The Devil All the Time - Donald Ray Pollock [50]
“Better hurry!” Lenora yelled.
“Okay, okay,” the boy said, setting the gun down on the cloth. He bent down and blew out the tiny flame.
“So what did you wish for?” Lenora asked. She hoped it had something to do with the Lord, but the way Arvin was, she wasn’t going to hold her breath. Every night, she prayed that he would wake up with a love for Jesus Christ glowing in his heart. She hated to think that he was going to end up in hell like that Elvis Presley and all those other sinners he listened to on the radio.
“Now you know better than to ask that,” Emma said.
“That’s all right, Grandma,” Arvin said. “I wished that I could take you all back to Ohio and show you where we lived. It was nice, up there on the hill. At least it was before Mom took sick.”
“Did I ever tell you about the time I lived in Cincinnati?” Earskell said.
Arvin looked at the two women and winked. “No,” he said, “I don’t recall it.”
“Lord, not again,” Emma muttered, while Lenora, smiling to herself, lifted the stub of the candle off the cake and put it in the matchbox.
“Yep, followed me a girl up there,” the old man said. “She was from over on Fox Knob, was raised right next to the Riley place. Her house ain’t there no more. Wanted to go to secretary school. I wasn’t much older than you are now.”
“Who wanted to go to secretary school,” Arvin asked, “you or the girl?”
“Ha! Her did,” Earskell said. He took a long breath, then slowly let it out. “Her name was Alice Louise Berry. You remember her, don’t you, Emma?”
“Yes, I do, Earskell.”
“So why didn’t you stay?” Arvin said, without thinking. Though he had heard parts of the story a hundred times, he’d never before asked the old man why he had ended up back in Coal Creek. From living with his father, Arvin had learned that you didn’t pry too much into other people’s affairs. Everyone had things they didn’t want to talk about, including himself. In the five years since his parents had passed, he had never once mentioned the hard feelings he held against Willard for leaving him. Now he felt like an ass for opening his mouth and putting the old man on the spot. He began wrapping the pistol back up in the cloth.
Earskell peered across the room with dim, cloudy eyes as if he was searching for the answer in the flowered wallpaper, though he knew the reason well enough. Alice Louise Berry had died in the influenza epidemic of 1918, along with 3 million or so other poor souls, just a few weeks after starting her classes at the Gilmore Sanderson Secretarial School. If only they had stayed in the hills, Earskell often thought, she might still be alive. But Alice always had big dreams, which was one of the things he had loved about her, and he was glad that he hadn’t tried to talk her out of it. He was certain those days they spent in Cincinnati among the tall buildings and crowded streets before she took the fever were the happiest ones of her life. His, too, for that matter. After a minute or so, he blinked away the memories and said, “That sure looks like a dandy cake.”
Emma took up her knife and cut it into four pieces, one for each of them.
20
ONE DAY ARVIN WENT LOOKING FOR LENORA after school let out and found her backed up against the trash incinerator next to the bus garage, surrounded by three boys. As he walked up behind them, he heard Gene Dinwoodie tell her, “Hell, you’re so damn ugly I’d have to put a sack over your head before I could get a hard-on.” The other two, Orville Buckman and Tommy Matson, laughed and squeezed in closer to her. They were seniors who had been held back a year or two, and all of them were bigger than Arvin. They spent most of their time at school sitting in the shop building trading dirty jokes with the worthless industrial arts teacher and smoking Bugler. Lenora had shut her eyes tight and begun praying. Tears were running down her pink face. Arvin got only a couple of licks in on Dinwoodie before the others tackled him to the ground and took turns punching him. While he was lying in the gravel, he thought, as