Cures for Hunger (18 page)

The next week, I knocked again, and she answered.

“I'm doing a fund-raiser for a field trip,” I told her. “We're cleaning up carports. It only costs fifty cents.”

“That's all?” Her mouth hung open, showing small crooked teeth.

She got the change out of her wallet and gave it to me, and while I was sweeping, she took her children to the Buick, telling me that she was off to get groceries.

I pointed to where a faded yellow raft lay deflated in the corner.

“This is getting mildewed,” I said. “I'll hang it out to dry, okay?”

“Sounds great,” she called. “Thank you. This garage has been a mess forever.”

Since Dickie obsessively used sprays for mildew in the basement, I knew about it, but the raft didn't appear to have any. I'd simply noticed it while keeping track of the family. The cluttered carport was no more than a concrete slab built off the house, with a roof supported by metal posts and no walls, so I'd itemized everything in it while trying to come up with a plan. I hung the raft over the motorcycle. It covered it perfectly, barely revealing the front tire. I cleaned, making sure that the job was impeccable. I went home just before my mother arrived at six o'clock.

I watched the house for another week. Then I told Brad and Travis my plan.

“If we leave school right away, we can be at my house by three thirty. That gives us one hour to strip the motorcycle.” I didn't mention the stepson who occasionally returned.

Brad gave his cigarette a flick, trying to look tough and accustomed, though he resembled a fidgety society lady in a movie.

“We can do that,” he said in a nasal voice.

“Fuck yeah,” Travis agreed. “That's easy.” He was smaller but gruffer than Brad, with long mousy hair from which his pointy nose and chin emerged.

After school, carrying empty gym bags and backpacks, we half-jogged to my house.

No one was at my place or the neighbor's. With socket-wrench
kits and a bucket of Dickie's tools, we ran to the carport, threw back the rubber raft, and got on our knees. We removed the carriage bolts, then quickly detached the engine, the gas tank, the seat, the chain, the brakes, even the gauges and wires, leaving only the naked frame.

I hung the raft back over the bike as Brad and Travis ran the pieces to the concrete room built off the outdoor stairs to my basement. That was where I kept the old motorcycle I'd found in the barn. With so many parts scattered about, no one would notice new ones.

Brad and Travis put the engine, the gas tank, and the seat into gym bags. Then they walked back to school to call Brad's mother for a ride.

 

 

The night of the dance, a hurricane dispersed into a tropical storm, wind and rain pressing up the coast. Gusts shook power lines and lampposts along the road to school.

“But you only got the engine,” Elizabeth said. I knew her from pre-algebra, and in the loud cafeteria, she stood close to hear my story, tilting her head back to see from beneath bangs as stiff as a blond garden rake.

“It's cool,” I said. “I'll get the rest. I have a plan.”

I could hardly believe it—how quickly crime won respect. I was no longer the same kid, and others saw this, that I wasn't afraid of the police, of anyone.

Brad and Travis joined us and told Elizabeth and me to follow them. Two sisters were also there, one bleach blond, the other quite dark, and both referred to as the Watermelon Sisters.

We crossed the field behind the junior high and made our way, with a six-pack of Busch, to a new subdivision. We went into an unfinished home with plywood floors and empty doorways hung with plastic. The wind was so strong that the walls shook.

“I don't know if this is safe,” Elizabeth said, gripping my wrist.

We each held a lukewarm beer. Travis grabbed the arm of the dark Watermelon Sister and led her to another room, beyond several plastic sheets. We could hear him tearing insulation from the wall and spreading it on the floor, then the two of them lying down and struggling with their clothes.

Brad was telling his Watermelon Sister about living in Germany, about what really happened to Hitler's body and how a friend's dad had his jawbone.

“You see, they know it was his because there are so many gold fillings in the teeth. My friend's dad keeps it locked in his filing cabinet. It's worth millions.”

