One viable offspring. This was the White female’s pathetic output—even after the so-called sexual revolution of the 1970s, which Victor did not experience personally. In the 1970s people were going at it like rabbits, sex in groups, among strangers, sex in every wild permutation. And yet, despite all that fucking, birth rates had dropped precipitously—but only among White women.
Victor did not experience it personally, having spent most of that decade in the joint, but he was aware of it happening. He read about it in the magazines of the day.
One viable offspring. He chalked it up to laziness. A pregnancy took only nine months, and females were living longer and longer. A healthy one could squeeze out an entire baseball team with decades to spare. But the White female, for whatever reason, refused to see this. Nature had entrusted her with an awesome power she was incompetent to manage. The White female lacked the focus and discipline, the practical intelligence, to understand what her life was for.
AT SUPPERTIME HE WANDERED OVER TO RANDY’S, LURED BY THE smell of fried meat. His stepbrother lived in a tin-roof shack at the bottom of the hill, a square box with half its shingles missing. He lived exactly as he always had, though he was sitting on a pile of frack money big enough to tear down all of Bakerton and rebuild it from scratch.
They were as close as brothers, though they were not blood-related. Childhood had sealed them together, their two parents careening into each other like drunken motorists, skid marks and squealing tires, the sky raining broken glass. The two boys grew up in the wreckage, or maybe they were the wreckage. And here they were sixty years on, two odd, lonely men growing older and now old.
Victor was blood-related to no living person he knew.
Randy was sitting in the kitchen, at an old card table draped with a vinyl cloth. At his elbow was his dinner, a gristly pork chop spread with ketchup. As always, he was staring at his laptop.
“You hungry?” he asked. “I can make you a chop.”
“I can’t eat,” Victor grumbled. “My fucking tooth.”
Randy’s laptop was old and monstrously large, so heavy that it caused the card table to bow in the middle. He could afford a new computer, he could afford it many hundred thousand times over, but he was not the sort of person to replace a thing that still worked. The computer was slow, but fast enough for his purposes, buying junk on Craigslist and jerking off to internet porn.
“Luther is selling his generator. I seen it on Craigslist,” said Randy. “Same model as our one. You might could take a look.”
IT WAS RANDY WHO’D GIVEN HIM THE IDEA. LAST FALL, VICTOR had returned from a marathon week of sign-planting to find Randy at his laptop, scrolling through USA Today. Now that it could be read for free online, it was his sole source of information. His favorite section was “News From Around Our 50 States,” brief items culled from local papers across the country.
They raided a hoorhouse in some little piss-ant town in Alabama, he told Victor. Look at this poor bastard. They caught him with a girl and put his pitcher in the paper.
Sorrow in his voice, genuine empathy. After he got his first frack money, Randy had been a prodigious consumer of prostitutes. An online pharmacy kept him supplied with Canadian Viagra, and once a month he’d disappear for a weekend and come back with tiny soaps and shampoos from Pittsburgh motels. It took a drunk-driving arrest to break his habit. The fine was eight hundred dollars. After that he stuck close to home, his needs satisfied by anonymous women with webcams. Such women existed all over the world, apparently. Randy’s monthly subscriptions cost less than a single night in a motel.
That could of been me, he told Victor. Makes you stop and think.
And Victor did just that. He stopped and thought. Shame, he knew, was a powerful motivator. You could shame a person into just about anything.
HE BUILT THE SITE HIMSELF, OVER SEVERAL WEEKS. TECHNICALLY, it was nothing special; he knew this. Still, he was proud of what he had accomplished. He had a fifty-year-old diploma from a backwoods public high school. Nobody would have called him an educated man. And yet—with the help of Web Design for Dummies—he had brought the Hall of Shame into being. Everything he knew, he had taught himself.