Mercy Street(38)
There was a hatchet-faced boy with a soldier’s haircut, a face he had seen before.
Something in the air. Victor blamed the glad-handing cracker president, a type he recognized: the glib salesman, the apple-polishing smart boy. He hated Bill Clinton’s toothy smile, his undeserved ease in the world, as though he’d forgotten where he came from. Watching him on television, Victor thought: You’re no better than I am. You are hill trash just like me.
HE LEFT MARYLAND FEELING DEFEATED. THE REMAINING SIGNS clattered in the truck bed. In a gas station men’s room he studied his face in the mirror—his father’s face, the same bristled white eyebrows and fleshy earlobes and handlebar mustache. The resemblance was startling. Turning into his father wasn’t something he’d planned on.
It was a thing no one talked about, what age did to a man’s earlobes.
The swelling of his jaw was now visible, as though he’d been socked in the mouth.
His bag of peas had turned squishy and tepid, so he bought a pint of ice cream and got back into his pickup. The cab had a distinct human odor, as though someone had been breathing and farting and perspiring inside it for hours on end, as was in fact the case.
He got back on the road and set out driving, holding the pint of ice cream to his face. The offending tooth, a rear molar, had spread its poison widely, a kind of guerrilla warfare. The ache stretched from his jaw to his sinuses, in solidarity, as though the entire maxillofacial neighborhood had joined in the fight.
He had not been blessed with good teeth, but through obsessive brushing and absolute avoidance of sugar, had made it to his sixties with most of his dentition intact.
The paternal resemblance was not accidental. Nature—this had been proved time and again—always had a reason. Faced with the female’s swollen belly, the male of the species naturally had questions. The paternal resemblance existed for one reason only: to prove that the female was not a whore.
Victor Prine had never seen dental floss, nor known of its existence, until he saw it for sale at the PX at Fort Benning.
He drove and drove.
As a boy he’d had a headful of rotten baby teeth, a casualty of lax dental hygiene and the wanton consumption of Kool-Aid, red or orange or mouthwash-green, which his mother mixed in a mayonnaise jar and which they all drank like water. Milk teeth were temporary anyway, the thinking went, not worth the inconvenience of toothbrushing or even the small expense. His father, careless of his own teeth—he wore false ones, top and bottom, by age thirty—had a hillbilly skepticism of dentists, who after all were paid by the cavity. Who could say that the dentist hadn’t put them there himself, with his nerve-squealing drill?
His father was not a trusting man.
His father was a coal miner. Lovell Prine went underground at sixteen and any vestige of the boy he had been went down there with him, never to resurface. For the rest of his life he did not hunt, did not fish. He would not watch a ball game or play cards or throw horseshoes or read a newspaper. He did not even whittle. As far as his son could recall, mining and drinking were the two things he did.
Not a trusting man. Once, while working underground, Lovell had opened his dinner bucket and found his water jug empty. Someone on the crew was stealing his water. Thereafter, when he filled the jug each morning, he dropped his bottom denture into it. No one ever drank his water again.
VICTOR CROSSED THE STATE LINE, GLAD, AS ALWAYS, TO LEAVE Maryland, with its speed traps and degenerate radio stations, the snazzy rhymes of angry Black people. In Pennsylvania the voices quieted. The radio emitted a gentle static. The road was pleasingly empty, laid in segments; every twenty feet his tires crossed a seam in the pavement. This produced a gentle cadence, like the clop of a horse’s hooves.
He exited the highway and drove back into winter—frozen fields, a vast emptiness. A radio preacher urged repentance: the End of Days was coming. Dead animals littered the highway, as if to prove the point.
The road jogged and jumped, winding around the hills. Here and there, in the valleys, were clusters of ramshackle houses, as though a great flood had washed through the mountains and left this detritus behind.
He scanned the dial until he heard, through the static, the voice of Doug Straight, now in national syndication. In the satellite era, you were always in Straight Nation. Doug was never far away.
Today Doug was talking about the Founding Fathers, a favorite topic. In drafting the Second Amendment, they had shown remarkable prescience. The Founding Fathers had seen hundreds of years into the future, when private citizens would need enough firepower to protect themselves from the government the Fathers had just created.
That was the whole idea, libtards: every free man locked and loaded, ready to defend life and liberty when the need arose.
Victor didn’t disagree; how could you? And yet it was the Founding Fathers who’d made the original mistake.
Doug cut to a caller, Roger in Boise. Victor recognized the voice, a high-pitched drawl with a western twang. Roger in Boise had called the show before.
The mistake was indisputable, a matter of historical record. The Founding Fathers hadn’t invented slavery, but they had embraced it. Exhibiting a striking lack of foresight, they’d seen no downside to importing boatloads of captured people from the other side of the world, with no possible way of sending them back.
If the Founding Fathers really were visionaries, they might have asked themselves certain questions.
What happens when the boatloads of people get sick of being whipped and beaten and worked like pack mules, when they decide they’d just as soon not plow your fields and pick your cotton and build your new country for you, for free, for as many centuries and generations as it’s going to take in the absence of irrigation and gas motors and simple shit like insecticides and power tools? Hey, Founding Fathers: What happens then?