As he spoke, he leaned close to his Watermelon Sister, but she put her palm against his chest and pushed him back. He stopped talking, and she changed the subject to a girl who'd talked shit about her and how that wasn't cool and there was going to be a reckoning.

The wind kept slamming the walls and thrashing at the plastic, blowing up dust that stung our eyes. Elizabeth stood close. She sipped her beer and told me how, each morning when she did her hair, she looked for spiders on the walls and gave them a shot of hair spray, then watched as they walked slower and slower and finally froze. She said she wanted four more piercings in each ear and an eagle tattoo on her back with wings that went down her arms.

I told her how my father was an ex-con and that someday I'd rob a bank, and about my list—steal a car, break into a house, get shot. Wind knocked against the walls as some forgotten Steinbeck character, invoked as if in a séance, spoke through me.

“If you get shot, you're close to death. Imagine how badly you want to live.”

She stepped close and pushed her lips to mine. I kissed back, careful not to spread saliva, following the rules I'd heard from Brad: not to slobber, to stay close to the lips, to let her put her tongue in my mouth first, and, above all—the cardinal rule—never to exhale into her mouth while kissing, or else the air would make a sound like a duck.

As I imagined divers did, I controlled my breathing. We kissed, and she rubbed my jeans. The world sparkled and anguished, and then she pulled away.

Travis and the Watermelon Sister had come back and were saying that we had to go. They were scratching their arms and legs as if fleas were devouring them.

As we returned to the dance, he kept clawing at his limbs, rubbing and patting, sighing and groaning, as if having sex with himself now.

“Goddamn,” he hollered and clutched his balls. “I can't stop itching.”

“Maybe you got crabs,” Brad told him.

“Ew,” Elizabeth and the other Watermelon Sister said.

“No, you dipshit,” Travis told him. “It's the insulation. Fiberglass itches like hell.”

The girl who'd been with Travis stayed quiet, her shoulders pulled in as she walked ahead, one hand reaching up under her skirt to rub at her ass and thighs.

Brad was staring for each glimpse of pale skin.

“Was it worth it?” he asked Travis.

“Hell yeah. It's always worth it.”

The Watermelon Sister walked faster, leaving us behind, dark hair whipping about in the hurricane's final push.

The next day we arrived at school to see that, on the hill with the new subdivision, the house where we'd been had collapsed, pummeled by the wind. Though I wanted to claim this disaster, to say I'd started a fire or kicked the walls like a martial artist, I didn't think I could get away with the lie. Besides, it was enough to say I'd been inside, drinking just before it fell.

Brad and Travis and Elizabeth liked the story and took it up, saying it collapsed just after we left, while we were crossing the field.

We all heard it, we agreed.

“I heard something, anyway,” Elizabeth said. “I was scared just being in there.”

Despite our stories, something about it seemed grim, an omen, a bad beginning for love.

 

 

The narrow lane, shaded by high trees, followed the sunlit train tracks, then veered over them and wound down through the dense forest that, with each turn, became increasingly crowded with battered cars.

Dickie came here often to look for the parts he claimed he'd been
seeking forever, even though he just cleaned them and never used them. I liked the wrecked vehicles, trucks torn nearly in half, cars like accordions, motorcycles squashed as small as suitcases. I pictured the swarming lights of police cars and ambulances, arms and legs sticking out from crushed metal, a bereaved wife falling to her knees as she tore at her hair.

“Hey,” Dickie called. He was holding his bucket of tools and stood hunched in the shadow of a massive oak. “Why don't you go ask the old man for a job?”

“I don't want to,” I said, making myself appear stern and uninterested. Dickie and his ideas were beneath me. I'd accompanied him just to get out of the house for a while.

“What the hell? Come on. You'd be a good mechanic.”

“I don't want to be a mechanic.”

He curved his back like an angry dog. “Get your ass down there!”

My dirty sneakers scuffed dark red lines in the sunburned clay. I knocked at the trailer.

The old man pulled the door open with one hand while checking his fly with the other.

