Cures for Hunger (11 page)

At my new school, I jostled through the morning crowd, kids turning and saying, “Hey, watch it!” I fell asleep in class. I forgot my homework. When kids talked about the presents Santa had brought them, I said Santa didn't exist. “Only babies believe in Santa,” I told them. “Get over it.”

A girl began to cry. I heard someone say he hated the new kid.

During recess, I explored the sprawling grounds. I despised everyone. I couldn't talk to others without wanting to hurt their feelings. As I turned the corner, five boys appeared before me.

“Hey, it's the new kid,” Tom said. He was in my class, tall and blond, his bangs neatly brushed back.

The kids formed a half circle and began closing in.

Years ago, when I started first grade, my father had given me talks about fighting, as if I weren't heading off to elementary school but to become a mercenary. He'd warned me never to show fear and said that I should terrify my enemies.

“Fuck you, dog-shit-faced cocksuckers!” I howled.

The boys backed away, but Tom broke from them and ran forward and kicked me in the balls. I dropped to my knees, the air gusting from my lungs.

“Run!” he shouted to his friends. “This kid's crazy!”

They raced off while I held myself, waiting for my lungs to work.

Back in class, Jamil approached me. He was a swift, dark East Indian boy I'd seen that morning near the entrance to the school. He'd pushed down another boy and farted in his face, then sped off. He glanced at the dirt on my knees.

“I don't believe in Christmas either,” he told me. “It's a bunch of crap. Do you want to be friends? We can beat up Tom after school.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “Let's beat him up.”

Until now swearing had been as good a defense as my fists. Prayers and mantras might reach the invisible world, but profanity was the power of words brought into this world to lay low my enemies. And yet I'd been kicked in the nuts. My father was right. I needed to get tough.

As Jamil passed the information through class that I was challenging Tom to a fight in the alley between two brick buildings, I could hear myself describing the victory to my father. But an hour later, walking into the alley, I began to tremble.

Tom was waiting with his friends, their shirts rumpled, dark with the interminable winter drizzle. Every detail appeared mapped out against the brick wall, their nervous faces drawn on graph paper. Rain beaded along Jamil's hair as he stood at my side, saying, “Go! You take him!”

Tom shoved me in the chest. I got him in a headlock. We stumbled against the wall, the bricks rasping our clothes like sandpaper.

His friends tried to jump in, but Jamil blocked them. He kept slapping them in the face, dancing from side to side as if guarding a volleyball net.

“What's wrong, pussy?” he shouted. “Tom can't fight for himself?”

Tom popped out of the headlock. From behind me, he tried to dig his fingers into my eyes. I rammed him backward into the bricks. I threw my body against him again and again until his head struck the wall with a wooden sound.

I spun and punched him three times. He just stared, his nostrils too large and dark. Blood began to drip from one of them. His eyes teared up. He ducked and grabbed his backpack and ran. He disappeared along the alley, his jacket flapping.

I had blood on my lip where one of his fingernails had dug in.

I hurried to the pickup zone. My brother was waiting on the sidewalk. His eyes went to my face and then, like a switch, dropped to my mouth.

“What happened?”

“I got in a fight.”

Kids gathered around, pushing between us. They told him about it, speaking quickly, pointing here and there.

My mother's brown van appeared from the traffic and pulled to the curb. I got in, and she reached across the space between the front seats and took hold of my chin.

“Are you fighting?”

Her blue eyes glared at my cut as if seeing the one thing she most hated.

“I had to.”

“Fighting is wrong. You don't fight. You talk to people. And if you can't resolve the problem through talking, you tell your teacher. You tell the principal. You tell me. Do you understand?”

I just sat. It was pointless to argue. What she was saying would ruin me at school. I'd have to fight constantly.

My brother spoke from the seat behind us.

“Everyone said that Jamil helped you.”

“What?” she asked.

“It's not true,” I shouted. “He just made sure no one else hit me.”

