Cures for Hunger (21 page)

 

 

His house stood off a wooded lane on the edge of Surrey, a sprawling suburb. Trees and overgrown hedges and a high fence closed it in, and his six dogs ran free. He'd bred German shepherds since before I was born, calling them simply “shepherds,” and now, oddly, he sold new litters to the police. He also had three cats, and hair of various colors crosshatched the carpets and linoleum. A sweaty crust of flea powder edged the rugs.

He'd built the back patio into a high enclosure where he kept a hulking breeding stud. When he'd run across the ad for the hundred-and-fifty-pound shepherd and gone to see it, the people at the kennel had directed him to the cage but kept their distance. True to what he'd read—and to what I saw through the chain links—the dog had bullish shoulders and a handsome snout brimming with teeth. My father walked up, opened the gate, and went inside. Everyone stopped what they were doing and watched. He petted the dog, inspected its paws and mouth, and decided he liked it. Only later did the owner tell him that he was the first person the dog had allowed near it in almost a year.

Unfortunately, the same was true of the years to follow. The patio door had two crossbars like those on a barn, and when I passed it the dog's heavy, padded steps approached and it snuffled about the cracks at the bottom and sides, then began to growl. It stood and put its paws against the door, and the wood creaked and popped softly within its frame.

I slept on a dusty couch in the basement. Cobwebs strung the ceiling, and the floor's peeling linoleum was like leather. The furnace came on with a loud whirring, the air smelling of exhaust.

“What's there to eat for breakfast?” I asked in the morning, opening the fridge.

Aside from Pepsi and cream-filled chocolate rolls, it held only a plate and cup.

“Why do you have dirty dishes in here?”

“So they don't get moldy and I can reuse them without washing,” he told me.

 

 

Though he'd gone bankrupt five years earlier, he now had three stores. There was the one in the public market as well as the same snack bar at the ferry landing where he'd had his fight years ago. He seemed to be retracing his steps. He'd owned even his main store before the bankruptcy, a rundown building, the rotting floors reinforced by loosely placed plywood, so that crossing the room felt like walking on ice.

His acquaintances reminded me of when I was a boy. He'd taken me along to meetings with Native American men in gravel parking lots near highways, during which I chewed strips of smoked salmon as he spoke in a hushed voice. I grew accustomed to the presence of men whose strength I sensed in their stillness, in the way they watched.

His employees had fallen on hard times, evicted or newly paroled. They cleaned fish behind the store, glaring at the knife and bloody cutting board. Everyone he knew worked for him in some capacity. They borrowed money or wanted to sell him things, and he had a list of men who'd tried to take him for a ride and who could no longer be trusted. Oddly, even these men came by and spoke with him, shaking his hand before leaving.

That first week, we made deliveries often. He was reticent when I asked for stories. He said his life had changed, that he wasn't the same person. Sometimes he told me how happy he was to have me back. He smiled, but then pursed his lips, studying me intently. Often, when we passed stores, he asked if I liked anything and insisted on buying whatever I showed interest in. He got me the leather jacket I wanted, bulky and thick. And then, as soon as I put it on, his gaze went dead.

I couldn't stand his work: the odor of fish, the scales that stuck to everything like dull sequins. I was waiting for crime stories, my thoughts following the paths of novels. But before long these novels became a problem. Whenever I was bored, waiting in the car or while he talked to employees, I read.

“It's rude,” he told me.

“I'm just waiting.”

“You don't need to read.”

“But I'm just sitting in the truck,” I said.

“Didn't she teach you to do anything other than read those goddamn books?”

“What?”

“You read those books too much.” He pulled into the street, acting engrossed by the traffic. The way he said
books
made them sound childish, as if he wanted me to behave like a man.

It had never occurred to me that I could rebel only against those who refused to accept what I was. Since my criminal interests didn't anger him, they seemed innocent, whereas the literature my mother had encouraged was questionable. I realized he'd probably never read a novel. What was it like to be someone who'd never finished a last page, never experienced that amalgam of fullness and loss, satisfaction and longing?

