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?”
Her eyes were red from crying. Claudia slid a box of tissues across the desk.
“Massachusetts law is very specific,” she said. “To get an abortion, you have to do it before twenty-four weeks.”
“Okay, but four days?” Ladan sank into the puffy yellow jacket they’d given her at the church, a type of garment she’d never had a use for, never known existed, until she came to Boston. “What difference does it make, four days?”
It was a reasonable question. Morally, the law made no sense. On Monday an AB would have been acceptable. On Thursday it was a crime.
“I’m sorry, but we have no choice in the matter. That’s the law.” Claudia had said these words before, and would say them again. It was the one part of her job she hated, the moment she dreaded most.
Ladan made a sound low in her throat, a moan ending in a sob. “So what am I going to do now?”
“We can talk about that,” Claudia said, feeling her heart. “But first I want to understand why you waited so long. Did you have second thoughts about having an abortion? Are you sure this is what you want?”
“No second thoughts,” Ladan said firmly. “No baby. I know from the beginning it’s not possible.”
She explained that she had a child already, six years old, born over there when she still had a husband. The boy was her heart and her life and yet he made everything harder. When you were just yourself you could live anywhere, sleep anywhere. You could work the worst kind of job cleaning floors at South Station; you could work all day and all night because what else did you have to do?
“One child already makes it harder,” she told Claudia. “Two is not possible.”
When Claudia asked about the man involved with the pregnancy, Ladan waved a hand dismissively. “Dee is his name. He’s just a kid.”
In fact he was her age exactly; he only seemed younger. “Born in America makes you younger,” Ladan said.
That morning, when the security guard asked him to empty his pockets, Dee had said, What for?
Dee was good with her boy, but that didn’t mean she was going to have a baby with him. Where did he work? Where did his money come from? He wasn’t putting on a uniform to go work at Burger King. Dee would end up in jail or dead like her husband, and then what would she have?
“You sound very sure,” Claudia said. “About the abortion. So why did you wait so long?”