Cures for Hunger (19 page)

“He can't be that bad.”

“You don't know how bad he can be. He told everyone that I left because he was going bankrupt, but I left because he was crazy. I always told myself I'd know when it was time. Then one morning he was reading an article about a man who went bankrupt and killed his wife and children and himself. He said it made sense to him. That's why I took you so far away. I told him that a psychic said I should leave, about the earthquake and that stuff. If I'd said he was crazy, he might have hurt me. But I gave him another reason.”

It made sense. Nobody wanted to hear that something was his fault.
But I didn't believe he'd have hurt us. People talked all sorts of shit when they were angry. He hadn't meant it. My fondest memories were of times with him, his wildness, our adventures.

She put her cheek against my shoulder. Cars passed on Route 28. Pods from the maple helicoptered down with each gust of wind and disappeared in the dusk, on the shingles of the roof.

 

 

A leather jacket came in the mail, but it was the wrong kind, glossy and thin, the seams making a V in the back. It was something a European rock star would wear. I'd wanted the heavy, armored look of a biker, but this would have to do.

At school, Elizabeth told me that we weren't girlfriend and boyfriend. Though she was thirteen, she said, “Sorry. You're just a kid. I like men.”

Every day, Travis and Brad wanted to know how we'd get the motorbike frame. I said we had to wait—that it would be soon. But I could hardly wait myself. This seemed the longest year of my life, and to take the edge off my impatience, we broke into a storage unit one night, disappointed that it held only boxes of old Christmas decorations and one of smoke detectors, which we stole, thinking they might be worth something. We prowled farmland, smashing the windows of old cars on blocks, taking rusty pipes and knocking out headlights and reflectors, gouging the few still-inflated tires with our pocketknives. We broke into a house and took tools and cassettes, spare change and more knives.

I saw crime everywhere. My brother kept to his room, curtains drawn, the only light his computer screen. He was pale, with etiolated hair, but surely a hacker breaking into government databases, taking over the world like the computer in
The Terminator.
I still snuck into the vaultlike silence of his room to read his stories: men who stared women in the eye, longing, or who looked out windows. Longing was in the inky darkness, in the canyons between the towers of the future, in the galactic space between alien nations. But the men never did anything. They watched. They calculated. The women paced before them in black skirts and high boots.

Did he feel what I did? Did he burn with the same obsessions?

From time to time, he went into the kitchen and took a jar of hot peppers from the fridge. He slouched at the table, eating them until tears gathered in his eyes.

 

 

Two dozen people sat on a basement carpet before a medium, a woman who communicated the wisdom of a celestial being.

I was next to my mother and Dickie, who had his knees pulled to his chest, his eyes wary. Over the years, my mother had tried to convert him to her vision of the unpolluted palate, but he still smoked and now he was drinking again, watching shoot-'em-up action flicks and eating dinner before a TV loud enough to drown the steady and unconscious smack of his chewing. The séance was a victory for her, and for me, a return to childhood magic.

The medium sat, spine straight, palms on her knees. Her facial muscles slowly relaxed, becoming lugubrious, like those of a drunken man. With half-lidded eyes, she surveyed the audience. Her assistant announced that she was ready.

Someone asked about a recurrent nightmare, and the medium cleared her throat.

“This dream,” she said, sounding like a man, “it is an expression of fear, but there is no real fear, only the unknown. There is no danger . . .”

Her words on life and death and the currents of pain and the fractured, dissatisfied selves that haunt our sleep—the unknown both within and outside us—seemed obvious. But I, too, had a recurrent dream. In the valley, I went to the shed where my father had built the pen for his German shepherds. A man stood inside, covered in matted hair, his hands on the two-by-four slats. I could hardly see him or decipher his rough, muddled language, but I understood that he was asking to be let out. I fled, knowing that sooner or later he'd break free and find me.

All that night, after returning home, I read a bulky fantasy novel. Dawn reached my window as I began the last chapter. The hero accepted his destiny and trekked to a tower in desolate mountains to face a being so evil that its origins were a mystery. This was his purpose, to destroy the source of evil itself. But the confrontation was inconclusive.
The being vanished. There was an unforeseen glitch in the prophecy, some mystical red tape that the hero would have to sort out in the sequel. My mother was already reading it.

I tossed the novel on the floor and stood. Blood buzzed in my ears. I shuffled to the bathroom and peed. Then I stared in the mirror: a pimply boy with a bad haircut and not nearly enough muscle. I went out the front door. The highway swayed like a rope bridge, and I stumbled alongside it. Before I'd left British Columbia, my father had told me that if I stayed, he'd give me direction. He'd teach me how to fight.

Dawn lit the rural dregs of a landscape bought up and hewn into subdivisions, the bashed fenders and bald tires and rusted appliances of forgotten lives appearing through the October leaves after a dry summer. On the gravel shoulder, I saw myself from the sky, as if my father might be looking down, ashamed of my worn-out jeans and dirty sneakers, the scraps and flattened cans, the cigarette butts and bottle caps that littered my path.

 

 

We were moving again, to a mobile home in the woods, beneath a leviathan electrical tower whose lines cut a swath through the boondocks. My mother and Dickie would build a house there, and the cramped trailer would be temporary quarters. But I didn't care. I was almost fifteen.

I walked to the neighbor's carport and knocked. The last of the evening commute shuttled along Route 28. The woman answered, looking tired, the TV loud inside.

“My friends and I put some money together,” I told her. “It's almost enough. I thought maybe I could try the motorbike out first.”

“Sure,” she said, again perking up at the mention of money.

I felt as I had standing next to the highway at night, inching nearer to each passing rig, wind against my skin and in my hair, metal blurring just before my eyes.

The yellow raft slid from the bike frame. The woman just stared.

