Cures for Hunger (22 page)

“That's probably the angriest I've ever seen police,” he told me, though he said nothing else about the arrest. “I started robbing banks not long after that. It felt good, you know. Each time I got away with it, it was like winning the lottery. I loved that life.”

For a moment after he stopped speaking, he kept his eyes lowered. Then he looked up. His expression reminded me of when I was a boy and he would read the paper in his chair. Sometimes I went to the living room door and watched. He was serious and concentrated and sat a long time without moving. Then he lifted his eyes, and there was a moment when he was just seeing me, staring, before warmth entered his expression. He had the intensity of a guard dog fixing its gaze, trying to recognize the person approaching.

That evening, when we got home, he sat and turned on the TV as he always did, the channel muted and set to hockey.

“Have you ever thought about being a criminal?” he asked.

I tried to swallow but couldn't. Years with Dickie had taught me to be cautious. I mixed a shrug and a nod, letting my head tip to the side thoughtfully, the entire gesture slow and considered so I could insist he'd misunderstood if he was angry.

“You're like me,” he said. “You'd be good at it.”

Up to this point, my fantasies had been of easy heists and open horizons, the distant blue jewel of a roadblock on a desert highway. Again, I thought of my mother.

“It's a good life. You have the best of everything,” he added. He set his elbows against his knees and studied his watch, tracing the dial with a flat fingertip. He was cleaning it, I realized, picking away fish scales. “It's better than what I do now. A lot better.”

“Isn't it different than how it used to be?” I asked, hoping he'd say it was still possible.

“You have to find the right bank. I still know people out there.”

He hunched in his chair but didn't speak.

The phone rang, and he looked at it as if unsure of where he was. He answered. He listened for a long time, the receiver cradled against his shoulder as he moved his fingers through his arm hair. He wrote down some prices and replied “Yes” several times.

I stared at the muted TV. I'd never considered actually stopping school or not writing. All my futures had coexisted in my imagination.

He murmured prices as silent hockey players slipped across the hazy screen.

After he was off the phone, I waited for him to say something else about crime, but he didn't, and I was afraid to ask.

 

 

It was dark, raining again as we arrived at the market with two plastic crates of fish, each about five hundred gallons. They'd been loaded by forklift, and normally we emptied them by hand. I hated this work.

“Can't we just put the truck in reverse and hit the brakes?” I asked. It was the sort of comment I'd made often over the years, adults rolling their eyes, but he turned in his seat to judge the distance to the delivery door.

Sara stood, lit red in our taillights, and he yelled out the window, telling her to get out of the way. He jammed the accelerator, and the truck shot forward and stopped sharply at the edge of the lot. The crates slid to the back window.

“This should work,” he said.

Then he threw the truck into reverse and hit the gas. I twisted in my seat. The market wall was approaching fast. He slammed the brakes.

The tires screeched, and the crates hopped from the bed of the truck and seemed to hang briefly, suspended. They landed upright and skidded to the wide delivery door.

We got out, shocked into silence, and inspected the crates.

Heads lifted, everyone in the market stared at us, like deer in a field.

He smiled at me, his grin easy, not followed by scrutiny or anger. I laughed as if we'd done something like this every day of our lives, as if we'd just lurched from the railroad before the train passed.

We did it again three days later, though one of the crates spilled, hundreds of small salmon flashing across the market floor, under counters. For the next hour, we gathered them, customers and nearby vendors occasionally bringing us a fish, offering it to us as if it were a wallet forgotten in a restaurant.

 

 

“Are you getting along with him?” my mother asked the next morning when I called. I'd told him I wanted to stay home and write. He'd agreed, though he'd left with a scowl.

“Of course,” I said in an annoyed voice. I talked a little about his life, that he was alone and didn't appear to have anyone close, even that he liked a girl who worked for him.

“Be careful,” she said. “He might be recording his calls.”

“I doubt it,” I replied, glancing at the gray, loosely kinked phone cord on the dirty rug.

“What school are you going to go to?”

“We've looked at a few . . .”

“A few . . . ,” she repeated. “You should enroll soon.”

“I know. I will. Don't worry. I'll be fine.”

After our conversation, I wandered through the house. There were details I found strange: a sign on the kitchen wall that read God Bless This Mess, or doilies on the couch's end tables, a vase of withered flowers in the dining room. It was as if a woman had been living there.

His room had the musty smell of a lair. Heaps of stiff clothes covered the floors of his closets, loosely folded jeans and button-down shirts on top of his dressers, price tags still on them. I counted a dozen pairs of running shoes, the laces and suede white, the soles unscuffed. Each had an orange sale sticker. In the closet, between two casual leather jackets, a Kmart bag on a hanger held seven red shotgun shells.

They felt heavy and cold in my palm. The printing on the casings read Slugs.

I went to the dresser and opened a drawer. It held photographs. A blond infant standing among dandelions. Two boys playing at the edge of a mud puddle. There were no images of children past the age of ten, as if their lives had ended.

In a field, my mother held me, my brother standing next to her. My father must have taken the photo. What had drawn her to him? That he was free and a rebel? I knew from living in the US—the trailer park had taught me this almost overnight—that Americans admired those who weren't afraid of the law. Maybe she'd had that wildness in her, too—the way she'd run away, rejecting the Vietnam War and her family. She'd wanted a free-spirited life and had probably thought she could find that
with him. But she must have seen something other than a criminal. I knew her. If she hadn't, she wouldn't have stayed.

I kept searching. A rubber band held a dozen social insurance cards, each with a different name, one of them my brother's. My father must have named him after one of his aliases. This made sense. He wouldn't want to live under a name he didn't like—and naming oneself, starting a new life, might be like naming a child.

