Cures for Hunger (17 page)

I'd done it, something worth bragging about. It was hard to believe. I arrived home a few hours before dawn on Sunday. I couldn't go inside yet. I had to pretend I was coming back from a friend's house.

The lock on the van's passenger door had been broken for over a year. I went into the back, opened the couch into a bed, and lay on it. The fabric smelled of dirt and hay and sawdust, of dogs and horses and sweet oats, of the far-off valley and the homes in between. I put my face to it and cried.

DISCOVERING FIRE

I had been nursing the question for days, waiting to be alone with my mother, and now we were, driving home.

“Was André ever in prison?” I asked, trying to sound nonchalant.

She didn't speak for a moment.

“Why are you asking about him? Have you seen him?”

“No,” I said quickly, not wanting to scare her. “I was just thinking about him. It made sense to me. He's been to prison, right?”

She appeared to consider this. Then she exhaled, a tired, controlled sigh, though she still didn't look at me.

“Yes,” she said, “but just for small things.”

“What small things?” I didn't believe her. Her words hardly matched her fear. I craved details, to be trusted with this knowledge.

She didn't answer, sitting primly at the wheel as we cruised Route 28. We passed overgrown fields, their slated destruction announced by billboards with the names of subdivisions.

She pulled into our driveway and killed the engine and stared ahead, the backyard's dusty yellow broken by a swath of green near the clothesline, where the septic system ran.

“I don't want to talk about this.”

“I have a right to know.”

She sighed, not moving, still staring straight ahead.

“Okay,” she said. “Okay.”

I didn't speak, afraid to interrupt her.

“Your father . . . he spent a lot of time in prison.”

Her expression wasn't easily read, and I studied it, conscious that in some way I might be hurting her with my questions.

“What for?”

“I was going to tell you when you were older. He got in trouble before you or your brother were born. He robbed banks.”

She turned in her seat. I was used to the way she gazed openly, searching my expression, trying to see what I'd been up to at school or if I was lying, but I showed nothing. My father was a bank robber. The truth was better than I'd expected. I felt as if I were reading the stories of gods and their progenitors. This was what I'd wanted, something that would set me apart forever.

 

 

That same day, she sat down with my brother and me. He listened intently, his masked expression no different than when he played computer games for hours, but I knew what she was saying must be affecting him. I'd snuck into his room to read his notebooks and had been startled by the emotions in his stories. Men paced the smooth floors of control towers or faced the inky darkness above futuristic cities, gazing out with rage and loneliness.

“What your father did is wrong,” she told us, “but he's still your father.”

I nodded, and when the discussion was finished, I got up and went to my room. I shut the door and stood with my back to it.

Bank robbery.

Never again would I care about chores and homework. No one could tell me what to do.

I closed my eyes and took a breath, my heart speeding, my body bracing for the rush of adrenaline as I pulled the mask over my face. He and I burst through the doors, sweeping pistols before us and sending everyone diving to the floor. As if in a cartoon, he glided across the lobby to the vault and, pulling on a handle like that of a microwave oven, swung it open. A very serious manager stepped out, holding before him a single white bag marked with a golden dollar sign.

“Fuck yeah!” my father shouted once we were in the car, the engine revving.

We escaped over dusty roads and desolate ranges, laughing, the wind in our hair.

This is how it worked, I knew. In fantasy or gritty American fiction, the best characters refused the laws of a weak, conformist society. They craved intensity and the unknown.

I opened my eyes. Starving, I hurried to the kitchen to see what was in the fridge. As I ate, I considered my new existence as if reading it in a book. I wanted to fight, to test myself and write about it. I would be a novelist and an outlaw.

 

 

Another card had arrived. It bore glittery words, “Thinking About You.” Inside was his number, nothing else. As if in a movie about prison, I felt like an inmate who receives a gift in which the means of escape are hidden. I left the house and went down the highway to the 7-Eleven.

A storm was blowing in, the sky dark and the power lines swaying. Trucks slowed and chugged into turns where the highways intersected, and after I dialed collect, his voice came thinly onto the line.

We hadn't spoken in months. He sounded different, reserved and unsure of himself, nothing like what I'd imagined since my mother had confessed his crimes to us.

He asked how I was, and I told him, “I'm okay. I'm just sick of school.”

“Oh,” he said. He asked how my brother and sister were, and I said, “Okay.” I talked a bit about rebuilding an old motorcycle I'd found in the barn where my mother kept her horses and a leather jacket I wanted. But then I ran out of things to say and we were silent for so long that I knew I had to tell him, that I had to share the only thing I could think about.

“Bonnie told me.”

“She told you what?”

“About”—I said—“about your crimes.”

He didn't speak.

Clouds were moving in, drawing evening with them.

“What did she tell you?”

“She didn't say much. I was the one who asked. I guess I already knew.”

“You already knew what?”

“That you'd been to jail. I was proud of you. She said you robbed banks.”

Again the long silence. Wind blew through the dust of the parking lot, knocking a crushed Styrofoam cup against the brick wall.

“She said that?” he asked, softly.

“I want to know about what you did.”

“What I did?”

“I want to know everything. It's amazing. No one else has a father like you.”

He was breathing into the receiver.

“What do you want to know?”

“About the banks. Did you only rob banks?”

“No.”

“What else did you rob?”

“I . . .” He sighed. “Lots of things.”

“Like what?”

“You want to know about this? You're proud?”

“It's amazing. I think it's amazing.”

I'd been almost panting, my heartbeat too fast. I sensed how much of a stranger he was. Four years had gone by, and I'd imagined him as he was before, living in the same house, driving the same car. But from the way he spoke, the care with which he chose his words, I knew he'd changed.

“I robbed banks,” he said. “It's true. I robbed a lot of banks. And jewelry stores.”

