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.
They ate dinner on the screened porch, three generations gathered around the table: Sweet and his wife, their young sons and teenage daughter, and Sweet’s elderly mother, who lived up the hill. When they joined hands to say grace, Victor held the wife’s hand in his left, the daughter’s in his right. The prayer was interminable, a long-winded dose of praising and blessing, but Victor didn’t mind it. He would have sat there for hours. It was the first time he’d touched a female in many years.
He spent that night on a foldout couch, in the airless upstairs room Sweet’s wife used for sewing. Lying awake, Victor could smell her in the room. She had impressed him powerfully, a brisk, practical woman who worked as a midwife, who grew vegetables and baked bread and made all the children’s clothes. He saw that Sweet had chosen wisely. Acquiring such a female was like investing in a generator, an essential power source.
That evening, as they passed the dishes around the table, he’d come to certain realizations. The choice of a helpmeet wasn’t as difficult as he’d made it. Females, in most cases, were just what they appeared to be. Victor had picked one who served liquor to strange men, who cursed like a sailor and dressed like a whore. A blind man could have seen that it would end badly. And yet, when she killed his baby, he’d been genuinely surprised.
He lay awake and thought of Sweet’s daughter, sleeping on the other side of the wall. When he’d taken her hand for the blessing it had felt exactly like her mother’s, a fact he found significant. Both were warm and strong and delicate, as though they were attached to the same woman. Their hands were exactly the same.
He rose early and left in darkness, while the family was still sleeping. He never saw Larry Sweet again. For the rest of his life he would remember that hot summer night, the teenage girl sleeping on the other side of the wall.
I should have taken her, he thought.
In retrospect it seemed the obvious solution. Sweet’s daughter was small and slender. She weighed no more than a midsize dog.
BY THE TIME HE CROSSED THE NEW YORK BORDER, HIS TOOTH was throbbing. In the rearview mirror he studied his swollen face. He wished that he had packed aspirin, though he was probably too far gone for that. At home in his medicine chest was the one remedy that sometimes worked, Orajel Plus, made for infants who were teething.
“Pull it already.”
He spoke the words aloud, in a voice he recognized. It wasn’t God’s voice, or Doug Straight’s or Tim McVeigh’s, for that matter. He was speaking in his father’s voice.
Things were breaking down.
WHAT WOULD HAPPEN ON MERCY STREET REMAINED UNCLEAR.
In the first scenario, he would penetrate the clinic without resistance, his BCS. It seemed too much to hope for. How likely or unlikely this was, Victor could not say.
In the second scenario, he would be met with armed resistance—theoretically, at least, his WCS. But Victor Prine had never shrunk from danger. In his heart he was still a soldier, mentally and physically prepared to do what had to be done.
His jaw pulsed rhythmically.
Scenario three was the most complicated. In scenario three, he would be forced to pivot. If Columbia could not be located, the clinic offered other high-value targets—including, but not limited to, the abortionist himself.
Scenario three, it must be said, was vague to him. How he would find the abortionist, or recognize the guy when he saw him, was not clear. Better intel would have helped, a trusted lieutenant to make inquiries. What he needed, more than anything, was boots on the ground.
Of course, boots on the ground would have rendered the entire mission unnecessary. This was not a helpful thought.
In scenario four—his BCS—he would locate Columbia and contain her in an enclosed space.
He thought of the deer he’d lost in the woods north of Garman Lake, and of Larry Sweet’s daughter. He would not make the same mistake again.
Pull it already.
In a gas station men’s room in upstate New York, he reached into his mouth and pulled out the tooth.
VICTOR GOT BACK ON THE ROAD.
His mouth was now on fire. Pulling the tooth hadn’t solved the problem. Pulling the tooth had plunged him into new depths of pain.
Pull it already. His father’s voice, predictably, had led him astray. It was a lesson he’d learned many times and ought to have remembered. Only a fool took advice from Lovell Prine.
He thought, helplessly, of Orajel Plus. In his fragile state, the very thought made his eyes tear. He imagined himself a baby crying out in pain, a beautiful young mother soothing him. Gentle fingers in his mouth as she rubbed the cream into his gums.
He got off at the next exit and spotted, in the distance, a CVS drugstore. He parked and went inside. The store was mostly empty. He walked up and down the aisles until he spotted what he needed. Orajel Extra Strength. For relief of teething pain. The package featured a photo of a round-faced infant, grinning broadly to reveal a single tooth.
At the cash register, a lady clerk was flipping through a magazine—a big round-faced gal, well past her prime, with meaty shoulders and a firm shelf of breast jutting forward like the prow of a ship. An ordinary female, nothing special. She would never have qualified for the Hall of Shame.
“You find everything all right?” she asked, barely looking up from her magazine. The hand turning the page looked plump and soft, the nails painted a pearly pink.
“Yes, ma’am.” Look at me, he thought. Please look at me. Why this mattered so much, he could not possibly have said.