Cures for Hunger (25 page)

“What?” she asked, the door open enough for her to look at me above the chain. With a kick, I could break it. Her skin gleamed, her face puffy, her hair limp against her shoulders. That she didn't threaten to call the police seemed a sign of her guilt. But as I was asking for the money, trying to explain, a feeling of disgust came over me, so strong I wanted to vomit. Fifty pathetic dollars, taken from this pitiful house, from a pregnant girl.

I walked back to the road.

My father's truck returned and stopped, and I got inside.

He asked me nothing.

 

 

A space heater sat on the freezer, and Jasmine and I held our hands before it, staring at the line as hazing rain iced up the road. I'd finished my last novel, yet another world saved from cataclysm. The sky here was as dark as in that land whose sun had been extinguished, but it wasn't my destiny to change it. I wished snow would fall and erase everything.

A radio sat on the shelf, and having nothing to read, I took it down. I cleaned dust from the dial, then searched the static until a voice came through with startling clarity.

The forecast was dismal. The weatherman mused that a white Christmas would be nice, not this slush and freezing rain. Then an announcer gave the time. He spoke of the year in review, the historic events
the world wouldn't soon forget. In December alone, Czechoslovakia and Romania had overturned Communist dictatorships. The list included Tiananmen Square and the anti-apartheid movement, Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Democracy movements were taking over in Latin America, General Colin Powell was the first black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, New York had its first black mayor, and Virginia had elected the first black governor since Reconstruction. There was the three-million-dollar price on the head of Salman Rushdie by Ayatollah Khomeini, and later the ayatollah's death. The recap went on, a countdown not unlike Casey Kasem's
American Top 40,
but edged with violence and urgency. These events, the world itself, seemed in no way connected to my life, and I couldn't imagine writing something important enough for people to want to kill me.

“Why do you stay here?” I asked, standing as if to pace the tiny room. I said how angry I was, that I felt trapped.

A flush came into her cheeks, her dark eyes wide and bottomless.

“Stop complaining,” she told me and looked away.

 

 

Footsteps on the porch woke me. Jasmine turned her body to fit the register drawer through the doorway. Outside, the string of colored lights swayed. The rain had stopped.

She set the drawer on the kitchen table and came into the room. I moved my feet so she could sit on the couch.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Yeah, I'm fine.”

She put her hand on my leg and rubbed it, as if to reassure me. We just stared at each other, her fingers on my thigh.

“I want to tell you something,” she said.

“What?” I asked, still half-asleep.

“Your father and me—we used to live together.”

I didn't speak. Her hand rested on my jeans, slightly curved, appearing awkward now, and she took it away and put it in her lap.

“He made me stay here because you were coming,” she said.

When I'd called from Virginia to ask if I could live with him, I'd heard a woman's voice and the sound of dishes being washed.

She described the last few years, the way he'd started his business again, her words reminding me of how he'd worked when I was a boy. She thought they'd have a family.

What had I failed to grasp? It was hard for me to understand, to make sense of who he really was or wanted to be. Was he just trying to have a normal life: a good car, a successful business, nice clothes, and an attractive girlfriend? Sara was much prettier, and maybe when I'd returned he'd wanted to impress me. Had he hidden the parts that looked wrong? I'd pushed him. I knew that. I'd wanted his wildness, but this wasn't what I expected to find.

She finished, and then just sat. The clang of the ferry docking filled the silence.

What had he been expecting when I came back? My fantasies seemed cold things, robberies and escapes. My fondest memories were of the days he and I had spent fishing, hours by rivers, scanning the water. I'd dreamed of a mythical fish that, when finally caught, granted wishes. But the fish came up, glittering desperately in the sunlight, and he gutted it, sweeping out the deflated organs with his knife.

She put her hand on my side, as if to comfort me.

