Mercy Street(54)

What he did instead was harder and more calculated. He waited. No one will ever understand the effort it cost him, the superhuman restraint.

They sent him to prison—the Great Lakes Correctional Institution in Erie County, ten miles west of nowhere. The judge gave him seven years. Because the apartment was occupied, he was charged with first-degree arson. It didn’t matter that Barb wasn’t home when it burned, having hiked across town to watch the fireworks with the new guy she was now fucking. Purely by accident, Victor had torched the building on yet another patriotic holiday. The timing was unconscious, or maybe it wasn’t. The coincidence seemed significant. For years afterward he would ponder what it meant.

In prison, the Lord found him. It’s the one part of the story he is slightly ashamed of: his own suggestibility, his weak-minded surrender to fantasy. The prison chaplain had caught him at a vulnerable moment. Later Victor would come to his senses, but at the time it had felt real to him. He had wanted so badly to believe.

At first he resisted. He and the Lord had no prior relationship. They ran in different circles and had no acquaintances in common, and Victor did not, as a rule, open the door to strangers. Out in the world he would have run from grace, he would have died running. In prison there was nowhere to run.

Why would the Lord want him? Why would anyone? He subsisted like livestock in a pen ten feet square. Each morning he shat in a concrete toilet, two feet from where he’d laid his head. There wasn’t a single one of God’s commandments he hadn’t violated. In Saigon he’d paid a girl who gave him the clap. He had fornicated with Barb Vance while she was pregnant with his child.

His brief, hysterical conversion had no ill effects, and one positive one: encouraged by the chaplain, he began painting. At the time he had only one subject—the child Barb Vance had taken from him, his baby son (he is certain it was a son) slaughtered in the womb.

He served his full seven. The parole board refused to see his side of things. The prisoner shows no remorse.

To Victor it was the crowning insult. Barb Vance had killed his baby so she could go on fucking. It was Barb Vance who had shown no remorse.

The injustice was intolerable. It was, truly, more than he could bear.

Victor regretted the lost time—seven years of his youth, gone forever—but he did not regret what he had done. He came out of prison a stronger man, larger in all ways. They had not broken him. They had only increased his resolve.

He was thirty-three years old, the age of the mythical Jesus. Long-haul trucking paid well, and for the first time in his adult life there was no lieutenant barking orders, no shift boss hanging over his shoulder, no CO busting his balls. He’d been truthful on his application, but the manager didn’t care that he was a felon. As long as a load arrived on time, no one cared how it had gotten there.

Driving, he thought of Barb Vance. For a while he tried to find her, but this proved impossible to do. After the fire she’d moved south, to Maryland or Virginia, where she married, divorced, married, and divorced. Over the years she’d had different names, become different people. To Victor it was the ultimate injustice. Barb had been given multiple lives, while he could only ever be himself.

Being Victor Prine was a life sentence.

What exactly he’d have done if he’d found her, he wasn’t entirely sure.

The injustice, in the end, was bearable. He had borne it, but only just. It will get easier with time, the prison chaplain had told him, but this proved to be untrue. When Victor died, five or ten years from now, it would be as though he’d never existed. No part of him would be left in the world.

Single-handedly, Barb Vance had erased him. In a few short years he would be expunged from human history, his line extinguished. Victor Prine would be gone without a trace.

DAY AND NIGHT, HE DREAMED OF WOMEN.

On an endless loop he watched the parade of whores. The killing of an unborn child wasn’t just a murder; it was also a theft. Always there was a second, invisible victim, a man robbed of his progeny. It was a perversion of the natural order, the female trying to run the table. For a brief, frightening time, she had absolute control of a man’s legacy. She could hold his line hostage out of stupidity, whorishness, laziness, or spite. The female had been put on earth for one reason only, a single exalted purpose. Stubbornly, perversely, the Barb Vances of the world refused to play their part.

For such females he felt the same contempt he’d felt for hippies, the whiny longhairs who’d burned their draft cards while he’d offered up his life. Women who refused to be women were no better—they were far worse—than men who refused to be men.

The female who slaughtered her offspring was an abomination. She had committed an atrocity, a high crime against nature. At best she was irredeemably sick, deformed by some extreme mental illness. If you saw a dog eat its own pups, you’d be disgusted. You’d do anything to prevent its sickness from spreading.

In the interests of herd health, you would put that bitch down.





12


Ladan B. was twenty-six, from South Sudan by way of Ethiopia. Her name, she told Claudia, meant healthy. Her mother had died in childbirth shortly after giving her this name.

“We’re too late.” Mary Fahey handed Claudia the ultrasound report. “Twenty-four weeks and three days. She’s just over the line.”

“Four days!” The patient had a notable voice, deep and resonant, too big for the tiny room. “I come four days ago, it would have been no problem. Is this true?”