“How many?”

“Maybe . . . I don't know . . . maybe fifty banks. Armed robbery wasn't a big deal. It was easy. I only did one bank burglary. That's different.”

“What do you mean?”

“Burglary is when you go in at night and take everything. You go into the vault. Robbery is with a gun. Anyone can do that. But burglary takes brains.”

The image of him with a gun, robbing a bank as if it were nothing, impressed me, but burglary didn't interest me at all.

“What about the jewelry stores?”

“Lots of them,” he said as if to please me. “I unloaded what I got with the mob.”

“The mob?”

“It's not that big of a deal. It's pretty common. I probably robbed—I don't know—fifty jewelry stores, too. It was like a job.”

His voice became hoarse, and he coughed. I asked how bank robbery worked, and he told me about surveillance, knowing what time the armored truck came on payday. That's when the tellers had more money. He hesitated, clearing his throat, and said, “Anyway.”

I could hardly breathe, hardly think of what to ask next. I had so many questions. I wanted him to speak, but he grew silent. Then the words came out of my mouth.

“Have you ever killed anyone?”

Rain had begun to fall, striking up the parking lot dust, the sky flat and low and gray, the wind strong.

“No,” he said finally, his voice so hoarse he was almost whispering. “Listen, Deni, I got out of crime because of you guys. I wanted a family. I didn't want to go back to jail and not see my children. That's why I stopped.”

“But it's amazing. I think it's amazing. No one else has a father like you.”

The downpour began in force, gusting under the overhang, soaking me where I huddled at the phone. Lightning flared beyond the highway, illuminating the cluttered rooftops of a subdivision. Thunder shook the ground, and the line went dead.

I hung up and pulled my jean jacket over my head and ran home.

 

 

“Watch this,” Brad said, hoisting a Coke bottle plugged with a burning rag. We'd filled it with the proportions of gasoline and dish soap necessary to make a good Molotov cocktail, according to what he claimed he'd learned during riots in Germany. Standing in a field, he hurled it against the weathered husk of a junked car, and fire spread along the door.

“See that?” he said to Travis and me. “The dish soap makes the
gasoline stick. You get that stuff on your skin and you're going to burn to death.”

Since my house was close to the junior high, we often walked there. Dickie commuted from DC and my mother had to pick up my brother and sister from their schools, so no one was around until six. We smoked Dickie's cigarettes and went through the materials that he compulsively bought for his crowded shop. We made flamethrowers out of spray cans of engine lubricant or paint. We put Styrofoam peanuts in jars of gasoline, concocting what we called homemade napalm. In overgrown fields, well out of sight of the highway, we set things ablaze. Bottles of rubbing alcohol and cans of spray paint wrapped with burning rags burst as we shot them with the .22 rifle I'd gotten for my fourteenth birthday. We filled an old TV tube with gasoline and ran into the trees as it exploded. We competed to see who could hold a lighter's flame under his palm the longest. It seemed there could be no love for life without a love for fire.

When I was alone, restlessness drove me from books to my notepads, then into the fields and along the sides of the highway, and back to my books again. A few times I hounded my mother for details of my father's crimes, insisting that she must know more, but she claimed she didn't. I was desperate to hear these stories, yet I didn't call him again. I was less than a year from fifteen, and I sensed that calling would open our life to him and put my mother in danger. I knew that if I talked more, all my frustration and anger would come spilling out. It was better to wait, to call him just before I turned fifteen, and then to leave once and for all.

To calm myself, I made a list of everything I'd do:

Steal a car

Break into a house

Get shot (revised to, Get shot and survive)

Rob a bank

But what was the point of breaking and entering if I hadn't even lost my virginity? I had tried, to be sure, but I was too frank, too honest. With men, I showed nothing. But to girls I wanted to reveal everything, all that I'd read and dreamed. I gazed at the letter sewn to the chest of their cheerleading outfits:
T
for the school mascot, the Trojan. We all carried one in our wallets. The older boys sold them, ancient, wallet worn,
meeting us in the bathrooms and slipping them into our palms for a few dollars, so that we could hurry back into the adolescent throng like illegal immigrants carrying fake passports.

But what was the point of condoms if I couldn't show the rough indifference of the older boys, the meanness that drew girls like crows to roadkill.

“My father was a bank robber,” I told Travis and Brad. They looked me over, seeing the kid who'd always been obsessed with books.

“Yeah right,” they said.

Furious, I was determined to impress them.

 

 

For as long as I'd lived on Route 28, my neighbors had had a dirt bike in their carport, and I'd never seen it moved or used. I came up with a plan, then went over and knocked.

The woman next door had messy, dark hair and a slack, somewhat harried expression. I'd often seen her rushing two small children out to her claptrap Buick. I told her some friends and I were looking to buy a motorbike and wanted to know if theirs was for sale. Her eyes lit up at the mention of money, and she went into the kitchen and made a phone call. She was speaking to her stepson, she told me. It was his bike, and he wanted nine hundred dollars.

“I don't know why he's asking so much. He hasn't touched that thing in years.”

I put on a disappointed face. I told her that my friends and I would have to save up more. She seemed to want to negotiate, but I left.

Back in my room, I moved my desk to the window facing her carport, and each day after school, while reading
East of Eden
or
Tortilla Flat,
I kept a log of my neighbors' comings and goings. This must have been how it was done for banks. The husband returned each evening around seven thirty. The mother was never back before five o'clock. The only wild card was a lanky young man with long hair who showed up once a week. He wore acid-washed jeans and made himself a sandwich in the kitchen, took a beer, and devoured both in the carport. Then he left. His arrivals had no clear pattern but were rare enough and usually
took place around four o'clock, an hour before the woman—his stepmother, I assumed—returned.