Mercy Street(50)

The magazines taught you what you were supposed to want.

The young whores had accompanied him to basic training, to Vietnam, to highway rest stops across the country. The actual women in the photographs would be grandmothers now, a fact he didn’t like to think about. Fifty years later, their young faces and bodies were still burned into his memory, a mental repository of images he could flip through when the need arose.

Now, when he reached for his cock at night, a new set of pictures flooded his mind.

WHEN THE HALL OF SHAME WAS UP AND RUNNING, HE BUILT A private version just for himself. He chose the best photos and arranged them in a slide show, with a slow dissolve in between.

Occasionally a particular girl caught his attention. In San Diego there was a freckle-faced blonde. Victor gave her a name, a complete biography. Bonnie was twenty-three years old, a kindergarten teacher. She had been raped by a (White) stranger when her car broke down by the highway. The attack was not her fault; Victor knew this for a fact, having visualized it in great detail. He imagined comforting her, holding her close, explaining, gently but firmly, her duty to the White race, Bonnie agreeing through tears that he was right. Thanks entirely to Victor, her precious White child would be spared.

Bonnie, it must be said, was not typical. For the most part, the Hall of Shame was full of whores.

Sometimes you could tell by looking: the hair dyed unnatural colors, the tattoos and slutty makeup. Some were fat or brutishly ugly. One wore an actual ring in her nose. What sort of man would want to fuck such a creature, Victor could not imagine. Though, in point of fact, he would have fucked most of them.

He set the slide show to music.

Fallen women were everywhere, fucking indiscriminately with no thought to the consequences. The precious life that resulted was merely an inconvenience, a problem to be dealt with. In a lifetime of whoring, a female could kill a staggering number of children—up to six a year, by Victor’s arithmetic. Of course, she’d have to do a tremendous amount of fucking to get pregnant six times a year. By the looks of them, many did.

They killed their babies so they could go on fucking.

He sat back and watched the parade of whores.

He ran the slide show on a continuous loop. Occasionally he drifted off to sleep. The late-afternoon nap was a pleasure he’d rediscovered in his sixties. Like a reversion to earliest childhood, this slow toddle into drooling old age.

His dreams were unnaturally vivid. Victor blamed the pills. The VA doc had prescribed them for his prostate, which still did whatever a prostate was supposed to but was so swollen that pissing took ten minutes.

He dreamed he saw his mother outside the clinic. He called her name—Audrey!—but she didn’t hear him. She walked purposefully toward the clinic like a runway model, her long hair lifted by the breeze. In the dream he ran after her, his heart pounding. If Audrey went inside the clinic, he himself would be aborted. He was running for his life.

THE DAY, LIKE ALL DAYS, BEGAN STRATEGICALLY. HE ROSE AT first light and drank his coffee at the computer, sorting through a new batch of photos. In Boston the snow was still flying. Anthony had sent three dozen photos of women in winter coats.

The coats depressed him. It had been shortsighted to launch the Hall of Shame in winter. The women’s bodies, if they had bodies, were impossible to discern. Victor thought of women in Arab countries, swathed head to toe in fabric. Say what you want about Muslims; they were realistic about human nature in a way regular people weren’t. Male urges—Victor knew this from long experience—were not to be trifled with. If you didn’t want your wife or daughter to become stroke material for some horny male stranger, measures had to be taken. An extreme but highly effective precaution was to swaddle her in cloth.

Say what you want about Muslims, they knew how to manage their women.

He respected the Muslim discipline. And yet, if Muslims ran the world, there would be nothing to look at. Single men like Victor would die alone, of unrequited horniness, without ever seeing another ass or breast or thigh.

He respected the discipline, no question. But he wouldn’t want to live in such a world.

A knock at the door. “I’m going to Costco,” said Randy. “Where’s my list?” He was dressed for town, in what Victor thought of as his Daniel Boone outfit: a fringed buckskin jacket that had cost him six hundred dollars—for a cheapskate like Randy, a stupefying sum. He was still a runt—five-three on tiptoe—but over the years had made peace with his stature. On his whoring trips to Pittsburgh he’d dressed flamboyantly, in a long trench coat and leather ranchero hat. He was a crackerjack mechanic, a competent electrician, a better carpenter than Victor, skills acquired through a lifetime of overcompensating. Randy was so good at so many things that it was easy to forget he was short.

“On the fridge,” said Victor.

His computer pinged loudly.

Randy leered. “Is that one of your lady friends?” Impressed by the number of hours Victor spent at the computer, Randy was convinced he had a wild sex life, with dozens of virtual floozies on the hook. That a computer had other uses besides the viewing of pornography was a rumor he didn’t quite believe.

Victor ignored the question. “I’m going to the show later. Leave your license on the kitchen table.”

“Roger that. Put some ice on your face, will you?” said Randy. “It’s swole up like a basketball.”

Victor returned his attention to the screen. One girl had real potential—long curly hair, soulful brown eyes—but the effect was ruined by the puffy down jacket she wore, a ridiculous garment for women. For Victor, a pretty face wasn’t enough. He needed at the least the suggestion of a body.