The Devil All the Time - Donald Ray Pollock [56]
Taking a careful breath, he cleared his throat. “I ain’t seen him since he was a boy, but his mother says he’s all right. Him and his wife should be here in two weeks, and like I said, he’s just gonna help out for a while. I know he ain’t from around here, but try to make him feel welcome anyway.” Sykes started to weave a bit and grabbed hold of the pulpit to steady himself. He pulled the empty Five Brothers pack from his pocket and held it up. “Just in case any of you need it, I’m gonna hand this over to him.” A hacking fit came over him then, bent him double, but this time he managed to cover his mouth with his handkerchief and hide the blood. When he got his breath back, he rose up and looked around, his face red and sweaty with the strain of it all. He was too embarrassed to tell them that he was dying. The black lung that he’d been fighting for years had finally gotten the better of him. Within the next few weeks or months, according to the doctor, he’d be meeting his Maker. Sykes couldn’t honestly say that he was actually looking forward to it, but he knew that he’d had a better life than most men. After all, hadn’t he lived forty-two years longer than those poor wretches who had died in the mine cave-in that had pointed him toward his calling? Yes, he’d been a lucky man. He wiped a tear from his eye and shoved the bloody rag in his pants pocket. “Well,” he said, “no sense keeping you folks any longer. That’s all I got.”
24
ROY LIFTED THEODORE OUT OF THE WHEELCHAIR and carried him across the dirty sand. They were at the north end of a public beach in St. Petersburg, a little south of Tampa. The cripple’s useless legs swung back and forth like a rag doll’s. He was rank with the smell of piss, and Roy had noticed that he wasn’t using his milk bottle anymore, just soaking his rotten dungarees whenever he needed to go. He had to set Theodore down several times and rest, but he finally got him to the edge of the water. Two stout women wearing wide-brimmed hats rose up and looked over at them, then hurriedly gathered up their towels and lotions and headed for the parking lot. Roy went back to the chair and got their supper, two fifths of White Port and a package of boiled ham. They had lifted it from a grocery store a couple of blocks away right after a truck driver hauling oranges let them out. “Didn’t we spend some time locked up here once?” Theodore asked.
Roy swallowed the last slice of meat and nodded. “Three days, I think.” The cops had picked them up for vagrancy just before dark. They had been preaching on a street corner. America was getting as bad as Russia, a thin, balding man yelled at them as they were escorted past his cell to their own that night. Why could the police throw a man in jail just because he didn’t have any money or an address? What if the man didn’t want any goddamn money or a fuckin’ address? Where was all this freedom they bragged about? The cops took the protestor out of the block every morning and made him carry a stack of telephone books up and down the stairs all day. According to some of the other prisoners, the man had been arrested for vagrancy twenty-two times just in the past year, and they were sick of feeding the Communist bastard. If nothing else, they were going to make him sweat for his bologna and grits.
“I can’t remember,” Theodore said. “What was the jail like?”
“Not bad,” Roy said. “I believe they gave out coffee for dessert.” The second night they were there, the cops brought in a big, hulking brute with a carved-up face called the Zit-Eater. Right before bedtime, they stuck him in the cell down at the end of the hall with the Communist. Everyone in the jail had heard about the Zit-Eater except for Roy and Theodore. He was famous up and down the Gulf Coast. “Why do they call him that?” Roy had asked the paper