 

 

Christmas Eve, a wind blew up. Frost patterned the dirty windows, the yard a sheet of ice. Tepid air blew in the vents, and I woke on the couch, wondering if I'd been remembering or dreaming the valley: clouds moved too quickly, turning in on themselves as our mother led us across a field of dead grass, pines the only green on the mountain. Her graying hair was pulled back, and it seemed that the warmth of my hand against my chest was the reassurance of hers. We'd gone for a walk after the snow had melted, springtime almost here. In the way she'd breathed and carried herself, I'd sensed her relief that winter was finally ending.

And then, in sleep, just images. A tree shrouded in mist. A child straggling below mountains. The valley echoing, hoots and laughter, then
so silent that a German shepherd came to the slats of the pen and peered at the heavy sky.

I sat up, unsure of where I was. I rubbed my eyes. The curtains were drawn, a wand of streetlight through a hole. I lifted my fingers to it and they glistened. The furnace thrummed and wind rattled the panes. When I opened my eyes again, the room held a thin gray light.

No sounds came from the ferry landing, no idling engines in the line. I slid the curtains open. The asphalt glistened, its cracks and crumbling shoulder a sheen of ice.

I pulled my shoes on and went outside. The cold had thinned the mist that lingered, pushed about by the wind. Far above, sunlight flirted with the clouds. The cold felt good in my lungs. It made me want to clean out everything, to leave and forget. I stepped carefully up the driveway and onto the landing, the walk separated by a railing and scattered with salt. Melting ice dripped into the water from the planks beneath me.

The river stretched out, gray and faintly rippled, so wide that the opposite landing looked like a snag of driftwood. The ferry, a white barge parked among the lit poles, began to hum. It struck me as odd that I hadn't crossed, that a person could simply choose his freedom and leave.

Halfway along the docks, I stopped. As the sun penetrated the clouds, I glimpsed high white mountains in the distance. The ferry set out, its wake grooving the water. A tiny figure stood at the railing, one hand holding down a hat.

What had driven my father to leave his home, his family, to travel the continent and become someone else, to rob banks and risk his life over and over? What would drive me?

A wall of fog moved along the river. Briefly, I could hardly see my lifted hands before it passed. Then the sun broke in along the clouds, revealing a range of white mountains that shone against the sky.

BORROWING FACES

“So that's it? You've made up your mind?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said and went back to my plate of greasy chicken cacciatore, one of our ceremonial dinners, consumed like a smoldering peace pipe while our talk hinted at war.

“And you know you're on your own then? I'll give you some money to get started, but that's all.”

“Yeah. That's fine,” I said, chewing between words.

We'd been wrangling over the future. He wanted me to work for him and thought his threat carried some weight:
If you choose to go to school, you'll have to move out and live on your own.
He didn't seem to realize that I wasn't living with him. I insisted on school.

After New Year's, he drove me to the rundown house of a short gray-haired woman who had a room for rent. Her easy smile softened the heaviness in her face. Her daughter, petite and auburn, a year younger than I was, had worked at my father's store over the summer.

My window faced the highway, one pane broken, masking tape holding a cardboard patch. I looked through the dirty unbroken glass that, with the passing of cars, shook in its crumbled glazing. As if I'd come to rent the window, I said, “It's fine.”

That night, as headlights fanned across the ceiling and the engines of big trucks vibrated in the floorboards, I lay in bed. Though I didn't like this room, I was closer to choosing my life, to being a man. Emotions fell away—fear, anger, sadness. Cars revved up the incline or swished down the opposite lane. The cold stung my nostrils, and I parted my lips. I
breathed, feeling a delicate sliver of cool air between my teeth. I sensed my path taking shape.

The next evening, over a dinner of boiled pork, my landlady told her own stories, of a principled father and a suicidal mother. She sipped warm scotch cut with tap water and had difficulty walking even when sober, something to do with years of drinking.

Afterward, I called my mother. As the phone rang, I cleared my throat, trying to relax my voice.

“It's me,” I told her.

