The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock Page B

her penned up on his back porch in a plywood doghouse when he wasn’t selling her ass out behind one of the bars in town. People said she’d do anything you could think of for fifty cents. Hank had seen her in Meade this past Fourth of July, standing by the door outside Dusty’s Bar with a black eye, holding thebiker’s leather helmet. The best years of Mildred’s life were behind her now, and his own were just getting ready to begin. The woman he was going to pick up in Cincinnati would be a hundred times finer than any old Mildred McDonald. A year or two after he moved away from here, he probably wouldn’t even be able to recall her name. He rubbed a hand over his face and looked over, saw the Russell boy watching him. “Damn, was I talking to myself?” he asked the boy.
    “Not really,” Arvin said.
    “Hard to tell when that deputy will show up,” Hank said. “They don’t much like to come out here.”
    “Who’s Mildred?” Arvin asked.

9
    LEE BODECKER’S SHIFT WAS NEARLY OVER when the call came through on the radio. Another twenty minutes and he would have been picking up his girlfriend and heading out Bridge Street to Johnny’s Drive-in. He was starving. Every night, after he got off, he and Florence drove to either Johnny’s or the White Cow or the Sugar Shack. He liked to go all day without eating, then wolf down cheeseburgers and fries and milk shakes; and finish things off with a couple of ice-cold beers down along the River Road, leaned back in his seat while Florence jacked him off into her empty Pepsi cup. She had a grip like an Amish milk maiden. The entire summer had been a succession of almost perfect nights. She was saving the good stuff for the honeymoon, which suited Bodecker just fine. At twenty-one years old, he was just six months out of the peacetime army, and in no hurry to be tied down with a family. Although he had been a deputy only four months, he could already see a lot of advantages to being the law in a place as backward as Ross County, Ohio. There was money to be made if a man was careful and not get the big head, like his boss had done. Nowadays, Sheriff Hen Matthews had a picture of his round, stupid puss on the front page of the Meade Gazette three or four times a week, often for no conceivable reason. Citizens were starting to joke about it. Bodecker was already planning his campaign strategy. All he had to do was get some dirt on Matthews before the next election, and he could move Florence into one of the new houses they were building on Brewer Heights when they finally tied the knot. He had heard that every single one of them had two bathrooms.
    He turned the cruiser around on Paint Street near the paper mill and headed out Huntington Pike toward Knockemstiff. Three miles out of town, he passed by the little house in Brownsville where helived with his sister and mother. A light was on in the living room. He shook his head and reached in his shirt pocket for a cigarette. He was paying most of the bills right now, but he had made it clear to them when he came back from the service that they couldn’t depend on him much longer. His father had left them years ago, just went off to the shoe factory one morning and never returned. Recently, they had heard a rumor that he was living in Kansas City, working in a pool room, which made sense if you had ever known Johnny Bodecker. The only time the man ever smiled was when he was busting a rack of balls or running a table. The news had been a big disappointment to his son; nothing would have made Bodecker happier than discovering that the fucker was still earning his keep somewhere stitching soles onto loafers in a dingy red-brick building lined with high, dirty windows. Occasionally, when he was driving around on patrol and things were quiet, Bodecker imagined his father returning to Meade for a visit. In his fantasy, he followed the old man out into the country away from any witnesses and arrested him on a phony charge. Then he