His earliest memory was of his mother. Victor must have been very small. They were in the kitchen of the old house and she was giving him a bath in the sink. A flicker of memory, fleeting, strobelike: the warm water running over him like a blessing, the porcelain cold against his back.
His mother was a whore named Audrey, a name his father would not speak.
After she left, father and son lived in three rooms above a pool hall. When his father worked Hoot Owl, the boy was alone all night in the apartment. He lay awake thinking of the loaded shotgun in the kitchen closet, and waited for an intruder to come.
His mother was a whore because what other kind of woman would leave her child?
Her blonde hair dark at the ends where it dipped into the sink.
His father switched to day shift and in the evenings went out prowling. Victor witnessed adult behavior, drunkenness and fornication. Later he understood that this had warped him, shaped his character in ruinous ways.
He was nine when his father married Junie Thibodeaux. She was not a virtuous woman, which was to be expected. What virtuous woman would have anything to do with his father?
Junie was not virtuous, but she was kind. She approached little Victor cautiously, like a feral cat she meant to tame. Naturally he resisted. In the rooms above the pool hall he’d bathed when he felt like it, which was never. If he got hungry he boiled up a hot dog from the fridge. At Junie’s house—a tin-roof shack out in the sticks—the food wasn’t much different, but they ate it together at a table. There was mustard and ketchup and a slice of Wonder bread to wrap around the hot dog.
Junie had a son his own age, a shy, undersized kid who stuttered when nervous, a choke chain of consonants jammed in his mouth. Randy was born small and had stayed small—not the worst thing that could happen to a child, but in the mid-1960s, in the public schools of northern Appalachia, it opened the door to the worst things. Randy Thibodeaux—technically Victor’s stepbrother—was a runt, it was true. But holding his head in the toilet bowl—the accepted and time-honored punishment for runthood—seemed excessive. As the biggest boy in his class, Victor felt a certain responsibility for maintaining order, like a junior county sheriff. When his stepbrother’s head was held in the toilet bowl, he did not let it stand.
After the incident in the boys’ washroom, Randy didn’t say thank you. He thanked Victor silently, wordlessly, for the rest of his life.
Junie was not virtuous, but Victor was fond of her and sorry when she died. Her days had begun, always, with five minutes of convulsive hacking that woke the household. The cough was a part of her, like her choking laugh and sandpaper voice and the beaded vinyl case that held her Virginia Slims, the brand advertised on the back of Cosmopolitan magazine. Junie kept a stack of back issues in the family’s one bathroom—a convenient arrangement for young Victor, who for one fevered youthful summer masturbated over them twice a day. He was just a boy; he knew nothing of sex. Without the young whores leering out from the pages of Cosmopolitan, he might never have found his own cock.
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.