“Good heavens,” she said. “What on earth am I looking at?”
“I took that photo myself. It’s a dumpster behind an abortion mill in San Antonio.” He had said this so many times that it had become true; he could nearly remember taking the photo, despite having cribbed it from a pro-life website he viewed as a competitor. The deception didn’t trouble him. He could have taken the photo. No one could prove he hadn’t.
“Get off my property,” the old lady said.
HE’D BEEN PLANTING SIGNS FOR HALF HIS LIFE. IN HIS THIRTY years as a long-haul trucker, he’d placed them in national parks, on grazing lands, and once, in the oil fields of Williston, North Dakota. SAVE GOD’S PRE-BORN CHILDREN. He’d posted a photo of that one on his website—a pump jack bobbing behind it, dipping its head to sip the earth like some exotic waterfowl.
In the West, the land was anyone’s. There were literally millions of acres of land with no owner to speak of. The degenerate federal government had no authority, legal or moral, to own anything, in Victor’s firm view. He’d explained his position at length to a county sheriff outside Laramie, who’d threatened to cite him for trespassing and defacing public property.
All he’d done was plant a sign.
That was how he thought of it: each sign was like planting a seed in the ground. It pleased him to think of all the people who’d seen them, year after year, the young mothers moved to spare their babies. It was humbling to think how, in a split second, a life could be saved.
Later he saw the flaw in his reasoning. How many pregnant females were driving across the empty western states, the great thunderous trucking routes of North America? In the average two-week hitch, he saw no women at all, never mind pregnant ones.
The sheriff in Wyoming did not cite him. He stood and watched while Victor took down the sign.
In those years he lived everywhere, he lived nowhere. Every couple weeks he’d stop off at his stepbrother’s in Pennsylvania, where he slept and did laundry and saw no one. Except for hunting and occasional trips to the lumberyard, his waking hours were spent in Randy’s barn, lifting weights and painting more signs.
He crisscrossed the country and listened to talk radio—a show out of Kalispell, Montana, hosted by a man named Doug Straight. Listening, he began to understand the world. The voice on the radio was the voice of adulthood, the bearer of hard truths. Doug Straight didn’t pretend that the world was fair or generous. The America he spoke of was a place Victor recognized, the tough neighborhood where he himself was raised.
There was something in the air in those years. The news was full of cryptic signals, random happenings that seemed to be building toward something. The European states lining up in a shadowy alliance, a New World Order emerging. Race riots in Los Angeles; in Idaho, a Christian family gunned down on their own sovereign land. In Texas, a faith community of women and children, executed in cold blood—immolated by the federal government, at taxpayer expense.
There was a hatchet-faced boy with a soldier’s haircut, a face he had seen before.
Something in the air. Victor blamed the glad-handing cracker president, a type he recognized: the glib salesman, the apple-polishing smart boy. He hated Bill Clinton’s toothy smile, his undeserved ease in the world, as though he’d forgotten where he came from. Watching him on television, Victor thought: You’re no better than I am. You are hill trash just like me.
HE LEFT MARYLAND FEELING DEFEATED. THE REMAINING SIGNS clattered in the truck bed. In a gas station men’s room he studied his face in the mirror—his father’s face, the same bristled white eyebrows and fleshy earlobes and handlebar mustache. The resemblance was startling. Turning into his father wasn’t something he’d planned on.
It was a thing no one talked about, what age did to a man’s earlobes.
The swelling of his jaw was now visible, as though he’d been socked in the mouth.