I tried to meet her gaze but felt blinded, as if looking at sunlight flashing on seawater.

“Listen,” she said. “I don't want you to fight again, but André is going to ask what happened. When he does, don't tell him that you got help. He's not going to like that.”

 

 

My father was so busy that we hadn't seen much of him, but that night he was taking my brother, my sister, and me to dinner. By the time he picked us up, my mother had already left for one of her meetings. My father hardly spoke, not even in the restaurant. He called for coffee, then noticed my lip.

“Did you win?” he asked, his eyes suddenly still.

I glanced at my brother. “Yeah,” I said.

“You did?”

I nodded, trying to hide my anger. The story was almost perfect. The confrontation in the alley, the kids gathered to watch, the rain falling along the narrow slice of sky. As far as fifth-graders went, Tom was a bruiser. But with my brother sitting across from me, I couldn't tell the story right.

“What was it like?” my father asked.

I glanced once at my brother, then avoided his eyes and hesitantly described how I'd knocked Tom into the bricks, then spun and hit him three times and gave him a bloody nose.

“That's good,” my father said.

I risked another glance at my brother. He was watching me, his face nervous and confused. My father looked between us, and I dropped my gaze to my hands, but it was too late.

“What is it?” he asked. “Why are you looking at him like that?”

When I didn't say anything, he turned to my brother.

“Come on. Let's have it.”

My brother shrugged. He could never lie. I was doomed.

“Deni got help,” he finally said.

“No I didn't,” I shouted. My tongue curled in my mouth,
son of a bitch
caught in it, trying to get out as I clenched my jaw to keep it in.

“What help?” my father asked.

Reluctantly, my brother explained, but he was telling it wrong. He hadn't even been there, and all he described was Jamil protecting me.
He had the details right, but the way they went together wasn't. Tom had almost clawed my eyes out! I'd banged his head against the bricks all by myself. It was a close call!

My father glared at me. “From now on, you stand up for yourself. You can handle a couple of kids, you hear me?”

I wanted to remind him how he and his brother had watched each other's backs in their village. But there were dark creases beneath his eyes, and the bones of his skull seemed close to the skin. A look came into his eyes, like that of a dog about to bite.

“Anyway, we all know you're not too smart,” he said, his lips smiling thinly, showing his upper teeth. He began to say something else, but my tongue came loose and I yelled, “Shut up!”

The room tilted and blurred. I had blood on my lips again. My brother and sister stared into their plates. I felt dizzy and didn't speak. I wouldn't look at him.

As we were leaving, he kept sighing and rubbing his face and glancing over at me, but I refused to return his gaze. What he had taught me, I knew, was what I had done. If I could have told the story my way, he'd have understood.

“That fucking bank,” he said to himself. “It's ruining my life. I'm going to dump a load of manure on their steps.”

I sat near the window, cold radiating from the glass. If the end was inevitable and there was a new beginning, why not pray for it? Why not get it over with? I'd had enough of their rage, of them crying out like animals in the dark.

The next day, I told my mother that I wanted to leave.

 

 

She packed our lunches, but instead of taking us to school, she drove us to the house of one of her friends and told us to stay there and play
Dungeons & Dragons.

When she returned, it was almost noon. Everything we owned was inside the van, boxes and blankets crammed to the walls, her favorite German shepherd lying between the seats. Her white horse trailer had been hitched up, both horses inside.

She hurried us into the van, saying she'd explain soon. We drove to the border.

On the interstate, she told us that we would stay with our aunt in Virginia.

My sister began to cry. She said she'd never see her friends again, and my mother told her that she would someday. My brother remained silent, sitting in the back, arms crossed as he stared at his feet. But my rage had been released, and I felt as if I were waking from a long sleep, empty and open, eager to see the world. When we drove through Seattle, I pointed out the Space Needle.

“Who cares,” my brother said, “we're not here to look at things.”

