Mercy Street(80)

There was something in the air.

Months or years later, when the bombs exploded in Oklahoma City, Victor was driving. At a 76 truck stop outside Spokane, he saw the mug shot on television. He understood, then, how wrong he’d been. The kid at the gun show was like no one he’d ever known.

Tim McVeigh was long gone now, dead by lethal injection. At the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, they’d put him down like a rabid dog. Victor thought of him at odd moments. Alone in his basement, organizing his preps and waiting for the shit to hit, he sometimes felt that he was being watched.

On a Monday night in early April, as he fired off another message to Anthony, he felt a familiar presence behind and above him, the unseen observer. It was a moment of reckoning. In that moment he saw clearly how he would look to a man like McVeigh, who, whatever his faults, had died with his boots on. Tim McVeigh had remained, to the end, a soldier. Victor Prine was an old man squinting at a computer screen.

He got up from his chair and went down to the basement, took his bug-out bag from its hook on the wall. The bag was packed with unnecessary items, useless in an urban setting. Victor ditched the filtration tabs and bear spray, the waterproof poncho. That left enough room for a street map of Boston, his EDC and side holster, a box of ammo, and a handful of zip ties. Whether he would need any of these items was impossible to say.

At first light he set out driving, the bug-out bag on the seat beside him. Stashed beneath the passenger seat was the Mosin-Nagant. As he watched the log house disappear in his rearview, he wondered if he would ever return.

VICTOR PRINE WAS ON THE ROAD.

It was his natural habitat, the life he was made for. He could not remember choosing it. Driving, he wondered: Was this what people meant by happiness? He didn’t feel happy, exactly. But he felt perfectly at ease.

Thirty years behind the wheel. On the road his loneliness had seemed normal. Only now—stripped of his rig, exiled for the rest of his days to ordinary life—did he feel hopeless, angry, and lost. The world excluded him. A female pushing a shopping cart down the aisles of Walmart, a young child strapped inside it. High school football games for which the entire town turned out, parents and grandparents rooting in the stands. At such moments he felt unfairly punished, by the someone or something that had decided, long ago, that every ordinary human pleasure was off-limits to him.

Kids in costumes, trick-or-treating. A car decorated with streamers—JUST MARRIED—dragging a pair of shoes behind.

On the road, such scenes were nonexistent. The highways were busy with truck traffic, solitary men hauling ass across the country. For thirty years Victor had encountered them at diners and highway rest stops, at roadhouses, at weigh stations. Wherever he went, he saw other versions of himself. He didn’t speak to these men, didn’t need to. It was enough to know they were out there, that he was not alone.

IT SEEMED BEST TO AVOID THE INTERSTATE, WHICH WAS NOT A problem. Victor didn’t mind the back roads. In his old rig the route would have been impossible, but in the F-150 he felt light and agile, the pickup nimble as a sports car. At a service station he bought coffee and a packet of peanuts and a scratch-off ticket.

The road dipped and weaved, winding through mountains. He scanned the dial for Doug Straight, but heard nothing but static.

The scratch-off ticket wasn’t a winner, but it never hurt to try.

He’d traveled no more than fifty miles when his tooth began to ache. For weeks it had been mostly quiet, thanks to his soft diet, soup and oatmeal and Jell-O pudding, all of Randy’s cooking pounded into mush. Now, without warning, the ache was back. He blamed the peanuts.

A shot of whiskey was the most effective solution, but sobriety left him with few options.

Pull it, already.

He thought or heard or possibly spoke the words aloud, in a strained voice that was not his own.

Things were breaking down.

HE WAS AT THE STAGE OF LIFE WHEN A MAN LOOKED BACKWARD. There was so much life behind him and—no point in denying it—so little ahead.

He didn’t regret his wild youth—the two tours of duty, the girls he’d balled, the hell he’d raised. Regret was not the right word. Though if he’d known then what he knew now, he would do everything differently. He would choose a sensible female and marry early, plant as much seed as she’d let him put there. He had learned, too late, that this was the only wealth that mattered: the saplings that would outlive him.

If he had it all to do over again, he would attend to his line.

YEARS AGO, ON THE EVE OF HIS FIFTIETH BIRTHDAY, VICTOR Prine took stock of his life. In the Army Buddies Usenet group, he made contact with a guy he’d known in boot camp, a Kentuckian named Larry Sweet. After Vietnam, Sweet had returned to his homeplace, a little mountain town called Mineral. With the aid of a magnifying glass, Victor located it on a map.

That summer, after dropping off a load in Louisville, he made a trip there. Sweet lived in a ramshackle farmhouse at the end of a rutted lane, flanked by an immense vegetable garden. As Victor rolled up in his rig, a woman in a straw hat knelt there weeding. When he explained who he was, Sweet’s wife seemed happy to see him. Larry had gone to town but would be back shortly. Victor was welcome to wait.

Inside, she poured him lemonade. He drank it in a dim old-style parlor, studying the framed photographs that hung on every wall. His buddy was in every picture, the long horsey face and jug ears, the distinctive underbite. In certain photos he seemed to appear twice, as a teenager and as a very old man, Sweet’s father or grandfather, maybe. To Victor it was a thing of wonder, the same face replicating itself over generations, unchanged and unchanging, without end.