We drove along the highway through tepid, quickly vanishing sunlight. He had another meeting, he told me, this time in the offices of a packinghouse, and he parked and hunched off through the drizzle. Soon, the windows were opaque with rain and condensation. I put down my book. Why had I come back? What had I imagined? A fantasy of my father and me crossing the bright tiles of a bank, dark figures set against the light?

I dug around in the trash on the floorboards for a pen and a scrap of paper. I drew his face, the dark curl on his forehead making him resemble a cartoonish Elvis. He appeared somewhat Mexican, distinctly foreign, and I couldn't understand how he was my father.

Footsteps padded over the concrete, and his shadow moved across the driver's window as the door handle clicked. I crumpled the paper.

Our next stop was a late lunch at an A&W. He didn't appear talkative, so I told him about the motorcycle theft, then, when he showed no interest, about a summer day when Brad and Travis and I had walked the train tracks and decided to derail a train. We'd found a heavy, rusted plate of indeterminable origin and hefted it onto a rail. We'd waited on the embankment, but after an hour the train hadn't come and we went home.

He barely looked at me, busy dipping fries in ketchup, three or four at a time, and pushing them into his mouth. It seemed as if he was finished with crime stories for good.

“Why do you do this?” I asked.

“What?”

“This work. Fish. It sucks.”

He flinched, then drew himself up, straightening his back as if to command respect.

“You used to love helping in my stores when you were a kid.”

I shrugged, not sure why he cared so much. “What about school?”

“What about it?”

“When am I going back?”

“It'd be better for you to work a bit,” he said. “You were never good at school. Why don't you take some time off so we can get to know each other?”

“But I am going back, right?” I hated his stores, and school was the only escape I could think of.

Derision tweaked his upper lip, making him look a little like Elvis after all.

“You don't know how hard it was to get the business going again after the recession,” he said. “Your mother just left. She didn't care that I was struggling. I lost everything and ended up living out of an old van. You really don't understand.”

It was my turn to focus on the food. He was blaming my mother for his bankruptcy, but I remembered how he'd spent money before we'd left. Even now he lavished it on employees, tossing crisp hundreds on fast-food counters or giving Sara a fifty and telling her to get herself a coffee, then not accepting the change. Maybe my mother was right to leave.

We drove back through the city, the tops of skyscrapers hidden in the mist. He asked me to help with the next few errands, and this was a relief, though we hardly spoke.

By dinner, he appeared pensive. We were in another of his drab restaurants, and I worried that my aloofness might bring out his temper.
I remembered how angry he could get, how frightening. But now he looked uncertain.

“When I learned to crack safes, I wasn't much older than you.” He glanced at my face to see if I was interested. “It wasn't easy. You had to be really focused to do it, but I liked the challenge. That's when I started crime. Everything else happened because of that . . .”

He described his departure from his village in Quebec, how he worked as a logger when he was sixteen, away from home all winter—and then in mines and construction. “But one day a friend died on a high-rise. He fell headfirst, and I realized I had to do something different.”

He spoke softly, sounding tired, as if he had little interest in sharing his past but knew it was the only way to reach me. Someone in Montreal taught him safecracking, he said, his voice becoming angry—and this same person, his first partner, later set him up. In prison, my father learned how to burglarize banks and launder money.

“I did a lot after that. I tried to get out of crime a few times, but it was hard to go back to shit work. I ended up in California and Nevada, pulling armed robberies. We'd head to Vegas and blow our earnings in a weekend, then rob another store or bank, and drive to a resort in Tahoe. I'd grown up with snow, but I had no idea how to ski. We'd buy the most expensive ski clothes and hang out in the bar and pick up models. I'd tell them I was a businessman but that I couldn't say what I did. They loved it. Then I went to prison again and was deported. That's around the time I met your mother.”