“Deni. Hey. How are you?” She sounded happy, though every time we'd spoken since I'd left I could detect fear in her words. “Where—where are you?”

“I'm living with André.”

“Is everything okay?”

“Yeah. Of course. I just called to say hi. I'm fine.”

“Oh.” She hesitated. “That's good.”

“You know, I'm writing a lot,” I said. Since there was no way I was going back to her and Dickie, I couldn't tell her about my life. It made me feel strong to be able to reassure her, to keep my problems to myself. Still, I had to talk about something else.

“I've been writing stories and poetry. I even wrote a short novel, but I'm not sure it's any good.”

“I bet it's great.”

“I don't think so.”

“Can you send me some stuff?”

“Maybe. I need to read everything again, but I wrote a poem that might be okay. Do you want me to read it to you?”

“I would love that.”

I already had the page, and I tried to take my time with the words, but halfway through I realized how childish the poem was, about the world in the mind's eye, its freedom. I sped up, mumbling the last lines.

“Oh,” she said. “That was great.”

“Really? I don't like it anymore.”

“You went a bit fast in the end, but I liked what I heard.”

After we said good-bye, I lay staring at the ceiling. She loved art and studied it at university before running away with a draft dodger. Every now and then, when I was little, she drew a picture that amazed me—a lightly penciled, perfectly realistic tree and house for the cover of a story I'd written, or, when I struggled with my portrait of Frankenstein, unable to make his strangler's paws believable, she sketched a hand with dark creases and smudged, shadowed areas. It looked more real than my own, as if it had just finished changing a truck tire and might now reach from the paper to snatch my pencil.

The air brakes of semis thudded on the highway. Why had she given up art? To ignore such a gift confused me. When I was seven or eight, we were in a mall where artists set up stands and drew portraits. One exhibited caricatures: a vampiric, hooked-nosed Pierre Trudeau; Reagan with a massive jaw and a tuft of goofy black hair. Impressed, I wanted to know if she could draw like that, and she told me it was easy.

“Will you do one when we get home?” I asked over and over until she agreed.

That afternoon, while she was sitting on the back steps in the sunlight, I brought a pencil and pad for her, pushing them into her hands. My brother and sister edged close.

“Draw André,” I requested.

She looked into the distance, toward the mountain beyond the fields, and a smile came onto her lips, a faint, mischievous narrowing to her eyes.

She sized up the blank page and began to sketch. My father's head took shape like a balloon about to pop, stamped with a ridiculous toothy smile and the big blank eyes of a happy idiot. Yet it was unquestionably him, with his dark beard and curly hair.

“What about his body?” I asked when she'd finished.

She moved her pencil down and drew a miniature torso, arms and legs sticking out like pins. It looked tiny in proportion to the head, as if I were seeing it from high above.

We all stared a long time, and then my sister threw her head back
and burst into laughter. She couldn't stop, and after a few seconds, we joined her.

 

 

I found a job at an Italian restaurant, washed dishes and minced garlic and ate everything sent back: small pizzas that I folded and forced into my mouth, risotto that I spooned rapidly, my cheeks bulging as I went about my tasks. I rode there each evening on a rusted, rickety bike without brakes that I'd found leaning against the wall in my landlady's shed. I puffed through the cooling air, grinding uphill, and then rushed back, late at night, down that dark, thrilling, terrifying sweep of highway.

Daily, the mirror in my room confronted me. I showed it an indifferent face, a thuggish stance. I picked up gestures and expressions anywhere: the glowering brow of a burly redheaded man arguing over a beer bottle refund in a convenience store, or the squint of an Italian tough waiting for his girlfriend in a sports car. On the public bus the day I went to enroll in school, I wore my leather jacket. A gray-bearded man with reflective sunglasses and a Harley-Davidson vest sat next to me. He prodded my arm.

“Thick,” he said. “Good choice. It's hard to stab a man through leather like that.”