As I watched the darkening highway, I felt an excitement I couldn't explain. We were traveling, and maybe someday, when I saw my father again, I'd tell him this story, of leaving, of discovering a new life. We wouldn't be angry anymore, and he'd tell me everything he'd done after we'd left. He'd laugh and describe how he'd driven into the city and gone to the bank, a salmon in his briefcase. He paid for the safe-deposit box, took the key, and locked the fish inside.

I tried to picture him wild and victorious, the way he'd been when I was little, always laughing, always playing a new trick, but suddenly I was angry again.

The gray dawn reached us as we crossed the mountains east, scars of snow on the roadsides, blue ice on the rocks. The moon was still out above the far, fading lights of distant towns. This wasn't the journey he'd told me about, the one from which we'd return and start over. And yet I felt the freedom of movement, of newness, the thrill that moves from the heart along the limbs, the desire never to stop, never to be held again in one place.

GHOSTS OF THE CIVIL WAR

Early in their relationship, my father wouldn't let my mother drive. He didn't believe women should. Though my brother could walk to the valley's five-grade, two-room schoolhouse, she insisted on a better school thirty minutes away. My father, having discovered the demands of driving children, gave her an ancient box truck he'd used to sell fish at intersections before he opened his stores. Its panels were leprous with rust, and the only seat was the driver's. My sister sat on a wooden stool next to my mother, but my brother and I were happy on the floor because of a rusty hole.

“Get away from it,” my mother told us. Each day, I collected lumps of chewing gum from the playground to see how they thwacked against the asphalt. Even when she yelled, we remained on our hands and knees, studying the blurred, passing grain of the road, pleased when we changed lanes and the broken yellow line flickered past.

In 1980, my father brought home our first new vehicle. The GMC Vandura was earth brown, a three-quarter-ton, and, to my five-year-old eyes, a mountain. It had a cream corduroy interior with four swiveling captain's chairs, a shag rug, two tables on posts, small ceiling lights like those in airplanes, and a couch that opened into a bed, lit by lamps in plastic shades. Between the front seats, a cover unlatched to reveal the glistening engine, and on the back, a chrome ladder joined a roof rack printed with maple leaves. That first day, I practiced climbing around the van, looking for fingerholds, counting laps without falling, until I grabbed the antenna and that was it for FM radio.

My father found the van difficult to navigate through traffic, so he
let my mother use it and bought himself a Ford Bronco, which, a few years later, he exchanged for a minivan newly on the market, one stripped for hauling cargo. But she fell in love with the brown conversion van, its V8 capable of pulling a horse trailer with ease. She said she wanted it and stood her ground until he signed it over and let her make payments.

She drove us kids, as well as our German shepherd, everywhere. High above the road, offering a vantage on the traffic, the van swayed, sailing on its shocks so that we had all, including the dog, vomited on the rug in the days before we got our sea legs. She used it to haul hay and goats, and we took it on road trips, parking on gravel washouts in the mountains where we fished, or to Barkerville to see gold panned by bearded men who my father referred to as winos. She hated these trips, her van back under his control, and while he fished, she packed, unpacked, cleaned and readied the food, demoted from captain to stevedore.

But eventually she completed her mutiny. She drove us across the border and headed east, rushing through that first night.

I slept on the floor, lulled to sleep by the engine's vibrations, but at dawn, I woke and sat next to her. She studied each passing car, glancing in the side-view mirror often.

“Why are you so afraid?” I asked.

She sighed, the first rays of sunlight in our eyes.

“He's angry,” she said in a measured tone. “I don't know what he'll do. He didn't want me to leave, and . . .” She hesitated, searching for words, then finished her thought all at once, as if she couldn't hold it in any longer—“I don't trust him. He's dangerous.”

As the sun rose, I also glanced behind us, at the dim faces that became visible when a car pulled close. Why should we be so afraid? How bad was he? He'd talked about nothing worse than driving fast and getting in fights. But then I recalled the night at the ferry, the blood on his face and hands, the knowledge that two people lay unconscious on the gravel driveway. Could he do this to us, too?