He hesitated. “But crime,” he said, “crime was a good life. I've seen some crazy things.” He leaned forward, smiling, and described what it was like to blow fifty thousand dollars in a night at a Vegas casino. “Diana Ross was next to me for about forty thousand of it. If I hadn't been trying to get back what I'd lost, I'd have taken her home . . .”

He no longer spoke as if his words were for me. His gaze opened out as if just to the left of me spread the vista of his past. Staring into it, he grew silent.

“What's the scariest thing you've done?” I asked, afraid that he'd stop talking. He looked at me as if remembering I was there.

He sighed and smiled slowly. “The time I got the front page. I forget which paper it was. I should have made the front page for the burglary, but LBJ got it then. I got the second. He was the president, and that seemed pretty fair to me.

“But the thing is, it wasn't really me who made the front page. It was the guy I robbed. He owned a jewelry store that'd been held up five times, and he'd just been interviewed for an article on crime in LA. I guess he said something about how he'd never let it happen again. He said he had a gun and would rather shoot or get shot. If I'd known that, I'd have done some other place. You don't want to rob people like that. Common sense doesn't work with them . . .”

Our food had arrived, but he didn't pause to eat, just kept staring off, serious now. I struggled to make sense of the way he changed as he spoke. With each word, he seemed more dangerous, more real, more certain, as if there was nothing he couldn't face.

“We used to dress up nice when we did a job, that way no one would suspect us. People think the poor are criminals. We'd just go in and ask to look at the jewelry, then hold them up. I sold it all to some guys I knew in the mob. They didn't give us much, but jewelry stores were easier than banks. There was almost never security.

“Anyway, when I pulled my gun on this guy, he grabbed his. I almost shot him. There was at least a second—and that's a long time—when we stood with our guns pointed at each other. I saw he wasn't going to shoot. I don't know how I knew. I told him I would kill him. He had his gun aimed at my chest, but I had mine to his head and that's scarier. I asked if he was ready to die, and he put the gun down.”

He studied me now, maybe wondering why he was telling this, what it meant. I wished he was still the person he'd been, the one he seemed to be when he spoke. My heart had sped up just hearing the story.

“I don't talk about this anymore,” he said. “I barely think about it. But that was a crazy moment. I thought I'd shoot him. If you kill someone, the police don't give up on you the way they do when you pull a robbery. Insurance can't do anything for dead people.”

Suddenly, I wasn't sure what I was looking for. I saw my mother's face
so clearly she might have been there. She'd said she trusted me. She'd written that my father charmed people, but there was nothing he wanted from me, and she'd been wrong about so much.

“You want me to tell you these stories?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “I love them. I want to hear them all.”

He nodded. “I remember getting the paper the next day. The guy described me as over six feet tall and dark. I thought that was funny. It's amazing what fear will make you see.”

“Do you miss it?” I asked.

“Sometimes.” His expression softened. “You'd be good at crime. It takes people with nerves. But you have to want that feeling. I don't know why I did. I just did. I was so angry. When I was growing up, we were so fucking poor. I didn't want to have a miserable life.”

All this made sense. It was how I'd felt in Virginia, why I'd come here.

Then he referred to the story I'd told him earlier, the one I thought he'd ignored, about trying to derail the train.

“I did things like that,” he said. “When I was a kid, some friends and I went into a work site and pushed a big roll of metal fencing over a hill. It could have killed someone. We didn't care. We just wanted something to happen. I remember, when I left Quebec, after I got out of prison, I was so angry. I was driving to Calgary, and I couldn't stop thinking how I'd never had a chance, just a shitty life. The angrier I got, the faster I drove. A police car came after me, and I couldn't stop. I knew that the longer I waited, the worse it'd be, that I was ruining my life, but I didn't care. I hated everyone. By the time I got to the city, there were three cop cars behind me. I drove over medians and through parking lots and yards, down sidewalks and alleys. People were jumping out of the way. I knew I couldn't escape. More police joined in, and we just kept going until I ran out of gas. By then I wasn't angry anymore. I was laughing. I couldn't stop laughing.