“I guess I never met the right girl,” he added gruffly. “Met a few wrong ones, though.”
At this Ernestine laughed. Her laugh was remarkable, rich and melodic, a laugh that was larger than them both. She laughed at what he’d said and what he never could, at the dizzying variety of pratfalls and misfires and bitter regrets—absurd, brutal, irreversible, and irredeemable—a person, any person, could rack up in sixty-five years of living.
The moment passed, but Victor never forgot it. It was a pleasure he hadn’t experienced in many years, or maybe ever: the simple joy of making a woman laugh.
HOSPITAL DAYS WERE LIKE PRISON DAYS, LONG AND EMPTY. VICTOR ate and shat and ate again, like a factory-farmed chicken. Mealtimes were the only events worth noting, the highlight of his day.
Each morning a slip of paper was delivered with his breakfast tray.
The slip of paper was vitally important. The patient was to note his preferences for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Grilled cheese or tuna sandwich, meat loaf or spaghetti, oatmeal or scrambled eggs.
Victor filled out the form slowly, with great difficulty, the tiny type swimming before his eyes. Straight lines looked wavy. At the center of his vision was a blank spot, as though he were staring into a searchlight. He held the paper over his left shoulder and studied it out the corner of his eye.
Once Ernestine came into the room as he was filling out the form. “You need your glasses, Victor?”
“I can’t find them,” he grumbled—shamefaced, as though she’d caught him in some misdeed.
“Try these.” She took off her glasses, bright red plastic, and handed them over. He was so flabbergasted he couldn’t speak. There was nothing to do but put them on, the plastic warm from where it had sat on a Black lady’s nose.
Victor stared at the slip of paper. At the edges of his vision the type looked clearer, but only a little.
“They’re probably too strong for you. I’m blind as a bat.” Unperturbed, she took the glasses off his face.
“It’s not the glasses,” he said, his heart racing. “I just can’t see.”
He had never said it aloud before. The next day an orderly came with a wheelchair and took him down to the second floor, where an Oriental woman put drops in his eyes. He stared at the chart on the wall and made his best guess.
Glasses wouldn’t help him. That was the long and short of it. In accented English she explained that the hole in his vision was irreversible. Over time it would only get bigger. There was nothing to be done.
FROM THE HOSPITAL HE WAS SENT TO A REHAB CENTER. MEDICARE paid for thirty days. At rehab he did stretching exercises and watched television. He was issued special low-vision glasses that didn’t help in the slightest. The occupational therapist taught him to navigate the world with his walker, to shower and dress himself.
In the end he went home to Saxon County. His brother Randy came to get him. The trip was seven hours long, the most time Victor had ever spent as passenger. His pickup truck had been totaled in the accident, his expired license surrendered. His driving days were done.
In the log house he mainly watched television. His computer sat idle in his office—the keyboard untouched, the screen dark. Since coming home from the hospital, he had turned it on only once. When he typed in the address for the Hall of Shame, he was greeted with a plain yellow screen.
This URL is now available from GoDaddy!
It took him a moment to absorb it: his domain name had expired. The Hall of Shame had disappeared from the world.
Curiously, he did not miss it. The young whores in their puffy jackets, the slide show set to music. The pain pills had killed his libido. He felt dead from the waist down and didn’t care. His mad hunger for Columbia had faded like a dream.
He had failed in his mission. Victor understood, now, that the defeat of the White race was inevitable, its decline irreversible. The Hall of Shame had been an inspired idea, but in the end it was too little, too late. His fortified basement—the shelves stocked with provisions, the arsenal of weapons—was likewise useless. He hadn’t visited his preps in many months. The steep, narrow staircase was too dangerous to navigate, and anyway, it didn’t matter. The End Times had already come.
Shit, meet fan.
He thought back on his time in the hospital, the weeks in rehab: the attending physicians, the Indian surgeon who’d pinned together his fractured pelvis, the Oriental optometrist who gave him the bad news. The anesthesiologist who’d sedated him, the physical therapist who’d tortured him for a solid month. Not one of these people was White. Victor’s tribe had lost the game long ago; holed up in the mountains, he simply hadn’t noticed. In Saxon County there were no Blacks or Orientals or Indians, no foreigners speaking in tongues. Quietly, without him noticing, they had carved up America and divided it between them, in whatever way suited them.
The collapse had come and gone.
Victor still mourned the White race, the once-great tribe now disgraced and diminished. But the urgency he’d once felt had dissipated, drained away like blood from a wound.
He lay on the couch and watched television. With his new satellite dish he found a station that aired westerns twenty-four seven, and watched hungrily. The hole in his vision didn’t bother him. The stories were as familiar as the sky above. It was easy enough to fill in what wasn’t there.
He’d seen them all before, or maybe he hadn’t. In truth, it was hard to tell. The same characters appeared again and again: the solitary hero, the devious Indians, the saloon girls and kindly madams, the gruff sheriffs. I’m the law in these parts. From the corner of his eye Victor drank in the landscape, the wide-open spaces he recalled from his years on the road.
The cattle rustlers and ranchers, the brawling cowpokes, the glory days of the White man. That America was gone now, lost forever, but Victor still had its embers—available to him day and night through the magic of satellites, beamed down from heaven to the disc on his roof.
“PLEASE, MOTHER. PLEASE DON’T KILL YOUR BABY.”
On Mercy Street, protestors came and went. This one was young, maybe thirty, with a Jesus beard and long dark hair in a ponytail. He reassured Claudia that God had a plan for her, that his ways were mysterious.
Claudia thought, You have no idea.
“I’m not your mother,” she told him. “If I were, I’d tell you to stop harassing women in the street and do something useful with your life.”
She plowed past him to the door and keyed in her new access code.
A higher power with a vivid imagination, a highly developed sense of irony. These weren’t qualities she had ever associated with the protestors. It seemed unlikely that any god they believed in would operate in such a way.
Inside, Luis was waiting. “Claudia, this is stupid. You’re going to get hurt. I’m putting my foot down. From now on, you need to use the garage.”
Her usual argument was ready on her lips. His face stopped her, his genuine concern.