and went to the bathroom, emptied his bladder. He didn’t comb his hair or brush his teeth or wash his face. He dressed in the same clothes he’d worn for the past week, his purple shirt, a baggy pair of shiny, gray suit pants. Sticking the film canisters in his pockets, he sat on the edge of a chair and put his shoes on. He thought about waking Sandy up so they could get a move on, but then decided to let her rest. They’d slept in the car the past three nights. He figured he owed her that, and besides, they were going home anyway. No reason to hurry now.
While he waited for her to wake up, Carl chewed on a cigar and took the army boy’s wad of money out of his pocket. As he counted it again, he remembered a time the year before when they were cutting across the lower end of Minnesota. They were clinging to their last three dollars when the radiator on this ’49 Chevy coupe they were traveling in that summer blew a hole. He managed to temporarily seal the leak with a can of black pepper he carried for just such an emergency, a trick he’d heard about at a truck stop one time. They found a hick gas station a mile or so off the highway before it busted open again, ended up spending the bigger part of a day waiting around while some grease monkey with a pack of Red Man hanging out of his back pocket kept promising to fix it as soon as he finished a tune-up his boss wanted done yesterday. “Won’t be long now, mister,” he told Carl every fifteen fucking minutes. Sandy didn’t help matters any. She parked her ass on a bench right outside the garage door and filed her nails and teased the poor bastard with glimpses of her pink underwear until he didn’t know whether to shit or go blind, she had him so tore up.
Carl finally threw up his hands in disgust and got the rolls of film out of the glove box and locked himself in the restroom behind the station. He sat for several hours in that stinking sweatbox thumbing through a pile of ragged detective magazines stacked on the damp floor next to the filthy, crusted commode. Every once in a while, he heard the little bell ring around front, announcing another gas customer. A brown cockroach crawled sluggishly up the wall. He lit one of his dog dicks, thinking that might help move his bowels, but his insides were like cement. The best he could do was dribble a little blood now and then. His fat thighs grew numb. At one point, someone pounded on the door, but he wasn’t about to give up his seat just so some no-good sonofabitch could wash his dainty hands.
He was about to wipe his bloody ass when he came across the article in a soggy copy of True Crime. He settled back down on the commode, flicked the ash off his cigar. The detective being interviewed in the story said that two male bodies had been found, one stuffed in a culvert near Red Cloud, Nebraska, and the other nailed to the floor of a shed on an abandoned farm outside Seneca, Kansas. “We’re talking within a hundred miles of each other,” the detective pointed out. Carl looked at the date on the cover of the magazine: November 1964. Hell, the story was already nine months old. He read the three pages over carefully five times. Though he refused to offer any specifics, the detective suggested there was a good chance the two murders were connected because of the nature of the crimes. So, judging from the condition of the remains, we’re looking at the summer of 1963, thereabouts anyway, he said. “Well, at least you got the year right,” Carl muttered to himself. That was their third time out, when they got those two. One was a runaway husband hoping to find a new beginning