“Yeah, what do you want?” Head tilted back, mouth open, he studied me from beneath his glasses.

“I was wondering if you need to hire someone.”

“Hire someone?” He glanced around the fields and forest that looked like a crowded parking lot decades after Armageddon. “To do what?”

“I don't know.”

“Hell, boy.” He shook his head as if I were the nuttiest damn kid on earth and he had nothing but sympathy. “I don't make no money, can't pay no money.”

Later, when Dickie and I got home, I saw the oily metal stashed under the front seats. He'd used me as a distraction so he could take things without paying. He'd also stolen the old man's portable welding kit. Pathetic, I thought—robbing a junkyard.

He carried it all into the basement to clean, and I worked out on the back porch. How much longer would I have to live like this? With my feet propped on the steps, I did push-ups until sweat ran into my eyes and dripped from the tip of my nose. I did sit-ups with a thirty-pound
dumbbell behind my head, counting eight goddamn
it, nine goddamn it, ten motherfucker.
I wanted a new life, a new body, money, and respect—to get laid. I did biceps curls until the veins in my arms bulged and my hands shook and I couldn't flex my fingers to hold the weights.

Dickie slunk up from the basement and stood, wiping his greasy hands on his work jeans as he blinked in the sunlight.

“Check it out,” I told him and came down from the porch. I flexed my arm.

His eyes popped open. Then he lifted his right hand as if to make a muscle too, but he grabbed the meat of my arm. My knees almost gave out.

“Have you been using my stuff to make bombs?”

“No!”

“Bullshit. I'm missing a lot of stuff.”

“I don't know what you're talking about.” My jaw clenched as he dug his fingers, but I forced myself to show nothing. That was how you won with men, by not caring, by making them feel stupid.

“Don't let me catch you in my shop. I'll tear your fucking arm off.”

He let go and went back downstairs.

The next day, each finger was imprinted in black on my skin. After school, when my mother came home, I showed her. Her eyes lingered.

“What did you do?” she asked, her face drawn. “You must have done something.”

“Don't blame me,” I shouted, though I knew she'd yell at Dickie in private. “I don't want to stay here anymore. I want to go back and live with André.”

I stormed outside, onto the back porch and down the stairs, intending to sulk in the fields, where I could find things to smash.

She caught hold of my sleeve in the yard. Her hair had gone entirely gray, though she called it frosted, and the curls of her perm had relaxed so that a few strands hung about her face.

“You know what? Your father was just a kid. He had to be the center of attention. But he was worse than a kid because you couldn't question a damn thing he did. If he came home late, he had to wake you guys up. He'd play games so you knew he was the good guy. I was the bad one. I made you go to bed. I made you eat good food. He'd let you do
anything as long as it didn't threaten him. And he'd take you places with those people of his, let them drink around you or whatever. If you want that, fine, you can go back when you're fifteen. But if you do, your life won't be what you want. It will be what he wants. You'll be there for him. Maybe that doesn't make sense now, but it will someday.”

I refused to look at her. Stars were appearing behind the filmy light of the nearby subdivisions. A firefly blinked above the trash bins.

“Why did you stay with him so long?” I asked.

She looked away. “I was afraid. I didn't believe in myself, and he kept me from believing in myself.”

Dickie opened the screen door onto the porch. He leaned on the banister, the sleeves of his T-shirt lifting above his faded army tattoo, an eagle just beneath his shoulder.

“I'm getting tired of this. Why don't y'all come inside?”

“Go back in the house,” she told him with a coldness that made me proud. “We're talking.”

“Christ,” he said. The screen door clacked behind him, and the stove light flickered as he passed in front of it.

“All I ask,” she went on, “is that you trust me. I'm doing what's best for you. That's why I took you away. I wish I could tell you more and someday I will.”

“Why someday and not now?”

“I can't.”

I clenched my fists. “I'm sick of everything here. I hate it. I want to go.”

“You're not fifteen. I told you you can go when you are.”