Devil All the Time, The by Pollock Donald Ray

Author:Pollock, Donald Ray [Pollock, Donald Ray]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, General, Suspense, Suspense Fiction, Literary, Ohio, Ohio - Rural Conditions
ISBN: 9780385535045
Publisher: Random House Digital, Inc.
Published: 2011-07-12T05:00:00+00:00

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 hanger with the handlebar mustache in the cell next to theirs.

“Because the fucker gets you down and pops your pimples if you got any,” the man said. He twisted the waxed ends of his black mustache. “Lucky for me I’ve always had a nice complexion.”

“What the hell does he do that for?”

“He likes to eat ’em,” another man said, from a cell across the way.

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