The Devil All the Time - Donald Ray Pollock [72]
“Carl,” Sandy said, but he waved his hand for her to keep quiet.
“What the hell you want to do that for?” the man said.
“Well, I’m a photographer,” Carl said. “I just think you’d make a good picture. Heck, maybe I could sell it to a magazine or something. I always keep my eyes peeled for fine subjects like yourself.”
The man looked past Carl at Sandy standing beside the station wagon. She was lighting a cigarette. He didn’t approve of women who smoked. Most of them he’d known were trash, but he figured a man who took pictures for a living probably couldn’t get anything decent. Hard to tell where he had picked her up. A few years ago, he’d found a woman named Mildred McDonald in his hog barn, half naked and sucking on a cancer stick. She had told him she was waiting on a man, just as casual as anything, then tried to get him to lie with her in the filth. He glanced at the gun Carl was holding in his hand, noticed that his finger was still on the trigger. “You better go ahead and get out of here,” the man said, then started walking fast toward his truck.
“What you gonna do?” Carl said. “Call the law?” He glanced back at Sandy and winked.
The man opened the door and reached inside the cab. “Hell, boy, I don’t need a crooked sheriff to take care of you.”
Hearing that, Carl began to laugh, but then he looked around and saw the farmer standing behind the door of the truck with a rifle pointed at him through the open window. He had a wide grin on his weathered face. “That’s my brother-in-law you’re talking about,” Carl told him, his voice turning serious.
“Who? Lee Bodecker?” The man turned his head and spit. “I wouldn’t go around braggin’ about that if I was you.”
Carl stood there in the middle of the lane staring at the farmer. He heard the squeak of a door behind him as Sandy got in the car and slammed it shut. For a second, he imagined just raising the pistol up and having it out with the bastard, a regular shootout. His hand began shaking a little, and he took a deep breath to try to calm himself. Then he thought about the future. There was always the next hunt. Just a few more weeks and he and Sandy would be on the road again. Ever since he’d heard the Republicans talking in the White Cow, he’d been thinking about killing one of those longhairs. According to the news he’d seen on the TV lately, the country was heading for turmoil; and he wanted to be around to see it. Nothing would please him more than to watch the whole shithouse go up in flames someday. And Sandy had been eating better lately, was starting to fill out again. She was losing her looks fast—they never had gotten her teeth fixed—but they still had a couple of good years left. No sense throwing that away just because some stupid-ass farmer had a hard-on. As soon as he made his decision, his hand stopped twitching. He turned and started toward the station wagon.
“And don’t ever let me catch you back here again, understand?” Carl heard the man yell as he got in the front seat and handed Sandy her pistol. He looked around one more time as he cranked the engine, but he still didn’t see any fucking cows.
31
OCCASIONALLY, IF THE LAW GOT TOO ROUGH or the hunger bad enough, they would head inland, away from the big water that Theodore loved, so that Roy could find some work. While Roy picked fruit for a few days or weeks, Theodore sat in a lonely grove of trees or under some shady bushes waiting for his return every evening. His body was nothing but a shell now. His skin was gray as slate and his eyes weak. He passed out for no reason, complained about sharp pains that numbed his arms, and a heaviness on his chest that sometimes made him puke up his lunch meat breakfast and the half fifth of warm wine that Roy left him every morning to keep him company. Still, every night, he’d try to come alive for a couple of hours, attempt to play some music, even though his fingers didn’t work too well anymore. Roy would walk around their campfire with a jug trying to get some words started, something from