The Devil All the Time - Donald Ray Pollock [55]
“Damn it, Lenora, stop talking that nonsense,” Arvin had told her. “Besides, you might not even be an orphan. As far as everyone around here’s concerned, you daddy’s still alive and kicking. Hell, he might pop over the hill any day now dancing a jig.”
“I hope so,” she’d said. “I pray every day that he will.”
“Even if it meant he killed your mother?”
“I don’t care,” she said. “I’ve already forgiven him. We could start all over.”
“That’s crazy.”
“No, it’s not. What about your father?”
“What about him?”
“Well, if he could come back—”
“Girl, just shut up about it.” Arvin started toward the cemetery gate. “We both know that ain’t gonna happen.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice breaking into a sob.
Taking a deep breath, Arvin stopped and turned around. Sometimes it seemed as if she spent half of her life crying. He held his car keys in his hand. “Look, if you want a ride, come on.”
When he got home, he cleaned the Bel Air’s carburetor with a wire brush dipped in gasoline, then left again right after supper to pick up Hobart and Daryl. He had been down all week, thinking about Mary Jane Turner, and he felt the need to get good and sloshed. Her father hadn’t taken long to decide that life in the merchant marine was a hell of a lot easier than plowing rocks and worrying about whether it rained enough or not, and so he had packed his family up and headed for Baltimore and a new ship the previous Sunday morning. Though Arvin had kept after her from their first date, he was glad now that Mary hadn’t let him in her pants. Saying goodbye had been hard enough as it was. “Please,” he’d asked as they stood at her front door the night before she left; and she had smiled and stood on her tiptoes and one last time whispered dirty words in his ear. He and Hobart and Daryl had pooled their money together for the bottle and a twelve-pack and a couple of packs of Pall Malls and a tank of gas. Then they drove up and down the dull streets of Lewisburg until midnight listening to the radio fade in and out and blowing off about what they were going to do after high school, until their voices turned as rough as gravel from all the smoke and whiskey and grandiose plans for the future.
Leaning back in the rocker, Arvin wondered who was living in his old house now, wondered if the storekeeper still stayed by himself in that little camper and if Janey Wagner was knocked up by now. “Stink finger,” he muttered to himself. He thought again about the way the deputy named Bodecker had locked him in the back of the patrol car after he had led him to the prayer log, like the lawman was afraid of him, a ten-year-old kid with blueberry pie on his face. They had put him in an empty cell that night, not knowing what else to do with him, and the welfare lady had showed up the next afternoon with some of his clothes and his grandmother’s address. Holding the bottle up, he saw that there was maybe two inches left in the bottom. He stuck it under the chair for Earskell in the morning.
23
REVEREND SYKES COUGHED A LITTLE, and the congregation of the Coal Creek Church of the Holy Ghost Sanctified watched a trickle of bright blood run down his chin and drip onto his shirt. He kept preaching, though, gave the people a decent sermon about helping your neighbor; but then at the end he announced that he was stepping down. “Temporary,” he said. “Just till I get to feeling better.” He said that his wife had a nephew down in Tennessee who had just graduated from one of those Bible colleges. “He claims he wants to work with poor people,” Sykes went on.