“My stepson must have taken all the parts.”

I made myself look disappointed, even a little angry.

“I wanted to buy it. I was trying to get the money together.”

She went into the kitchen and took the phone. An argument ensued between the father watching TV and drinking beer and his son, as she repeated what they said.

“I didn't touch your piece-of-crap bike,” the father yelled over his shoulder.

“He said he didn't touch your bike,” she called into the receiver.

“Your loser friends probably did it,” the father hollered. “They know you don't use that thing.”

When they'd finished and she'd hung up, I chewed my lip and shrugged.

“Hey, look, I guess I could use the frame if you're just going to throw it away.”

“I don't know,” she said.

I took a twenty-dollar bill from my pocket.

“I could give you twenty dollars for it.”

She stared at the money.

“Oh, heck,” she said and reached for the bill. “I'm just going to say we threw it away.”

 

 

That weekend, I packed: childhood books on fish, those of myths; the many fantasy series, Civil War accounts, and tomes about ancient cities; and of course Steinbeck's novels. They all traced a line into mystery: primal shapes beneath dark water, the world's creation, the excesses of violence and the ceaseless vanishing of empires, and at last, the solitary longing of a drifter.

Back at school, minutes stretched into years. What would the medium say about my future, and would I want to hear? My body felt caught in a current, pulled by floodwaters.

There was a home football game that night, and after it started, I walked out and sat in the parking lot, on the curb between two cars. The tidal roar of cheering reached me. Floodlights gave the suburban sky a cadaverous hue. I was so frustrated, so impatient, I could hardly breathe, as if the air refused to fill my lungs. The emptiness in me joined me to
the world, everything I saw made to satisfy me, to fit into the story I could hear myself writing.

I closed my eyes, the click of cooling engines soft behind the syllables of my speech, as if the racing machine of time had faded back into the song of creation.

 

 

That Saturday, when no one was home, I took the phone into the trailer's back bedroom, pushing down the extra-long cord so I could close the door. My father's number had changed again, and I dialed it from yet another card he'd sent.

As soon as he answered, I told him I wanted to go back and live with him. A woman chatted in the background, dishes clinking, and he fumbled with the receiver.

“Come back?” The noises became muffled, as if he were holding his hand over the mouthpiece.

“I want to live with you. I'm almost fifteen. I'm allowed to now.”

He didn't speak, and I added, “I need to get away from here. I hate it.”

“Okay,” he said.

“Will you send me a ticket?” Asking this, I had never felt braver.

“Does your mother know?”

“I haven't told her yet.”

“Tell her you want to get to know me. I'll send you the ticket, but tell her you want to leave with her blessings.”

Later, when I repeated his words, saying, “I want to leave with your blessings,” she gritted her teeth. “Don't you ever use his words with me. He told you to say that.”

“No, he didn't,” I lied.

She looked tired and distant. I knew that she'd been inspired to build the new house, that she still had energy and hope, but she must have realized that everything was falling apart, that it was time for me to leave. It was better for all of us.

“If you don't let me go,” I said, “I'll run away.”

“No.” She shook her head. “You don't have to do that. You can go.
I guess it's what you need to do. When you get the ticket, I'll drive you to the airport.”

Later, I told my brother and sister, but they just nodded and said nothing. Over the years, we'd become increasingly distant, and now I closed myself off to everyone.

That night, I tried to picture my father's face but couldn't. Unable to sleep, I lit a candle as my mother had done for me when I was child wanting to meditate on levitation. I put it on a wooden chair in the middle of my room, then sat and stared, the flame's faint shifts like those of a feather held between fingertips. Something was being asked of me, and I would face it.

I must have fallen asleep. When I opened my eyes, the candle was gone and the chair was on fire. In that moment, before I panicked, I knew that this was one of the most beautiful things I'd ever seen.

THE BIG JOB

The last half of my flight was a slow sunset that ended shortly after I landed. Just before Vancouver, the plane dropped into clouds, racing blindly toward the city and mountains I wished to see.

As we taxied on the runway, I tore up a letter my mother had given me. . . .
He could charm anyone. He knew what to tell me to make me do and think what he wanted. But you are more adult than I was. You will see through him and decide what is best. You are your own man, and no matter what he wants, you will make the right decisions. . . .

This was a technique of hers, to praise me for being what she wanted, and after reading her letter, I wondered if she'd learned it from him. I tore the paper into strips and shoved them in the pocket of the seat in front of me, then stood to get my backpack.

I had on torn jeans and a black T-shirt, and in the forward shuffle of the immigration line, I considered my appearance—my posture, my stride, the way I held my head, whether I should gesticulate when I spoke or hook my thumbs in my belt loops. Was frequent eye contact childish, an aloof gaze more masculine?

The crowded customs hall opened on a lobby, cavernous and silent but for echoing footsteps.

It took me a while to notice the man at the window, gazing out as a plane touched down on the distant runway with a semblance of gentleness. He turned and stared, hands in the pockets of his leather jacket. He had on white running shoes and crisp jeans, the denim creased from the shelves. It was the first time I'd seen him without a beard.

“Hey,” he said and came forward. Awkwardly, he shook my hand and gave me a sort of half hug that neither of us put much energy into.

I stood a good bit taller, and he looked me over, then glanced around the room and back. I'd recalled a towering man, shadowed eyes that seemed angry even when he smiled. He was darker than I remembered, his features chiseled and, when he spoke, his accent thicker than over the phone. He looked like someone I might pass on the street.

He stepped back and reached out to pat my arm. The cuffs of his blue shirt showed an inch past those of his jacket.

“I'm happy you're here,” he told me. “Are you hungry?”

“Sure,” I said and had to cough to bring moisture to my throat.