Mercy Street(53)

In spite of himself, Victor was impressed. He had discounted Wayne as a slow-witted blowhard. Who would have guessed he could think on his feet?

The cop slipped the license into his pocket. “There’s a lost and found at the front office. I’ll turn it in for you.”

“Thanks,” Wayne said.

When the cop moved away from the table, Wayne met Victor’s eyes. “Jesus, Victor. That was a close call.”

“Yeah. Sorry about that.” Victor was a little rattled. He looked longingly at the Ruger. “He’s gone now. Can you run that background check real quick? I wrote down all the numbers.”

Wayne looked panicked.

“Victor, man. I get caught doing this, I could lose my license.”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” Victor said.

At that moment the PA system crackled, an announcement coming on: Will Randy Thibadoo please come to the office to claim a lost item? Randy Thibadoo.

Victor’s face—he could feel it—flushed scarlet. It isn’t worth it, he thought. The last thing he needed was to get slapped with a gun charge.

He really wanted that Ruger.

He said, “I should hit the road.”

HE DROVE HOME IN A FOUL MOOD, THINKING OF THE RUGER and of L. Washington—an armed Black man, vested with the full authority of an immoral government. He thought about what he’d say to Randy when he wanted his license back.

He tried to look on the bright side. The trip was not entirely wasted. To cheer himself up, he’d made an impulse buy. In the parking lot, a kid had sold him a rifle on cash and a handshake, a Mosin-Nagant in mint condition. In Pennsylvania, only licensed dealers were required to do background checks.

The law was hopelessly misguided. No question, it had complicated Victor’s life. He hunted at odd hours to avoid the game warden. He steered clear of gun shops and shopped only at shows. When he struck a bargain on a piece, it was always Randy’s license he handed over, Randy’s Social Security number the vendor entered into the FBI database. That his stepbrother didn’t know one end of a gun from the other was, to the law, an insignificant detail. Randy could buy anything he wanted—except for a six-year-old DUI, his record was clean. To Victor—a lifelong hunter, former army sniper and gun safety expert—the injustice was galling. He himself was the second-best shot he’d ever known, after a Kentuckian he’d met in the service—a boy who’d grown up with a rifle in his hand, in a place where men who couldn’t hunt had long ago gone extinct.

The injustice was intolerable. Like all his dealings with government, it reduced him to a state of blind rage.

Fucked by the bureaucracy, the petty rules of a corrupt and illegitimate federal government.

Fucked, again and still, by Barb Vance.

THEY MET IN SUMMER, A FEW YEARS AFTER HE CAME BACK FROM Vietnam. She was a bartender at the Commercial Hotel, old enough to serve drinks, but just barely; a fox-faced redhead with full-body freckles and schoolgirl tits that disappeared when she lay down. A scrappy, mouthy girl, a ballbuster. Cursing came as naturally to her as breathing. In the beginning Victor found this exciting. Her foul language inflamed him, made him want, urgently, to teach her a lesson.

One night she called the law on him for no goddamn reason, or so it seemed at the time. It was a Friday night in late May, the beginning of the Memorial Day weekend. He and Barb had gone out drinking, then stumbled back to her place to fuck. Immediately afterward they began fighting, their usual pattern. If they were not fucking or fighting, they had just fucked and were about to fight, or had just fought and were about to fuck.

That night, like most nights, the fight/fuck cycle began anew.

Their argument was heated, but they’d had a dozen worse ones. When Victor put his hands on her it wasn’t to hurt her, he explained to the town cop. Barb was a hellcat. He was only protecting himself.

The cop refused to see his logic. Victor was led away in handcuffs. Due to the holiday, district court would be closed until Tuesday morning. He spent four nights in the county lockup for no goddamn reason, or so it seemed at the time. While he was locked up, Barb went to see a doctor in Pittsburgh. He hadn’t even known she was pregnant on the day she killed his child.

He wouldn’t know it to this day if not for her sister, who’d driven her to the appointment. When the sister told him this, Victor knew immediately that it was true. The timing convinced him: when Barb called the cops on him, she’d already made the appointment in Pittsburgh. She’d deliberately goaded him into an argument, then had him locked up to get him out of the way.

When Barb came out of the Commercial that night, he was waiting for her in the parking lot. How could you do it? What did that baby ever do to you?

To his astonishment she did not cry, did not apologize.

Oh, Victor. She sounded weary and amused, as though he were a child talking nonsense. What else was I going to do?

It wasn’t the reaction he expected. There was no sorrow in her, no shame at what she had done.

(If she had come to him, if she had touched him. I’m sorry, Victor. Forgive me, Victor. If she had shed a single tear.)

I would have married you, he said.

She said, Who’d marry a crazy motherfucker like you?

It was very late, the parking lot deserted. It would have been laughably easy, it would have been the most natural thing in the world, to kill her with his bare hands. For all her fire, she was a skinny little thing. It would have taken him two minutes, his hands around her throat.