I pulled a box from under the bed: every sort of card, Christmas, birthday, get well, all unused, all for children. Another box was filled with fishing equipment, tangled lines and lures, faded cork floaters, three-pronged hooks, a hand scale, a fly-fishing kit, a bag of old backlashed reels.

I found a Valentine's card I'd made for him in school, concentric multicolored hearts on construction paper, like the echo of affection. I sat in his chair. On the wall were three portraits of us our mother had given him for his birthday, simple charcoal sketches by a mall artist that made us look chubby. I hadn't found the shotgun in any of the obvious places.

Nothing, not even the trees outside, seemed to move, and then a German shepherd barked behind the house.

 

 

Sara sat on the freezer next to me, thigh to thigh, and took my hand and held it in her lap in a childish way. “Does André talk about me?” she asked.

I hesitated. He'd just gone to get something from his truck. I couldn't figure out their relationship, because she never came by his house and she mostly spoke of her high school friends, though she'd recently dropped out.

“Well, yeah,” I told her, “I guess. I mean, he likes you.”

“Really!” she said, as if she had no idea.

He came back into the market, walking quickly, then slowed, seeing us sitting close.

“You ready?” he called and looked away as if distracted. I got off the freezer.

Soon we were back at Knight and Day, beneath the same dim, green metal lamps. He hadn't said much other than to order, and sat, rolling the edge of his paper place mat.

“You know,” he told me, “I'm thinking about starting a new family.”

“You'd want that?” I asked. Nothing seemed more miserable to me.

“Why wouldn't I? There's Sara. She needs to calm down.”

“But are you two even together?”

“She drives my car. That Cavalier, the maroon one, it's mine. I shouldn't have been able to get it, not after the bankruptcy.” He spoke as if having the car were strange, but it was his interest in Sara that bothered me. She was only eighteen.

His eyes stilled, looking into mine. What did he see? I had no idea if I was giving anything away, and I tried to make my face show nothing.

“Listen. I have a job for you. Some Indians are making a delivery tonight, and I want you to take care of it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Business has been hard. It wasn't easy to start up again. So I buy from the Indians. They can fish as much as they want. And they always have good quality.”

I just nodded, trying to mask my thoughts. I didn't say that what he was doing was illegal. That would be ridiculous. But this wasn't the crime I wanted.

“They're bringing a load of salmon to the place near the ferry. You can stay there for a few days. A girl who works for me lives there. She'll explain things to you if you need help. There's a road behind the house and some old freezers in the woods. The Indians have been there before. There's also a scale. Make sure you use it. Don't let them use theirs. And make sure you clean the ice off the plate if there's any. You have to watch that they don't weigh the salmon with ice in them. Check the cut where they were gutted.”

After a pause, he said, “There should be about two thousand pounds. You can do this?”

“Of course,” I said, not sure that I wanted to. But at least he trusted me and thought I could handle it.

“Just make sure nobody can see from the road. And I want you to
do the weighing. You should be the one to read from the scale and write it down. You've seen me do it. It's easy.”

 

 

The road descended through rocky pine forest. The green numbers on the dash read 10:17, and the truck's tires vibrated against the ridged surface of a bridge. I watched a lamppost pass, catching my reflection in the window.

“She's eighteen,” he said of the girl who worked at the ferry. “You guys should get along.”

The green trailer with a hand-lettered Fish 'n' Chips sign looked the same as I remembered, next to the misted river, just off the road where cars lined up. A few drivers stretched their legs as the ferry's lights moved across the dark expanse.

Gravel crunched loosely beneath the tires, and my father parked, though the driveway continued, rutted and muddy, into the forest. Yellow paint peeled from the house like birch bark, and a strand of green and red bulbs hung between a post and the snack bar awning, their color flaking, showing bright specks of light. A girl came to the door. Dark, curly hair framed her face, her skin faintly olive. She wore jeans, and a thin white shirt hung against her breasts.

Little was said beyond introductions, my father the only one speaking, the girl's eyes darting back to him after each time she glanced at me. Her name was Jasmine, and he told her I'd be sleeping on the couch. She forced a smile, her front teeth separated by a gap like a coin slot.

He and I then walked back along the looping driveway. It was dark beneath the pines but for the pale rectangles of two ancient freezers. He told me to put the salmon in them and handed me a wad of twenties.

“A thousand dollars,” he said. “Don't give it to them until the end.”

After he'd left, Jasmine and I hardly spoke. She lingered in the kitchen.

“I put some blankets on the couch,” she told me.

“Thanks.”

“Are you okay? Is there anything you need?”

“No, I'm fine.”

“Okay, well, good night,” she said and went upstairs.

The room with the couch had a scantily decorated Christmas tree that leaned in its stand, anchored to the outlet by a string of lights. I lay and stared at the ceiling, trying to feel that this was important, that I was doing something serious and impressive.

After weeks dreaming of the addictive terror of risk and the hard-earned win like a lottery jackpot, here I was. Maybe even when the crime was serious, you were alone in a dingy room, waiting on something you didn't care about, just for money. I'd wanted the thrill, that and to be with my father. I hadn't imagined ex-cons like his surly employees, warily meeting my gaze as if waiting for an accusation. People my age seemed hopeful, and I hadn't really considered life without school. My mother had been obsessed with education when I was little. She and my teachers had encouraged writing and yet did I love novels because I'd loved my father's stories? He'd never even read one.

I gazed past the threadbare curtains. Drivers sat behind damp windows, exhaust rising in the glow of taillights. Cars and trucks left the landing, tires banging over corrugated metal. Motors started up. Mist lay thick and low, variously tinged and glittering like rain beneath the streetlamp. The light changed at the entrance, the mist now green. The cars crept forward until the line was empty. The mist shone red again, eddying, settling against the dark asphalt.